How to Grow Up

by Michelle Tea

  But like I said, I vacillate. How could I not, in a world that insists that college is the place to be if you value your intellect and want a prosperous life? It’s true I would be more eligible for teaching jobs if I had a degree backing me up, and I’d be able to command a higher rate of pay. But even more persuasive is having access to what I’ve come to believe is college’s top benefit: connections. My mother’s glum refrain “Money goes to money” is true, and if you don’t have any money, one way to get some is by being around people who do have money. And those people go to college. I know that for working-poor kids it’s not as easy as enrolling, becoming besties with some heiresses, and getting hooked up. Working-poor kids are likely too bewildered and stressed out (and holding jobs in addition to studying) to have a big social life, and friends they make are bound to be others like them, able to offer support and understanding in this scary new world. But I’ve seen friends who attended university—some on their parents’ dime, some at great cost to themselves—make phone calls that produced jobs, internships, literary agents. It’s as if there is an inside world and an outside world, and one way inside is through college. I didn’t know that then, and I don’t know if knowing it would have made a difference—I still wouldn’t have had the resources. But as I grew older and my experience of the world broadened, I began to understand how important networks are, how being part of a network can make your life happen. Understanding this, it’s hard not to wonder what my life could have been like with some help from the inside. I could have had a great writing professor take me under his or her wing; I could have had a story passed to a magazine, gotten hooked up with an agent. Perhaps I could have sold my first book for more than three hundred dollars, my second for more than a thousand.

  In my early thirties, newly sober, I started wondering about college again. Looking back on my path, all I could see right then was the destruction my prioritization of drugs and alcohol had wrought, the many ways I’d stunted myself. Maybe it had been foolish not to have tried harder to go to college. I was engaged in making “amends”—reaching out and apologizing to people my drinking had hurt. One person you make amends to is yourself, because often you’re the one most harmed by your boozing. These amends often take the shape of living your life the way you would have if you weren’t such a mess. By my senior year of high school, my drinking had already been in full swing. Did I owe it to myself to give college a try?

  The question led me to a fancy East Coast university, one of the few colleges that has a grad program in literature that’s free and that will sometimes overlook an absence of undergrad if you have a surfeit of life experience. And did I ever! I’d published three books, memoirs that explored what life had been like for an off-center, working-class girl like me. I’d managed to get them published on small presses that didn’t have much to offer me financially, but they got my books into the world—a dream come true, a dream I had barely dared to dream. Those books found readers, and many of them liked what I was writing about. One even got a review—a good one!—in the New York Times! This alone seemed more than anyone from my circumstances could hope for, but there was more. In addition to the ongoing Sister Spit tour, I’d also organized long-running literary series, more than a few, the latest one being at the San Francisco Public Library. It meant a lot to me and to the underground writers I worked with to present our writing in such an “official” place. I hadn’t gone to college, but I’d done all this. Surely it must mean something!

  Nervous but excited, I brought copies of my books to my meeting at the creative writing department at the East Coast university. It had taken me more than a decade, but I was finally figuring out how to do what I hadn’t been able to do as a teenager: I was visiting a school, observing the campus, meeting with a professor. The man took a look at the small stack of books I’d brought him, then looked at me. “You’re actually more accomplished than what we’re looking for in our graduate students,” he said.

  I didn’t realize how much hope I’d put into that meeting until it evaporated. “Yeah,” I said, possibly desperately, “but I did it all outside of the system—no undergrad, nothing.” The professor looked a little stunned at that, a little confused. He didn’t respond, except to stammer, “Well, you’re certainly welcome to apply.”

  Apply? Do you know how much those application fees cost? I remembered my mother, stress-smoking cigarettes in the kitchen as I typed up applications to colleges we couldn’t afford. And I understood, suddenly, how she felt. I wasn’t going to put all that effort and money into getting into a program I was told would likely not accept me. Once outside the office I let a few angry tears sneak out before getting myself together. It was hard not to feel like I was being punished for being resourceful, for working hard.

  I was at a funny crossroads. Having just sobered up, I’d lost the glow that booze can lend to poverty. I didn’t want to be broke for the rest of my life—I wanted security; I wanted a nice thing or two. I had enough money trickling in to make me know I wanted more. It was a time when a lot of writer friends, tired of toiling over poems few people read, had decided to return to school. I looked into a program for late-in-life female students at Smith College. It wasn’t free, but they did a lot to support you as you entered this new and overwhelming landscape. A Smith graduate was urging me to apply. At the same time, an offer came in from an art publisher. They wanted to publish a collection of short stories I’d written, accompanied by graphic illustrations. I’d have to get to work tidying the writing up and would need to go on a tour once it came out, to promote it. I knew I couldn’t do both. The school application would be its own effort, no time to work on my writing and reach the publisher’s deadline. If I got in, there was no way I could tour the book, and if you’re publishing books on small presses you’ve got to tour them. Did I take this crazy risk and apply to a school on the other side of the country, abandoning the life I’d built instead of going to college, getting into the debt I’d studiously avoided? Or did I stay on the path of crazy risk that had become my life, continuing to build the career momentum I’d created?

  “Michelle,” my friends observed. “People go to college so they can publish books. You’re already publishing books. Why do you want to go to college?”

  Huh. They were right. (You may have noticed a pattern—my friends are usually right. It pays to have friends who are smarter than you). Why did I want to go to college? I wanted to go because I was scared. I was scared I had made a bad decision a long time ago. That I was missing out on some vital experience that could propel me to increased wealth and glory. But a glance at all my struggling college-educated friends stripped me of that illusion. A college education hadn’t been the magic bullet that shot them into their dream lives. Life is hard for everyone, a chiaroscuro of awesome triumphs and sucky setbacks. Everyone wants more than what they have and they have to hustle toward it best they can. My path might be different than that of so many people around me, but it’s also very much the same. In 12-step there’s a saying: Do the next right thing. The next right thing was to allow these stories I’d written about my weird-ass beautiful life to be published, and then do what I could to support that work. What did I want to be when I grew up? A librarian, I’d once thought, so that I could be close to books. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could be the person who wrote the books. A writer. And now I was one.

  So, I didn’t go to college. I still haven’t, and I can’t imagine I ever will. When the old doubt creeps back into my skull and I start worrying that I don’t really know what the word postmodern means, or that when someone accuses me of being an “essentialist” I have no comeback because I don’t know what the frig they’re talking about, or that I’ve never read the gender theories of Judith Butler (even though I think I tend to date people who embody them), I do what I’ve always done when I want to learn. I pick up a book. I haven’t made it past the C’s in the Dictionary of Critical Theory, but entry by entry, I’m sure
I’ll reach the end . Earlier this year I decided it was time to step up my literary education and read Hemingway, a writer I’ve always avoided because his reputation precedes him too mightily and macho-ly. Much to my surprise, I stuck it out through all five-hundred-plus pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls, shocked at how much I was enjoying a war novel (totally not my thing), humbled by how wrong I’d been about this writer. By the end I was crying on public transportation. Next I moved on to Madame Bovary, delighted by how like an antique French soap opera it read. I may not have been able to attend college, but the stuff that’s taught there can be grabbed by anyone, any day of the week (at our local libraries, staffed by those awesome “old maids,” the real Ms. Americas).

  Maybe I’ll always harbor distant fantasies about going back to school, because I love to learn and read, and I love to live. Maybe when I’m in my eighties I’ll be one of those rad old ladies who wind up on the nightly news for being an octogenarian college freshman. But I doubt it. Having graduated from the School of Hard Knocks, I enjoy operating as the institution’s development director, PR person, provost, and department head. It’s important to know that there are lots of ways to do things, many routes to life and learning, more than one way to be what you want to be. I’d rather college be affordable enough that the decision not to go is one made by choice rather than default, but even if that were to happen, I’d keep my post as dean of the alternative way, that famously less traveled road.

  8.

  The Baddest Buddhist

  Sometime after my epic breakup, when I was still seething with resentment, I visited with my family in sunny Santa Monica. We were among a horde of people wandering toward the promenade, a public space lined with stores and odd, often sad street buskers, like the man playing a violin with an empty soda bottle, or the “psychic cats”—malnourished felines in Ren Faire garb trained to grab a scroll of psychic hoo-ha for a spoonful of wet food. As we pushed forward, I noticed a man in the crowd who was walking funny and spouting fury. Others moved to give him space lest he suddenly become violent; we did the same. As we passed him I caught a glimpse of his face—reddened, tortured, full of rage.

  “I did everything for you and you did nothing for me! I did everything for you and you did nothing for me!” he chanted. The people moving by him looked scared, or disturbed. Some laughed at him; some looked briefly compassionate and quickly moved on—the various coping mechanisms we develop to deal with the sight of one of our kind losing it in public. Beneath all reactions, even the cruelest, is a bit of There but for the grace of God go I.

  That afternoon I felt especially close to the freaking-out gentleman. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had put in a lot of time with my rapper ex, taken a lot of shit, worked really hard, and all for nothing. I’d cared for this person emotionally, financially, even physically, and for what? Eight years of my life, gone. I did everything for you and you did nothing for me! The only difference between me and the dude in the street was that I kept my grudging fury on the inside, while he had lost that ability. There but for the grace of Stevie Nicks higher power go I.

  Remember that 12-step slogan I mentioned, about how resentment is like drinking a glass of poison and expecting the other person to die? I had a churning pit of bitterness and anger in my body, but my ex seemed to be having a great time bouncing around town with his new girlfriend. No matter how much I stewed and sunk, he appeared buoyant, remorseless. I knew I had to do something about it, lest I turn into a woman muttering aloud in public shopping centers. Writing lists of everything I was grateful for wasn’t soothing my angst; spending an extra twenty minutes on the treadmill didn’t exhaust it out of me. My regular stable of self-help tools wasn’t cutting it. It was time to get a serious perspective injection, to declare spiritual war on myself. It was time to get Buddhist about it. I’d long sought solace and wisdom from the occasional Buddhist read, but my current state of mind was pushing me toward a deeper interaction with the ancient discipline. I’d thought Buddhism would save me from hating my ex, but instead it helped me grow up a little more.

  While the thought of shaving my head is terrifying (I did it once, during a feminist nervous breakdown, and was shocked to learn that I have a very pimply scalp), and vows of silence intimidating (though it would certainly be nice for everyone if I shut up once in a while), and pledging to swear off meat stressful, Buddhism is the spiritual philosophy that has always made the most sense to me. I believe 100 percent in the truthfulness of it. I believe there is a middle path, and that it is the sanest one to trot. I believe in the five precepts, a scaled-down version of those Ten Commandments drilled into me in Catholic school—no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, avoid “false speech,” and abstain from “fermented drink that causes heedlessness.”

  I find these five rules that Buddhists live by basic, totally fair, and much, much harder to abide by than they look. Even the first one, no killing, is more complicated than it appears. At first you’re like, Duh, I would never kill anybody. Then you realize that it doesn’t say no killing people; it says, simply, no killing. Now, unlike Christianity, Buddhism is very much figure-it-out-for-yourself, which is one of the reasons I dig it. For me, no killing means, simply, no killing, and includes the nation of ants I annihilated on my countertop this morning, not to mention the mouse beneath my sink. If I believe that “no killing” is the righteous way to go, why do I find it so hard to commit to? Because I’m human. If these five precepts came easily to any of us, humans wouldn’t have been creating religious disciplines around them since the dawn of time. It’s our nature to stray, and our nature to regret it. It’s our nature to yearn for a sort of purity, and our nature to fail ourselves. The precepts, like whatever you pledged to take up or quit this past New Year, are tough to stick with.

  Though it sounds counterintuitive, I’ve found the Buddhist precept against stealing easier to master than outright murder, even though I often think a little shoplifting isn’t such a big deal. I don’t judge any down-on-their-luck person lifting food or toiletries or other human requirements from giant retailers. And I also don’t judge the scrappy, broke girls I know who have made an art of ripping off fashion from places like Neiman Marcus and Banana Republic—many a time I wished I had their daring and skill!

  My own experiences with thievery are so small-scale it’s almost embarrassing (bragging about thievery may be one of the realms where the horrid phrase “Go big or go home” is applicable). When I was thirteen years old and began sneaking into Boston, I gravitated to Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a shopping emporium stocked with carts hawking the sorts of juicy trinkets one went wild for in the 1980s. Plastic heart key chains. Shoelaces stamped with ice cream cones or shooting stars. Rolls of scratch-and-sniff stickers that reeked of pickles or root beer. Dangly purple earrings from a cart that sold only purple things. Erasers shaped like unicorns. Smallish items easy enough to pocket if the urge struck you, and the urge did. I coveted these things so powerfully it made me sweat. To me they were emblems of the world outside my shitty small town, a world where people wore cool clothes and thought cool thoughts and did cool things. If I could bring, say, a purple pencil embossed with metallic gold lightning bolts from Boston back to my real life, it would be like bringing an object back from a dream; it would enchant my everyday hours and infuse them with possibility. So I began to shoplift.

  I prized my ability to find creative ways to boost an item. Fingerless gloves, very in at the time, were a great aid; I would simply slip palm-sized objects into the glove and wave the shopkeeper good-bye as I walked away. I was also good at faking a sneeze while tossing the contraband into my mouth. At home I hid my loot in an old cedar box my grandmother had given me. The only problem with stealing such cool stuff is I couldn’t actually use any of it. My mother would see it and ask me where it had come from, and I knew my stammer would betray me. So, I started selling it. The girls in my shitty Catholic school in my shitty run-down town also drooled
at the sight of hair barrettes braided with silky ribbons and bright earrings and neon rubber bracelets. The loot vanished from my cedar box, replaced by dollars.

  I might’ve gone on forever, slowly building a stolen-goods empire. I could be writing to you from prison right now. Instead, I got caught, and the getting caught made me stop my shoplifting ways—about 95 percent of them. That day, I was wandering the aisles of the Kmart at the crummy Mystic Mall with some friends, up to no good. I wanted watermelon Kissing Potion so bad. The desire for the taste of sugary candy makeup on my mouth was so strong, I now wonder if I’d had low blood sugar and maybe just needed a slice of pizza. But no—I needed my lips to look all wet and shiny like the girl in the ad with the perfect frosted-blond feathered hair. When we hit the cosmetics aisle I grabbed a package of the roll-on gloss and casually walked it into the boys’ department. I buried it under a stack of pajamas and, while looking (so I thought) like I was digging around for the perfect size jammies for a little brother I did not have, I ripped the package open and shimmied the tube of gloss into the wrist of my jacket.