To which class do I belong?

While walking the dogs through Prospect Park recently, I had an overall sense of gratitude. It wasn’t to anyone or for anything in particular but about how, after five months of floundering in Brooklyn, unsure of what the hell I was doing, reeling from the craziness of Northampton, and thinking I was pushing my luck starting over again at 53, I’m doing okay. Better than okay; better than I imagined. My work is steady and promising, I have uninterrupted time and peace-of-mind, my life has taken interesting turns, my body feels strong, I adore my old and new friends, my apartment feels like a home, my dogs are happy, even my plants are happy, and I’ve been able to write for the first time in years. And I’m in New York City again. Sometimes I can’t believe I made it back here.

So while I was wandering and daydreaming and thinking about where I’ve been and what I’m doing, I thought about what class I might belong to. I had an idea -- that now embarrasses me but I’ll say it anyway -- that I am a modern-day bohemian. I was pleased with this idea until I did a Google search and found that “bohemian” has strayed far from its 19th century origins and “modern bohemian” is now an aesthetic that reads something like “wealthy California faux-hippie neo-Republican.” I scrapped the idea.

Class is really a mess. And its applications are suspect. If I look at the charts that divide class, I’m closest to Lower Middle Class; however I have more of an education, less of an income, and more autonomy than the usual definition. I also refuse to be ordinary, complacent, normal, marginal, fade into the background, or work at something I don’t care about.

Freedom matters to me more than money. I can’t be a cog; I’m a terrible team player. I’ve tried it. It’s not that I’m an “I don’t take orders” kind of person. It’s not arrogance, it’s that I can’t follow what it is I’m supposed to do unless I have a personal interest, and boredom is something I don’t tolerate. I can’t remember the last time I was “bored.”

Oh, I do remember: It was with my mother when I was about 12 and we were on one of our jaunts into the city from the Valley. We were going to Fairfax, the old Jewish section (if anything in LA can be called “old”), to Canter’s deli and then to Farmer’s Market where they sold everything from fresh horseradish to moccasins. We usually wound up at Dupar’s for coconut or banana cream pie at the counter. But this day she wanted to stop at a furniture store. The store was the size of a warehouse and they sold the plastic molded tables and floral couches cheaply. It was a sea of beige. She flirted with the salesman, ignored me and I was left to wander this deadeningly boring place that offered absolutely no visual or mental stimulation whatsoever. I wound up sitting in the car, blazing hot from the California sun, and crying with fury. I displaced boredom with anger. After that I never went anywhere without a book.

So how does this relate to class? While I’m not a team player, I’m also not an entrepreneur. Well I guess I am in the sense that I’ve started two businesses 25 years ago – personal training and freelance editing – and they’ve sustained me since, but I don’t have the “entrepreneurial spirit.” I’m terrible at self-promotion and I’m not an opportunist. If I make it big it will be because the book I’m writing is a hit, not because I am a Professional. None of the things I am or do fall into a particularly class.

As a personal fitness trainer, I don’t work in a gym, am not "certified" (a marketing scam started about 15 years ago; the field is unregulated); nor do I work with just anyone or many people in a day. I don't make videos or sell products. I started my business 25 years ago when there was no such thing as a “personal fitness trainer.” I was offered money to teach a recording artist what I knew about exercising. Since then I’ve taught others what I’ve tried out on my own body. I know how to reshape a body. I love the challenge. Exercise is a passion for me. I take the “personal” in personal training seriously. That is always what it has been to me. I’m not an industry. I’m not a guru.

Then there’s my education. My skills don’t add up to expertise in one area and my education is unusual: BFA in Dramatic Writing (playwriting) and an almost-PhD (missing a dissertation) in the theory field of Performance Studies. I did all this schooling at NYU in my mid- to late-30s and while the degrees are fairly useless since I’m not a playwright nor a professor, the education made me a more scholarly and well-rounded person. That’s why I went to college. I wanted to learn how to see the bigger picture: how to make connections between concepts; the difference between the disease and the symptom (institutionalized poverty and crime, or sexism and prostitution); the difference between sex and gender, how hierarchies function. I was always a smart person but I grew up in vapid surroundings and just eked by in high school because I didn’t pay attention and never went. (I still don’t know enough about the branches of government or wars or great literature.) I always wanted to go to college.

Early in life I belonged to a transient class: Jews moved into neighborhoods of poorly constructed tract homes in the early-60s San Fernando Valley. There were blocks and blocks of us. The vibe was “fake it ‘til you make it.” Everyone wanted to be something more than they were. We were Jews! The Chosen People! It did not feel like a community of settled people. Maybe it was still soon enough after the end of WWII and the birth of suburbia for Jews to feel like assimilating to an ordinary non-persecuted life was enough of a goal. The feeling in my neighborhood was that one should aspire to be of a better status – though things like integrity, values, ethics, were secondary. Status was about having enough money to look rich regardless of what you did or how you got it. It was all about girls marrying well and boys making money. So instead of being pushed toward an education, I was pushed toward May Co. department store. I learned how to be of use for a man, but not how to balance a checkbook or support myself.

revisiting my childhood home in 2004. The window behind me was in my bedroom.

But class is about access too. My mother has a curious, lively mind, and she took me to plays, dance and music performance, museums, galleries, strolls in Beverly Hills where we could pretend to fit in – but she also took me to ethnically-marked neighborhoods to eat, look in shops, observe people. I’ve lived that way since – with access to culture both high and low, to homes I could never afford to live in, to wealthy people, to restaurants and vacations I couldn’t afford unless I was taken, and so on.