How to Grow Up (22 page)

The work-life balance plagued me throughout my teen years. As much as work could get in my way, without a job I didn't have the money to take the train into Boston to be with all my new, cool, black-clad friends. I didn't have the funds to purchase my
preferred beverage, Smirnoff Blue Label vodka mixed with Veryfine iced tea, or a pack of Marlboro Lights to chain-smoke while blitzed. My life ground to a halt without employment. With no cash to get into the city, I was trapped at home, playing Trivial Pursuit, eating Kraft mac 'n' cheese, and zoning out to MTV. I realized that having a job to fund your life's purpose was every bit as important as being ready to quit your job when it got in the way of your life's purpose. The only life's purpose I could divine at that moment was to hurl myself into hard, wild, reckless living, with the fearless intensity of the (male) writers I was reading, and hope that someday I, too, could put it all down on paper, and maybe some lost, drunk, broke teenage girl could read it and begin to understand her own place in the world. There had to be more than boring, soul-slaughtering high school, a place where boys threw food into my hair in the cafeteria; more than these jobs, equally boring, with checks that felt shockingly low after so many eight-hour shifts.

The summer I graduated high school I got hired to hand out coupon books to passersby in Harvard Square, in full view of the punks who congregated in the area around the subway stop known as “the pit.” I was afraid they'd judge me, maybe start a fight with me; though we all looked like interchangeable weirdos to normal people, the Harvard Square punks were a different breed than I and my art-fag, Goth-rock friends. Some of them were runaways, homeless kids; I was intimidated by their authenticity and toughness. But their punk ethics wouldn't let them fuck with a kid broke enough to take such a humiliating job. Instead, they helped me out by sneaking off bundles of coupon
books and dumping them in the Charles River. I was paid by how many books I handed out each day, and my paychecks went up thanks to the punks. I had the money I needed to get myself around, but now that I was out of high school it seemed that I should be looking for a more adult job.

What is an “adult job”? Presumably, it is any job an adult works, which means every job is an adult job. Thrust into the grown-up workforce, I searched for jobs the same way I always had—walking around, looking for HELP
WANTED signs—and got my first real full-time job at a café on tony Newbury Street. Newbury Street started out ritzy, with the actual Ritz-Carlton, and got punker and rockier as you traveled upward to Mass Ave., where shops sold noisy records and bondage-y clothing imported from the UK. The café, being right in the middle, served rich people and rockers, and sometimes both at once, like Ric Ocasek or Aimee Mann. It wasn't a terrible job—the boss was nice, the food was tasty, and I got to eat all I wanted. But was it an adult job? Was I an adult?

My mom thought I should be looking for employment that utilized the training I'd gotten at the Voke. The problem was, I didn't really get much training. The only shop that had captured my interest was the highly competitive cosmetology department. I didn't make the cut, according to the meanie who ran the joint, because she would not allow students with blue hair in her shop. I was heartbroken; I'd actually thought my amazing indigo dye job was proof of what an excellent, innovative hairdresser I'd be. Instead, I wound up in graphic arts, simply because some metalhead friends were there. Graphic arts was essentially printing, during a
time—the late 1980s—when the industry was at the start of an upheaval. Soon everything would be computerized, but not quite yet. The old machines were obsolete and not worth learning; the new ones hadn't trickled into this out-of-the-way vocational school. The male instructors only put females on the fading printing presses if they asked; being lazy and uninspired, I did not. I was left in the “computer typesetting” room, where I was asked to type out the one-sheet school newspaper, published two to six times per year. Otherwise I typed out song lyrics in dramatic fonts, or checked V. C. Andrews books out of the library. Or put my head down on the desk and slept.

As my graphic design shop hovered in some strange technological limbo, so did the industries it purported to prep me for. Eventually I took my mom's advice, quit the café, and got a job at a publishing house in Newton (Mom had found it for me in the want ads). It was in the design department of a company that published industry magazines for industries I'd never heard of. My job was taking shiny sheets of text, running them through a wax machine, and then cutting the type and laying it out on giant boards. As more and more type was set via computer, there was increasingly little for me to do. I wrote stories and practiced reading tarot cards. I saved up enough money to take a vacation to Montreal and to pay, with the help of some basic student loans, for that one year of college.

If you grow up blue collar, you're generally not expected to find a job that you love;
love
and
job
are two words that rarely show up in the same sentence. You
endure
your job. Ideally, you make “enough” money. Not enough to get ahead, or beef your
savings up to the recommended safety zone of eight months' living expenses. Not enough to invest in retirement and certainly not enough to invest in stocks, or even learn how people do such things. Ideally, you make enough to cover your bills. Ideally, you have some health insurance. Ideally, your boss isn't a suck-ass and you can slack off a little bit. Ideally you're not working
too
hard, because all you're really doing is making some other guy rich.

After my experiment in the adult workforce and my subsequent experiment in college, my time for experimenting was up. I'd had a single inspiring class during that year, a creative writing workshop taught by an old guy who wore tweedy three-piece suits and climbed up on the desks to recite poetry. Maybe he'd seen
Dead Poets Society
a few times too many, but as literature and Hollywood had set me up for disappointment with my paltry education, this guy's class was the only one that offered the sort of cinematic collegiate experience I'd been expecting. Not only did the teacher excite me by embracing the wild, performative aspects of literature; he liked the things that I wrote. When I read them aloud in class he would stand very close to me, stepping on my foot as if it were a brake when I spoke too fast.

Right around this time I became aware of a revolution in self-publishing, led by girls like me: zines. People were taking their own writing—fiction and rants, poetry and analysis, drawings, letters, clip art, really anything they wanted—and they were pasting them into these singular magazines, running them off at copy shops or after-hours at their workplaces or schools. I found a book for sale at a record store:
Angry Women
, a collection of interviews with writers who were as edgy and wild as Hunter
S. Thompson and Jim Carroll and William Burroughs, but they were
girls
. And they were
into
being girls. They wrote about it and talked about it; they crafted weird performances about it. Some made sex movies and some wrote operas, but what they were all doing was creating culture—weird, underground culture—using their lives as the raw material.

None of this was being taught in my schools. Maybe if you had a bunch of money you could go to some really cool, expensive art school where you'd be encouraged to rewrite classic male literature in the voice of a sexually abused, sexually liberated female protagonist, like one woman in the
Angry Women
book was doing, but I didn't have access to that level of education.
I
was going to be my education. I realized that the most I was going to get from college was what that
Dead Poets
professor had already given me—confidence that I could write. I wasn't suited to be a student in this dull way. I wasn't suited to join the workforce, either. I was suited only to be some sort of an artist, a refinement of my teenage life's purpose to live fast and crazy and risky. To befriend
Rocky Horror
drag queens. To write snarky rants and read them at dive bars. To stage counterprotests to antiabortion protestors; to walk around red light districts offering free condoms to streetwalkers. To paste together zines filled with writings and ravings. To stage my own poetry events, inviting other young people trying to live as writers. To book a cross-country tour, as if we writers were a rock band, and travel through America in a big blue Chevy van. All these things were one for me, and all were my work: creating culture.

These activities require immense skill—people skills,
management, marketing, promotion, graphic design, publishing, distribution, writing, editing, talent scouting, analysis, mapping, courage. But it took me more than a decade of doing this work for it to become what our culture recognizes as work—something that pays.

A blessing of my working-class upbringing and its low expectations for career success is that I was able to devote myself wholeheartedly to things that didn't make me a cent. Had I gone to college I'd have been saddled with student loans, and a “good job” would have been more important. As it was, I was disappointing no one in my family by earning my living straightening racks of secondhand clothing at a thrift store, or patching together calls at a phone sex company. Once I was paying my own way in the world, though, I knew that I had to try a little harder. Having no money didn't mean I'd be stuck at my mom's house eating ramen; it meant I'd be stuck on the street eating at food kitchens. I became a more efficient hungover worker; as an adult living in the party city of San Francisco, my drinking went from teenage weekend benders to imbibing every single night of the week. If I called in sick every time I had a hangover, I'd never show up. Still, once a job began to interfere with my
real
work—readings and tours—I would quit it.

This was actually my way of aiming higher, doing better than the people I come from. Sure, I wasn't making much money, and I often didn't care about whatever disposable job I was working at any given moment, but I
had
found something that gave my life purpose and meaning, something that brought me happiness. It just didn't pay. I may have been working a shitty job like
everyone back in my hometown, but my shitty job was funding an excellent life.

There is a contemporary, self-help-y wisdom that if you do what you love, the money will follow. I've found that to be true—it just took ten years for that money to track me down. Those ten years living below poverty level would likely be unacceptable to someone reared in a wealthier environment, but I always expected I'd be poor. I hadn't expected to be able to build a life around being creative, and I
really
hadn't expected to ever make a living at it. But after ten years of putting on shows around San Francisco, I caught the attention of a grant writer. I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened about a year after I got sober, either—I've found that when you make a big, positive change in one area of your life, the resulting magic infects everything.

“Do you know,” the grant writer asked, “that there are nonprofit organizations that don't produce half as many events as you do, and they get hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding?”

Uh—no, I hadn't known that. Or maybe I had, but I never thought there would be any money for a runt like me putting together events where single moms and lesbians and recovering drug addicts and performance artists and feminists and poets and drag queens and filmmakers and burlesque dancers and bloggers and crafters and witches and politicos and zinesters and academics and club kids and hookers and bikers and students and rappers and cartoonists and strippers and astrologers and trapeze artists and graffiti artists and photographers and vegans and fat activists and hasbians and fags and teachers and foodies and comedians and nerds and
ex-cons and hippies and punks and porn stars and philosophers and homeless people got together and told their stories and shared their work. But I was wrong.

I didn't get the first few grants my fairy grant-father wrote for me. No big deal, he assured me—most people don't. You have to keep trying. So we kept at it, and as predicted, we began to get funded. I named my organization RADAR Productions, because I thought that this work I was doing spanned wide cultural distances, yet seemed invisible. Also, Radar encompasses everything, and there was a lot I wanted to do. First I began a regular reading series, a free one. Like my fairy grant-father, some people at the San Francisco Public Library had noticed all the literary work I'd been doing, and began paying me to bring writers in for a once-a-month reading. I would spend those afternoons baking cookies, and after the authors had read from their work, I encouraged the audience members to ask them questions; if they did, they got a homemade cookie. There were always lots of questions.

I professionalized Sister Spit, those national tours I'd started in my twenties when I was drinking all the time and didn't care about sleeping on floors across the USA. Now I worked with a professional tour booker who put us up in hotels and got us on the road in a rental van guaranteed not to break down (unlike past vans, which cracked their engines at midnight in the middle of the Deep South, or burst into flames in Lovelock, Nevada).

I brainstormed ideas for literary events with my fairy grant-father, and the grant people liked them! Soon I was getting paid to put on the fun readings I'd always done for nothing, and the
writers I was working with were getting paid, too. With the help of Tali and Bernadine I started a writing retreat in Mexico, in Akumal, on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán. Fairy grant-father had a condo there, and he rented to us dirt cheap during the off-season, and got some other condo owners to do the same. Soon the building was filled with writers who spent all morning and afternoon completing memoirs and plays and graphic novels, swimming with sea turtles on breaks and gathering together each night for home-cooked meals of ceviche and fried plantains and chilaquiles, with churros and casserole dishes of lemon ice for dessert. In recognition of the economic situations of the low-income writers and artists we worked with, our retreat, the LAB, was always free; the artists only had to get themselves to Mexico (and in the few cases when that wasn't possible, we'd chip in and help). We funded this project by throwing a giant fund-raiser once a year, and begging pieces of art off every artist we knew. The ticket price, art auction, and a raffle where we gave away donated prizes like books from local publishers and rainbow-flag dog blankets sewn by Tali's mother brought in just enough for us to pull it off.