Tea - Against memoir: complaints confessions + criticism

Published in 2018 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition 2018

Copyright 2018 by Michelle Tea

All rights reserved.

This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing May 2018

Cover and text design by Suki Boynton

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tea, Michelle, author.

Title: Against memoir: complaints confessions + criticism / Michelle Tea.

Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017049287 (print) | LCCN 2017054713 (ebook) | ISBN 9781936932191 (E-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Tea, Michelle. | Authors, American--20th century--Biography. | Lesbian authors--United States--Biography.

Classification: LCC PS3570.E15 (ebook) | LCC PS3570.E15 Z46 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049287

For Dashiell, for everything, forever.

CONTENTS

Table of Contents

Its hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the wrong word. Its just a literary device. Theres no organization called SCUM... Its not even me... I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who think a certain way are SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in the mens auxiliary of SCUM.

Valerie Solanas, Village Voice, 1977

I was thinking a certain way when I first came across the SCUM Manifesto. I had retreated into the desert of Tucson, Arizona, in the midst of what I now refer to as my Radical Lesbian Feminist Nervous Breakdown. I make light of it, but it was a dark and dangerous moment in my life. I only just learned that my stepfather had been spying on my sister and me through holes hed stealthily carved in the walls of our homethe bathroom walls, the bedroom walls. Throughout my teenage years Id lived with the suspicion that this was happening, a state of mind that had me tipping on a chasm of anxiety and denial I feared could end with me going totally insane.

The thing was, my stepfather was cool. The dad he replaced had not been cool, hed been a moody alcoholic whod fight with my mom till she cried. When he came home from work adulterously late and fucked up on booze or pills, we didnt know what wed be getting. But this new dad was a cheerful alcoholic. Hed played drums in bands and had a pierced ear and a homemade tattoo on his finger. He was always nice to my mom and to the rest of us. He took delight in cooking extravagant family dinnersthree-alarm chili washed down with pint glasses of lime rickeys, gutted limes scattered across the kitchen table filling the house with the sharply optimistic smell of summer. How could he be spying on us?

For years, I lived with the understanding that there was something wrong with me. Something dark and perverse. To see such a nice man, a man who finally loved me and my mom the way a father-person should, a man who went to the courts to adopt me, who bar-brawled with my birth father at the local Moose Club over his love for us, his familyto know all this and then think that hes watching me? Sexually, I guess? What a creep. What a creep I was.

What a fishbowl my teenage bedroom was. I loved to be inside it, reading books and magazines, listening to records, sneaking cigarettes out the window. Painting band names on the linoleum with nail polish, playing with makeup, lip-synching in the mirror. Id be wrapping my blackened mouth around the voice of Siouxsie Sioux and would suddenly freezeWhat if he was watching me right now? My room suddenly turned eerie, spooky, I was a girl in a horror movie. There was a terrible stillness, I felt like Id been caught. To break the spell, Id do something bizarre, or lewdgrab my crotch, squeeze my breasts, squish my face into the mirror, my tongue lolling out. Id look like a madwoman. I wouldnt have done that, touched myself there, if I really thought my stepfather was watching. So I didnt really believe it, and so it wasnt happening.

Later, before sleep, Id burrow under my neon-striped comforter to touch myself. I tried to make my face look really, really still in case he was watching. I didnt want him to know what I was doing. I tried to put my face under the covers, but felt smothered. I popped my face back out into the cool air. He couldnt be watching. He couldnt be watching because if he was then I couldnt masturbate and I really wanted to masturbate. What a creep. What a creep I was.

This was a long-term, low-grade crazy, a steady hum I could live with. When I found out it was all truethat there were holes in the bathroom door that fit perfectly with a hole in the jamb, creating a tunnel that aimed your eye right at the toilet, where I would sit and pee or poop or smoke a stolen cigarette or masturbate. That there were holes carved into my bedroom wall, holes a person could access by walking into the back hallway, nudging over a stray piece of paneling, peeling off the electrical tape (dry and curled from being pulled so many times), and looking through the hole in that wall right into the hole in my own. I looked through that hole myself and saw it allmy bed, my posters on the wall, my clothes strewn on the linoleum, the mirror I kneeled before, lip-synching. When it all came down I got a new, sharper crazy. I couldnt hide it like Id hidden the schizoid feelings of being watched and being creepy. I was filled with an electric hurt, a frenzied rage. I was sick, sickened.

My mother rushed to take his side, to protect him. It shouldnt have been a surprise, we had spent the past three or four years fighting weekly, if not daily, about the way I looked, my white face makeup and dyed-black hair, my torn clothes. People would beat me up for looking the way I did, men and boys. I got into fistfights or they just threw things at me from car windows, they just spit at me in the street, they just called me a freak and a slut as they sped by in their cars. That was how it went outside. Inside, it was a war with my mother, who thought Id brought it on myself. I didnt have to look that way. And then I went queer and that was a problem. And then the insanity Id been staving off, I think my dad is watching me, erupted into reality and I sort of lost my mind.

Having to leave my house, I moved in with my girlfriend, a prostitute. Needing more than the minimum wage I was making at a Greek deli, I became one too. Notice I didnt say I got work as a prostitute, found a job as a prostitute, was hired to do prostitution. Prostitute is not a job, its something a woman becomes.