Michelle could intuit the clear narrative trajectory of a man crying to his suicide in prison. This seemed promising. Maybe Michelle could actually keep the ideas that obsessed her — injustice, struggle, gender, feminism — but put them onto a man, thereby making them universal! Women have been trying to make feminism universal forever but had anyone ever thought of this? She would be such a hero! Michelle felt all fired up but it was probably just coffee. She felt herself sag as the caffeine peaked in her bloodstream and began its retreat.
All anyone would have to do is look at her, Michelle, the author, and her ulterior motives would become clear. The book would be deemed suspect, have an intention other than literary, be branded propaganda. For such a novel to succeed a man would have to write it.
Every female Michelle knew was writing memoirs, excavating dark childhoods and heartache. Michelle didn’t know any men writing memoirs, but she also didn’t know any men — other than trans men. Maybe she could write a memoir under a pen name, a man’s name, infuse it with all the molestation and tragedy found in a common female memoir, and bam! a best seller, maybe. She could write a novel about a girl pretending to be a guy in order to write a successful book. Or a girl pretending to be a guy pretending to be a girl to stir up a sensational literary scandal. This was the terrible thing about fiction, Michelle could write about whatever she wanted. She could write about dinosaurs mating with unicorns in the lost city Atlantis and some fool would read it. In the face of so many options she spun, paralyzed, overthunk. She just wanted to write a humble novella about a girl in love with a petulant genderqueer teenager, both trying to get their lives together in Los Angeles, but even if she were to convince Lu to let her do it, even if she fashioned a different Lu who never got low blood sugar or did drugs, who hadn’t been raised in a household where everyone yelled at the mother, thereby learning that yelling at women was a great thing to do — even if Michelle worked all of this out, such a book would never cross over. She deleted the man-story she’d written.
Michelle closed her laptop. Maybe something was germinating inside her and she was fucking it up with all this obsessing over the perfect universal male narrator. She had an inkling of inspiration — maybe she could take her life and sort of superimpose it onto Wendy. Maybe an aging, crack-smoking, Bostonian psych nurse in a lousy relationship would be compelling to readers, maybe they would sympathize with her and not judge her drug use. That was the thing — people tended to judge drug abuse unless you were an imposing or hardy man and then they sort of reluctantly envied your daring. Still, the tragedy of Wendy was so compelling to Michelle, perhaps she could find a way to articulate it to a large audience and cross over and really be a writer then, be safe, have a future. Michelle thought about it. She sat in her kitchen late at night listening to the Smiths.
And when you want to live,
how do you start?
Where do you go?
Who do you need to know?
Oh. .
Well, Wendy would have to be straight, for starters.
7
Michelle was drinking from a great big jug of wine. When the jug ran dry she would lie upon her futon and sleep. Except for the nights when she craved, really craved, another jug of wine. If she had emptied that first jug by a reasonable hour the Pink Dot would still be open and she could order herself another. Oh, the Pink Dot was so marvelous! Michelle didn’t understand why all cities didn’t have them, it had convinced her of Los Angeles’s superiority — sorry, San Francisco. Yes, the earth is deader here than anywhere else on the planet, but facts are facts: in Los Angeles you could make a phone call, read the numbers from your ATM card, and forty minutes later a man would be at your door with liquor, cigarettes, and a dish of pasta in a takeout container. Los Angeles wins.
Michelle liked to order champagne. Though she might actually want another jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano, a sturdy bottle, wide and round, low-slung, like a lady pregnant with a belly full of wine, she ordered instead champagne. Champagne was less alcoholic. It was more celebratory, performative. Michelle was taking on the persona of a slightly lunatic female drinking champagne at her kitchen table at three o’clock in the morning. There was a strength inside the tragedy of it, if you regarded it from the right angle and depending on what you wore. Drinking and smoking in a pair of sweats and a stained T-shirt was an obvious cry for help, but if Michelle teetered around her kitchen in a fluffy nightgown made in the 1950s, something pink and polyester with bits of lace and flowers, and over that wore a cover-up of sheer pink chiffon that floated out behind her when she clicked around in her golden mules, yes, mules, stuck with wavering bits of marabou — if you were wearing this and drinking champagne right from the bottle, well, something fabulous was happening! No matter that no one was there to see it. In such a getup, late-night binge drinking was acceptable.
Also, in addition to what you wore (finery) and what you drank (champagne, preferably pink, to match your finery), what you did while drinking alone late at night made the difference between alcoholic and artistic. Like if you sat at the window and cried because you had moved miles away from home and friendship and had nothing, if you were left only with the dregs of your personality, replaying everything that you had done wrong in your relationships, psychoanalyzing yourself, alternately blaming your parents and then feeling terrible and weak for blaming your parents — that would be really alcoholic.
But if you sat at your kitschy 1950s kitchen table and made a gigantic scrapbook out of your life’s ephemera, turning your regret and sadness into a craft project, that was artistic. That was what Michelle did, in a thrifted nightgown, finishing off a bottle of wine she’d found on sale at the Rite Aid earlier that day. The Rite Aid was at Hollywood and Gower, in a part of Hollywood called Gower Gulch. In days of yore, aspiring actors would hang out on the corner in cowboy gear, hoping to be picked up to work as an extra in a spaghetti western. The front of the drugstore was painted with murals of cowboys swinging lassos and pointing shotguns. Inside, Michelle bought ice cream. She loved Rite Aid’s rocky road in a dense, square scoop on a cone. She also liked the discount red wine. She went to Rite Aid often.
Every photograph Michelle ever snapped went into her scrapbook. Photos of her singing karaoke with Andy one Christmas Eve, hours before becoming alcohol poisoned. Photos of Ziggy on New Year’s Eve, topless at the queer bar, a metallic paper hat on her head, piercing needles and glitter stuck to her skin. A photo of Michelle outside her old house in a fake leopard fur coat — snow leopard — her clunky motorcycle boots, a cloth flower in her hair, looking at the camera with love in her eyes. Andy had been behind the lens. She pasted them into the scrapbook. Flyers for every event Michelle had gone to in the past ten years — benefits for sick dogs and bunnies, for Model Mugging, to save a failing queer business, to put a band on tour. Letters from people Michelle would never see again because she moved to Los Angeles. She would sit and drink and smoke out the kitchen window, her fingers growing gummy with glue stick, and when the glue stick went dry she moved to Scotch tape and when the roll spun out she switched to duct tape and then she was really drunk, about a half hour away from putting in a call to the Pink Dot — Think Pink! — for a bottle of celebratory champagne and another pack of blackout cigarettes. The scrapbook was a massacre of torn pages and fibrous slabs of industrial tape.