Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  Later

  “It’s called IWS.”

  “What?”

  “IWS—Inherited Wealth Syndrome.”

  This young man at a house party is telling me about his job with the Rockefeller family and the counseling service provided for inheritors and their spouses. This service helps with the trauma of having more wealth than you can comprehend; the trauma of feeling unworthy, for instance, since you will never be as great as the first Rockefeller, who made all the money.

  “They have parties after these seminars with the staffers.”

  Oh, the wealthy must envy the staffers—“You make a finite amount of money? That’s so amazing. Tell me, how do you spend your paycheck?” my friend jokes.

  How many people have this syndrome, I wonder? I guess if you’re that rich, it takes only three or four people to make it a bona fide disease. Quality over quantity. It’s all about reimbursement, and if it’s in the DSM, then insurance has to cover the treatment.

  A woman sitting across from me explains her recent money-raising idea. She posted an offer on Craig’s List that essentially read, “I will call and insult anyone you want for twenty-five dollars.” You could tell her a time to call your boss, landlord, or ex-whatever, and she would come up with an inventory of insults that cut to the bone. The response was colossal—but no one wanted to pay. One guy wanted a date and she wrote back, “Who exactly are you asking out on a date, asshole?” The listing said nothing about her gender or sexuality. I thought her response to him was a good calling card for her work, but he didn’t end up hiring her.

  In L.A. there’s what you say you do, and then what you do. Kind of like the Catholic Church, there’s the official and the unofficial word. Officially I’m a director/actor/producer/designer/fill in the blank, but unofficially I’m a waitress/stylist/wedding singer/sandwich guy/fill in the blank. I’m the kind of director who takes the budget shuttle, not the limo. You can only exaggerate so far. Eventually they see what you drive and it’s all over.

  Recently, I started teaching a friend of mine to drive at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where people drive—not much, but a wee bit—slower. We crept by the Cadillac-sized tombstones with famous faces etched into granite lined by remunerative palms. Flowers from strangers line the graves; there’s no love like the love for a stranger. Eventually we reached the back end of the cemetery and found a more humble section, where the tombstones sit like crooked little dog teeth. “This must be where the B actors get buried,” my friend said.

  “Well,” I responded, “I guess they made it in, huh?”

  MY MEMORY AND WITNESS

  LIS GOLDSCHMIDT AND DEAN SPADE

  Dean—

  Hey. How’s things in NYC? Tired here. Just home from hanging out with everyone. Feeling really tired of the class stuff we were talking about the other day. Tired of people fronting like they’re poor or grew up poor or whatever—like it’s cool to be poor. You know the deal. They put it on like an accessory. You know? Just like co-opting any culture. Do you know what I mean? It’s like people who wear “native garb” from wherever they’re exoticizing at the moment—but the thing is, they take it off when it gets old to them.

  I guess I’m just feeling pretty pissed. Like I can’t take it off. Like it is old. It’s always been old. And makes me feel old and fucking tired. And small.

  I don’t mean to rant.

  The main reason I’m writing is ’cause you carry the facts and I feel like I need them. You know the details that I think can help me not feel erased by these kinds of nights. You know how much Mom made. You know the welfare info. It sounds dumb—I know what it was like, but I’ve spent my whole life pretending it was something else, my whole life trying to pass as something else—and I need the numbers to feel justified or some shit. I need those numbers to prove me wrong or call me out or something. Does that sound weird? It’s like I’ve even convinced myself… also like I want some fact to separate me from those people.

  I mean I remember it. I remember what it was like. I remember the shame and all that. I remember that greedy excited fucked-up feeling I got when she’d bring home the groceries. I remember swallowing myself one zillion times. I remember being an invisible eyesore. I remember knowing this couldn’t be right. When I think of it now I get that same empty, gagging thing. I remember that heavy fucking cloud that hung around our tiny house. That fog that made it so hard to breathe. That stress that kept us all quiet and angry and sad. Remember?

  I’m scrambling to think of something good and light, but it goes back as far as I can remember. It only got darker and heavier.

  The end was the worst, right? I guess for me it was the worst because I felt like I was the mom when she was sick. You know? Not that we didn’t both have to pick up what she couldn’t carry anymore. But I remember doing the grocery shopping by myself. You know, I think it’s really only the last maybe five years that I don’t have some crazy fear while in line at the grocery store. I think this is actually the first time I’ve really thought about it. There’s the shame of shopping at the discount store. Scared someone from school would see us or something—and scared that if anyone ever came to our house (not that they ever did), they’d see the bags from there. (Not to mention just seeing the house!) But then there were all the times we had to put stuff back—do you remember that? I cringe thinking about it now. It was terrible. Embarrassing. I remember being scared to look at Mom in that moment. How she’d look it all over and have to decide what to put back. How did she do that? How can you decide what food your three kids don’t need? Can you imagine how stressful that must have been for her? Ugh. It fucking makes me want to puke. Then there was the shame of using food stamps. It’s funny how kids I know now use food stamps with so much pride.

  Dean, this sucks. I hate thinking about this stuff. I’m trying to reclaim it or something but sometimes it just feels like Mom trained us so well that passing is easier and the shame is too thick. Sometimes I think I’d make the world’s greatest spy because I can pretend so well. Time to sleep.

  I hope you’re well—

  I’m glad we have each other in this.

  xo, Lis

  Dear Lis,

  I took this letter with me to Montreal where I was showing the film Tara and I are making about trans people and bathrooms. While I was there, friends of friends had a “white trash”–themed barbecue. The people I was staying with called the hosts to voice our protest to this theme, and heard that others were also upset, so we went anyway, thinking people wouldn’t participate in the theme and that the message had gotten across. Of course, we were too optimistic. Many people came fake-pregnant, with giant Budweiser cans, fake southern accents, and severe blue eye shadow. What to do? I thought about how “trashy” it is for poor people to have children, how differently poor people’s substance abuse is surveyed and punished, how easily these white people employed a term that suggests that all nonwhite people are trash while only some white people require such labeling. I thought about the time you were invited to a white-trash event where people were encouraged to black out their teeth, and I thought of how Mom lived her whole life hiding that she had dentures—like everyone in her family—from a time when “dental care for the poor” was pulling out all their teeth in adolescence. When she died I learned she had hidden this from me (you too?) my whole life—sleeping in uncomfortable dentures all those nights during our thirteen years together when I was too scared to sleep alone—all to hide from even me her poverty and shame. (Meanwhile I dreamt of the braces the other kids at school could afford.) I thought of my own consciousness, starting in elementary school, of the need to separate myself from the term “white trash.” Be careful how you smell, who sees your house. Try to get Mom not to curse or smoke in front of other people’s parents.

  But at this party I bit my tongue and turned my head when they arrived in costumes. Couldn’t bring myself to speak on this rooftop full of people I had just met. I spend sixty to eighty hours a week exclusivel
y talking about poverty and advocating for poor people, but I could not advocate for myself, could not give up the small amount of passing, of blending in. We left fast and Pascal, Brianna, and I ranted on the street, wondering how we should have handled it, talking about how girl–social conditioning still operates in our trans bodies, convincing us we shouldn’t confront. With every passing hour I’ve become more irate. No place to put it. More anger to add to the churning crushing pile that lives behind my sternum.

  I’m tired of helping rich people appease the guilt about their hoarding lifestyles so they can act a little.

  Tired. I hear you about being tired. I’m tired of being diplomatic about poverty. Tired of trying to convince rich people at nonprofits, rich people at foundations, and rich gay people especially to care about and support the lives of low-income intersex and trans people. I’m tired of helping them notice that we exist, trying not to make them too uncomfortable to give money to the struggle that (when we win, which we will) will end wealth and poverty for everyone. Tired of being gentle and nonthreatening and helping them appease the guilt about their hoarding lifestyles so they can act a little. And I’m tired of hearing that you’re getting paid less than the private-college educated man who sits next to you doing the same job, and tired of seeing all my trans friends without jobs or adequate housing and trapped in the criminal-injustice system. I’m tired of other poverty lawyers (from upper-class backgrounds) telling me I don’t pay myself enough when I make twice what Mom supported four people on in the years she had jobs, and when our clients are fighting like hell for a couple hundred bucks a month from welfare or ten bucks to make a call from jail. I have to figure out how to not get too tired. Sometimes I think that’s what killed our mom. Somehow, you and I got out of there, out of that dirty house, off those gravel roads, out of Virginia, but she didn’t make it. I think all the time of what it would be like if she could see us now—if I could make her a fancy dinner in my apartment (artichokes) and take her to see something city-beautiful; if, for her birthday, we could fly her to San Francisco and all three of us could have tea in your kitchen and walk around Golden Gate Park and she’d tell us the names of all the flowers. It’s almost Mother’s Day.

  You asked for the facts. I carry them around like the chip on my shoulder. The most she ever made was $18,000 one year. Our welfare was less than $400 a month. We got a total of $50 when we three spent Saturdays cleaning the glass and mirror store, less when we cleaned houses. The social security survivors benefits our foster parents got for us were about $500 a month each until we turned eighteen. (It’s sick that she could support us better by dying but there was not money to help keep her alive.) The jacket she always wanted when she was in middle and high school, that all the other kids had but she never got, cost $7.02 Canadian. The most important fact, maybe, is that if we’d been in the same situation after the 1996 welfare cuts, we wouldn’t have been entitled to the same benefits because of her immigration status, and, in my estimation, we would have had a much harder time keeping a place to live or staying together as a family as long as we did.

  I love you, Lis. You’re my memory and my witness, and my only connection to all that we’ve lost. I love that you keep the sweatpants Mom got in rehab and that I slept in when you were caring for me after my chest surgery. When I’m not biting my tongue, it’s because I’m thinking of how quickly you call people on their shit, how vicious your wit can be, and how you always have my back.

  Love, Dean

  AUNT MARION, WHO LIVED IN FLORIDA

  LIZ MCGLINCHEY KING

  WE DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT CLASS WHERE I GREW UP. IN SOUTHWEST Philadelphia in the ’50s and ’60s, we knew there were really rich people in the world, and really poor people, and that we were somewhere in between. If someone were to ask, I guess we would’ve said we were middle class. But no one asked because we were all pretty much the same. I was well into my twenties when I realized that, with few exceptions, the families in the neighborhood of my youth were working class. Now, in my sixties, my knowledge of class structure in America gives me a more refined description. Although our pride kept us from even thinking we were at all deprived, I know how my family’s status back then would be defined today. We were the working poor.

  While most families in our neighborhood had more than a few children, we had a few more, with seven kids in our little row house. Dad’s salary as a foreman at the carbon factory got stretched pretty thin, barely making it from one payday to the next. Mom managed to serve up three square meals a day, without fail, but her struggle to make ends meet was difficult and sometimes painful to watch. I remember between-meal hunger and what that felt like, but we rarely asked Mom for a snack, because looking in her eyes when she had to say “no” was too hard. A peanut butter sandwich in the afternoon could mean someone would not get a sandwich for lunch the next day.

  I had some struggles particular to being the only girl in the house. Clothes for my six brothers were handed down from the oldest to the youngest. My clothes came from brown paper bags discretely handed to my Mom over the back fence. The former owners of my attire, girls on the block who were slightly older than me, never intentionally made me feel bad about wearing their hand-me-downs. But I saw the look of recognition on their faces when I showed up for a game of double Dutch in something one of them wore the summer before. I heard the quiet of the kind moment when they decided not to say anything.

  I used to daydream about things being different, imagining what my life would be like with fewer kids in the house. Considering each brother one at a time, I would think about a life with just one of them. Maybe we could dine in a restaurant, something we did not do, not even once, during my childhood. We would have more space in the house. My bed could be moved from its location in a corner of my parents’ bedroom, next to the baby’s crib, to a room of my own. The third bedroom would be for my only brother. The fantasy ended when I had to choose a brother.

  I HAD A CHILDHOOD FASCINATION WITH STORIES ABOUT PEOPLE who moved away. When the girl next door got married at eighteen and moved to Iowa with her new husband, I wanted to know why.

  “Why did Eleanor and Johnny move to Iowa?” I asked my mom.

  “Eleanor has an uncle there who can give Johnny a good job. He wants to give Eleanor more than he could here, working as a grease monkey,” she told me.

  I knew he worked at a local garage fixing cars, but I didn’t know why Mom called him a grease monkey. I never saw Johnny looking anything but handsome and spiffy clean, because a man always washed up and changed out of his work clothes before coming home.

  I especially loved to hear stories about the one member of my family who had moved away—Aunt Marion, who lived in Florida.

  Aunt Marion was the older of my mother’s two sisters, and stories about her were always told with humor and a bad girl bent. There was the story from her very early teens, when she would take her baby sister out for a stroll on summer evenings to give their mother a break. The walk from their row house in 1930s South Philly happened to pass the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

  “We were cruising for sailors!” she would later tell us laughing, during one of her rare visits home from Tampa. And there was the story of how she named that little sister.

  “This baby is too pretty to be called Agnes. I’m calling her Dolly.” More than eighty years later, Agnes is still affectionately called Aunt Dolly.

  There is an old picture of Marion as a preteen sporting a short boy-cut when it was downright defiant for a girl to cut off her long hair.

  “Oh, she was a real flapper,” Mom told us, while we looked at old pictures around the dining room table.

  Marion’s choice of living in Tampa seemed like a natural part of her singular spirit. The distance made her mysterious and romantic, even in a trailer park setting. I was well into my teens when I got curious about it. During my daily evening chore of setting the table while Mom prepared dinner, I asked her why Aunt Marion lived in Florida. Mom was standing an
d stirring something in a mixing bowl—the bowl tucked under her left arm, a wooden spoon in her right hand. She stopped stirring, looked me in the eye and matter-of-factly answered my question.

  She told me about the murder.

  “Your Uncle Ed came home from work and found your Aunt Marion in bed with another man, so he shot him.” I was silently shocked, but Mom was so calm about telling me that I accepted her simple explanation, and never asked her about it again.

  Turns out, it was much more complicated.

  HERE’S WHAT I GLEANED RECENTLY FROM CLIPPINGS MY SISTER-IN-LAW and fellow writer, Denise A. McGlinchey, found in the newspaper archives at the main library of Philadelphia.

  “Husband Shoots Escort Bringing His Wife Home, Wounds Him Seriously After Scuffle in Chester House.” So stated The Evening Bulletin on December 13, 1946. Ed, whose age is stated as thirty-three, and Marion, listed as age twenty-seven, lived in the low-income housing projects in Chester, on the outskirts of Southwest Philadelphia. (In true Aunt Marion style, she knocked two years off her age.) They had four children whose ages at the time of the shooting ranged from four to twelve. The children were often left alone while Aunt Marion and Uncle Ed hung out, separately, at local bars. The gas and electric services were turned off for lack of payment. The house had no heat and no lights.

  My cousin Elsie was the oldest of their children. As an adult, she did talk about those days and nights when Aunt Marion and Uncle Ed left the kids on their own. Elsie would go door-to-door begging for food, without appearing to do so. Even in the projects, families considered begging beneath them. Elsie would knock on one neighbor’s door with her well-rehearsed inquiry.