Black Wave Read Online Free PDF

and so they eventually would tumble, crashing through a fence and onto the street, hopefully not killing anyone, blocking the sidewalk until the city came and dragged it away.
    In the coming blocks hookers would suddenly materialize, women in big shoes and cheap little outfits. Sometimes Michelle would be walking alone in a similar outfitand the women would regard her skeptically, wondering if she was working their block. Men in cars would slow their roll, also inquisitive. Michelle offered smiles of solidarity to the women and flipped off the men, masking her fear with snobbish indignation, praying for them to drive away. Once, drunk, she removed a high heel and walked toward the curb as threateningly as one can with such a gait, one pump on, one pump held menacingly above her head. The would-be predator drove away. Mostly the men were simply looking to purchase sex, not terrorize anyone. Michelle understood that to truly support a prostitute meant wishing her a successful business, which translated to streets teeming with inebriated men propositioning anyone who looked slutty from their car windows. She tried to have a good attitude about it.
    Michelle wrenched the 40 from her friend’s grip. She hated sharing anything with Ziggy, who bogarted the booze and whose strangely wet lips soaked cigarette filters. Once Michelle hit her Camel Light only to have Ziggy’s saliva ooze from the spongy tip. Ziggy would not take a languid, gentle inhalation but a stressed-out trucker pull, one and then another, making the cigarette hot, the tip a burning cone. Michelle did not know what to do with such a cigarette. She would rather buy Ziggy a carton of Camels than share a smoke with her, but she was stuck. Ziggy was her best friend and everyone was broke.
    Ziggy was both scandalized and delighted by Michelle’s love-at-first-sight encounter with the teenager. Her walk when newly drunk became a sort of dance, she swiveled out from her hips as she slid down the street. Like many butches, Ziggy dealt with her feminine hips by weighing them down with a lot of junk. A heavy belt was threaded through theloops of her leather pants. The word RAGGEDY was spelled in metal studs across the back, as if you could not simply see for yourself. All the dykes had recently discovered the shop in the Castro where leather daddies got their belts, vests, caps, and chaps. A bearded fag resembling the Greek god Hephaestus would pound the word of your choice into the leather with bits of metal. It was expensive, but worth it if you had it. Ziggy went from rags to riches regularly, scoring jobs at yuppie restaurants and then slipping on a wet floor and throwing her back out. She blew her cash on leather goods and rounds of tequila for everyone, plus some cocaine and maybe a nice dinner in a five-star restaurant where service people treated her like a pig. Whatever was left over was given away to people on the street, and then it was back to bumming cigarettes off her friends.
    But Ziggy’s hips: a Leatherman was snapped to the belt, like a Swiss Army knife but more so. The gadget flipped open into a pair of pliers with a world of miniature tools fanning out from the handles. Screwdriver, corkscrew, scissors, tweezers. The Leatherman was a lesbian phenomenon and life ran more smoothly because of it. Ziggy had that on one hip and a Buck knife in a worn leather sheath on the other. A hankie forever tufted from her back pocket, corresponding to the infamous faggot hankie code. The hue, pattern, or even material flagging from Ziggy’s ass transmitted the desire for a particular sexual activity, right or left pocket communicated whether the butch would prefer the giving or receiving end. Ziggy’s tastes were varied and shifting and hankies of many sort danced between her pockets. That night a flash of lamé dangled from her right cheek, signaling her wish to be fucked by a fancy femme.
    In Ziggy’s other pocket sat a leather wallet,