Caca Dolce

by Chelsea Martin

  I was in an economic no-man’s-land, rich in education and opportunity, poor in money and time, with no one to complain to.

  I took financial shortcuts wherever I could find them, stealing small portions of tea from my job after every shift, “dining out” at gallery openings every week, basing project ideas off of supplies I already had or could be stolen from the textiles department, and living in a bedroom the size of a medium-size closet. Then, inevitably, I’d have a weak moment, blow forty-five dollars at a fabric store, and make a mental note to beat myself up over it every time I made a student loan payment for the rest of my life.

  I began to question my reasons for being in art school. Was I actually an artist? Was it worth the amount of money I was spending to figure it out? Did I need to be here even if I were an artist? And, if I wasn’t an artist, what exactly was I doing? These are common questions for art students, rich or poor. It isn’t easy to come to terms with the fact that artistically expressing intangibles is what you want to do with your life. It’s amazing to me that teenagers are encouraged to make these kinds of long-lasting decisions about their futures, are given what seems at the time like play money to follow their whims, are manipulated into betting future income on what they feel like doing when they’re seventeen or eighteen, ages deemed years too young to be responsible enough to handle alcohol.

  I remained in art school because, as difficult and expensive as these questions were, I had no other ideas for my life. Obtaining an art degree was a vague, nearly meaningless goal, but it was the only one I had. I’d already invested so much just by enrolling that I was determined to find some value. Maybe the next class I took would be the one to change my life. Maybe when I graduated I would be offered a glamorous art job. Maybe I needed to trust whatever misguided impulse had brought me to art school and saddled me with an unfathomable amount of debt in the first year alone, to see this thing through until I was absolutely bankrupt.

  I couldn’t help but see each class I took as a dollar amount. I watched money borrowed from some hypothetical future self spill away as I tried to understand my poorly planned and ill-conceived academic and creative pursuits.

  I took a $3,000 required drawing class and gained confidence drawing plants in charcoal.

  I took a $3,000 Intro to 2-D Materials class that was mandatory for all students, and was required to do things like cut up pieces of paper and staple them to a tree and was reprimanded by my professor for not taking it seriously.

  I took a $3,000 oil painting class and realized halfway through that I hated oil painting.

  I took a $3,000 illustration class and a $3,000 intermediate illustration class and realized that maybe I didn’t really like acrylic or watercolor painting that much either.

  I enrolled in a $3,000 textiles class because two of my friends were taking it. I liked weaving, so the next semester I took a $3,000 weaving class and a $3,000 advanced weaving class and after those I took a $3,000 jacquard weaving class and realized that I couldn’t imagine weaving for the rest of my life, that it seemed more like a relaxing hobby that I could do one day when I was rich enough to buy a loom and have studio space big enough to house it than an art form I was seriously interested in pursuing.

  I took a $3,000 general writing class and loved it, so I took a $3,000 fiction writing class and a $3,000 literature class and a $3,000 creative nonfiction class, and was then told that I had taken classes in too many disciplines outside my declared major, painting, and would never graduate on time.

  I was advised to finish my studies in painting, as I had almost enough painting and drawing credits to satisfy those graduation requirements. The writing and literature courses could be used to fulfill my humanities requirements. Or I could apply to be an interdisciplinary major, which would require me to convince a jury that my art practice was so nuanced and complicated that I needed the support of multiple departments. Unable to envision myself finishing school in the painting department, I chose the latter, even though I did not know how to present my work as interdisciplinary. Also, come to think of it: What work? The weavings I had abandoned the year before? The short stories I was just beginning to write? The paintings that I stopped making after my first year?

  I was embarrassed that I had spent three years and more money than I could even conceptually fathom to figure out I didn’t like painting, that I kind of liked weaving, and that I was interested in writing. My mistakes were adding up.

  I had spent more money on my education than anyone in my family or town had ever led me to believe I should spend on anything. I didn’t have the luxury of having a parent or society to blame for pressuring me to go to a fancy college. I had done this all on my own. I was to blame. I thought I could be an artist, but clearly I could not. Art was for rich people, people who could afford to take the time out of their lives to learn a craft, and I was financially ruining myself to learn this.

  I felt guilty and stupid for attending such an expensive school when many of my high school friends were in community college waiting to transfer, or had already given up on the idea of college altogether and were still living with their parents, working at Walmart or the gas station or something. I was extremely lucky. I had so much privilege. Complaining even a little bit would be unappreciative and ignorant, I reminded myself. Over and over, I reminded myself how lucky I was.

  I tried to stay confident and optimistic. Maybe I would have more to write and make art about than I would if money and experiences had been handed to me. Maybe there was some psychological benefit to working hard. Maybe my massive debt would be the fuel I needed to become a success. Maybe there were advantages to being poor. Maybe I was like the guy named Loser the Freakonomics guys wrote about, who was so burdened by his name that it became a motivating factor for making a good life for himself, surpassing his brother Winner in all standard measures of success. Maybe that was who I was—setting myself up to drown in debt so that I would have to become strong and have no choice but to succeed.

  •

  At the beginning of my last semester, I found out that my government loans had not been issued in the amount I expected, so I was $3,200 short on tuition. I was still working at the tea café and had also taken a nice-paying work-study job in the administration office, but my private loan money was gone, no one was helping me pay my bills, and there was no way I could afford a $3,200 payment on top of rent and bills and all the other grown-up things I was now responsible for.

  “Is there some kind of extra loan I could get?” I asked my financial adviser. There seemed to be no limit to the amount of money I would steal from my future self. If my future self became financially successful, I figured, $3,200 would be nothing to her. And if she were unsuccessful and continued to be poor, the exact amount of her debt would be irrelevant, as it was already so high that she would only ever be able to make minimum payments, if that, for the rest of her life.

  “You’ve taken out all the loans you qualify for,” my adviser told me.

  “Maybe I have to drop out,” I said. I felt relieved at the thought, and also slightly badass, as if dropping out might add depth or authenticity to my personality, or harden me.

  Yeah, that’s me, I dropped out of art school, I would say defiantly to my friends at the homeless shelter, my voice somehow deep and dry from the existential heaviness of not obtaining an art degree. Who’s askin’?

  “You want to get your degree,” my adviser said firmly. “You’ve already invested so much time and money, and you just have one semester left.”

  “What can I do?” I said.

  “Is there anyone in your family you can borrow money from?” she said.

  I imagined my seven-year-old sister holding a weekend bake sale or lemonade stand, and then imagined myself manipulating her into giving me the jar of quarters she earned. You know I’m good for it, I would say, my imaginary self in this scenario imagining an even less likely version
of myself who was about to become rich from the sale of a piece of imaginary art, art that no imaginary version of myself could picture but that I knew must exist somewhere deep within me. I imagined bringing my sister’s jar of quarters into my financial adviser’s office and emptying it onto the desk. Plenty more where that came from, I would say, unsure why I was using a threatening tone of voice.

  “No,” I said. “Nobody has any money.”

  “Okay.” She sighed. “Think about it over the weekend and come back in on Monday.”

  I avoided my financial adviser’s office and any phone call from an unknown number after that, hoping my tuition shortage would be forgotten.

  I pulled together my interdisciplinary presentation. My weavings were actually illustrations, I explained to the jury, because I used the color and composition methods that I learned in my studies in painting and applied those concepts to the weavings. Illustration is imagery shown alongside or instead of text, and it just so happened that my weavings, when paired with their descriptions, sort of formed a satirical narrative about societal pressures. I printed books that reproduced my art next to short essays I wrote about their meaning, in case the connection to writing wasn’t clear.

  “You’re so irreverent,” one of the jurors said, smiling.

  It turns out being an art student while struggling to pay my bills taught me a very important life lesson after all: how to bullshit.

  I spent my last semester finishing my requirements and taking writing classes. For my senior show, I recited a long poem I had written called “McDonald’s Is Impossible,” which I had memorized. I served McDonald’s French fries and hamburgers, which I had cut up into hors d’oeuvre–size quarters and placed elegantly on platters.

  After graduation, instead of receiving a diploma, I received a bill from the school in the amount I owed. I didn’t pay it, reasoning that I would try to cough up the money if it turned out I needed a piece of paper proving I had a BFA.

  I have never had a reason to see proof of my academic achievement.

  12

  man-hater

  Mornings before I went to work, if I had time, I would stop at James’s house and cuddle with him in his bed for half an hour. I cherished this time with him. I loved his soft, nearly motionless kisses and I loved being held by his warm sleepy body. Usually I couldn’t fall asleep, so I would lie there and stare at him, maybe try to move a chunk of his dark hair away from his face without waking him up. I also loved the fact that in the early morning, when he was hours away from being fully conscious, I was free of the responsibility of talking to him.

  I had broken up with James months earlier over the phone, when I was living two hours away in Oakland during my first year of art school and he was in Clearlake and still a senior in high school. We had started dating right before the school year ended and had a happy, fun summer together, but once I left for college, the relationship became a chore. I would have liked to see James every day, but since that was impossible, it seemed easier and less frustrating just to give up on our relationship altogether and reallocate the hours I spent on the phone with him each night doing other things—making friends, pursuing other romances, and honing my artistic skills.

  But this isn’t what I said to James when I broke up with him. I told him it was his personality that drove me away.

  “You’re becoming too needy,” I said, trying to speak into the phone loudly enough so that he would hear me over his own crying, but not so loud that I would be heard through the walls of my dorm room. “You call me too much.”

  I continued talking to him on the phone every night for weeks after our breakup, implying that I was trying to tend to his feelings of broken-heartedness but mostly trying to lessen the emotional repercussions the breakup was causing me: guilt, loneliness, and the nagging thought that I would never find anyone else willing to tolerate my personality as eagerly as he did. I had the feeling that the world was suddenly expanding at an emotionally overwhelming rate, making me feel tiny and insignificant and seeming to call into question my purpose, especially late at night while I did things like glue dried leaves onto an incredibly shitty “natural materials” 3-D Design project that was due the next morning. Talking to James made me feel grounded, and even if our conversations were awful and confusing and emotionally draining, it seemed right to be going through this together.

  “It is so much easier to be the person broken up with,” I told him, using a tone of condescending maturity that I found annoying even while I was using it. “Someday you’ll understand what I’m going through and you’ll feel bad that you gave me such a hard time.”

  When I finally started feeling good about being single and didn’t need his emotional support anymore, I demanded he stop calling me. I had other shit going on, I explained. I could not be expected to prioritize the needs of my long-distance ex-boyfriend indefinitely. I had art openings and parties to attend, projects to work on. Just taking the time to explain this to him was eating into my college experience.

  “I am literally passing up opportunities to hang out with people so that you can have the privilege of listening to the same annoyed, half-hearted explanation of this situation for the fifty-fourth time,” I said.

  But once my first year was over and I was back in Clearlake for the summer, James and I fell quickly into old habits. We hung out constantly, made out in front of our friends, took turns drawing each other’s portraits, talked about music and art and the future, and gave each other back massages. I clumsily avoided conversations about our relationship, and when he backed me into a corner about it, we fought.

  “We do everything we did when we were together. And you tell me you still love me. So why can’t I be your boyfriend?” he would say.

  “You’re making me regret coming over,” I would say, arms folded, staring into his watery eyes until he submitted to my will and looked away.

  I knew I was behaving poorly, but I had already decided to forgive myself. I was being selfish and shitty and irresponsible with the feelings of someone I claimed to care about, but I was a teenager. I was allowed to make mistakes. Wasn’t that the whole point of being a teenager? Surely, as a teenager, I was entitled to choose when to ignore and when to capitalize on my ex-boyfriend’s feelings, based exclusively on what would be most beneficial to my own needs while preserving the image of myself as a sensitive human being. Surely I was allowed to bend the shape of reality in my own mind to make it something I could comfortably live within.

  Surely, I thought, no one would begrudge a teenager the right to make a few mistakes.

  The trap of Clearlake is financial as much as it is geographical as much as it is psychological. Being born there all but guarantees a life of poverty. Getting finances together to move out of town is a huge obstacle. Mountains surround Lake County, where Clearlake is nestled, and on the other side are places like Napa and St. Helena, towns that cater to the very rich and offer few incentives for poor people to visit or move into. Beyond those towns are modest cities like Santa Rosa, which you might, if you were a very privileged Clearlake resident, visit a few times a year when you wanted to go to the mall. But many people don’t leave town very often, and this creates a fear of the outside world that only becomes more pronounced as time goes on.

  Some people try to leave. They go to college, or move in with a relative in some nearby city, or pack up everything and just go. My mom and Seth and I had done this when I was seven; we’d packed up a U-Haul and moved to Washington state to start over. We enjoyed some adverse weather, discovered Starbucks, and started obsessively collecting and trading stickers with our new friends. (Okay, that was probably just me.) But Clearlake beckoned, so we drove our U-Haul back before I turned eight. It was a sad, fucked-up little town with absolutely no opportunity, but it was ours. These were our dirt roads. These were the crackheads we had known our whole lives.

  It was funny how beautiful Cl
earlake now appeared to me after a year of being away at college. It was as if I had never really looked at it before. Maybe it was that I had spent the year in a large, dirty city and was grateful to be away from the frenzy and constant light. Maybe it was that I had just spent the year making art and wondering why I was making art and being asked to defend my artistic choices in front of people who seemed to have a much better idea of why they were making art than I did, and it was just such a relief to be around simple, artless people who didn’t want to hear about that stuff and only wanted to get drunk with me.

  Or maybe I was beginning to feel Clearlake’s pull, the one that no one can seem to escape, the persistent voice that told me life was better here, that maturity was being able to see the majestic rolling hills without being bothered by the smoky, rotting trailers that peppered them. That maybe this was the only place in the world where I could stand out as special. That maybe I belonged here.

  •

  “Do you still love me?” James said as I detached myself from him and his bed, checking myself in the mirror to make sure my uniform wasn’t too wrinkled.

  Of course I knew what James meant when he asked me if I loved him, and I knew what it meant that he even felt he needed to ask. It meant that I was successfully manipulating him. It meant that I was maintaining his love and attention while avoiding any of the responsibility that I felt when we were in a legitimate relationship.

  But I pretended to believe he meant Do you love me? in the broader sense of love that included the love I had for my brother, for example, or my cat, or sesame seed bagels with extra cream cheese, which I did love, without a doubt. I loved him very much in that sense of the word, and told him so in that quick, irritated way that implied that any further questioning on the matter would lead to a fight.