A person can get away with anything if they’re dressed well and act like they belong, even when they don’t. This is an important thing to know if you live in a place like New York City, where the shabby are judged sharply and stalked by in-store security like they are at a checkpoint on the North Korean border. The lesson of Pretty Woman, in which the hooker with the heart of gold actually can afford to buy all the clothes she wants and, therefore, deserves good service in those snooty stores on Rodeo Drive, just like anyone else, has not been taken to heart here. At the first whiff of a homespun manicure, no one will look at you, no one will serve you, and if you happened to spontaneously combust, no one would walk across the aisle to pee on you to put out the fire. You won’t merely feel invisible; you will be actively scorned. And it’s not your imagination. You might as well have just pushed a shopping cart of old soda cans into the store and eaten a live cockroach that you plucked out of your own cleavage. The mail-order bride behind the counter probably killed her own grandmother to get here and she’s not going to waste her time giving a free makeover to the unkempt lady in the sweatpants.
You always hear stories about people walking out of department stores having shoplifted canoes and freezer chests and things, and when you ask how they got away with it, the answer is undoubtedly “no one thought to stop them.” It’s partly a confidence game and partly a testament to the person’s physical appearance. And although those stories probably never actually happened, they could have if the thieves were well-groomed, nicely dressed, and looked like they could afford a canoe if they wanted one—or at least exuded an intimidating air of confidence that discouraged anyone from asking to see a receipt at the door.
I’ve been analyzed unfavorably by retail workers since I first entered adulthood, stopped wearing makeup, and got my first, but not my last, Anne Murray shag haircut. Now shopping makes me feel emotionally fragile, the way some people feel when they shop for bathing suits. For me, shopping is like a purgatory in which I am eternally shopping for a bathing suit; only in this case, everything is a precious, hand-crocheted, white string bikini two sizes too small. Only super-bitchy drag queens will serve me, while blatantly twittering about the cellulite above my knees.
The air of haughty self-confidence I try in vain to project is as flimsy as the fabric in the bias-cut dress that a shop owner once refused to let me try on, because my body type wouldn’t have “looked right” in it. It was difficult to take a principled stance on that one, with my lower lip quivering uncontrollably and my eyes filling up with hot, wet shame. When I bought my last pair of running shoes, which I typically buy on the basis of expensiveness (important) and a cool color combination (essential), I was asked, “Are you fast?”
I couldn’t tell if the sales clerk was talking to me. “Are you talking to me?”
“These shoes are for fast people. If you’re not fast, they’re not right for you.” As in, I’m looking at you and I can tell that you don’t run fast. Fast people don’t shop for running shoes with a Java Chip Frappuccino and a baker’s dozen of Tim-bits spilling out of their fanny pack. I can tell you just want those shoes because they’re orange.
“Yeah . . . but. . . they’re orange.”
These kinds of confrontations flummox me. Why would this woman care who was buying the shoes? Wasn’t she working on commission? Was anyone really expecting Mercury to amble into The Running Room in a Sunday post-brunch haze to peruse the latest in jet-fueled shoe-wings? And why was her obvious yet irrelevant disdain for me penetrating my soul?
Of course, I immediately had to tell her my entire life story because I am compelled to by blood. Like my mother, and her mother before her, at the first crack in our “confident shopper” facade, we are required to give too much personal information to people who don’t care about us and think we are basically hillbillies—thereby confirming for them that we are, in fact, hillbillies.
“Well, fast, I don’t know. I mean, I have been running for many years. I recently had a baby, so I’m not running that much anymore. Haha! Muffin top! Did I say that? Anyway, who’s got the time for running with two kids? Uh, not me! But I guess . . . hmmm, fast, well, not fast exactly, not not fast, though. I mean, define fast. I did a ten-K with my dad a few years back and, let me see, what did I do that in? Let me think . .. well, my time wasn’t bad. You know what, let me call my dad. He knows more about it than me. [Now I’m dialing my phone.] He just ran the Chicago Marathon, which is so great considering he tore his Achilles tendon a few years back. By the way, I eat opossum. Would you care to share my lunch of neck bones and gravy? It’s an old family recipe. I live on a swamp . .. my only toy growing up was a corncob.”
Of course, as I age I understand that my already tenuous hold on all of these skill sets will progressively erode to the point that I just give up and start wrapping myself in old drapery. Until they invent turtleneck Spanx that extend from just under my chin to the tips of my toes, all public excursions will be met with dread and spontaneous eruptions of perspiration from glands I never knew existed. I get it. I no longer fit in anywhere, nor can I ever get away with anything ever again. But, let me assure you, it wasn’t always this way.
For a brief time, as a teenager, I had an acute understanding of how much you can get away with if you look like you’re “going places.” My first boyfriend and I spent our days dressing like Hickey Freeman catalog models and financing a lavish lifestyle from the profits of a brief teen crime spree. Although, instead of stealing canoes, we stole cars, and instead of doing teen things like dropping acid and fucking, we ordered bespoke shirts and threw parties in expensive hotels for other teens.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, we were doing it. Everyone was doing it. We were fifteen years old, for God’s sake—by the standards of our circle of friends, waiting so long to do it practically made us Amish. I accelerated from Barbies to full-score sex in less than three weeks with an enthusiastic can-do attitude, only to find, sadly, that there were no real surprises in store for me on the flip side of my virginity. Except for the realization that once you “broke the seal,” no subsequent high school boyfriend would accept the answer “No” again without a superhuman amount of whingeing on his part.
Sex with my first boyfriend was a little bit like learning how to put in a tampon, but only half as enjoyable! I could have taken it or left it, to be honest. I took it, I found it boring, and after we broke up, it took years and many successive relationships before I even remotely felt like trying it again. Together we generated the kind of sexual chemistry that occurs when a sea cucumber sits motionless on the cold, dark ocean floor and dreams about dry-humping a nearby scallop.
But we had much bigger plans for ourselves than just being mediocre lovers. Why not try our hand at being mediocre criminals? Me and my Dapper Dan boyfriend fancied ourselves a modern version of Bonnie and Clyde. If only Serge Gainsbourg had known about us! He surely would have written a song about us, too! We were pretty sure we were “just like them”—kind of cool and counterculture, crime committing, and “a couple,” although we had no knowledge of their story, the things they did, what era they lived in, or the violent and controversial way in which they were killed.
We felt like rare birds in a sea of dirty street pigeons. We knew that we were leagues ahead of all the other teenagers because we had a “life plan,” which basically amounted to living in a car until we could start our own crime syndicate in Miami Beach. But we looked so good together in our coordinated mint green oxford shirts and madras shorts that no one could deny we were moving up in the world. I carried “an important bag” of fine horse-bridle leather that he bought for me, and wore the kind of sunglasses even my parents couldn’t afford. We once went an entire year without wearing the exact same outfit twice. It was very romantic.
Obviously, we were idiots.
We would sit for six hours on the phone, sometimes overnight, not saying a word to each other, just breathing into the phone. My mother would quietly agonize over our extreme stupidity in the next room, and pray that no emergency would befall us that would require her to wrestle the phone from my hands so that she could dial 911. When we weren’t busy listening to each other stare into space, all we did was argue about whether or not I was a slut. I said no, he said yes. Because he was Eastern European, he knew for a fact that all Canadian girls were sluts. This was a known fact in the Eastern European community.
I would cry unstoppably: “But you’re the only person I’ve ever had sex with!”
“I know! Only a slut would have sex with me!”
“Well, what does that say about you? Maybe you’re a slut for having sex with me!”
“I’m supposed to be a slut. I’m a boy. You’re just a slut.”
“How do you know I’m a slut?”
“Because you have slut tits.”
“What are slut tits?”
“The tits of a slut, stupid.”
When he was mad at me he would call me “slut tits,” which drove me to hysterical fits of rage that often ended with me threatening to hurl myself down some sort of embankment.
He was decidedly unattractive, with a big nose and tiny, dark, closely set eyes that gave him the appearance of a skinny dog you might run into on a beach vacation. At first you would feel sorry for it and throw it a piece of food, then you would be slightly annoyed by its perseverance, and in the end, even the most peaceful dog lover among us might be inclined to beat it to death with a stick. His miserable personality, I figured, was the result of a life lived without sufficient parental affection. I vowed to give him the love he needed, no matter what. It probably would have been better for all of us if one of my tight, loving hugs had ended up gently smothering him to death.
He wasn’t brown skinned, but he was definitely ethnic enough for my grandmother to find him confusing and scary. For one thing, his name was barely pronounceable, even for the most cosmopolitan among us. The dearth of vowels made it impossible for my grandmother to speak his name without twisting her mouth into an awkward grimace. This was a woman who had trouble with the word Perrier when ordering it in restaurants, so any attempt to say my boyfriend’s name just made it sound positively menacing, like the name of some rare disorder.
He and his family wore their heritage proudly. So proudly, in fact, that it was his ethnicity that drove the deepest wedge between us, taking our shabby teen romance and elevating it to the level of Romeo and Juliet, let’s say. Star-crossed lovers who were meant to be together but were torn asunder by the prejudices of their families.
He was Croatian, and his parents hated me. I mean, they hated me . . . partly for distracting their son from his nonexistent studies, but mostly for not being Croatian. They loved everything about Canada, except for the part about it not being Croatia, and thought all Canadians were idiots and chumps. Their big thing was making fun of the type of food they imagined Canadians eating for Sunday dinner, all processed and studded with marshmallows. I tried explaining that our national diet was a lot more varied and interesting than that, and that yes, ambrosia did qualify as a dinner salad because it was supposed to be served on lettuce leaves. Anyway, what did Croatians like to eat that was so nutritious and authentic? It’s one thing to feel disliked, but these people practically drove me out of their house with torches and pitchforks when I came over for lunch one day and admitted that I had never heard of Provolone cheese. His family was really into their cheese.
My boyfriend and I had a huge argument about it afterward.
“It’s not even Croatian!”
“It doesn’t matter. Everyone knows what Provolone cheese is.”
“But I’ve never had it before . . . !”
“I know. My parents think you’re stupid.”
“But my parents don’t keep it in the house! How would I have even known about it?”
“Well, then your parents are stupid, too. Stupid cakes.”
Even though he was Croatian, he liked to call Canadians “mangia cakes,” like all the second-generation Italian kids did. It made reference to the belief that we pasty Anglo-Saxon Canadians were just a bunch of pathetically lapsed Catholics who didn’t believe deeply enough in transubstantiation. Therefore, to us, eating the holy host was as sacred as just “eating cake,” which is to say, not sacred at all. In a roundabout way, it meant that we as a group were lacking in culture and proper values; that we were a gormless blob of laziness and low standards. I once asked him what he thought the expression meant, and all he said was, “It’s because you like to eat cake, stupid slut tits.”
Anyway, all over his house were pictures of the Pope and President Tito that followed you with their eyes, and after his parents caught me messing around and trying to make their precious portraits come to life, that was it. I was forbidden to enter his house ever again. It wasn’t a difficult exile for me. As far as I could tell, all they ever did was despise other cultures and yell at one another; though in retrospect, I think that was just their style of talking.
He was banned from my house, too. I think my mother was afraid we were going to “make unregulated whoopee” all over the place and that I would end up pregnant, just like she had in her teen years. Her strategy was to take away my house key, so that even I couldn’t come home. I don’t think she really thought it through, because in the end, all it did was drive our activity underground, beyond the reaches of any parental interference. We had no choice but to find creative places to satisfy our most suburban desires—to fornicate unsatisfyingly and to hold dinner parties.
Enter crime.
He started out as kind of a lowbrow thief. Fencing car stereos and whatever he could get his hands on. I found this endlessly cool, because it meant that he always had money in his pocket and never had to get a job working for “the man” like I had to do. I don’t know how it happened exactly, but his thievery escalated to the point that he started stealing cars for a living and using them as his own for long periods of time. Later he would sell off whatever he could from them.
I was his lookout girl, the accomplice, the one with her eyes bugging out of her head and making bird sounds in the designated parking lot, while trying not to slip and fall in the sweat dripping off her upper lip and pooling at her feet. I wasn’t very good at it, but still, we never got caught. A fluke, for sure, but I took it to mean that I was a criminal mastermind, and the whole time we were together I knew I had an incredible secret that made me special and cool. I never gave a single thought to the immorality of the whole endeavor—to the idea that stealing was wrong in any way, that my actions would one day come back to haunt me, that people worked hard for the things they possessed, and having some snot-nosed kid rife through them in a deserted Dairy Queen parking lot was extremely unsavory. I literally thought it was a victimless crime, since in my worldview, owning a car in the first place automatically made you a fat cat. If you were rich enough to own one car, surely you could get another. I mean, these things were insured, right? Big deal! You’d probably end up with a brand-new car for your trouble! Lucky duck . . .
I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I mean, we had a family car, but we weren’t exactly fat cats. If someone had stolen our car, it would have been a huge issue. A major crisis. Although, as far as I could tell, there was no great black-market demand for boxy cars from Communist countries, so I think we were safe. Our family car was the antithesis of design and desirability. It was like driving Hitler’s mustache.
We may not have been rolling in dough, but we also weren’t poor. It’s not like I couldn’t afford decent clothing or had to steal food to stay alive. There was absolutely no justification for my participation in these crimes. I suppose it was a combination of teen narcissism and minor-league thrill-seeking that inspired us.
But I can’t deny that I did love snooping through other people’s glove compartments and personal effects, and integrating them into my life. Wearing their shoes, eating their crackers, and making fun of the mix tapes they had spent hours dedicating to their loved ones. I still have and use a good-quality stainless steel stockpot that I took from the back of someone’s car. The person whose car we stole must have been so confused, because they eventually got their car back intact, but with no stockpot.
“Who would steal a stockpot?” they must have said to themselves. “What possible use could a thief have for a stockpot?”
Well, let me tell you. Even thieves like to make turkey soup from time to time.
Anyway, my boyfriend was responsible for all the real dirty work, for all the actual criminal activity, but I benefited the most. Neither of us even had our driver’s license yet, but he would hot-wire the cars so that we could drive them around as much as we wanted without a key. We drove carefully, so as not to raise any red flags with the police, and took great road trips anywhere we wanted to go. Then, guided by inner voices that would tell us when the car was getting too dangerous to continue using, we would abandon it on a busy street and walk away. Of course, not before selling off any valuable parts, which he would do, and then I would rent a hotel room under an assumed name, and we would throw a big party. At the time, you could pay cash for any hotel room without leaving a credit card, and he was too shy to do it himself, so that was my job.
We went to expensive hotels only. I would put on my best, most preppy outfit and forge into the lobby like my parents owned the place. I always wore a diamond ring on my ring finger because—and don’t ask me why—I figured I could pull off the look and that it would be more convincing if everyone thought I was married. I didn’t want to be regarded as a hooker.
As if anyone at the front desk ever believed I was a “Mrs. Rosewell,” which was the name I always used because I thought it sounded sophisticated and rich. My hair was cut shorter on one side than the other, I usually wore white Bermuda shorts with two or three polo shirts layered on top of one another, and I had braces on my teeth. I was fifteen but could have easily passed for eleven. When I see photos of myself from that era, I think I look like a miniature sociopath—the kind who is able to play a relaxing round of tennis after stabbing her classmate to death with a pair of toenail clippers. Nobody would have ever mistaken me for either a wife or a hooker, but they always rented us suites anyway, and gave us long, bemused looks as we walked by, arm in arm, talking loudly about the state of disrepair at our “summer home.”
In any case, I’m sure they weren’t thrilled by the steady stream of teenagers who would later mosey through the lobby with bags of chips and six-packs, on their way to our room. I would organize cocktails and snacks in one area, and he would be the greeter, leading people through the place like it was our condo and we were the Onassises, if Aristotle Onassis had come from a long line of dry-walling contractors whose brains were addled by too much exposure to toxic caulking compounds.
Everyone knew and appreciated how precious and unique it was to have a hotel room to party in, and we demanded that people respect an appropriate noise level so that we wouldn’t get kicked out and lose all of our money. We did get ejected from a hotel once, for getting it on in the fire stairwell. Our sex was obviously so no-frills that they probably didn’t even identify it as such, but they kicked us out anyway for looking like we were “up to something” in an off-limits area. Perhaps they were too embarrassed to give it a name, it looked so rote.
My parents never figured out the exact nature of any of my delinquent activities, but they knew something was going on. They were convinced that I was on drugs, though nothing could have been further from the truth. My boyfriend and I had a pretty strict “just say no” policy in place, and though we would have been happy to sell you the subwoofer from the back of a Volkswagen Golf we had just jacked from a hospital parking lot, we would judge you pretty harshly if you tried to “spark one up” in our presence. Drugs were for losers. And Canadians.
In fact, much to the confusion of my parents, I was like a roving one-teen antidrug crusader around my own home. Whereas other kids were busy rifling through their parents’ stashes and gleefully diminishing their supply, I was deliberately and dramatically flushing it down the toilet and reprimanding my parents for their youthful disregard for drug laws. And drugs were expensive then, too. My parents did a really good job of hiding it all; they sensed that I was after it, but for all the wrong reasons. Nothing could compare to the youthful vigor I applied to rummaging around in their private stuff to find incriminating evidence against them. With the methodical thoroughness of a CSI and the maniacal determination of an SS, I ransacked whole rooms for evidence of their drug use—like a junkie looking for smack, except that if I had actually found smack, I probably would have called the police on them and initiated the process of emancipating myself, just to be a bitch about it.
By contrast, if they even dared to move my jacket from the banister into the closet, I considered it a personal violation punishable by a twenty-four-hour tirade of teen angst, concluding with a hunger strike and something nice and passive-aggressive like leaving the freezer door open overnight so that everything in it would melt.
It never occurred to me to actually try the minuscule amounts of pot that I sometimes found or to even sell it, which I easily could have done. My rebellion came in the form of long-winded lectures delivered just when my parents needed their dope the most to calm their jangled nerves; for instance, when being confronted by their fifteen-year-old daughter saying things like, “Guys. It’s your attitude that determines your altitude.”
Assuming that I was on drugs was just wishful thinking on their part.
There’s no question that my boyfriend brought out the worst in me, but I had never looked better. And thank goodness, because it really diverted attention from my main hobby, which was skipping school for great swaths of time. I became a master forger of sick notes, and combined with my innocent appearance, no one was the wiser as we spent almost every day joyriding and breaking into his house while his parents were out to watch space shuttle catastrophes or The Price Is Right.
Only after I blew off exams before Christmas break in tenth grade did I feel threatened with exposure. This was surely something that would have repercussions and necessitate a call home from the school authorities. Maybe even a parent-teacher meet-and-greet. I could hardly afford that.
My plan was to break my writing hand and pretend it had happened days earlier, thus having rendered me physically incapable of completing my exams, retroactively. No one in my family had seen me for about a week; by that point I was more of an apparition around the house, coming and going after dark, occasionally plundering the supply of cheese while everybody slept, so I figured I had a good chance at pulling it off. Time was of the essence, of course, since I had already missed all of my exams without having provided the school with any excuse for my absence. My boyfriend accommodated me by bashing my hand over and over with a rock as it rested on the fender of a stolen car. I was so relieved when a big swollen egg popped up and I was able to go to the emergency room! Naturally, we did it at one o’clock in the morning, because we had procrastinated all day. But when we finally did the deed and walked into the ER with big smiles on our faces and a broken hand, we must have looked like the Grady Twins.
Of course, none of the hospital staff bought our story. I claimed to have fallen on the ice, but the type of injury made things very obvious. It must have been perplexing for them when I learned that my hand wasn’t actually broken and I registered disappointment. It seemed to me at the time that a simple sprain was going to be a tougher sell to my parents and the principal of my school. Surely the hospital staff thought that my boyfriend was physically abusing me, and yet, for all that, no one called my parents. Two kids in the ER in the middle of the night and no one called home.
To be fair, I was wearing my pearls.
When I got home at four o’clock in the morning on a school night, I shoved my mother awake and coolly hissed: “I missed all my exams. I sprained my hand. Expect a call from the school. Go back to sleep.”
Later, I withdrew from the high school I had been attending and transferred myself to a different one, close to my boyfriend’s trade school. No one seemed to care that my parents hadn’t made the request; they released my school records to me, and the new school accepted me without so much as a peep to my legal guardians. I delivered that news to my mother in the middle of the night as well.
Though my parents tried, no matter what they did, they couldn’t keep me away from my boyfriend. His verbal abuse and questionable morals were powerfully alluring to my teenage brain. Eventually, though, I’d had enough.
My father had insisted that I attend the wedding of a close friend out of town, and I adamantly refused to go. My boyfriend had demanded that we spend the day together, knowing full well that I had an important family event to attend; he loved to stir things up in my home life and found any conflict involving my father especially delicious. As usual, he threatened to break up with me if I didn’t do as he said, which was just about the worst thing I could have imagined at the time. Conveniently for him, I failed to notice that he never seemed to follow through on all his idle bullying.
I railed against going to the wedding and made up a million excuses, but my father was wise to me by then. Naturally, he was hoping that my boyfriend would break up with me and detach his Croatian proboscis from our family for good. Confronted with anger on both sides, I decided it made the most sense to simply kill myself, so that everyone in my life would suffer as greatly as I had in this cruel dilemma that had befallen me. That is to say, having to go to a wedding when I really didn’t want to.
It would be great! They would all be so sad! I, of course, would be dead. Nonetheless, as my final breath approached, I would have the opportunity to savor the sweet smell of victory, which would make everything totally-totes worth it. No note would be necessary. Everyone would know what they had done to me.
I drank a quarter cup of Pine-Sol, took six Correctol laxatives, and waited for death. For good measure, at the last minute, I popped in a videotape of The Killing Fields and lay down on the couch, so people would know that in my heart I was very smart and socially aware. As I slipped away, into what I hoped would be a deep, deathly slumber, I recall questioning the logic of killing myself with stool softeners on the newly upholstered sofa.
Eight hours later, and I had miraculously lived. My father and stepmom were home, buzzing about, getting ready to go to the wedding, oblivious to my personal suffering. In the end, they made me go, though I had terrible diarrhea and my breath smelled like pine resin. I was too ashamed to tell them what I had done, and since no one was likely to be checking the supply of ladies’ laxatives in the medicine cabinet for missing tablets anytime soon, thankfully my bungled suicide attempt went undetected.
A day or two after the wedding, my boyfriend threatened to break up with me again, and this time I just let him. He had just worn me out. I gave him his stupid bag back, stopped dressing like Phyllis Schlafly on the set of The Love Boat, and started obeying the laws set forth in our society with respect to stealing. If anything, I threw myself headlong in the opposite direction, finally embracing the life a normal degenerate teen would live. I traded my roughly hewn Slim Jim for a roughly hewn apple bong, started smoking hash like the poppy fields were going out of business, and let the spring “resort wear” catalogs pile up in my room, at long last, unread.