by Michelle Tea
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!”
When the game was over, I walked out with fifteen hundred dollars. I was trembling. “What if we get mugged?” Katy whispered as I shoved a giant roll of cash in my tiny beat-up thrift store purse. We threw a tip at the bartender on our way out, and ran to the Ford Falcon. Once we slammed the heavy doors and punched down the locks, we let loose in a roar of screams. I won the jackpot! I immediately gave half of it to Katy, filled with relief at being able to pay her back for all the gas and meals and hotel rooms she’d bought us. We found a bingo supply store in a strip mall on the edge of town, and I tricked myself out with a special bingo bag, replete with outside pockets to carry your daubers, and a pair of earrings made of teeny-tiny bingo cards. We bought an extra day at New York–New York and hit the bingo hall at the Showboat a couple more times, but my luck had apparently run out. Both of ours had. We drove back to San Francisco and completed our whirlwind breakup.
Ever since that Vegas trip, the idea of pulling the Wealth card from the stack of tarot filled me with a magical feeling of possibility. I didn’t think that I was likely to find a pile of cash hidden in the floorboards of the eleven-hundred-dollar apartment, but I did take it to mean that moving in wouldn’t land me in the poorhouse; I had sufficient wealth to be able to afford it.
As I strolled through the apartment, I imagined waking up each morning in that bright front room with the crisscrossed window frames. I would feel like Snow White, like a bird was apt to land upon my sleepy shoulders, and maybe if I stood out in that blooming backyard, one would. I thought about the blazing persimmon tree I would be leaving behind. I still appreciated its noble, persistent beauty, but it was nothing next to an actual backyard stinking of jasmine vines and exploding with azalea, sweet plums dropping from the plum tree each fall.
In this apartment, every day would be a new day. I would shuffle into the kitchen, open the fridge I shared with no one, pull out some food unmolested by vermin. I would sit at my table and drink coffee and read Vogue. All of this was easily worth an extra three hundred dollars. If I had to mug old ladies in the street to get that money, I’d do it. But I figured I probably wouldn’t have to resort to that. I put the trust in the tarot, and in myself.
On the night of my fortieth birthday, my new apartment was filled with people. My sister came up from Los Angeles to celebrate. Friends came from Portland and Brooklyn. I requested only crystals, plants, and mix CDs for gifts, and I received a terrarium and a potted vine and succulents and hunks of amethyst and the complete works of Bruce Springsteen. In my kitchen, people drank whiskey around my yellow kitchen table. They snacked on sweet-potato-and-prosciutto pizza at the antique library table I’d found at a thrift store. They lounged on my bed (a French antique carved with flowers and ribbons) and sat on the new white leather club chairs I’d arranged beneath those charming windows with the crisscrossed window frames. My purse collection was housed in the built-in, as was my colle
ction of European fashion magazines. I’d made my writing desk into a vanity and did my writing anywhere I wanted, because the entire apartment was mine. I’d gotten everything I wanted for my fortieth birthday. I got to maybe, just a little bit, grow up.
4.
I Have a Trust Fund from
God—and So Do You!
“Magical thinking”—a tendency to believe you can just wish goodness into your life and hope the bad things away—is native to alcoholics. Maybe it’s how the booze addled our brains; maybe it’s because drunks are such dreamers; maybe it’s a side effect of the denial it takes to sustain a career of heavy drinking. Whatever the cause, if you get sober and go to those culty little meetings, you hear the term a lot. Oddly, much of the 12-step guide to right living includes a regular indulgence in new-agey practices: believing that the Universe will take care of you, that the god of your choosing (mine is Stevie Nicks) has a plan for you, that you can do the right thing and have faith and it’s all going to work out. At first glance it may look a little hypocritical—especially if you’re newly sober, incredibly cranky, and looking to disprove these theories so you can get back to drinking.
But after a decade of continuous sobriety I’ve come to believe it’s just about getting yourself in good enough shape—mentally, physically, dare I say spiritually—so that your desperate old magical thinking is transformed into straight-up magic. I often feel a bit bummed for my nonalcoholic friends, that they don’t find themselves in random church basements practicing this odd, effective spell casting. Alcoholics aren’t the only ones who need help; we’re just the loudest and messiest. So please—allow me to introduce you to the weird world of intentional affirmational nondenominational prayer-ish magical-thinking magic!