How to Grow Up (10 page)

For me, the money terrors came when I was purchasing something I didn't need, which in my austere mind was anything outside rent, electricity, and Internet, plus maybe a few cans of beans and a sack of rice. Chills ran up my spine as I brought a seven-dollar bar of Fresh soap that smelled like the armpits of tree sprites to the register. My stomach would plummet as I walked the frock I'd found on the Urban Outfitters sale rack to the counter. I'd break out in a sweat as a cashier rang up a stack of books.
They're books
, I'd scold myself.
You can
always
buy books!
Once, in the bathroom of a soul food restaurant in Tacoma, Washington, I sat on the toilet and read a poster taped to the back of the stall door. It was a cheesy thing listing ways to have a happy life, the sort commonly illustrated with folksy roses and birds and decorative, beribboned straw hats.
Never regret money spent on books or flowers
was one of the commandments. Ever desperate for something permitting me not to have financial regret, I cosigned the sentiment before I could flush the toilet.
Yeah! Books and flowers make life worth living! I'm never going to regret buying them ever again! The books are even tax write-offs!
This
ridiculous poster actually had a lasting impact. But like most tools, it wasn't enough on its own. My money issues are so unruly, I need an arsenal. My friend sat at the table with her higher power, so what could my own Stevie Nicks spiritual guide do for me?
Well, she could start by giving me a trust fund
, I thought cynically. And then I realized she already had.

What if the money in my bank account wasn't
my
money, but God's? What if the cosmos
was
taking care of me, and I didn't have to worry about it all the time? My life as a freelancer, like my life as a sober person, was still new enough to be unfamiliar and scary. I was always doing stressful calculation—
I've got enough for this month, but what about next month?
When next month turned out to be fine, it was,
Sure, I've got enough for the next few months, but what about in half a year?
When I asked myself how much money in the bank would make me feel secure, I honestly couldn't come up with a reasonable number. The thought of something else taking responsibility for my finances filled me with crazy relief. I'd learned to turn my cravings for alcohol over to this Stevie Nicksian deity—why not turn my money panic over as well?

So I decided I had a trust fund from God. I didn't have to sweat it. Maybe sometimes the balance would be lower than I wanted it to be, but I was going to trust that I would always have enough to do the things I was meant to do in this life. What if I wanted to spend three months lolling on a beach somewhere, daydreaming? Sorry, not in the cards. Not part of Stevie-Goddess's plan for me. What if I suddenly needed to go to New York City to do something writing related? Apparently, my higher power approved. The funds were available.

Like all of these fanciful tricks, they don't stay lodged in your mind in a constant way. Again and again I would totally forget that I had a trust fund from God. But frequently, in the throes of minor panic, I would remember, and start to calm down. This shit
works
. Of course, for it to make any sort of nonsensical sense, you not only have to believe in some sort of god, but it has to be the kind of god that actually wants you to have money and happiness and an all-around excellent life, including the occasional luxury. This can be hard for some people to wrap their heads around, as many of us were raised with the notion of a punishing god who is sort of like a demonic Santa—seeing you when you're sleeping, knowing when you're awake, always waiting to bust you for some sort of totally human infraction. “Oh—God's punishing me!” How many times have I heard someone say that? It's always after they've shared a relatively harmless piece of gossip and then stubbed their toe or something. Really? Your god is that petty? In my own Catholic upbringing I was taught never to say a prayer for myself, or for material things, but only for other people to be okay, and also for God to pick up my soul if I happened to croak in the middle of the night. I do believe that praying for other people is mandatory, and that following a directive I learned in 12-step—to pray to know God's will for you—is ideal. But I don't see the harm in throwing in a few prayers for things like money, or a robust sex life, or a pair of really great shoes or a vacation. If you are unfortunately saddled with a petty, Mean Girlsy, or otherwise grumpy god, I suggest you get rid of him. One thing people don't understand about gods is you can always trade yours in for a new one, a DIY god created in your own image.

My favorite poet, Eileen Myles, has a poem called “A Blue Jay,” with these lines:

I begin

to believe

in a God

I could

build like

a porch.

I began

to have

a need

like that.

She shall

be fat &

wrap her

arms around

me.

If you're going to fool around with all these airy-fairy new-agey ideas, you're going to have to find something to pray to. I call this thing “God,” because it's an easy shorthand, but I understand that the G-word conjures an image of a rageaholic lightning-bolt-wielding dad for some people, so I intersperse it with “Higher Power,” “The Universe,” and “Stevie Nicks.” My Stevie Nicks god wants me to have everything I want. Like a quality therapist, she has unconditional positive regard for me. She understands why I would like to have that Creatures of
Comfort dress with the eyeballs and hearts on it. Stevie Nicks god knows that when I look good, I feel good, and Stevie Nicks god
always
wants me to feel good. She wishes she had an extra $575 she could pop into my trust fund right now so I could snag that cute frock, but she just doesn't. Don't ask why—Stevie Nicks god is benevolent as all get-out, but she's still a
god
, after all, and it's her prerogative to work in mysterious ways. I don't get to know or even understand her whole plan for me. But I can trust that she's not going to punish me for wishing for a high-waisted felted wool Chanel skirt or a pair of Stella McCartney eyeglasses or a monogrammed Goyard bag. Stevie Nicks god wants all these things, too!

Do I think people experiencing extreme hard luck just haven't chanted in the shower enough? No way. There is lots of bullshit plonked in the path of people who'd like to improve their lot. But I think it
is
possible to cast a spell on yourself, hold lightly to expectations, and see what happens. Fire your judgmental, old-guard god and let your awesome new HP hook you up a trust fund, or let her be your matchmaker, or your literary agent; use her to get whatever you're after. Figure out what your own weird-ass, shaky, earnest, doubtful praying sounds like and do it in your own shower or at the gym or on the bus or while you do the dishes. The worst it's going to do is make you feel a little dumb and maybe give you some additional insight into yourself. But at its best, it just might help you make some legitimate magic.

Beware of Sex and
Other Rules for Love

W
hen I emerged from my eight-year monogamous relationship, ready to date, I was insane—like, feral. I was like a child who had been locked in a closet for ten years and then unleashed upon a world of toys and goodies. I was tripping over my feet and drooling foam from the corners of my mouth at the prospect of new partners. The possibility of fresh romantic adventures was a terrific distraction from my breakup heartache. Plus, my ex had hooked up with someone immediately, and the only way to engage with that seemed to be (A) never date again, as if I was now completely above such landscapes of sordid trysts and disappointments, and also
so
satisfied with my own company that I wished not to compromise my independence even the slightest; or (B) get totally competitive about it.

Everyone told me to give it a minute.
Don't hurl yourself into the dating pool just because your ex has shacked up with the local DJ
who tromps around town in Daisy Dukes and thigh-high stockings. Don't jump in bed with the nearest stranger because the two of them start showing up at your favorite brunch spots and 12-step meetings and—horror of horrors—acting
friendly
toward you.
Even though I was being urged by concerned friends to take some time off—a month, six months, a year—I knew I was not that girl. You know—the girl who does a cleanse instead of hitting a club looking for a hookup. Or, like,
knits
. My life as a sober person had calmed down
a lot
, but I clung to the thrill of sex like the addict I was:
You're not going to take
this
away from me, too!

After I sent my ex on a couch tour of his closest acquaintances, I did what all females recently released from a long monogamous relationship should do: I called my best, sluttiest gay boyfriend and asked him how to get my game back. Unlike my other friends, Lee would never tell me to take a break from dating. He was part of a gay-boy world that contained steamy bathhouses and department store men's rooms, roadside truck stops and vertiginous city parks—places for gay men to find one another and, in complete anonymity and flagrant disregard of the law, get it on. He understood that the thrill of sex was a natural high, as important to the body as a bowl full of kale and a jog on the beach. Lee believes that in submitting to our animal instincts, we encounter a sort of pagan holiness. He was the perfect enabler.

I phoned him from the front stoop of my North Beach apartment. I was smoking, and the skin above my heart was burning. Not with love—I'd just gotten a tattoo. It was of a pair of elegant
female hands holding branches of lush blue roses. It was really pretty.

So was my tattoo artist. After sitting beneath him for hours, watching flowers bloom around my collarbone, I had developed a crush on him. I thought maybe he had a little bit of a crush on me, too. I didn't mind making the first move, but every motion I thought of felt clumsy and awkward, too tacky or too buttoned-up. I realized that if I had ever had any game at all, it had surely shriveled up and died during my LTR. Lee would be filled with advice on how to execute my first seduction, and he'd get a gossipy delight from hearing my story. I was filled with anticipation as I pressed my phone to my ear. When he picked up, I overwhelmed him with a deluge of chatter and questions and details. The tattoo artist was so cute, with his pixie-boy rocker shag and the crappy tattoos that crawled up his neck like those of a Russian jailbird! Should I proposition him boldly, or would he think I was too trampy? Should I act demure? Demure takes so long, and I wasn't confident I could pull it off anyway. I didn't want to marry the gent; I just wanted to fornicate with him on the tattoo table after the shop was closed. What if he turned me down? I'd be humiliated! Help me, Lee, help me!

“You gotta be ready to get rejected,” Lee said to me, a simple piece of advice, but also profound enough that it stuck with me through the next four years of falling in and out of love like the dumbest baby bird who just
cannot
figure out how to fly out of the fucking tree without crashing again and again and again. “The more you put yourself out there, the more rejections you
get. It's just the law of averages. You can't take it personally.” My BGB (best gay boyfriend) knew what he was talking about; the gay-guy hookup world allows for extremely particular preferences. Dick size, cut or uncut, age, fitness specifications, ethnicity, whether you are a pitcher or a catcher in the game of love—it's like they're buying a house, not sourcing a BJ in the back corner of a bathhouse. This culture hadn't hardened my BGB, but it had nurtured a sort of detachment in him. I found this advice crucial, as was his response when I asked him if you have to use a condom while giving a BJ: “The only people I ever see doing that are Renaissance Faire bisexuals at sex clubs, and they don't look like they're having very much fun.”

There was another problem, besides my near-decade out of the game: I'd never hit on a person sober. I'd never
dated
sober. Formerly when I wanted to sleep with someone I would get drunk and sidle up to my lust object with a blunt, “Wanna make out?” Sometimes they made out with me, sometimes they ran for the hills. My ex and I got together over margaritas in a Mexican restaurant, him wooing me with promises of the
best
crystal meth
ever
, so pure it glowed a faint lavender glow. He never did produce this mythical substance (and wasn't
pure meth
an oxymoron anyway?), but we did slide down a dark hole of drugs together, then clambered out together, and then broke up. When I looked back at the romances I'd struck up before him, I was embarrassed at how sloppy they'd been, at my inebriated bravado. It had worked well enough in my twenties, when everyone was stumbling in and out love, but I was hoping to have more dignity in my sober thirties.

“You're overthinking it,” Lee counseled. “If you're not trying to seriously date the guy, just ask him if he wants to hook up.”

“How?” I wailed. “It would be so weird for me to call him . . . and I can't do it at the shop, with everyone around.”

“Text him,” Lee suggested. Duh. Text him. Nobody actually talked on their phones these days; they took pictures and sent messages. Plus, I was a
writer
! I would be in my element with a text, would I not? I glanced at the clock on my phone. It was nine o'clock at night. My neighborhood was bumping. Handsome Italian maître d's beckoned passersby with platters of bruschetta; down the street, strip club barkers solicited similarly, while dancers in kimonos took cigarette breaks by the curb. Actual
sailors
, in their spiffy white uniforms, barhopped around me. The tattoo artist lived in this neighborhood as well. Perhaps he was sitting on his own stoop nearby, watching the lusty commotion, wishing for a way to jump in.

I hung up with Lee, who offered me a bounty of blessing and good luck wishes and you-can-do-it encouragement. I spent twenty minutes experimenting with variations on the sentence:
I think you're really foxy and if you ever want to hook up you should call me.
“I think you're really foxy. Want to hook up?” “You're a fox and I want to hook up with you.” “Hey, fox, want to hook up?” The longer I obsessed, the more ridiculous they all seemed. The guy either thought I was a fox and wanted to hook up as well, or he didn't. A slight change of phrase wasn't going to doom me, nor would it suddenly enlighten him to my charms were he oblivious. The tiny green screen of my Nokia glowed up at me. I hit Send. And was immediately rejected. It was a nice rejection,
and may have included a compliment and claim of feeling flattered, but it was a rejection. I deleted it so I could pretend it never happened, and sent the news to Lee:
Denied.

I wasn't devastated, but it stung. I understood that Lee's
prepare to be rejected
advice was good, but I also wanted to minimize the damage. I recognized that I had poor impulse control when it came to sex and romance, and I wanted to temper my nature with some structure. If this was a game, I needed some rules. At first my Rules for Love were formulated to try to minimize heartbreak and embarrassment. Later they helped me not to waste my time. Altogether and unexpectedly they led me toward an understanding of what I did and didn't want in relationships as I assimilated these new experiences and learned more about myself.

What Rule for Love did I learn from the tattoo artist? Well, first of all, don't hit on your tattoo artist. A female hitting on her tattoo artist is the equivalent of a dude hitting on his lap dancer. Just because they periodically back away from your partially naked body and say, “Nice,” does not mean that they think
you
are nice. They are not thinking of you at all. They are thinking of the design they are sinking into your flesh—a process, by the way, that is releasing tons of endorphins and other pleasurable chemicals into your brain, chemicals that might make you feel a little bit goofy and possibly in love with your tattoo artist. Especially if he is super-hot, and he wears pegged skintight black jeans and tiny, shrunken denim jackets and has jet-black hair jagging into his face like a painter inked it there. This entire scene might leave you (me) very vulnerable to thinking (wishing) there is a connection, some kind of energy occurring between the two of
you. There is not. If you must ignore my advice and proposition the tattoo artist—who I
promise
is looking at you not like a nuanced, intriguing person with a hot bod, but more like the side of a building in a run-down neighborhood that he is tagging with a can of spray paint—at least wait until your tattoo is done. I learned the hard way. After embarrassing myself with my tattoo artist via text message, I then had to go back for two more sittings to complete my tattoo.

Ultimately, being rejected by the hot tattoo artist was the sort of baptism I needed to bravely saunter back into the world of romance. I wish I could say that my subsequent conquests were less bumbling and ridiculous, but as you will soon find out, they were not. The dating blitz I embarked on after ending my LTR was wild, fun, humiliating, exhilarating, and very, very educational. As relationships flared and failed, I began to take note of patterns. I gained some clarity on the choices I was making. By paying attention, I began to realize and refine what I wanted. I found that I didn't like being single—I
loved
it. I didn't cry all the time when I was single! I wasn't always recovering from an emotionally exhausting argument! I didn't have to endure the wack television choices of my significant other! (
The Real World
? Really?) Another big plus of singlehood: I had way more money now that I wasn't partially supporting—get ready—a
rapper
who'd had an equally hard time supporting himself on rhymes as he had holding on to jobs. Being single was super cool. I felt like I was finally living the life of the liberated, bohemian female I truly was.

Eventually, though, the novelty of my bed being a lazy Susan
wore thin. I found myself envying the closeness and stability of my two best friends, Tali and Bernadine. They loved each other so hard, they had matching tattoos of each other's initials framed by a love letter held in the beak of a dove. Bernadine happily declared she would rather see Tali dead than leave her for another woman. I wanted something that deep and passionate.

I was also really inspired by my sister's marriage. She'd found a sweet, sensitive man she could be profoundly silly with, and together they had a couple of babies. Babies! I'd never really been around them, and my ex-boyfriend had been so anti-procreation that even
wondering aloud if I might someday maybe want to
think
about having kids provoked one of the huge and downward-spiraling arguments that I could only heal from by embarking on a beauty-product shopping spree. Those fights were expensive; I avoided them. But now, free of that stifling relationship and delighting in being a new aunt, I considered it. Kids. Who knows? Maybe someday. I was open to it.

But first, I decided, I wanted a stable relationship with someone who was so crazy into me that they wanted to freaking
marry
me. Yeah. That's what I wanted at the end of my sex vacation. I wanted to get married. I didn't care about its history of female oppression, all that selling women for dowries and vows of obedience. No one I knew practiced such a marriage, and when I dreamt about marriage, it was not a dream about cutting my life away in service of some dude. It was a dream, first, of a
party
, a big, fun celebration of love in which I would finally once again have the opportunity to wear a veil—something I'd not enjoyed
since attending a Billy Idol concert dressed as the bride from the “White Wedding” video.

After enough experimentation with the various models of being in relationship—serial monogamy, monogamy with some “gray area,” outright polyamory, dating—I loved the idea of a monogamous connection with someone awesome enough that you knew you'd be interested in them forever, hot enough that you'd want to get it on with them forever, loving enough that you wanted to stay all wrapped up in them forever. For so long, my feelings (or fears—is there a difference?) were summed up, as so many feelings are, by a Smiths lyric:
Love is natural and real / But not for you, my love
. I don't know why I thought I'd never get my day at the nondenominational altar—maybe I was trying to protect myself from wanting it in the first place, or maybe my dating track record didn't inspire confidence. But as my standards for the people I dated grew, so did my standards for the kind of relationship I wanted. I wanted someone capable of the big-time forever love affair I always knew I was capable of.

I investigated my love life. I couldn't deny that the choices I was making weren't helping. Into my Rules for Love, a tier system was built: There were Sex Only people, Dating people, and then the elite and somewhat evasive Marriage Material. If I was serious about wanting to build something solid and lasting, I was going to have to spend less time frolicking in the first two camps, no matter how fun and sexy (or darkly psychologically compelling) they may be.