If Michelle hated working with the owners, she adored working with Joey, the gay manager who wore a do-rag and had the lyrics to Lil’ Kim’s entire oeuvre memorized. Together they bided their time until the owners left, then swapped out the acceptable bookstore jams — Norah Jones, Aimee Mann — for Lil’ Kim, Tupac, and Marilyn Manson. Working with Joey was fun, the most social activity Michelle was getting in Los Angeles, but she still preferred working alone, the time careening by as she lounged on a ladder with her nose in a book: Violette Leduc, Phoebe Gloeckner, Monique Wittig. The bookstore was a treasure chest, stuffed with books by publishers and writers who long ago had failed. This was the last place left to find them, a cemetery of sorts. It was her favorite place in all Los Angeles.
5
Michelle had placed her futon along the back wall of the studio’s main room, flush against windows that overlooked the alley below. Cops routinely ousted homeless youth from the alley, barking at them in the night, waving their flashlights like kids at a rave. The windows looked directly into the apartment next door, occupied by a man with long gray dreadlocks who shopped at the bookstore. Joey claimed to see him picking up the rent boys who worked the ho stroll by the gay center. Joey knew all about the gay center and shared with Michelle its secrets — by day all the rich Hollywood A-gays had meetings and fundraisers inside the compound, but when the sun began to set the neighborhood seethed with rent boys and tweaker transgender women selling their ass. It was the first time Michelle felt interested in going there.
The man across the alley was roommates with a dog with a meaty head, a rottweiler. Drool came rainily from its lips. The dog would come to the window, slap his paws on the sill, and crane his head, barking at Michelle as if seeking revenge. It was scary. Scarier still was when he propped himself in the window and simply watched her. He was like a monster or a man — a serial killer, a Peeping Tom. A large, intelligent animal considering you. Michelle would close the blinds, robbing the apartment of sunlight.
Michelle knew the placement of the futon was energetically wrong. She suffered nightmares of Kym and Wendy dying, of being stabbed in her sleep by killers who crept in through the rotting bathroom window. The position of the bed was wrong but there was nowhere else to put it. She had copied the layout of the woman who lived across the hall, after glimpsing her studio as she unlocked her door. In her apartment the sun felt soft, gentle, not murderous. The place was clean. It did not seem to have the pall of gloom that hung over Michelle’s studio. Her neighbor’s bed was backed up against wide, bright windows, inviting sunlight to pour over homey patchwork quilts, over ruffled throw pillows, over her cat — a cat that sprawled in the delicious glow, its tail twitching lazily. Wow, Michelle said, shamelessly peering through the door.
The woman smiled sheepishly and shrugged. Yeah, she said. Her cat was named Freedom and every so often the thing would escape and the woman would chase it down the halls yelling, Freedom, no! No, Freedom! No, Freedom!
Everyone in the building seemed to be thriving in Los Angeles. A guy downstairs was a computer programmer who drove a VW Bug he’d painted to look like that Mondrian painting: blue and red and yellow. Upstairs was an aspiring actor with shiny hair who had helped Michelle and Quinn carry a couple of boxes upstairs the night they arrived, then generously offered them a line of cocaine. A golf punker named Tommy lived down the hall. His hair was a torture chamber of perfectly straight spikes around his head, like a porcupine. He had created the ultimate styling gel for golf punkers, the Krazy Glue of hair products. Michelle hadn’t been aware of golf punkers before moving to Los Angeles, but apparently it was a thing — there was even a store called Golf Punk. Golf punkers were rich kids who didn’t think it paradoxical to enjoy their riches and familiar traditions of, say, golf, while also jamming out to punk music and adopting the aesthetic.
Michelle’s next-door neighbor hung seasonal decorations on her front door, above a chirpy perennial sign reading Think Pink! As time wore on, Michelle watched the ornaments on the front door shift from summertime ladybug to goofy-toothed jack-o’-lantern to glittering plastic snowflake. Passing her door gave Michelle the sinking feeling of living in a college dormitory. Why did this woman feel the need to hang a sign instructing everyone to Think Pink? What did it even mean to Think Pink? Michelle came upon her once as she unlocked her accessorized door. Her Chiclet teeth stretched into a newscaster smile and her hair was a maroon color, a fake reddish purple that swung above her shoulders in a perky bob.
Boy, am I glad you moved in! She greeted Michelle as if she knew her. The last guy who lived in your place — ugh! She flicked her hand around to ward off the evil past of Michelle’s apartment.
What Do You Mean? Michelle inquired.
Oh, he was an alcoholic, she said, but a bad one. Real bad. And PCP too. They brought him out of here one night on a stretcher and there was blood everywhere. I don’t know what he did. I don’t know how they got it out of your carpet! She chortled. Her door swung open, revealing a pale-pink temple of single girlishness. We’ll have a drink sometime, she promised. I’ll tell you all about it. The door clicked shut behind her. Think Pink!
Michelle moped into her gruesome apartment. Had someone actually died here? Was that the vibe of wrongness she felt, the bad feng shui? Was the ghost of this man hunkered in the corner, drifting above the suspicious spots and stains, blotches that Michelle now knew to be blood, was he watching Michelle like the rottweiler across the alley, did he recognize her as a kindred spirit, another addict who had come to die, alone, in this miserable little piece of Hollywood?
6
What is this guy’s problem? Michelle wondered, staring at a character outline of man-Michelle on her computer screen. He’s got a great job and this house and stuff, and his wife is nice and his kids aren’t deformed. Why is he so angsty? Is it just the human condition to be angsty? If so, why couldn’t Michelle just be her queer feminist fuckup angsty self and be universal that way?
Don’t be reactionary, Michelle scolded herself. The human experience is male. Okay. Does he have a problem with his father, aren’t men always competing with their father or something? Michelle didn’t have a father so she didn’t know how to pursue that narrative. She cursed her lousy imagination. The real problem here was she just wasn’t a very good writer. Okay. If this guy is going to do a bunch of drugs, what is it that he’s trying to escape? The prison of masculinity? How sexism hurts men, too? Maybe he just wants to cry. Maybe he becomes a massive drug addict because the patriarchy won’t let him cry, they’ll call him a fag and throw shit in his hair. He’d get fired from his job if he cried and would be forced into a life of crime and he’d get busted because nothing in his protected, middle-class existence prepared him for that. He’d end up in prison getting gang-raped till he shanked himself in the throat with a shiv made from a burned toothbrush.