Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  My parents had two kids, both of whose purpose in life was to become rich. The torch had been passed. It was now my parents’ goal to mold us into something “rich,” to strategically insert us into the upper crust, thus ensuring a wealthy retirement. Their first attempt at this was to enroll my sister and me in private school (from which we were rapidly ejected, since they couldn’t pay for it). They insisted this would give my sister and me a much better chance of marrying some sweaty-palmed old-money boy when the time came. Unfortunately, they overlooked the fact that these rich children wanted nothing to do with us. The rich, like those mysterious Masons and the CIA, have seriously tight-ass circles that not just anyone can penetrate. This really messed with my sister’s mind; she was in a constant state of agony. All the other girls in her classes had designer jeans, and my sister was the only one in the whole school suffering without. My mother sewed fake patches onto generic jeans, but this only made the whole thing worse when a classmate ratted her out.

  Next they enrolled my sister and me in ballroom-dancing classes at the country club, where we were nearly guaranteed to become “cultured” and “civilized.” This move was in part a response to my natural attraction to vandalism and dirt-bike ganging, which severely infringed upon my parents’ princess dreams. At the country club, they thought, we would learn how to charm the hell out of the rich, play their games, rub elbows with the next generation of money people. Membership was by invitation only. We were the only kids in the classes whose parents weren’t members. These kids came from well-known, old-money families. For them, the waltz and the fox trot were some sort of perverse “fun,” where they got dressed up and twirled around a ballroom like royalty. To me, it was horror.

  Everything about me showed I didn’t belong, from my inappropriate, not-quite-formal tube dresses to my macramé jewelry. (Our clothing arrived in the mail from our Canadian cousins—hand-me-downs from the hinterland—and was better suited to square dancing and getting beat up in a big city.) My mother tried to compensate by hand-sewing me the gaudiest satin and lace dresses. She went for the latest fad: low-waisted, poofed-out dresses that made me look like my torso was twice as long as my legs, like some shapeless, disproportionate mutant. She even bought me little white gloves—like the JonBenet freakazoids wear on the creepy children’s talent shows in Atlantic City—and patent-leather Mary Janes.

  Once a week, my mother, in her beige polyester London Fog–style overcoat and metallic-blue eye shadow, her helmet perm and beige secretary pumps, drove me up the winding road of manicured grounds in our clunking Toronado station wagon. At the top of the hill sat the Colonial castle within which waited the liverwurst-scented old ladies with castanets and the teeming brood of the stinking rich of Delaware, all prissied up like miniature millionaires. There I slouched in a “period” chair against the wall while all the little boys in suits and gloves chose all the little girls in velvet and lace, leaving me to sit there for the entire time. One of the deeply creased, too-much-sun-in-a-lifetime old ladies sometimes forced one of the boys to dance with me—more as a punishment to some lazy boy than to help me. Their parents were Du Ponts and oil tycoons, and one boy, his rubbery hand like a hoof on my hip, said to me, “You’ll never marry one of us.”

  “I know,” I said, and I wasn’t offended. I had gone to private school with this arrogant little boy, who was commonly known as “Booger” for his ever-sunken finger in his ape-shaped right nostril. I just wanted to go ride my bike down a steep, rocky embankment, give someone a black eye. Instead I found myself seated at a very long table, my eyes full of what seemed like hundreds of sparkling utensils. We were “quizzed” during each course of a sickeningly massive meal as to which utensil to use. My hand trembled over the fourth fork from the left, the knife located beside the smallest plate, expecting a slap on the wrist from one of the wrinkled mummies. Each item presented by some annoyed waiter was smothered in hollandaise. Boiled meat and hollandaise. String beans and hollandaise. All this in preparation for a final banquet and ball, to which the parents were invited to get loaded and watch their kids do the bunny hop. I was thankful to find out we weren’t invited, but my sister wept bitter tears for days. Her sorrow worsened when we found out we were the only ones enrolled in the classes who weren’t invited. My parents complained that they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth for the classes. They couldn’t understand what had gone wrong.

  MY MOTHER WORKED AT A BANK WITH BRUCE WILLIS’S MOM. Every day, sucking up minimum wage, my mom told Bruce Willis’s mom about how she would be rich someday. My father worked at Sears with Elvis Presley’s drummer. He did the same. He asked a customer, “You want us to rotate the tires while we’re at it?” and then told Elvis Presley’s drummer how he would be rich someday. Elvis Presley’s drummer rotated the tires, smiled slowly at my dad, and went to the bar after work like everyone else. The reality of working shit jobs somehow didn’t sway them from their delusion. Instead of resenting the rich, who would never let them into their club, they talked about them as if they were family: “George Wellingham III got a new Porsche!” “Ivana Porkroll is divorcing Richard—it will split the families for sure.” “Little Rutherford Hoggerton has been chosen to go to the military academy—did you hear, girls? He’s your age!”

  Every day when I walked to school I walked past the private school, where my friends and I were harassed by a bunch of horse-faced blondes in team shorts, holding on to lacrosse sticks. It just so happened that the school had constructed a pedestrian tunnel under the road, and a few kids from our school had been killed crossing the street there, so we opted to walk through the tunnel. “No white trash allowed!” they would bellow, threatening to call the cops. The property between the private school and the public school was all Du Pont estates. One day an old lady in the back of a limo pulled up next to us on the street and told us she didn’t want us walking past her driveway—on the public street. She wrote down our names and said she would notify the authorities of our intentions to rob the Du Ponts. My associates and I decorated the walls of the tunnel with slogans, such as, Rich Fucks, Fucking Snobs, Eat Shit Moneybags.

  MY FATHER QUIT SEARS AND PLUNGED HEADLONG INTO SALES. Real estate. He worked seven-day weeks for the same or less pay than the Sears job. It seemed like a turn for the worse, but then, rather suddenly, my father started making money. A lot of money. They went on vacations to the Caribbean (a perk from the company for high sales), from which they returned with rolls of photos of dangerously sunburned, severely inebriated Realtors and their spouses, their heads wrapped in wet towels, their swollen faces sucking on mixed drinks; dance floors full of drunken, Delawarean Realtors screaming into the dirt under a limbo bar; Realtor wives shielding their eyes from the camera while Realtor husbands bend them over folding chairs for a mimicked spanking.

  My parents gave in to the reality of their long-awaited fantasy. They bought stuff like crazy. They bought rental properties and a beach house, new cars, an antique car. They hired a maid. They bought my sister and me jewelry and clothing, furniture and toys, new everything they could get their hands on. The hand-me-down hoe-down clothes were quickly replaced by rich-kid fashion, which sent me into a junior-high identity crisis. For the first time I realized I was trapped between classes—considered too uppity by the poorer kids, and having nothing in common, except the same uniform, with the richer kids. I sat alone in my suddenly made-over bedroom, stripped of its chaotic wall of Scratch-n-Sniff stickers, Scott Baio and Dukes of Hazzard posters, and giant carnival-prize stuffed animals. My completely whitewashed new room, with custom-designed cabinets, framed fine art posters, and a vanity full of gold jewelry and make-up, was completely foreign and frightening. I hid the jewelry, afraid it would be stolen and my parents would never forgive me.

  Now we were going to brunch at ritzy hotels, driving to Pennsylvania to try the latest new fancy restaurant. It was all an abrupt turn from my mother’s infamous boiled-chicken dinner. It seemed like one night we were carefully removing
the nearly liquid white skin from a boiled chicken leg, swallowing half a softer-than-butter boiled onion—and the next night our dinner was being served on fire. My father, who was almost always embarrassingly drunk and loud at such occasions, was glaringly out of place in his red suit and American flag/bald eagle tie, using a long umbrella with the head of a duck as a cane, his lips pulled back in a huge, unconvincing smile, framing half an unlit cigar in his teeth. Yet there I sat, in some hideous pastel dress and flats, watching the waiter’s mouth as he asked us to quiet down/put out that cigar/pay the tab and leave.

  At home in our big house flanked by new cars and gaudy decoration, our better-than-thou-neighbors’ posturing was scandalously tarnished by barbecue bread violence. My father insisted on a loaf of bread being present at meals, to save him from choking (some weird thing from my grandmother). During the summer we usually ate outside on our deck, which was highly visible to the entire neighborhood. By the end of the meal, my drunk-ass dad would almost always be ready for a fight—any fight—and he usually let loose on the bag of bread first. Neighbors would stare shamelessly as my father pitched the loaf into the chain-link fence, where it would explode into a tragedy of misshapen slices while he bellowed, “I bring home the bread!” This popular exclamation was heard by all on many occasions from my father: from the second-floor balcony in his underwear, from the lawn with shotguns in each hand, from his car wrestling with my mother for the keys.

  THEIR DREAM FOR US HADN’T DIED. HIGHER EDUCATION, TO MY parents, was still a way for their children to jump class. And so, when the time came, they insisted we go to college, though both of us protested. We would be the first in both of their families to go. They were sure that with our first step on campus we would meet scads of tall, block-jawed future doctors and lawyers who would fall in love with our cultured, high-class charm as soon as they laid eyes on us. My sister’s Mohawk and chain-smoking of menthol 100s, and my common pastime of watching TV flat on my back with a bowl of cereal propped between my breasts, somehow didn’t dissolve their mirage. These were just phases that would end with high school, they assured us. Apparently they looked at me and saw a potential cheerleading sorority girl in the raw, ready to be polished for action at any moment, unleashing those two years of private school and dance-class etiquette.

  No matter how hard they tried to turn us into just-add-water Kennedys, all of this posturing failed, and so did college. The bottom line was that we were lower class, and there was no way we could be any different. As we were dragged nearly screaming off to college, the late-eighties economy steadily sank into the toilet. Their rental properties remained vacant, the beach house unrented; the cars wouldn’t sell, and the real-estate market floundered. Their debt grew so out of control they were faced with declaring bankruptcy. All of the Realtors from the tropical vacation photos were declaring bankruptcy like dominoes, but my father couldn’t deal with the shame. His suicide note was addressed mostly to his parents, and said how he had failed them by not being rich. He also declared his right, in the freest nation in the world, to choose death.

  Our family was left in a sinkhole of debt. People came to the house during the funeral to claim cars and to try and buy the house. Everything was liquidated, and we all went our separate ways.

  Despite my parents’ arduous attempts at my reconstruction, I have retained bits of my native culture that will now be offered up to my daughter whether she likes it or not. Like eating green olives and watching Lawrence Welk, dirt-bike ganging and the art of survival in a classist nation, flamboyant American-flag apparel preferably worn in conjunction with a Mohawk or similar angst hairdo, and, most important, keeping a bag of bread on the table—not for fear of choking, or as a festering analogy to money, but to eat.

  CAREER COUNSELING

  ARIEL GORE

  I DON’T LIKE THOSE PEOPLE WHO TELL KIDS THAT ADOLESCENCE IS THE BEST years of our lives.

  That’s the kind of lie that can really kill you. It’s the kind of lie that makes you feel alone in your depression. It’s the kind of lie that can scare you for a long time.

  There were other lies like that.

  “I think I want to be a writer,” I told the career counselor at the California junior college where I almost signed up for classes.

  I was back living with my mother and stepfather in the stucco house I’d run away from more than three years earlier, trying to pretend I didn’t notice the sour stench of my own humiliation.

  My mother made fresh zucchini and peach baby food. She painted my childhood bedroom pink. She held Maia in her manicured hands, said we could stay as long as we needed.

  But at night she said the opposite. “Everyone,” she whispered, “is very embarrassed for you, Ariel.”

  Who was everyone?

  I imagined a whole audience of everyone I’d ever met, spotlight on me, and they all cringed knowing I’d done something terribly wrong.

  I share my childhood bed

  with the baby

  nurse her as we both fall asleep

  her body is soft like clay

  all hunger

  I needed money so I could leave but didn’t know how to get any, not with a baby. The jobs I was qualified for wouldn’t pay for childcare.

  One day I got a chain letter in the mail.

  I sent ten dollars to the name at the top of the list.

  I added my name to the bottom of the list and sent it off to ten unsuspecting members of my stepfather’s church congregation.

  Surely, if I waited, I would receive $10,000 in ten dollar increments—small white envelopes in the mail. I awaited my $10,000, but all that came in the mail was a Stonehenge postcard from the baby’s father.

  Dear Ariel,

  In Londontown hanging with Joe Strummer. Almost have the money together for the airfare to San Francisco. Sorry about everything. Let’s start new.

  Love,

  Lance

  I threw the postcard away.

  I’d always had a soft spot for the baby’s father. He sang that David Bowie song, “Kooks,” in the morning in his sweet London accent, but he was a mean drunk at night, and even though I didn’t know about alcoholism yet, I could see that the drinking was getting worse. I could see something else, too—something I couldn’t quite put my finger on—something about the way the world kept telling him to “be a man” that frustrated him to the point of violence.

  I SAT ACROSS FROM THE COLLEGE COUNSELOR IN HER LITTLE GRAY office. She wore a well-ironed gray suit.

  A poster behind her pictured the Everest summit: Aim High.

  “Aim high,” I mouthed to myself. I didn’t tell the counselor I’d crossed the Himalayas by myself on foot when I was seventeen. Before the baby.

  “You know, write?” I said. “Creative writing?”

  The career counselor shook her head and her exhale held a silent, bitter laugh. She let the corners of her mouth turn up as she said, “Good luck.”

  I sat there, not saying anything. I glanced over at Maia asleep in her soft blue onesie in her blue polka-dot stroller. She didn’t mind sleeping in that stroller, didn’t even mind sleeping cradled next to me on park benches on warm summer nights, but I knew she’d grow and need more.

  The counselor leaned back in her gray chair and adjusted her gray jacket and tilted her gray head to the side like she was maybe trying to pop a vertebra in her neck.

  “Miss Gore.” She looked down at the piece of paper on her desk, like maybe she was trying to remember my first name. “Ariel.”

  She said, “Miss Gore, you have a child to take care of now. You really ought to make an attempt to come down to earth and think about that. You need to think about your child and you need to ask yourself how you’re going to make a living.”

  She pointed to a small stack of brochures on that gray desk: Become a Certified Electrician.

  Her words made my heart contract, but I still felt compelled to politeness.

  “Thank you,” I said before I grabbed the handles o
f the polka-dot stroller. I opened the door to get out of that airless office, held it open with my hip as I maneuvered the stroller.

  The career counselor didn’t rise to help me.

  “Thank you,” I said again, and I let the door slam shut behind me.

  Why did you say thank you, Ariel?

  You’re an idiot, Ariel.

  Shut up, only crazy people talk to themselves, Ariel.

  I pushed the stroller, my pace quickening. My mother’s words rattled in my head, too.

  I’m nineteen and I’ve already lost, and there’s no unlosing now.

  You chose this life, Ariel.

  You’re on your own, Ariel.

  Everyone is very embarrassed for you.

  Like I’m nineteen and I’ve already lost, and there’s no unlosing now.

  THE CEMENT PATH LED PAST CEMENT PILLARS, PAST SQUARE GARDENS, toward a green expanse. “Aim high,” I whispered under my breath, then tasted the rage. “That fucking bitch.” My walk morphed into a run. Tears streamed down my face. I pushed the stroller. Maia slept. She kept on sleeping.

  Maybe the career counselor was right. Maybe I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t know how to make a living. My parents had always been broke, my mom making art no one wanted to buy and my step dad selling books for minimum wage, but they had a house. I wondered what it would feel like to have a house.

  I had to make a living. Becoming an electrician sounded cool, but becoming an electrician scared me. Electrocution scared me. I felt too anxious and afraid—I should have told that counselor—to be trusted with live wires.