Tanya

People often ask me if Tanya is a real person, and if I know whatever happened to her. The short answer is that there was a friend upon whom I based the character of Tanya, and people who knew this real person will easily recognize her in my writing. But that is not to say that any of the stories I relate about Tanya are really true.

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Tanya is a character that I stumbled upon by combining a real person, a friend from a different lifetime, with all of hypotheses I developed about that friend and her experience, back when I was trying to make sense of her. The real person never gave anyone anything close to all of the answers, and in the process of trying to connect the dots I created the character of Tanya as a way of understanding both her and myself, insofar as who I was when she was in my life.

As for whatever happened to her, I cannot be sure. I found some internet evidence that she might be selling real estate somewhere not so far from where I last saw her. But, as is the case with everything about Tanya, if this is so, it is just the beginning of the story. It is just as possible that she is selling real estate as that this is a cover for her CIA identity, or that this is a money laundering scheme that somehow involves the Russian Mafia. Because of this, I prefer to muse upon the Tanya character that exists in my head, whose experience could not ever possibly be as fanciful and full of mysteries as the real thing.

Below are the archives of the Tanya posts I've written. They are not for everyone. I have written them for myself and for those of you in the audience who enjoy hearing about Tanya, and have asked for more stories. Insofar as the stories have any significance at all, it is in this context. They are not a statement about the world, nor do they constitute a politics of any sort. They are fiction. Sorta. So enjoy.

Andy, You’re a Star . . . in Nobody’s Eyes, But Mine

by anna on 11.21.2008

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Andy was a Sophomore transfer student from the Wharton School of Finance at Penn. Not the Wharton School of Business, because that is a graduate program, of course, though to this day Donald Trump seems to confuse the two when speaking of his daughter’s accomplishments. Or perhaps he just hopes that not enough people know the difference, and will assume that Ivanka has an MBA already, which she kind of does, if you think about it, since what better Masters in Business Administration program could there be than growing up with The Donald in the next bedroom?

When you first met him, Andy still oozed that frenetic energy that he attributed to his PTSD from living in Philadelphia. And since you had never been to Philadelphia, you figured this was as reasonable of an explanation as any other. Every afternoon, he would pace back and forth on the brand new industrial carpet of your freshman dorm room, offering observations about the differences between living in Shallow Alto and Philadelphia, talking about Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (which he thought of as some kind of Bible), or relating whatever had happened that morning in his macroeconomics lecture. This was back when Andy went to class, when you both did, and when the extent of your adventures consisted of his tales from the Philly days, where he had procured for himself a switchblade, and where he had met a man who could help him, should he ever need to have someone killed. When Andy brought out his switchblade, you found it peculiar that a 20-year-old from Scottsdale would risk bringing a weapon through airport security at SFO, when you might have been attending school in the safest place in the entire world, provided you weren’t afraid of quadratic equations and all-male a capella groups.

But Andy was different, and over the course of those months, he paced his way into your life, in spite of any objections you might have initially had. Andy smoked Camel Lights, and he did so ostentatiously, out on the sun porch at the end of your hall in Kimball, for everyone entering and leaving the dorm to see. And though you had been smoking more or less regularly since returning from Paris the summer after your Junior year in high school, you never joined him out there. Yours was a very quiet, if not reliably odorless rebellion. It was a war you raged against yourself during early mornings by the beach before going to school or, now that you were in college, over by the Slavic Studies department, where you never saw anyone go, though you assumed they must go, since why have a Slavic Studies department building if nobody ever majored in it?

Andy knew you smoked because you reeked of smoke. It was a tough habit to hide, and other people were confused and annoyed by your efforts to hid the stench. Once, Denise Kahn asked, loudly, in the middle of a French seminar, “Is your perfume like, uh, JUST REALLY STRONG, or something?” And you, humiliated, nodded, even though you had only sprayed the perfume to make it seem less stinky. There was a dirtiness about smoking, and it embarrassed you at the same time as it sucked you in. That was why you did it, and that was why you hid it. You smoked, because you hoped for an early death, and you needed to cling to something, as the song said. These were the days when you went around telling people of your plans to kill yourself once you hit thirty, because you hated life, and why hate life AND be old at the same time?

“Why won’t you come out to the sunporch and have a cigarette with me?” Andy asked you, for the eighty thousandth time. It was an adjustment, smoking had been something you hid the entire time you had done it. Was it something that could or should be shared? You had objected to Andy’s invitations for so long, knowing that he had some kind of a crush on you, and really not wanting to pursue that story arc any further than need be, since he was most definitely not your type and though he made you laugh, you didn’t want him to have any expectations.

But Andy had a way of inserting himself into your life in such a way that after a while you started to wonder what had held his place before he had gotten there. He introduced you to things like putting relish in egg salad, and tabasco sauce on pizza, and smoking because you felt like it, and because that’s what people did. That’s what adult smokers did.

So when you had that first Marlboro Light on the sunporch–because that was what you were smoking back then, before you realized that all Marlboro Lights do is give you a sore throat–when you had that first public cigarette, it probably didn’t seem like a big deal to anybody else. It probably didn’t seem like an earth shattering experience to people walking by, and if they noticed, it would only have been to say, “Huh. I didn’t know she smoked.” But for you, it might have been a little something else. It might have been the first step on a path that was windy, messy, dirty, riddled with stones. And tough, but maybe for the first time ever, the path that was uniquely yours.

And that’s why when Tad, your childhood friend who had attended all of the same schools with you–almost miraculously, really–since Kindergarten, continuing on now, through college, when Tad came over and you told him you wanted to have a cigarette on the sunporch, Andy wasn’t there but he was in a sense. And when Tad said, “You know, the changes I see are interesting. Really. But the smoking, is a little much.”

And you smiled and said, “Tad, I’ve been smoking for 3 years. Where have you been?”

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Tanya: There I Was . . . At My First Real College Frat Party

by anna on 11.14.2008

Not everybody knows that there was a short period in the mid-nineties when Stanford was the school of choice for the former child star. This was just before Chelsea Clinton began her Freshman year, and Jennifer Connolly–post-Rocketeer but long before A Beautiful Mind–was already on campus. Later, you would find out that Reese Witherspoon was an undergraduate at the time, though nobody had heard of her yet. And as far as surreal dorm experiences went, there was nothing quite like the time when you were sitting in the one-room double in Lagunita (where you had been stuck by the vengeful Gods of Unguaranteed Housing when the living arrangement with post-psych ward Tanya was no longer feasible), and Danny Pintauro (aka Danny Pituitary Gland of Who’s the Boss? fame) walked in and introduced himself.

Fame was a thing. Because even if none among the Formerly Famous were at the top of their game at the time, there could be no question that you, whoever you were, would know who they were sans introduction. Danny Pintauro did not introduce himself as Danny Pintauro, he was simply, “Dan,”–unassuming, totally normal and average “Dan.” Similarly, Summer Sanders was “Summer,” and Tiger Woods–had you ever met him–would probably have just been “Tiger,” rather than “Tiger Woods, the Top Amateur Golfer in the World.” And without these epithets–without “two-time gold-medalist,” “First Daughter,” or “the star of Freeway, alongside Kiefer Sutherland,” to reify it–the fame would sit there in the air between you and the celebrity, unacknowledged, but certainly felt by both of you.

What was the protocol? Should you acknowledge it? Was it appropriate to say, “Yes, I know who you are, you’re the little annoying kid from that show with Tony Danza. And, what’s more, I know that you know that I know, because otherwise, why would you come introduce yourself to me in my dorm room? Who does that?” Or did you ignore it, pretend that you were far too intellectual and self-important to have watched even one, much less every single show, possibly multiple times in syndication and definitely once or twice dubbed over in French when you were in Paris for the summer?

So yes, of course you knew, along with everyone else, that the latest addition to the campus’ list of the Formerly Famous was the kid who played Kevin Arnold on The Wonder Years. It was the talk of the town in a manner of speaking. Not because anyone cared about Fred Savage, of course. No, he had cultural currency only because of the effortless witty repartée his presence promised you. Just the thought of the Fred Savage attending classes or trying to fit into the campus community provided you with a list of easy one liners, e.g. “There I was, in my first Constitutional Law seminar,” “There I was, trying to get the SAEs to like me, to really like me,” “Would Winnie Cooper be waiting for me at the tailgate?” &c.

Still, you hadn’t seen him yet, you had only heard OF him, because Fred Savage, unlike others of the Formerly Famous, had aspirations to join the greek system, and so had been seen around the usual places at the usual times. And it was a strange thing, because you had been used to the Formerly Famous acting as if there were no fame to begin with, and even if there was some awkwardness, you didn’t begrudge them their shot at a normal college experience. They went their way, and you went yours. And you presumed they had their friends, and perhaps among those friends they would occasionally speak of celebrity, and what it meant to them, and try to decide if it was a good thing. Maybe they felt as if they could be known by these friends, for the first time, as just normal people. But you would have had no way of knowing, because they kept to themselves.

But Fred Savage, he was different. He wanted fame, and he wanted it in the particular variety that existed at Stanford. He wanted to be friends with the top athletes, to go to the best parties, to date the prettiest women. He wanted to be famous in a Big Man on Campus kind of way. And OK, it might be funny, but certainly he wasn’t alone, was he? Lots of people wanted that kind of fame. But to have it be Kevin from the Wonder Years wanting this fame, this kind of secondary, bizarre and geographically specific fame, was odd. There was no other word for it. Because would he use his real fame, the kind that results in TV shows and B-movies that depict switching lives with Judge Reinhold, would he trade THAT real, dollar-sign fame for the kind that could really only be used to get him past the bouncer at the Phi Delt house?

Late in the evening, on an average party night during your junior year, you would be smoking outside the Sigma Chi house, again, with Tanya. It was a typical Thursday. You had your Marlboro 100s, and she her Camel lights. And she would take out her little powder compact from the depths of her biker jacket, along with the eyelash curler that she carried with her always, and she would begin to curl her eyelashes. And after she finished this, right in the middle of a party, she would powder her nose. And this was for real, it was not a staid euphemism for something else–she was constantly checking to make sure that her nose wasn’t shiny, as if she was the chaste and pristine heroine of a movie from long ago. Except then she would ruin the illusion by saying something like, “You know, the guys this campus are just so pathetic. There’s not even one of them here I’d like to fuck.”

And before you could answer, the crisp white t-shirt in front of you would turn, and respond to Tanya’s claim by asking, “What are you talking about?” With the kind of smirky grin that meant he knew he could change her mind.

And Tanya, annoyed that somebody would butt into your conversation, said, “Who are you?” before she got a good look. Then, as recognition spread across her face, she said, “Oh, you’re Fred Savage. You’re a fucking star.”

And went back to powdering her nose.

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Tanya: The Bold and the Uselessly Criminal

by anna on 10.31.2008

It was the same visit in which you first heard of the unexplained envelope, and together, you and Tanya had been drinking tequila for the better part of Tuesday. And so it was that you found yourselves inebriated by late twilight, the summer break ensuring there would be no parties on the horizon, and therefore no promise of free alcohol within walking distance. Likewise, there were no clear prospects of going anywhere off campus, since driving was out of the question, and besides, you only had the kind of ID that worked at places with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge carding policy. The few bars that peppered the downtown streets of Shallow Alto had yuppie-kitsch names like Blue Chalk and Left at Albequerque and, though many of them were owned by former frat boys, they were hardly interested in risking their liquor licenses for you. Even if you were bringing Tanya with you.

Perhaps under different, more lush-friendly circumstances, you wouldn’t have come to an agreement that it was time to steal the coveted Lover’s Lane sign from the Delta Kappa house. But who is to say how many schemes might have gone unhatched in the grand history of college pranks, without the muse of drunken boredom fueling the fires? And was it stealing, technically speaking? How could one steal something that was stolen in the first place? Certainly it was a grey area, not that this mattered. How wrong could it be to steal from thieves?

The sign had once been government property, after all–a relic from some out-of-the-way street somewhere, probably in the Midwest, that had been stolen years ago by fraternity members you had never met–whom the current Delta Kaps had probably never met, in all probability. That this was a real street sign was clear: it was the standard-issue kelly green color of California freeway signs, and the letters–a bold verdana–were finished in the dotted reflective tape that covered signs up and down the 101 Freeway, all the way from school to home, home to school.

At one point, perhaps the Lovers Lane sign had been visible at night to young lovers looking for a place to park, and to motorists in search of the fabled scenic route of historic Americana. Or maybe it had marked the path to ready victims for a zealous copycat hoping to recreate the Zodiac murders. Nobody really knew. But now that it was hanging in the bar of the Delta Kap house, its government-standard reflective tape was only useful for making the room look extra cool on the night of the Delta Kap’s annual Black Light party.

Why had you and Tanya wanted that sign so much? Maybe its place in the tiny apartment you were to share for a brief period the next fall was the next step on the sign’s journey as a coveted piece of historical contraband? You only knew that it needed to be yours, and yours it would be.

The summer was the perfect time to do it, when there were very few students around, and most of the fraternities rented out vacant rooms to non-member boarders or the occasional conference attendee. The fraternity houses–dank, poorly lit architectural question marks from the late sixties or seventies–were situated atop the small hills on the north end of campus, largely obscured by trees. The location was no doubt useful for boys-to-men hazing new recruits in the spring and fall, but their relative isolation worked against them when it was the middle of summer and there were drunk girls on the prowl, hoping to pillage their pillaged wares. And so, under the cover of darkness, and with the kind of chutzpah that only a thick layer of alcoholic haze can provide, you made your way through the trees and up the path you had traversed countless times, and stepped headlong into your short but impressive criminal career as a thief of useless items.

It was Tanya’s motto to “be bold, and no one will question you,” and in the few times you had found it handy to adopt the policy, it had proven useful. But then, it wasn’t the kind of thing you would use in an every day situation, and who is to say that the cover of your complete, almost shockingly innocent exterior is not what had protected you in those instances? When had you ever been bold, anyway? Cutting in front of someone at a beer line? Turning in a paper when you had never attended the class?

This was different. You would be waltzing into a fraternity house as if you owned it, in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the night, and removing a large street sign that was attached to the very top of the wall over the bar of the “coolest” fraternity on campus. And how was it attached, anyway? Where was your recon on this mission? You had no tools, and no exit strategy, but those were things you would think of later–like in your thirties, maybe–but not now, when you are all of 19 and 3/4s and feeling the fresh breeze of devil-may-care self-destruction on your face for the very first time.

The house was, as you predicted, quiet, softly lit, unlocked. The hallways, newly equipped with handicap accessible ramps for the one pledge in a wheelchair the Delta Kaps had magnanimously pledged the year before, were oddly clean and free from rancid beer smell. What was the half-life on beer stank, you wondered? You marveled at this evidence that, apparently, in the absence of carpet, it was possible to free a fraternity house from beer stank in just a few months. But musing on the hygeine of frat houses was not your purpose tonight, so you turned left, and followed Tanya down the few steps into the Delta Kap bar.

And there it was, alone, unprotected. Could it be this easy? Tanya scaled the bar, climbing on the tip toes of her black ankleboots to reach the bottom of the sign. She could just barely reach it to pry it from the wall.

“It’s just attached on nails, can you believe it? Not even a screw!” she said, banging it down against the wall. “I’m not tall enough, though, it will be hard to balance.”

“I’m taller than you, here,” you said, jumping up beside her. And as you lifted one side off of its nail, Tanya was able to catch the other side as it fell. Together, you lowered the sign to the floor. It was a bigger sign than you had thought. Still, was it going to be this easy?

It was.

And the two of you took it, together, out of the door and into the warm night, marvelling that nobody had seen or questioned you, the thrill of the uncontested theft either unbelievable or anticlimactic, or both, the taste of the conquest whetting your appetite for more even as you stumbled, laughing, back down the hill.

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Tanya: 24-Hour Hold

by anna on 10.24.2008

On the day they came to lock up Tanya, you were wearing those hideous stretch pants you had gotten for free from a friend of a friend, a seamstress in Carpinteria. Deep down, you knew you should never wear stretch pants–even post-lipo–but you did that year, as if the boundaries of the campus also marked the borders of an alternate reality in which you had the kind of legs people would want to see in detail. Perhaps by then you had broken free from the past enough to start thinking that maybe things were possible, and that despite all appearances, they had always been–and if that realization only as-of-yet had translated itself into the choice of inappropriate bottom-half attire, then so be it. Everybody had to start somewhere.

No, it was not technically your fault that Tanya was to be put on a 24-hour hold on the locked psychiatric ward of the hospital. Not officially. But who were we kidding? You were her roommate, and her best friend. And you were scared she was going to die. But it was Cate who told her therapist of Tanya’s living in that 10×10 room, up in a loft, like a caged animal, coming down only to do drugs and visit the bathroom, or to offer evidence of her vampire alter ego’s existence. How could any of you have known that telling a licensed professional of such things would necessarily involve the authorities?

Was Tanya a danger to herself? Certainly. But now that you had ipso facto ratted her out to The Man, there was a good chance that, if she were ever released, she would be a danger to you, Cate, and Linda as well. But most especially you. She had ideas, you knew already, of how to handle such a situation. Tanya had told you on several occasions to signs to look for if you were in danger of a terrorist attack, or a hired hit.

“If you ever come out to a parking lot, and see your car, and the rear lights are broken, don’t get into the car,” she had said.

Admittedly, you were intrigued.

“Why not?” you had asked, not sure if this was a friendly sharing-of-experience or a deeply veiled warning for some as-of-yet-unknown betrayal that you would commit–that Tanya must have half-expected, in retrospect.

“Because, if you take the bulb out of a taillight, and break it, and put it in a gas tank, it will make a car explode,” she explained, in the matter-of-fact tone that was her habit when she was talking about such things.

“Huh,” you said, not sure how to respond.

“I have lots of ways of getting back at people,” she said. “Some of them are pretty evil, though. But when you grow up in Lebanon in the ’80s, that’s what happens.”

And now here you were, Judas in green and blue striped stretch pants, waiting for the campus police to show up and cart Tanya away indefinitely. When they showed up, the faculty liaison would introduce herself to you as Patricia Phillips, a name that was notable not only for its stranger-than-fiction alliteration of “p”s, but also for its proximity to the name of the wife of your faculty advisor.

And so it happened that you stood at the door to your tiny apartment in Kingscote, pilfered Alpha “A” you stole from the TAE house displayed proudly–like the trophy that it was–on the wall behind you, and stared down the wife of the man who held your graduate school future in the palm of his hand. You answered Patricia Phillips’–”Please, call me Patricia, dear,”–questions truthfully, explaining that Tanya was still sleeping, all the while working hard to remain undistracted by the tragic-comic turn the soundtrack of your life had just taken. Did King Missle have a song appropriate to this moment, you thought? “My advisor’s second wife is here to lock up my coke-addled roooommmate,” you thought, it could be catchy with the right people working on it. Where was the damn comic plot interlude when you really needed it? You could have gone for an otherwise boring Hiro and Ando scene, right about then, not that you knew who they were at the time.

After you had acquainted her with the particulars, Patricia ventured into Tanya’s room to wake the dead. And hell had no fury. As Tanya threw things around her room, being made to understand that she was leaving, whether she liked it or not, she shot deadly looks in your direction, demanding to know where her wallet was, and at that moment you remembered the $5 you had borrowed. It was a common thing, you and Tanya would share money whenever needed, but she had been asleep when you took it, and now circumstances had changed, and from Tanya’s perspective, you had taken her dignity along with her last $5. And in turn she would try to take yours.

“There was $5 in here! You took my money!” she yelled, and if she had really been a vampire it was likely you would have been infected by the venom in her voice. You protested that you had only borrowed it, when out of cash, and here was the money back, Tanya! But your explanations were worthless, strewn like 30 pieces of silver across the metaphorical field of your iniquity, the hackneyed, heavy-handed allusion of it all made believable only because you were there. And because it would be you who would clean it all up.

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