Caca Dolce by Chelsea Martin

Author:Chelsea Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

11

how to bullshit

Because only a very small part of me wanted to move away from my friends and family, I applied to just one very expensive art college, figuring I would most likely not be accepted, and, if I were, I would not be able to pay for it and therefore couldn’t attend. Then it wouldn’t be entirely my fault when I inevitably got pregnant my first year out of high school and lived in blissful, blameless poverty and squalor for the rest of my life.

College was not an obvious next step after high school in Clearlake. It seemed like a rare, special privilege meant only for the special and privileged. From each graduating class of about two hundred students at my high school, ten or twenty went to college directly after graduation. My family didn’t encourage it much either. To us, it was something you might get around to after many years of work and raising children, and even then it was only night classes squeezed in after a full day’s work.

So, out of caution, I remained ambivalent about my future. I was equally ready to leave town and go to college as I was to remain living at home and start my lifelong career at Safeway, where my aunt Helen could probably get me a job.

But I got accepted to the art school I applied to. And found a way to pay for it, sort of.

I got a small scholarship from my high school and a pretty good scholarship from the art school, and those, along with government loans each semester, would almost cover the cost of tuition. I took out a private student loan for $15,000 to cover the rest of tuition plus extra for rent, food, and art supplies. I knew that $15,000 wouldn’t last four years, so I decided I would ride it out as long as possible, get part-time jobs to supplement that money, and figure out what to do when the money ran out.

I had never considered my family poor. In Clearlake, we had always occupied some middle ground between those who I now recognize were extremely poor, which was what I considered poor at the time, and those who were almost-not-poor, which was what I considered rich. In my mind, we were firmly middle class. This delusion was supported by the fact that we were able to rent a house with approximately enough bedrooms for everyone, that we ate dinner most nights, and that we were on welfare only when my mom was pregnant or nursing.

The first few months at art school dramatically changed my perception of where I fit in on the class scale. I was easily one of the poorest kids on campus. Of course there were other poors, like me. These were people taking on massive amounts of debt, who wouldn’t allow themselves to purchase a cup of coffee, and who wore clothes their grandma had bought them before their freshman year of high school. The poors blended in pretty well, though.

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