I have second-row seats to see Yo-Yo Ma because I nicely asked the lady at the symphony box office the day before tickets went on sale to the general public and complimented her on her hair.
Merlin, the guy who just put memory in my computer at Mac Tonic (Eugene does not have a full-service car wash, let alone an Apple Store), did not charge me for removing seventy-eight viruses and updating my iMac to 10.8.
I love Eugene.
Last week, I walked the couple blocks downtown to the farmer’s market that takes up four whole streets. I brought a basket. It’s all organic produce that has been picked that morning. I once saw the two mushroom dealers get into an argument about which one found the rarest mushroom ever that resulted in one of them storming off, shouting, “I don’t care if you have pictures! You did NOT find a Tree Hugger next to a Gray Shaggy Parasol! It is fungally impossible!” while his rival threw a chanterelle at him to symbolize his disgust. I get a whiff of VooDoo Doughnuts making their signature delicacy, the Cock-n-Balls, and I smile. There’s a young traveler sleeping on Ken Kesey’s bronze lap—at least I hope he’s just sleeping—and his pit bull puppy is playing with another pit bull puppy of another teenage vagabond, who is holding a sign that says “I love VooDoo Doughnuts. Buy me one.”
Homeless people in Eugene seem to just want doughnuts.
Then I dip down into an alley shortcut, where a guy in his late teens has made a home out of two sewer pipes and a tarp. He is strumming on his guitar like he just snorted an entire eight ball and sings loudly, “Jack and Jill went up the hill to see if they could score. Jack came down but Jill is just a whore.”
A young couple is next to him, seated against a wall, paying no attention to the pornographic nursery rhyme because they are busy. He’s holding a tiny glass bottle, and she is pulling the syringe out of it and moving it to her arm.
And then, ten feet away, literally about three steps, there’s a wooden cart full of bright green, red, and yellow peppers.
My first stop at the farmer’s market is at the meat wagon, where they also sell fresh eggs. I notice that there’s one dozen left in the case, and I say out loud, “Oh yay! He has a dozen left!” and I hear the hipster in the shiny gray shirt and man bun ahead of me in line say, “Oh yeah. And a dozen eggs.”
And that’s when the Phoenix girl comes out in me—the same girl who had someone try to burn down her house in Coronado three times (I have a feeling that at least two of those times it was my mom), who had a gang shooting on her street, and who once found a used condom on top of her block wall—and says, “Seriously? You’re taking the last dozen because you just heard me say that?”
Then the meat guy says from behind the counter, “The eggs are five-fifty a dozen, but for six bucks, they’ll go home with the winner.”
And the Phoenix girl says, “They won’t go home with the winner. They’ll go home with the biggest asshole. And that won’t be me.”
Then the hipster turns to me and says, “This is not the only game in town for eggs.”
It turns out it is. All the eggs are gone, so I buy some purple carrots and a jar of honey, and then I make my way to the booth of the tamale lady, the stop I have saved until last. She’s from Bisbee, and she makes awesome tamales and enchilada sauce. People in Eugene put broccoli and tempeh in their burritos, and several times I almost made a citizen’s arrest due to the obscenity of it all. But the tamale lady understands, and every week, I beg her to open a restaurant that doesn’t have American cheese on enchiladas.
“People here have no idea,” I say, and she laughs.
“Do you miss it?” I ask her.
“Miss what?” she replies.
“The desert. The Southwest. Arizona,” I answer.
“Oh sure,” she says. “But I love it here.”
“I love it, too,” I agree. “But I just saw two kids shooting up in an alley and some asshole just stole my dozen eggs from the meat guy.”
“What a jerk,” she replies. “In Arizona, someone with a concealed-weapons permit would have taken those eggs back.”
“My brother-in-law would have shot him,” I add, and we laugh.
“But which place is home?” I ask her. “Eugene, or Arizona?”
She thinks for a minute. “Here,” she finally says. “I’ve been here twenty-three years. It’s home now.”
I smile and nod. But when I think about it, when I really think about it, I can’t agree. Eugene is home, as in the sense of it is where I live, where my house is, but where my home is, well, that’s a different story.
My home, I know, is a three-day drive south, where people have fired me, where people hate me, where broccoli has never touched a tortilla, and where even at the end of September it is 107 fucking degrees, and I am unsure if I peed my pants or if my cooter has simply sweat that much. I’m actually hoping it’s pee.
On my way out of the market, I decide to avoid the alley and take the street instead. At the stoplight is a man bun in a shiny gray shirt holding my stolen eggs, and as the light turns, he steps into the crosswalk.
“Hey,” I yell after him, “I bet you’re going to get salmonella from eating ill-gotten asshole eggs!” And my only wish is that I had a mushroom to throw after him.
This is you, me, us, at age fifty. I know! I can’t believe I’ve lived this long either! I’m sure you remember, since it happened like literally yesterday for you, that after a couple of drunken tumbles on the train tracks, people placed bets on your li fespan. Looks like a couple of people owe us money, but it turns out that we have actually outlived them! How awesome is that?
First, I want to thank you for not leaving me with a badly rendered tattoo, or a piercing on the face or elsewhere. I would rather have a large, obscenely colored birthmark than a Pearl Jam stick figure on my arm or an overarching bridge of roses and thorns across my chest. Thank you so much for spending most of your money on booze and cigarettes so luxuries such as lifelong mistakes made by a drunk twenty-five-year-old were never made. I love you for it. Yes, stealing five syrups from IHOP or mail from a church was ill-advised, but in comparison, you did far less damage than was ultimately possible.
So here’s the deal: At the rate that technology is advancing, it’s just a matter of time before you show up on my doorstep like something I might have left at a fire station in an era of frivolity. Actually, regarding that: Surprise! You’re barren!!!!! Whore around all you want. Your ovaries are no more functional than doorknobs when it comes to reproducing, so take all of that money you’re going to spend on pregnancy tests and just buy a car. You’ve got a way better chance of making raisins in your office than you do of anything ever attaching itself to the inside of that uterus unless that zygote is a rock climber and has a stubborn streak.
Anyway, I thought I’d beat you to the punch of time traveling because, frankly, I live in kind of a decent neighborhood now, and knowing you, you’re not coming alone. There’s liable to be a band in your car, with one of the guitarists bound to puke in the front yard and at least three other people in the backseat with outstanding warrants. Sure, hopefully enough time has passed when you cross through the space and time continuum for statutes of limitations to take effect, but I’ll tell you right now that I’m not bailing out the guy who went to San Quentin. I’ll never get my bond back, and yes, I care about things like that now. So stay put, okay? My homeowner’s umbrella policy will not cover you. I’ve already asked. Plus the former diplomat across the street still has CIA connections. Throw a grapefruit at his Christmas decorations and all of you will be renditioned to Turkey. Or someplace worse. Like Florida.
This is what I want to tell you. I really want you to listen, because it is important. This is the most important thing I can teach you.
Don’t shit where you eat. Keep your areas of preference unmarred. Do not mess them up with sex, crushes, flirting, or bounced checks. If something is important to you, don’t ruin it by ruining it. Example: If you like a band, don’t ruin it by sleeping with a guy
in the band. If you like a restaurant, don’t ruin it by sleeping with a waiter at the restaurant. If you really like hanging out at a bar, don’t ruin it by sleeping with the bartender, manager, or bouncer. If you like where you work, don’t ruin it by sleeping with a co-worker or your boss. If you really enjoy having someone as a friend, don’t ruin it by loaning them money.
Stop dating assholes. If he can’t call you back, or is already drunk on your date when you pick him up because he doesn’t have a car, or sprays you on the leg with compressed air and gives you a burn because he thinks it’s funny, or (and this is a good one) tells you he met a girl on the train from Portland to Seattle and he’s going to hang out with her for a while, he is an asshole. If he is still living with his ex-girlfriend, he is an asshole. If he is caught kissing another girl in a closet at a Christmas party, he is an asshole. If you see him banging his own head against a fence because he is a loser, he is a psychotic asshole. And P.S. Don’t talk to the guy at the work party with the long blond hair. Just don’t. It’s tempting, he looks like Gregg Allman, but he is not Gregg Allman. He is worse. He is not going to break your heart for forever, I promise that, but when he flees the state it will make you miss your macroeconomics final and that is going to suck way harder. Besides, that guy now drives a school bus in Seattle, lives in an apartment, and clearly never went back to community college. Sometimes the Internet is a wonderful thing.
Always wear a slip. This is wisdom from an Old Lady Who Once Used to Go to Punk Shows, and you know that’s true because that was merely years ago for you. Slips are your friends. Slips are miracles. Slips will prevent your cotton skirt from being eaten by your butt crack when you are wearing tights, as exampled by the girl in front of me in the crosswalk yesterday. Slips keep everything where it is supposed to be. Blanche DuBois wore them, Maggie the Cat wore them, and Marilyn Monroe wore them. Spanx is not enough. In addition to the squeeze, you need a protective layer of slink. I promise you, I say this with love. P.S. Spanx is something you should have invented instead of a skinny girl named Sara who is now worth sixty billion dollars. You wore it first, sugar. You wore it first.
You’re not as smart as you think you are. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You don’t even pay for your own car insurance yet. Sure, you’ve taken a psych class at community college and some art history courses, but your life experience is just starting. No one really cares what Monet painted and why, and you’re never going to understand the makings of a narcissist until you meet one. And you will. Don’t get in a fight with Pop Pop about Hiroshima no matter what you think is moral or not. You only saw pictures of the war; he spent three years in Europe fighting it. And stop, this very moment, saying the “R” word. One of your best friends is going to have a sweet little baby with Down syndrome who is going to light up your fucking world and make you want to punch yourself for every time you said it. And it’s a lot.
Here’s the thing: Every single day, you will learn something. It might be not to pay one credit card with another, or it might be that on Charnelton and West Twentieth Avenue, there’s a rise in the sidewalk that will bring you down every single time. It might be that meat goes bad after five days in the fridge and not to serve it to guests. It might be that you really don’t need to wait for the hippie blocking the freezer section you need to access while he reads the ingredients on every single box on the third shelf; you might just say, “Excuse me,” and move on in. It might be that arriving on time feels way better than making your friends wait ten minutes to order appetizers. Either way, your knowledge grows every day that you are alive, and by now, I know 9,125 more things than you do, literally twice as much. Which means that the people you may not think have a pulse on what’s going on know all too well what’s important and what’s not. Old people are not creepy. They are living libraries of experience. Use them.
All right. This next part is going to be hard. Please take a deep breath.
Everything goes gray.
Everything.
But getting older isn’t all bad; there are a lot of good parts, too. Because you still wear tights every day, most of the hair on your legs is rubbed off like on the calves of old men who wear socks for eighty years.
That’s awesome, right?
You can afford to buy nicer shoes, and when the soles of your boots wear out, you won’t have to wrap them with electrical tape anymore. You can pay a cobbler to fix them for twenty bucks.
You like Indian food. You really do. When you had curry that time in 1985, it was made by a hippie who had absolutely no idea what she was doing. Seriously. Six tablespoons of cumin, a carrot, and some yogurt is not, and will never be, curry. Try it again. Preferably made by someone who knows where India is.
Don’t waste time on books that suck. You have my absolute permission to abandon a book or movie that is not lighting you on fire. I don’t care who wrote it or that she was shortlisted for a Pulitzer for it. It is not the book for you. It takes forever for the little girl to be eaten by the lion, I’m just warning you. In fact, you’re going to be assigned Orlando next year for your Women Authors class, and it will become your Most Hated Book Ever. Do read that one. It will give you something to argue about twenty years from now at the English Department faculty parties. Other than that, employ this rule: A book gets fifty pages. If you aren’t dying to get back to it the next day, move on over to the next one. There is absolutely no sense in reading an awful book when a good one is waiting for you to open it. That includes anything written by me.
You’re not fat. It’s true, you’re not as skinny as Alicia, and, yes, Alicia will win the affections of the boy you like, but that’s not why he dumped you. He dumped you because he is stupid, and you deserve someone smarter than a guy who will drop you when he sees someone prettier. And skinnier. And with looser guidelines. (She’ll get drunk one night and tell you everything. You will be horrified and never look at a picnic table in a public park again in the same way.) But it does not mean you are fat. You are actually pretty awesome. Don’t duck out of pictures, jump into them. You are twenty-five. Thigh gap is genetic, it is not attained, and that is not your fault. And you won’t believe this, but twenty-five years from now, people will be getting ass implants in hopes of having a bubble butt exactly like the one you have now. So celebrate, even if it is a little early. Your ass rocks.
Always buy a round-trip ticket. You will one day be stuck in Seattle with an ex-boyfriend who lives with a stripper, her baby, and her two hippie nannies with fairy names. You will realize you’ve made a huge mistake in your plans to stay and see how Seattle works out when the stripper and her nannies spend all day making a pot of soup (with another six tablespoons of cumin) for homeless people, then drive their van downtown to dish out the soup without realizing that most homeless people do not have dinnerware on their persons. Like soup bowls. Or spoons. Seattle will not work out for you. You can still go, but just make sure that you have a way to get back home after your mother told you she was not going to be buying you a plane ticket back home because actions have consequences and it is about time you learned your lesson. She is right, but she will change her mind once you call her with your prepaid phone card and tell her that no one in that house takes baths.
You only have room for one crazy friend at a time. Insanity requires a good deal of effort and likes to talk on the phone a lot. Therefore, you can have a crazy friend, just keep it at a maximum of one. Trips down the rabbit hole, or even a run over to T.J.Maxx with a crazy friend, can last a lifetime, especially if your friend’s not done looking at every single item in the store and hides from you when it’s time to go. Also, always get takeout when eating with your crazy friend, especially if drinks are involved. There will be a fight with the waitress. There is always a fight with the waitress, and food is sent back, spit in, and returned to your table. Plus sometimes they shoplift, and the last way you want to spend an afternoon is in the back office of World Market because your friend pocketed some fake turquoise earrings and a jar of Nut
ella. Remember, also, that there are times when you are the crazy friend to other people who have their shit more together than you do, so if your burrito is lacking cheese, suck it up.
Dad’s right, you do suck at art, so major in something else. I know. Hard pill to swallow, but I’m afraid it’s true. It’s also true of most art majors who had parents who were too afraid to tell their children that their talents lay elsewhere. Like in retail sales. Kudos to Dad for making you major in journalism when journalism was still a career before it became advertising and public relations. Yeah. That’s the shitty part. But I already told you that everything goes gray, so I’m not going to venture into the level of intelligence in the world today. There are things called blogs. I shall say no more.
You’re going to get fired. More than once. More than three times. More than seven times. So far, you have been fired nine times. Which is a lot. For anyone. Sometimes it will be sucky, but other times it will be quite joyful. There is always unemployment, and who doesn’t need a job sabbatical? Put aside the cursing oils and spells, because if there’s one person who can do her job exquisitely well, it’s karma. To date, every single person who has ever fired you has subsequently lost his or her job, too, except for two of them. But there is still time. There is still time. Heh heh heh.
If people in your life are important to you, let them know. And not just when you’re drunk. In fact, never when you’re drunk. The only thing you get to do when you’re drunk is laugh, otherwise you might end up on a picnic table in a park somewhere, and that is gross and whorey, Alicia. What I mean is never hesitate to tell a friend how much you miss them if you haven’t seen them for a while. If you think someone is awesome, make sure they know. Do nice things for people when you get an opportunity to without going overboard. Maybe I’m sentimental now, but I’m old enough to know that the most important thing in your life is the people around you. Nothing else means shit. Hug Nana when she’s not expecting it. Dance with Pop Pop when he puts on Bobby Darin and asks you. You might try telling Mom that you love her. (Spoiler alert: In 2016, she might say it back.)