How to Grow Up

by Michelle Tea

  Though I wanted to pass as moneyed, I couldn’t risk bringing my fake Louis Vuitton—my Faux-ton—into the store. If anyone would be able to spot its ignoble Canal Street birthplace, it would be someone who handles three-thousand-dollar purses on the daily. I’d get more respect wearing something artfully, painstakingly thrifted, an ensemble that hadn’t yet reached the inside of a magazine, but could possibly arrive on the floor at Barneys in a season or two. With Coco Chanel’s command Elegance is restraint as a guide, I wore a simple pair of skinny jeans and a boxy oatmeal-colored top with some necklaces. A pair of grungy hiking boots I’d found at Goodwill completed the woodsy ensemble. I’ve never been a hippie and I’ve never spent time in the woods, so in punk parlance my outfit rendered me a total poseur. When your first entry into fashion is so subcultural, it’s hard not to see every outfit as a uniform, your clothes doing the double duty of keeping you warm while signaling to the world what you’re all about. But I wasn’t doing that anymore. I was wearing things just because I liked them and thought they were beautiful.

  “Love your boots,” said the salesboy on the Co-op floor, where the leather hoodies lived. Shitkickers, the boys in my vocational high school used to call the style, popular with the kids in cabinet making and welding. Mine had a strip of to-die-for flannel lining the ankle. The nineties were back! Who said there were no second chances? I’d sat out the decade’s fashion in radical lesbian feminist attire, but was now getting a chance to wear the hiking boots and babydoll dresses I’d snubbed in my twenties. The salesboy sucked his teeth in envy and approval. He’d have to wait nine months for the designer versions to appear, and then another nine months for the more affordable knockoffs to crop up.

  I was escorted to the rack of leather hoodies. There was an array of them, including the particular one I’d been coveting, a gorgeous brown leather jacket. Brown! How daring, how not-black! The sleeves were weirdly long, with cool wrinkles stitched into the wrists. Leather drawstrings dangled from the hood, which was wide and boxy, making you look tough and mysterious, not like a conehead. There were leather side pockets, and a zipper. Some buttons, like butterscotch candy, ornamented the top. It was gorgeous, and it was about to be mine.

  Anxiety rose in my chest like water in a Las Vegas show, shooting this way and that, choreographing itself to the musical timbre of the salesguy’s voice: “Okay, will that be all? Is that debit or credit? Would you like to apply for a Barneys card?”

  As my heart rose and fell inside my body, I talked myself down: It’s cool. You have a job. You got money coming in. Nothing bad is going to happen. I sent a tiny prayer of gratitude to the Universe for bringing me the blessed teaching job at the fancy women’s college that had made this jacket possible. I thanked it for the grant that was lodged in my bank account, making me feel truly financially secure for the first time in my life. I thanked it for the book deal that had just fallen into my lap, and its attendant payment. It was really true that I could afford this jacket, even though I had to hurl myself over the unusual feeling of doing it, the haunting throb that whether or not I could afford it, spending nine hundred dollars was just inherently unethical, and if I was a better person I would have found a needy family to give that money to. “Thanks, enjoy your purchase!” the salesguy chirped. He rang up thousands of dollars in merchandise all day long. He had no idea how I was wilding out inside.

  When I was done with my purchase I called Annie. “Annie. I bought the leather hoodie,” I said gravely into my cell. I was running laps around a Barnes & Noble, still filled with crazy energy from my purchase.

  “You did? Oh my god! Oh my god, that’s amazing! That’s so great! I’m so glad you did it!”

  When you are a broke person who is suddenly not-broke, it is important to have friends who are also not-broke but once were, and who can coach you, like a therapist, through the intense psychological highs and lows of making an unnecessary and expensive purchase. My anxiety soon dissipated and was replaced by the very real dopamine high that good shopping can bring. I stopped power walking through the bookstore and began to ethereally drift. Maybe I wanted a book, too. I’d spent nine hundred dollars and hadn’t been struck by lightning. What was another twenty on top of that? My perception of money, the relativity of it, shifted inside my body like an acid-trip revelation. Whoa. I remembered having twenty dollars to live off for a week. I remembered breaking a twenty to purchase body lotion at the health food store and then crying. I hadn’t needed the body lotion; I was just drawn to the luxury of it, how nice it would be to smell like yuzu, whatever that was. This jacket I just bought was like a hundred bottles of yuzu body lotion.

  “Where are you right now?” I asked Annie, always a fun question. Once a teenage runaway “sandwich artist” at a Subway in Detroit, she now managed a band that was marginally popular in the United States but wickedly successful elsewhere in the entire world. Sometimes Annie was calling from a muddy music festival where she had to shout to hear herself over the backstage cacophony of rock stars and supermodels; sometimes she was in her truck on her way to thrift the Bins, an infamous Portland secondhand warehouse filled with bins stuffed with old clothes. Currently Annie and the band were in the UK, hobnobbing with Grace Jones, who was sharing her room service fried chicken with them. A British fashion editor was starting a new magazine and putting the band on the cover. Soon they would all decamp for Paris, for Fashion Week.

  “You should come,” Annie said casually. My heart stopped. I ceased to breathe.

  “For real?” I asked, gripped with a panic that Annie was just being flip, sharing a passing idea with me, an idea I would cling to desperately and then embarrass myself in the near future trying to make it happen.

  “Yeah, totally,” she said, excited at the idea but still sort of no big whoop about it. After all, this was her life now. “Fendi is paying for me and the band to have our own rooms at the Westin, but the singer doesn’t like to sleep alone, so you can have mine.”

  “Can I actually come to the shows?” I asked, feeling a little bit like a bitch. I mean, many would argue that a free five-star hotel in Paris during Fashion Week would be enough to warrant a trip to Paris. But to be so close to the shows—the shows! I had to ask.

  “Yeah, duh,” Annie said. “Not all of them. I can’t even go to all of them; only the band can. But I bet we can go to a bunch. Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Chanel. Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier might be hard, but we can do Karl Lagerfeld and Jeremy Scott. And the band is playing the Fendi party, so we can all go to that. Can you come? It’s in two weeks.”

  Gosh, Annie made it sound so simple! Here, I booked your ultimate dream for you! A vacation you can’t actually buy your way into; you have to be invited. Do you think you can make it? It will probably never, ever happen again!

  “Of course,” I said, my heart pounding anew. “Of course I’ll come to Paris Fashion Week with you!”

  • • •

  The question of coming to Paris Fashion Week on a couple of weeks’ notice needed to be evaluated in two ways: whether it was financially feasible and whether it was a responsible decision. Could I afford a last-minute ticket to France, to stay at the Westin on Fendi’s dime? Not only could I now afford it, but I even had this cool new leather hoodie to wear to the shows! However, was I able to leave town without recklessly abandoning my responsibilities? I was a single person, no ball and chain holding me back. No dependents, not even a pet to find a sitter for. But I did have a job, a fancy job teaching aspiring female writers at a college that paid me well enough to be able to afford an impromptu trip to Paris. The paradox was maddening.

  If I arranged with a magazine to write about my time in Paris, then it would be work, and to not go would be to stunt my writing career. It was a question of balancing my teaching career—something wonderful that had come unexpectedly into my life—with my writing career, something vital that I had fought long and hard fo
r, against considerable odds. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Surely my boss would understand I’d have to miss a few weeks. Just in case she didn’t, I decided not to tell her.

  This wasn’t the same as lying, exactly. I arranged for a writer with more teaching experience than I had, a professor who had actually gone to grad school, to fill in for me. To make sure I maintained a presence in their life, I arranged to have the students e-mail me their stories while I was in Paris. I was pretty confident I’d get away with it. I rarely saw any other faculty, be they my superiors or fellow adjuncts, so if nobody saw my face for a couple of weeks, no big deal.

  “I have to go to Paris to write about Fashion Week for a magazine,” I told my students the week before I left, hoping this was impressive enough to quell any abandonment issues that might arise. I reassured them they’d be well cared for in my absence, and that we would talk remotely. And then, there was a knock at my door. Surprise, I was being observed! By a tenured faculty member, a woman with wild, dark curly hair who sat at the back of my class and listened as I coaxed my students away from the rape, madness, and sci-fi that filled their stories. I did a hyperquick intake of my teaching style. It tended toward hippie (maybe I’d earned the right to that oatmeal-colored top after all!), encouraging them to let their freak flag fly and conducting group meditations, but then I’d get supercranky schoolmarm on them, ripping their little freak flags to shreds. Later the observer reported back to the department head that I was simply wonderful. My department head contacted me and offered me a job the following semester, teaching at the graduate level. I was thrilled, and took the job.

  “Great, come by my office next week,” my boss said. My heart sunk. Next week. The week I would be in Paris. I could bump our meeting to the following week, but I’d be in Paris then, too. With a pit in my stomach, I realized that I was going to have to tell my boss about my diabolical plan. I grasped at a shabby hope that maybe she would understand. Maybe she’d always wanted to write about some beloved world just out of her reach, and had it been granted to her, she, too, would risk security to take advantage of it.

  Yeah, right. My boss was as livid as I’d expected. Not only was I abandoning my class, but I’d intended to lie about it. My defense was weak, but passionate. “You invited me to teach here not only because I am a writer, but because of the kind of writer I am. That I offer perspectives outside the academy, class, and gender perspectives. My literary career is completely self-created, and if I don’t grab hold of the opportunity to write about Paris Fashion Week, it’s like I am undoing all the hard work and personal sacrifices I’ve made to get such an opportunity.”

  Of course, the same could be said about the opportunity to be a well-paid teacher at a prestigious college. Even to my own ears my pleading rang a little tawdry—was I really begging off from college to go to fashion shows? Once again I could feel the degraded place fashion occupies in the world of serious, intellectual women. It was like I was asking for time off to get hair extensions and a boob job. I was at an important crossroads. If I left for Europe, I would be leaving against her will and the will of the school. Was I going to hold on to a stable job that gave me not only great pay, but health insurance? Or was I going to Paris Fashion Week?

  This question was one I’d pondered hundreds of times in my life, metaphorically. I was always having to pick between a metaphorical teaching job—stability, the tried-and-true path, the sure bet—and metaphorical Fashion Week: art, writing, the once-in-a-lifetime chance, the irresponsible, reckless, and memorable. One would think that having grown up broke would make one desperate for financial stability, eager to rest in the economic security of a good job. Rather, it gave me the freedom to take chances. I knew how to get by on next to nothing. I wasn’t letting anyone down by not being a college professor—my parents hadn’t expected me to amount to much. Against a fair amount of odds I’d built my life into something that constantly fed me surprises, and no matter what, I found a way to get by.

  For years I’d quit my menial jobs whenever they got in the way of me doing something for my writing—participating in a reading, going on tour. I’d dealt with my persistent fear of poverty not by working my ass off to snag high-paying jobs, but with a Zen-like acceptance of life’s impermanence, and a fragile comfort in the now. As in, Right now you’re okay. Right now you have some money, have a home, are well fed. And if poverty strikes again, what will happen? You’ll have less, and you’ll be fine. You’ll write, and be with friends, and live cheaply. Just like before.

  Finally, I turned to the ultimate conundrum decider—the old deathbed scenario. When I was on my deathbed, would I want to look back on a life filled with fear-based fidelity to a series of jobs that were not my true passion?

  No. I wanted to have lived. To have taken chances. To not have settled for the poor person’s reduced experience of life, shackled to a job, making ends meet, but to have lived as much like a rich person as I could, with their fuller experience of the world, with travel and art and proximity to things beautiful. I wanted to live like I wasn’t afraid, like life was there for my taking.

  When I was on my deathbed, surrounded by young, adoring fans, would I regale them with the time I taught a fiction class?

  No. I would tell them about the time I went to Paris Fashion Week.

  And so I chose Paris, as if there was ever a question. And I gathered purse-loads of glamorous anecdotes to share with whoever might be sitting by my deathbed hoping for a story. I would tell them about how, in the mad rush of people trying to get backstage after the Jeremy Scott show, I nudged up against Kanye West. His then-girlfriend, Amber Rose, was wearing one of the mint-green cropped motorcycle jackets the designer had just sent down the runway, along with a pair of Chanel sunglasses topped in the brand’s iconic dripping gold chains. At Vivienne Westwood, staged in what looked like a condemned French bank, I watched Pamela Anderson horse-stomp along the model path, wearing a tutu starched to look permanently blown up by a gust of wind over her bum. A stand of paparazzi on risers held their cameras like a brass section about to play; when she rounded the bend and headed straight for them the clash of flashes was blinding. Backstage at Stella McCartney I recognized a curly-haired woman as my favorite photographer, Nan Goldin. I struck up an awkward conversation with her, and was rescued by a television crew asking her what she thought of Paris Fashion Week. “Yes,” she replied enigmatically, referencing the surreal responses Andy Warhol would give to journalists. When Olivier Theyskens’s last collection for Nina Ricci came to a close, an army of models in strange shoes with no heels and long whispery gowns and odd hats that dipped into their faces stormed the runway en masse to the thundering sound of the Cure’s Pornography, and I actually cried from the whirl of emotion the spectacle produced inside me. Backstage at Karl Lagerfeld I watched Sophia Loren sip champagne in a long fur coat. Olivier Zahm, the grizzled, roguish editor of Purple Fashion magazine, asked me to lie upon a carpeted floor at a hotel room after-party, so he could best photograph the tattoo on the back of my leg for his blog. I obliged. At the Loewe show—which I learned was pronounced Low-vay and not Low—I sat directly across from Anna Wintour and her tremendously cool sidekick, Grace Coddington, all of us at tiny, elegant tables heaped with espresso and champagne.

  When the band took the stage at the Fendi party, tears sprang to my eyes, and I turned around to see that Annie was crying, too. Like me and like Annie, the band commanding Fashion Week’s attention had been raised poor, in broken families, and there we all were, together in Paris. It was weird and amazing, nothing short of a miracle. For a flashing moment I understood and believed in destiny. We were all exactly where we were supposed to be, and an incomprehensible chain of choices and happenstance had brought us here, together. Then, Kate Moss rudely shoved me so that her friend could pass by, breaking me from my reverie. This is what I was living for.

  • • •

  The telephone rang as I
was taking an afternoon nap in my luxury hotel, exhausted from a late Fashion Week after-party night and an early morning with Karl Lagerfeld, marveling at the maniacal excess of the furred motorcycle helmets he’d sent down the catwalk. It was Annie. “Meet us in the lobby in literally five minutes. We’re going to the Fendi showroom and I think we’ll all be able to get stuff.” I’ve never dressed so fast in my life. I ran down to the Versailles-inspired lobby and found Annie, Jo—the band’s lead singer—and an Italian representative of Fendi. We rode in a little car to the Paris showroom, where we were given espressos and trays of sushi, both of which I consumed desperately. I was as food deprived as I was sleep deprived, my schedule of party and fashion not allowing a ton of time for eating.

  The nice Fendi man gave us all souvenirs of our brush with luxury—golden combs stamped with FENDI, which lived in embossed leather comb holsters. I would have been satisfied with such swag, even if it was the Fashion Week equivalent of a flashlight keychain at an independent film festival.

  After giving Jo a detailed tour of the showroom, the man thoughtfully left the celebrity to “shop” in peace. I’m saying “shop” because Jo wasn’t paying for anything. Not the leather dresses, not the fur capelets. Not the stilettos or the jewelry or the purse after purse after purse. I remembered being in the van with Annie at the end of our road trip, keeping each other awake with fashion magazines. What would you have from this page, if you could have anything you want?

  “Grab a purse,” Jo hissed at us, “and throw it in my pile.” Had we cast some crazy spell over ourselves during that maniacal sleep-deprived drive? A spell that took some years to manifest, but here we were, in the Fendi showroom, and what would I have from this page, being able to have anything I want?