How to Grow Up (8 page)

At night I dreamt of Paris. Oh, the luxury I'd known! How I'd slept in a giant, scrumptious bed, and in the morning picked my way through a buffet that included yogurt in quaint little glass jars and a breakfast cereal that was the French equivalent of Cocoa Krispies, only being French it was perhaps made from Valrhona chocolate. How a maid had cleaned my room. How my shower had always sparkled. How my only duty had been to dress up as much as possible and observe high fashion as it was debuted to the world.

I knew I could not, like Eloise or Lindsay Lohan, live inside a hotel for the rest of my life. But I could certainly hit something a little higher than where I currently shivered. Friends had started to ask me what I would do for my fortieth birthday. People did significant things to mark such an occasion. They went to Tuscany or hiked the Pyrenees. For my fortieth birthday, all I wanted was a home with a clean refrigerator.

I started putting the word out. When you live in a city for a long time—I'd been in San Francisco for almost twenty years—the best housing deals are ones you find through word of mouth. I had a couple of leads, but they were falling short—too expensive, snatched up too quickly, or too far outside the area where I wanted to live.

At a literary event, I ran into a friend who was talking to a photographer who documented the literary scene in town. This
photographer was also the building manager of a place in the Lower Haight. My friend told her about my plight. “There's a one-bedroom opening up,” she offered. “Eleven hundred dollars.”

“Eleven hundred dollars!” My cry was not the cheer of incredulous delight it should have been. My cry was one of shock and horror, the gasp of a person who has been insulted. I had become my mother in Whole Foods, gazing at the meat case.
If I lived here, I'd starve!

The photographer gazed at me curiously, puzzled by my tone. “That's a really great price for a one-bedroom,” she said gently. “It's below market value.”

“Maybe so, maybe so.” I brushed her off brusquely, and with this
attitude
. Fully triggered, my scarcity issues took over my personality.
These people don't know how
real
people live
, I thought harshly.
They think
eleven hundred dollars
is a reasonable price for a one-bedroom apartment?
My
people can't pay that kind of money. They must have mistaken me for a
rich
person—and who could blame them, with my Louis
Faux
-ton and organic baby spinach in my teeth, stinking like a $150 rose?

“Maybe so,” I told the building manager icily. “But it's just not for me.”

They looked at me like I was insane. It was a look I would become familiar with as I recounted the exchange with others.

“How's the housing search coming?” asked friends who knew all I wanted for my fortieth birthday was a fortysomething lifestyle.

“Okay,” I grumbled. “I heard about a one-bedroom, but it's eleven hundred dollars.”

“A one-bedroom for eleven hundred dollars?” they would repeat. “Not a studio?”

“Not a studio.”

“Where is it? The Outer Sunset? The Avenues, the Richmond?”

“No . . . the Lower Haight. Sort of Hayes Valley.”

Hayes Valley was having a moment. Not only was there an artisanal one-cup-at-a-time coffee kiosk tucked away in a cute little alley; there was an artisanal one-scoop-at-a-time ice cream kiosk. The one-scoop-at-a-time place was right where the artisanal meat truck parked each week, selling cuts of meat from animals who had gotten massages the whole of their short lives. It was across the street from a candy store that sold chocolate bars made with basil and rosehips, around the corner from a bar that rimmed its strawberry cocktails with sugar and black pepper and served its very own artisanal potato chips with a crème fraîche onion dip.

All of this could be mine, for eleven hundred dollars a month.

“You do understand,” friends gently coaxed, “that is only three hundred dollars more than you are paying right now, to live with twentysomethings and a fridge full of maggots?”

Three hundred dollars. Surely I could wrangle up an extra three hundred each month? That wasn't
that
scary. But then what about everything else—the utilities and Internet bills no longer split. I would have to pay it
all
.

“Yeah,” my friends said, nodding. “You will have to pay your $19.99 Internet bill all by yourself.”

I'd worked enough with my money issues to get a sense of when my perception was wack, and began to understand that my comprehension of the eleven-hundred-dollar one-bedroom was a little effed up. I e-mailed the photographer who managed the building, and asked if I could come and peek at it. She invited me over the following night.

THE
ALEXANDRA
,
the tiled lobby floor introduced itself. A large, leafy plant sprung exotically from its terra-cotta planter. Inside it was all wood. Little holiday wreaths were hung along the stairs, making the hallway smell like a magical forest. I climbed the carpet to the first floor, and entered the open apartment. The photographer was there, showing the vacant space to a straight couple. We greeted each other in that weird way people who are after the same apartment greet each other—friendly, but sizing each other up as competition. I could imagine their calculations:

Tattoos. Not a good sign. Maybe she does drugs. Can't have a great credit score. Does she have a good job? Does she have
any
job—can people
get
jobs with a tattoo on their neck?

I made my own calculations:

Fuck, they're totally normal. They look like they could sell insurance on a TV commercial. This is what people are
supposed
to look like. Crap. They're even married. But maybe that's a strike against them. I'd just be one person in the apartment—less wear, less tear. I'm not going to have a fight with my spouse the whole floor can hear. I'm not going to have a baby all of a sudden and keep the building up with its crying. There are a lot of perks to having a single lady as opposed to a couple.

Meanwhile, the couple continued peeking at me, imagining the trail of thuggish lovers my promiscuous, tattooed lifestyle would lure into the building.

As it happened, there were not one, not two, but
three
apartments open in the building. The tension broke with a near-audible crack. Our phony smiles relaxed into genuine grins and we strolled around the apartment.

The place was lovely. A giant front room with tall decorative windows overhung the busy street below. A walk-in closet poked off the side, which could also be converted to a teeny office or meditation room. French doors slid open to reveal a middle room with a giant built-in shelving unit shuttered in leaded glass. The bathroom sported a claw-foot tub and charming archaic details. There were hardwood floors, and checkerboard linoleum in the kitchen; a sparkling clean fridge and a laundry room downstairs; a freaking
backyard
, a wilderness with a plum tree and vines of jasmine and a bottlebrush tree and wrought iron furniture and a fire pit and pots of tomatoes and artichokes.

Before I had set out to view the apartment, I'd done what I'd long done at one of life's crossroads—I'd picked some tarot cards. “You're so California!” people always say when they learn of my love of astrology and tarot cards, but I was like this long before I left New England. I got my first deck at fifteen and went about studying in earnest, doing readings for my family.

A good tarot reading tells you what you already know, only maybe you're a bit too clouded with fear or confusion to see it. A good tarot reading brings clarity and perspective. It shows you where you're headed, but it can also show you how to head it off.

“What would it look like if I moved into this apartment?” I asked the tarot while I shuffled, and then flipped over a single card: Wealth.

The last time I selected a single card and got Wealth, I'd been in Vegas, on a breakup road trip with my ex-girlfriend Katy. We'd fought and cried from Chicago through the Midwest, chugging along in her white Ford Falcon, driving from airbrushed sunrise to fiery sunset, through lightning storms that cracked and crashed above our heads, a mirror of our own storm. Electric-blue mascara ran down my cheeks as I drank cans of beer in the front seat, while Katy gripped the wide steering wheel with white knuckles. We both had a kitschy love of Vegas and its ridiculous, gluttonous existence in a scabby desert. Katy liked to play slots and I liked to play bingo; she liked the roller coaster spinning off the side of New York–New York, and I liked the round-the-clock free cocktails. We hoped the glitzy town would operate as a distraction and a DMZ, where we could put the unraveling of our relationship on hold and have some mindless fun, like all the other vacationing hedonists.

Pulling the Wealth card while in Las Vegas could only mean one thing, but I dared not even hope it was true. “Look what I got.” I flashed the card at Katy.

“You're gonna win money!” she crowed. I appreciated her wild optimism, even though it was the same trait that kept her hanging on to our rotted relationship. We headed over to the New Frontier, a Western-themed, old-Vegas establishment with regular bingo games.

I
love
bingo. When I turned eighteen in my lousy town,
joining the ladies in my family for a round in a smoky church basement was a rite of passage. I was finally an adult, trading in crumpled bills for a stack of paper cards and my very own dauber, producing globs of bright ink on the numbered squares in time to the bingo caller's numerical hollers. I loved everything about bingo—the smoking, the greasy treats, the adrenaline that built as my cards got more and more inked up. I loved the lingo—“I'm waitin'!” hissed a player just one number away from winning. I loved the winning—unlike in other gambling games, in bingo
someone
was going to win. Why not me? In the hazy, subterranean spaces, the aging women of working-class New England became something more than specters of worst-case scenarios, or bitches who clucked and sneered at my hair; engrossed in their urgent hope, chain-smoking, cussing out people who talked during the game, scowling “Shit!” when they lost, they became somehow comedic and iconic, both human and cinematic. Sweating my own urgent, chain-smoking sweat, it was one of the few times, growing up, that I felt like I belonged to my city and its people. The way they made superstitious piles of “lucky objects” before their cards—tiny religious statues and troll dolls, rabbits' feet and photos of grandchildren, of husbands, of deceased loved ones. For a bingo player, heaven is a place you go after you die to help your living relations win a bingo game. The first game I played, I won fifty dollars. “You're lucky,” my grandmother told me, and because she'd said so, I was.

It looked like the luck had followed me again, because there in the New Frontier, I promptly won seventy-five dollars.

I was, at that moment, someone for whom seventy-five dollars was a significant pile of money. I had just come off a literary tour, reading my zines around the country, selling them at a whopping three bucks a pop, which was promptly spent on booze, cigarettes, and electric-blue mascara. We went straight to World's Largest Gift Shop, where I considered buying a sixty-dollar taxidermy jackalope—that mythical half-jackrabbit, half-antelope found nowhere but in kitschy souvenir shops—but instead splurged on other useless items for the both of us, and treated us to yet another bingo game, this time at the Showboat casino, a doomed old-timer located off the Strip.

The Showboat bingo hall was way bigger than the New Frontier's, and the prizes were bigger and more creative: A glass box stood in the center of the room, filled with money. If you were lucky enough to win a certain type of bingo, you got to stand in the box while powerful fans were switched on, and you kept all the money blown onto your body.

There was another special winning that evening, the Powerball. For the first number called at the start of the night, any person who called a bingo on it in a subsequent game got an additional thousand dollars.

The room was humming with excitement and filling with smoke. Placed before my cards was a strawberry daiquiri topped with whipped cream, from the bar outside the hall. Katy and I had befriended the bartender, who had insisted I was going to win.

“I already won today,” I said shyly. But I had a feeling, a physical feeling inside my body. I don't think I'd ever felt it before. It
felt like
luck
. Was this what people meant when they said, “I feel lucky”? I thought it was simply a turn of phrase, but apparently, luck was a real state, one of electric grace.

Next to my lucky daiquiri was a pack of lucky cigarettes and whatever mojo items I could scavenge from my bag—a chunk of cloudy quartz I'd found while peeing on the side of the road, a vintage rhinestone brooch, a penny flattened with an image of Niagara Falls. The caller announced the first number of the night, I19, and the game was on. I loved smoking while playing Bingo, the toxins from the cigarettes merging with the anxiety of the game, producing a slight mania tempered by my daiquiri. The hall was full of serious gamblers, Vegas people, a more varied bunch than the crabby, catty women of Chelsea church basements. A few games in, I won.

“Bingo!” I shouted, but it wasn't the happy, smiling relief of a bingo, because the game was continuing—I could very well get another bingo on this same card, so while one hand was held in the air for an attendant to come check my card, my other hand was still inking out numbers, as my cigarette grew into one long ash on the silver cardboard ashtray.

The attendant had hair that was a million shades of yellow, held up with a purple velvet scrunchie. “You don't even know what you won, do you?” she teased me. I believe I actually felt annoyed with her, this woman who was delivering my winnings.
Couldn't she see I was still playing my card?
“You called Bingo on I19. You won the Powerball jackpot!”