Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  When I was still a child, we drove past the most spectacular group of buildings near our home in upstate New York. It was Vassar College. My parents said it was a school for rich girls. They said Jackie Kennedy went to Vassar. I thought it looked mysterious and beautiful, like castles. (I would later learn the term Gothic as it applies to architecture and black lipstick.) I wanted to be there so much I could taste it above the fear and I said, “I’m going to Vassar just like Jackie Kennedy.”

  And that’s kind of what I did: I went to Vassar. I just did it a little differently than the former First Lady. Upon hearing my childish declaration, my father quit one of his two full-time jobs and obtained a position at the college as a security guard. He had learned that if he was an employee of the college his child’s tuition would be waived, providing his kid could get accepted. I was not yet in middle school.

  My father was born in 1927. I was not born until he was forty-nine years old and he has no other children. He is a charming man. Handsomely rugged in appearance and quiet, he is almost immediately likeable. He’s towed cars, been a courier, a school-bus driver, a janitor, a security guard, and many other miscellaneous things. He has worked at least two full-time jobs, more than eighty hours every week, for at least forty years. He was gone often when I was growing up and was frequently exhausted when he came back home. My dad’s work meant he was on his feet, cleaning, lifting, moving, and protecting, almost all the time. He is still, at seventy-six years old, part of the invisible fleet of people who keep our bathrooms clean and our mountain bikes from being stolen. Kept invisible because who among us wants to look at the stranger cleaning our shit off of public toilets? His is a life dedicated to the service of thousands who will never know his name.

  My father adores me. I often suspect it was the combination of his enormous strength and endurance and his devotion to the women in his life that led me to love butches and trannybois as an adult. It was for me he played Wheel of Getting the Fuck Out of Here like no one had ever played before. This is the romance I warned you about.

  I would come to learn, as a student, that tuition remission was considered a perk for professors and their families. It was not unusual for the child of a faculty member to apply to Vassar. But in 1994, the kids of security guards came knocking only slightly more frequently than they had in Jackie Kennedy’s day. It left me with an out-of-place feeling that wasn’t necessarily unpleasant but that has remained with me ever since.

  None of that mattered when I entered Vassar. The castles, the ghosts, all of the people with nothing better to do than take their brains out on long walks enchanted me. We were doing work. It wasn’t lazy to sit around all day and read—it was mandatory. I took whatever crumbling faith I had remaining in the Catholic Church and placed my bet on humanism. I was going to become a scholar committed to the pursuit of knowledge and I was going to work smart. Vassar was powerful enough to catapult me so far out I would never have to look back again. My first week of school, dozens of kids stomped around complaining because they hadn’t gotten accepted into Brown. I had no idea what “Brown” was.

  This experience, I imagine, is similar to that of other working-class kids who are the first in their family to go to college, or a certain type of college. My entire life thus far had been a battle strategy to get me to this place. Everyone’s resources were used in this endeavor and now I was on my own to navigate the Seven Sisters experience. The rules, language, and vantage point of the upper class are different from mine. They know very little about the lives of working-class and poor people. I watched professors from one of the most liberal colleges in the United States walk past my father like he was a polite ghost. Perhaps we are only interesting in theory.

  Throughout my freshman year, the majority of my friends on campus were cleaning ladies, security guards, and cafeteria workers. They were the army who made it possible for me to study feminist film theory, Othello, and the elements of moral philosophy. I was, unequivocally, the safest person on campus. My bathroom was the cleanest. My meals were often free. I was their collective darling. They were watching someone on the verge of getting out and they guarded me as something precious.

  I loved school. I loved spending entire Sundays in the enormous stone library with its secret passages, stained glass, and ghosts. I knew the information I had at hand was powerful because it was so well hidden. The library was for members of the Vassar community only. And of that community, only faculty and students made use of the resource. Staff cleaned and guarded the building, but they did not check out books very often.

  The better I understood my education, the angrier I became that most working-class and poor people are denied one. Why are the children of doctors, lawyers, and engineers taught the mysteries of existence while the children of janitors and waitresses are taught fear? I developed a preoccupation with my own inadequacies, aided by a few professors of elitism. To combat my growing anxiety, I began to envision myself a class spy. I would soak up all of the information they could give me and run reconnaissance for my team.

  With time I began to question the validity of Wheel of Getting the Fuck Out of Here, which felt very much like questioning the existence of the sun. If I was so close to getting out, why was I still afraid? Why did I want to leave the people who had been so good to me? The reality of my upper-class peers was so drastically different from my own—did I really want to become exactly like them? And even if I wanted to, I knew it would be impossible. I could make millions of dollars and I would still wake up every morning searching for something greater than myself. I could transform myself into the most sophisticated intellect and they would still be able to smell my fear.

  There exist the wealthy and the working class. At Vassar I learned the two are not mutually exclusive. No matter how rich I might become, I will always be the daughter of a janitor. I will always look the woman who empties my garbage in the face. I will always say thank you to the man who serves me lunch. I am one of them, and I do not want to Get Out unless they can come too.

  That was it for me, the Game Piece. I would not take a lucrative corporate job and I would not participate in the brain drain of the working class. Game Over. The culture of the people I come from is as valuable as any I have studied. Our language, our unique perspectives, our strengths and weaknesses deserve critical attention. It is not our status as workers that prevents our happiness, but the glaring and obscene disparity between our paychecks and the paychecks of the ruling class. Working-class culture is not something we should run from even if we are offered the opportunity to escape poverty.

  Poverty is not a natural conclusion. It is an invention. We are not poor because we are inferior as a group of people; we are poor because it is imperative to the global economy that a limitless supply of labor exist. The labor must be cheap and disposable.

  This Game Piece respectfully declines the opportunity to exploit the labor of somebody else’s mother or father. As long as we believe it is desirable to get out of the working class, we will continue to be afraid. Assimilation does not free us; it whitewashes the most obvious lie ever told. The Game is a con. The Wheel is fixed. It’s time to invent a new one.

  What are our choices?

  FIGHTING

  BEE LAVENDER

  THE FIRST FIGHT I REMEMBER, I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD. MY UNCLE ANTON had just married a dimpled, dark-haired girl; the church was filled with golden light streaming into my eyes, and I blinked jealously from the front row. The girl had not asked me to be in the wedding.

  After the ceremony there was a cake reception in the basement of the church and my family stayed on one side of the big drafty room, sitting on folding chairs behind round folding tables. The bride’s family stayed on the other side—except for the maid of honor, the bride’s little sister, Susie, who had been sneaking drinks from some old man. She went from table to table in her cotton eyelet dress with yellow bows, giggling and talking to people. Susie had dark hair cut short like Dorothy Hamill’s, a bowl shape on to
p of her head. I watched her moving around the room and wished I could have that hair, but my straggly reddish blonde hair was past my shoulders and my mother set it each night on squishy pink curlers. In the morning she combed out the curls and sprayed on hairspray. My hair fuzzed in soft curls for a few hours and then fell straight again before the middle of the day.

  The flower girls were all from the bride’s family, little girls in eyelet and ribbons, and I didn’t want to talk to them. My Aunt Louisa held my hand and walked me over to the strange girls and introduced us. “These are your new cousins,” she said. I didn’t get it; why did I need new cousins? I had so many already, we were related to most of the town. The little girls stared back at me. They were wearing cute white bonnets with yellow ribbons under the chin; real brown curls trickled from under the bonnets and all the way to their waists. They didn’t say hello; they just stared. Apparently they didn’t need a new cousin either. Aunt Louisa let go of my hand, patted me on the back, and walked away to talk to Susie. I turned and walked away from the girls. They looked mean.

  The church party broke up quickly, all the presents were loaded into a truck, and the bride and groom made out in front of the car my dad and some of the other grown-ups had decorated with shaving cream and tin cans tied on with string.

  Back at my grandparents’ farm, the real party started, with just our family and the neighbors and a few of the teenage friends of the teenage married couple. The uncles had stacked cases of Budweiser on the back porch, and Grandma Vi had cooked a big dinner of macaroni noodles and tomato sauce with crumbled hamburger, store-bought greasy whole chickens, and packages of flaky pull-apart rolls.

  My mother brought in plates of deviled eggs, which had been stored in our trunk during the wedding, and she stood in the kitchen laughing and talking to her sisters as she mixed up tuna to spread on tiny pieces of sliced rye bread. My mother was beautiful, young; she would have been twenty-three when that party happened. She was wearing a green velvet dress with puffy sleeves. All seven kids in her family started blonde and ended up dark, like the relatives from Finland—dark-haired blue-eyed people with high cheekbones, everyone with broad shoulders, the women with soft breasts and curving hips, a good place to sit if you were small enough to demand the privilege. I wasn’t that small anymore, but I was small enough, and my mother loved me and held me tight. I could still sit in Grandma Vi’s lap, and I could still ask my mother to carry me when I was tired.

  I played with my cousins in the sewing room, a white room with a huge closet we used as a fort, a magical portal, and a hiding place, standing between or behind the rows of Grandma Vi’s silky polyester dresses, which smelled of acidic perfume, Lysol, dog. The whole house smelled of dog; there was Tuta, which they said meant “girl” in Finnish, a mixed German shepherd with a happy face and waggly body. There was Boyka, which I suppose meant “boy,” or was a bad translation or joke or something; he was a big red Irish setter, tall and strong enough that I could ride him like a horse. He was Anton’s dog and would go to the new house with the new couple. There was Conrad, a white wolfish dog, rescued by my Uncle Frederick from an abusive home. He was friendly and sweet and known to attack anyone wearing a uniform. There was a tiny, ancient black mop of a dog named Midgie who had always been around and probably dated back to my mother’s childhood. Midgie was territorial about Grandma Vi’s recliner, wouldn’t let us sit in it. She went everywhere we went, and Grandma would buy her ice-cream cones and hamburgers.

  We played in the back room and the grown-ups sat around the house, smoking and drinking and cracking jokes at the new couple’s expense. We ate off paper plates, the plain red tomato sauce seeping through, bits of food dropping off to be eaten by the dogs. People started going home, the great-aunts first, with their assorted kids and grandkids, then the teenage friends; they had other parties to go to that night. Soon it was mainly family in the house and it was late, and my mother told me to lie down on the couch, then tucked a crocheted brown and red afghan around me. My own little dog snuggled with me on the flat, dirty silk pillow stitched to commemorate a stranger’s trip to a foreign port, Manila or Okinawa, the memory fades. I fell asleep listening to my mother and her brothers and sisters, all together, all laughing, Grandma Vi and Grandpa Tom and assorted husbands and wives in the dining room and kitchen.

  I woke up to the sound of glass breaking, voices raised in anger. I sat up and hugged my little white dog to me, confused. My mother ran past, coming from the bathroom with towels, and said sharply, “Put on your shoes.” Had I done something wrong? What was happening? I reached down for my shiny, black buckle shoes. I slipped one small foot into a shoe and was pushing the strap through the buckle when a roar and a chorus of screams made me look up, just as my uncle, the groom, came running straight at me, face red and mouth cracked open in a hideous scream, his eyes the eyes of a horror-movie maniac. His brother, the one who rescued dogs, was behind him, tattooed arm reaching forward to grab his shirt, ponytail disheveled; Grandpa Tom was there too, his hand on Anton’s belt. Anton screamed a conquered-warrior scream, a victim scream, the sound of a sick and dying animal cornered and fighting back. My uncle and grandfather leapt forward at the same time, tackling Anton, and the three bodies hurtled through the air, sliding across the coffee table in front of me, pieces of their errant bodies connecting with my knees, arm, head. They slid across the coffee table and landed in a heap next to the front door, knocking over lamps, and my little dog jumped into the fray, biting at any piece of flesh he could reach.

  Someone grabbed me and yanked me off the couch, and it seemed like I was flying through the rooms, carried aloft like lumber, one shoe dangling, the other lost in the fray of fighting men, grunting and pummeling one another. I screamed, “No, no, my puppy!” But whoever was carrying me ignored my screams and ran away from the fight, past the remains of supper on the big oak table, through a kitchen spattered with blood and sparkly broken glass, through the dark porch and outside. I could smell whiskey and beer and then I was standing with no coat in the yard, next to the picnic table and the sandbox, the silver dollar plants and willow tree, the bride.

  She was crying, and in the dim light from the nearby chicken coop, I could see mascara streaming down her face and neck, making smudges on her white shirt. We were alone. The rest of the family was inside, and we could hear them yelling, dogs barking; but we had been set aside, sent away into the exile of the yard. My foot with no shoe on was wet from the dew on the grass, the night was cold, and I could see stars and a sliver of moon above the orchard. The bride cried and cried and I patted her arm. “It’s O.K.,” I said. “This doesn’t happen very often.”

  THE NEXT FIGHT I REMEMBER WAS MY OWN. I WAS SIX YEARS OLD, and I was playing in the woods across from my house, a tangled mass of blackberry bushes and salal and wild rhododendrons, evergreens shading our special places. The children of the neighborhood—not so much a neighborhood, really, just four short streets of low-income housing set down next to an abandoned city dump, on the far southern outskirts of the county—had made paths in and out of the remnants of the forest closest to our homes. We had clearings and we had hollowed logs; there were tiny winding trails and some bigger trails our dads made for dirt bikes. I was in the woods, in a clearing, on a sunny weekend day in the fall, after kindergarten started, before the rainy season.

  The two red-headed girls from the yellow house, the only one with an eight-foot fence around the whole yard, were with me, along with my best friend Shanna’s younger brother, Todd. Shanna was locked in her house doing chores; she was three years older than me and faced a vastly more complicated system of rules—commensurate with her status as an older kid, a fourth-grader. Todd was two years younger than me, not in school yet, a baby; but a mean-tempered baby with the whitest of white hair, dark suntanned skin, ripped denim jeans, and the top to a set of Underoos worn as a shirt.

  We were playing a game where the girls were the pioneers, in wagons, trudging across the deserts and barren pl
ains we had seen on television Westerns. It didn’t occur to me then to wonder how the pioneers who went all the way west, to the Northwest, the Olympic Peninsula, the very farthest tip of the United States before it drops into the ocean, covered in a dense, mottled, cold, impenetrable rain forest, had managed their journey. Now it seems to me that the barren plains, though barren, would at least have been easier to walk across. No hacking away at scrub.

  Todd was the ox, tied up with a jump rope, pulling our weary pioneer wagon as we sang songs and worried about ambush. “Faster, oxen,” I called to him, tapping his bottom with the wooden handle of the jump rope. Laura and Jeanne giggled and Todd said it would take more than that to make him go faster. I tapped his bottom harder, and he stared at me with his cold baby eyes. “Is that all you can do?” he challenged me. I tapped again, harder. He laughed at me and the girls giggled. “How about this?” I asked, and hit harder. He kept laughing. I raised my arm above the soft bottom he was wiggling at me, daring me, and brought the wooden handle down with a thwack!

  Suddenly the “ox” reared up, ropes swinging in an arc, and he wasn’t a pretend animal anymore but a real one. He shoved me to the ground and pinned me, hitting and scratching as I pushed and writhed and tried to get away. The red-headed girls had stopped giggling and were standing there with their mouths open, and then they ran away, not to get help, but to hide behind their high fence. I shoved at Todd but I was shocked and scared, and he was a solid boy.

  We rolled in the dirt and then he had his hands on my ears, on my pretty new earrings, and he clutched and yanked as hard as he could, and then his face was close to mine and I could feel my ear lobe tear and I started to cry and then his mouth was on my cheek, his teeth digging in, ripping the skin, the skin of my face and my ear, and I screamed and pushed and knocked him away, running for home without looking back.