How to Grow Up (7 page)

“Better not bring it around Paris,” she said. “Wait till you get home to wear it.”

“I will.” I nodded, gazing at Jo. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Punk rock!” she hooted, going back to her room. As insane as my life was, hers was unfathomable in its rags-to-riches lunacy.

It had been a dream, a sort of joke dream, to go to Paris Fashion Week, and inexplicably, it had happened. Once I knew I was
going, I jokingly told my friends, “I want to see Kanye West and score a purse,” never really thinking that I would find myself in multiple closed spaces with Kanye and Pink, and Kate Moss, and the Kills, and Paul McCartney, and those wicked Geldof girls—and find myself cuddling a batshit crazy Fendi purse that I was sure went for no less than five thousand dollars on the open market. Surely it was part sleep deprivation and part protein deficiency, but after I returned from Fendi I wept, there at the desk in my room at the beautiful Westin. I felt like I needed to reach out to someone, so I e-mailed the person who knows me best: my little sister.

I shoved as much of my otherworldly week into my e-mail as I could, and ended on the quasi breakdown I was having with my Fendi purse.
I must be crazy
, I typed.
But it's all making me emotional. I guess I'm overwhelmed.

My sister's reply was swift.

Sometimes
, she wrote,
I sit back in the house that I live in in Santa Monica, where I can see the ocean, where I live with my incredible husband and our beautiful baby daughter, where I'm not struggling, where I get to be a stay-at-home mom like I dreamed, and I go back in time and I say to the thirteen-year-old me who felt so out of place and trapped and hopeless, Don't you worry. You're going to grow up and get out of here and have the life that you want.

Michelle,
she continued,
you used to get
beat up
for the way you looked. You and Ma fought every day for four years about how you dressed. You need to go back to teenage you and tell her, Don't worry. You're going to grow up and get out of here and have the life you want. You're going to get to go to Paris and go to the shows and you're going
to get an incredible $5,000 purse for free because that is just what is going to happen to you. You're not going crazy. It's a big deal.

Gazing out my window at the Tuileries, the grounds littered with Fashion Week tents, I took her advice and spaced out and talked to thirteen-year-old me. I told her all about Paris and Annie and Jo and the purse in my hands, and I cried even more. Then, I snuck outside my door, grabbed the end of a stranger's baguette from a room service tray left out for pickup, ate it, and passed out.

That's what I'm going to talk about on my deathbed.

My $1,100 Birthday
Apartment

T
here are many head-fucks a person who grows up broke will contend with for most of her life, and one of them is not really understanding what things cost, or what things are worth. My understanding has always been skewed, and I've seen this confusion—often accompanied by fear and a bit of defensiveness—in other broke folks, including my mom.

Once, on a visit with my sister in Santa Monica, we stopped at a Whole Foods to pick up dinner fixings. My mother tried to help with the shopping, but not only were much of the offerings foreign to her (Gluten-free pasta? Kimchi? Coconut kefir?); the prices struck a deep and confounding terror in her heart. Her eyes grew wide as she took in the costs at the meat counter. “If I lived here I'd starve to death!” she gasped, upset. I watched as the world tightened around my mother, grew smaller. An entire region was now out of her reach. She would remain trapped in
Florida, with other poor New Englanders who'd gambled on a better life and found the same poverty in a warmer climate, with worse labor laws.

“Ma, you would not starve. There are other places to shop. This is an expensive place.”

What I wanted to say was,
There are poor people in Los Angeles, too
, but I was afraid to refer to my mother as
poor
; it might make her feel ashamed. Plus, maybe she didn't feel poor. Was poor a mutable identity, like gender or sexual identity, or was it essential, based on the facts of your paycheck, your wallet, your response to the price of a pound of organic grass-fed non-GMO-fed beef? When I was young, my mother would send us to the grocer, Goldstein's, and we were to order a half pound of the good meat and a half pound of the bad. She'd crumble it all together and that would be dinner, Hamburger Helper.

I, too, once flinched and cringed at the higher cost of eating well, but after a point, I came to accept it:
That's just what organic food costs.
I learned that I could buy it and nothing would happen. I didn't wind up homeless choosing the organic kale over the conventional.

For me, part of stumbling toward adulthood has included getting real about what things cost, and not getting mad at the world about it. It's also understanding what I can and can't afford. This understanding is often psychedelically clouded by what I lovingly refer to as my “scarcity issues.” It's pretty simple: You grow up with money being scarce, and it gives you hella issues. Mine manifest most powerfully in a terror that everything I have will be somehow taken away from me—probably through
my own fuckups and carelessness—and I will not only be broke again, but broker than ever. All the worst-case scenarios I've managed to avoid, like outright homelessness, will make themselves clear as my destiny. In order to stave off this horror, my scarcity issues counsel me, I must make sure my cost of living remains low, forever. Sure, I might be able to clamber over my issues to make a onetime purchase of a luxury leather hoodie, but I must never, ever make a decision that raises my monthly bills—say, getting better Internet (hence my getting online via a telephone cable snaking across the apartment for waaaaaaay too long), or acquiring a cell phone (I cracked years after everyone else in my life, and only at the bullying of a friend, who was then required to come and hold my sweaty hand for the duration of the transaction). I can't get cable, because what if that extra monthly expense is the final straw that catapults me into extreme poverty? Same goes for health insurance. I'll just keep using the free clinics, thank you very much. For years, I did my grocery shopping at Food 4 Less, where the other broke folks wheeled their carts around, collecting our gently dented and discounted cans of soup. My scarcity issues were present whenever I spent more than thirty dollars on anything (later, after much personal work, the number was bumped up to fifty), making me dizzy and flooding me with anxiety, but I slowly learned to tangle with them, to make the purchase in spite of feeling like it might literally give me a heart attack.

In my youth it was easy enough to cultivate a low level of taste. A pint of generic vodka (or better yet, an economical forty-ounce of malt liquor) and a free poetry reading were all I needed
to be happy. But in getting sober, your tastes change. Literally—you can, like, taste things. After decimating your appetite with stimulants, you suddenly are in love with food. You crave sweets, or complicated savories. (Plus, what do people
do
if they don't drink? They eat. And go to the gym. And become sex addicts.)

And so it was that I became accustomed to shopping in the fancier grocery stores. You'd never expect that a young woman cruising the bulk bins at a health food store could be having such a profound nervous breakdown, but initially I was. I felt like I was betraying my mother, insulting her struggle by buying pricey food like it was no big thing; like I was somehow checking out of my class politics, aligning myself with the bougie mofos who'd spend twelve dollars on a bulbous heirloom tomato; like an outsider, someone infinitely more at ease inside a grocery store stocked with Oreos and Doritos than one peddling flaxseed crackers and purple carrots.

After a couple of years I stopped feeling like a dirtbag impostor, someone more suited to a block of government cheese than a round of
fromage
aged in a French cave and packed in volcanic ash. I stopped writing the price code for the conventional rice on my bag of organic rice. The punk in me could argue that organic food should be free and I
deserved
a discount on my health food after all I'd been through, but the more sober and clear I got, the more these defenses sounded like the self-serving, juvenile attitudes they were. In my 12-step program, there was a lot of emphasis on living free of fear, changing fear-based behavior. Why would I engage in the pettiest of petty theft, passing off my $3 bag of organic rice as its $1.99 cousin? Because I was scared. I was
scared that if I became accustomed to a lifestyle of organic rice I would then be ruined.

Ruined? Sure. Or if not ruined, punished somehow, by someone. A terrible finger would point at me, dirt wedged under the nail, and hiss,
Traitor! Class traitor! Think you're too good for Minute Rice? Huh? You'll see. You'll end up back here with the likes of us, eating twenty-five-cent packages of ramen you can't even cook properly. Ramen is a
soup
, but you cook it like a bunch of noodles sprinkled with a crumbly, MSG-laden flavor packet. Why? BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO TASTE.

You get over it like you get over it, a bit at a time. By the time I was visiting with my mother and sister in L.A., I did not cry out in pain at the two-hundred-dollar Repettos in the shoe boutique we tucked into; well versed in the math of fashion, I understood that was simply what Repettos cost. Of course, they were worth every penny—they were
French
.
Strange new politics entered my consciousness. So much of the expensive clothing I coveted was made in Europe, by people paid a living wage, engaged in a crafts tradition that had been passed down through generations, sustaining whole villages. Slowly, the elevated price tags began to seem like a bit of justice. What was the real price of a pair of thirty-dollar shoes? Could it perhaps be more in line with my class politics to purchase a few higher-quality, well-made items than to comfort myself with a piece of fast fashion made by Bangladeshi women who would be assaulted with high-pressure hoses for protesting their working conditions?

I persisted in lusting after luxury items—like Le Labo Rose 31 perfume, which I'd had the good fortune of smelling when I
was put up in a hotel that offered the scent in its toiletries. Le Labo Rose 31 smells like you've stumbled into some sort of divine cathedral consecrated to the worship of women—1920s burlesque dancers, sultry Italian mothers of eight, the drag queens found in Jean Genet novels. Hookers. Expensive, successful hookers. It is a dark rose scent made darker with something spicy and churchy. At the hotel I shampooed and conditioned my hair in it, and I scrubbed all my dirty bits with the smooth white cake of soap. I slathered myself in the lotion. Then I took everything and stuffed it into my bag so that housekeeping would leave me a new set. Then I stuffed that new set into my bag, and did it all again a third time.

As a former drug addict, I'm hesitant to claim to be
addicted
to something like a smell, but the truth is, both drugs and smells set off complicated chemical reactions in your brain. And since I'd surely firebombed my brain's dopamine factory for years, impacting its output, and since smell can fire up your pleasure centers and ramp up dopamine—well, who knows exactly what happened in my brain as I huffed and puffed and blew my mind with the smell of this new perfume? Maybe my crisscrossed, beat-up brain waves were surging at the smell of Le Labo Rose 31, eking out another little drip of precious dopamine. All I know for sure is when I ran out of my pilfered hotel toiletries I
missed
that rich scent, and daydreams of walking into Barneys and having the nice perfume guy whip up a bottle with my name on it took over.

While visiting my sister in Los Angeles I realized, as we were wrapping up with brunch, that we weren't that far from Barneys.
I scooted through Beverly Hills, past Porsches parked brightly alongside the curb, past an ice cream truck selling treats to a little girl who had greeted the morning full glitz—lipstick, dangly earrings, designer sunglasses. Beverly Hills is a circus, and I let myself enjoy the spectacle, maybe even become my own sideshow as I fell into the store and stumbled toward the Le Labo bar behind the racks of sale shoes. The risk was never that I
would
do this, indulge my lust for a pricey perfume. The risk was that I wouldn't. That the old fear would set in, the
You can't buy nice perfume, other people do that.
The
Buying fancy perfume is a slippery slope, then what will you buy, before you know it you'll be out on the street!
The
Think of what your struggling mother would say if she knew you just spent $150 on something so stupid.
The risk was that I'd let fear and shame and guilt make the decision for me.

When I drank, I was wild. My wildness, of which I was so proud, took the form of risk taking. If a man sexually harassed me on the street I would remove a shoe and come at him menacingly; I would follow him in circles asking, “What did you just say? What did you just say?” Once, on top of a very tall building, I climbed a ladder to vandalize a sexist billboard, a can of spray paint rattling in my hand. I was naked and wet, because in addition to a billboard, the rooftop hosted a swimming pool and I'd been skinny-dipping.

I'm not necessarily
proud
of these moments, and I am very grateful I didn't accidentally get myself killed. But this urge to identify the most outrageous, slightly dangerous possibility and hurl myself into it—both daring the Universe and trusting that it would somehow hold me safe—has always been inside me. I
think it's in a lot of addicts. Life can be scary. On some level it's scary for everyone, and those layers of scary can really pile up when you're female, when you're sort of weird, when you're broke, when you're queer. The way life dares and challenges you can just become your day-to-day, invisible. There's something great about staring solid
Jackass-
style hijinks in the eye and consciously diving in. Acting fearless creates an understanding of yourself as sort of a badass, which generates extreme confidence—which is super helpful when your individual battle to find your place in the world feels more than daunting.

How is all of this transformed by sobriety? How do you indulge your daredevil demons? How do you challenge yourself to do things that scare you? Some people jump out of airplanes, but that's not for me. I'm not actually an adrenaline junkie, and I don't feel the need to face a fear of death. I'm fine with being afraid of death. But my fear of spending money, my fear of betraying my working-class roots, my fear that extreme destitution is always right around the corner no matter how much I work or accomplish? Now you're talking.

So I bought the perfume. At home I sprayed a cloud of it into my bedroom and walked through it, letting the mist of it settle on my clothes, my skin, my hair. I fucking love it. It smells like heroin. No, it doesn't—heroin smells like vinegar, like rot; it smells disgusting. This smells like money. Piles and piles of money, made by some goddessy woman who earned it in her garden or her atelier or her boudoir.

I wish these games of psychological truth or dare would cure me of my money issues once and for all, but I still get scared a lot,
still feel the way my mom felt inside Whole Foods—utterly ignorant of what things cost, but certain that the price is too high for the likes of me. Blind spots loom, always. And a big one was the ultimate monthly expense, rent.

I was twenty-two years old when I landed in San Francisco, with only one friend in the whole seven-by-seven-mile city. I was estranged from most of my family. I'd dropped out of college after two semesters. Setting out for some sort of new life in San Francisco, I had one priority: cheap rent. It was only through cheap rent that I would have any life at all, that I would be able to be a writer and have a writer's life, a life that in my twenties occurred mainly after sundown, in bars and taverns and saloons, with shady characters and wanton women. Cheap rent allowed me to have time to scrawl in my notebooks, time to sleep in after those late, scribbling nights. I was always willing to make the sacrifices one had to make in order to have very low overhead—rowdy roommates, and too many of them. A front hall that smelled suspiciously like mouse. Maggots in the fridge.

When I returned from Fashion Week it was a rough landing. For weeks I'd been shuttled around on the dime of Annie and the prosperous musical outfit she managed. And then—back to San Francisco. The dirt smudges on my bedroom walls seemed to have grown darker in my absence. The Bloomin' Onion ashtray installation had swelled, now large enough that I could detect its dank stink through my windows. The windows, how they shook and rattled in the wind and rain! And the fridge, oh, the fridge! I dared not even open it. I began to long for a real kitchen, a clean one, where I could linger at my table with a magazine, or
cook healthy vegetables at night, never encountering a roommate's mess, never having to clean it in order to proceed or just give up the evening's culinary aspirations and flee to the nearest taqueria.