by Michelle Tea
So I have reclaimed the sex work lineage in my family, and I write about a sex worker crew. My books have become an intentional version of the young woman I used to be, who deploys her sexy girl persona for the greater good. These steamy novels are a stealth social justice organizing strategy for my community. The book reels the reader in with a promise of sexy, uncomplicated pleasure, but the politics of the book hit hard: feminist health care, wealth redistribution, and labor organizing. So, in spite of my class upward mobility, I maintain a connection to the sex work community, and I stay committed to hustling justice for my poor and working-class folks.
WINTER COAT
TERRI GRIFFITH
“DO YOU GET ENOUGH TO EAT AT HOME?” THE SCHOOL NURSE ASKS, AS SHE sets the clipboard in her lap and looks at me earnestly.
“Yeah,” I answer, not really sure what she’s getting at.
“Did your mom make you dinner last night?”
“Yeah.”
“What did she make?”
“Macaroni and cheese.”
“Did you have breakfast this morning?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you have breakfast every morning?”
I don’t know why the nurse is asking me these questions. I don’t know why she came to my classroom and in front of my classmates asked Mr. Logan to have me excused. But it’s obvious from the sound of her voice and her overly controlled tone that she thinks my mom has done something wrong. Maybe it’s me who’s done something wrong. Her questions make no sense. How can I give her the right answer if I can’t understand why she’s asking me these things? I don’t want to get my mom in trouble. She wants to know what my mom feeds me. Maybe my mom cooks the wrong food. Maybe I eat the wrong things. Maybe it’s because I didn’t finish my vegetables last night.
“Well, I’m concerned because you’re underweight. You’re very small for your age.”
The nurse was right about that. When I was in elementary school, I was small for my age, but it wasn’t because I didn’t eat. I ate fine, in a ’70s sort of way. Beanie Weenie. Meatloaf with corn. Frozen fried chicken with salad. I never once went hungry. But there were a lot of times when I complained and didn’t finish my dinner, especially after the third night of split-pea soup with ham hocks and carrots. Now, when I look back on the times when I think I might have gone hungry, my mom and I conveniently went to dinner at her best friend’s house. For a while, we ate dinner at her house a lot.
Just four years later, in the sixth grade, I would be the second-tallest girl in the class, complete with boobs and a period. I was never the skinniest girl in my grade; Sarah was. Her parents were rich. I bet no one pulled Sarah from class to ask her what she had for dinner last night.
When I started kindergarten, not one of my classmates had parents who were divorced; I was the only one. But by the time I was in junior high, more than half the class came from single-parent homes. Without exception, all of us kids were raised by our mothers, who worked two, sometimes three jobs to support their families. It was just my mom and me, and although things seemed bad, other families had it much worse than we did.
The 1980s were hard on the Pacific Northwest economy. Many people lost their jobs, the timber industry collapsed, lumber mills closed, the salmon runs were depleted. The families in my neighborhood were all tied to these economies—families I considered rich because the kids played on soccer teams, bought their school clothes at department stores, and lived in houses their parents owned. Now I understand that these families weren’t rich at all. Their fathers were longshoremen, their mothers worked at the paper mill, their family owned a fishing boat. All of these people had working-class jobs, hard jobs that extract the life from a person. I guess I was lucky when I was young—my mom had a white-collar job working for the Department of Corrections. Even though it sounds fancy, it didn’t pay much—but she made ends meet. Then my mom got laid off, and life for us got much harder.
The thing about being poor is that you know what it means to be poor—and there’s always someone poorer than you. For all my funky hand-me-down clothes from my mom’s best friend’s children, there was always some girl in class with greasy hair who smelled like pee and didn’t have a winter coat.
My school didn’t make it any easier to be poor, though at first glance it might have seemed as if it did. We “free lunch” kids stood in a separate line and had to give our names to the Lunch Lady, who checked us off her list. For what? To make sure we didn’t get two lunches? The Lunch Lady said we had to stand in this “special” line so that she could keep track of which kids “took advantage” of their free lunch. It always felt as if we stood in that line to make sure there was no confusion between whose parents could pay for a hot lunch and whose couldn’t.
The really poor kids got free breakfast, too. This was the worst of all possible elementary school fates—being tagged “free breakfast.” When my mom told me that I was to leave the house a half hour early so that I could have breakfast in the cafeteria, I nearly died. I didn’t want to go, didn’t want to face the other kids I would be joining. Their parents didn’t have jobs, they came from huge families, and at least a fourth of them were from the giant government-run Children’s Center, two blocks away.
These Children’s Center kids had, as the principal described in a special assembly (without them), “behavioral problems,” and weren’t able to stay in regular foster homes with real families like other boys and girls. Back then I didn’t know who those kids were. I do now. Who’s labeled “incorrigible” at six? What kind of fourth-grader is unplaceable in foster care? Kids who are abused sexually and physically, kids who are drug-addicted at birth, that’s who.
I was terrified of what these children might do to me. They were animals—we had been warned. Would they beat me up? Stab me in the leg with a fork? I would be one of these “free-breakfast” kids, and now everyone would know it.
At first, I simply didn’t go to school early. I took my time, played in the gully, sat in the alley outside my best friend’s house until she left out the back door so we could walk to school together. I waited out the breakfast portion of my day, but I was a little girl and I got hungry. Free, hot breakfast was waiting for me if I were willing to claim it.
The free breakfast my school provided was too tempting to resist. Pancakes, syrup, bacon. Scrambled eggs, sausage, cinnamon rolls. My mother’s idea of a yummy breakfast consisted of bland puffed rice, dreary puffed corn, and the narcotic winter favorite, Cream of Wheat with a square of melty margarine on top. Of course, I gave in. Even so, I still had my pride. I wasn’t about to give up my breakfast secret that easily. My technique was this—I shoveled the hot breakfast into my mouth as fast as possible, then shot my hand into the air and waited as the lunchroom attendant came and checked my plate to make sure I’d eaten every bite. If I ate fast enough, I could make it out of the cafeteria and into the hallway before the regular kids started arriving. That way, everyone would think I was just an early riser and not the “free breakfast” I really was.
“COPS ARE GONE,” RICKY YELLS FROM THE TOP OF THE STAIRS.
Who knows how long we have been in that basement room, all thirty of us, crowded together, waiting in the dark, the only sound that of someone taking a slurp from their beer can. It happens all the time. The band is playing upstairs, someone spots a cop car, and we all rush to the basement before they make it to the front door. The band members always stay upstairs and pretend it is an innocent band practice that is making all the noise.
“No, officer, there isn’t anyone else here. Just us.” Then Ricky mumbles some promises of a quieter rehearsal, and the cops leave.
I head back upstairs to look for Kelly, a girl I can’t quite call my girlfriend because we are both closeted and we only ever kiss when we both get drunk enough to make out in a back room or some car, anyplace our boyfriends won’t catch us.
The two of us talk about music, smoke cigarettes, discuss what edgy book we’ve just read, drink ev
en more beer, and make plans to see whatever cool band is playing in Seattle next weekend. What we never talk about is our future, what college we will go to, what we want to do for a living, what we want to be when we grow up. From where we stand, it is impossible to see our way out. We keep our talk simple. Even if we do harbor secret hopes for what our lives might someday be, we don’t share them. I know it is foolish to think I can climb my way out of this ditch and into the American Dream. Eventually, Kelly will stumble back behind her drum kit and the band will start playing again (a little softer this time), until the early hours of the morning.
It’s hard to plan for the future when there isn’t one. If you didn’t have money and never expected to, you joined a band, went to shows on the weekend, drank cheap beer, and listened to hardcore.
It’s hard to plan for the future when there isn’t one. What did the world have to offer us working-class kids? In the eighties, if you had money, or thought you might ever have money, you were preppy: applied to business school, liked Michael J. Fox, read books by Bret Easton Ellis. If you didn’t have money and never expected to, you joined a band, went to shows on the weekend, drank cheap beer, and listened to hardcore.
With few exceptions, none of us were bad kids. Well… sometimes we behaved badly, but there was never malicious intent. My friends moved into “the city” (population 75,000), where I lived. They came from rural areas, towns with 5,000 people, the neighboring islands, and the reservation. A bunch of scruffy punk rockers who worked as cooks, like me, or at the lumberyard or shake mill. For some of my friends, life didn’t turn out too well. Many of us ended up strung out, in prison, or dead. Some got permanent work at the paper mill or airplane factory. Others became teachers, professional musicians, and parents.
What’s a young dyke with no role models to do? How could I conceptualize a future that I had never seen? I had met a couple of grown-up lesbians before. There was Butch, who worked at our neighborhood gas station. I never thought much about it, just figured she was another girl with a boy’s name, like Sam or Pat or Stevie. It wasn’t until high school that I realized “Butch” was probably not the name her mother gave her. Then there were the ladies who worked at the paper mill. Flannel shirts and shift work, that’s what I thought being a lesbian meant. I couldn’t be a lesbian; I wasn’t anything like those women.
My mom raised me to be middle management, to go to college—community college first, then state college (scholarship willing). I was specifically brought up to not go to work at our town’s ubiquitous factories. Pink collar over blue collar any day! I was also raised to not take risks, not because my mother thought I was incapable of taking care of myself, but because she believed that a steady paycheck was the key to a happy life, which it just might be. My mom wanted my future to contain all the things she didn’t have. New clothes, the ability to pay the electric bill when it was due, the luxury of hoping to someday own my own home.
Without the protection economic stability provides, there is no room for failure. I had no room to fail. My mother had no room to fail. When a child is raised to always take the safe road, the intention is to make that child’s life easier, to empower her with financial security. But really, it only teaches her that she can’t do anything.
I STOOD ON THE TRAIN THIS MORNING WEARING MY NEW WINTER coat. I live in Chicago now, and it’s the coldest place I have ever been, below-zero cold, cold that can kill you. The kind of coat you wear tells everyone on the train who you are. She’s poor: She’s wearing two lightweight coats that look like they came from a thrift store, or “resale shop,” as they’re called here. He’s rich: His coat is black leather and lined with fur. She’s working class: Her coat is warm and puffy, but a few years old and machine washable. In Chicago your coat is a statement of your material worth. You don’t really think the stars of hip-hop videos wear those down-filled or shearling coats because they’re cold, do you? Before I moved to Chicago, coats didn’t mean anything to me.
Chicago has poor like I didn’t even know existed—public housing projects that go on, literally, for miles; families of six living in one-bedroom apartments and people sleeping under the elevated train tracks. And there’s rich like I’ve never seen, except on television—women and men wearing full-length furs on the street, three-hundred-dollar dinners for two, and eight-million-dollar condominiums. Oprah lives here!
My new coat cost two hundred dollars. I’ve never spent that much money on an article of clothing in my life—not shoes, not even a bridesmaid’s dress. My coat is black wool, with shiny buttons. It’s fitted, long, and has an opulent black fox collar and cuffs. I wear this coat to job interviews, out to dinner, and sometimes to parties. I will not wear this coat to bars or shows, anywhere I think will be too smoky or where someone might slop beer on it or burn me with a cigarette. This coat will be expensive to clean.
Despite its warmth and evident beauty, my coat makes me uncomfortable. I have never owned a coat so nice and I am afraid the other passengers know this too. I look around the train to see if anyone is looking at me. In this coat, I feel like a spectacle.
What do people think of me? Do they think I’m rich? Am I rich? I bought this coat, even though it was with a credit card. I’m scared to wear it too much because I don’t want to wreck it, or wear it out, or spill something on it. My girlfriend says, “Wear the coat! It’s not made of gold,” though to me it is. Can the people on the train tell that I am ill at ease in something so costly? Do they think I am trying to pass for something I am not? Am I trying to pass? I worry most about what the working-class people on the train think. I want to go up to everyone wearing a faded old coat and say, “My clothes, what I have on underneath, all of it comes from the Salvation Army! Really, this is a fluke. Really, I am one of you.” I don’t say these things, but I think them.
Is this what growing up “without” means—that I can (almost) afford a fancy coat, but can’t enjoy it? What about the American Dream, the theory that with hard work and perseverance people can transcend the class into which they are born? I want to believe in it, but I don’t. Class is about more than money; it’s about safety and security, knowing that what you have today, you will have tomorrow. It’s about having faith and feeling safe in the knowledge that when my coat gets worn out, there will be other coats.
When I get home from work, I place my new coat on a wooden hanger, and hang it on the shower-curtain rod. I do up all the buttons, smooth it out, then go over it with a lint brush. I am going to make this coat last forever.
THE JUST-ADD-WATER KENNEDYS AND BARBECUE BREAD VIOLENCE
POLYESTRA
FEWER THAN ONE PERCENT OF AMERICANS BREAK OUT OF THE CLASS THEY are born into. Despite these grim odds, people like my parents still base their entire lives on the dream of class jumping. The television gospel told them it was not only possible, but normal. To not increase your wealth was more shameful, to my family, than a brown lawn, unusual offspring, and unemployment combined. They considered every day that went by without a yacht and a swimming pool embarrassing. And everyone else in the neighborhood who didn’t miraculously obtain a new Cadillac or a vacation home at the beach, or who was still working construction or driving a cab, was equally shameful. To my parents, every day in this working-class neighborhood was temporary. It was just a matter of working hard enough.
My parents didn’t think of “class” as an ingrained culture, as a part of who they were. They had no pride in where they came from, only in where they dreamed of going. They were two out of millions who erased themselves for the homogeneity of TV-inspired blandness, smiling into cereal commercials like adoring fans. The American Dream. Television was a sick ritual for people like my parents. After dinner my father would peel down to his undershirt and light up a cigar, clenching it between his lead-and mercury-filled molars (some strange side effect of serving in the military). He reclined in his personal chair, his oiled black pompadour shining in the TV’s light. My mother perched posture-perfectly on the sinking c
ouch. They pored over images of gluttonous mansions and commented on how they would arrange the furniture in such a place, what color scheme they would apply to each room, where to put the remote control, rotating fireplace, and wishing fountain. They wanted every car in every car ad, every diamond ring, dinette set, wide-screen television. Their idea of “rich” wasn’t being able to afford furniture from somewhere other than Sears, but being able to afford the most expensive furniture, and a lot of it, from Sears.
My parents had no pride in where they came from, only in where they dreamed of going. They erased themselves for the homogeneity of TV-inspired blandness.
Every weekend we went to my grandparents’ house, no skipping allowed. If we were all dying of pneumonia, we were still required to go, or suffer the wrath of Thelma and Johnny. My father’s parents were hard-core about their son becoming a millionaire. They had been through the Depression. Their lives reeked of financial failure and poverty—one big drag for all the world to know about—and now it was up to my father to save them from dying in shame. These were bitter people: The old man chain-smoked and drank canned beer while the woman actually wept over “the mixing of the races.” They had been robbed and screwed over, or had screwed themselves over, so many times they had developed a fear of hordes of non-Caucasians entering their row house at night to kill them and make off with their nicotine-stained divan, their silver utensils (which were hidden in the wall of the cellar), their rechargeable electric grass clippers, their monogrammed pen and notepad set from 1939. Even in the worst dry spell of generic-cigarette half-price sales, their son would surely save them. Even if they ran out of green olives for their “special occasion” martinis, even if the TV went on the fritz during The Lawrence Welk Show, my father would save them. Even if my grandfather slipped away into an alternate plane, humming songs of Austria while belching up bile and swallowing it again, which he did, my father would take care of them. And so he did.
