It Happened To Me: I Wrote Bad Checks (On Purpose)
PLUS: Jane's Can't Live Without Product is on major sale!
Hello, glorious people!
There have been such beautiful tributes to beautiful Valentino over the last couple of days, so I'll just chime in with two little memories in case you're interested (and in case you didn't already read these on my socials, such as they are – in any case, this is the less family-friendly version just for you subscribers!):
This was probably sometime in the early 2000s. I was leaving the Costes Hotel for the airport following Paris fashion week. I had been up late partying after the last show the night before, slept through my alarm and was an unpacked mess (what else is new). So I threw everything into my suitcases and ran out to make it to the airport in time.
I stumbled into the elevator, not realizing that I had stuck a pencil in a bun in my hair to hold it up while I was washing my face (actually known as wiping off the drool around my mouth with a wet towel). I had half taken my hair back down, but didn’t look in the mirror and didn’t feel that the pencil was left sticking up from my head. The hair was tangled yes, with I’m sure a couple of days worth of old product in there and just finger combed (a Beauty Editor way of saying that I ripped apart some of the matting and didn’t attempt a brush), so the errant pencil held firmly.
When the elevator doors opened on my floor, I said a warm hi to Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti (another extremely gorgeous soul), who were standing next to each other in the elevator already. Then I turned around to face the front. There were other people in the elevator who I didn't know, so I ignored them. Next thing I know, something was gently placed into my hand from behind. Giancarlo had removed the pencil and slipped it back to me. When I turned around to say thank you, Valentino just smiled and acted like he hadn’t seen anything at all. But those Costes elevators are not large and Valentino was directly behind me. He was so kind and so classy all the time.
Another momentous and profound (sarcastically speaking) Valentino encounter happened during a Fashion Week event he hosted where he asked me to sit next to him (not for an entire sit down dinner or anything, heaven knows! It was a mingling kind of situation, and he specifically asked for me to come and sit by his side for a chunk of it). If you know anything about the hierarchy of the fashion world, for him to put me in that position felt crazy when there were so many other much more prominent and important editors there. I appreciated it and was stunned by it. What a genius and what a gem.
I know those tales don’t live up to the Armani story where I got my period all over my front row white cushioned seat at his show and the stain was still there to humiliate me the next season - but Valentino’s chair’s weren’t white, so I worked with what I had. Anyway, those are my not-very-intimate-or-particularly-revealing-at-all recollections of that wonderful man, so take them or leave them from one of the trillions of people whose lives he made nicer.
And Now For Something Unpolished and New…
Second thing I have for you today is something I promised you, based on reader feedback (meaning one of you wrote me an email about it): I am going to try recommending products and procedures and tips I have learned or made up over the years. So here is my first one and of course it is toilet related. (Sorry, elegant Valentino, for the proximity to your tribute!)
My first suggestion is not for something brand new but it is for something important and that is the toilet paper with the scalloped edges. Its supposed genius is that it doesn’t tear down the middle or do that thing where one side gets pulled off in a little strip while the other is stuck to the core. (Speaking of which, in an attempt to reduce waste, I have always wiped my pee with the core of the toilet paper when the paper part was used up and then thrown the core away. A couple of years ago, I started getting a lot of persistent burning and finally realized it’s because I was using scented toilet paper and that the way they scent it is by soaking just the core in something I’m sure very not good for your vagina. Lesson learned on that but I still do it when the toilet paper is unscented. Like my beautiful exquisite elegant soft-as-anything scalloped-edged Charmin I am waxing poetic about today.)
The reason I first bought it was because it was dirt cheap. Maybe because of a special promotion to get it out there as widely as possible, but for whatever reason, this Ultra-Soft “Smooth Tear” version is also cheaper still now, though a little higher than when I discovered it, than other brands and styles and comparably priced with the cheapest, which is from Dollar Tree incidentally.
By the way, the idea of buying it because of a cheap special promotion takes me back to being a teenager in Durham, North Carolina, which we didn't know was a test market for Procter & Gamble products. If you lived there, based on the TV ads and the displays at all the drugstores, you would have thought that these new tampons, called Rely, made with sponges instead of cotton, were a worldwide or at least nationwide phenomenon. They were being sold at bargain basement prices, so I got three or four boxes at once from the Kerr Drugs at Northgate mall and started using them right away. Well, those tampons were what led to the first big wave of Toxic Shock Syndrome – before it had a name and then was highlighted on those warning pages inside all tampon products. I was one of that initial wave. The skin peeled off my hands and feet for months after taking the antibiotic that knocked it out and I lost a few of my nails eventually, all of this during my first year at Oberlin, but no digits and not my life like a number of the girls who had tried Rely along with me.
That super long-winded aside is I think only relevant here in terms of the enthusiastic hyping of new products where they price them very cheaply at the beginning to get you to try them, and I don't think it indicates that there is anything in the toilet paper I am now in love with that could kill you – but you never know. Proceed with caution if you’re that type of wise person that I can’t relate to. Also, I have considered that this TP is produced by the same company I boycotted for decades after my Toxic Shock incident, Procter & Gamble, so I feel a little sell-out-y about promoting it, but I am telling my truth, so.
I originally bought this newfangled toilet paper because it was the cheapest, as I said, but then learned that it also solves that problem I didn't know I had with that clean-tear technology (other customers apparently think that it still does tear off poorly, but I disagree). And now I mostly adore it because it is so soft (if any of you use Super Strong varieties instead, I am curious why) and, best of all, sooooooo pretty. It feels like a revelation multiple times a day (I pee a lot) to see something that you have only seen in one style your entire life as a whole other refreshing visual delight.
Right after I first started using it exclusively at my place (which will last as long as the prices stay good and as long as you don’t tell me there is something really wrong with me supporting them), I flew out to the West Coast to stay with my amazing friend Courteney. The first thing I did (after saying hi and hugging and stuff) was to go into one of her bathrooms, where I took these pictures of the toilet paper roll to send to my daughter. Because of course Court, who always finds the best of the best, knew about this brilliant discovery too.
Some caveats: Plumbers can forgive me (or thank me!) because softer TP apparently leads to more clogs. And Procter and Gamble still sucks, apparently, for using virgin pulp from Canada’s boreal forests, linking it to clearcutting and habitat destruction.
You can weigh all that but if you haven't yet tried this toilet paper and do so, tell me if it feels as joyously uplifting for you as it did for me. My upcoming tips and tricks will be a little more exclusive and off-beat, I promise. Thanks for letting me get my first one out there.
Now let's read! Or whenever you want to. Rachel's pitch for today’s featured story was another case of me hardly being able to believe that I've never run an It Happened To Me on this topic in all these years. But that's probably because I was waiting four decades for Rachel to tell her version of it, which is perfect. I love the honesty and humor with which she tells it. Go Rachel go! And go, you all, go, too! I love you like crazy!
xoJane
By Rachel Kramer Bussel
The first time I kited a check I’d never heard the word used as a verb; I thought “kite” just meant the colorful things my dad and I used to unfurl in the summer during my childhood summers, marveling as they fluttered through the sky.
But “check kiting” is actually an illegal form of bank fraud. It means writing bad checks from one account to another, and of that, I was definitely guilty. I don’t remember the exact first time I did it, but I know it was the mid-1990s, I was 21 years old, living in Greenwich Village, going to law school, and living on student loans. Those loans might have been enough to cover basic expenses in a less costly city, but New York felt like a magical playground and I didn’t want to be the one hiding in the sandbox (or the law library). I wanted to take full advantage of my glorious location and the freedom that came with it.
I had chosen NYU because it was a top-ranked law school and because New York was pulsing with the same kind of energy I was. I’d lived in a college town, Berkeley, California, for the past three years, and while I had a great time there, I was eager for a bigger and brighter life filled with culture and adventure. I thought I could juggle that with the grind of law school (you probably don’t need a spoiler alert to know I dropped every ball I was juggling in a most spectacular fashion).
I was in for a rude awakening. As someone who’d always done well in school—not straight As or a perfect GPA, but enough to win praise from my earliest teachers and make the honor society in high school, without having to pull too many all-nighters in college—I wasn’t prepared for feeling absolutely lost in the early months of law school. I had graduated college in three years with a double major, determined to get “ahead” in the work world, so I assumed I was prepared for whatever level of hard work was required. And, as with money, maybe I would have been able to buckle down if the Big Apple didn’t offer so many delicious temptations.
I soon found myself blowing off complicated, confusing, and often boring homework involving cases that started to blend together in my mind to go out to the music clubs that were within walking distance—The Bottom Line, Brownies, Mercury Lounge. During my three-block walk home from class to my dorm, I’d take a detour and go to record store Kim’s Underground and Rocks in Your Head and another one whose name I can’t recall, more eager to chat with the clerks about the latest indie pop albums than I was to study con law.
I got immediate gratification from those conversations, a rush of energy and excitement when I got to my dorm and absorbed the new music I’d bought with funds intended to feed my belly rather than my soul. In law school, I felt like one more irrelevant body taking up space, destined to spend my future staring out the window of an office building looking down on New York, rather than on the ground, experiencing it. But during these shopping trips, I felt alive, fueled by a kind of energy I couldn’t name but that animated me deeply.
My role models shifted from legal minds like William Kunstler, an attorney who’d defended the Chicago Seven and written books like My Life as a Radical Lawyer, to bands like Sleater-Kinney, whose Dig Me Out poster I proudly taped to the door of my dorm room. I didn’t want to be a musician, but I wanted to live my life loudly and connect with other people via my words. My dreams of being some kind of pro bono activist lawyer were fading into ones of a creative career so murky and seemingly unattainable I had no idea how to channel it, so instead, I shopped.
When I wasn’t buying music, I was visiting every bookstore within a mile radius, getting lost in the stacks, especially the new releases sections for fiction and non-fiction, hoping someday to find my name on their shelves, or scouring Time Out New York for free art gallery exhibits. There were so many more exciting ways to spend my time than poring over gigantic law books whose contents didn’t make sense and often seemed to go in circles.
Soon I was using my “emergency” credit cards for things that seemed urgent to me, like CDs and concert tickets and books. I couldn’t handle the idea that I’d have to forgo those pleasures now in order to reap the rewards of a graduate degree and a higher earning potential later. Money was a hazy, largely abstract concept to me; I’d had jobs in high school, but they’d been for extra cash, not to earn a living. I knew my goal was to get a “good” job, but I didn’t know exactly how much money I’d need to earn to do that, or how much would be taken out in taxes, or what my eventual costs would be. I was well aware, though, that there was a gap between my trickle of incoming funds and the ubiquitous temptations I didn’t have the impulse control to resist. Because my finances felt so hazy, it was easy to spend and spend until my cards were maxed out.
Eventually, I ran out of credit, but I’d noticed that one day when I deposited a check, some of the funds were immediately available, while the rest the bank was waiting to add to my account until the check cleared. The brain I wasn’t using to study torts or contracts came up with the idea that if I wrote a check to myself, a portion of the money would be available as cash, which I could withdraw before the bank realized the error of their ways.
