Caca Dolce Read online

  also by chelsea martin

  Everything Was Fine Until Whatever

  The Really Funny Thing About Apathy

  Even Though I Don’t Miss You

  Mickey

  This is a work of nonfiction. However, some names and identifying

  details of individuals have been changed to protect their

  privacy, correspondence has been shortened for clarity,

  and dialogue has been reconstructed from memory.

  Caca Dolce

  Copyright © 2017 by Chelsea Martin

  All rights reserved

  First Soft Skull edition: August 2017

  “Goth Ryan” first appeared in Hobart; “I Lost a Tooth at Work” in Buzzfeed;

  and “Voluntary Responses to Involuntary Sensations” in Catapult.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952067

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Martin, Chelsea, 1986– author.

  Title: Caca dolce : essays from a lowbrow life / Chelsea Martin.

  Description: New York : Soft Skull Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017009907 (print) | LCCN 2017019518 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781593766825 (ebook) | ISBN 9781593766771 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Martin, Chelsea, 1986– | Authors, American—21st

  century—Biography. | Artists—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A77783 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.A77783 Z46 2017

  (print) | DDC 813/.6 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009907

  Published by Soft Skull Press

  1140 Broadway, Suite 704

  New York, NY 10001

  www.softskull.com

  Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Printed in the United States of America

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  For Ian

  contents

  A Very Special Introduction That Knows It’s Not Actually Special

  1.Child’s Play

  2.The Meaning of Life

  3.Vandal

  4.Punks Not Dead

  5.A Year Without Spoons

  6.Voluntary Responses to Involuntary Sensations

  7.Goth Ryan

  8.Ceramic Busts

  9. A Scrap of Hello Kitty Notepaper

  10.Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker

  11.How to Bullshit

  12.Man-Hater

  13. Trashy Coming-of-Age Story

  14. Romantic Comedy

  15. Zeitgeist

  16. Evolution and Maybe Death

  17. I Lost a Tooth at Work

  18. The Man Who Famously Inspired This Essay

  a very special introduction

  that knows it’s not

  actually special

  Many times when I was growing up, my nana would pull me into her bedroom, close the door behind us, and press a five-dollar bill into my palm.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she would whisper, referring to, I supposed, my cousins, who were the only people who would possibly have been interested in the transaction, and who were usually playing in the next room. I agreed not to tell anyone because I loved and respected my nana, and because I didn’t want to share the money with anyone, and, most important, because I would never have told my cousins in the first place. It would have hurt their feelings.

  “You’re my favorite,” she would often say. “You’re the baby.”

  It was a strange thing to say, considering I wasn’t at all the baby. I was the sixth-oldest and eighth-youngest of all Nana’s grandchildren, landing me somewhere near mid-eldest. I was the first child of her youngest child, which possibly could have meant something to her. I accepted my nana’s words the way I’ve always accepted compliments that I felt I didn’t deserve: I smiled politely and told myself not to take it to heart. Maybe she said this to all my cousins. Maybe there was some alternative definition of the word favorite that I didn’t know about. Maybe I was the opposite of special and this was her way of making sure I didn’t find out.

  I was often singled out by my teachers as an example for my classmates, which always seemed wholly unjustified. I was smart but never the smartest in my class, kind but never went out of my way to help anyone, creative but unmotivated, neither popular nor unpopular, attentive but nonparticipatory, and between one and fifteen minutes late to school almost every single day of my entire life. But almost without fail, I was the teacher’s pet. The one who never got in trouble even when I deserved it. The one who got second and third chances in the spelling bee because my teachers were more willing to believe that they’d heard me wrong than that I didn’t know how to spell a word. I always felt that I had managed to trick adults without intending to, and was fearful that I would somehow reveal my true self to them.

  Every compliment felt like a lie or a misunderstanding. When someone suggested I was cool, I couldn’t help thinking, What the fuck is your problem?

  But it started working the opposite way too. There was part of me that believed that I was the one who was wrong about me, that I just couldn’t see my own greatness from my vantage point inside myself. When I was depressed, or felt like a complete piece of shit, or doubted my ability to do anything, there has always been a small but persistent voice saying, You’re actually kind of great. My self-doubt and confidence became inextricably linked, like a tessellation. One side couldn’t exist without the other.

  “You have so much artistic talent,” my nana told me when I was fifteen, after she heard I was showing an interest in art.

  Oh yeah? I thought grouchily. Name one medium I’ve worked in. I believed she had no idea what my work looked like or what “artistic talent” meant or what she was talking about. I was somehow mad at her for not believing in me in the right way.

  “Thank you,” I said. I realized I believed in myself. Not because she said it, and not because anybody else (falsely, in my opinion) believed it of me. Despite all the concrete evidence I had to the contrary, and despite how embarrassing it was to admit, I believed in myself.

  It has been with this embarrassing and self-inflicted confidence that I have written this book about myself, hoping to expose myself as the piece of shit I am, but also show how sweet and beautiful shit can be.

  1

  child’s play

  I had my first sexual experience while watching Child’s Play when I was six. I felt a mysterious but not unpleasant tingliness in the area that I referred to at the time as my “peepee.” I had never felt such a sensation before. I think it may have had more to do with my position on the couch than with the content of the film, but because it was my first time experiencing the sensation, I attributed it to Chucky, the evil sentient doll.

  I knew that this area of my body was somehow dangerous, because it was the part that was covered when I wore my bathing suit, and I had been told many times that the part of one’s body that was covered by a bathing suit was off limits to anyone but myself and potentially the doctor.

  “Chucky is cool,” I said to my cousin Jenna, who was next to me on the couch. “Do you think Chucky is cool?”

  “It’s okay,” Jenna said.

  I adjusted my body so that a couch cushion rested against my peepee, and when Chucky was over I called my nana over and asked her to rewind the tape for me so I could watch it again.

  “I think Chucky is really cool,” I said.

  After a little
while, I went to the bathroom to investigate the tingling area. Then I felt the urge to pee, so I sat on the toilet and watched my peepee, trying to figure out where the pee was coming from.

  “What is pee?” I asked my mom later that day, after my bath, as she powdered me with baby powder in front of the fireplace. My aunt Lynn was watching Fox News on TV next to us.

  “It’s just waste that your body doesn’t need,” my mom said.

  “Where does it come out of?”

  “Your pee hole.”

  “Your urethra,” Aunt Lynn corrected.

  “It’s not my poop hole,” I said. “I watched.”

  “No, it’s a different one,” my mom said. “You have two.”

  “You have three, if you really want to know,” Lynn said, laughing.

  “You’re silly, Lynn,” I said.

  Jenna and I began asking our nana to rent us horror movies whenever we spent the night at her house, which was all the time. Candyman. Pet Sematary. The People Under the Stairs. The Exorcist. We watched them at night in the playroom, peeking through the blankets we wrapped ourselves in.

  None of them had quite the same effect on me that Chucky had, but they still had an effect on me. My heart pounded for the endangered protagonists. The muscles in my abdomen tightened with anticipation as I began to understand the cues of the musical scores.

  I made myself watch the gory, blood-soaked scenes. I was amazed that images of violence and terror were so accessible to me, so plainly displayed. Watching the scary parts all the way through was actually less scary than covering my eyes and imagining what was happening by the sound effects alone. But as scary as the films were, watching them gave me some sense of satisfaction. I was confronting my fear. If this was what being a grown-up was about, then maybe I could handle it.

  •

  A few months later, I had sex with my cousin Danny. At least that’s what his sister, Jenna, told us we were doing, after she instructed us to crawl into bed and lie on top of each other fully clothed. The weight of Danny’s body pressed against mine, first face to face and then spooning, as Jenna deemed appropriate. She was only a year older than Danny and me, but she had the weary experience of an old hooker.

  “Stop picking your nose, Danny. You need to pay attention.”

  Earlier, Jenna had been mad at us because Danny and I wanted to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles instead of Play-Doh. Then she’d said she knew of a game we could all play together. She had seen her parents doing it and she would tell us how it was done.

  “I have to pee,” Danny said.

  “That’s good. That’s what you’re supposed to do,” Jenna said.

  “Ew! Don’t pee on me,” I said. “I don’t want to play anymore.” I scrambled out from under Danny and jumped off the bed. I grabbed the Leonardo action figure to comfort me.

  I felt deep shame and regret for what I had done. I didn’t understand what sex was, but I was beginning to glean information about it from TV and from what Jenna told me. It was meant for grown-ups—I knew that much—and I was no grown-up. I also knew that sex was gross, even for grown-ups, because my nana would always say, “That’s caca,” any time there was nudity or kissing on television. The phrase “That’s caca” had also been used when I ate a roly-poly in the backyard, and when my cousin Alana had picked up a piece of dry dog poop from the yard and threw it into the sun, smiling.

  And I knew, from the way grown-ups dodged the “Where do babies come from?” question, that sex probably had something to do with that as well.

  I didn’t want anyone to ever find out about Danny and me, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about it. I felt overwhelmed trying to guess the consequences of what I had done.

  “Let’s tell Alana about sex,” I said to Jenna. I figured if our three-year-old cousin started thinking and talking about sex, maybe I could feel less guilty about my own experience with it.

  “Sex,” we said to Alana, closing the door to the playroom. “Say ‘sex.’”

  “Set,” said Alana. “Sets.”

  “Sex,” Jenna said, repeatedly inserting her right index finger into the center of her left fist, our secret code for “sex.”

  “Sest,” Alana said.

  “You’re stupid,” Jenna said.

  “Do you want another haircut?” I threatened. “Say it right.”

  We fashioned Alana’s bangs into a jagged angled edge with some toenail clippers, then handed the toenail clippers to Alana and told her to go into the living room to show our moms her new look. When she wouldn’t go, Jenna and I ran out of the room, yelling, “Help! Alana’s cutting her hair!”

  The next Christmas was The Best Christmas Ever. My family was on some social program that gave us day-old bakery goods and canned foods every week. But that year, we had gotten on a special program for Christmas. We got all the basic holiday foods, plus my gender and age were put on a list and an anonymous family bought gifts for me and my mom and her husband, Seth.

  The anonymous family got me everything I could have ever thought to ask for: two Mattel-brand Barbies (so much better than the crappy hollow plastic dolls I sometimes got), Aesop’s Fables cassette tapes, a bunch of awesome animal-shaped fabric coin purses, a neon winter jacket, a scarf and gloves, and a bright-pink plastic sled. From my mom I got an illustrated copy of The Secret Garden and a new bike helmet; from my nana and papa I got a used book about cats, a cat calendar, and two glass cat figurines; and from Santa I got five VHS tapes with home-recorded animated movies complete with commercials, just like the ones my nana sent me on a regular basis, and were even labeled in my nana’s handwriting. Which is all to say that I was a little suspicious about Santa. My gut told me that the grown-ups were exaggerating his generosity and/or his ability to coordinate the entire holiday by himself. Maybe he had to work with the grown-ups to get gifts. Maybe I had been a little too eager receiving my nana’s homemade VHS tapes, and they had taken my enthusiasm to mean that I loved homemade VHS tapes over all other toys. Maybe my nana had intercepted Santa, said something like, “I got this one. Take care of the other children.”

  My friend Tanja had gotten Barbies for Christmas too. She lived in the same apartment complex as my family, so we were allowed to hang out much later than we were with our other friends.

  Her family was very modern. Tanja introduced me to snack foods I had never heard of, like Corn Nuts and NutRageous, and her mother allowed us to bathe together, something I had never done with a friend before. After the bath, Tanja and I were also allowed to play with our toys until my mom came to get me.

  I was always a little hesitant, with new friends, to make my Barbies have sex. I would dance around the subject, make them hold hands and kiss, but Tanja’s Barbies always started having sex in the first two minutes of play.

  “They’re having sex now,” Tanja said, laying the Ken on top of the Barbie.

  “Are they going to have a baby?” I said. “Having babies” seemed like the sexiest thing in the world to me.

  “No,” she said. “It’s casual sex.”

  Sometimes the word still brought a sudden unshakable sense of doom. My whole body blushed with shame.

  I had sex with my cousin, I thought. I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands for a few seconds to make the thoughts go away.

  •

  My mom and I visited Jenna and Danny’s family after Christmas. They had moved to Oregon and I hadn’t seen them in several months, and I was thrilled to be able to play with them again. They had had a depressing Christmas, my mom told me, so I wasn’t supposed to talk to them about the gifts I’d gotten from the anonymous family.

  My cousins and I went outside to throw a Frisbee and play with the dog while the grown-ups made dinner.

  “Remember when we did it?” Danny asked me when Jenna had run away from us to fetch the Frisbee.

  “No,” I told h
im. “We didn’t do it. Never talk about that. Never say that to me again.”

  “Okay, but you do remember, right?”

  “No. I’m not talking about it.”

  Danny mentioning it made me feel much worse. It was confirmation that it had actually happened, and wasn’t merely a realistic dream that I couldn’t shake. I didn’t yet know the words pervert or deviant, but I felt them innately. I was caca. I was gross and bad and everyone would know that, if I didn’t hold on to this horrible secret forever.

  It would be easy, I told myself. It had been so easy to pretend all day that I hadn’t gotten such wonderful gifts from that anonymous family. It was easy to pretend that nothing had happened, that I was neither lucky nor gross.

  But the more I tried not to think about it, the more I thought about it. I worried Danny would tell someone, that my mom would find out, or that maybe she already knew. Maybe she already knew I was caca and didn’t love me as much as she used to. Maybe she thought less of me for not having the bravery to tell her.

  “I had sex with Danny,” I said to my mom a few days later. It came out suddenly, surprising me. It had been on my mind constantly, a dull, unrelenting nausea, and I couldn’t bear the thought of feeling that way for the rest of my life.

  I described what I had done, what Jenna had told us to do, how she had stood by the door to make sure her parents didn’t come check on us, and that I didn’t think I could ever forgive myself. I wished I would cry, to emphasize the point that I hated what I had done, that

  I felt bad about it all the time. But no tears would come.

  “It’s okay,” my mom said, trying not to laugh. “That’s not sex.”

  I considered initiating a hug but changed my mind.

  “Next time just say you don’t want to do that.”

  2

  the meaning of life

  I was lying under the swings in my backyard, throwing a swing up into the air and letting it fall toward my face before it sprang back up by the power of some mysterious gravitational force. I was trying to desensitize myself to the surprises of the world, equipping myself to resist what I felt was an embarrassing instinct to react to my environment and other people without logically deciding how to react.