How to Grow Up (9 page)

When the game was over, I walked out with fifteen hundred
dollars. I was trembling. “What if we get mugged?” Katy whispered as I shoved a giant roll of cash in my tiny beat-up thrift store purse. We threw a tip at the bartender on our way out, and ran to the Ford Falcon. Once we slammed the heavy doors and punched down the locks, we let loose in a roar of screams. I won the jackpot! I immediately gave half of it to Katy, filled with relief at being able to pay her back for all the gas and meals and hotel rooms she'd bought us. We found a bingo supply store in a strip mall on the edge of town, and I tricked myself out with a special bingo bag, replete with outside pockets to carry your daubers, and a pair of earrings made of teeny-tiny bingo cards. We bought an extra day at New York–New York and hit the bingo hall at the Showboat a couple more times, but my luck had apparently run out. Both of ours had. We drove back to San Francisco and completed our whirlwind breakup.

Ever since that Vegas trip, the idea of pulling the Wealth card from the stack of tarot filled me with a magical feeling of possibility. I didn't think that I was likely to find a pile of cash hidden in the floorboards of the eleven-hundred-dollar apartment, but I did take it to mean that moving in wouldn't land me in the poorhouse; I had sufficient wealth to be able to afford it.

As I strolled through the apartment, I imagined waking up each morning in that bright front room with the crisscrossed window frames. I would feel like Snow White, like a bird was apt to land upon my sleepy shoulders, and maybe if I stood out in that blooming backyard, one would. I thought about the blazing persimmon tree I would be leaving behind. I still appreciated its
noble, persistent beauty, but it was nothing next to an actual
backyard
stinking of jasmine vines and exploding with azalea, sweet plums dropping from the plum tree each fall.

In this apartment, every day would be a new day. I would shuffle into the kitchen, open the fridge I shared with no one, pull out some food unmolested by vermin. I would sit at my table and drink coffee and read
Vogue
. All of this was easily worth an extra three hundred dollars. If I had to mug old ladies in the street to get that money, I'd do it. But I figured I probably wouldn't have to resort to that. I put the trust in the tarot, and in myself.

On the night of my fortieth birthday, my new apartment was filled with people. My sister came up from Los Angeles to celebrate. Friends came from Portland and Brooklyn. I requested only crystals, plants, and mix CDs for gifts, and I received a terrarium and a potted vine and succulents and hunks of amethyst and the complete works of Bruce Springsteen. In my kitchen, people drank whiskey around my yellow kitchen table. They snacked on sweet-potato-and-prosciutto pizza at the antique library table I'd found at a thrift store. They lounged on my bed (a French antique carved with flowers and ribbons) and sat on the new white leather club chairs I'd arranged beneath those charming windows with the crisscrossed window frames. My purse collection was housed in the built-in, as was my collection of European fashion magazines. I'd made my writing desk into a vanity and did my writing anywhere I wanted, because the entire apartment was mine. I'd gotten everything I wanted for my fortieth birthday. I got to maybe, just a little bit, grow up.

I Have a Trust Fund from
God—and So Do You!

“M
agical thinking”—a tendency to believe you can just
wish
goodness into your life and hope the bad things away—is native to alcoholics. Maybe it's how the booze addled our brains; maybe it's because drunks are such dreamers; maybe it's a side effect of the denial it takes to sustain a career of heavy drinking. Whatever the cause, if you get sober and go to those culty little meetings, you hear the term a lot. Oddly, much of the 12-step guide to right living includes a regular indulgence in new-agey practices: believing that the Universe will take care of you, that the god of your choosing (mine is Stevie Nicks) has a plan for you, that you can do the right thing and have faith and it's all going to work out. At first glance it may look a little hypocritical—especially if you're newly sober, incredibly cranky, and looking to disprove these theories so you can get back to drinking.

But after a decade of continuous sobriety I've come to
believe it's just about getting yourself in good enough shape—mentally, physically, dare I say
spiritually—
so
that your desperate old magical thinking is transformed into straight-up
magic
.
I often feel a bit bummed for my nonalcoholic friends, that they don't find themselves in random church basements practicing this odd, effective spell casting. Alcoholics aren't the only ones who need help; we're just the loudest and messiest. So please—allow me to introduce you to the weird world of intentional affirmational nondenominational prayer-ish magical-thinking
magic
!

As a witchy woman, I am comfortable with the word
magic
, but if it conjures up images of dweeby guys pulling bouquets of fake flowers out of collapsible top hats, call it something else. Call it connectivity—your connection to yourself and the world around you. Call it intuition, your sixth sense. Call it the power of positive thinking, like the business world does. At its simplest, it can be the humble
It's all good
of a friendly hippie. To me, they're all the same—one person's pagan spell is another's Christian prayer; it's about setting intention. Personally, I like to cover my bases, casting spells
and
saying my prayers. Even after discarding Catholicism I held on to the saints; I loved their stories of martyrdom and perseverance, how supernatural their tales were. Like me, many of them were persecuted by their contemporaries. Like me, most of them were girls. In my early twenties I became interested in Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion that was created when slaves were forced to hide indigenous spirituality behind a devotion to saints; today, practitioners still use the Catholic imagery interchangeably with African gods and
goddesses. I've always thought we're just simple humans calling out to energies and forces too big for us to understand. The face we put on it—be it the Catholic Saint Barbara or the cross-dressing Santeria deity Chango—is mutable, and can be determined by what best captures our imagination.

Prayer gets a bad rap in our culture, because there are a lot of nutty people abusing it, trying to push it into classrooms or use it to punish people. Not shockingly, my own prayers avoid such negativity, tending toward the more floaty, nondenominational spiritual utterance—a request for help, guidance, or strength from the Big Unknown—a thank-you to no one in particular for the beauty of a sunset or the love of a smart-aleck friend or a scrumptious meal. Most days I have at least one moment when I cast a glance around my life and see the cozy adorable house that I live in, my foxy adorable love that I live with, my bathroom shelves full of smelly beauty products, my closet full of thrifted finery, and I think,
Holy shit! I can't believe this is my life! Thank you.
My most common prayer is probably
Holy shit—thank you!
And there are always a million things to say
Holy shit—thank you!
for. I have all my limbs. I wasn't born in a war-torn country. My house has indoor plumbing. I'm not hungover and puking right now. I'm not trapped in a small town somewhere. I'm safe. I'm not in jail. My family wasn't murdered by the government. Not to get all grim, but the darker edge of human experience has no dropping-off point. Who knows what random maneuver of luck and fate saved me from unknowable disaster?
Holy shit—thank you!

Some people are into affirmations—repeating high-self-esteem phrases to yourself in the mirror or leaving them jotted
on Post-its stuck all over your boudoir as a reminder of how excellent you are. These, too, are sort of nondenominational prayers, prayers that you'll wake up and realize how awesome you are. I like affirmations. Some years ago, inspired by a writer I heard talking on a panel, I began saying the Money Magnet chant. Someone had asked the writer how she supported herself, and she admitted that whenever she started feeling worried about cash she'd stop and say this affirmation/prayer/spell/wishful thought:

I am a Money Magnet

Money comes to me

Money loves me

Money is sexually attracted to me

Money wants to be near me

After a few chants, something would happen—her mom would send her a check; a freelance gig would come through. A writer friend from a working-poor background similar to my own scoffed when he heard this: Perhaps one needs to have check-writing parents for such affirmations to work. I decided to do my own research, adding to the end of the chant:

I love Money

I am Money

Did a pile of cash land on my doorstep? Well, it did seem like opportunity knocked a little harder when I was in the Money
Magnet groove, for sure. The sudden offers to do a paid reading or write an article kept me chanting away each day in my favorite prayer spot, the shower. Standing beneath the spray, I'd close my eyes and recite the chant. And like magic, the next day, I'd learn that a grant came through.

Would I have gotten the grant anyway? Was the granting based on my actual application and the quality of my work, not how melodiously I intoned a few phrases in the bathroom? Probably. And, as I do make my living on the haphazard accumulation of speaking gigs and freelance writing, perhaps those shouldn't be surprising either. But there was another, unexpected magic the Money Magic chant worked on me: It transformed my relationship to cold, hard cash.

When a system is oppressing you, it's easy to take the most glaring physical representation of that system and demonize it. The system itself tends to be invisible, an infinite string of transactions and reactions stretching into antiquity. As a poor person sensitive to the stings of classism, I decided early on that I hated money. Money was evil; money was the problem. I avoided financial exchanges when possible, putting on free events, doing free tarot readings, giving away my little books of poetry sometimes. When money was inevitably involved in one of my projects, I shuddered and pushed the responsibility onto someone else:
You deal with this; I
hate
money.

Once I got sober, I lost a lot of the booze-fueled bravado that had helped me cope with the harsh realities of being poor. With alcohol, I achieved a persona of tough-assed bitch who didn't give a shit about cash and thought you were a damn fool if you
did. Stripped of inebriants, I was just myself—smaller, more vulnerable, broke, and a bit lost. Plus, the practices I was learning in 12-step programs were about compassion—not judging people, not hating. Suddenly, I was thrust into these small rooms filled with people I used to love to rail against when drunk—men, people with more money than I had. But now we were all the same, gathered to discuss how fallible we were, how we had fucked up, how we were trying to be better people, for ourselves and for our worlds. Whatever delusions we'd used as coping mechanisms had withered in the stark light of sobriety. After about a decade of demonizing and avoiding money I realized the disadvantage I'd set myself up for. I was underpaid, if paid at all. People handling the cash at my events sometimes helped themselves to it, probably figuring if I hated the stuff so much, what would I care? And, perhaps worst of all, I had no power. Not believing in a system doesn't make it go away. After working my butt off organizing a huge literary event only to watch, again and again, the person handling the money being treated like the mastermind while I was little more than ignored, I faced the hard fact: Whoever has the money has the power. When I exiled myself from the financial aspects of my work, I cut myself off from avenues of respect, control, and autonomy as well.

The thought of facing the rest of my life as a broke person, without alcohol to lessen the sting, filled me with despair. I had to figure out a way to make this part of life less painful. One of the most powerful things I'd learned since getting sober is to love and accept life on life's terms. Alcoholics have a hard time doing this; we're little id-driven crybabies, guzzling and complaining
about how nothing in this life goes the way we think it should. Accepting and even embracing the world as it is can be radical, and it can have powerful, positive results.

I decided to apply some of this sobriety dogma to my money problems.
Money loves me
was a really good start—that money could be benevolent and loving was a revolutionary notion. I imagined the spirit of money as a tenderhearted fairy who longed to share herself with everyone but kept getting kidnapped by dastardly villains. A sort of less cranky Tinker Bell, this money loved me and loved
all
the downtrodden!

Okay, money loves me. But for me to love money? That was preposterous. Yet I knew that in order to heal my abusive relationship with prosperity, I was going to have to start approaching this part of life not with fear or anger or hurt, but with love. Couldn't I love a fairy-esque money with a generous spirit, too easily captured by brutes? Embedded in this fairy tale, my desire for cash began to feel like a righteous conspiracy to break money out of the prison the 1 percent had locked her up in.
Free money!

What about
I am money
? What was that about? It was partly an impulse to get as
close
to money, this thing I'd avoided, as possible. But it was something else, too: an acknowledgment that, like it or not, I was part of the money system. I did work and get paid. I took my money and spent it, on stupid shit as well as on necessary objects. Acting like I was somehow outside—or above—the money system was ridiculous. It was time to join the human race.
I am money.
Money kept me fed today. Money kept me under this roof. Money bought me this computer, the clothes on my back. Letting go of value judgments, dropping the idea of
myself as poor or rich or whatever, I saw myself in the center of a web of prosperity. I had all these things, this life, and I was grateful.
I am money.

Money comes to me, money loves me, money is sexually attracted to me, money wants to be near me.
Slowly, the subconscious notion of money as a giant war machine, as the dreadful Moloch of Allen Ginsberg's
Howl
, faded. Money became something silly, something flirtatious. Images flashed as I spoke the chant in the shower: The little money man from Monopoly! Me, naked, on a bed of cold, hard cash, throwing it into the air with abandon! The money pixie, freed from her dungeon! After a lifetime of making money antimatter, I needed to make it something light. It did the trick. Less and less did it seem like money was an evil force with unlimited power over my life. Increasingly it felt like something I was in conversation with—no longer something that wanted to destroy me, but something that wanted to build me up.

The chant didn't “fix” me, of course; it was just one more tool I had to use in the lifelong task of dismantling my scarcity issues. There were others. In my support group I started meeting with a woman who had more time sober than I had. In her I was able to catch a glimpse of the sort of person I might someday become if I managed to keep dodging the lures of booze and coke—she seemed healthy, in body and in spirit. Having established her sobriety, she was able to deal with other issues that had been festering beneath her drinking. Alcoholics don't emotionally grow when they're using; once we get it together, we realize that there's a whole banged-up psyche that needs our loving care. And one thing we were both dealing with was money issues. It's
something a lot of alcoholics have to face up to once they're sober, even people with middle- or upper-class backgrounds. Nobody makes good financial choices when they're blitzed all the time. Chances are you can't hold a good job, and you're spending all your cash on booze and drugs. You wake up in the morning vaguely remembering a trip to the ATM, even though your wallet shows no sign of such activity. You do absolutely nothing to plan for any sort of future, because the only future that matters is when you can have your next drink. My friend's basic alcoholic money issues were compounded by the fact that in her own early sobriety she fell prey to a secondary shopping addiction. In the wake of this mess, paying bills became terrifying, a morass of self-loathing, disappointment, and frustration. But a year or so of wrestling with her alcoholism had taught her all sorts of magical tricks. At bill time, she started pulling an empty chair beside her at the table and asking her idea of God to sit down and keep her company while she faced her fears.

I know some of you are throwing up in your mouth right now. These methods may be a bit too deep in woo-woo fairyland for the more logical hard-asses out there, the word
God
too triggering. I respect that. But the idea that she wasn't alone while staring down the barrel of her checking account gave my friend a glimmer of relief. Enough to lick the damn envelopes and get the checks in the mail.

At this point I had enough time in 12-step programs, and had followed their advice with enough dogged desperation, that I could see that they were working. I just felt better. I wasn't as freaked out or stressed out. There is this phrase about people who
come into 12-step culture and get super blissed out when they find it working for them: the pink cloud. I was super duper on a big pink cloud. At heart I'm really a hedonist—I just want to feel awesome, all the time. For a while, drugs and alcohol helped me achieve that. Now that using had stopped working, it looked like this new world of self-investigation and higher-power communication was doing the trick. I thought about how my friend invited her HP to bill time, and wondered how I could come up with a similar trick to help me with my own money issues.