How to Grow Up (21 page)

I was haunted by the predictions some married friends had made on what our various wedding expenses would cost us, those thousand-dollar DJs and photographers. Luckily, the arts community I'd been a part of for the past two decades was filled with talented people who
wanted
to work our wedding, and at a reduced rate. I couldn't believe our wild luck! The DJ from the soul party where Dashiell and I had fallen in love offered to spin Motown at our bash, for a kindly rate. A photographer I'd modeled for offered to shoot the event, also for less than average. One of our guests worked for the lighting design company that had just lit up the redwood forest where a boorish tech tycoon had a decadent wedding involving cocaine, environmental crimes, and computers flung into rivers; he offered to light our wedding for free. We opted out of letterpress invites, as pretty as they are, for a cheaper design so classy no one noticed the difference. I got my gown at J.Crew. For a dress, it was expensive, but for a wedding
dress it was a steal! My hairdresser surprised me the day of by refusing to take payment for the amazing fishtail side braid she'd magicked my hair into. My bestie Rhonda, a landscape designer, filled the hall with dramatic vases of branches and leaves, lush aubergine flowers on the tables, the most gigantic air plants I'd ever seen accenting corners, fat bouquets of hydrangea and lilies, boutonnieres and corsages wound with exotic ribbon.

To top off this embarrassment of riches, I was pregnant. Our second go-round with IVF had resulted in a positive pregnancy, and by the day of our wedding I would be ten weeks along. Although I lived with the constant fear that my wedding dress wouldn't actually fit by the time our big day rolled around (those IVF hormones make you
bloated
), we were both so thrilled, so tickled that our future son or daughter would be, in this funny way, present at our wedding. We had an appointment with our obstetrician the morning of the rehearsal dinner, and we brought along our moms for a peek at their grandkid-to-be.

It hadn't occurred to us that we might get bad news.

The day before our wedding, Dashiell and I learned that the little blob of life we'd seen on an ultrasound just two weeks ago had shortly thereafter ceased to grow. The obstetrician's wand slid over my stomach, revealing the same amorphous bit of matter we'd seen weeks ago, no larger, and now with no flickering heartbeat.

There is no good time for a miscarriage, but surely the day before your wedding counts among the very worst. I was in shock as I sent out a volley of text messages to all who'd known I was expecting. There were a lot of them. I knew that there was a
tradition of waiting until you were out of the first trimester danger zone before sharing the news, but I'd found that hard, if not ridiculous, to adhere to. I am a wildly public person, and all sorts of people knew my business. I'd been blogging about our attempts to get pregnant for two years, and anyone who knew we'd recently had an egg transfer was inquiring about how it went. Plus, there was my body. Although I shouldn't have been showing at all, those IVF hormones had pumped up my belly till the elderly were offering me their seats on the bus. I looked pregnant. I
was
pregnant. So I had shared the good news, and now I would share the bad.

It wasn't until I spoke to Madeline that I broke down. “I feel like our wedding is going to be a sad thing now,” I cried into my first cup of coffee in three months. “Everyone will be feeling so bad for us, or they'll be uncomfortable, that way people get uncomfortable around tragedy. It will be tragic, and awkward. It's going to feel horrible.”

“Everyone loves you,” my sister consoled me. “Everyone is so happy that you and Dashiell found each other, and they are coming to celebrate that. You'll see. It is so awful that this happened, but you're going to have a beautiful wedding.”

As I noted before, weddings are showbiz, and the show must go on. There was no time to mourn, to collapse under covers and eat takeout and wallow in sadness. For starters, I needed a mani-pedi. It's true I almost lost it all over again when the woman painting my nails pointed to my protruding stomach and asked, “You have a baby in there?”

“No,” I said quickly, and turned my face away, down to the
People
magazine I wasn't reading, my cheeks burning. Even though this is the question you are
never, ever supposed to ask any woman ever
, I didn't blame her. I looked pregnant. Only hours ago I would have replied to her question with a yes and a smile. I placed my hand under the UV lights that baked the gel polish onto my nails, and the woman slid away quietly.

After the mani-pedi it was home for my progesterone treatment. Part of the IVF procedure is dosing yourself with progesterone from right before the egg transfer deep into your first trimester, first with nightly intramuscular shots that leave your butt both sore and numb, a grotesque combination, and later with little oval suppositories. Normally, when a fetus is found to have stopped developing, a woman would stop her progesterone. But stopping the progesterone increases the possibility of having a natural miscarriage, which can be an epic, painful, blood-soaked experience. I had a D and C—an abortion, basically—scheduled for two days after our wedding. In the meantime, I did not want a natural miscarriage to kick in. And I certainly didn't want it to happen at my wedding, as I glided around in a long white gown. The
Carrie
-esque, pitch-black humor of this did not escape me; the evil, nagging voice inside me, the one that insists that all my efforts to have a nice, normal adult life are bound to dramatically, flamboyantly fail due to some deep internal flaw, cackled wildly.
You would!
it hooted.
You totally would have a miscarriage all over your wedding dress. That is so you.

The night before our wedding, Dashiell and I lay in bed, too exhausted to cry. In the morning I woke up and inserted my progesterone, this time too excited to cry. Partly I worried about
being so distracted from emotions I was bound to feel sooner or later, but I was also grateful for it. There was no time for grief. My hairdresser was on her way to our house, and the photographer would follow, and it was time for me to finally slide into the dress I'd been hiding in my closet, time to step into the satin Lanvin pumps that were possibly the most expensive part of the wedding. It was time for Dashiell and me to marry one another.

With the help of our friends, the venue, beautiful to start, had become otherworldly in its romance. The flowers were exotic, and the space wasn't simply well lit; it was decorated with shadows in the shape of trees, so that it seemed we were gathering in a dark, majestic garden. I had grown deeply fond of our caterer, a French woman who had brought in a team of French-speaking ladies, all of them rushing around, prepping the dessert table with the most decadent lime pies, apple pies, pineapple cakes, and of course the banana pudding. An entire salmon, its scales replaced with rounds of cucumber, had pride of place on the savory table. It looked positively royal. After taking a barrage of photographs with every possible combination of family, it was time for Dashiell and me to hide. The guests were soon to arrive, and to our delight, the little room we'd selected to hide out in had a window that peeked out onto the street. We held hands in excitement, looking out at the parade of friends, all dressed up for our wedding. There was Tali, in a bow tie, ready to be our officiant (she'd clicked a box on a Web site and been instantly ordained a minister!); there was Annie, climbing out of the cab from the airport, her blond curls a wild halo around her head. A limousine pulled up and two cousins from Chelsea poured out, all
long legs and wild hair. There was that person and that person, in their sequined jackets and cocktail dresses, their suits and their acid-washed jeans, their ascots and thrifted maxi dresses.

Dashiell had planned with our DJ when the music to cue the procession would begin, and when the melody would change to cue our own walk down the aisle. Ducking behind a wall, we caught little glimpses of my nephew, the ring bearer, stumbling down the aisle clutching a bird's nest I'd carefully tied our rings to. My nephew had only just learned to walk, so it was a little touch-and-go, but he took to his duty so loyally he refused to relinquish the nest, and it had to be pried from his hand. Next came our flower girl, my five-year-old niece. Worried that she would fling all the flower petals onto the floor in one fat handful, I had told her to do it slowly.

“One at a time?” she'd asked.

“Yeah, totally,” I'd said. I'm not used to talking to children. I'm used to talking to my sarcastic friends who are always joking and joshing. It did not occur to me that my niece would actually walk down the aisle with the slow concentration of a butoh dancer, meticulously placing one petal at a time onto the floor.

“Oh my God,” I whispered to Dashiell from our peeking place. “It's like . . . Yoko Ono. It's performance art.” Eventually, Madeline leapt from the stage and helped her daughter along. As the audience was mostly filled with performance artists, it was a highlight of the event.

My highlight of the event was when Dashiell in her custom-made three-piece suit and I in my trailing gown clasped hands and set off together down the aisle. At the sight of us the entire
audience rose from their chairs and let loose a thundering cry of joy. They hooted and yelled and screamed and whistled. They cheered and clapped and stamped their feet. Dashiell and I looked at one another in utter shock, before cracking up. My smile was so big I thought it would break my face. I didn't think, then, of my sister's promise that our wedding would be filled with love and joy; I wasn't thinking of anything, so totally in the moment I was. But I would think of it later, how her promise was so true. Our wedding was filled with love, and we were at the gorgeous, beating heart of it.

Tali started crying before she even opened her mouth to speak, delivering a speech about the history of queer love we were a part of, referencing this new ability we have to actually, legally marry one another. Her crying was contagious; soon bunches in the audience were dabbing their faces. Our friends were largely ignorant of weddings, being mostly queer people whose friends hadn't been permitted to wed; many of them had grown to dread weddings as those awkward obligations that force you to hang out with family members you can't stand. It felt magical to be in the midst of this controversial tradition, doing it our way, making it meaningful not only for us but for a community of friends alienated from the rites of love and commitment.

I pulled my vows out of my bouquet of hydrangea and lilies and spoke my promises to Dashiell: I promised to snug and be snugged. I promised to respect her autonomy. She pulled her vows from the pocket of her suit and promised me the same. Unsure of who we would now be to one another—husband? But
Dashiell's a girl! Wife? Fine for me, but Dashiell is way too much of a boy to be anyone's wife!—I didn't know what to tell Tali to “pronounce” us. “Each other's person?” I suggested weakly, knowing how awkward it sounded. But she figured it out herself.

“I now pronounce you married,” she crowed, once our rings were safely jammed onto our fingers. We kissed, and bounded from the stage, Dashiell instinctively raising her hand in a fist pump. It's just how she expresses joy. We dashed back to the little room that had been our hideout, to catch our breath while the guests filed into a cocktail room.

“We did it,” Dashiell said, wrapping herself around me. “We did it.”

“Did you hear everyone cheer? Did you hear that?” I asked, as if she could have missed the entire room rising to their feet and thundering their love at us. We kissed and kissed and kissed some more, and then went out to join our party.

By the end of the night I had heard from many people that our wedding was the first they'd ever felt an actual emotion at. They talked about how Tali had made them cry, how my niece's flower petal placement had been the best piece of durational performance they'd seen in a long time. I hoped that at least some of the couples left feeling inspired—after a year of wedding planning, I now wanted to go to someone else's wedding! So far, none have made any announcements. My bridal bouquet was caught by a particularly slutty fag, but then again, even slutty girls settle down sometimes.

You Can't Fire Me; I Quit

A
t fourteen years old I was eager to join the workforce. I went to city hall and fetched a card for my mother to sign, granting the government permission to override the final years of protection offered by child labor laws.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” My mother scrunched her face. “Once you start workin' you'll be workin' till you're dead, you know.” It was sweet of her to try to stave off lifelong wage slavery for another year or two, but I was desperate to become a career woman. And I knew where to start. My run-down hometown had recently gotten a
mall
!

Our new local hot spot, the Mystic Mall, was built on the weed- and trash-encrusted empty lots where the city had notoriously burned down in the seventies. The humor of its name was lost on me. It wasn't a galleria of new age shops selling cut-rate crystals and swoopy Stevie Nicks shawls; it was simply named after the nearby Mystic River. Still, it's not incorrect to say that
the mall became my temple, a place filled with objects of worship that elicited many urgent prayers. Marianne's sold clothes so cool, I'd never seen anything like them—shirts that looked
just like leather
, slashed with zippers! Neon button-up shirts with neon-splattered
neckties
! Deb sold fingerless gloves, the kind worn by Madonna and Sheila E. and Adam Ant in the music videos I'd studied on TV. The Gap of yesteryear was
nothing
like The Gap of today; it hawked heart-covered T-shirts with spaghetti straps that tied into bows. Record Man offered Billy Idol and Van Halen records, some of them collector's-item picture discs, with Billy's bleachy spikes and luscious sneer gazing out at you from the grooved vinyl. At Mr. Tops you could pick out a T-shirt and flip through the gigantic three-ring binders stuffed with glittery decals, and the worker would sear your selection onto the shirt with a giant steaming iron, even laying out your name on the back in fuzzy letters, or sticking a velveteen lightning bolt on the shoulder. It was the eighties, and the opening of the Mystic Mall corresponded almost exactly with the introduction of MTV, which corresponded almost exactly with my puberty. Suddenly, I knew what cool was, and I wanted to be it. Amazingly, this brand-new mall, right here in my uncool hometown, could help me.

To score any of these things—a U2 pin from the revolving pin case at Mr. Tops, a fringed skirt from Marianne's, purple eye shadow from the drugstore—I would need money. Coolness was a luxury in my family; there was very little extra for such frivolity. But I was beginning to understand that this idea of coolness might, in fact, save my life—get me out of my hometown and into the larger world. The need for a J-O-B was serious. My
mother signed the card, and I was hired at DeMoulas Market Basket, the gargantuan new supermarket built alongside the mall. There were still some laws governing how many hours I could work, but I worked as much as I could—after school at St. Rose, buttoning my smock on over my Catholic school uniform, and on weekends.

At first it was exciting—picking up my tray, the cash neatly organized in the little slots, and proudly walking it over to my cash register. I loved the
clickety-click
of punching the prices into the machine, loved counting back the change. Girls who'd worked there longer taught me how to steal packs of bubble gum and where to stash them in your drawer, how to space out the bathroom breaks you spent smoking in the ladies' room. And as the novelty of employment wore off and the monotony of the work wore on, these little tips were what the job became about—not so much how to work as how to
un
-work. How to steal little bits of time for yourself, shave something extra off the top. I learned to daydream, especially while bagging groceries. I wrote stories in my head, the story of my life thus far, and realized that with twists of tone and vocabulary I could make my story sound glamorous or triumphant, funny or tragic.
Maybe I'll do this one day
, I thought, sliding cans of baked beans and plastic packages of hot dogs into paper sacks with Tetris-like efficiency.
Maybe I'll write about my life, and make it glamorous and triumphant and funny and tragic.

I quit DeMoulas right before I got weird, dyeing my hair and drawing upside-down crosses on my uniform. It had begun to feel like too much to do both school and the job, and to have time
left over for important bonding with new friends, finding secret places to chain-smoke cigarettes and compare notes on boys and music videos. But after my weirdness was firmly established I realized that I actually needed a job more than ever—for bus fare to sneak into Boston, for pins declaring my favorite bands, and for packs and packs of cigarettes—and tried to get hired back. But DeMoulas would no longer have me. “You've got to wash that pink streak out of your hair,” my old boss said, shaking his head at me.

“It doesn't just
wash out
,” I said, offended. “It's
permanent
.” I'd recently learned what a poseur was—a person whose commitment to rock 'n' roll was not legitimate, someone who was only pretending to be hard-core, who was going through a phase. Rock 'n' roll, I had come to know, was my
life
. From here on, everything about my appearance was calibrated to broadcast this allegiance to the world around me, in hopes that, beacon-like, it would attract to me others whose devotion to the underground was obsessive and true. Thus far, it hadn't. Thus far, it was simply getting in the way of me having a job so that I could continue to afford my rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Manic Panic doesn't grow on trees! Oh, the irony!

There was only a single store in my hometown that would hire a girl with a pink streak in her hair in 1986—Mr. Tops, that make-your-own T-shirt shop with its books of glittery decals and trays of velvety letters. One woman who worked there looked just like Martha Quinn, the MTV VJ with the pixie cut. I shyly commented on her look-alike-ness while browsing through the book of rock decals, and she said she knew that. I told her that
Martha Quinn was one of the women dancing in lingerie in the J. Geils Band “Centerfold” video, and she told me she knew that, too. I told her that the J. Geils Band was from Boston, right across the bridge from us. She was aware of that. Fake Martha Quinn seemed to know as much rock trivia as real Martha Quinn! When I asked if Mr. Tops was hiring, she gave me an application, and a week later I had a new job. One where the boss didn't mind if I came to work wearing white greasepaint meant for actual clowns as foundation makeup. One that didn't mind if I played the Cure's doomy-est album,
Pornography
, over the store's sound system—even if the customers did. It had all the makings of an awesome after-school job, except for one thing: I couldn't do it.

First of all, I couldn't fold the shirts. Folding things in general—shirts, wrapping paper, towels—is something I bumble at to this day. My creases are weak. Bits are sticking out where it should be streamlined. After learning that my best efforts resulted in stubborn imperfection, my frustration overwhelmed me and I stopped trying. I sort of rolled the T-shirts into soft lumps and hoped nobody noticed.

Then there was the giant iron that melted the decals onto the poorly folded (and thus wrinkled) shirts. Customers would choose a simple, sparkly decal that I'd have to iron on smack in the middle of a shirt. I
'
M
A
BEAUTICIAN
—
NOT
A
MAGICIAN
!
A
TOUCH
OF
CLASS
.
MAKIN
'
BACON
!
(That one had a cartoon of two pigs having sex. Gross.) There was the little puffy green guy always sticking up his middle finger, sometimes proclaiming, DISCO
SUCKS
.
There was
DISCO
SUCKS
BUT
ROCK
IS
ROLLING
.
PAYBACK
'
S
A
BITCH
had a deer holding a rifle. It took me a while to realize it was a hunting reference. People didn't hunt in my hometown. There wasn't any wilderness, or animals.

The real stress came when somebody wanted their name on the back of their shirt. Or even worse, a proclamation of their love—DONNA
LOVES
SULLY
;
DOM
'
S
GIRL
4-
EVA
.
These jobs required exact spacing not only between the letters but then between the words, all of it placed perfectly in the center of the garment—low but not too low, high but not too high. And you had to be sure to depress the iron slowly, lest a slight breeze ruffle your painstaking work and produce a wonky result. My results were often wonky. Sometimes an entire baseball or football or hockey or cheerleading team would place an order and I would be in tears, salty mascara trails cutting through not just my white greasepaint but the dusting of baby power I sprinkled over my face to kill the greasepaint's intense, clowny shine, creating a grayish mud on my face. I looked crazy; I felt crazy.

I liked my bosses, a couple of doctors who lived in a little castle by a beach somewhere and had ties to the Boston music scene. I hated showing them my mistakes, seeing how anxious it made them. So I began hiding my fuckups, balling them up in my army bag and then throwing them away in the dumpster behind the mall. Instead of thinking their new employee was totally inept, they now thought that someone was stealing their T-shirts. They never suspected me of thievery—with my uniform of vintage black dresses purchased from the Salvation Army, they knew I had no interest in baseball tees and sweatshirts. But after coming into the store and finding me so engrossed in a paperback that it took me
ten or fifteen minutes to realize they were there, they decided I was unintentionally abetting shoplifters by reading
Portnoy's Complaint
rather than keeping my eye on the goods. I was fired.

This began the chain of firings that defined my teenage employment. Many of these terminations were appearance related, and the rest probably due to alcohol. The hair salon that let me go for missing a busy receptionist shift after staying up all night sleeping out for New Order tickets, drinking so much rum I couldn't make it in. There was the ice cream parlor that dumped me for a similar no-call, no-show on a hectic Sunday morning. You wouldn't imagine Sunday mornings to be a popular time to chow down on a banana split, but this ice cream joint was in Faneuil Hall, and there was often a line of people waiting for their scoop before we opened. I guess being on vacation makes people feel wild and free enough to eat hot fudge sundaes for breakfast.

The night before my ice cream expulsion I had gone to nearby Providence, Rhode Island, to see the Ramones, and then to an all-night after-party at the home of a friend with out-of-town parents. The concert and the after-party involved huge quantities of alcohol—at the tender age of sixteen, my alcoholism was already in full effect. When I woke up for work I'd only been asleep for an hour or so, just long enough to feel completely sickened by what I'd ingested. I decided I would pretend that I hadn't known I was on the schedule that Sunday morning—even though I was on the schedule
every
Sunday morning. When I showed up for my after-school shift on Monday, the manager wouldn't even let me in the back to collect my things.
“Employees only,” he snapped coldly, slapping my dog-eared copy of
The Basketball Diaries
onto the counter. Fired again.

Not
all
of my jobs ended in such dramatic terminations. Some jobs I just stopped showing up for, like the one at the copy shop. I was the only female employee, working with a bunch of twentysomething dudes who wore vaguely corporate drag to work but played in bands after they punched out. “A tie is an arrow that points at your dick,” one said to me glumly, flicking his neckwear. When I asked if I could step outside for a “cigarette break,” another replied, “Sure—right after I have my ‘heroin break,'” then rolled his eyes. Weeknights were busy, copying reams of court transcripts from nearby law offices, but weekends the financial neighborhood was shut down, so I could usually hang out reading
Rolling Stone
—an article about William Burroughs called him an “antihero” and a “cult writer”! What a cool thing to aspire to!—or Hunter S. Thompson's
Hell's Angels
and
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. But one Sunday morning, after another night of heavy drinking (Bacardi 151—highest proof possible
plus
the bat logo was
so Goth
!), I was simply unable to get out of my sickbed and onto public transportation. I was a no-call, no-show. I now knew better than to pretend I'd confused my schedule and, somewhat embarrassed, just never returned.

I said
somewhat
embarrassed. My work ethic was developing alongside my reading preferences, and the writers I was discovering were total miscreants who would never let a stupid
job
stand in the way of a crazy adventure. And my teenage nights were increasingly filled with crazy adventures. I was brought onto the stage at the local
Rocky Horror Picture Show
to lip-sync “Time
Warp” with the fully costumed cast, resulting in a brief romance with the bisexual witch who played Frank-N-Furter. I snuck onto the tour bus of my favorite Goth band, Christian Death, and begged to run away with them until the pink-haired driver threw me out. I went on a NoDoz-fueled overnight road trip to Pennsylvania to help my gay best friend, Joe, find his lost gay boyfriend, Lizard (my mom thought I'd slept over at a friend's house and spent the following afternoon at a museum). In the summertime my friends and I sprayed whipped cream on the bottom of cardboard boxes and went sledding down a hill. We blew up an inflatable raft and tried to float among the Swan Boats in the Boston Common. We got in fights with jocks who tried to beat us up for our awesome hairdos; we ran from cops who tried to arrest us for public drinking. And so my young life slowly but irrevocably split into two lives: the wild life I wanted and loved, and the straight life I endured to make the wild life possible. Straight life equals school, jobs, lying to Mom about my whereabouts. Wild life equals riding in the trunk of an overstuffed Hyundai, downing a four-pack of wine coolers, and making out with a tangle-haired Goth boy who hadn't figured out he was gay yet. I needed these jobs to keep me in Aqua Net and thrift store finery, and I needed to abandon them when they stood in the way of a mescaline trip at the Museum of Science or a jaunt to Western Massachusetts to see Joan Jett play for free.