How to Grow Up

by Michelle Tea

  A PLUME BOOK

  HOW TO GROW UP

  PHOTO BY LYDIA DANILLER

  MICHELLE TEA is the author of four memoirs, one novel, a collection of poetry, and a young adult fantasy series. She is the creator and editor of Muthamagazine.com, and she blogs regularly about her attempts to get pregnant at Getting Pregnant with Michelle Tea on xoJane.com. She is founder and artistic director of RADAR Productions, a literary organization that produces monthly reading series, the international Sister Spit performance tour, the Sister Spit Books imprint on City Lights, and other events.

  Praise for How to Grow Up

  “Full of insights and weirdness, crazy hope and transcendent humor and despair, How to Grow Up is a riveting read for anyone who’s clawed their way into adulthood kicking and screaming, or knows someone who’s still clawing. I can’t recommend it enough.”

  —Jerry Stahl, author of Happy Mutant Baby Pills

  “If this is your first introduction to the force of nature known as Michelle Tea, get ready for a new hero in your world. Her ferociously wild life has served up some of the juiciest stories in memoir and now she reflects on that life with her singular humor and brazen honesty at full tilt. Few writers come off so scrappy and so elegant at the same time.”

  —Beth Lisick, author of Yokohama Threeway

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by Michelle Tea

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Tea, Michelle.

  How to grow up : a memoir / Michelle Tea.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-698-15081-2

  1. Tea, Michelle. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3570.E15Z46 2015

  813'.6—dc23

  [B] 2014032902

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Cover design: Jaya Miceli

  Cover photograph: Lydia Daniller

  Version_1

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. You Deserve This

  2. Fashion Victim

  3. My $1,100 Birthday Apartment

  4. I Have a Trust Fund from God—and So Do You!

  5. Beware of Sex and Other Rules for Love

  6. How to Break Up

  7. Too Cool for School

  8. The Baddest Buddhist

  9. Getting Pregnant with Michelle Tea

  10. Ask Not for Whom the Wedding Bell Tolls

  11. You Can’t Fire Me; I Quit

  12. WWYMD: What Would Young Michelle Do?

  13. Eat Me

  14. I’m So Vain

  15. Confessions of a Gym Rat

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Perhaps some of you have glided into adulthood with all the grace of a swan, skimming lightly into an adult living situation, adult relationships, adult jobs and income, and, most important, an adult sense of confidence, of a solid place in the world, of stability.

  Who are you people? I’m not sure you actually exist.

  If you are not yet an adult and fear you may never be one; if you suspect you in fact may be an adult, but your grasp on both the concept and the lifestyle is shaky enough to wake you up at night; if you spend too much time longing for items you can’t quite afford and break into a cold sweat whenever you do part with some of your hard-earned cash; if your sliding-scale therapist has diagnosed you with post-traumatic stress disorder from the dysfunctional formative years you’re clambering out of; if you are slowly learning how to clean your house; if you are slowwwwwwwwly learning how not to date narcissists; if you’ve spent too much time with too much booze in your belly; if you never went to college; if you have embarrassing spiritual inclinations that lead you to whisper affirmations under your breath and hiss occasional desperate prayers to unknown unicorn goddesses; if you have a stack of unread self-help books under your bed; if some of your most ridiculous, irresponsible choices have turned out to be some of the best decisions you’ve ever made; if your path into so-called adulthood has been more meandering and counterintuitive than fast-tracked, then this is a book for all of you, my darlings. And as for those graceful individuals who swanned themselves effortlessly into adulthood, you, too, might find something that interests you, even if it’s just a juicy bit of voyeurism.

  I have spent the past decades alternately fighting off adulthood with the gusto of a pack of Lost Boys forever partying down in Neverland, and timidly, awkwardly, earnestly stumbling toward the life of a grown-ass woman: healthy, responsible, self-aware, stable. At forty-three years old, I think I’ve finally arrived, but my path has been via many dark alleys and bumpy back roads. Along the way I’ve managed to scrawl a slew of books—memoirs about growing up a persecuted Goth teen in a crappy town, or a love-crazed party person getting my heart smashed up again and again; about the creepy secrets my family was harboring; about my time working in the sex industry. That I got these books published was a shocker—I hadn’t gone to college or studied writing or anything. That people read them, and liked them, felt like a total miracle. Because of these books I’ve been able to cobble together something of an adult life, writing and producing literary events, blogging and running a nonprofit of my own creation.

  It is from this somewhat trembling, hard-won perch of adulthood that I type to you now. I type to you from a marginally clean home—no longer do roaches scamper under cover of darkness! No longer do stubbed-out cigarette butts stud my floors! No longer will hungover twentysomething roommates vomit in my toilet! I type to you as one who has, amazingly, learned to fix my “broken picker”—you know, the terrible radar that sends a person fluttering in the direction of the cad most likely to trample your heart. After a lifetime of flat-broke-ness that includes many dips into full-on poverty, there is enough cash in my bank account to occasionally blow on pricey perfumes and other useless but beautiful items. And, after nearly killing my life with drugs and alcohol, I have more than a decade sober, and all the oddball spiritual wisdom that comes with it. After a lifetime spent writing memoirs that detail the struggles that I and countless other girls experience when they’re born broke, or weird, into tricky families and unsafe towns, it seemed like time to write a book about how that struggle can actually, with luck and grit, lead you straight into a life you didn’t know you wanted and never thought you’d have.

  Getting from there to here is a story that will take us to Paris Fashion Week and the punishing halls of blue-collar all-girl Catholic high schools; to the bingo games of Las Vegas casinos and a New England bus sta
tion where an Internet-sourced date peddled her pills; from a yacht on the French Riviera to a run-down San Francisco apartment with a persimmon tree in the backyard; from Buddhist meditation halls to the magnificent Pacific Ocean. Like life, these tales rise up out of nowhere and leave you shaking your head and changed from the experience. Through repeat failures and moments of bruised revelation, I have mastered the art of doing things differently and getting different results. If you can’t quite relate, I do hope you enjoy the wild ride. And if you do relate, I hope that what I’ve lived and what I’ve learned serve to make your own messy journey to adulthood a little less rocky, a little less lonely. At the end of it all, we’re all just kids playing dress-up in our lives, some a little more convincingly than others.

  1.

  You Deserve This

  I chose the apartment because of the persimmon tree outside the bedroom window.

  I haven’t always selected my residences based on special magical details—more like, if I was lucky to score a room in an apartment that was a cheap-o price, I snagged it. Never mind if people were shooting up between the cars parked outside my door, or if an anal yet ambitious roommate attempted to charge me an hourly rate for the housekeeping she did (true stories). Never mind if a nation of cockroaches scattered when a light flicked on and roommates responded to my horror with a snotty directive to “learn to cohabit peacefully with another species” (true story). Never mind if the shower was a tin can with a floor so rusted that one had to stand upon a milk crate in a pair of Tevas in order to bathe (like everything you will read in this book, true, true, true). This was the landscape of my twenties. I was flat broke and planned on spending the rest of my life as an impoverished writer; cheap rent was a must. I was a little funny-looking, with tattoos sprawling across my body; choppy, home-cut hair that was dyed a color not found in nature; and thrifted clothes that fit strangely and bore many holes and stains. If all this was overlooked and I was permitted entry to a household, it was always in my best interest to grab it, roaches and rotting showers be damned.

  In my twenties I spent seven years living in the Blue House, a crumbling Victorian so infamous for its lawlessness and squalor it had its own name, and its name was legend. The rent was ridiculously cheap, cheap enough for even the worst slacker/artist/alcoholic/addict to scrounge it up without having to clean up their lives too much. And speaking of clean—we didn’t, as a rule, and we would state this as baldly as possible to new roommates. “You don’t clean?” a prospective cohabitant would ask, a bit incredulous.

  “Just look around,” I would invite them. Cigarette butts covered the floor, mashed there by a shoe, as if it were not a house but a bar after closing, before the cleaning crew came in. The beer cans and bottles rolling into the corners also suggested not a home but a tavern, or alternately, a frat house. Dishes were stacked in the sink, unless they were stacked in the bathtub, where they were piled when the sink stack rose too high. Heaps of trash bags mounded at the top of the stairs, where feng shui practice suggests you have an altar to peacefully greet you as you arrive home. And the kitchen floor—how interesting, the potential cohabitants probably thought, to see a mud floor in an American home in 1997! How unexpected! But no, it was not an actual mud floor; we simply hadn’t cleaned the kitchen in quite a while. We were busy doing other things, man! Like, um, getting drunk! And in my case, at least, writing a book about it.

  Although the Blue House was by any standard a total wreck of a place, it served me well. I simply didn’t know how to take care of myself in my twenties. I was feral, and I needed a feral cave that allowed me to live in my simple ways. Because my rent was cheap, I didn’t have to work very hard, and because I wasn’t spending all my time at a J-O-B, I had plenty of time to write, and I did. I woke hungover every morning (okay, well, afternoon) and would wobble down to the bagel shop to spend the next four hours scribbling into notebooks. I wrote my first few books in this way, back when my alcoholism was, as they say, “working.” Sure, there were consequences, but I lived so low I didn’t notice them. In fact, my low living was a consequence of my drinking, but I didn’t see that then. I just saw, and felt, the thrill of the constant party. So there were some nights spent with my head in the toilet, some baffling inebriated fights with lovers and friends, some roaches in the kitchen. There were also my notebooks, filling up and piling up, and the exhilarating feeling that I was living. I’d missed out on the East Village in the eighties, that heyday of decadent art and culture. I felt like I was getting a second chance in the Mission District of 1990s San Francisco.

  At the dramatic finale of that wild decade, I hooked up with a man I would spend the next eight years with. Or, to be real, a man-child. He was nineteen years old when I met him, a Teen Poetry Slam champion. He moved straight from his parents’ house into my own squalor palace, much to the alarm of my roommates, who I’d believed were beyond feeling alarmed about anything. I guess even a punk house has its limits, and a jobless teen slumped on the couch watching Unsolved Mysteries and smoking pot all day is one of them. I was twenty-nine, coming down from my Saturn return, that infamous, dreaded moment when, if you believe in astrology, you feel the often brutal effects of Saturn, planet of limits and responsibility, returning to the place it sat at your moment of birth. This completion of the planet’s orbit around the sun syncs up with the end of your twenties. It also roughly corresponds to the frontal lobe of your brain—the place that comprehends risk and empathy—finally developing. The frontal lobe gets damaged by alcohol abuse, so maybe that was why, so close to the moment when one is meant to comprehend her limits and get her shit together, I embarked upon a long-term cohabitation with a teenager.

  When he and I moved out of the Blue House at the end of my seventh year in residence, I hadn’t expected that it would be the start of eight years of house hopping together. But the both of us were a mess, and it was easier to scan our low-rent apartments and declare, “This—this is the reason we are so miserable,” than to look at the root causes of our unhappiness. It was as if each new apartment would elicit from us the harmony we lacked, each new house key a metaphorical key, too, the elusive key to making this thing work. Maybe here we would stop squabbling like children. Maybe here my boyfriend would find a job he wasn’t compelled to quit, bringing in some grown-up income. Maybe here would be the place where I would stop agonizing over whether mine was an “unhealthy relationship,” stop daydreaming about running away with whatever doe-eyed creature happened to glance my way on the bus.

  Our first apartment was a studio plagued with roaches; our next one was so crooked that fallen items rolled south. Eventually we scored an apartment that had not a single strike against it—it was clean and spacious, affordable, and bug-free. Of course, we needed a roommate in order to make rent, and so we endured a parade of lunatics to make it work: the compulsive liar who smuggled a pet Chihuahua into the apartment, as if we wouldn’t hear it barking; the guy whose girlfriend left strange notes in the common spaces hysterically declaring how super sexy he was, as if she needed us to be aware of their powerful amour; my boyfriend’s twin sister, the both of them engaging in the sort of psychotic fighting that only twins from dysfunctional families engage in. Our final home was in San Francisco’s Italian North Beach neighborhood. It was as if the clouds had parted and angels had shoved it out of heaven and onto busy Columbus Avenue, bustling with tourists and the young Italian men who worked the restaurants, Chinese grandmothers clutching pink bags of produce, and drunkards on their way to the strip clubs over on Broadway. The North Beach apartment held such promise: no roommates, but bigger than a studio; two bedrooms, yet affordable enough that even I with my freelancer’s erratic income and my boyfriend with his underachiever’s erratic employment could make rent, no problem. Sure, our building manager, Mr. Fan, strangled ducks for dinner on his back porch right behind our bedroom. But he was always handy with a set of keys when I locked myself out, and I supposed I preferred witnessing the occas
ional murder of waterfowl to participating in the daily murder of vermin—our new little apartment was bug-free.

  The special magical detail of this apartment was the old-fashioned funeral band that played outside the mortuary across the street each weekend. At first, we were both enchanted by it. The apartment would suddenly fill with horns and drums—“Amazing Grace” and some wrenchingly dramatic melodies lifted from Italian opera. The sound would invade the space and, just as abruptly, be gone, like a plane traveling overhead. It was so majestic that we forgot it was in honor of someone’s passing.

  Anyone who believes in omens knows that a funeral band and a procession of mourners outside your window every weekend is not a good one. The songs were like odes to this dying relationship, one I’d started nearly a decade ago. A lot had happened since then. I’d gotten sober, hadn’t had a drink in years. I’d gotten published, and a photographer from the daily news came to take my picture. He snapped my photo against a brightly painted mural in my neighborhood, the wind blowing my hair around, a chunky strand of fake pearls around my neck. In the picture I’m looking off in the distance, as if at my own future—which, now that I was sober, I actually had a shot at. I’d felt so old before I’d quit drinking. The damage and drama that accompanies a downward spiral weighs on your body and mind like age. The longer I stayed sober, the younger I felt, as if emerging from a chrysalis.

  Even though my boyfriend had also gone through significant changes during our eight years together, eventually dealing with his own addictions, our personal transformations hadn’t made our relationship any easier. I’d read somewhere that people’s patterns are established very early on, and if that’s the case, my ex and I had gotten off to some brutally bad starts, back when I was still drinking and he was a deadbeat teen. But for eight long years we continued. And at the end of every fight, when we made up, we would dissect what had happened and feel like we’d solved the mystery—the mystery of why, when we loved each other so much, we couldn’t get along. Armed with knowledge, we’d pledge to never, ever do it again.