Agorafabulous! (19 page)

We blasted Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run” all the way out of the parking lot and down the highway. It was that kind of day.

Billy Has a Boner

Billy’s boner was big and hard, and it was stealing the attention of my entire ninth-grade writing class. They were cracking up, but when he tried to join in he winced in pain.

“It hurts!” he moaned. “Don’t make me laugh, you guys!”

No one was doing anything about it, and I knew that the job had fallen to me. I had to handle it. Well, not
handle
it, but—you know.

I had not moved to Texas to deal with a fourteen-year-old’s unruly erection. And yet, there it was, straining against his baggy jeans, challenging me to prove that I was an adult who could weather any crisis. I had a feeling even Billy’s boner could tell I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.

Billy’s boner was just the latest in a series of problems that had plagued me since the summer. I hadn’t graduated from Warren Wilson at the expected time, because one of my professors had flunked me. This was partly his fault for being unsympathetic to my particular needs as a crazy person and partly my fault for not showing up to class very often. My friends all graduated in a big, beautiful ceremony on the lawn right outside my dorm window, while I hid my head under my pillows in an effort to drown out the amplified sound. All my Emerson friends had graduated on time the previous year. I couldn’t even manage to graduate from my second-chance school.

I felt enormously guilty that I had wasted even more of my parents’ money on my never-ending quest for a college degree. Exactly how many loans was I going to ask these people to take out before I actually had a degree to show for it? And now my brother was in college, too. He’d chosen a five-year program up in Boston, and it was just as expensive as my Emerson tuition had been.

After my failure to graduate, I moved out of the dorm and into an $800-a-month two-bedroom house with Chauncey and our pals Donnie and Belinda. I stayed in the tiniest bedroom, which had just enough room for my queen-size bed and a little bookshelf. Donnie, who was gay, shared a big bed in the big bedroom with Belinda, who was straight. Chauncey slept in the laundry room. We couldn’t afford to put in a washer or dryer, so he had plenty of space. Unfortunately, we also couldn’t afford to put in a door. Chauncey tacked up a big rainbow flag over the open doorway.

Asheville’s economic engine ran almost entirely on tourism, and year-round jobs were hard to come by. I found work as a cashier at Earth Fare, the local branch of a Southern natural-foods chain. It had somehow resisted absorption into the Whole Foods brand, which made it acceptable in the eyes of my punk-anarchist-farmer pals. They would’ve preferred I work on a cooperative collective utopian farm, but I enjoyed air-conditioning and paychecks. Earth Fare offered an array of “natural” anti-anxiety agents and antidepressants. I tried a few, even though I was doing just fine on the higher dosage of Prozac my Asheville psychiatrist had prescribed after my hospital adventure several months prior. Someone recommended valerian root as an effective deterrent for panic attacks, but after spending a day with the stinky bottle at my cashier station, I decided I’d stick with odorless Xanax.

The ultimate cashier job in Asheville was at the French Broad Food Co-op. The place was not named for Catherine Deneuve or Brigitte Bardot. Its unique moniker came from the French Broad River, which wound through town and was a favorite spot for rafters and kayakers. The Co-op was much smaller than Earth Fare, but it was way cooler. Its employees were called “worker-owners” and they got amazing discounts and
actual health insurance
. To get a job there, you had to be like some kind of master Jedi of cashiering. I was past the Padawan learner stage, but I didn’t exactly qualify for Obi-Wan levels of greatness. I mean, I didn’t memorize barcodes or anything like that.

I liked Earth Fare, and managed to do a decent job. I suppose a well-trained monkey could have operated the computerized cash register, provided said monkey were duly devoted to fresh local produce and fast, efficient customer service. I spent a great deal of my wages on the lunch buffet, which cost two arms and sixteen legs even with my 15 percent discount. My boyfriend at the time was a carpenter named Tom, and after I got done with work, sometimes we’d drive over to the cheap supermarket and buy the fixings for a kickass barbecue. I kept hoping he’d propose, just so I could protest, “But Thomas! We haven’t been together long enough!” and then, with tears of joy, accept his offer. If I couldn’t be a college graduate, I might as well be somebody’s fiancée. But the proposal never came.

Before un-graduating, I had applied for the world’s most useful degree, the Master of Fine Arts, at a variety of schools. I got wait-listed at the University of Virginia, and an enthusiastic professor wrote to tell me he felt sure they’d be able to find a spot for me. They didn’t, and I had been sorely disappointed until I found out I wasn’t graduating. Then I was relieved. I couldn’t imagine how embarrassing it would be to have to renege on an agreement to attend a big fancy MFA in writing program because I’d flunked part of my final undergraduate semester.

I had also applied to the AmeriCorps program in the winter, back when I’d foolishly assumed I would graduate on time. AmeriCorps, a government-funded program started under the Clinton administration, functions as a confederacy of nonprofit organizations. It’s the Peace Corps for pussies, public service for people who don’t want to take malaria pills. In fact, I’d first learned about it way back in high school at the New Jersey Governor’s School on Public Issues and the Future of the State. It sounded like a fine, respectable way to spend a gap year between college graduation and actual adulthood.

By the time
everyone in the whole entire world
but
me
graduated, I still hadn’t heard from any of the AmeriCorps programs to which I had applied. I figured I hadn’t gotten in. I would later hear that hardly anyone gets rejected by AmeriCorps. Makes sense, too. When your big draw is offering approximately $10,000 a year (before taxes) plus crappy health insurance and a $4,700 scholarship (before taxes) as an exit reward, you probably take anybody who is willing to fill out the application.

One day, on my extremely expensive in-house organic lunch break at Earth Fare, I heard from a program in Texas at a brand-new public high school for the arts. They wanted to interview me for a position as an artist-in-residence. I would have studio space in which to write, and I would get to design and teach my very own elective courses. I would also assist in the classroom of a regular teacher, perhaps in English or Social Studies.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the personnel director. “I’m really quite interested, but I didn’t end up graduating on time from college. So I don’t have a college degree.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem,” the personnel director said.

That should have been my first clue.

The initial interview went well, and so did the one after that. When they called to offer me the job, I was shocked. I’d never really considered moving to Texas before. The Southwest held no attraction for me. And I didn’t want to be a high school teacher.

But really, what else was I going to do? Hang around Asheville, go back to Warren Wilson in the fall, and pass my smirking professor on campus while I walked to and from my two required courses? I hated feeling like a loser and seeing all the classmates who had graduated come through my line at the grocery store. I’d ask them what they planned to do, and they had so many ideas, so many possibilities. I didn’t. With the aggravated narcissism of a woman in the thick of an extended adolescence, I imagined they were all staring at me and feeling sorry for me. I needed to do something big and significant to prove to everybody (read: myself ) that I wasn’t a failure. Moving two thousand miles away seemed pretty big and significant. I took the job.

“Do they have psychiatrists out there?” my mother asked when I told her.

“Of course they do, Mom!” I snapped. “It’s a completely normal state with normal things like shrinks and Prozac.”

“You were just in the hospital eight months ago,” she said.

“I wasn’t
in
the hospital. I was in the ER, and I went there by my own choice. I was
rejected
by the hospital for not being
crazy
enough.” I was huffily shoving clothes in duffel bags and wondering how I was going to convince Tom to fly out to Texas every weekend to visit me.

“What are the roads like?” she asked. “Do they have direct flights from Newark? What if you need me and I can’t get to you?”

“I’m twenty-three years old, Mom!” I shouted. “I haven’t had a panic attack in three months! I’m totally fine!”

“Just make sure they have Xanax in Texas,” she said.

They definitely had Xanax in Texas. And thanks to its proximity to Mexico, they also had every other kind of drug imaginable, legal or illegal. My brother and I drove out to Texas, found me an apartment within a day, and walked over the border to notoriously violent Ciudad Juarez shortly thereafter. We ate some great Chinese food and wandered among the sex tourists and rifle-toting
federales
. I came back with enough cut-rate prescription drugs to last me for months, at a fraction of what I would have spent at Walgreens. I also hauled a large Virgin of Guadalupe statue back over the border, and plopped her down in the corner of my bedroom. I figured I’d probably need her help. I was right.

The school turned out to operate in a manner very similar to community theater. Someone in town said, “Let’s put on a school!” and decided to do it. Thanks to the Bush administration’s enthusiasm for throwing money at anyone who wanted to start a charter school, the state of Texas’s historically awful public school system was flush with cash for just this purpose. The founder, teachers, and administrative staff were enormously enthusiastic, and their good intentions were evident. But in that first year, upward of 40 percent of the staff quit or was fired. It was hard to know how to follow the rules when the rule-makers kept disappearing.

On the upside, the school was small. Only about eighty-four students enrolled that first year, so there was no question that each student would get lots more individual attention than would be possible at the four other large public high schools in the district. The school provided a safe haven for the gays, goths, and other weirdos who’d been endlessly tormented by the vicious popular kids and wannabe thugs that populate the halls of every American public high school. It also served as a last-chance school for gang members who’d been kicked out of all the other schools. And then there were the religious homeschooled kids who’d never been socialized in human society. Their parents decided our school was the place for them, in the thick of awkward adolescence, to learn how to behave in public. Among the latter group was a sweet Jew for Jesus who had a messianic bat mitzvah instead of the traditional Mexican
quinceañera
when she turned fifteen. The Christly bat mitzvah still featured a mariachi band, though.

Thankfully, I had a team to bond with over this odd, strange, wonderful, insane, stressful new job. There were eight AmeriCorps artists-in-residence from all over the country, ranging in ages from twenty to fifty. Some had experience working in classrooms, and some (like me) didn’t. None of us had teaching licenses. A couple of us didn’t even have college degrees. Eventually I enrolled in a weekend class at the local university and transferred the credits back to Warren Wilson. They shipped my diploma from North Carolina to Texas. But by that time, I’d already logged nine months in the teaching trenches.

We designed our own courses, wrote our own lesson plans to comply with state-mandated standards and benchmarks, ordered our own supplies, graded our own students—all with little supervision. Two of the AmeriCorps artists mysteriously disappeared before the end of the first semester. One was said to have quit, while the other was rumored to have been fired—for what, we never knew. I’m pretty sure we weren’t supposed to teach in a classroom without a licensed teacher watching over us. But that’s what happened, every single day. And the results were predictably a mix of great success and great disaster. Which brings me back to Billy’s boner.

I didn’t actually notice it myself (I mean, it wasn’t
that
big). What I noticed was the tittering and giggling that arose as soon as I entered my classroom that afternoon.

I looked around suspiciously. My initial thought was that they must be laughing at me. I knew my dyed-red hair looked a little odd with bright pink streaks, but it had been that way for weeks and they ought to have been accustomed to it by now. Was it my thrift-store skirt? My dangly plastic earrings? The other gaudy accoutrements that marked me as a stereotypically wacky, unconventional, artsy-fartsy teacher? Or had the sad joke of my complete and utter incompetence as an educator (and human being) finally dawned on them?

We were reading
Romeo and Juliet,
because that’s what I had learned in ninth grade and I figured it was their turn to be tormented by it. I found Shakespeare’s language just as boring as they did, but when I’d taken this job I had agreed to play the role of an Adult, and Adults make Children do boring things for their own good. I’d wanted to liven it up by assigning the kids
Sandman
by Neil Gaiman, but had gotten called up in front of the principal when ex-homeschooler Miguel Sanchez’s evangelical Christian father had complained about a panel depicting a nearly nude woman. (“
Technically,
she’s a goddess, so it’s not even
human
nudity,” I had protested when the school director scolded me.) Years later, I would interview Gaiman and his rock-star girlfriend, Amanda Palmer, in a bathtub at the Maritime Hotel in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Neil wore a business suit, and Amanda was completely naked. I wore a short skirt, a push-up bra, and a T-shirt that read,
THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE
. During a break in taping, I found my mind wandering back to Miguel’s father. This was probably exactly how he had imagined I spent my free time.