How to Grow Up (5 page)

•   •   •

Let me introduce you to my dear friend Annie. Like me, Annie is in recovery from a bout of radical feminism that temporarily destroyed her amazing aesthetic (think cherry-red or platinum-blond untamed corkscrew curls, Vivienne Westwood Melissa jelly stilettos, and body-con micro-minis). Reared in the same sort of low-income urban decay as I'd been, she, too, struggled to balance her desire for nice things with the knowledge that much of the world doesn't have
food
, let alone a pair of Stella McCartney sandals. (Hey, at least they're vegan!)

Annie has great fashion sense, putting together outfits like a dumpster dress with Dior pumps and a leather jacket she had an artist friend paint the back of. Or a pair of leggings made to look like golden peacock feathers paired with giant clompy ankle
boots and an actual—or phony—Balenciaga bag dangling from the crook of her arm. It was with Annie that I bought my first fake designer purse, on Canal Street in New York City, a Louis Vuitton Alma knockoff with multicolored monogram, a big “leather” bow, a gleaming little lock that came with an actual key,
and
a dust bag. It looked so convincing, so expensive, that people treated me differently when I carried it. Saleswomen in department stores were nice to me, and salesgirls in cool little boutiques snubbed me. I had mixed feelings about passing as wealthy. On the one hand, I had lived through grunge fashion, when every trust fund baby was decked out in a torn flannel and an ironic trucker cap. It seemed only appropriate that I, a poor person, should appropriate posh style. But when the girls working minimum wage at the movie multiplex started whispering about my bag, I couldn't bear to have them believe I was a richy-rich. As someone long impoverished, I had a strong sense of solidarity with the downtrodden, and I didn't want this illusion of wealth to come between me and my sisters.

“It's fake!” I hissed at them with a wink and a smile. Like,
You could have one, too!
Fake designer fashion is political! It's the great equalizer! No more class hierarchies, not if my thirty-dollar Louis Faux-ton buys me the same class deference as a two-thousand-dollar “real” one! And who is to say what is “real” anymore? I didn't go to college, but I have a feeling that some people have written some papers on this subject.

But the Cineplex girls gave me stink-face when they learned my purse was not legit. Why would I brag about such a thing? Ugh! One even snorted at me. “Fake!” Then they all turned and
laughed at me.
Well, at least I'm not making minimum wage at the mall!
I thought, all class solidarity evaporated before you can say
reality television
.

Annie helped me get closer to fashion in other ways as well. Once, on a road trip, we drove straight across the country, anxious to get the rental car back before we got charged extra. This meant nonstop driving, a brutal and dangerous game in which we sort of lost our minds. We drank Red Bull and chewed caffeinated gum and rolled down the windows so the wind could smack us in the face. And we read fashion magazines.

For miles and miles, I held pages of
Vogue
or
Elle
or
Harper's Bazaar
open to Annie, who would take her eyes off the road to gaze at the goods on each page. We played
What is the ugliest thing on this page
,
Guess how much that purse costs
, and
What on this page is the most “me”?
Also, desperate to get as much mileage as possible from each magazine on our journey,
Who would you have sex with on this page and yes, you absolutely have to pick someone.

By the end of the trip, I was hooked on fashion magazines. I was hooked on them in the way that a person gets hooked on things when repeatedly exposed to them while being deprived of sleep and nutrition. I remedied this new need by getting fake subscriptions to all of them. A fake subscription, by the way, is when you put a fake name and a real address on a subscription card and check “bill me later.” You'll get a handful of magazines before they cut you off. It's stealing, basically, a sort of benevolent scam well known to the broke and fashion obsessed (in the eighties, when I was broke and music obsessed, I ran a similar scam with the long-defunct Columbia Record and Tape Club, getting
a bunch of Van Halen and AC/DC tapes for a penny). For the scam, I came up with the pen name Angelica Ford—clearly a rich woman who had been raised right in this world, raised with privilege, who had probably modeled before marrying a shipping heir from a country that still had a monarchy.

My magazines came pouring in, regenerating a love I hadn't indulged since back before the days of radical feminism. In my youth, in high school, and in the early nineties, I had loved high fashion. Madonna had paved the way for me to know Jean Paul Gaultier, and Vivienne Westwood was the perfect bridge between the world of the Sex Pistols and the world of Chanel. I was thrilled to reacquaint myself with both designers, and to learn about a whole bunch more.

My new morning ritual was to read the magazines with a French press of coffee. This was less than a year into my sobriety, and the novelty of mornings had not worn off. Alcoholics don't get mornings. Waking up without nausea, without a splitting headache, without the shakes, sitting in a kitchen that is actually clean, and cute, and paging through fashion magazines while starting the day—it was marvelous. How I loved starting my day with fantasy, with luxury! Even though I was still relegated to shopping at thrift stores, the education the magazines were giving me had sharpened my eye. I couldn't afford that black-and-gold Miu Miu cocktail dress, but when I saw the eighties version of it hanging in Thrift Town, I knew it to be a fantastic approximation.

As my magazines began to dry up from lack of payment, I became sad. Then I looked at what my
Vogue
subscription
actually cost. It cost
ten dollars.
A
year
! Ten dollars! Well, I would spend ten dollars this week alone on burritos! I realized that I was making decisions with an old brain, having not yet grown into this new brain—a sober brain, a brain that maybe didn't want to look and act like a giant angry dirtbag for the rest of her life. A brain that was maybe perhaps hesitantly interested in
growing up—
whatever that was.

Despite the training wheels tacked onto its lobes, my new brain recognized that even
I
could afford a ten-dollar annual magazine subscription. And so when the next you-better-pay-or-we're-shutting-you-off-we-
mean-it
-this-time envelope came, I stuffed a check for ten dollars inside it. And I crossed out the name ANGELICA
FORD and replaced it with MICHELLE
TEA.

•   •   •

Between my cheap rent and the grand trine of a book advance, a literary grant, and a high-paying job at a fancy women's college, I suddenly had enough money to buy something big. Something expensive. Something I wouldn't want anyone around me to know I could afford, lest they all turn against me in hate and envy. It had been a long time since I'd slunk down a city street to cop drugs—skittish about being seen, slightly guilty about what I was doing, yet also experiencing a deep, dark thrill—but walking up to the possibility of spending a bunch of money on a luxury item felt very familiar.

The object I'd been lusting after was a leather hoodie, one I'd first seen in the pages of
Elle
, and then in
Nylon
. Just the word combo—
leather hoodie—
was enough to get me a little high. Since
getting sober, I'd found the most interesting things could get my body, desperate for intoxication, a bit high: spectator pumps, Mark Rothko paintings, the color orange, driving under overpasses, and the phrase “leather hoodie.” It was leather—how luxurious, how glamorous! It was a hoodie—how tough, how street! It seemed a nice way to slide into the realm of higher fashion—something already common to me, but insanely elevated.

In order to see the leather hoodie, I had to go to Barneys. I'd never been in Barneys before. I assumed there was probably an electric sensor around the door that went off whenever a current or former dirtbag came through it (nope, only if you're black!). I'd been enjoying a better reception from the world since living in San Francisco—a more open-minded landscape than chilly New England—but if there was a place in the Bay Area where one could be judged for how poorly one was dressed, it seemed like it would be Barneys.

Though I wanted to pass as moneyed, I couldn't risk bringing my fake Louis Vuitton—my Faux-ton—into the store. If anyone would be able to spot its ignoble Canal Street birthplace, it would be someone who handles three-thousand-dollar purses on the daily. I'd get more respect wearing something artfully, painstakingly thrifted, an ensemble that hadn't
yet
reached the inside of a magazine, but could possibly arrive on the floor at Barneys in a season or two. With Coco Chanel's command
Elegance is restraint
as a guide, I wore a simple pair of skinny jeans and a boxy oatmeal-colored top with some necklaces. A pair of grungy hiking boots I'd found at Goodwill completed the woodsy ensemble. I've never been a hippie and I've never spent time in the woods, so in punk
parlance my outfit rendered me a total poseur. When your first entry into fashion is so subcultural, it's hard not to see every outfit as a uniform, your clothes doing the double duty of keeping you warm while signaling to the world what you're all about. But I wasn't doing that anymore. I was wearing things just because I liked them and thought they were beautiful.

“Love your boots,” said the salesboy on the Co-op floor, where the leather hoodies lived. Shitkickers, the boys in my vocational high school used to call the style, popular with the kids in cabinet making and welding. Mine had a strip of to-die-for flannel lining the ankle. The nineties were back! Who said there were no second chances? I'd sat out the decade's fashion in radical lesbian feminist attire, but was now getting a chance to wear the hiking boots and babydoll dresses I'd snubbed in my twenties. The salesboy sucked his teeth in envy and approval. He'd have to wait nine months for the designer versions to appear, and then another nine months for the more affordable knockoffs to crop up.

I was escorted to the rack of leather hoodies. There was an array of them, including the particular one I'd been coveting, a gorgeous brown leather jacket.
Brown!
How daring, how not-black! The sleeves were weirdly long, with cool wrinkles stitched into the wrists. Leather drawstrings dangled from the hood, which was wide and boxy, making you look tough and mysterious, not like a conehead. There were leather side pockets, and a zipper. Some buttons, like butterscotch candy, ornamented the top. It was gorgeous, and it was about to be mine.

Anxiety rose in my chest like water in a Las Vegas show,
shooting this way and that, choreographing itself to the musical timbre of the salesguy's voice: “Okay, will that be all? Is that debit or credit? Would you like to apply for a Barneys card?”

As my heart rose and fell inside my body, I talked myself down:
It's cool. You have a job. You got money coming in. Nothing bad is going to happen.
I sent a tiny prayer of gratitude to the Universe for bringing me the blessed teaching job at the fancy women's college that had made this jacket possible. I thanked it for the grant that was lodged in my bank account, making me feel truly financially secure for the first time in my life. I thanked it for the book deal that had just fallen into my lap, and its attendant payment. It was really true that I could afford this jacket, even though I had to hurl myself over the unusual feeling of doing it, the haunting throb that whether or not I could afford it, spending nine hundred dollars was just inherently unethical, and if I was a better person I would have found a needy family to give that money to. “Thanks, enjoy your purchase!” the salesguy chirped. He rang up thousands of dollars in merchandise all day long. He had no idea how I was wilding out inside.

When I was done with my purchase I called Annie. “Annie. I bought the leather hoodie,” I said gravely into my cell. I was running laps around a Barnes & Noble, still filled with crazy energy from my purchase.

“You did? Oh my god! Oh my god, that's amazing! That's so great! I'm so glad you did it!”

When you are a broke person who is suddenly not-broke, it is important to have friends who are also not-broke but once
were, and who can coach you, like a therapist, through the intense psychological highs and lows of making an unnecessary and expensive purchase. My anxiety soon dissipated and was replaced by the very real dopamine high that good shopping can bring. I stopped power walking through the bookstore and began to ethereally drift. Maybe I wanted a book, too. I'd spent nine hundred dollars and hadn't been struck by lightning. What was another twenty on top of that? My perception of money, the relativity of it, shifted inside my body like an acid-trip revelation. Whoa. I remembered having twenty dollars to live off for a week. I remembered breaking a twenty to purchase body lotion at the health food store and then crying. I hadn't needed the body lotion; I was just drawn to the luxury of it, how nice it would be to smell like
yuzu
, whatever that was. This jacket I just bought was like a hundred bottles of yuzu body lotion.

“Where are you right now?” I asked Annie, always a fun question. Once a teenage runaway “sandwich artist” at a Subway in Detroit, she now managed a band that was marginally popular in the United States but wickedly successful elsewhere in the entire world. Sometimes Annie was calling from a muddy music festival where she had to shout to hear herself over the backstage cacophony of rock stars and supermodels; sometimes she was in her truck on her way to thrift the Bins, an infamous Portland secondhand warehouse filled with bins stuffed with old clothes. Currently Annie and the band were in the UK, hobnobbing with Grace Jones, who was sharing her room service fried chicken with them. A British fashion editor was starting a new magazine
and putting the band on the cover. Soon they would all decamp for Paris, for Fashion Week.