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My first fake ID was from a five-foot, thirty-five-year-old woman named Rosario and, surprisingly enough, it worked—so long as I ducked down nine inches, wore a wig and put on my I am not eighteen face. It was either that, or the bouncers were drunk.
I’m betting on the latter.
Anyhow, it was my freshman year at Boston University and I worked nights at The Cottonwood, this upscale Southwestern restaurant. I was too young to serve liquor so instead I was a food runner, which means when a plate of jalapeno poppers came up in the kitchen, I carried it to table twenty-five. Yep, that was it. I carried jalapenos across a room.
Rosario worked the line: chopping carrots, peeling potatoes and making Guacamole with other illegal immigrants, not unlike every kitchen in every restaurant in the entire country. What made Rosario different was she wanted US citizenship, and she somehow thought I could help her.
“I spoke with Callie.” she said—Callie, FYI, was this cocktail waitress who was suuuper into the club scene, which in 1994 meant she wore blue lipgloss and glowsticks and was always making me listen to techno on her headphones. “Isn’t it, like, spiritual?” she’d say, moving around like her joints were made of jelly. “It’s what love would sound like if love had sound.”
(Yeah, I know. And this was before she took the ecstasy).
Anyhow, I hated techno, but I’d never admit that to Callie, ‘cause I really needed a friend. You’ve done that, right? Latched onto someone you really don’t like ‘cause it’s better than being alone? Luckily, I didn’t have to spend too much time with her—she was always at the clubs, and I was underage.
“Callie say you study English,” Rosario said. We were in the Cottonwood kitchen: her washing cilantro and me folding napkins.
“That was last semester,” I said. I’d realized that majoring in classical literature would in no way guarantee me a job, and since I didn’t like carrying jalapenos across a room, I’d changed departments to something more realistic. Something with a future. “Now,” I told Rosario, “I study philosophy.”
The day before, in Ethics class, we’d started Aristotle. Can you imagine what three hundred eighteen-year-olds can do to Aristotle? We sat in this giant lecture hall, the professor talking in front while TA’s ran up and down the aisles with microphones. The discussion that day concerned the true nature of the self. “Aristotle wrote that one’s actions define one’s true self,” said the professor.
I wrote the word ACTIONS in my notebook.
“As in, a knife’s true self would be defined by cutting.”
I wondered if a knife could have a true self.
“So consider,” the prof went on, “what action defines your true self?”
Hands shot up all around me, and the TA handed the mic to some Brainiac in John Lennon glasses. “Professor,” he said, his voice Oh So-Higher Academics. “Shouldn’t we first discuss what defines TRUTH?”
Okay. So, no matter how many drinks anyone’s had, we’re all waaaay to sober for the whole What is Truth conversation so I’ll just shorthand it—Jesus rose, relativism, Buddha, Ghandi, e=mc squared and James fucking Frey—but back THEN? When I was eighteen? WHAT IS TRUTH was a terribly profound question and of course I was the only one pondering it because I was rare and enlightened. Who IS my true self? I wondered, putting lemon garnish in the tortilla soup, and, like most college students, I spent the next four years searching for that self, as exhibited by the following list of my favorite songs (which were, of course, accompanied by the appropriate clothes, attitude and friends):
(Yes, I was a Renthead, shut up).
happened because of a boy, so I had to get real cool real fast).
(Boy and I broke up).
“You help me learn English, please?” Rosario asked in the Cottonwood kitchen, and of course I said yes. She’d always been nice to me, and there was plenty of time to kill between the lunch and dinner rush. We’d sit on upturned milk crates by the dishwasher and run flashcards, pronouncing first vowels, then syllables and finally entire words before graduating to their definitions. One day, Callie came back to stock glassware and found us there.
“Hey, Rosario,” she said, peering over our shoulders the flashcards. “Are you paying Megan for this?”
Rosario glanced at me. “I don’t have—“ she started.
“I don’t need—” I started.
“Your ID,” Callie said. “Give Megan your ID.”
And that’s how I started clubbing.
There are three things you’ve got to understand about the scene:
1. The beat
Drop what you’re doing, grab a sledge hammer and bang it repeatedly against your skull. For the entire year I spent in the clubs, that’s what it sounded like inside my head.
2. The clothes
I wore pants that fell like a tent around my feet; Princess Leia buns on the top of my head; glow in the dark bead-necklace chokers and—the worst—putty-thick glitter all over my face. When THIS me looks back on THAT me, I want to march her in the bathroom for a good scrubbing.
3.The drugs
Callie’s supplier was this hotshot at MIT who mixed his own e in a basement lab—you might have read about him. He got busted in 96 the month after graduating salutatorian—anyway, ecstasy was readily available, and it did make the music sound like love. It also made the strobe lights, like, SO pretty, and there’s all these PEOPLE, and they’re all TOGETHER, sharing an experience, which is like so awesome and can totally change the world.
If my stupidity in this moment isn’t a SAY NO TO DRUGS advertisement I don’t know what is, but that was me, nearly every night: standing in the back of some trance club, rolling out of my mind and pretending like I fit. I slept through classes. My grades dropped. I was so out of it I couldn’t even tell you what day it was—but I can tell you the day it all changed.
We were at some club, who knows which one, they’re all the same in my mind. Callie was off dancing and I stood by the bar, waiting for the e to kick in. Without it I felt out of place, like an impostor. That’s when this guy came up to me—totally normal-looking—he could’ve been you or you or you. “Hey,” he yelled over the music, and I waited for the inevitable pick-up line.
“So, this might seem sort of out there,” he started.
Wait for it, wait for it—
“But can I be your slave?”
I laughed.
“I’m serious!” he said. “I’m writing a collection of essays. In each one I’m someone’s slave for a week and I write about what they have me do.”
Show of hands, ladies—who’s gotten hit on by a writer? Right—oldest trick in the book, but since I was still waiting on the ecstasy I thought I’d kill time. “What DO they have you do?” I asked.
For the next hour, this guy told me things that my eighteen-year-old self didn’t know were possible. One woman prostituted him to her gay friends and kept the money. Another made him clean her house wearing only a saddle. A suburban couple filmed him setting fire to himself—“They made me pour lighter fluid in my hair,” he said, “like it was shampoo or something,” and yes, I know, I was gullible as all hell and he was probably lying through his teeth but the thing is, I believed him. I was young and lonely and the e had kicked in so this poor poor man was so lovely, he had such nice hair, and aren’t we all just, like, searching for who we really are?
Anyhow, I asked him why he actually DID these things. Why didn’t he just write fiction?
“Fiction?” he said, like it was a bad word. “People don’t want fiction. They want the truth—the blood and guts and piss and shit.” I could feel the drugs tingling in my fingertips, the beat pounding through the floor in the bottoms of my feet. “Besides,” he went on. “The things people have you do says a lot about who they are.” He paused. “What would YOU have me do?”
I didn’t know what to say.
NOW, now I know exactly what I’d say—I just had a baby, so I’d be all do my laundry, cook my meals, burp this child and clean the poop off my floorboards—but back THEN?
Could he help me study? Carry jalapenos across a room? Buy me liquor, take me shopping, take my virginity, bend time so I could hurry up and be an adult, light years away from this stupid, desperate eighteen-year-old want?
“Well, think about,” he said. And he gave me his card.
I still have it, and every now and then I type his name into Google, looking for that book. It’s not out—yet—but I recently found an essay of his about the couple who set him on fire. “It’s an interesting study of their character,” he wrote, and I thought, Dude, what does it say about yours? I mean, granted, I’m thirty-two years old and I still can’t put my finger on the elusive action that sums up my whole being but I never LET STRANGERS SET ME ON FIRE while I looked for an answer.
For me, what’s easier than defining who I am is defining who I’m not.
That night, nearly fifteen years ago, I went in search of Callie and found her dancing by herself in a corner. Her eyes were glassy from the drugs, her movements choppy and robotic. “You don’t understand,” she said when she saw me. She put both hands on her head, like she was trying to hold down her brain. “This song, it’s like, ME. It’s who I AM.”
I was low on patience by that point: the e was wearing off and I wanted out of my skin. “Let’s go,” I said—but she wouldn’t. “You don’t understand,” she kept saying, and I thought, You’re right. I don’t understand. I really really don’t.
That was the end of me the Club kid. I went home, washed the glitter of my face and put the baggy pants in the back of my closet—funny how at that age you can take a personality off as easy as a sweater—and while I’d later try on all sorts of other selves, just then I was … sort of nothing, an empty slate waiting for my next influence. I went to classes. I carried jalapenos across a room. I sat on milk crates with Rosario.
Her citizenship exam was coming up fast, and every day we ran vocabulary flashcards. That lady was a champ, I tell you what—her English was better than my own and she knew more US policy than probably everyone reading this combined.
“Inept,” she read, enunciating each syllable. “Care. Cruel. Ironic. Trivial. Truth.”
TRUTH.
I stared at the definition on the back of the card as Rosario recited aloud: “TRUTH. Genuine, not pretended, insincere or artificial.” I looked at her, this tiny woman with her black hair plastered back under a mandatory food-service hairnet. Every day she chopped potatoes; every day she cried because of the onions; every day she sat on that milk crate, working her ass off, repeating definitions, her accent wrapping thickly around the harsh English words. These were the actions that defined her.
“Rosario,” I said. “What would you do if you had a slave for a week?”
She laughed like that was the funniest thing in the Universe. “That will never happen,” she said.
“But if it did,” I insisted. “What if it did?”
She didn’t even need to think about it. “Run flashcards,” she said, as though this whole Who is my true self thing wasn’t so complicated after all.
Paul M Davis