How to Grow Up (16 page)

So, I didn't go to college. I still haven't, and I can't imagine I ever will. When the old doubt creeps back into my skull and I
start worrying that I don't
really
know what the word
postmodern
means, or that when someone accuses me of being an “essentialist” I have no comeback because I don't know what the frig they're talking about, or that I've never read the gender theories of Judith Butler (even though I think I tend to date people who embody them), I do what I've always done when I want to learn. I pick up a book. I haven't made it past the
C
's in the
Dictionary of Critical Theory
, but entry by entry, I'm sure I'll reach the end
. Earlier this year I decided it was time to step up my literary education and read Hemingway, a writer I've always avoided because his reputation precedes him too mightily and macho-ly. Much to my surprise, I stuck it out through all five-hundred-plus pages of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, shocked at how much I was enjoying a war novel (totally not my thing), humbled by how wrong I'd been about this writer. By the end I was crying on public transportation. Next I moved on to
Madame Bovary
, delighted by how like an antique French soap opera it read. I may not have been able to attend college, but the stuff that's taught there can be grabbed by anyone, any day of the week (at our local libraries, staffed by those awesome “old maids,” the real Ms. Americas).

Maybe I'll always harbor distant fantasies about going back to school, because I love to learn and read, and I love to live. Maybe when I'm in my eighties I'll be one of those rad old ladies who wind up on the nightly news for being an octogenarian college freshman. But I doubt it. Having graduated from the School of Hard Knocks, I enjoy operating as the institution's development director, PR person, provost, and department head. It's
important to know that there are lots of ways to do things, many routes to life and learning, more than one way to be what you want to be. I'd rather college be affordable enough that the decision not to go is one made by choice rather than default, but even if that were to happen, I'd keep my post as dean of the alternative way, that famously less traveled road.

The Baddest Buddhist

S
ometime after my epic breakup, when I was still seething with resentment, I visited with my family in sunny Santa Monica. We were among a horde of people wandering toward the promenade, a public space lined with stores and odd, often sad street buskers, like the man playing a violin with an empty soda bottle, or the “psychic cats”—malnourished felines in Ren Faire garb trained to grab a scroll of psychic hoo-ha for a spoonful of wet food. As we pushed forward, I noticed a man in the crowd who was walking funny and spouting fury. Others moved to give him space lest he suddenly become violent; we did the same. As we passed him I caught a glimpse of his face—reddened, tortured, full of rage.

“I did
everything
for you and you did
nothing
for me! I did
everything
for you and you did
nothing
for me!” he chanted. The people moving by him looked scared, or disturbed. Some laughed
at him; some looked briefly compassionate and quickly moved on—the various coping mechanisms we develop to deal with the sight of one of our kind losing it in public. Beneath all reactions, even the cruelest, is a bit of
There but for the grace of God go I
.

That afternoon I felt especially close to the freaking-out gentleman. I couldn't shake the feeling that I had put in a lot of time with my rapper ex, taken a lot of shit, worked really hard, and all for nothing. I'd cared for this person emotionally, financially, even physically, and for what? Eight years of my life, gone.
I did
everything
for you and you did
nothing
for me!
The only difference between me and the dude in the street was that I kept my grudging fury on the inside, while he had lost that ability. There but for the grace of Stevie Nicks higher power go I.

Remember that 12-step slogan I mentioned, about how resentment is like drinking a glass of poison and expecting the
other
person to die? I had a churning pit of bitterness and anger in my body, but my ex seemed to be having a great time bouncing around town with his new girlfriend. No matter how much I stewed and sunk, he appeared buoyant, remorseless. I knew I had to do something about it, lest I turn into a woman muttering aloud in public shopping centers. Writing lists of everything I was grateful for wasn't soothing my angst; spending an extra twenty minutes on the treadmill didn't exhaust it out of me. My regular stable of self-help tools wasn't cutting it. It was time to get a serious perspective injection, to declare spiritual war on myself. It was time to get Buddhist about it. I'd long sought solace and wisdom from the occasional Buddhist read, but my current
state of mind was pushing me toward a deeper interaction with the ancient discipline. I'd thought Buddhism would save me from hating my ex, but instead it helped me grow up a little more.

While the thought of shaving my head is terrifying (I did it once, during a feminist nervous breakdown, and was shocked to learn that I have a very pimply scalp), and vows of silence intimidating (though it would certainly be nice for everyone if I shut up once in a while), and pledging to swear off meat stressful, Buddhism is the spiritual philosophy that has always made the most sense to me. I believe 100 percent in the truthfulness of it. I believe there is a middle path, and that it is the sanest one to trot. I believe in the five precepts, a scaled-down version of those Ten Commandments drilled into me in Catholic school—no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, avoid “false speech,” and abstain from “fermented drink that causes heedlessness.”

I find these five rules that Buddhists live by basic, totally fair, and much, much harder to abide by than they look. Even the first one, no killing, is more complicated than it appears. At first you're like,
Duh, I would never kill anybody
. Then you realize that it doesn't say no killing
people
; it says, simply, no killing. Now, unlike Christianity, Buddhism is very much figure-it-out-for-yourself, which is one of the reasons I dig it. For me, no killing means, simply, no killing, and includes the nation of ants I annihilated on my countertop this morning, not to mention the mouse beneath my sink. If I believe that “no killing” is the righteous way to go, why do I find it so hard to commit to? Because I'm human. If these five precepts came easily to any of us, humans wouldn't have been creating religious disciplines around
them since the dawn of time. It's our nature to stray, and our nature to regret it. It's our nature to yearn for a sort of purity, and our nature to fail ourselves. The precepts, like whatever you pledged to take up or quit this past New Year, are tough to stick with.

Though it sounds counterintuitive, I've found the Buddhist precept against stealing easier to master than outright murder, even though I often think a little shoplifting isn't such a big deal. I don't judge any down-on-their-luck person lifting food or toiletries or other human requirements from giant retailers. And I also don't judge the scrappy, broke girls I know who have made an art of ripping off fashion from places like Neiman Marcus and Banana Republic—many a time I wished I had their daring and skill!

My own experiences with thievery are so small-scale it's almost embarrassing (bragging about thievery may be one of the realms where the horrid phrase “Go big or go home” is applicable). When I was thirteen years old and began sneaking into Boston, I gravitated to Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a shopping emporium stocked with carts hawking the sorts of juicy trinkets one went wild for in the 1980s. Plastic heart key chains. Shoelaces stamped with ice cream cones or shooting stars. Rolls of scratch-and-sniff stickers that reeked of pickles or root beer. Dangly purple earrings from a cart that sold only purple things. Erasers shaped like unicorns. Smallish items easy enough to pocket if the urge struck you, and the urge did. I coveted these things so powerfully it made me sweat. To me they were emblems of the world outside my shitty small town, a world where people wore cool clothes and thought cool thoughts and did cool things. If I
could bring, say, a purple pencil embossed with metallic gold lightning bolts from Boston back to my real life, it would be like bringing an object back from a dream; it would enchant my everyday hours and infuse them with possibility. So I began to shoplift.

I prized my ability to find creative ways to boost an item. Fingerless gloves, very in
at the time, were a great aid; I would simply slip palm-sized objects into the glove and wave the shopkeeper good-bye as I walked away. I was also good at faking a sneeze while tossing the contraband into my mouth. At home I hid my loot in an old cedar box my grandmother had given me. The only problem with stealing such cool stuff is I couldn't actually use any of it. My mother would see it and ask me where it had come from, and I knew my stammer would betray me. So, I started selling it. The girls in my shitty Catholic school in my shitty run-down town also drooled at the sight of hair barrettes braided with silky ribbons and bright earrings and neon rubber bracelets. The loot vanished from my cedar box, replaced by dollars.

I might've gone on forever, slowly building a stolen-goods empire. I could be writing to you from prison right now. Instead, I got caught, and the getting caught made me stop my shoplifting ways—about 95 percent of them. That day, I was wandering the aisles of the Kmart at the crummy Mystic Mall with some friends, up to no good. I wanted watermelon Kissing Potion
so bad
. The desire for the taste of sugary candy makeup on my mouth was so strong, I now wonder if I'd had low blood sugar and maybe just needed a slice of pizza. But no—I needed my lips to look all wet and shiny like the girl in the ad with the perfect frosted-blond
feathered hair. When we hit the cosmetics aisle I grabbed a package of the roll-on gloss and casually walked it into the boys' department. I buried it under a stack of pajamas and, while looking (so I thought) like I was digging around for the perfect size jammies for a little brother I did not have, I ripped the package open and shimmied the tube of gloss into the wrist of my jacket.

This jacket was a good one for shoplifting. It belonged to Jen Spicoli, the most popular girl in my class and my own best frenemy. Often I would stay the night at Jen's house, planning the all-pickle “health food” diets we would go on beneath the posters of Sylvester Stallone that lined her bedroom walls. In the morning, I would be told not to tell anyone that I'd spent the night. It was like we were having an affair, Jen Spicoli and I, though I swear nothing ever happened between us. I actually sort of hated staying at her house because she slept with the radio on, which I thought was really cool but which very much impeded sleeping. I'd lie awake next to her in bed, having what I now know to be a panic attack. Still, I always wanted to stay over. Jen was cool: She had an older brother who was into AC/DC, she wore black eyeliner, and she had superstraight blond hair pinned back from her forehead, and the softest, tenderest hairs would straggle out from her hairline—baby bangs, she called them. She wasn't just a member of Chelsea's Pop Warner football cheerleading squad; Jen was
head
cheerleader. And in spite of her ambivalent feelings toward me, she'd let me borrow her cheerleading jacket. It was amazing: bright-red corduroy, with her name in cursive on one arm and a patch of the devil on the other. As much as I hated Chelsea, it
was
cool that the city's mascot was a leering, mustachioed Satan. As a
bonus, the wrists of Jen's jacket were tight elastic, meaning that anything stuffed up the sleeve wouldn't fall out.

I would have made it home with my watermelon kissing potion if not for the daring of Elena Rubinski, and my own stupidity. Once safely outside the Kmart, huffing and puffing and glowing with the wild dopamine and adrenaline surges shoplifting released in my hormonal body (for sure, this was my first drug), Elena, who had been too chicken to lift anything, decided she wanted the watermelon-scented eraser that had been packaged with the gloss. I was so excited for my friend, that she would soon know the rush and material gain of shoplifting, and I was proud to be her mentor, showing her the ropes. We walked back into the fluorescent-lit apocalypse of Kmart, the stink of fake-buttered popcorn and tangy blue Icees all around us. We walked back to the pile of pajamas and found the gloss packaging right where I'd left it. Elena snatched the eraser. And then the security guard snatched us.

If only, if only! If only I had taken the stupid lip gloss out of my coat and stashed it in a trash can or something. But I hadn't. When the plainclothes guard brought me and a crying Elena into a back room hung with the Polaroids of fellow shoplifters and ordered me to take off Jen's coat, the gloss fell to the floor. The guard didn't put us in handcuffs or call the cops, though he threatened us with both. I managed to convince him that the eraser belonged to Elena, and that she just had the misfortune of befriending a shoplifter. She was let go, and the guard called my mother. I was banned from the store, and Jen Spicoli was
pissed
that I got Kmart-arrested in her
cheerleading jacket. What if they thought she was
me next time she went in for an Icee? I looked at her like she was nuts; Jen Spicoli was waaaaaay prettier than I was. I
wished
it took but a cheerleading jacket to make me look like her. Nonetheless, Jen became less
fren
, more
nemy
. And that was pretty much the end of my criminal career, minus a few forays into, you know, drug dealing and prostitution.

As much as I might not care about people lifting a bottle from Sephora or any other megachain, I myself cannot do any of it anymore. Quite simply, I'm too old. Too
grown-up
to get caught. The thought of getting busted, Winona-like, for stealing an unnecessary luxury is totally humiliating. As the late, great comedian Lotus Weinstock said, “I used to want to change the world. Now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity.” And leaving a Bloomingdale's in handcuffs for boosting a pair of earrings is just not dignified. (Though, goddammit, try as I might to resist, it
does
have a gritty Courtney Love–type glamour to it, does it not?) Being engaged with Buddhism helps me keep in mind the recovery assertion that every problem is a spiritual problem. If I want to steal something, I must think I don't have everything I need already. And in my case, I do. I do have everything I need. Recognizing that lays bare my thieving desire as the bundle of greed or fear that it is. And then I can deal with
that
.

Precept Three: Avoid sexual misconduct. This is so personal, and so subject to interpretation. I think it comes down to this: Do you think, in your heart, that your sexcapades might be hurting you or others? Are you cheating on someone, or helping someone else break a commitment? Are you a sexual thrill seeker, putting yourself in danger by recklessly hooking up with
hoodlums? Do you use sex to manipulate people? (And I don't mean a stripper manipulating a dollar off a gent—that's a job. A job that might include such sexual misconduct, and also might not. Totally a personal call.) As someone with a bit of sex addiction mixed into her addiction Christmas stocking, sometimes I couldn't tell if I was feeding the beast or, you know, just enjoying the privileges of a single lady in my place and time—privileges my foremothers
died
for! It's tricky, these precepts. And yet, I believe that figuring out how to handle your sexuality with respect and dignity is a crucial part of growing up. Sometimes being at the mercy of my libido made me feel powerless, and feeling powerless made me feel like a child. Taking control and building that scaffolding of Rules for Love led me to a place where I was calling my sexual shots from a place of sanity, thinking about the whole big picture of my romantic life as opposed to the instant gratification of a two-bit hookup.

What other Buddhist precepts do I maybe sort of obey, maybe not? False speech is variously interpreted as lying, or gossiping. I am guilty of both. I don't lie to my loved ones, with the exception of my mom, because it is a daughter's job to lie to her mother, and plus it's good for our relationship. I would say I lie rarely. A big part of my 12-step practicing is accepting life on life's terms, and if you feel the need to lie you probably aren't doing that. Was I accepting life on life's terms when I decided to lie by omission to my department head at the fancy college and jet off to Fashion Week? No, I guess not. Knowing that telling the truth would get me fired, I opted for deception. This might be the career
equivalent of a hungry person stealing a loaf of bread, and then again, I might be delusional.