by Michelle Tea
In my downtrodden hometown, a VA hospital sat high on a hill, a warren of brick buildings beside a red-and-white-checkered water tower so tall it could be seen all over the city. My uncle Rocky, a ne’er-do-well, had drunkenly scaled the thing as a teenager, plummeted, and lived to brag about it. The VA hospital offered a free nursing school, largely attended by working-class mothers on the verge of divorce, women who had to come up with a career quick, to support their brood once their man split. That was how my mother got there—by the end of her schooling, she was both a licensed practical nurse and a divorcée. In exchange for the free education, you agreed to work at the VA after graduation, which propelled my mother into a specialty of taking care of the elderly, though she’d have much rather worked with children. Why didn’t she switch her focus once she’d worked off her debt to the vets, then? Or continue her studies to get her RN? Registered nurses command way more bucks than LPNs, after all. “I don’t want to be like them,” my mom said dismissively when I made the suggestion. “They think they’re better than everyone.” RN wasn’t a job to aspire to; it was a class of people better off than she was—the enemy. You can become obsessed with class, being from a lower one in a culture that insists such divides don’t exist. You see shades of have and have-not everywhere you go.
In a way, my mother was right: There’s gotta be room in the world for the ditchdigger, and the dishwasher, and the barista and the stripper and yes, the LPN. After all, the world the haves occupy runs on the efforts of the have-nots. Someone has to haul goods to the stores they shop in, provide T and A for courted clients to gaze upon, deliver their mail, care for their parents when the elders start peeing themselves. These are my people. My truck driver uncle and his stripper wife. My postal worker father and LPN stepfather. My grandfather, whose hands were never not blackened from the machines he grappled with all day; not even those abrasive industrial soap granules could scrub it away. My grandmother at her cash register. The older I got, the harder it was for me to see where I would fit in this world, how I would make my own living. What ditch would I dig? I longed for something better, but I didn’t know what better was.
When you grow up in a blue-collar world, you don’t even know what other jobs are out there. An engineer? A sommelier? A film editor, art therapist, financier? Even if one knew these positions existed, one still might not understand what they were, let alone how to get in on it. Gazing out at this stunted landscape of occupations, I was haunted by the question What do you want to be when you grow up? I never wanted to be a nurse, or a truck driver. There was only one job in the whole world that I had ever heard of that sounded good to me: I wanted to be a librarian. Who became librarians? Old maids. It was something women wound up as, not aspired toward. My aunt Shirley would shush me when I shared my dream of being paid to hang out with books all day. “You don’t want to do that,” she said with a sour face. “You want to be Miss America!” And then she’d start singing the theme song to Miss America at me.
I was always a rabidly bookish kid. My mother likes to tell the story of how as a toddler, I’d try to make friends with passersby by standing against the chain-link fence in our front yard and begging, “Play with me! I got toys! I got books!” (Probably I am still doing this.) By grade school I was reading so far above my age group, the librarian made my mother write a note allowing me to take out big-kid books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, reading it before I even understood what a period was. I founded a second-grade newspaper, The Schoolyard Gazette, and tried my hand at journalism, crafting hard-hitting articles about chicken pox and penning a comics and jokes page as well. I had enough material for my first chapbook of poetry by third grade. Had my family hailed from a different class, I would have been shoved into a prep school, tested for prodigy potential, encouraged to work my interests into an impressive extracurricular CV. Instead, my father complained to my mother that he thought I was reading too much and demanded she talk to me about it. My mom was a reader herself, and was proud of my reading, but she was also susceptible to her husband’s suspicion that there might be something wrong with a girl so obsessed with books. She asked me hesitant questions about fantasy and reality—Did I understand the difference? Did I know that my books weren’t real; they were made up? That life, the world around me, was real? I nodded. Yeah, of course. I’m not stupid!
But the questions made me a little nervous. I’d been secretly selecting a different fictional heroine each day and then walking through the world as if I were her! What would Harriet the Spy do? Or Leslie, from Bridge to Terabithia? Or strange Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time? Girls in books were so passionate and deep, so smart. They navigated their own hard worlds with a grace I envied. What if these fictions could become my reality? Well, clearly that would mean I was a crazy person! I scrapped my experiment and returned to the world as Michelle, lonely in my intelligence, a future social outcast.
The idea of becoming a librarian stuck around as a vague, lingering thing, like a song you heard a long time ago that occasionally gets stuck in your head. It felt further away each time it popped up. No one ever told me what a person has to do to become a librarian. Maybe everyone around me thought, as I did, that you just filled out an application at the library and got hired, the way I was hired at DeMoulas Market Basket when I was fifteen, my first cash register of many. Of course, one must go to college if one wants to become a librarian. One goes to library school. And if one is planning to advance one’s education thusly, one should put a little thought into where one goes to high school. My dream school was Newman Prep, a pricey Boston institution where the artsy students dyed their hair the color of Coke cans and no one called them “faggot” or threw food at them. But such a school was out of the question. It was too expensive, and it was in Boston, where I would get raped and mugged! As if our downtrodden city wasn’t teeming with rapists and muggers and everything else.
And so my first high school was St. Rose, a Catholic high school for girls. By the time I was fourteen my freak flag was waving high enough to catch the negative attention of my burly Italian classmates. New England is an interesting place. It’s Pilgrim-y and puritanical. People still have an eye out for witches and they are ready to burn others for looking or acting different. I scooted out of class early each day, to avoid pummelings by the brawny girls who were driven to rage at the sight of my chemical-black hair, teased into a sprawling, inky tarantula upon my head. “What, are you a satanist or somethin’?” they’d ask me regularly. Who could blame the dears—I penned upside-down crosses into the plaid of my uniform skirt and listened to a band called Lords of the New Church, whose lyrics had inspired in me an atheism that thrilled, after nine consecutive years of oppressive Catholic school. I felt like I was learning more about the world from the songs of the obscure bands I was discovering than from the nuns. I didn’t believe in religion anymore, so the religion classes felt bizarre. In composition the teacher had us write essays for or against abortion; I wrote a pro-choice screed and was called before the class to explain how in the world I was okay with the murder of innocent babies. “Satan worshipper!” a classmate hissed as I sulked back to my seat.
“If there’s no God, there’s no Satan, either,” I’d snap at my tormentors. Duh! Who were these idiots? Rather than argue with my classmates, I eventually began responding to the accusation with devil horns and a smile. By the end of ninth grade the head nun had had it with the community outrage my satanic appearance provoked, and told me I would not be able to return for my sophomore year unless I untangled my hair and returned it to its native mousy brown. It didn’t matter. My family couldn’t come up with the last installment of my tuition, so it was on to the city’s public high school for me.
Throughout my whole life, my mom made sacrifices so that I would be kept out of public school, with its threat of ass kickings and teenage pregnancies. Sure enough, within a week of being there, gangs of cackling females were shoving me in the hallway, snea
king up behind me, and knocking me into walls. Or worse, knocking me into other students, who would then spin around angrily and knock me again. Maybe I could have removed the black rubber bat that I had pinned to my shirt as jewelry, or wiped off the black lipstick I’d found at the drugstore the previous Halloween. I could have allowed myself to be bullied into a plainer outfit and less ghoulish makeup, but not without tremendous cost to myself, something I recognized early on, with wordless instinct. Plus, one thing a decade of Catholic schooling gave me was the understanding that good people are regularly martyred by jerks who don’t get it. Eventually I decided to transfer to a third high school, Northeast Metropolitan Regional Vocational High School—the Voke. At least I had some metalhead friends to hang out with there. People thought they were satanists, too.
When I registered at the Voke I was asked if I planned to go to college. “No,” I replied. It was a quick answer, born of fear. What college would I even go to? How did you find out about them? How would I get there? Who would pay for it? Because of this shortsighted answer, the better English and literature classes became off-limits to me, and I was forced into strange, pulpy courses: Mysteries and Westerns; Sci-Fi and Fantasy. My piece for an assignment in which we were to continue writing The Pit and the Pendulum past Poe’s ending so impressed the teacher that he hung it on the wall and made my classmates read it. “This,” he said, “is what I’m talking about.” Another English teacher commented admiringly on the way I became so engrossed in my reading, tuning the whole world out. It was a practice I’d developed at home, a small place often aurally cramped with a blaring television, chatty phone calls, and neighbors who dropped by to smoke cigarettes and drink tea and gossip loudly. Snug in my book, I found that the whole world fell away; as I grew older and recognized my world to be often cruel and unfair, depressing and ugly, books became a preferable alternative to reality.
After graduation I did try, in my own clueless way, to go to college. After learning about the School of Visual Arts in New York City, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to make movies. My weirdo Goth friends and I occasionally made horror movies with someone’s parents’ video camera, and I loved all of it—brainstorming the story, choosing which angle to shoot, casting my friends, becoming an evil clown or a spurned lover or a juvenile delinquent. Imagine if doing that could be my life. I sat down at the table with my typewriter and filled out my application, wrote my essay. Nobody helped. When I was done I asked my mother for fifty dollars, the application fee. She turned white as a ghost, but she gave it to me. Next I applied to Tulane. I had romantic feelings about New Orleans from reading Interview with the Vampire. Maybe I would live there and write my own vampire story among its voodoo priestesses and antebellum ghosts. I’d already written a screenplay about a bunch of teenage vampires living in mausoleums in an abandoned New England cemetery (soundtracked to Bauhaus, of course). I thought my script was pretty great, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe at college I’d find out. When I finished that application, I asked my mother for the fee.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she said, stressed out. “It’s too expensive.”
I didn’t get into SVA or Tulane. A hundred dollars down the drain; spending it all on scratch tickets would have made more sense. I was disappointed, and plagued by a new feeling that would soon become old—the feeling of not knowing how to be in this world. There was a way to get into college, and I didn’t know it. I was probably supposed to call someone. Make an appointment, have a meeting. A person who had gone to college would have known the drill, could have told me how the game is played, but I didn’t know anyone who went to college. Plus, smart as I might have been, my grades sucked. I hated reading Zane Grey novels in my Mysteries and Westerns class. I was completely lost in trigonometry. I’d failed gym because I refused to go in the pool and get my giant ratted hairdo wet. The only class I excelled at was philosophy, where I was able to study existentialism. Finally, something I could relate to!
After graduation I watched as friends scattered to various schools. I knew that I was smart, and creative, and it seemed like if I went to college, I might be in the company of other smart and creative people. Maybe there I would find a place for myself. So I took a year off to work to save enough money to pay for tuition at a state school. I knew my state school couldn’t compare with the big-city art schools I had originally applied to, but I hoped that I would somehow find a path into a life that was a step up from ditchdigging.
For one semester I slept in a dorm room at a school on the North Shore of Boston. It seemed that the terrible people I’d gone to high school with had followed me here—classmates who spotted my tarot cards asked if I worshipped the devil, and boys who called me “faggot” in the hallways. (Faggot? But I’m a . . . girl. Oh, forget it.) Wasn’t college supposed to be a place of “higher learning” where students’ minds were cracked wide open and thinking superdeep thoughts? Not this place. I’d opted to stay in the dorms because the college was an hour from home and because I’d read way too many young adult books about girls expanding their consciousness at college and having love affairs and best friendships on the rolling lawns of campus. But my experience was not like that. I had nothing in common with my roommate, who snuck her boyfriend in and had sex with him right there, with me a foot away, pretending to be asleep in spite of the noisy grunting and fog of sweat that bloomed off the boy’s back, turning our cement-block room into a hothouse. Once a week some jerk pulled the fire alarm in the middle of the night, sending us all out into the parking lot in our pajamas. I’d be too tired for class, and was happy to skip anyway.
And while it was awful from a social standpoint, college wasn’t the intellectually fulfilling experience I had imagined. My history professor forbid us to use the term Native American, and stopped me from doing a study on the lives of women in ancient Egypt, as women weren’t rulers so therefore didn’t matter. (Um . . . Cleopatra?) My psychology professor showed us a film detailing how gayness in men is “caused by” stress in pregnant women. At the end of the semester, I found I couldn’t afford to keep living in the dorms, so I transferred to a commuter university in Boston and moved home. By the end of the year, my cash was spent and my college career was over. Never once had I sat under a tree on a rolling lawn having deep conversations with other students. Never once had I seen anyone else doing this, either. I remembered what my mother had told me so long ago: Books weren’t real. I’d based all my expectations of college on novels written by middle-class women who’d gone to pricey learning institutions, and at the end of it all I had nothing: no new, exciting knowledge; no new, intellectual comrades; no deeper purpose in life; and no money.
Even though my decision to quit is decades old—and even though I’m regularly brought in to teach at colleges around the country in spite of it—I still vacillate. Was it awesome that I didn’t go to college, or was it stupid? And is it too late to go now?
Mostly I love that I didn’t go to college. When my friends are stressing about their student loans, for instance. I’ve watched people go to college to study writing, then graduate and get a soul-crushing full-time job in order to pay off that debt, no time to write the book they went to school to learn how to write. Plus, I—and many writers—remain dubious about whether something like writing can be taught. Certainly people learn, they get better and more skilled, but must you pay a hundred thousand dollars for it? I set out to learn to write by writing—something I had a lot of time to do with no debt breathing down my neck. I read my work out loud at free open mic events, learning from the cheers and the boos what worked and what didn’t. I read a lot, picking up, mostly through osmosis, a wider vocabulary, an understanding of style, the backbeat of rhythm.
When I’m traveling around, reading my work and teaching workshops, people always ask me where I went to school. I love to watch their reaction when I tell them I didn’t. Their expression changes abruptly; I can see a paradigm shift occurring befor
e my eyes. Having grown up in a place where it was normal to not go to college, I wouldn’t have imagined it would be so shocking, but time and time again, I’ve witnessed how the fact blows people’s minds. And this is a good thing. It makes people recalibrate their idea of what a person who doesn’t go to college looks like, sounds like, and acts like. Sadly, a lot of people hold on to stereotypes of people who opted out of higher education as shiftless bums, not to mention stoopid. But there are lots of ways to be smart, and to learn. As a reader, I’m constantly hoovering information into my brain. Yes, a bunch of it is arguably meaningless trivia about the lives of fashion designers (Did you know that Tom Ford takes five baths a day?), but I love reading science magazines, too.
Not going to college does not mean you’ve opted out of educating yourself. Traveling, paying attention, asking questions, and always, always reading feed your smarts. And self-directed learning can lead you into random areas you would not have found in college, like the dozens of “underground,” small-press writers who have taught me different ways to write and to live. Plus, I feel like a badass telling people I graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. While others were studying the finer points of the Western literary canon, I was teaching myself how to book a national tour, bringing two vanloads of feminist writers across the country to perform their work in bars, art galleries, and, yep, universities. This tour, Sister Spit, still travels the country every fall. After a recent show at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where hundreds of students turned out to listen to us talk about class, the performers sat in a beautiful redwood cabin talking with students about what they’d learned. And I realized: If I had gone to college, none of us would have been there right then. The thought hit me powerfully. There are other ways to create a life built around literature and learning, and mine is living proof.