I've been scanning letters. My letters. My mother (may she not live forever) saved every letter I wrote to her from the time I left home to the time I returned, twenty years later. When she embarked upon her own death cleaning (without the death part), she gave me back all those letters, two heavy shoe boxes stuffed with envelopes. Hundreds of pages. I couldn't throw them away without peeking at some of the things I wrote when I was twenty years old. Behold the slow-moving train wreck of my youth. Once you look, it's hard to look away.I scanned one box over the past week, wrestling the dusty pages out of dirty envelopes, many addressed to "Mommy," from "Kidlet." I guess I was a very immature twenty-year-old. I don't remember much, to be honest. My memory works in Polaroid snapshots, not Sony Betamax. I recall moments, images, a dress, a song. How they connect I have no idea. Reading snippets of the letters from my earlier self helped me remember events I'd long forgotten.
Back then, everything was art. The letters, the envelopes, the scrawling calligraphic marks on the page. I drew pictures of clothes I designed and made at fashion school. It was 1978. Disco, leggings, spike heels, permed hair. Los Angeles was the place to be for a wannabe fashion designer. The voice coming through the letters was that of a child, a naive, foolish, optimistic child who was willing to live life on the edge—because what a creative life it was.
Like a child, I complained about everything. I was in a constant snit about something someone had done or failed to do. Until I read my own words, I didn't remember any of these snits . . . or most of the people. As I read, the places I lived, the people I knew started to resurface in my memory. The apartment on Romaine, where I lived in 1978 when I got hired at the department store. The apartment on Orange, where I lived in 1979 when I got fired from the department store. My month as a Dupar's waitress. Enrolling in fashion school. Working late hours doing paste-up for California Apparel News. Sleeping on the bus. Leaving fashion school after one year.
In 1980, I sent home photos of me with my friends, prancing around in tight-legged vinyl jumpsuits with shoulders the size of small turkeys, hennaed hair spiked half a foot above our heads. We showed our designs in fashion shows. We thought any moment, we would become famous. We thought people would be banging on our door in droves, demanding amazing costumes they couldn't sit down in.
The second box contains letters from the mid-1980s. I haven't started scanning those letters yet. I believe I was somewhat calmer then, perhaps more realistic. I was no longer making bizarre artfashion costumes that left the wearer drenched in sweat and unable to pee without wardrobe assistance. I'd lost my enthusiasm for fashion. By then I'd sold my soul to the custom sewing business and enslaved myself to making other people's designs and altering their stinky clothes. I myself was the worst-dressed person in L.A. To this day, I hate to sew.
Something corrosive happened to my soul when I became mired in a money-losing business doing something I despised. My good friend said, "It's never too soon to stop doing what you hate and start doing what you love." Even though I haven't quite managed to live up to that creed, I still think it is the best advice I've ever received.
I'm not the manic wackjob I used to be. I said I don't want to burden the world with more paintings, and that is true for now. One thing I can do, though, is write, and those letters are a vast hoard of rich and energetic descriptions from a life I barely remember, a life that might be fun to write about and read about. Maybe she, me, the young naive maniac with a passion for fashion will find her way onto the pages of some story, a book, a memoir, who knows.
It's almost enough to know that once, I had passion for something. Misguided, maybe, but I was a believer. I believed in my art, as only the young and innocent can do, before they find out it's hard to earn money making art. Life is real, rent is due, and we can't live on apples and cheese quesadillas. Money and art don't mix in my world, they never have, but that doesn't mean I won't figure it out someday.
