Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered

by Karen Kilgariff

•    pedicures

  •    a piece of art

  •    a donation to your local grammar school to pay for school lunches

  •    a subscription to National Geographic

  Georgia Gets Her Nipple Pierced for All the Right Reasons

  Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

  —RAY BRADBURY

  The border between liberal, diverse Los Angeles County and conservative, WASPy Orange County is known by haters as “the Orange Curtain.” I, my friends, am one of those haters. Every reality show you’ve seen depicting Orange County as a playground for upper-class narcissists with fake tans who actually use the word bling in everyday life is 100 percent true.

  As a weirdo kid who fit in to none of those Orange County stereotypes, I felt the stifling weight of that curtain as soon as I was old enough to understand I could leave someday. And while it took me until I was eighteen years old to physically escape Orange County, I was lucky enough to find my way out via my imagination through books right in the nick of time. OK, I know that sounds super cheesy and woo-woo and all Mr. Rogers of me, but I really do think it’s a miracle that I got out instead of ending up a drug addict or a lonely, bored housewife with a fake tan and tons of “bling.”

  When I was thirteen years old, I turned from a quiet, goofy kid into a straight-up, made-for-TV-movie-style juvenile delinquent. One minute I was a nerdy, self-esteem-less girl who wanted nothing more than to fit in with those preppy girls with starter credit cards but couldn’t hide her natural weirdness (I wore socks with sandals and had a perm) and hyperactive goofiness (later to be revealed as ADHD), and by the time my thirteen birthday candles were giving off smoke and my bat mitzvah party was winding down, I’d pulled a one-eighty and ran screaming headfirst into my newfound life as the kid my friends’ parents refused to let their daughters hang out with.

  It all started with a cigarette. My older brother, Asher, had taken one from a party for me ’cause I wanted to try one. Not that it was my first cigarette. I’d crafted my own “artisanal” cigarettes out of loose tea leaves rolled up in a joint I’d fashioned from a paper towel and smoked in front of my bedroom mirror after school when I had the house to myself (shout-out to the latchkey kids!). If necessity is the mother of invention, then rebellion is her cool aunt.

  I was so sure I looked super sophisticated and sexy as the plumes of smoke curled from my mouth and the ash and smoldering tea leaves dropped in flurries and singed my bare legs. In the mirror, I saw myself as none other than Audrey Hepburn with her awesome long-ass cigarette holder. Classy AF.

  So technically, I smoked my first real cigarette with Asher out behind the apartments where he lived with our dad, directly across the street from where I lived with our mom and sister. That day, I learned that smoking actually means inhaling smoke into your lungs (cue coughing fit), not just into your mouth, and also that I had an insatiable curiosity for the more nefarious actions in life.

  Over the next two years, smoking cigarettes both real and tea-filled turned to smoking pot, which turned to smoking meth, which was surprisingly easy to find in the ’90s in Orange County. I shed my elementary school friends despite the fact that they were kind, smart people who would grow up to become tenured professors and marine biologists and other respectable things, and instead took to hanging out with the kids around town who were up to no good. My new friends came from broken homes like mine, where custody battles were the norm despite neither parent seeming very interested in actually parenting anyone. The dudes were older and shaved their hair into mohawks and played in (what I now realize were terrible) punk bands.

  Here’s a brief but exciting list of things that happened in my life when I was thirteen:

  •    I touched a penis for the first time.

  •    I stole money from the popular girls’ backpacks.

  •    I tried meth.

  •    I started doing meth regularly.

  •    I stopped eating.

  •    I kept doing meth.

  •    I went to rehab.

  •    My grandmother died.

  Obviously thirteen was a banner year for me.

  Looking back, I feel so sad for the sweet baby angel I was. I couldn’t see it at the time, but the anger that was fueling my rebellion was a badly worn mask attempting to cover a deep sadness and loneliness that started when my parents divorced. It’s almost embarrassing to me how transparent it is now, but the staying out all night, the angry punk rock music, and the parade of crushes and boyfriends who were three-plus years older than I was were all part of a loud, obvious cry for attention.

  * * *

  How to Spot What Is Really Fueling Your Actions!

  LOOK:

  Take a quick inventory of your current life. Make a list of the very best things going on, like your cats, friends, loved ones you can count on (and your therapist, too!), a car that runs, nice feet, and so on. How would your life benefit from whatever actions you’re taking or thinking about taking? How could your life be negatively affected by those actions if they don’t turn out the way you planned? If you’re reluctant to take this first step, chances are you already know your actions are being fueled by negative bullshit.

  LISTEN:

  Ask your cats, friends, and loved ones you can count on (and your therapist!), the ones who don’t have a stake in your decisions, their opinion, and now here’s the hard part: ACTUALLY LISTEN TO THEM! If you find that you’re countering every single one of their thoughts with “Yeah, but…” or “I know you’re right, but what if…,” then it’s time to reevaluate your actions.

  * * *

  Deep down, I didn’t think I deserved a normal, happy life like everyone else who fit in so well, so I actively tried to have an unhappy, abnormal one as a “fuck you” to that picture-perfect normalcy that so alluded me. I thought I was too stupid for school (again: undiagnosed ADHD), so I didn’t go very often, which left me confused and behind when I did go, inadvertently proving my point. I thought I was hideously ugly, so I covered my face with copious amounts of goth makeup and wore grungy, torn clothing. If I could prove I knew that I was ugly by acting the part, then no one else would feel the need to tease me about it anymore.

  To this day, I’m shocked I was able to get off that path before it left any lasting marks. Well, other than a couple of old piercing scars. And also, the at-home stick-and-poke tattoo of my then best friend’s initials on my ankle, a design that’s now covered by a pretty, professional tattoo.

  Aside from those outward acts of rebellion—which are endearing in an eye-roll-inducing, crazy-stories-to-tell-at-parties kind of way—even at thirteen, I was self-aware enough to know that the meth and the eating disorder were not endearing. Even though my anxiety causes many negative issues, it also makes me hypervigilant to my behaviors, destructive and otherwise.

  That anxiety was fueling me when, before school one morning, I pulled my sister aside and confided in her that I was worried my eating disorder was getting out of hand. I asked her to tell our mom for me knowing I couldn’t face her myself, but I knew my sister, who was mature beyond her years, would help me.

  Later that afternoon, before my mom had time to react to the news that her daughter was regularly sticking her finger into her throat to puke, I got caught doing meth at school. I’d just snorted up in my junior high bathroom (GEORGIA, WTF?) when the security guard caught me and brought me to the principal’s office. My mom was given an ultimatum: take me directly to rehab, or I’d be arrested. Off to rehab I went!

  I spent two weeks that included my fourteenth birthday there, and about one year to the day after my bat mitzvah, I was sent home. As I walked out the door for the last time, one of the nurses looked at me and said flatly, “You’ll be back.”

  But post-rehab, I did go back to using, this time determined not to get caught. But after a couple of months, I quit
on my own, cold turkey, after reading a book. Again, I know that’s cheesy, but oh my god, I seriously love reading. And the book that was the catalyst for my salvation was … (drumroll, please) … The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens!

  No, I’m kidding. It was The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

  Reading has always been important to me (I bet we have that in common, reader), thanks to my mom and her own lifelong love of reading, so I’ve been an avid reader ever since I was a tiny person. I’d sit in the closet underneath the staircase of my childhood home (like Harry Potter, but before there was a Harry Potter), atop a pile of afghans knitted by my grandma, with my cat, Whiskers, curled up in my lap. That was my favorite place to get the fuck out of Orange County and live somewhere else, even if it was only in my head. Sometimes I was convinced that when I opened the door back up to leave the closet, the real world would be gone and instead I’d find myself crawling into a fantasy world. I mean, shit, for all I know, maybe I did walk out into a parallel universe a couple of times.

  The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

  —RAY BRADBURY, Fahrenheit 451

  On one of the days I actually showed up for class, my eighth-grade English teacher, who’d either been scared of me, or more likely for me, slipped me a copy of The Martian Chronicles. It was an older, worn copy that she must have brought from home. On the cover were two sleek Martians sitting amid an alien world and gazing at a star streaming across the horizon. My mind took me there, to that place on the cover. When she handed me the book, she said, “I think you’ll like this.” I started reading it under the stairs that afternoon. She was right. I loved it.

  How could you not love something that starts like this:

  The Men of Earth came to Mars. They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone.

  The book is about humanity’s experiences on Mars and the drive to conquer the planet. “We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”

  It’s creepy and funny and scary and thrilling, and the prose is poetic and beautiful. My old copy is falling apart, and its pages are worn from reading and rereading, and you can still see the faint highlights from when I found a line or passage especially significant (those are the quotes throughout this chapter).

  Reading one of Bradbury’s books feels like watching an episode of The Twilight Zone, except instead of just inactively flopped on the couch, he makes you feel like you’re living it. Like he’d written about spacemen and Martians and rocket ships specifically to drag me out of a dark closet into the sky.

  All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

  —RAY BRADBURY, Farewell Summer

  He made me realize that the world was so much more than the suffocating suburbia I was growing up in, where I was an outcast because being “normal,” which seemed to come so easily to other kids, was impossible for me. No matter how hard I had tried to fit in, I was always exposed as “weird.”

  And for the first time, I looked into my future and saw that my unhappy childhood was just the beginning. That things would be different later and that not being normal wasn’t a bad thing, it was an asset, because nothing normal ever happened in his books.

  The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool.

  —RAY BRADBURY, Dandelion Wine

  I’d always been taught—at home, at school, in the media—that I was supposed to want college, marriage, babies, and a job in an office or a life as a housewife. All of that stuff can be amazing for the right people, but to me it all sounded like fucking bullshit, even as a kid, and not desiring those things made me feel like I’d failed as a person. Reading about other paths and unexpected journeys gave me hope.

  I stopped hating my life for what it was and what it had been so far and started getting excited about what was going to be. I was excited about my future for the first time in my life.

  I know it sounds crazy and far-fetched that The Martian Chronicles had such a profound effect on me, but that book came into my life at the perfect time. I’d continued to do drugs because I was bored, because life as a loser teenager was boring and my suburban-as-fuck town was boring and being me was difficult and boring.

  This book opened up a whole new way of thinking that was So. Not. Boring. And it made staying in to read in my dusty nook under the stairs all night instead of going out to party with vapid friends and gross older dudes an obvious choice. I’d dabbled in juvenile delinquency, and I’m not going to lie, it was pretty fun while it lasted, but it wore out its welcome right as it was making me feel more trapped than free.

  When I’d finish one of Bradbury’s books—The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine—I’d tear the paperback cover off and thumbtack it to my bedroom wall. Eventually, I’d read every single book he’d published, and then reread them. And he changed my life.

  Time looks like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing.

  —RAY BRADBURY, The Martian Chronicles

  So three years later, I was sixteen and I’d gotten my shit together. I stopped tattooing myself at home and skipping school, I discovered thrift stores and vintage dresses, and I’d limited my recreational inhaling back to the occasional nonartisanal cigarette. At some point that year, I found out Ray Bradbury was going to speak at the UCLA book fair, and my heart was like, You have to go thank him.

  I had another incredible, caring English teacher at that time, Mrs. Mercer, and she helped me craft a long, thoughtful letter to give to Mr. Bradbury. I told him how much his work meant to me, and that I was so ridiculously grateful to him, and that I cherished his books. She also told me that if I wanted to get access to talk to Mr. Bradbury directly, I should wear something cute and to smile a lot and show off my dimples.

  Now look, I know it’s not very feminist to tell a high school girl that an influential older man will only talk to her if she looks cute, but I trusted Mrs. Mercer. She knew how to wield her femininity with confidence and power. She’s one of the staunchest feminists I’ve ever known, so I listened to her when it came to advice on how to beat the patriarchy at its own game, despite it being somewhat antiquated.

  I wore my favorite vintage dress, a lime-green day dress with giant daisies made by an old-school designer called Lanz Originals. Still my favorite vintage label. I stole my sister’s favorite vintage ’70s wedges and piled on my raver jewelry because it was the ’90s and oh my god we had the worst fashion sense of any decade. (See: JNCO jeans, butterfly hair clips, hip-hugger jeans, tongue piercings.)

  Even though I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, my mom knew how important this trip was to me, and she knew that I wanted to take it alone, so she let me take her car, and I drove stick shift in wedges the full forty-five minutes to UCLA. I had my window rolled down and I rocked my Deee-Lite cassette the entire way. To this day, it remains the most exhilarating drive of my life.

  But it was my first time driving alone and my first time at UCLA, so I got lost, and by the time I found my way and parked, I was late to the lecture hall (later on, you’ll learn about how much I love being late). Ray Bradbury’s lecture was just about to start, and the theater was at capacity by the time I got there, so I was turned away by the college boy manning the door. In a fit of brilliant deception that came straight from the tiny rebellious thirteen-year-old me wearing devil horns on my left shoulder, I told my first of two lies that day.

  Me, smiling sweetly: “Excuse me? U
mm, my mom is inside, and I just needed to grab something from her purse really quick.”

  I flashed my dimples, watched the college boy clock them, and I was in! It worked! I strode into the auditorium with purpose and ducked into the only open seat right as the Ray Bradbury came on stage.

  As he spoke, I tried not to barf from excitement or cry from admiration. I don’t remember a single word he said, but when the lecture was over and the auditorium cleared out, I made my way to the stage, where he was being interviewed by a gaggle of male reporters. I was so nervous, gripping my letter in my sweaty hand. I was sure I looked like a stalker and was going to get kicked out by security, but when there was a break in the questions from the reporters, I pushed past them and awkwardly thrust my letter at Ray Bradbury without saying a word.

  “What’s your name?” he asked as I stood staring, gobsmacked.

  “Georgia,” I stammered.

  “That’s my granddaughter’s name,” he said with a sparkle in his eye.

  I blurted out that I was a huge fan and thanked him profusely. Then I turned around, vintage dress flouncing around my knees, and walked out of the auditorium. I swear to god I remember feeling like I was floating in my sister’s wedges, excitement and nervous sweat radiating off me. He was also the first famous person I had met, so it just felt overwhelmingly bananas.

  The day had gone so perfectly, and when I got back to my car, I just wasn’t ready to drive back home and have it end. I needed a memento, something that would help me remember this day and how perfect it was. So with another idea whispered in my ear by the thirteen-year-old me on my shoulder, I headed off to Melrose Avenue and stopped at the first seedy tattoo parlor I could find. Then I told my second lie of the day.

  Me, wielding my dimples again: “Hi, I’m eighteen and want to get my nipple pierced, but I don’t have ID. Can you do it anyway?”