Free How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea Page A

feeling like a dirtbag impostor, someone more suited to a block of government cheese than a round of
fromage
aged in a French cave and packed in volcanic ash. I stopped writing the price code for the conventional rice on my bag of organic rice. The punk in me could argue that organic food should be free and I
deserved
a discount on my health food after all I’d been through, but the more sober and clear I got, the more these defenses sounded like the self-serving, juvenile attitudes they were. In my 12-step program, there was a lot of emphasis on living free of fear, changing fear-based behavior. Why would I engage in the pettiest of petty theft, passing off my $3 bag of organic rice as its $1.99 cousin? Because I was scared. I wasscared that if I became accustomed to a lifestyle of organic rice I would then be ruined.
    Ruined? Sure. Or if not ruined, punished somehow, by someone. A terrible finger would point at me, dirt wedged under the nail, and hiss,
Traitor! Class traitor! Think you’re too good for Minute Rice? Huh? You’ll see. You’ll end up back here with the likes of us, eating twenty-five-cent packages of ramen you can’t even cook properly. Ramen is a
soup
, but you cook it like a bunch of noodles sprinkled with a crumbly, MSG-laden flavor packet. Why? BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO TASTE.
    You get over it like you get over it, a bit at a time. By the time I was visiting with my mother and sister in L.A., I did not cry out in pain at the two-hundred-dollar Repettos in the shoe boutique we tucked into; well versed in the math of fashion, I understood that was simply what Repettos cost. Of course, they were worth every penny—they were
French
.
Strange new politics entered my consciousness. So much of the expensive clothing I coveted was made in Europe, by people paid a living wage, engaged in a crafts tradition that had been passed down through generations, sustaining whole villages. Slowly, the elevated price tags began to seem like a bit of justice. What was the real price of a pair of thirty-dollar shoes? Could it perhaps be more in line with my class politics to purchase a few higher-quality, well-made items than to comfort myself with a piece of fast fashion made by Bangladeshi women who would be assaulted with high-pressure hoses for protesting their working conditions?
    I persisted in lusting after luxury items—like Le Labo Rose 31 perfume, which I’d had the good fortune of smelling when Iwas put up in a hotel that offered the scent in its toiletries. Le Labo Rose 31 smells like you’ve stumbled into some sort of divine cathedral consecrated to the worship of women—1920s burlesque dancers, sultry Italian mothers of eight, the drag queens found in Jean Genet novels. Hookers. Expensive, successful hookers. It is a dark rose scent made darker with something spicy and churchy. At the hotel I shampooed and conditioned my hair in it, and I scrubbed all my dirty bits with the smooth white cake of soap. I slathered myself in the lotion. Then I took everything and stuffed it into my bag so that housekeeping would leave me a new set. Then I stuffed that new set into my bag, and did it all again a third time.
    As a former drug addict, I’m hesitant to claim to be
addicted
to something like a smell, but the truth is, both drugs and smells set off complicated chemical reactions in your brain. And since I’d surely firebombed my brain’s dopamine factory for years, impacting its output, and since smell can fire up your pleasure centers and ramp up dopamine—well, who knows exactly what happened in my brain as I huffed and puffed and blew my mind with the smell of this new perfume? Maybe my crisscrossed, beat-up brain waves were surging at the smell of Le Labo Rose 31, eking out another little drip of precious dopamine. All I know for sure is when I ran out of my pilfered hotel toiletries I
missed
that rich scent, and daydreams of walking into Barneys and having the nice