…AND ALL THIS WILL COST YOU A PIDDLING $500.

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Lately, it’s been occurring to me on a daily basis, in floods of realization, just how much psychic and emotional blood has been sucked out of me my entire life, and how this has always prevented me from seeing myself clearly. Because I was always being stomped and shit on and gaslit and exsanguinated and abandoned by narcissists, I never really developed a healthy sense of self-worth or self-esteem.

Well, brothers and sisters: after banishing all the demons in my life, I have been experiencing a rush of sensational energy that has made me see things very differently. I feel like for the first time, despite my being serially devalued by Godless bloodsuckers, I actually know my own worth now, and it is fucking intoxicating and liberating. My aura is literally sparkling. My frequency got higher. I’m humming like a tuning fork, and any chuckleheads who want to mess with my new high vibe best be ready for some stark-ass humiliation, because I am never, as God is my witness, never going to allow myself to be disrespected or devalued or verbally or emotionally or psychologically abused, ever again, by anyone. I’ll straight butcher any hobgoblin that tries.

This stance has really calmed down my shrieking Hellen Keller of an inner child, who for most of my life has been habitually flailing all over the dining table and throwing potatoes due to all the neglect and negative input I’ve received over my life.

By finally cutting all the narcissists out of my world, I’ve learned to stop hearing their voices and start hearing MY inner voice, one that actually recognizes my needs. I’ve finally figured out how not to abandon myself. I can actually feel my own power, and the will to do battle for myself. This is a brand spanking new sensation, and a big change from feeling constantly deflated. Two years ago I nearly killed myself. I’m glad I didn’t.

I’m what you call an empath: I have always seen the best in people, often to the exclusion of seeing them clearly. I never had a malignant enough imagination to believe that some people close to me could silently hate me and intend to do me serious harm, so I kept walking into the same situation: I was like a girl hitchhiker who just never learned not to get in the dirty van with the Manson-eyed speed freak.

Lately I’ve been mildly obsessed by a cluster of tarot readers on Instagram, because they’ve been reading me like the back of a Lucky Charms box with hair-raising accuracy and details they couldn’t possibly know. “It’s the algorithm,” say my friends, which is really frightening. I don’t mind psychics getting a look at my inner spleen, but if it’s the algorithm, it knows waaaaay too much about my soul.

Because I was raised the way I was, I had no defenses against wompires. I couldn’t recognize them. I found them so familiar that whenever I met an attractive toxic narcissist I would feel butterflies in my stomach and a crazy flood of oxytocin. I would think, “I know him from other lifetimes. This is destiny.”

It may have been my destiny, but it was always a totally fucked-up destiny that left me in tatters; I spent the better part of my adult life a tremblingly nervous, heartbroken wreck, and I was convinced I was intrinsically unlovable in areas of my brain too remote to address with therapy.

Through the advice of these card readers and other research, I’ve recently learned how to start validating myself and stop seeking it from others. I was constitutionally unable to do this before. This has opened a wellspring of energy in me, like someone loosened the nut on my hydrant.

Now I am what the Instagram psychics say is a “Dark Empath.” I’ve entered my Villain era, which means I have learned discrimination and pattern-recognition when it comes to demons and/or Cluster B personalities. No more people pleasing. Now I will slice a motherfucker into bouillon-sized cubes if they try to dim my vibrant light to match the low wattage of their insecurities. Take heed, ya fuckin’ warlocks.

I lived in the dark basement of believing the things that narcissists told me about myself my whole life— their dim views of me, their endless tirades of faultfinding. I internalized it all. I even thought it was virtuous to run myself down all the time, because I wasn’t feeding my ego; the last thing I EVER wanted to be thought of was an egomaniac. I’d seen the trails of bodies down the path of every egomaniac I knew. I was nearly one of those bodies more times than I can count.

It has been a long time since I’ve felt so good about myself — actually, it might be the first time ever. Like my parents, I have historically only liked myself when I had achieved something.

The rotten men I chose always had me proving myself and overextending and ignoring my own boundaries for their crumbs of non-love. I was never taught to love myself, I didn’t know how. I was built to be serially victimized by used care salesmen, and I was.

Not no more, Satan. Never again.

I literally remembered who the fuck I am, yesterday. I had forgotten.

I was thinking something along the lines of “Holy Shit, I actually AM an authority. By gum, I should be striding around with the leather vested confidence of being the fastest gun in the West.” My Imposter Syndrome flew out the casement window. I know I walk the walk. I’ve finally proven it to myself, and have nothing more to prove.

Actually, I don’t think I ever have felt more whole, attractive, sane, strong and alive. I swear I felt the presence of holy beings in my life and in my heart this week.

Suffice to say, a big idea finally occurred to me. It’s the idea I’ve been waiting for, for years, and it makes more sense to do now than ever before.

I think I may have found my calling and my purpose. I think I may have solved my life.

We’ll see. Anyway, I got my groove back. I got the fight back in my dog. There’s going to be a lot more video.

Demons, fear me and skedaddle! Or you will get the Chop!

Alafia

NEW 5 WEEK MEMOIR WORKSHOPS ARE STARTING SEPT 7 and SEP 8

SLOTS STILL OPEN. WRITE ME: cintraw@gmail.com

Full service editing. Holler.

This piece originally appeared on salon.com in 1996.

A couple of weeks ago I set out for Mexico City, braving hail, plane delays and the constant tauntings of a muddy-mouthed group of East Indian children whose mother, during a five-hour stopover at La Guardia, felt it perfectly acceptable that they mock me wildly, repeatedly tear off my glasses with their teeth and claw at my eyes with their glutinous fingers.

Once we were in the air, I gave myself up to the pleasurable anticipation of a leisure-oriented four-day weekend, steeped in mind-erasing frozen cocktails and the benevolently muted rays of a foreign sun healing me from its glazy socket in a damp grey sky. I would speak of great things from the comfortable curve of the rattan chaise lounge, my attractive friends would laugh and smoke, happy and well-fed children would bring us ceramic bowls of chilled fruit and mariachis would strum elegantly painful ballads in their rolling native tongue. It didn’t work out that way.

On the first day in Mexico City, my dear friend M. and I put on tight sundresses, high heels and movie-star sunglasses and set out for the center of town with our friend “Xavier,” who is a native Mexican and a long-haired, leather-jacketed type who resembles the archetypal Leisure-Class Druglord. As the three of us entered the old city, surrounded by collapsing churches of soot-blackened rock, we created quite a stir. It was as if we had been airlifted from a Lite Beer commercial wearing nothing but wet thongs and dropped in the middle of a militant Islamic religious ceremony. Catcalls and whistles whirled around us like a meaty typhoon of dark lust. Spite and envy curled out from behind brick corners and rose up from poncho blankets spread with plastic Jesus paraphernalia, the poisonous sparks swarming around us like a swarm of black gnats. M., a doctor of anthropology, glowered defiantly at the drooling scowls of the poor and restless men from her impenetrable fortress of large, safe, White Money, Intelligence and Entitlement. I just started giggling and smiling at people, hoping to shuck the whole experience off as a momentary channeling of the Goddess of Love.

As we walked along, men kept running up to us and muttering something in Spanish to Xavier. When we asked him what they had said, invariably it proved to be something along the lines of “You will lend them to me for several hours?” All comments on our appearance were directed to Xavier, who was perceived to be our owner and proprietor. Our high spirits began to sag as we realized that our glamour and prestige was directly related to the oppression of the men violently slobbering at us.

As I walked out of a terrible little restroom, my ass was surreptitiously grabbed by a stealthy hand. This let the last air out of my otherworldly balloon. I suddenly realized that we were inviting not admiration but violation. We were buckets of bloody chum dropped into a knot of sharks, USO showgirls performing nude in front of a group of speed-addled war prisoners. “It is simply not done,” the city intoned about our sundresses. We embodied everything nasty, all evil temptations: porno videos, dirty money, hard booze, crack cocaine and free time, all rolled up into two unsuspecting touristas. Get your rich honky tits away from our good Catholic men, who wish to smear you into the ground with open-mouth kisses and frot you limb from limb, came the hum from the cobblestones and the Che Guevara T-shirts pinned to canvas frames. Go back on the television where you came from.

That night, Xavier gathered a group of us together for a romp in the Wayward Mariachi Graveyard, another square in the city, where vast numbers of the famed roving troubadors go to beg and howl and drink and die. Groups of three and four men in identically brocaded toreador suits chased alongside our taxi like packs of dingos with fat guitars, inflicting angry spurts of song on us with the desperate aggression of panhandling window-washers. When we arrived in the square, Xavier’s friend Geraldo and I posed for a photo in front of a plastic box containing a Virgin of Guadalupe, within eyeshot of another slurry of feral
mariachis. Geraldo, a fan of the nation’s tequila, feigned licking my armpit for a quicky polaroid with the Holy Mother. He did not realize that the burly serenaders were in charge of protecting her honor and that they now intended to shoot us. Sweating with fear, Xavier desperately tried to explain to the mariachis that we were stupid Americans who didn’t understand that imitating armpit-licking in front of a religious icon was grounds for being executed by musical Christian thugs. Geraldo and I, oblivious to this interchange, skipped away with our lives and the oblivious luck of the drunk.

The next day, Xavier, M. and I set out for the charming little craft village of San Miguel de Allende to stay in the palatial home of a friend of my family. We were to be taken care of, said the family friend, by the capable cook and delightful maids. In fact, the aforementioned employees greeted our arrival with less than ardent enthusiasm, and the next morning we were nonplussed to discover that all of M.’s jewelry had vanished from her purse, never to return. This disappearance was clearly a miracle, because the housekeeper and the owners of the home regarded everyone in the house as so far above suspicion that the only possible explanation was a sudden ascendency to the heaven where good jewelry goes following the Rapture.

Having been warned throughout my childhood that vagabonds in any foreign country would cut off your index finger with a dirty razor blade for a Snoopy ring, I was a little surprised that M. had brought thousands of dollars worth of jewelry to Mexico, but we nonetheless all felt the loss sorely and left San Miguel at once with a cloud of distress over our heads.

Far from making me feel hostile toward Mexico or Mexicans, though, the entire experience seemed to have a great equalizing effect. It reminded us of the importance of humility. The flexing of our obscene power before the natives in Mexico City had been somehow paid for with M’s queenly gems. It could have been a lot worse: Judging from how badly we pissed people off, we might have paid with our lives. The moral of the whole trip was, “Don’t wear a little tiny sundress in Mexico City or all of your jewelry will be stolen in San Miguel.” Or something. In any case, we all learned some kind of valuable lesson — I guess we’re still trying to figure out what it was.

CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM. SLOTS OPEN NOW.

I have never really bonded with an animal. This is largely because when I was growing up, my mother had these horrible scraggly Himalayan cats who whined and shed long grey hairs all day and puked and pissed on all the rugs in the house, due to chronic bladder and stomach problems from the cheap food my mother fed them. Plus, I was allergic to them; they made my eyes swell up. They were utterly nasty-tempered, repellant and mangy cats, who scracked all day at each other like angry old Korean ladies. Their relationship reminded me of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” and they made the entire patio area into a giant heated cat box, the smell of which alone was enough to want to boil them.

I sort of bonded with an English Bulldog puppy one of my ex boyfriends bought, but he immediately started racking up crazily expensive vet bills for terrible gory skin holes (“hot wet spots,” in the parlance of the vet); his eyelid popped out in a red bulb and his sinuses filled with cement. His hip bones, it seemed, were essentially made of Bisquick and were sure to be the next expensive thing to go.

My boyfriend kept threatening to put the puppy to sleep, because the puppy mill had given the animal some truly fucked up, stepped-on genetics and it was costing thousands. I didn’t fully bond with the dog because he was on Death Row. As soon as I fired the boyfriend a few weeks later, the pup went with him, and I didn’t want visitation rights. I just wanted out.

When I was married and lived in Brooklyn, I went to the shelter and adopted a very taciturn short-haired grey cat that I promptly named Luther Vandross. I adored Luther, but Luther absolutely hated being snuggled or pet on. He grew into enormous size, a burly mini-panther, who totally fucking hated me to the point where once when I picked him up to kiss him, he grabbed my face with his claws and tried to bite my eye out. He did come in handy after the divorce. Since Luther would only tolerate my ex-husband, Luther went with him when we split. I learned later that Luther would perch at the top of his staircase and lay in wait every morning for my ex to walk up so he could pounce on him, claws outstretched, fangs bared.

In the neighborhood where I live now, there is a literal epidemic of feral cats. In the politics of a neighborhood strewn with feral cats, there are few ground rules, like, Please Don’t Name Them.

I named all of them.

There are three generations of a feral cat colony traipsing at will across my back patio these days.

The grandfather and patriarch I call Harlem. He’s a really hardcore, bony-faced black cat covered with battle scars, who impregnated the hell out of the neighborhood — most notably, the grandmother, another slender, tired-looking jet-black cat, whom I refer to as Nefertiti Jones. They both look like they should have had walk-on parts in “The WIRE.” They are haggard, with thousand yard stares, and little trust for mankind whatsoever. The life expectancy of feral cats, I recently learned, is only about 5 years. They’re probably around 3, but they look 67.

They had a litter that I was mildly obsessed with, but I wasn’t feeding them so I couldn’t get near them. They were, however, incredibly handsome cats: two tuxedos, and two tabbies. Since then, I’ve named one of the now teenaged tuxedoes Davenport. He has a diagonal white stripe across his face like the Bend Sinister slash in heraldry which signifies a bastard, which is somewhat appropriate.

Then THAT generation of kittens had kittens (“The tomcats around here are so rapey!” said my neighbor) and my roommate Char-O and I became intent on seducing the new kittens because they were unbearably, nose-bleedingly cute. Again, the new litter contained two tabbies and two tuxedoes.

They were all INCREDIBLY shy.

The two tuxedo kittens, a boy and a girl, I named Seabiscuit and Zasu, respectively, in honor of their formal 1930’s attire.

I have been sprawling all over myself like an idiot for weeks trying to get these kittens to like me. And in some ways, it’s working.

We started with cans of “Chicken of the Sea” tuna.

This hypnotized a few of them onto the porch, most notably two of the babies we were most besotted by. When the bravest, most fearless tabby boy made it upstairs to the deck, it immediately struck me that his name was Sinjin (an English truncation of St. John). Since the moment I stared into his crazy green eyes, I have been embroiled in love with this little creature, and hell bent on socializing him. He has the coloring of a snow leopard - all grey, black and white tiger stripes — and astonishing Cleopatra eye makeup.

First I bought a catnip mouse and put it on a makeshift fishing pole, because I’ve found that drugs are a great way to make friends. He enjoyed batting that around a bit.

These kittens are third or fourth generation feral, so if you come near them, they usually run away. If you let your hand get too near them, or brush against them, they flinch like they’ve been electrocuted and then run.

It took a couple of weeks for Sinjin to chill out enough and acclimate enough to our presence to hang out on the deck with us.

A kinesiology professor once told me that I was good with babies because I got down to their eye level to play with them. I decided this could be applied to little cats. When Sinjin came to visit, I started laying on my stomach like a worm and talking to him at his height.

One evening a bit of tuna on my fingers got licked off, and I about lost my mind with glee. It reminded me of the time Luke Perry stuck his tongue in my ear. I felt like I was in The Yearling.

Maybe a week later, he started playing patty cake with me - swatting my fingers. I noticed, after a few swats, he redacted his claws, and my heart grew 42 sizes.

I starting pining for him and worrying if he didn’t show up in the evening. He’s not at all reliable. Sometimes he comes, sometimes he doesn’t.

About a week later, I got the Holy Grail moment I didn’t know was possible.

Sinjin was so obsessed with his face in the tuna, he stopped caring and after a few full body flinches actually let me actually pet him. This was a feeling unlike any other, for me, comparable only to the first time I met my first baby niece. My heart spat rainbow firecrackers and started spinning in its socket.

I’ve pet him many times since — even fed him in the house a few times! But, the boy’s just not that into me. He’s getting bigger every day, has hundreds of lairs in all the back yards, and I suspect he has a few other Sugar Mamas in the neighborhood. Those cats are wild, and it’s hard to keep a gorgeous young man like Sinjin on the porch. It seems like it would be a real shame to cut his balls off so he can watch TV with me, but I made the mistake of NOT doing that with several ex-boyfriends, so I’m leaning towards doing it, if I get the chance.

I HAVE EDITING SLOTS OPEN, IF YOU FINALLY WANT THAT MANUSCRIPT TO LOOK LIKE SOMETHING.

CintraW@gmail.com. Reasonable!

This article originally appeared in the New York Times in 2008.

ON the subway platform, I saw a girl beautiful enough to merit one of those triple takes you do when beholding the fearful symmetry of a supermodel. After a minute, the vision dissipated; she was slouching in a pair of rubber flip-flops, chewing gum with her mouth open.

Pop! goes the beauty, corrupted by nothing but youth.

Juicy Couture, the blingy brainchild of Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor (and now the adopted daughter of the dowager conglomerate Liz Claiborne), came to power splayed pinkly, in terry cloth and velour, on the buttocks of various starlets out with their morning Starbucks cups. The designer Peter Dunham once described the Skaist-Levy sensibility as “Duchess of Windsor meets Iron Maiden.”

It is apparent even a half-block away that Juicy’s window dressers have been worshiping at the altar of Simon Doonan, the creative director at Barneys New York. The big glass box is a riot of drolleries. Multicolored drunken ballerinas in tutus and hoodie sweatshirts sprawl around a squad of tattooed mannequins in plaid kilts, combat boots, knee socks and Roman breastplates.

In the boy’s section, Teen Slob and Basquiat-brut are juxtaposed with Sir Harry Potter-style Olde British heraldry and a brazen affection for taxidermy, ersatz French court furniture and paintings of hounds, all whimsically defaced into what one imagines Prince Harry’s dorm room looked like after a rough Pimm’s No. 1 Cup bender. One half expects to see a stuffed corgi wearing a shock collar of Barbara Bush pearls.

The Juicy staff, fresh baby-fat creatures with rosy cheeks in bright shirts, bound about like oversize puppies, stand too close and wag their tails enthusiastically in your personal space bubble.

“You O.K., Miss?”

This from a lad wearing lawn-mowing apparel with a gray beaver-felt top hat.

Am I O.K.?

“Yisssss,” said La Cobra Blanca.

“O.K.! Just makin’ sure everything is good!” he yelped, recognizing a natural predator and fleeing behind a large purple Robert Rauschenberg goat wearing a necktie.

The girl for whom Juicy Couture is designed, I determined, is Lady Veruca Salt: the imperial tween in the candy store who screams: “Daddy says only weak people have recessions. I want an Oompa Loompa NOW!” Oversize apothecary jars line the shelves with greedy quantities of Mike and Ikes, Pixy Stix, pink rock candy and baseball-size jawbreakers.

Like Tory Burch, whose influence is felt here nearly to the point of plagiarism, the Juicy Couture line seems to aspire to dress young ladies straight from the closet of Lady Bird Johnson. Gunchy enamel charm bracelets. Handbags with big gold, post-Versace medallions. A high-neck vermilion silk dress would not have looked out of place on Nancy Reagan ($1,100) and would go nicely with a double-breasted cashmere swing coat with big gold buttons and fox collar ($3,400). A blond mink coat ($6,800) was perfect for Tippi Hedren; a murder of stuffed crows was gathered on an oversize wooden chair, waiting for right blonde to try it on.

Both Tory Burch and Juicy provide classic, trophy-wife establishment chic; the big difference between the two is that Juicy is posing as disestablishment chic. It is putting food coloring in its blond hair and driving to the underage punk show in Dad’s Lexus. Juicy is de-punkinated punk that rarely verges into the naughty; it is a co-opted counterculture look that seems intent on ushering in a new mainstream paradigm: Instant Vintage. New Thrift.

Juicy has taken all the thought out of being a sartorial dumpster diver. Shelves are lined with little mismatched bone-china teacups. A sexless black dress ($278) had the prewrinkled appearance of being pulled straight from the Hefty bag. The stuffed peacocks looked as if they wanted to see my credit report.

I searched high and low for something to try on that wasn’t covered with rhinestone gobs or VIVA LA JUICY! glitter decals or cabbagey princess sleeves, arriving finally at a long charcoal-gray cashmere hoodie ($328).

The hoodie was nice, but in trying it on, I discovered a rhinestone “J” on the zipper and a superfluous heart appliqué. I left it on the chair.

All of Juicy Couture’s creative exuberance merely frames the crown jewel and ur-text of all Juicy-wear: the signature terry-cloth and/or velour tracksuit. The featured black velour hoodie (with JUICY NEW YORK emblazoned, Hard Rock Cafe-style, on the back) is $128; the matching white T-shirt is $72.

A complicated economic theory dictates that when T-shirts hit $72, my contempt knob cranks to 11.

The Rosetta stone explaining all the Juicy paradoxes was a hoodie printed in a style recognizable as hip-hop fashion, only with a silver damask pattern ordinarily found on nice cloth napkins ($158). It said: “Check it out! My mom bought me this cool signifier of streetwise rebellion that she said I could wear on Christmas Day!”

I reminded myself that hippie and punk chic, the fashion statements of a genuine counterculture, were empowering precisely because they were trash. These were the fruits of creative Salvation Army salvaging, proof that you had enough natural style to find treasures in society’s discards, proof that you had rendered yourself immune to the rewards of a system designed to control you.

I bought a pair of striped boot socks with anchors on them — they were on sale for $9.99. Next to me was a young girl at the counter, shopping with her “best friend,” Mom, who was handing over the credit card. The girl, no more than 15, was carrying a genuine Chanel handbag, covered with Swarovski charmlets.

What do we pay for, after all, if not the illusion — the ability to see the beauty we wish to see, with or without bubble gum?

LOOSEY Spoiled tween princesses and conservative moms everywhere will rejoice over this whimsical new flagship on Fifth Avenue, which will encourage young women everywhere to dress like political wives.

GOOSEY If you abhor taxidermy, beware: Only the Museum of Natural History has more glass eyes staring back at you.

COLOR ME PUCE-Y This grayish pink-purple mauve has risen from its Pantone grave and returned to haunt in the form of Juicy brand luggage and fleur-de-lis-spattered thermals.

CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM

When I was loitering around San Francisco State University selling weak joints and taking Afro-Haitian dancing, my roommate and fellow student Bronski dragged me to the front of the school bookstore one day, and purred into my ear in his thick Leningrad accent, “Ceentra, look. There is no security here.” And by golly, he was right — there were some 7-foot black rectangular boxes sitting menacingly around the cash registers with squares of reflective silver tape on them, which might have looked like a hi-tech security apparatus if you’d never seen black paint or reflective tape before, and you failed to notice that there was no wiring of any kind.

“They aren’t hooked up to anything. Those boxes are empty,” said Bronski, with a pirate laugh. “It’s security theater.”

From that moment on, Bronski would steal the bookstore blind and then return all the books for cash. He had other such scams running in department stores downtown; some mildly sophisticated short con he ran with a female performance artist we knew. Bronski — a swarthy black Russian bon vivant, was one of my closest friends. He acted like a brother toward me. He had taken me under his wing and I was grateful to him. He was in his early twenties; I was barely 18. He took a chance on me as a roommate and had to utterly housebreak me into being an acceptable co-habitating adult, since my parents had failed at it. Bronski had a technique when it came to shoplifting: he would pay for his vegetables but steal all his meat, which gave me ideas. In any case, due to Bronski’s criminal appeal, shoplifting started to look like a good idea.

I had never been a thief, even in my earlier teens. I stole a little steel one-hole paper puncher from my saintly grandmother when I was three or four and the guilt positively ate me alive. I went through Dostoyevskian dark nights of the soul under my blankie. After a couple of years of intense pangs of spiritual suffering I finally tearfully confessed the whole thing to my grandmother when I was 6. She was puzzled by my dramatics, and had not remembered the theft event I’d been eating my liver out over, night after night. I was forgiven by her, but I had torn my own ass out so hard I decided that thievery was clearly not my calling, and just never did it again.

I’ve always considered ripping anyone off to be the utterly disgraceful habit of IV drug users. That said, I’ve found money on the ground I just quickly pocketed without hollering around to find out whose it really was. I was always desperate for money, operating on about $4 a day. I had no financial help from my family whatsoever. Desperation trumped morality and I considered such strokes of fortune gifts from God as I scuttled out of the café. Such was the extent of my criminal malfeasance, until Bronski argued it so well just by pulling bacon out of his pants it almost seemed to be our responsibility.

After reading a few pamphlets on revolutionary socialism, I somehow rationalized not paying for more expensive things. Not super-expensive things, just stuff I felt was really necessary that I couldn’t afford, like apricot facial scrub. I felt it was a grey area.

Capitalism convinced me I needed it, and didn’t give me the means to get it. Besides, I didn’t give a shit about the Key Foods on 23rd and South Van Ness. It was a horribly lit ghetto supermarket with wilty brown produce; a place of no pride.

Key Foods was the only grocery store in the dirty, ugly neighborhood and I had lived all over in various group apartments in damp, unkempt victorians for years — 22nd and South Van Ness, 23rd and South Van Ness, 24th and South Van Ness, 25th and South Van Ness. This was back when the Mission District was mainly Hispanic, and white hipster kids after cheap rents were the invading culture. The sky was always cold and grey and the whole atmosphere was saturated with black bus soot thick enough to write on, coating all the unloved 4 story, residential buildings. It was an inherently depressing place, and the Key Foods was no exception with its klieg lights and dusty plastic bags of expired Mexican spices.

At a certain point, I became so deft and natural at shoplifting, I thought I was invisible. I had gotten away with so much casual theft that I no longer took any precautions whatsoever — I didn’t look around for employees, I didn’t look for mirrors. These objects simply belonged to me, and I was taking them.

This was my state of mind as I strolled into Key Foods early one morning to buy some bruised fruit and steal a tube of apricot facial scrub. I was deeply hungover, wearing a large overcoat and a kind of Moroccan velvet fez. My vintage 1940’s heels were unbuckled and the straps were swinging. This detail was perhaps my downfall.

A second after I had been through the checkout line, I heard an “Excuse me, Ma’am,” and I knew the jig was up. I had never been caught before so I started babbling. “I’m so sorry! I do this all the time. I am a kleptomaniac,” I said, thinking the insanity defense might work. It didn’t. The security guard dragged me to the last checkout counter, handcuffed me to it, and left me there until the police came. I made sure to lean against my hands so it wasn’t readily apparent to other customers that I was a scumbag.

This is perhaps why a young man walked up and started talking to me about how he liked my style. I thanked him. We chatted for a few minutes, and finally he asked me to write down my phone number (this was a pre-cellular world, if such a thing is still imaginable.)

“Well, I’d like to, but I’m a little tied up at the moment,” I said, moving aside from the handcuffs and giving the chain a nice punctuational click. The young man evaporated.

I told the cops I was a kleptomaniac, and for some reason, they let me go.

My brain lies to me as much as anyone else’s, but as far as my memory serves: I never stole anything again.

Well, maybe one or two things. But mostly, I’m honest.

Unless Amazon accidentally refunds me twice. I figure anything I can swindle out of Amazon is a small victory. Fuck Amazon.

CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM. Full service editing for all your writing needs.

!LITERARY BARGAIN ALERT!: I have one slot left in my Monday Workshop, which has already been going for 2 weeks. If you want to take the last 3 weeks of my memoir class, it will cost you a measley $300. Hit me at cintraw@gmail.com if you’re interested.

This piece previously appeared in the New York Times in 2008.

I ALWAYS liked the scene in the first “Matrix” where Keanu visits the Oracle. You expect her to be a giant neon hologram or a wall of fire, but she is an older African-American lady baking cookies in her chewed-up linoleum kitchen. In the context of the slick cyberpunk world of the movie, this unsexy, low-income environment gives the Oracle a semiotic impression of soulfulness.

There’s a new post-1980s, post-grunge look developing down in Little Italy. Subtle but dramatic discoveries are being made.

I queried a couple of multilayered girls on the street about their seductively comfy-looking shearling clog-boots (a vast improvement over those crudely shapeless après-ski boots that appear to have been made for the Flintstones out of sheared Muppet). Both girls enthused about No. 6, with the kind of breast-beating love ordinarily reserved for hairstylists.

This look derives from one I associate with Williamsburg, F.I.T. students and Nicole Richie: boho-luxe, ultra-casual. Sarcastic ’80s blouses or plaid shirts, skinny jeans, big sunglasses; stringy, undone hair. Leathers are distressed, collarbones stab out of asymmetric necklines. Scarves and curious necklaces are tangled around the neck, at the same time.

I’ve been waiting impatiently for this look to die. I resent the whole “I got dressed for an hour to look like I slept in my car” thing. (I’ve been dressing like an extra from “The Matrix” since high school.) To me, it’s neither fish nor fowl. It derives from neither extreme of the ’80s: overtly filthy punk; froofy, glitzy Lacroix.

One of the No. 6 owners, Karin Bereson, appeared in a plaid flannel shirt and faded leopard-print jeans to tell me about the wall of clog-boots, which occupies the pole position in the cozy retail space. These are made to order in patent leathers and shearling, in a short bootie length ($335) or in 15-inch boots to the knee ($415). For a few dollars more, they can be made in olive green suede, or from a stock of brown vintage skins.

Could I order them with a black sole?

Ms. Bereson recommended the natural sole, which “really shows off how cool there are,” but black was no problem. She could have them in by Wednesday.

I pushed the envelope: Could I have them made as 11-inch, three-quarter boots?

They don’t usually do it, but sure.

The ease and flexibility of this transaction was mind-boggling.

A sales assistant, a tall young Audrey Reynolds with dye-stained fingers, applauded my decision. “These are my bedroom slippers,” she said, indicating her booties. “I don’t even wear them with socks.”

The racks, arranged according to color group, are a mix of select vintage garments and new stuff that looks vintage.

I never cottoned to hippy chic. I find earth tones, peasant skirts, gauzy tunics and the very idea of bralessness to be utterly terrifying. A rack of dresses in this mossy-mushroom palette made me involuntarily revisit the smoggy world of Maurice Sendak’s “Night Kitchen,” and reminded me of hot-tub intelligentsia women from my childhood who were into experimental education, made compost and lived in yurts by choice. A vintage Ted Lapidus jumpsuit in a color I dubbed Soylent Green ($208) would have been perfect for Joan Didion or Frida Kahlo to toss on and go to a 12-hour est seminar.

A steady stream of young women dapples through the store all day long, begging advice from Ms. Bereson, de facto den mother to the Lost Girls of Urban Bohemia.

One told her: “I am broke now, so my life is changed. But I still need a present for my friend. Can you recommend a vintage jewelry store?”

She was obliged.

I wasn’t sure what to do with crazy old geometric rabbit furs from I. Magnin, old fringed vests from the Harley-Davidson collection or a scrunched leather bolero pocked with conchas.

I finally asked the right question: “Would you pick me out some stuff I would never think to try on?”

Audrey and Ms. Bereson quickly loaded my dressing room with stuff I would never select (but, having expertly sussed out my style, everything was black).

I tried a vintage black knit Ungaro micro-minidress with a print of golden fish scales ($180). It was delightfully soft-core in a Mrs. Stallone kind of way, but not me.

“Hey, didn’t you come in a year ago, and I photographed your boots?” I overheard Ms. Bereson ask an incredulous woman. “Isn’t it nice to know that people recognize you from the knees down?”

I walked out in a wrap-dress I’d call “June Cleaver Like You’ve Never Seen Her Before.”

“It’s way more than just ‘Hello,’ ” Ms. Bereson remarked.

She urged me to try a straight, New Wave minidress in black and navy. It looked surprisingly great.

I tried a boxy silk blouse ($190) covered with zigzag ruffles that Audrey called “a T-shirt substitute just toss it on.”

“I’ve always thought cuts like this were for girls with body dysmorphic disorder,” I said, looking in the mirror.

Ms. Bereson chose her words carefully. “You know ... you don’t always have to show your body.”

All air left my lungs.

“It looks elegant,” a customer chimed in. “Kind of old Chanel.”

“A slouchy shirt ... it’s ... a different kind of confidence,” Ms. Bereson said.

My dusty light bulb, long thought dead, abruptly blinked on.

“I am having a paradigm shift,” I said, wholly stupefied. “I may have to adjust my whole ethos.”

Like the care of a good doctor, there’s no substitute for personal attention from experts.

No. 6 provides a crash course in self-reinvention, but it also provides lasting solutions to affordable style. It teaches new ways to see cuts, new ways to see yourself and a different kind of confidence: style that doesn’t require permission from the economy. With revolutionary eyes, No. 6 gives back the best thing about the ’80s: the power of fashion, yanked away from the platinum card, and put back in the thrift store where it belongs.

CLASSIX Morgan Yakus and Karin Bereson’s charming boutique has an open atmosphere in which to explore new lines and rediscover inspired shapes from the not-so-distant past.

BASIX The clothes are pleasingly edgy, but the shearling clog-boots are primed to become a winter staple, even for the meekest of wardrobe.

RIC OCASEK Though you may never have thought you liked pop styles from the angular ’80s, the selections here are smart enough to rock even severely jaded perspectives.

cintraw@gmail.com

ATTENTION ALL WRITERS AND WOULD-BE WRITERS: My greatly beloved memoir workshops are starting again next week. They’re small classes with a maximum of 5 students, they’re on Zoom, and they occur on Monday or Tuesday nights for 5 weeks, at 6PM PST. I still have a couple of slots left and you should fill them, because these classes are lively and you’ll learn a lot. Contact me at Cintraw@gmail.com if you’re interested.

Lately I’ve been working a part-time job, in addition to the writing and editing and teaching stuff. I’m the personal assistant of a top notch tech bro, whom I actually love like a little brother. I’m essentially his butler. I make him ginger tea and salami sandwiches and pick up his dry cleaning. I don’t mind the gig at all — it’s fun to be professionally doting toward someone who is paying you to do it, especially if you genuinely like them.

The city of Oakland has a pervasive dumping problem. It occurs on a quotidian level in front of certain curbs where workers sit and eat lunch — usually they just throw all the fast food containers into the street right in front of them. Getting rid of larger amounts of trash is costly, so people accumulate a bunch of garbage — like hoarder-level mounds — and just dump it all on the street somewhere out of the way. Sometimes lots of people dump their shit in the same places, so there are impromptu landfills under various overpasses.

One underpass near the Bart station was so dark and filled with walls of garbage heaped at least 8 feet high, I was afraid to drive through it because I thought there might be spiritual cooties living there. It looked and felt evil. Then, the next time I drove through it, I noticed that there was a couple actually camping between the walls of trash. The black woman was young and very beautiful, and 9 months pregnant. The next time I drove to the Bart station, she was sitting in her bleak mounds of filth in that concrete bat cave, holding her new baby.

The unhoused of Oakland have dirty, tough lives. There is a curious phenomenon that happens to some of them, especially around Lake Merrit — they assign themselves corners of the lake, and surround themselves with a 6-foot radius of small pieces of garbage that have a very peculiar amber-brown hue. This is serious garbage that looks like it has been marinated in a thick broth of wet cigarettes — fast food bags, clothing that lays in discolored clumps like it washed up from the sewer, twisted milk cartons. “Why do they camp in a mandala of garbage?” I asked my roommate Char-o, who told me about a city ordinance: the cops won’t dismantle your spot if everything you own is touching. It creates a kind of cordon unsanitaire. To some, it is an unsightly mess — I mean you wouldn’t want to touch any of it without 2 pairs of gloves and a tetanus shot. To others, the strewn trash is a buffer of safety. A white picket fence, essentially, only inhumane and dismal.

I work out of my boss’s house in Oakland, which is near a basketball court and a public park. People leave the damndest things around.

“I love the vignettes you see in Oakland garbage,” said Char-o. “Like, you’ll see a self-help book next to a pair of running shoes next to a plastic vape next to a bag of Cheetos, like someone just had the rapture and had to leave it all behind immediately.”

About a week and I, Char-o and I were hiking on one of the beatific, redwood-filled Oakland nature trails, and sitting right in the middle of one dirt path was two recently stolen Toyotas, professionally stripped to the bolts — the doors, the hoods, the engines — everything. Violently ransacked car carcasses, sitting deadly in the middle of nature. Car theft is rampant in Oakland. Char-o got the catalytic converter ripped out of her Prius four times.

The park near my work, however, has been magical. I go smoke cigarettes in it, and I invariably find some discarded object so incongruous as to thrill my very soul.

Once, on the way to the park, I discovered a large box filled to the brim with wet wigs.

Sometimes I find actual treasures.

Once, I looked inside a strange gift bag sitting all by itself in the park, and inside was a handblown Murano glass vase, which now sits in my kitchen window. It was covered and filled with dirt, like someone had been making mud pies with it.

I found the brass top of a large hookah in the middle of a children’s playground, right under the jungle-gym. I took this as a sign of great good fortune, and have been trying to buy the rest of the accessories on eBay. I got a cobalt-blue base for it, painted with golden cobras.

In the last 2 weeks, I’ve found a pair of wraparound pavé sunglasses, a large box of Nag Champa incense, a decorative 1970’s cutting board I am dying to get spanked with, and a windbreaker that says “COMPTON SURF CLUB” on the back (dope).

Next to a mound of charcoal briquettes, I just found a strange, blown out Polaroid of some mysterious boxes. It is so puzzling it will probably be a good writing prompt for somebody. I also found a large unopened can of Tomato Rebonado, whatever the hell that is, under a tree.

There is another very beautiful black woman who is unhoused, who sometimes lives in the park I frequent. She always looks away when I pass her, but today I heard her carry on a very involved conversation with someone who distinctly wasn’t there.

It is my firmest belief that racism is the main thing preventing the US from having a social safety net — the poor are generally viewed as undeserving people who haven’t tried hard enough, to the bloodless, empathy-free vampires who reallocate funds directed toward the poor towards themselves instead.

Despite numerous volunteer cleanup efforts, Oakland still has an ongoing garbage crisis. Nobody thinks to address the entrenched poverty and/or mental illness which is really behind it, which strikes me as a bit myopic.

Shantytowns of broken down RVs and dead cars can be found down many of the more industrial streets, strewn with moats of trash. Entire neighborhoods of invisible people. Human flotsam.

In the midst of these apocalyptic dumps, children are born. One black lady with a broom sweeps the sidewalk in front of her tent every day, with unvarnished dignity. But the executives who live in the hills don’t see her. I don’t think they even see the garbage. Anyway, they remain unmoved, and dedicated to making the poor even poorer.

I’m hoping this week while smoking in the park, I find a guillotine.

It’s not totally implausible.

CintraW@gmail.com. Affordable!

This article originally appeared in the New York Times in 2009.

AFTER at least 40 days and 40 nights of nonstop rain, there were, for the first time in what seemed like millennia, no umbrellas on Madison Avenue just luxuries bathed in sunshine, and the gilded personages who buy them.

I do not consider myself an envious person. I manage to live a rather fortunate bohemian life and often indulge myself far beyond my means. But there have been rare and memorable moments when I have been made acutely, grindingly and painfully aware of how great it would be to inherit an obscene amount of money.

Once or twice a decade, I see an object so covetable that it absolutely cramps my soul not to own it. Photos of Cher’s infinity pool overlooking the Pacific made my spleen throb for nearly five years. (Coincidentally, I opened a magazine yesterday and read that Cher’s Malibu estate, with the pool in question, is on the market for $45 million.)

I thought I would be safe when I was assigned to visit the jewelry boutique of Solange Azagury-Partridge. Most jewelry, to my mind, looks slightly vulgar, a somewhat primitive display of conspicuous wealth. I own little more than a handful of yawn-inspiring basics: pearls, a signet ring — mostly from pawnshops. I was prepared to focus my attentions straight into the precious rocks and enjoy the little prismatic light shows. I was not prepared to suffer from a raw and unquenchable envy that would make me consider extra moneymaking strategies like kidnapping/extortion or piracy.

I rang the doorbell before noon and was swarmed upon by a phalanx of attractive saleswomen in cocktail dresses who seemed uneasy when taking in my shredded jeans and Converse low-tops. Since I was the only nonemployee in the store, I promptly outed myself as a New York Times reporter. ( It would have been impossible to take notes, otherwise.)

“Do you have a card?” a gorgeous saleswoman in black chiffon asked with a brusqueness that could slice through chain saws.

I don’t carry a card, and their eyes began to swivel. I began stuttering through my explanation: I’m supposed to be anonymous, I ... I ...

Their body language suggested I would not be allowed past the doormat. (It has happened before that some shops are less than overjoyed at the prospect of my visit.) I finally stammered out something that sounded vaguely like a threat, which had them holding their hands up in “Whoa!” positions and assuring me that I would be allowed free run of the place.

“Oh, I thought you were on the verge of throwing me out!” I said, pinkly embarrassed.

“You’re paranoid,” Ms. Brusque said, with a charmlessness ordinarily reserved for sorority hazings. I was relieved that the warm and lovely Josephine Campanella was elected to squire me around instead.

Ms. Azagury-Partridge, according to her publicity material, has had no formal training in jewelry design, but she didn’t need it. Her work explodes with energy, brilliance, sensuality and courage. It is thrillingly exuberant, scary-smart and intensely personal. She has so clearly thrown every atom of herself into the creation of these pieces, you can feel the fiery presence of a remarkable woman. It’s art, and I’m not the only one who thinks so; the Louvre and the Victoria and Albert Museum have acquired her work for their collections.

The shop interior, its deep red walls embedded with 630,000 Swarovski crystals, looks somewhat like the opera set for “The Magic Flute,” reimagined by Marchesa Casati: goth-Freemason with a touch of chinoiserie thrown in, just to drop-kick me over into nosebleeds of unfulfillable desire.

The pieces range from the quasi-affordable enamel Hot Lips rings, in a dark rainbow of shades ($1,500; or a studded-all-over-with-rubies version, $24,000) to the maybe-if-you-just-sold-out-an-eight-year-run-in-Vegas, like the Galactic necklace, which looks like a diamond breastplate King Tut might have given to Elizabeth Taylor ($350,000).

Some popular pieces are pendants: an anatomically-shaped Heart of Gold in 18 karats is $6,800; the Bleeding Heart version of the same, dipped in red enamel, is $8,200.

But this wasn’t the stuff that really got me going. I know sacred geometry when I see it, and there was a whole lot of golden ratios and fearful symmetry going on.

The Platonic line, for example, looks like your average batch of Art Deco diamond creations. Closer inspection reveals more than meets the eye: the blackened gold and bead-set diamonds seem to have been modeled on a sideways variation of Johannes Kepler’s platonic solid model of our solar system. (An ultra-geeky thrill.)

The designer did sneak a couple of Archimedean solids into her Platonic line. (Naughty girl. I bet she thought her shoppers wouldn’t notice an extra polygon here and there.) But I was delighted, because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that there just aren’t enough truncated cuboctahedrons and rhombicuboctahedrons to be found in jewelry today.

The lovely Ms. Campanella showed me her bracelet, a diamond cuff made into the kabbalah Tree of Life symbol. It filled me with such inexpressible spiritual pleasure that I had a nearly irresistible urge to mug her.

ON the subway home, I noticed that the tattoo-esque logo for Solange includes a honeybee sitting in the middle of what looked like an early design by the 17th-century mystic Jakob Böhme: a flaming tetractys. The honeybee, of course, constructs hive cells in hexagons, which, for some people, suggests that geometry has some deep cosmic significance in the natural world.

When I got home, I noticed an enormous rainbow out my window (a nice coincidence, considering it was gay pride day). The rainbow, at least, was free and democratic, and shone upon the gay, the unemployed and those who can afford to buy exquisite jewelry by Solange Azagury-Partridge alike.

So, until we can figure out how to geometrically deprive rich people of rainbows, we must all do as a post on lifelounge.com succinctly put it: Sell a kidney, girls.

SO LUXE The former creative director of Boucheron, whose designs are beloved of rock stars, Vogue editors and movie moguls alike, brings her vast intelligence and superb eye to those fortunate enough to afford her glorious creations.

SOLAR Much of the store’s visual theme has a distinctly pagan bent: white gold zodiac signs, enamel rams’ heads. Ideal for the numerologist in your life, but leave your evangelical aunt in Texas.

SO LOUNGE Ms. Azagury-Partridge also designs home furnishings and richly colored, distinctly Frank Stella-like rugs. It’s all bloody gorgeous and totally out of reach, but I hereby will that my cremains be stored in one of her green onyx ashtrays.

I’m starting 2 new memoir classes in June and there are still a handful of slots available! IT’S FUCKING MAGIC, IT IS.

“Taking a writing course with Cintra is the best investment I have ever made in my career and myself. Cintra knows where to cut and how to find the kernel of what you want to communicate. She will build your confidence, bring out your best voice, and help you write like a professional badass.”

— Amanda Nealon

“Cintra Wilson is one of the best writing coaches and editors I’ve ever known!”

— Phil Beauman (Screenwriter, ”Scary Movie”)

“Cintra cuts through the crap with incisive and inspirational critique that makes you look forward to class all week.”

— Dave Todd

“Cintra’s insight and spot-on suggestions helped turn my second novel into my best work ever!”

— Christine D. Beatty

“Because of Cintra’s expert guidance and encouragement, I have so much more inspiration and confidence in my writing ability. This class is a great opportunity for anyone who wishes to improve their skills, and I guarantee you will have a great time in the process.”

— Laura Dreyer

HEY! So I’m doing the memoir classes again because they are just so bloody magical. People are taking them again and again. Books are forming. I’ve seen some outstanding transformations. You’d be amazed what a bit of undivided attention and feedback will do for your words. Why, just read the stunning testimonials below, dammit.

“Taking a writing course with Cintra is the best investment I have ever made in my career and myself. Cintra knows where to cut and how to find the kernel of what you want to communicate. She will build your confidence, bring out your best voice, and help you write like a professional badass.”

— Amanda Nealon

“Cintra Wilson is one of the best writing coaches and editors I’ve ever known!”

— Phil Beauman (Screenwriter, ”Scary Movie”)

“Cintra cuts through the crap with incisive and inspirational critique that makes you look forward to class all week.”

— Dave Todd

“Cintra’s insight and spot-on suggestions helped turn my second novel into my best work ever!”

— Christine D. Beatty

“Because of Cintra’s expert guidance and encouragement, I have so much more inspiration and confidence in my writing ability. This class is a great opportunity for anyone who wishes to improve their skills, and I guarantee you will have a great time in the process.”

— Laura Dreyer

BE BRAVE. THE STUDENTS ARE SUPER NICE, TOTALLY NON-JUDGMENTAL, AND HERE TO HELP YOU EXPRESS YOURSELF IN WAYS THAT MAY SURPRISE YOU. I’M GONNA TELL YOU NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. IT’S DOPE.

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At a point in my forties, after the demise of another disastrous relationship, I came to a realization I had never quite grokked before at such a deep, internalized level:

Holy shit, I thought. Men really, really hate us.

This hit me with a bone deep certainty.

I had been applying semiotics to fashion retail ads for a while, and I stumbled on a Marc Jacobs ad somewhere - VOGUE probably. It was a picture of a woman in a sun dress. She was laying in the dark in a park with her dress flipped up, her face dirty and her purse open beside her with its contents dragged out and seemingly strewn around her by animals. It looked like the girl had been raped and strangled to death, and abandoned to the elements.

How the fuck does this sell handbags? I asked myself.

Then I got into the psychology of motivation, and I got one of the worst shocks of my life. On some deep shadow level, I learned, men all want to rape and kill us. That wasn’t the worst of the realization. The worst was this: on a subconscious motivational level, women are hard wired to want what men want, up to and including our own rape and murder.

I had just escaped 2 horrible relationships — one with a sadistic French defense contractor, and another guy I’d known since I was 18 who ended up stalking me.

Well, fuck that, I thought. I went on strike.

I’ve spent so much of my long dating life as a doormat for malignant narcissists. Most of them dated me because I was attractive or well-known in writing circles — not because they actually cared about me. For years I felt like I ended up being the projection screen onto which asshole boyfriends broadcast old movies of every woman in their lives they ever hated.

Unless something or someone really shakes them to the core, men don’t seem to have much truck with maturity or emotional development. It’s not something they feel they need, because for the most part, the world, including women, rotates around their bullshit.

So I thought to myself, “Why the fuck am I ‘keeping it tight’ for men?” And so I stopped going to the gym. I couldn’t figure out a single reason why I’d want to work out for myself. It all seemed like another hard-wired rapey motivation I didn’t want to deal with anymore. Why should I be sexually attractive? To attract MEN? I’d utterly had it with men.

I let myself go completely. I started dressing in battered workwear I called my “Lesbian Boiler Repair” look and let my cousin give me a terrible haircut. I put on 40 pounds of emotionally protective weight. All together, it was a look which discouraged sex entirely. A fashion statement that said, “I will bite it off, sailor.”

When I went out to bars I pretended I was a butch lesbian, and found I had some of the best conversations with straight men I had ever had. They treated me like a bro, and I was shocked to find out how nice men can be when they have no inkling of fucking you.

When I interviewed Chaz Bono, he told me the same thing. He was astounded by how nice straight men are to each other. (He also said that since becoming a man, he had little patience for women talking. It became an annoying, chattering sound.)

This battered, wounded mindset continued for about ten years, most of which I spent in bed watching reruns of “Ink Master” and drinking White Claw. I didn’t, at the time, realize I was living a trauma response to repeated and prolonged narcissistic abuse. Bed rot took over, and I must confess I largely enjoyed every minute of it.

A shift slowly started happening, when I did a thorough investigation of what I thought men were and what I expected them to be, and realized that men just weren’t built that way. A male-dominated society and its various rom coms had set me up for emotional ruin. I realized I was suffering from the Cinderella Complex writ large, despite the fact that I have always maintained that a lost glass slipper often contains a human foot. I’ve left my pumpkin coach burning next to the freeway onramp more than once.

Fortunately I have a number of fantastic male friends who I love. They broke shit down for me. I adjusted my expectations and tried to learn how to appreciate men for what they actually are instead of what I stupidly wished they were.

I still didn’t want to work out in a gym anymore though. It seemed stupid and futile — and I was a bushy-tailed personal trainer in my twenties. Gyms and their equipment felt stale, soulless and corporate — the office gerbil solution to physical fitness.

Then, one day a couple of years ago while house-sitting at my scumbag uncle’s beach estate, I took a handful of magic mushrooms. It was one of the best experiences of my entire life.

I realized, permanently, that man is a contiguous element of nature. Nature is not outside of ourselves. We are nature.

This cheered me up immensely. I started walking outside a lot more often, despite my Gothic propensity to avoid sunlight at all costs.

The stuck wheel of my life seemed to slowly creak forward since then, and has been gaining speed ever since.

My opinion of men is largely benign, these days. Those poor fuckers just don’t have the inner strength to keep it in their pants.

My body, however, seems to be making a surprising comeback lately.

I’ve been on the GLPs for several months now, and I have lost over 20 pounds. Not being fat anymore feels like quite the glow-up. I’ve been doing yoga and dance workouts with weights on YouTube in my living room, and walking whenever possible in the tremendous Oakland redwoods, and/or walking the 3.5 mile sidewalk around Lake Merritt. What is most thrilling is feeling my stamina improve. My roommate and I are shopping for a treadmill. It’s feeling really good.

It’s got nothing to do with men, this new affair with fitness. It also has nothing to do with health, since I can’t afford to live to be very old. Now it’s strictly for the negative ions and the endorphins, which, I finally remembered, have a captivating high.

I’m a sucker for captivating highs.

MORE OF MY FRANKLY AMAZING MEMOIR WORKSHOPS ARE COMING UP in a few weeks. Holler at me at Cintraw@Gmail if you’re interested. Space is extremely limited — first come, first serve.

Yeah and then hire me as an editor so it makes bloody sense.

This piece originally appeared in the New York Times in 2010.

LIKE any Frenchman worth his fleur de sel, the new Pierre Hardy boutique immediately poses challenging questions.

Like, where is it?

Monsieur Hardy, an intriguing artist on several fronts, came to shoes after scholarly forays into fashion illustration, dance and scenography. In the store literature, he proclaims that he eschews nostalgia and history, preferring to find inspirations for his futuristic footwear through design and conceptual art.

In an architectural sense, the shop is so understated as to be virtually invisible: a wall of dark topaz glass is inset several feet from the sidewalk, with no identifying markings. This is the kind of cold, tinted slickness generally preferred by military contractors around Arlington, Va. At first glance, the shop might be the front office for an international weaponry brokerage, an illegal plastic surgery cult or perhaps an entertainment law office-slash-sex dungeon. The (presumed intentional) effect is to cause the shopper to question her own validity. Should she potentially corrupt the space inhabited by these rarefied shoes by insinuating herself into it, or should she should let all her credit cards slide from her fingers into the middle of West Fourth Street, lie down on them and succumb to a coma of existential ambivalence?

M. Hardy’s aesthetics of disinvitation are reaffirmed by the fact that there does not appear to be an actual door. Getting inside requires more than galvanizing a certainty of one’s metaphysical being; the determined shopper is forced to hurl her full body weight across panels of amber glass until a secret hinge eventually yields, allowing her to stumble inside, stripped of pride and balance. It is a somewhat Masonic experience; you realize that there were no witnesses to your fall from grace because everyone who works there seems to be somewhere in the back, and it’s really dark in there (and therefore grace arguably never hath left you).

The floors are black leather strips cut and arranged to resemble wood planks; the benches are black powder-coated industrial I-beams. Gray shoebox-size cubes appear to have crystallized like raw lithium formations in corners of the space. This is where constellations of M. Hardy’s signature items are displayed: unisex suede desert boots ($490) and high-top sneakers with Velcro ankle straps, in kicky flavors like heathery flannel, charcoal patent leather, gold lamé ($520).

The staff, once inspired to participate, is particularly lovely and laid-back in that casually hospitable, elegant French way — no fussiness or pretense, and a rather effortless way of dealing with customers.

At one point, I heard thumping and fluttering and looked toward the street, thinking that perhaps a rash of adolescent doves had performed a group suicide against the window. But no. An incognito Andy Samberg and a comely model-slash-actress seemed to be leaving mime handprints all over the glass, apparently having the same problem I had with the Zen koan of the doorless door. We watched in silence until they passed the initiation and lurched inside.

I stalked the couple for about 10 minutes before realizing that despite a distinctly Sambergian hair, face and parka combination, this young man was an imposter, who had obviously lured his comely date into the (Pierre) Hardy of Darkness hoping that the dearth of lighting would cause her to continue to believe that he were actually Andy Samberg.

Drawing my attentions back to the footwear, I began to recognize a theme. Many styles for both sexes featured grommet portholes along the sides, laced through with a leather thong: a Ricardo Montalban, Gucci-style loafer in creamy gunmetal suede, for example, featured a Top-Sider bow instead of the classic business tassel. A variation on a women’s shoe I originally dubbed the J-Lo Desert Storm Bootie, a kind of ersatz combat-Timberland with a wooden stiletto heel, had been whimsically retooled into a tactical boot-slash-boating pump, dysfunctional for both armed conflict and yachting.

It was finally explained to me that I was looking at the Cruise collection, which helped me to appreciate M. Hardy’s masterful redesign of the classic jute-soled espadrille ($660), a Cubist red patent wedge with an ankle strap, designed to elongate the leg. They were so tall, I thought they’d be difficult to wear even in a motel bed, but M. Hardy winds a lovely way about the human foot. Even the sight of my own toes was such a pleasant experience I reasoned that they probably weren’t mine. (It was awfully dark in there.)

There were instances of particular beauty — a collection of evening pumps had tiny suede straps webbed about the arch in a kind of beaux-arts crocodile pattern, sprayed all over with such tiny Swarovski crystals as to appear condensed with dew — but the best of show, IMHO, was a highly versatile pair of men’s black patent loafers. These were stripped down and totally elegant, like a vintage car with what low-rider enthusiasts call a “shave job” — all extraneous hardware and chrome is removed from the car, which is then covered in putty and sanded down to its purest shape. It’s the one shoe I’ve seen that I thought could stroll from Levi’s to pinstripes to tuxedo without breaking stride.

Pierre Hardy offers elite, leisure-class footwear for those with enough passive income to support actual leisure time, and such leisurely delicacies as $520 sneakers. The rest of us may find exiting the store a bit less painful than entering, and live to fight another day.

Pierre Hardy

30 Jane Street (West Fourth Street); (646) 449-0070.

HARDY BOYS Pierre Hardy’s new boutique features nimbly architectural, unisexy footwear for the romping dandies and fatal femmes.

NANCY DROOL Prepare to be lulled into dropping over $500 for conceptual jet-set froufrou that is more decorative than on deck.

MYSTERIES As Diane Keaton might say, the space “has such marvelous negative capability.” Bring night-vision goggles to fully appreciate it.

CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM. Full service editing, all the time.

DUDES AND DUDETTES —- These classes have been absolutely magical.

Amazing people have been taking them, and their stories have been mindblowing. I’m continually amazed.

Come add your unique subjectivity and perspective! Add to your creative community!

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I have a kind of animist relationship to vehicles. I have motor lust.

Once after selling a book for more money than I am ever likely to receive again, I bought a new VW Passat wagon V6 off the lot, for the sticker price, because I was an idiot back then. I was married, owned a brownstone, had long red hair. I did a lot of yoga and wore sport clogs. I don’t know who the fuck I was back then, and remember very little of that entire life episode. I was a totally different human being, a happily bourgeois wife and homeowner. I didn’t personify or anthropomorphize the Passat. It was too grey, too new, too boring. It had no personality. It was merely a car. When I sold it several years later, it was at one of those lowball joints where you drive your car in and they buy it. I took the lowball and hailed a cab. It was wholly unsentimental.

Then…

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I heard the astrologists saying this Mercury in Retrograde was going to be a real motherfucker, and oh baby was this ever a week from Florida.

It must be said that 99% of the time, I had a terrific time touring with Michelle Shocked. I respected the hell out of her talent, I loved harmonizing with her. We got standing ovations in New York and San Francisco. I loved performing “Krapp’s Last Tape,” which is a masterpiece of Irish sarcasm. She and I got along really well until we didn’t.

I left the tour the day before yesterday. We got in a nasty fight at the Benson hotel in Portland, and I hightailed it into the night to the airport and took the first plane home.

Artists are usually unreconstructed mentally ill people, if they’re worth their salt as artists. That’s usually how it works. I’m no exception. ADHD and other shit aside, I’m a crazy quilt of triggers when it comes to…

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Well, I’ve been panicking my ass off about performing “Krapp’s Last Tape.” My plane leaves tomorrow. My first performance — which will be woefully underrehearsed - is with Michelle Shocked in Orlando, Florida on March 5, which is right around the fucking corner with a large axe. My life is being sucked into a jet engine! It will be chaos! The whole thing could be a fucking disaster! Punk rock!

I’ll be keeping a tour diary in this space so watch for it. There is no telling what stories this rock tour rabbit hole will bring.

In my downtime, to calm the fuck down, all I really want to do is watch tattoo shows. I have a passion for looking at tattoos and hearing the stories that inspired them. A well-thought-out tattoo is so personal, it’s like looking at someone’s psyche swimming in a fishbowl. The right tattoo can enhance the body and save you thousand…

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(This piece previously appeared in the New York Times in 2008)

Hey! For those of you in the Bay Area, I will be at Specs Bar in North Beach, SF this Sunday (Feb 22) from 2-4PM, reading some damn thing as part of the “Stranger than Fiction” reading series. Come on out! XXX CW

IT seems that with old, eccentric or artistic people there is a fine line where self-permission is pushed to excess. Sometimes they let go of the rope and allow their whims to wander. This can make for compelling art, a dissonant clang or both: a vertiginous feeling of being divorced from context.

In the storefront window, before a backsplash of beveled mirror subway tiles, a geyser of yellow chiffon ruffles stands powerfully atop a shiny black Louis XV table: cabriole legs astride a field of red lacquer. Behold the mannequin!

It appears that Christian Lacroix had some pent-up creative urges he had been itching to unleash. Perhaps they were ideas better left unrealized, but they’re loose now, and there’s no screwing their froofy fuchsia top back on. His current looks are doing a bad job of aging gracefully. They don’t want to grow up, so they’re throwing a visual tantrum and regressing to 1983. But it is definitely fun to watch.

M. Lacroix, a fashion historian, costumer and master of his own couture domain, is best known for romantic reinterpretations of gypsy costume in hot, saturated colors and clashing prints, and “le pouf,” a short, bunchy ball of a skirt — almost a tutu — favored by debutantes in the 1980s. At the moment, he seems to be indulging one of the great luxuries of fashion design: the creative recycling of past spirits of the age.

It’s a fantasy ’80s-ex-’80s, a heyday where drugs never killed the party and AIDS never ravaged the earth. A flush new look for a life of freewheeling decadence, for stepping out of red sports cars with teased hair and a rolled-up hundred in your lipstick case.

Look out! A tree-frog-green eelskin trench coat.

One display case had tiny yellow kidskin gloves that only reached above the knuckles. Not gloves so much as finger shrugs. Form: yes. Art: yes. Function: not even a little. You might wear them to ride half a bicycle.

The designer has been very busy, explained the demure French saleswoman, doing all kinds of interior design projects: a hotel in Dubai, the Hôtel du Petit Moulin in Paris. I asked her what modern artist the prints were reminding me of, but she couldn’t say. It was a fusion: Willem de Kooning and Niki de Saint Phalle, if they were collaborating on a grade school mural in Mali.

There is a small but beguiling men’s section, with dress shirts in terrific versatile prints for $260. But beware, gentlemen: the suits are ver-r-ry tailored at the waist for a swerve line not seen since the mutton chop and the burgundy formal wear of “The Dating Game.”

I did, however, love the seersucker: black, gray and white. A butch new twist.

I ASCENDED the red carpeted stairs to the area devoted to gowns, a large portion of which seemed to be indulging a Matronly Infant paradox. A washed-out candy-striped chiffon in cream and watermelon ($3,060) would tend to all the human frailties and bourbon fevers of a Tennessee Williams “sisterwoman.”

Lacroix does use superlative fabrics. The silks are silkier. The linens, more linear. You could just see Joan Collins walking away from the pool in a black lacquered hat and that pleasingly thick pair of black dress shorts ($750).

One particular gown stood out: a sleeveless white silk sheath with an elaborate print ($3,400) that said, “I am Basquiat in hell, forced to endure a Sisyphean nursery school where I trace my hand and paint multilegged monster turkeys and get an F, forever. Then these discarded paintings end up on earth as formal wear for rich women.”

Some items were an acute reminder of Mr. Lacroix’s background in historical costume. A French maid-inspired number in black matte satin ($2,025) was perfect for a Merchant Ivory soft-core, but really, it was a French maid costume. There’s only one conversation you can have in that dress, pardon my French.

I was wild about what looked like a primitive argyle seat belt made of tiny glass Lite-Brite beads ... it was $804.

A rack of beachwear hit the right balance of haute whimsy and realistic accessibility. One cotton tunic looked as if Mr. Lacroix had attacked it with a set of felt pens and made an art-brut dashiki for the friendly price of $200.

I tried a fat beaded African bracelet. “Isn’t it wonderful?” the saleswoman asked. “It is like childhood.” Proportionally speaking, it was — a bangle the size of a grapefruit.

While the rest of the developed world is circling Africa like a kettle of vultures, the French seem to be getting sentimental about the aesthetics of their old colonies. It’s a casual approach to the perpetual ransacking of pre-conquered cultures, old icons converted into trendy adornments. Old Gods are rendered symbolically meaningless at the moment that the dominant culture declares them adorable. High fashion 1, Africa 0.

There was a fitted suit that I coveted instantly, a sleek 1940s secretarial thing that I was afraid to try (the jacket alone was $1,380). Happily, it didn’t fit; the smallest size, a 36, was roomy in all the wrong places. I had the same problem with the skirt.

I also tried a long black crochet ball gown in a 38. This fit fairly well but looked disconcertingly like something an evil walk-on character would wear on “Bonanza” ($3,799).

On my way home, a gorgeous woman was dragging herself up the subway stairs, clinging breathlessly to the handrail. Enormous painted eyes, perfectly blushed and powered cheekbones, jet-black hair, black flamenco shawl, black satin dress side-slit up to her hip. She had to be 80 years old.

Perhaps boxing the dusk in the twilight of life is the inspirational purpose of all great men and women. Perhaps the task of a public life is to reach the inevitable self-parody that accompanies this pungent state of persona as slowly as possible.

TOUT À FAIT The designer famous for rich colors and pouffiness sets a new boutique ablaze with a riot of richly pouffed colorfulness.

TOUTEFOIS The clientele tends toward those with a fond a remembrance of Lacroix past — i.e., monochromatic blondes with retro mahogany Bain de Soleil tans and big silk scarves who appreciate sleeves the size of organza football helmets.

TUTTI-FRUTTI Lacroix offers a transgressive visual romp right into a gilded second childhood (case in point: a lavishly finger-painted men’s polo for $200) or at least a chance to do the ’80s all over again with fewer social humiliations.

Theme song: Jack Black!