Confessions of a Goth Girl Turned Lawyer On All Hallow's Eve

I love Halloween. Let me repeat that. I love Halloween. I love the pumpkins on doorsteps, the skeletons hanging from doorways, the witches with cauldrons, the costumes, the candy, and the scent of fall in the air which smells like cinnamon and leaves crushed together.

As a former goth/punk girl (at least my exterior does not show it, inside I remain the same), my adoration for Halloween might be called cliché, or at the very least expected. Mind you, I do not care if I am judged. This is my holiday and I relish it every year, awaiting the sight of the big orange banners tied across the rented storefronts proclaiming that Halloween has arrived. I have even been known to clap and yell aloud to my husband, "Yes, it's here! Halloween is here!"

Every Halloween, I decide on a costume theme and execute it to perfection. Last year, along with my husband and our best friends, we were The Munsters and The Adams Family. I wore a long black dress with spider web sleeves and a long, black mistress of the dark wig. The year before, we dressed as characters from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I proudly twirled in my gold top hat and sequined top with short shorts as Columbia (although I did not tap dance). My best friend was the mad maid Magenta. The year before that, my husband and I were Danny and Rizzo from Grease (I am no Sandra Dee). Before that, we dressed as Alice in Wonderland characters. Before that, super heroes. Every year, it's something new.

I don't know if it is the process of reinvention that I adore, or whether it is the spookiness of the dark nights of this pagan All Hallow's Eve that I react to, but what I do know is that there is something magical about it all. As if everything could change in an instant and transport me into another portal.

As a lawyer, I put on a costume every day in order to have the authority that my USC law degree entitles me to along with my suit of a costume (I feel sorry for those lawyers for whom it is not a costume, because I would much rather be wearing jeans and a punk rock tee most days). I appear before a robed judge on a bench and make requests, arguments, even demands. But, there is a deference I must have. I must play by the rules. Decorum is everything. And, I believe in the formality of it all. It is like church. After all, these are people's lives I am dealing with.

Yet, sometimes, I want to scream and shout in the courtroom at the absurdity of it all or laugh out loud like the Mad Hatter. And, other times, I want to cry over the sadness and misery of it all. But, I do neither.

Instead, on Halloween I reinvent myself. And for one day a year, I get to play someone other than myself.

Dreamland

They tell me I have anemia and they prescribe iron which causes constipation which causes in turn, a urinary track infection. They give me pills that turn my pee orange to dull the pain and make the bladder numb. I think to myself, if only they had that for my broken, beating heart.

A couple weeks ago, I twisted my foot and hit my heel hard on my stairs resulting in fat pad syndrome where the heel of your foot is painful and tender whenever you walk. Taping my feet with athletic tape, I shake my head at myself and go buy Dr. Scholl's sandals and wear them instead of my monkey boots. Welcome to middle age. It should be called muddle age because you're forced to muddle through.

Many of my friends are sending their kids off to high school and/or college. I am still dreaming of a baby. Or at least a toddler in my arms. Lately, I've been dreaming that I am pregnant and walking around in dreamland elated singing lullabies.  Every night at 3 a.m., I wake up from the dream sweating as my pre-menopausal hot flash self and am sadly disappointed. Yet, I am also disappointed in myself for feeling disappointed. Buckle up, I think to myself, you should be used to this dull ache by now.

Still, I feel as if I am living two lives, one in my dreams, and one when I wake up.

Wake up, get up, is all I can tell myself. Accept this life, with all of its limitations. But, sadly, or not so sadly, I have never been one to settle for anything less than what I really want. The reality I crave may not exist, or maybe it exists only in dreamland, but I can still hope and pray that change is on the horizon.

The little engine that could

I think I can. I think I can. Those are the words running through my brain, full steam ahead, as I lay on the table, the probe of the ultrasound inside me. I can get through this. I can.

We can start the IVF process again. All the tests and the probing. The blood work. The estrogen. The shots. The money. All that fucking money. The hopes and dreams. The prayers.

My last ultrasound was horrific. It was two years ago and I was almost ten weeks pregnant after IVF with a donor egg. They couldn't hear a heart beat on the regular external ultrasound so they ordered a transvaginal one. The news was not good. The ovum was blighted, My baby was gone. The doctor told me matter of factly. I will never forgive him for his stoic professionalism.

It has been a long road to start the fertility process again after the horrible miscarriage. A big mistake I made was to allow the miscarriage to occur naturally at home, I am forever traumatized.

It took me almost a year to even feel anything close to normal again. I moved through my days on autopilot. I started having panic attacks while driving. My whole body would be covered in a sheen of sweat, my hands dripping so much water it made the steering wheel slippery. I would pull over and cry. Cars would drive by me going eighty miles an hour probably wondering why someone would pull over on the Cajon Pass. It was dangerous, but I didn't care. I was barren and forty-something. Childless. Hopeless.

I would think, let them hit me. Put me out of my misery. Let me start over, Maybe I would come back as a butterfly. Or as a woman with eight kids. People don't talk about having those kind of thoughts, but I have to be truthful with how bad it was. It was only with the help of a supportive therapist that I got through the darkness and saw the light again.

The light shined straight into my eyes in the ultrasound room and I blinked. The ultrasound technician was very kind and reassuring. As if she knew how hard the process was for me. She was wearing pink scrubs with dogs on them and had frizzy blond hair and Buddy Holly glasses. "Are you OK?" she asked again and again.

I nodded my head and whispered, "Yes. I think so. I think so. I think I am."

Inked

All I could think this morning was, I've inked my skin. I am no longer the good twin.

Yesterday, I stopped at a tattoo parlor in Upland. I had just met my best friend for a late lunch in Pomona after leaving work early. It was a Friday. I felt free blasting a Strokes album driving down Foothill Blvd from Claremont where I had stopped off at Rhino to buy the album in anticipation of their concert in a couple of weeks. I had seen a certain tattoo shop before and almost passed the driveway, but at the last minute I braked and made a sharp right turn to pull into the parking lot. The car behind me screeched to a stop and I shrugged at the car in my rear view mirror.

I sat in the parking lot in my car and changed the CD to hear a Bowie tune, Moonage Daydream, from the Ziggy Stardust album. I felt invincible. Blasting great music always makes me feel that way. I felt younger and lighter. I had wanted a Bowie tattoo since the day he died and had been planning it for months. I thought to myself, l'll just have them draw it out.

I walked in and a punk rock dude with a pierced face and stretched ears said, "Hey." Then he bent his face back down to his work. A woman was laying face down on a reclining chair grimacing as he inked in a tattoo on her lower back. Another guy named Billy (a big guy with arms sleeved with tattoos) looked up from a desk on the opposite side of the room and said, "How can I help you?" Billy's eyes looked kind and that stopped me from running away.

I felt like a poser in my black and pink Bowie shirt. At least I had done my winged eyeliner that morning. I pushed the words out. "I wanna get a Bowie tattoo. The lightning bolt. The red and blue one. From the Aladdin Sane album," I said quickly, my stomach buckling.

His eyes lit up. "Cool!" he said.

I showed him the pictures on my phone and I talked with him and the punk rock boy about Bowie, Iggy Pop and the New York punk scene bonding over our shared obsessions. "You wanna do it today?" Billy said with a smile." My stomach rumbled (my anxiety always starts there first) and I said, "I was just gonna make an appointment. I'm kind of scared. I have chickened out before. Six Feet Under Tattoo still has my Betty Page book." Billy smiled and said, "I got a couple hours, just do it. I can draw it right now. It just feels like a scratch."

I nodded. "Fuck it," I said. "Let's do this."

Less than an hour later, I lay face down, my nails digging into my palms. I had chosen my left shoulder because I have a higher pain tolerance on my back and went slightly larger than I had initially intended. Billy kept saying how great I was doing and I was surprised that I was able to get through it.

As he started the coloring in, I started thinking of my life and my journey from punk rock high school dropout to deputy public defender and I realized that the punk rock girl needed to come out more. I needed to live my life to the fullest and do all the things I was dreaming of. Like tattoos, like writing, like adopting a baby. Life was short. Recently, I had learned that the hard way.

"You're all done," Billy said with a smile. I looked at my back and smiled. I had done it. The lightning bolt would always be there to remind me to be artistic, and true and to reach for the stars.

Just like Starman.

The rock

I have a rock in my chest. I haven't felt this much grief since my Dad died. The world is falling apart. One tragedy after another. The only things that help are writing, reading and my punk rock music.

I just read Gabi: A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero and it transported me away. I got lost in it. Like the best kind of maze of a world, one that I never wanted to end. Gabi's world was so real to me. It was my own world as a young teen in a lot of ways. Chaos. Addiction. Choices. Gabi's story ended with her failing to walk at her high school graduation due to an altercation and suspension, but her graduation and acceptance to Berkeley remained. My high school story ended with me not graduating and watching my twin walk, sitting under the bleachers tears falling on my cigarette after dropping out five units short.

I wouldn't walk in a robe with a black cap perched on my head until my graduation from UCR almost a decade later. Three years after that, I would walk in a gold and cardinal robe to pick up a law degree from USC.

After I finished Gabi's story and put the book down, I opened Facebook and started reading about the shootings in Orlando again and tears swelled up in my eyes. Like an ocean wave, they poured down my cheeks as my husband snored. Is this the world we live in? Or some weird and evil dream?

But I know this is too real. I just want to escape from it. I want to get away from all of the sadness in my world. No more dead brown gay brothers and sisters, no more IRC shootings, and no more mother-in-laws having a stroke. And no more dad with cancer who dies at 69, leaving you in a room all alone with only words. You write just to hear his voice in your head.

Sometimes I wish I could forget my memories. Then, other times, I know the memories might look like rocks, but are really caged birds beating their wings at my mind, aching and breaking to be set free on paper.

By my hand.

The writer's life: a portrait of a not so young writer at her first AWP conference

I woke up yesterday exhausted. Not merely tired. Beat. Run down. Haggard. My feet hurt. My back hurt. This is what forty-something looks like.

Work has been crazy, pun intended. As a deputy public defender, I represent incompetent clients at Patton State Hospital as well as probationers/mental health clientele and it was a rough week with one fire drill after another. And, I had to interview for a promotion.

As a result, I missed the first three days of the annual AWP writing conference, a conference that was in LA, a mere hour away. I knew I should have planned it better and took the days off. Of course, my promotion interview would land on the first day of AWP. And a mandatory immigration training on the second day. Doesn't life always happen that way when you are making plans (paraphrasing John Lennon here)?

That said, I had promised myself I would attend on a Saturday day pass. Plus, I had agreed to man the book fair table for VONA.  So, when I woke up at 6 am I groaned. The weight of my pledges to myself and others heavy on my shoulders. But, I took a deep breath and got up, walked the dogs, drank my coffee and got dressed (which consisted of me tying my hair back and putting on some leggings and a punk rock tee with boots) and got on the road. Sometimes you just have to get the fuck up.

I arrived to the LA Convention Center a little early but not too early. My first seminar was originally supposed to be writing the spiritual memoir but I was too lazy to walk over to the Marriott blocks away so I chose what turned out to be the perfect panel, on sex, drugs, violence and rock and roll in YA. It was kismet. I sat through the panel aghast. It was as if God had made a panel built for me. After all, I am a punk rock girl from the IE who writes in child voice and whose family cursed a lot (I mean a lot, the F bomb was a very common occurrence, no exaggeration needed) and who is trying to incorporate music and YA books into her memoir. I even took a deep breath and raised my hand to ask a question. I felt proud of myself afterwards. Maybe I did belong.

The next panel was a reading by queer and straight mujers and again, it was an amazing experience. My friend Liz was reading and she brought down the house along with the four other Latinas. One woman's story was even about trying to get pregnant as a Queer woman and my reaction to her piece was immediate and visceral due to my own fertility struggles. I talked to her after the reading and it was amazing to feel that immediate connection with another writer. To feel the bridges form.

The rest of the day flew by. I ran around grabbing as many of the for sale books as I could, some were even free. I talked to old friends, made small talk with editors of literary journals, sipped on a beer, sipped on a coffee, ate a piece of pizza in a "We Need Diverse Books" panel listening to a VONA faculty member stress the need for change in the world of all white publishing houses. I manned the VONA table at the end of the day and made a new friend, a fellow Inland Empire girl who has read my work and who loves punk rock just like me.

I found myself, saw myself, motivated myself and began believing in myself as a writer at AWP. It was as if I was being reborn. James Joyce wrote Ulysses about the day in the life of one man and for me, my first AWP conference has that same significance.  It means I am here. For good.

In the weeds

Up. Five a.m. My first thought is that it is cold. Last night, the temperature drooped to a chilly forty degrees. The lack of warmth outside matches my insides.

Yesterday was a very hard day.  The modifier very doesn't even cut it. Most people have no idea what my job as a deputy public defender is like, but yesterday was toxic. The kind of day that made me wonder how or why I do the job I do. Am I a masochist immersed in other's misery? What hole is this filling in me? Does the chaos I have to deal with on a daily basis mirror something that might be familiar to me from childhood?

Or maybe I am overthinking it. Maybe a shit day is just that. They say it's how you react that matters. And I reacted badly. Screamed at husband over lunch about something petty. The negative energy had to go somewhere.

When I used to waitress, I had many bad days. I waitressed for almost ten years. I remember the days in the weeds where you were the only server on shift and the hostess sat eight tables at once. I would run around trying to keep up. I would not let the tables drown me. Rush, rush and more rush. It was fun in a weird, miserable way. Fellow waitresses would run in, often late for their shift. How can I help, they would ask? "Can you get that table drinks and get those people's orders," I would ask in a brusque tone. My fellow waitresses never took offense. They knew my "I am busy" voice. "Thank you," I would later say with a smile after I was caught up.

In the legal world, however, everything moves at a different pace and the decorum is much different. People often take my brusqueness for rudeness. They don't understand that I only know one speed. That I am often impatient, but that I am just trying to not let it all bring me down. And down.