He tossed thirty-five one-dollar bills onto my bed. He was silent for the next couple of hours as he refolded the things in his suitcase and read the poker book. After a while he told me how disappointed he was that I hadn’t worked harder on the list and hadn’t completed more tasks.
“You didn’t even offer to teach me anything,” he said. “You could teach me anything. How you do your eye makeup, anything.”
“Okay. Well, I don’t normally just start telling people how to do things. It seems awkward. Why would you want to know how I did my eye makeup?” I said.
“I don’t. Jesus. You need to meet me halfway here, Chelsea.”
I tried to understand what the problem was. My dad wanted to change what I did and said, and also the way in which I did and said them, implying that possibly everything about me was, if not outright wrong, somehow off, in need of correction.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know.” I took a shower and went to bed, even though it was only 8:30 p.m. Then I lay awake trying to figure out where the problem had started. Was it because I didn’t do everything on the list? Or was it because I balked at the idea of teaching him how I do my makeup? Maybe I needed to be more easygoing.
The next day we drove the rest of the way to Los Angeles. We hadn’t talked much since the conversation about the list, and any conversation we attempted was strained and unsuccessful.
“Red Bull is made of bull semen,” he said. “I don’t care. I love it.”
“Oh, weird. I used to drink a thing called Orbitz that had little balls floating in it.”
“Um, okay.”
At one point he exited the highway and pulled off onto the side of the road and we sat there in silence. I didn’t know why we had stopped, or what was going to happen. I tried to appear relaxed and confident, open to stopping needlessly in the middle of a long drive without having to make a big deal about it, open to following his lead without understanding it or judging it.
I’m chill, I thought. Stopping randomly on the highway and sitting here in silence is fine. This is actually a really chill spot.
After about ten minutes, he pulled back onto the highway.
“Why didn’t you ask me why I stopped?” he said half an hour later, irritation heavy in his voice.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound chill. “I was fine with it.”
“It’s really starting to seem like you don’t give a shit.”
I began driving school on my second day in L.A. I enjoyed it, and I was very excited by the idea of having a car. I was always getting stranded in Clearlake, and if I wasn’t stranded somewhere, I was stuck at home. With a car, I could do anything I wanted. Plus it was a beautiful car, big and solid and bright red. I took the written test and obtained a driver’s permit and my dad let me drive the Impala around the block a couple of times. I was a little nervous and shaky, but I loved driving. I felt powerful and positive about the future.
Later, we went to the mall, where my dad shuttled me from store to store, picking out and purchasing preppy/sporty clothes for me that I knew I would never wear but which I allowed him to buy purely because of how surprised I was that someone would voluntarily spend so much money on me. He also bought me expensive makeup, and took me to get my hair done, deciding that I needed platinum-blonde highlights. It was all very impressive, though it was embarrassing to find out that I was so obviously in need of changing my appearance and style.
“I could tell the hairdresser thought I was some old creep, and that you were my girlfriend,” he said.
“I don’t think she thought that,” I said.
“Are you kidding? That’s definitely what she thought. She was looking at me weird the entire time.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, maybe you could have said something like, This is my daughter.”
“You should just try to call me ‘Dad’ more frequently in public.”
A few days later, my dad suggested that we go get colonics together. He promised that it would help with my acne, that it would release toxins that were trapped in my digestive system that were making it hard for my body to cleanse itself, that I would feel better immediately, and that my hair would be shinier. I felt hesitant. I told him I didn’t want to do it. He said he knew of a good place, and gave me a binder full of laminated printouts of web pages about the importance of colon health and the positive impact of colon hy-
drotherapy.
“I’m sure it’s cool, but I just don’t feel ready to do that,” I said. “Maybe next time?”
“Chelsea, you need to stop punishing me. Just look at the binder,” he said. “But do not, under any circumstance, look at the last page of the binder.” Then he left the house for several hours.
The printouts were incredibly boring and from clearly biased articles, and the whole “don’t look at the final page” setup was extremely annoying, but I obediently skimmed through the colon hydrotherapy propaganda, avoiding the forbidden final page. Whatever eternal mysteries about my father or colonic health might have been solved had I looked at that page, I’ll never know.
I looked at the photographs of fecal matter mixed with water and white orbs of plaque, resigning myself to the fact that this would play out like that dumb TV trope where someone says they are definitely not going to do something and then it cuts to them doing exactly what they said they were definitely not going to do.
The lady administering my colonic was Asian and spoke very little English. She gestured at the machine and asked me if I had any questions. I had learned from the binder that a colonic involves pumping water into one’s colon and allowing it to mix with the remnants of your digestive tract, and then releasing that mixture out through the same tube and into some kind of shit machine. I told her I didn’t have any questions, wanting to quickly get this over with. I was nervous and irritated, but she attempted to calm me by making unceasing eye contact with me as she slid the lubricated tube into my anus.
I could feel cool water entering my body, and I could feel it press against the inside of my stomach. At first I felt okay with it, and then I began feeling bloated, and then I felt sick, and then I felt very sweaty and nauseated and desperate for a toilet.
“Relack,” the lady said. “Nothing come out yet. You need relack.” I tried to relax. I tried to keep breathing, but I was too sweaty and nauseous and was becoming disoriented. The machine wasn’t working. The water wasn’t leaving my body the way it was supposed to.
I was afraid I was going to pass out.
“Help,” I said, squirming, trying to explain my situation. “I
can’t . . .”
She seemed mildly concerned and mildly pissed.
“Something is wrong,” I said, aware that my line of vision was narrowing, somewhat sarcastically hoping to die.
“You need go, huh?” she said. I nodded. She pulled the tube out of my anus and I ran to the toilet on the other side of the room, watery poo dripping down my legs. I released into the toilet and started silently weeping while thinking I don’t understand, I don’t understand over and over, in reference to what felt like every single thing in the entire fucking universe.
“It’s okay. I can do that,” I said, still seated on the toilet as the woman wiped liquid poo off my legs. The woman continued to clean me anyway. I felt grateful that I didn’t have to speak to communicate with her, that she could tell what I needed without my having to say it.
“Smell like ol’ shit,” she said accusingly.
My dad dropped me off at his house after the colonic and left to do another unexplained errand. Jessica and Aaron had been hanging out alone for most of the day and seemed bored. Aaron was blasting Ludacris from the giant living room stereo system with the bass turned all the way up. The sound penetrated the entire house. I was headachey, still nauseated, and emotionally exhausted, and I demanded, probably very impolitely, that Aaron turn the music down. We fought
about it for several minutes before he pushed me out of the room and locked the door, preventing my access to the stereo. Shitty, stupid, bass-y music vibrated even louder through the entire house, and I felt myself becoming consumed by blind rage. I did what I still stubbornly believe was the best thing to do in my situation: I went to the bedroom the three of us were sharing and dragged Aaron’s suitcase into the bathroom. I picked out each individual article of clothing, dropped it into the toilet, flushed, and threw it into the bathtub. It would have been equally effective to throw the clothes into the tub and turn the shower on, but I was committed to the toilet bowl process. Jessica watched me as I completed my task, then went and told Aaron what I had done. Aaron chased me around the house and then outside, eventually catching me between a car and a large prickly bush, punched me in the stomach, and pushed me backward into the bush. Capitalizing on the fact that I was stuck in the bush, he punched me a couple more times and then called me a “faggot,” and went back into the house.
When my dad came home, he calmly listened to each of our stories and then asked me to wash the clothes I had stuffed into the toilet. I refused to do it, amazed at the suggestion that I do so. My dad said that he would really like it, and that it would really mean a lot to him, if I washed Aaron’s clothes.
“There’s no way I’m going to do that,” I said after carefully considering the request. I was not going to apologize for my behavior. I didn’t regret it. Maybe I was weird, or stupid, or irreparably frustrating to be around, or fundamentally unlovable. Maybe I would never overcome the obstacle of my own personality and for the rest of my life I would continue to slide helplessly into a pit of failure that was my own making. But I was not going to apologize for it.
“Okay, if you’re sure,” he said.
I confirmed that I was sure with no change in my voice or demeanor that might indicate to him that I had heard in his answer an implied disapproval of my personality. I wanted to suggest that I had an unlimited, insatiable capacity for disapproval, that there was no limit to the disapproval I could withstand. Then, for the first time in my life, I cried in front of my dad.
Later that evening I heard him apologize to Aaron on my behalf, and told him he would wash the clothes himself. Rozanna grunted and sighed unselfconsciously in the kitchen as she did the dishes. They were some of the most feminine noises I have ever heard. I wished I could be a woman like her, seemingly so unworried about how her presence affected anyone, calmly doing dishes in her own world. What does it feel like to be so self-assured? From the sleeping bag on the floor where I had been crying in for the last several hours, I fantasized about hugging her.
It sounds overly simplistic to say that I had a lot riding on the term father, that this was instrumental in my decision to talk to him, to continue being around him when I didn’t have much to say, to cry pathetically when I didn’t get preferential treatment from him over a child with less shared DNA. It was becoming clear that I was never going to have a father in the sense of the term as I understood it. There was no term for adult who one meets as a teenager and clearly doesn’t get along with but tries to, and ultimately fails, but keeps trying to form a bond with anyhow, but apparently that was all I was going to get.
The next morning he told me he had reconsidered giving me the Impala.
“I don’t think you’re mature enough for a car,” he said. “I’m going to sell it. I could get good money for that thing. You have no idea. It’s a classic car.”
“That’s fine,” I said, without looking at him.
I was disappointed, but I had been disappointed many times before, and I knew that disappointment was a feeling that not only fades but also makes future disappointments more bearable. Like many other things, disappointment gets easier with practice, and so, in that sense, this particular feeling of disappointment was ultimately worthwhile, an investment in my future of easier-to-handle-through-
sheer-routine disappointments.
“I love you,” he said, seemingly out of nowhere.
“I love you, too,” I said, because I had never heard that expression from someone I didn’t love, and I didn’t know any other answer.
11
how to bullshit
Because only a very small part of me wanted to move away from my friends and family, I applied to just one very expensive art college, figuring I would most likely not be accepted, and, if I were, I would not be able to pay for it and therefore couldn’t attend. Then it wouldn’t be entirely my fault when I inevitably got pregnant my first year out of high school and lived in blissful, blameless poverty and squalor for the rest of my life.
College was not an obvious next step after high school in Clearlake. It seemed like a rare, special privilege meant only for the special and privileged. From each graduating class of about two hundred students at my high school, ten or twenty went to college directly after graduation. My family didn’t encourage it much either. To us, it was something you might get around to after many years of work and raising children, and even then it was only night classes squeezed in after a full day’s work.
So, out of caution, I remained ambivalent about my future. I was equally ready to leave town and go to college as I was to remain living at home and start my lifelong career at Safeway, where my aunt Helen could probably get me a job.
But I got accepted to the art school I applied to. And found a way to pay for it, sort of.
I got a small scholarship from my high school and a pretty good scholarship from the art school, and those, along with government loans each semester, would almost cover the cost of tuition. I took out a private student loan for $15,000 to cover the rest of tuition plus extra for rent, food, and art supplies. I knew that $15,000 wouldn’t last four years, so I decided I would ride it out as long as possible, get part-time jobs to supplement that money, and figure out what to do when the money ran out.
I had never considered my family poor. In Clearlake, we had always occupied some middle ground between those who I now recognize were extremely poor, which was what I considered poor at the time, and those who were almost-not-poor, which was what I considered rich. In my mind, we were firmly middle class. This delusion was supported by the fact that we were able to rent a house with approximately enough bedrooms for everyone, that we ate dinner most nights, and that we were on welfare only when my mom was pregnant or nursing.
The first few months at art school dramatically changed my perception of where I fit in on the class scale. I was easily one of the poorest kids on campus. Of course there were other poors, like me. These were people taking on massive amounts of debt, who wouldn’t allow themselves to purchase a cup of coffee, and who wore clothes their grandma had bought them before their freshman year of high school. The poors blended in pretty well, though. Art school is a great equalizer. Intentionally insane and disgusting attire was expected and encouraged, found objects counted as fine art, and eating cheap microwavable garbage was viewed as good time management. Plus, no one assumes you are poor when you’re attending a college that costs $30,000 a year. No one is looking at you for clues of your poverty.
I watched and listened to my classmates carefully, waiting for them to drop clues of their wealth. A lot of them had been in art programs or art camps before attending college (things I hadn’t had the luxury of even having heard of), and had flown around the country visiting schools to decide which program they most wanted to be in. A lot of them had parents who had encouraged their artistic interests by taking them to museums and buying them art supplies that were not available in Walmart. Some had parents who were artists themselves, who had fostered artistic thought in their children from a young age. Many of them didn’t particularly want to be in art school, but had enough funds and pressure from their families to get a degree of some sort, and art school seemed like the easiest route for them
to take.
I had so many questions about their wealth. Did they f
ly on private jets when they visited different campuses? Did they look at prices before ordering something from McDonald’s? Was going to McDonald’s something they even did? Did their families drink tap water or only sparkling bottled water? What was a trust fund? I didn’t ask any of them, though, for fear of exposing my own undesirable economic status.
The initial awe and fascination with my privileged peers turned into anger and resentment halfway through my first semester, when I got my first job. I worked at a specialty tea café from 4 p.m. to midnight three nights a week. It was a cute café and I liked the job, but I became incredibly jealous of everyone who got to spend those twenty-four hours studying, visiting museums, working on art, and socializing. I already felt so behind artistically and academically, and now I had to work twice as hard to keep up.
I was spending the same amount of money on my education, but I wasn’t really getting the same education. I couldn’t spend every night in the studio, because I had to stand in front of a cash register and make bubble tea and pretend that these things filled me with such joy that I couldn’t stop grinning and nodding supportively for my entire eight-hour shift. I couldn’t read my assigned class materials thoroughly because I often had to do it after work the night before class. And if I realized halfway through a project that there was a more interesting way to do something, or I had a better idea, I couldn’t afford to start the project over.
I knew these were rich-people problems. Only rich people could afford to complain about the lack of time they had to create still lifes of indoor flora and to read about Dadaists. Complaining about my rich-people problems made me feel whiny and spoiled and further separated me from my impoverished roots. I felt as hypocritical as the Dadaists themselves, who critiqued the materialistic bourgeoisie while making art that, like most art, only rich people had the resources to consume.
On the other hand, my problems weren’t exactly rich-people problems. Sure, rich people might complain about a lack of time to finish Dada homework, but not because they were busy working a minimum-wage job. Rich people might use their extra time to attend the new show at MoMA, or to network with Sophie, whose mother ran an arts residency and was looking for applicants from our graduating class, but I was trying to earn money to buy enough frozen single-serving lasagnas from Safeway to get myself through the week. In this way, I also felt alienated from my new peers, unable to be as smart or productive or connected as they were because I had to attend to my basic needs.
Caca Dolce Page 12