How to Grow Up

by Michelle Tea

  Honestly, the more I pondered the possibility of Botox, the more the taboo around it excited me. I’d always gotten a thrill out of doing things I wasn’t supposed to do, whether it was copping drugs on the street or spray-painting a feminist slogan on a wall or having sex in a public bathroom. Some of these outlets for rebellion were thankfully closed to me now, and others just didn’t really seem that transgressive anymore. But declaring, as a feminist, that I didn’t dig some part of my body and would pay money to have it altered? At that point in my life, it was sort of the most off-limits thing I could imagine myself engaging in.

  As feminists we are just supposed to looooooooooove every little bit of ourselves. I get it—it’s a radical act to shuck off the reigning corporate-approved beauty standards, say Fuck You, the Man, I’m going to let myself go gray and wrinkly and I’m going to love myself in spite of the bazillions of dollars you’re spending to convince me otherwise. I rebelled against the social norm of shaving my legs when I was a newbie feminist, letting my hair grow long and curly down my legs. Guess what. My legs, sticking out of a vintage mini-dress, stuck into a pair of high-heeled Mary Janes, looked absurd to me. Every day I tried and tried to get down with them, beating myself up for being so brainwashed, for being a bad feminist. And every day the same word rang through my head as I looked at my scruffy legs: wrong.

  Not wrong in general. Wrong for me. I had friends whose hirsute gams looked tough and cool on them; surely there were people I dated with hairy legs I was hot for. But for me, it just didn’t work. Eventually, I caved in and shaved. I felt relieved at the sight of my new smooth legs flashing beneath a pair of cutoffs, but I felt a little disappointed in myself, too. Like I had failed feminism, meaning I had failed myself, and failed all women. Oh well, I internally shrugged. I guess I’m just going to be the kind of feminist who shaves her legs.

  I wasn’t alone. As I got older and more worldly I made the acquaintance of all kinds of females whose feminism was a challenge to the strict, neutered beauty standards that second-wave feminism had offered as a bland alternative to the dominant paradigm. These women wore stilettos and slinky dresses; they wore false eyelashes and engaged in occupations that feminists insisted were antifeminist, like hooking and stripping. Not long after I was among them, certain that we were a new kind of feminism—sex positive, femme positive, beauty positive. I do so love to rebel against an oppressive structure. When feminism felt like it was bumming out my reality, it was time to redefine what a feminist was.

  So, maybe I was the kind of feminist who gets Botox. If I can’t have cosmetic injectables, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. I pulled up Yelp on my computer and made an appointment with the top-rated Botox doctor in the city. Part of my nervousness about my decision came from the taboo I felt I was breaking, and part from the scads of cash I was about to blow, but I was also concerned about the reality of altering—paralyzing—part of my face, and with a toxic bacteria. I wanted someone who really knew what she was doing.

  The Botox doctor had a moon-shaped face, very pale and wide, with a perfectly smooth forehead. She was super friendly, and her office was hung with photos from the many missions she had done in Africa with Doctors Without Borders. “I recommend Dysport,” she told me. “It’s cheaper. It’s what I have; it’s what everyone in the office has.” Of course everyone in a Botox doctor’s office has Botox. They probably even get a discount. I thought back to the blond receptionist who had checked me in. Her brow was unlined, but she also looked about twenty. For all I knew, she was my age.

  Dr. Botox took me into a room and gave me a headband branded with the Dysport logo to hold my hair out of my face. Then she took a series of pictures with a digital camera, and uploaded them to my file on her computer. After analyzing them, she devised a course of action—a light introduction to the neurotoxin, hitting the dents between my eyes and some points along my eyebrow. I was a little disappointed. The addict in me likes for everything to be extreme. Botox is a drug, after all, and if there are drugs involved I’d like the highest dose, always.

  Dr. Botox loaded up the syringe and drew near, stretching the skin above my eyes and sinking the needle. The injections hurt, as injections do, but not a big whoop after sitting for hours of tattoos. Shortly thereafter, my brow began to tingle; then it grew numb and froze. I remembered my friend in Los Angeles, pointing at his brow while gasping, “I’m raising my eyebrows!” I did the same, flexing my eyebrow muscles and watching absolutely nothing happen on my new, super-relaxed-looking forehead—even though Dr. Botox had ordered me not to do this. Flexing those eyebrows wears the Botox away, and after you went through all the hassle to paralyze them, why keep trying to use them?

  Basically, no one could tell I got Botox—in a good way. I didn’t look crazy and frozen. I looked like myself, just maybe a little more relaxed, a little less Johnny Cash “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Sure, I was less expressive, but I could use a little less expression, if you ask me. I’m pretty animated. I tried to keep the irresistible “I’m raising my eyebrows!” trick to a minimum, and the Botox lasted for a good six months.

  When it faded away, and sensation returned to my brow with the weird tingles of an anesthetic wearing off, I wanted it again, badly. I made a last-minute appointment with Dr. Botox, before she went off to Africa and I went off to my writing retreat in Mexico, which would be followed by Cruise Dude. I figured there would be a lot of squinting in the sun, as well as a lot of photographs snapped, so why not get some more shots?

  This time Dr. Botox’s injections left a bruise on my forehead that looked like I’d been to church on Ash Wednesday and had a thumbful of burnt palm leaves smudged into my skin. My Botox bruise embarrassed me greatly. It seemed the sort of thing cynical people would hope would happen to a person who opted for the shots, something disfiguring to punish you for your vanity. But I don’t think vanity should be punished. When I remember how lousy I looked and felt at my bottom (“bottom,” in 12-step lingo, is when you are beat down the hardest by all the gnarly stuff you are putting into your body), and how happy and healthy and attractive the sober folks looked, I know that vanity in part has saved my life. Sometimes a bruise is just a bruise. It faded away before my cruise, and it was great to not crease up my forehead with all the stressed-out bawling I did while fighting with my boyfriend.

  I sure would like to get Botox again, but my cash reserves aren’t what they once were, plus you can’t go injecting poison into your body when you’re trying to have a baby. It’s not because I think older people are ugs, or want to look twenty-eight forever. So many older people are fucking gorgeous—I’m thinking of Patti Smith here, or Vivienne Westwood, or Yoko Ono. But when I look in the mirror, it’s not Patti’s striking face staring back at me, or Yoko’s (though we do have the same birthday). It is my goddamn face, only with Johnny Cash’s forehead. I know those ditches in my forehead are the result of too many hours scrunching up my face and weeping, because of bad fights with lovers or a brutal drug crash. Chemicals, at least in part, are responsible for the state of my face. And I continue to believe in the power of chemicals to reverse the damage.

  Just you wait. After I’m done delivering my test tube baby via an astrologically planned C-section, then breast-feeding till the kid is nine, I’m going to get so much plastic surgery! Look, kids! Want to see a trick? Mommy is raising her eyebrows, right now!

  15.

  Confessions of a Gym Rat

  I remember when I first discovered I had a body. The year was maybe 1979, and I had recently enrolled in a dance class—tap, jazz, and ballet at a storefront down on Washington Avenue. As a kid who always had her face jammed in a book, having an extracurricular that took place squarely in the physical world was a brand-new thing. Around nine or ten years old, I hadn’t been exposed much to sports—gym class at school was a lot of dodge ball, and once I’d joined a pickup basketball game around the corner. But dance was a whole other world. It i
ntroduced me to the leotard—a shirt with its own underwear attached to it! It was like a bathing suit for outside the pool! As I feel best when I am wearing the least amount of clothes possible, something about donning a leotard made me feel free, made me want to spin and leap and sashay. I loved the leathery ballet shoes I pulled onto my feet. I loved how the pale pink got so dirty so fast—they were being used. They were working shoes. I loved standing in a line with the other girls, in my leotard (blue) and tights (purple) and ballet shoes (dirty pink), staring at myself in the mirror. I both did and did not recognize myself. My hair was long and wild. I would forget to brush it and then discover with horror that the locks had wound together in a matted ball at the nape of my neck. A real rat’s nest, my mother would say as she painfully combed it out. I didn’t think I was very pretty, but I was still fascinated with the sight of myself. I existed. I had a body.

  I remember one sunny weekend escaping into my mom’s room, suited up in my leotard, clutching a giant glass of ice water. Her bed was gigantic compared to mine, the footboard a long, shiny bar of wood that made me think of the barre at the dance studio. I popped Barry Manilow in the 8-track and started working out. I was just, like, jamming my foot up on the footboard and streeeeeeetching down to touch my toes. I couldn’t do a split but I was getting closer little by little, and I loved the feeling in my body, like my muscles were malleable and I could make them limber and strong. I did sit-ups and push-ups and jumping jacks until I was sweaty. I tried a backbend, though it was scary to watch the world go upside down. I practiced my dance routines. I watched myself, red-faced and damp, in the mirror that sat on my mother’s dresser. I practiced high kicks, which were actually useless, as I learned in class. I thought the teacher would be impressed by how I flung my leg up, so straight and so tall, but in fact I was supposed to kick it up a little more gently, in line with all the other girls. Bummer. I loved kicking high, feeling the pull down my leg. It had to be good for something.

  I stayed in my mother’s room for hours, doing this. Periodically I’d walk into the kitchen, practically panting, to refill my ice water, and all the adults would look at me curiously. “Whatcha doin’ in there? Ain’t she a hot ticket. What a hot shit you are.” I swapped out the Barry Manilow for Tony Orlando and Dawn, or Kenny Rogers, and resumed my place at the foot of my mother’s bed. I had a body and my body was alive.

  It has always been a challenge for a spacey, living-in-my-head girl like me to really feel my body. The dancing and exercise did the trick when I was a tween, but in the years to come I would abandon it for other sensations. Smoking made me feel my lungs, those hot balloons. Pot made me tingle. Beer made everything perfect, like the world was at once submerged in water and totally electric. Crushes on long-haired metal boys who looked like girls made me flutter. Eventually I would dance again, spinning to Goth music at all-ages clubs, but it wasn’t much of a workout. Exercise? You’ve got to be kidding me. Once I joined a slightly athletic friend for a jog around a park. I thought it would be funny to jog while smoking a cigarette, but it was hard to jog and smoke and laugh. I collapsed on the grass with my pack of Marlboro Lights. With the exception of running for buses, I didn’t jog again in public for nearly thirty years.

  In my twenties I became aware of a curious distinction: There were people who were “in” their bodies, and there were people who were not “in” their bodies. I wanted to be in my body, because it sounded like the right way to be in the world, but I feared I was not. You know who were in their bodies? People who did yoga; dancers, modern dancers, the bulk of whom tended to be earth signs—hearty Taurus, graceful Virgo, solid Capricorn. I was a poet, an Aquarius, an air sign—mental, scrawny, full of ideas that burst out of me into notebooks and arguments. I didn’t exercise—who wanted muscles? Muscles were for meatheads: jocks, frat boys, softball lesbians, people who were not me. My physical activity consisted of dancing at nightclubs while drunk, getting into fistfights while drunk, and having sex while drunk. While drunk, I could always feel my body.

  Though I was never attracted to competitive sports, I had once loved the endurance of dance and exercise, a sort of private competition with oneself. That childhood pride I had in being able to touch my forehead to my knees or kick my leg so high became replaced, strangely, by seeing how much drugs and alcohol my body could endure. There is something pleasurable about things that are grueling, even punishing. Think of obstacle courses like Tough Mudder; think of mixed martial arts, cage fighting, long-distance runners doubled over puking at the finish line. These athletes are coming up against the limits of their physicality, and pushing through them. Brutal, yes, but there is also a feeling of toughness, of pride, a primal exultation in having a body. The shades of this I once felt while doing hundreds of sit-ups to Barry Manilow I later got from staying up all night on glittering rails of crystal meth washed back with vodka and a full pack of Camel Lights, then going to work and completing an eight-hour shift selling books at a bookstore. I was a machine! Was there nothing that could stop me? “Sex and drugs are the only time I know I have a body,” I remember telling someone, as if this excused and explained my indulgence, meaning I actually required it, a kind of medicine.

  If only one could stay young and on drugs forever! As I moved deeper into my twenties, then crawled into my thirties, drugs and alcohol continued to remind me I was flesh and blood, only now by giving my body the shakes, inducing vomit, roiling my guts with—sorry, but I’m trying to keep it real here—the most toxic, chemical-smelling bowel movements I have ever had. My head pounded and my voice grew hoarse from so many dehydration cigarettes. I was alive!

  At my lowest bottom, my rapper ex-boyfriend and I moved to Los Angeles. It seemed to be a great idea at the time but I now know it was a “geographic.” Geographics are these funny things that addicts do. With their world crumbling around them, they feel the way a duck caught in an oil spill looks—dirty, stuck, fatal. What could be the problem? Is it the junky heroin you’re snorting every other night? The cocaine celebrations that have moved from New Year’s and birthdays to weekends to hey it’s Wednesday let’s party? Nah. It’s probably just your city. Your city has bad vibes, man! It’s bringing out the worst in you. If you moved you could start over; a brand-new you would emerge, sparkling and fresh like an icky sticky bird bathed in dish detergent by a kindly volunteer. So, my boyfriend and I moved to L.A.

  We thought it was a very grown-up move, actually. Leaving the communal punk rock shanty for our very own Hollywood studio—what could be more adult than that? But we were—I was—boozy feral cats who did not know how to live in the world. I sabotaged a job teaching at an art college by showing up still drunk from the night before. Where did I get so drunk, you may ask—raging at some glamorous Los Angeles party in the Hollywood Hills? Ah, no. Try at my kitchen table, consuming an entire jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano—bought on sale at Rite Aid—chain-smoking, alone. My ex tried to sleep in the next room, light from the kitchen and a rolling fog of cigarette smoke spilling over him. “When are you coming to bed?” As soon as I finish this gallon of cheap wine! Unless I decide to call the Pink Dot and have them deliver a bottle of champagne!

  Lots of grown-ups are alcoholics, but I will posit here that they are not living grown-up lives. My definition of an adult is a person who can take care of herself, who comports herself with dignity, who has self-respect and respect for others, who is capable of dealing with reality and has managed to figure out, at least a little, how people do things—like pay taxes and return phone calls—who has learned that what the designer Tom Ford said is true: “By looking my best, it’s a show of respect.” Some alcoholics may be able to meet one or two of these criteria, but never many at once and always with that internal trembling, the terrible effort of holding it all together and hoping nobody notices the cracks.

  During this sad Los Angeles pit stop, my ex—who was wrangling with his own chemical issues—decided to start working out. As with pulling a geo
graphic, a lot of people who don’t want to deal with their drug and alcohol problems think that going on a health kick will fix everything. He got himself a membership at a fitness center located in a huge industrial hangar a few blocks away. He would begin each day with a workout, and because we were locked in a codependent death grip, he would bully me into joining him.

  There I was, scraping myself off the futon, my face puffy and my mouth still purple from the previous night’s Carlo Rossi. My ex was reading some diet book that makes you start every day with a big glass of water, so I did it, too, even though water is disgusting. After I choked it down, I would make a French press of coffee, pour it into a mug, and be ready to go. It made my ex so mad that I drank a giant tower of coffee while working out—it’s funny where his anger at my alcoholism manifested—but I was powerfully hungover and needed my coffee. And I didn’t want to be working out anyway; I was only doing it because I’m super codependent and couldn’t say no to my boyfriend.

  The gym was like a chamber of horrors, filled with gleaming metal racks for me to torture myself upon. Though my body held faded memories of the sweaty pleasures of physical endurance, I felt only relief that I didn’t throw up while negotiating the treadmill. Mostly I sat at the machines, trembling and catching my breath between pumps and lifts, clutching my coffee the way others clutch their water bottles. I would kill time until my ex was done with his workout, and then stumble home and cry in the shower.