I’m making a scrapbook! Michelle thought. Michelle’s mother Kym made scrapbooks. Michelle felt oddly close to her mother in those late hours, imagining Kym crafting through the heat of the New England night, also unable to sleep, smoking joints and pasting pictures of the past into tidy albums.
Michelle had moved to Los Angeles with three little suitcases packed with her personal memorabilia. She lifted piles of paper from the luggage onto the table and worked through the heap methodically. Smoke gusted from her mouth and fruit flies dive-bombed her glass of wine and died there, Michelle fished them out with a spoon. After a certain point she was too drunk and too obsessed with the scrapbook to remember to push the plastic cork back into the cheap jug of wine and the flies would invade the bottle, swiftly drinking themselves to death, becoming a raft of bodies floating on the surface. Michelle poured herself a fresh glass, straining the wine through a paper towel, making a bit of a mess, but the table was already so grimy with glue. Bits of snipped paper blew around like confetti. Michelle looked up and caught her reflection in the darkened kitchen window.
Is This Gross? she asked herself, wrinkling her nose at the paper towel full of dead flies.
In San Francisco Michelle had drunk nightly and long into the morning, but she did so among a community of drinkers and so nothing looked amiss. It was social, it was lively, it was what everyone did. In Los Angeles, cleaved from her drinking buddies, Michelle continued solo in her habits and found them to look a little different. Maybe a little pathetic
It’s Not Any Different, she said grandly, raising a dollar-store juice glass painted with a happy elephant. Wine and a stray dead fruit fly sloshed inside. It Is No Different Than Before.
Michelle pasted another smiling picture of herself into a notebook. She wondered, drunkenly, if she were perhaps dying, if she had lugged herself to the edge of the state to die like a dog alone on a cliff. Maybe she should dry out, go on a health kick. She had cut her drug intake drastically, no more heroin, no more cocaine. It had seemed fine for Michelle to keep drinking, but the scrapbook carnage before her on the table, the paper towel lurid with wine and the bodies of a hundred fruit flies, it looked worrisome, like a metaphor for a situation too awful to consider. Michelle vowed to put it away. She would learn to grill fish. Too late, no more fish left. She would learn what the healthy thing to grill was now and she would get it and she would grill it. She would wear moisturizer on her face and clean the house, put traps out for the roaches so she would not be forced to kill them with her fists each morning — that wasn’t sexy, Michelle was letting herself go. This was how women got ruined. In the darkened bedroom the telephone rang. It was the Pink Dot. Michelle buzzed the delivery person into the building. She returned to the kitchen, the foiled neck of a champagne bottle golden in her hand.
8
Michelle’s morning hangover and subsequent posthangover plan that afternoon was no different than any other hungover day in Los Angeles. She woke up on the futon, her head stuck to the pillow with sleep, her body dampened with a mild sweat, cooked with heat, the sunlight like lasers shooting through the venetian slats, burning her skin in stripes. She was underslept. Her body had metabolized the wine to sugar and she’d woken high from it, bouncy, her heart racing, dehydrated. Michelle woke up craving pineapple juice, rounded triangles of watermelon, long salted slices of cucumbers. She thought of San Francisco, of its dampness and mold, right then she did not miss it. She enjoyed the “tan” she was getting just snoozing, naked, in her bed at home. Sleepily she drifted away from herself, gazed down at her somewhat tragic life and found it looked good, like a Tennessee Williams play. Hangovers made Michelle tender, made her nostalgic — not for her past but for the life she was living right now, the moment passing through her fingers. She was not deep enough inside it, she had to live harder somehow, write it out, or maybe she just really needed to get laid. She should make Joey take her to a gay bar, or maybe start flirting with some customers at the bookstore. In that sleepy, sentimental moment Michelle pledged to lay off the alcohol for a while. At work she would seek out poetry books to augment her contemplative mood. She would read philosophy and self-help. She would cut down on her drinking, maybe take a break for a month. She would feel on the verge of changing her life.
By the end of her shift Michelle would feel normal — stronger, caffeinated, fortified. She’d think about how gloomy she’d been all day, how dramatic. She would laugh at herself, quietly, inside her head — how silly, how histrionic! She would stop at the Mayfair Market on the way home and purchase a bottle of wine. Why was she so extreme all the time? Get too drunk and it’s all, Oh, I have to stop drinking! Why so hysterical? She would have a glass of wine with dinner — civilized, European. She would fill tortillas with honey and cheese and let the blue flames of the stovetop singe them. Maybe Michelle would work on her scrapbook afterward, just for like an hour, then go to sleep, No calling the Pink Dot. No need to, she would just be having a glass of wine with dinner.
Michelle lay in bed teetering between her plan for the day (the same aspirational plan as every day) and her understanding of what would actually happen (the same drunken ending as the many nights before). Her hangover beat like a heart inside her head. If Beatrice and the husband came in today her hangover would be painful. If it was just her and Joey she could make her hangover funny, a sophisticated gag. She would tell Joey all about calling the Pink Dot, the flies dive-bombing the wine, and it would be funny, really funny, funny in a way it couldn’t be alone. Joey understood tragicomic lifestyles like only faggots do. Michelle would give him all the details of her nightgown and Joey would die, Joey would love it.
Joey didn’t drink anymore, not after almost dying of a heroin overdose while working retail back in New York City. He’d worked at a couture boutique and everyone who worked there was really hot and had a problem with heroin. They would go downstairs to the basement, shoot up, clamber back upstairs to collapse on a couch and stare at the customers. He got fired for dropping his bagel in front of the designer. He’d been nodding out early in his shift, standing in the middle of the boutique, swaying, an egg bagel in his palm. It landed all over the floor. You’re dropping your bagel, hissed the manager, and sent him home forever. Dropping the bagel was Joey-speak for not maintaining, for losing control, dysfunctioning. Michelle felt proud that she had never dropped the bagel at work, never, not ever.
There was another new employee at the bookstore, an unemployable rocker chick whose parents were friends of Beatrice. Beatrice was doing the parents a favor, paying the rocker chick minimum wage to alphabetize a crate of CDs in the back room. The girl was very twitchy and wore a stormtrooper doll on a cord around her neck. She’d been there for three days and had already passed out and been sent home twice.
She keeps dropping the bagel, Joey clucked.
Amateur, Michelle said.
One morning the telephone rang and rang. It rang and rang and rang and rang. Who the fuck is calling? Michelle wondered uselessly, unable to answer the phone. She wasn’t ready to be in the world yet. The digital beep trilled, the phone’s red light flickered. Maybe Joey had a celebrity sighting at the bookstore. Michelle had had her best celebrity sighting about one week ago, a life-changing experience. So far the celebs at the bookstore had been impressive but minor. Alan Quartermaine from General Hospital came in with his boyfriend, oh yes, Michelle was sure, that was his boyfriend, Alan Quartermaine was gay! Michelle couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized that, all those years watching General Hospital in the 1980s! She had much more respect for the actor. He played straight so convincingly.