Give Me All Your Money and I’ll Make Some Origami, Honey

While the point of the Courtney Barnett song quoted above isn’t what I’m writing about, the line is, in my opinion, appropriate here, too, and not only because it is a terrific line, and the one I always remember first when thinking about Pedestrian at Best, but also because I think it embodies something else vital, too, about these times of ours, other than being an accurate depiction of a borderline personality disorder.

I thought I had come to terms with what I do for a living by the time I was thirty, but at times I still experience those bad vibes of inferiority and being poor that seem to have magically eluded the rest of my age group. Everyone else seems to have it down. Life. They seem ignorant to the problems I tackle with. The terror of making or never making it in the real world. The Breakfast Club no longer meaning a thing for others. Being seen as a failure. Doing something financially worthless, but otherwise beyond measure. Turning forty and realizing certain things are never to be. Living, still, hand to mouth.

I have even stooped so low once as to lie about what I do. Eight years ago, as I was handling the rush hour at my work place, out of the sheer blue, a class mate of mine from middle school suddenly stood before me, and, as surprised as I was, asked, very inappropriately, what else I was doing with my life besides this. I stuttered something about university and going there, when in fact I hadn’t been to school anymore in at least five years, and afterwards I felt so awful about myself I wanted to kill myself. The spontaneity of the lying felt like treason against everything I believed about myself and my values to be true. Thankfully a friend was throwing a party that night, so I parked by the punch bowl, reliving the scene over and over, feeling like a big fat zero, and getting fantastically drunk while at it.

The joke should have been on him, yet, somehow, it had struck a nerve, the is this all you do –attitude, the taking for granted that no one in their right mind would settle for such a small thing.

Why did it matter in the least? It didn’t. Yet, somehow, I realized I wasn’t immune to social peer pressure of doing well, bringing home more than the bacon, producing beautiful kids into the world, buying my own home, driving my own car, which I hadn’t since my beloved HAL passed away and was taken to a junk yard in a huge grip of a giant truck specializing in gripping cars that no longer run and taking them to the junk yard.

And the real killer was, I was actually happy in my own life. It was just the pitying looks of people I had once known I couldn’t stand. The “But you did so well in school, what the hell are you doing behind the counter” –looks. My life, though simple and small to some on the outside, consisted of things that made me happy, and while it certainly is true that one will never be rich doing what I do, I was doing it despite the money, and that is saying something. Out of all the uniform- or blue collar-jobs of the world, there is nothing I would rather be doing, with the people who know me at my best and my worst and still offer their friendship and respect and a true sense of belonging to a community. The camaraderie of like-minded people in the locker room hyping about something that touches us all before opening for business is something I haven’t experienced in this caliber since with the circle of friends I belonged to back in my hometown.

I never ever, in my twenties, could have fathomed that for me, too, there would come a time when the distinction of who does what and who has money would matter in the least. But the time came. A few years after my humiliating lying episode at work, I once more spied an old class mate of mine, this time from high school, a woman I had been friends with back then, being part a small circle of Björk -listening, de Beauvoir –reading group of girls. It was almost twenty years later, and we hadn’t been in touch for maybe fifteen of them. Still, it was undeniably her, and I all but hollered a delighted hello to her by the door, when I saw her react to my presence there, only in the littlest way, but it was there. She walked right past me, leaving me stumped, wondering if it were possible that she might not have recognized me. Bollocks, I thought then. Just as easily as I had, beyond any doubt, known it was her, she had to have known immediately. This woman came from money parents, and when we were young, she would sometimes reflect on her own relationship with that fact, over coffee at her house, skipping classes and not telling our parents. It wasn’t like we pulled out knives and took a blood oath or anything, but still I found it absolutely ludicrous that she would now, as a grown woman in her expensive clothes and top-of-the-line haircut, snub me the way she had, just because I was on the wrong side of the counter.

There are, of course, a number of other explanations to her behavior. Maybe she had something else going on just then. Maybe she really didn’t know who I was. Maybe I was still, after all these years, super self-conscious about my surroundings when our eyes met. Only the thing is, I don’t think I was. I was truly fine then. And it was someone I had known well, not just another face in the yearbook. Maybe I am wrong, but I felt very strongly that my first instinct, that it was because of my work attire, was right, and that was the reason.

That night I didn’t park beside a bunch bowl, but felt helplessly angry and the spirit of Springsteen rising inside me. I could not believe this moment had finally come. Ours wasn’t, in the end, the generation to rise above such menial things. Things like having money had crept up on us all while we were busy looking elsewhere, and now there we had it. A world of hard values blanketed all of us, whether we wanted it to or not.

Not that not having money is always a bed of roses.

I had a huge obsession at one point of my life for doing crossword puzzles. I would do them with my mother, this was after a breakdown of sorts, having resulted in my moving back home for a while. It was a combo of a bad break-up, the lease on my apartment suddenly coming to a close, not getting a job, and my car breaking down so utterly that I was practically unable to drive it at all anymore. Not without money for the repairs, money I didn’t have of course, so my dear HAL ended up growing grass in the back yard of my parents’ house for a long time, until finally, the death grip. I got so good at doing the crossword puzzles my mother was finally at wits’ end with me, her favorite pastime destroyed by the prodigal daughter who would greedily stalk the postman for the new magazine loot on Fridays, leaving her with the most uninteresting ones, or the stupid ones, or ones with clues too far-fetched. The funny thing is, my entire need for solving them seemed to be confined to that house and my meltdown, because as soon as I moved out again on my own, I never touched a crossword puzzle since. The mere thought of crossword puzzles always takes me back to when I was at my absolutely poorest and lowest, and brings shudders down my spine.

My man likes to call my brain very Buffy-appropriately the eternal mystery, and has over our time together pieced little by little together the puzzle of some of my quirks and hang-ups and idiosyncrasies and just plain crazies that I get. For instance, my seeming utter lack of ambition, not a non-existent trait of mine, it just only manifests in the nerdiest or weirdest things, such as when discussing records, books, films, and of course my writing, my journals, my wardrobe, how many times a week I go for my walks, how well my pasta turns out, how many pairs of underpants I own in case of nuclear war, those kinds of things. The fact that I hang around the house a lot, writing, is excellent breeding ground for my already bad enough symptoms of OCD, that, luckily, have yet to worsen into full blossom with the whole nine yards with medication; so far the consciousness about it suffices to keep the most horrible evidence of it in check (although I don’t think he would agree with me here), and the rare yet very necessary blowing up of my routine. He says to me, quite rightly, that I cannot live without a steady routine, yet routinely I burst open the bubble I have created around myself, to get some air, to air out everything, which usually is also when we fight the most.

A boyfriend once said that I was the real life equivalent of the character Rob from High Fidelity; that I was so struck by and immersed in and taken with what I listened to, saw at the movies, watched and re-watched on TV, and the books I read, it made the harsh prosaic reality of day-to-day living exceedingly hard for me. Let me just say, this was during a kind of heavy conversation and not meant as compliment. Interestingly, my man has made the same unfortunate point on several occasions when discussing stuff. Was my total lack of wanting to be wealthy, the indifference towards things most people deemed as pursuit-worthy, a result of the kinds of works and popular culture I had seen and heard and experienced my whole life? Was I like this because I loved the things I did, or did I love them because I had always been like this?

A question nearly impossible to answer now.

But I’ll tell you this. When I was nine, I was accompanying my father to a meeting in a town a few hours away from home, something I used to do a lot, being daddy’s girl. I was hanging around the reception area of the hotel in a big lounge, only a bit bored, waiting for my father’s meeting to end, and the bartender was chatting with me from time to time, leaving me be for the most part because I didn’t mind being on my own. Father popped his head from the conference room every now and then to check that I was ok and to see if I had changed my mind and wanted to come sit with everyone else inside. Father’s huge meetings were to me like watching paint dry, so I much rathered waiting outside and reading and doing some thinking about the deep stuff one thinks about at nine. There was a small movie theater adjacent to the lounge and the meeting rooms, and the bartender had to tend to his work, so I looked at the posters and stills to pass the time.

The next time dad popped his head out, I asked if I could go see something while I was waiting. “Sure! Just put it on my tab!” he asked the bartender, it was a time softer and more trusting than the present, a time when this kind of arrangement was possible, so in I went. The movie of that particular afternoon was The Witches of Eastwick, by George Miller, starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Jack Nicholson.

I have since seen this movie about a thousand times, and when I was old enough to develop real interest in reading, I started reading John Updike’s novel once a year as well. Anyone who’s seen the movie and knows the book knows they are two completely different works, but I love them both to death. When I walked out of that little movie house to meet my father, who was waiting for me, I was mesmerized. I had fallen in love with all the incredible women, their small town life, and, to a girl, the fantastic elements were just unprecedented. It was so frightening, so adult, so exquisite, so undecipherable. I was in love with all of it.

My man likes to tease me about how I only choose books and films and TV shows on the grounds of how much they resemble my ideal setting; that Gilmore Girls and Murder, She Wrote and Roxanne and Beautiful Girls and everything else I love, even Amélie with its Montmartre setting, which is really like a little village of its own inside the grand city that is Paris, are all just variations of my ultimate favorite thing, The Witches of Eastwick. That by subjecting myself by accident (of course, there are really no accidents at all, yeah?) when I was nine to that kind of world, the world of strong women, who by outsider’s standards may lead a simple, even humble life with their meetings once a week, their vegetable gardens, their community work, and their respective arts that no one seems to care for except they themselves, until Darryl, (according to the book: Daryl in the film) the horny devil as well as The Appreciator, comes along, but who have an enormous and ferocious inner lives and a life force unmatched by anyone, I made a choice so massive it would later on dictate every move I made in life, be it a career choice, or where I wanted to live, what kind of works I appreciated, or how I wanted to conduct my life.

Of course we all know it isn’t so simple. But it’s a nice theory.

A short while ago yet another old school mate of mine appeared at my work place. Instead of a mutually embarrassing moment of more of the same I had by now grown accustomed to, and was therefore comfortable enough with, with my Mithril shirt underneath my attire in case of the air-treatment, she greeted me heartily, and without missing a beat, began telling that her husband was late to meet her and she was just wasting a little time while waiting, and how was I. It wasn’t a conversation for the annals of the world’s most fabulous conversations, but it was one that for me was one in just a handful, where I wasn’t judged in the slightest by what I was wearing, of the fact that I was serving and not being served. Turned out she was one of the provincial artist laureates at the moment, so I told her that I was trying to write. “Yeah? But that’s great! And this job must offer a real counterbalance for you, because writing is such lonely work.” “Yes! It really does”, I replied, so happy to be talking to her for those few minutes, I was in great spirits for the rest of the day.

When I watched The Witches of Eastwick last with my man, he was horrified when I recounted my watching it for the first time, and of course, as an adult, it did seem sort of crazy that they had let me inside the theater at all. Just to give a few examples of the inappropriate (all lines by Darryl):

“Men are such cocksuckers, aren’t they? You don’t have to answer that. It’s true. They’re scared. Their dicks get limp when confronted by a woman of obvious power, and what do they do about it? Call them witches, burn them, torture them, until every woman is afraid. Afraid of herself, afraid of men, and all for what? Fear of losing their hard-on.”

“Do you think God knew what he was doing when he created woman? No shit! I really wanna know. Or do you think it was just another one of his minor mistakes like tidal waves, earthquakes, floods? Do you think women are like that?”

“I always like a little pussy after lunch.”

After finishing the movie, he – my man, not Darryl, so I still have some hope with my sanity - turned to me and said: “You know, the fact that this film has been your favorite film since you were nine, kind of explains quite a bit about you.”  I said nothing, thinking about how happy he made me just then, and how glad I was to know him.

I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes from the movie. This line is also Darryl’s.

 “I see men running around, trying to put their dicks into everything, trying to make something happen. But it’s women who are the source, the only power. Nature. Birth. Rebirth. Cliché? Cliché, sure. But true.”