Pretty Baby: A Memoir by Chris Belcher

Author:Chris Belcher [Belcher, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982175849
Publisher: SimonSchuster
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

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It’s hard to tell when the seasons change in California, but the days got longer, spring semester seminar papers were coming due, and I got an acute feeling of summer on the horizon. I called the graduate school, just to be sure I’d gotten it right. They confirmed that, yes, May was it, my last paycheck until we returned in the fall. And it would be half a month’s pay at that, same as August. They weren’t responsible for me in the summer; I was on my own. I hung up the phone and calculated rent, car payment, and insurance—that was more than half my regular paycheck—not to mention my phone bill, internet, credit card payments, and food. I stopped bringing my course readings over to Catherine’s and started applying for jobs instead.

In April I got one, at a fancy, new coffee shop in West Hollywood. The other baristas already knew what they were doing. One had trained with a man who’d competed in the World Barista Championship. I had no idea that coffee shops were cutthroat—I couldn’t afford to hang out in the fancy ones—but the owner said that if I proved I could pour milk onto espresso with a hand steady enough to draw a heart, or a little leaf, after a month of training, I could stay. I wasted gallons of milk practicing. On my day off, after receiving my first paycheck, I stood in the line at the social services office downtown with a copy of my bank statement to prove myself eligible for food stamps. Somehow, I still felt upwardly mobile.

At semester’s end, I took a bus from my place to the public university across town. I planned to do some research for an end-of-term paper, but fertility agencies had plastered advertisements all over the women’s restrooms, knowing they could cash in on a crop of desperate students like me who needed to pay their summer rent. This was the difference between public and private school, I thought. I had never seen a single flyer for egg donation at the private university I attended, and I spent the day researching how to sell my genetic material instead.

I was twenty-six at the time—still young enough, but just barely. I may not have attended an Ivy League college—a big plus on donor applications—but I had somehow landed myself in a PhD program with other women who would have had no trouble selling their eggs. Maybe that’s what they would put on my profile: Donor pulled herself up by her bootstraps. I left the library and made an appointment for a consultation.

Days later, I walked into a Beverly Hills office in business casual like it was a job interview. I filled out a form promising that I could forego drinking and smoking for months on end, and that I hadn’t had a recent chlamydia infection. I lied and said that I hadn’t engaged in prostitution in the past five years, since that day with Tony was apparently disqualifying.

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