Oh, Never Mind (Kindle Single) Read online

  OH, NEVER MIND

  By Mary H.K. Choi

  Copyright © 2014 by Mary H.K. Choi

  OUTRO AS AN INTRO

  The key to leaving New York is to do it and not tell anyone. At my age—35 (which is neither old nor young)—it feels tacky to make a big thing of it. Especially in the spring, when everybody’s getting married or having babies or burying parents. I have no husband and zero babies, and my parents still give me money at Christmas to make up for their failings that have resulted in my lacking “anything worth having.”

  Life hack: If your parents feel sorry for you, just go with it.

  Bonus tip: Their pity doesn’t actually mean anything, and it’s not prophetic no matter how hard they try to sell you on it. This is doubly true if they’re ethnic and prone to hysterics.

  Addendum, in very small script: Your parents are way older than you, and you should be grateful that those hoary bastards are even alive!

  The way I see it, there are two kinds of people: the sort that throw themselves big weepy going-away parties—the same people who arrange sit-down birthday dinners for 30 at expensive restaurants—and the people I like. But, apparently, slinking westward to Los Angeles without a peep is going too far in the other direction, because my friends were really offended. Which was probably what I was going for. How else would I know they cared? The people who angrily called me out are some of my most cherished friends, and without them I would die.

  I’ve wanted to move to L.A. for a while. People who live in L.A.—especially if they’ve never lived in New York—are hilarious about New York. A lot of times they apologize for not knowing the useless things you know. Like that vaporwave comes after seapunk or how “meow meow” is bath salts or which table is the Beyoncé and Jay Z table at Lucali or who the hell Derek Blasberg is. And then they compliment you on something you’re wearing. Or else they get really amped on telling you that they’re from the East too. This is when they announce they’re from Jersey or Boston—which, if you’ve ever lived in New York, is a hilarious thing to say. It’s like saying you speak Mexican.

  But if you meet someone living in L.A. who used to live in New York, he or she will start talking shit about New York as if it’s a contest. As if the person wants credit for not only discovering L.A. but also for figuring out before you did that New York is kind of a garbage place to live. It’s some real Christopher Columbus shit.

  That said, leaving New York—even if you lived there for 12 years, as I had—feels like capitulation. For one, I felt like a failure for leaving New York without a life-changing haul of cash. I don’t know if that feeling will go away, but I can’t digest dairy and I don’t look good in bangs, so my life is a sham in many ways already, at least by certain New York standards

  I left New York in May 2014, when someone gave me a job. It was the craziest thing. In fact, the surreptitiousness of it was so batshit that it upended everything I thought I knew about humans and jobs and success. I happened to be in L.A. for work already. I was interviewing some actor-boy for a big-deal magazine. This is the kind of work I do every six weeks for money because I am a freelance writer with editor friends who are very good to me, and because otherwise I would starve. It’s unclear whether my editor friends offer this work with the same motivation as my parents and their annual payoffs, but in any case, I’m OK with it. I am very understanding.

  The actor and I were meeting at a diner-themed diner, and while I parked my car with five minutes to spare, I received from his publicist a text that he was waiting for me. This was, of course, upon postponing the meeting half an hour after asking to do it an hour earlier.

  At a high, padded booth, the actor and I discussed the “craft of acting” as it pertained to the superhero and sci-fi movie franchises he’d signed onto, and how to achieve “muscle confusion”—i.e., changing your workout routine so often that your muscles get flustered and decide to just grow—as it pertained to how he wanted to “cut” in order to be considered more of a “leading man.” He was arrogant and narrowed his eyes a lot, which is to say he’s going to be wildly successful. He’d recently gone to Disneyland, where he was so mobbed by teen girls that security requested advance notice the next time he decided to visit the park. This, I’ve learned, is a crucial imprimatur and rite of passage on your way to becoming The Next Big Thing.

  As the actor and I said goodbye, he told me in a joking way to have fun in Koreatown. I called him a fucking racist and we both had a good time laughing about it, since the alternative would’ve changed the mood of one of our days (mine). As you can imagine, I was really “loose” and “vibing” when, afterward, I met with a development exec at a production company about a potential job, instead of visiting my newly divorced brother or my entire extended family on my mother’s side.

  So, I meet with this woman. We are the same age and bond about how alone we are in the world. Her brain is fast and mostly correct, and we laugh about how she keeps spilling Diet Coke down her clearly expensive blouse because she is so, just so tired. The meeting is meant to be one of those “go-see” business things where you smell each other’s butts and silently mutually agree never to see each other again—except that she offers me a job on the spot.

  I took the job because it would give me exactly six days to leave New York. I flew back to the city, dispatched my French exit, and then landed at LAX with two suitcases, just as I’d arrived at JFK 12 years ago. I bought a one-way ticket and everything. I felt like Michael J. Fox in a movie about “making it.”

  I now work in the industry of daily, live news on a cable channel that no one I’ve met has ever heard of. This is awesome because when I tell people what I do, there are zero follow-up questions. No one has any idea where to slot me in the grand scheme of “What could she possibly do for me?” and this is very refreshing. I work 11-hour days for lots of money with people who make sense, and I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop—the day when I accidentally walk in on my show-runner reassembling his face-skin because humans are so prodigal and foolish and must be destroyed. I’m 14 years older than the youngest person I work with, but I don’t think about it. Because guess what: In Los Angeles, the sun shines on you all the time in pretty much the same way day after day, and that kind of consistency is reassuring, like purgatory. Besides, I never really got over the slight jet lag from New York, so my eyes still spring open at 6 a.m. In restaurants—which are exactly 20 percent less expensive, with portions that are 15 percent larger, than in New York—I overhear conversations I wouldn’t even know how to script given the unique tenor of idiocy. It’s all so foreign to me, and I love it.

  If you can’t tell, I adore everything about Los Angeles. Everyone is anonymous, and it’s thrilling. I feel as though I’m in a witness-protection program for people nobody cares that much about. I had a suspicion of what I’d be like when I moved here, and it came true. I have fulfilled all the base layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and am at the tippy-top. Self-actualization feels incredible. It’s the feeling of being totally ordinary and completely OK with it. In New York, everyone thinks they’re special; in Los Angeles, everyone feels entirely regular unless they’re famous, which, as a percentage, is basically no one. In this way, L.A. beats New York. It’s eating the red pill but living the blue-pill life. It’s next levs, as the kids would say.

  Just as I was leaving New York, I was offered my dream job, the job I’d moved to New York for in the first place. Saying no was profoundly liberating except that at the time, I panicked and burst into tears. It was an unbelievably cool job—a job that everybody understood to be cool—and saying no felt like taking the shit I was born to take. Which is to say it was amazing. Even if nobody wants to think abo
ut a girl pooping.

  Letting go of New York was like breaking up with every boyfriend I’d ever had all at once. And I know it’s not new to want to leave. Some of the cleverest people in the world kick rocks all the time. They write beautiful essays about leaving once they’re gone. Sometimes those essays are collected into whole books to show you that yours is not an original thought, and that’s OK. It’s just odd, you see, since I never thought wanting out would occur to me. I thought I was way too something for all that.

  Still. I did leave. I cried for how young I’d been. I cried for every apartment that I’d left and mourned for the sense of hope embodied by each new space I occupied. And then I stopped crying because I’d beat the fucking system and packed a nutritionally dense, paleo-friendly lunch in my carry-on and got really, really hungry on the way. So anyway, I suppose what follows is my way of saying goodbye. For now. Who the hell knows when I’ll be back? Nobody cares. In a good way! Like I said, the key to moving from New York to L.A. is to do it and not tell anyone. Because none of this ever takes. The Internet has turned us all into pure energy. Doesn’t it feel rad? Send help.

  MONEY ISN’T EVERYTHING; JUST MOST THINGS. BASICALLY EVERYTHING. IT JUST DEPENDS.

  A year ago, I was buying a $4,000 jacket. The entire transaction took 30 minutes but seemed like much longer, and the whole time I couldn’t feel my face. It was surreal. I walked into the store, tried on two things, looked at myself in the mirror, and handed over my credit card with the lowest APR and a conciliatory cash-back policy. The Asian girl who helped me had blunt bangs and heavily lined eyes, and wore a distressed denim duster. Her name was Shelley. It was all super casual in the store.

  Outside, on the blustery Tribeca street, I couldn’t breathe. My face was really, really hot.

  My boyfriend, who’d been in the store with me, was similarly gobsmacked. Holy shit, what did you do? I was wild-eyed and furious that he hadn’t stopped me; he, in turn, was unmistakably impressed.

  I had to sit down. I slid into a nearby café. Figuring alcohol would only make the day even weirder, I ordered a juice. I don’t even like juice. I’d just quit my job to become a freelance writer, so it was extra batshit that I’d bought two MacBook Airs’ worth of lightweight coat. I also knew, with conviction, that I’d sooner eat a pound of hair than suffer the humiliation of returning it.

  When the ginger-pineapple “elixir” cost $12, I laughed. It was the dry hiccup of my brain breaking. Things cost what they cost in a nightmare. The coat, I realized, was a butterfly-wing flutter in a deterministic nonlinear system that would result in catastrophe at a later state. It was Michael Douglas in Falling Down, trying to get a breakfast sandwich after the allotted breakfast-sandwich time. Or maybe the coat was the first time I’d noticed that everything was wrong and it was already way too late. Whatever the case, it had finally happened. In the 12 years of living there, New York had driven me nuts. If the rapture had cracked a fissure in the sky, I would have been like, Would you look at that? Those Caucasians in bad pants were right.

  I’m not one of those people who shops compulsively, feels feelings, and then shoves all that dread in a drawer and backs away. In fact, it’s a telling signal of egregious incompetency that my bank didn’t call me right then to see if shit was cool. What’s screwy is, I’m way too practical and far too accustomed to being broke. I’m the daughter of immigrants who work in the service industry. My dad salts away shirts older than I am, and my mother mends them when they tear. They live in San Antonio, Texas, and will never see this jacket, and if they do, I’ll lie about the cost in order to protect them. They’re not poor, they’re practical, and trying to be a writer in New York is a big-enough crazy that you get just the one before somebody puts a foot down. Even I know that.

  To make up for my dubious profession, I don’t loll around ordering garbage off the Internet, nor do I sashay into boutiques, cooing and air-kissing salespeople who refer to me as their “client.” I am not plied by overpriced gewgaws, nor do I commission saberings of jeroboams while declaring Macau the “new Vegas.” I don’t do “baller” things on Instagram. I have never purchased anything Kanye West has ever yelled about.

  Which is why the day’s events were so loaded.

  For a living, I predominantly write about fashion. I mention it only because for some people, writing about fashion can be hazardous. You’re constantly dealing with beautiful, louche, over-the-top baubles and their famously eccentric handlers. The results can be deleterious. Over time, it may start to seem reasonable to buy $500 sunglasses and $1,000 shoes and to treat yourself, for 15 grand, to a bangle with no diamonds that comes with a wee screwdriver for screws that you have to tighten and loosen yourself (“But it’s Cartier!”).

  Not me, though. I love the ridiculousness of fashion but have historically felt no need to participate. Like stats-obsessed sports fans who don’t play anything. Or how, at 16, I worked at a high-traffic Red Lobster in Texas and couldn’t bring myself to eat the free Cheddar Bay Biscuits. I had no desire to consume what I could smell on my skin. I’d been on this fickle and zany beat for a decade; I thought for sure I was inoculated. Chanel, Balmain, Alexander Wang I was immune to. Rick Owens would give me more trouble.

  To this day, I have no idea what possessed me to walk into his store. To call this flagship a store is hysterical. It’s a sleek, sparse, gleaming white encasement flanked by sheets of glass and bisected by varying walls of mirror. It’s a miniature fortress of solitude constrained by New York proportions that shrewdly offsets the stark, jagged cave-witch clothes inside. To the uninitiated, it’s uninviting and faintly hospital-ish. Entering is akin to arriving at the cafeteria of a new high school, where said high school is populated entirely by clones of Rihanna. It’s terrifying. You worry you might wet yourself a little.

  The mystique of the store has mostly to do with the designer. Rick Owens is a tall, sinewy man with a thin nose, Old World teeth, and fantastic hair. He resembles an Egon Schiele subject and lives in a five-story Parisian mansion with his muse and business partner, Michele Lamy. (Lamy doubles as Owens’s much older, pygmy-sized, polyamorous goth wife.) Together they make $800 shirts that look like lice-infested shrouds worn by medieval serfs.

  Their coats appear rough-hewn, essentially untreated hides cut into fascinating shapes of seemingly extraterrestrial origin. The moment you throw one on, however, the weight falls into a mysterious, life-affirming silhouette. Whoa, is Shelley smiling? Wait, is Shelley smiling at me or near me? The black suede, fur-lined Rick Owens motorcycle jacket I selected made me feel thinner, taller, and infinitely more interesting. I looked as if I were in on a secret. The coat was the distillation of everything I’ve ever found seductive about not only living in New York but the prospect of belonging there, too. (As opposed to the Hollywood red-carpet gown that makes tourists of us all by mandating a need for full-body makeup and a “flesh”-hued Spanx tourniquet to the knees.)

  I dared myself to buy that coat and then dared that coat to rebuke me. I know it’s inane to assign such meaning to an inanimate pile of textile. (Lord knows I’ve made fun of the deeply insecure magpies that do so regularly.) But I had something to prove. I could visit the apex of cool-rich-people New York (as opposed to the tacky, evil, overwrought rich-people New York*), buy a souvenir, and not turn into a hobo.

  Let me explain. I know native New Yorkers complain all the time about how anesthetized New York is now. It’s a defanged, declawed, Smurf’s Village strip mall compared to when they were kids. Sure, whatever. The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in New York (knock wood) is that I was once hit over the head with an umbrella by a 16-year-old girl in a residential neighborhood at dusk. She was being a total bitch as part of what I assume was an initiation rite for the other bitches she rolled with, who were yelling and laughing, and I told her so as I ran after her until my bullshit knees gave out. Still, I’ve always found living in New York deeply scary. Without a trust fund or famous parent (and even then, sometimes you
need both), the odds of success here are ludicrous. It’s not just the fact that you don’t have any money. It’s that money no longer makes sense. This is the part that took me forever to figure out.

  The soul-squelching indignities of exorbitant rent and health insurance become almost reassuring in that they are, at the very least, fixed. You must pay rent each month or you will be thrown away, and you will never afford real health insurance so don’t even worry about it. It’s the malarkey of everything else that’s the problem. The less you need something, the more unfettered access you’ll have to it. Only in New York could you keel over and die of malnutrition while your tote overflows with energy vodka, gluten-free cake pops, and $300 worth of hardcover art books.

  You will be lousy with neon designer jean “samples,” which you can wear while waiting for three hours at the free clinic where you make your bi-yearly visits. It’s the interminable gyno appointments that fucked me up. After six years slogging at super-credible independent publications and two at a heartbreaking attempt to start my own, I just wanted a waiting room devoid of entire families eating takeout while I fretted about venereal disease.

  At 29—six years ago, when “selling out” was still a thing—I took a secure, unglamorous publishing job with health insurance, dental (!), and a retirement plan. Six months later, I was laid off. The year was 2009. A subprime-mortgage market correction had resulted in a third of all the people I knew getting “downsized.”

  I took odd jobs—writing speeches for corporate executives, transcribing, and copyediting two separate car magazines. I learned it didn’t matter how good you were at anything. Or how ambitious you were in your spare time.

  I began writing gratis for a friend’s Web site. He and another friend had started it for something to do. The day we hauled his massive change bowl to the Coinstar was a happy one. We ate Australian food at the new Australian lunch counter that served only meat pies and prepackaged chocolate cookies. Then there was the time the other founder bought us tacos with his SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) card. We ribbed him as we ordered and looked away when he handed it over.