Tag Archives: memoir

“This,” He said quietly as he got onto the bus, “is cool.”

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Every couple of years this comes up.

In 1991, I was sitting in drama class with the person I most looked up to in early high school, and we came up with some truly bizarre, baffling, high-energy situations to share with our friends. It was a tale that couldn’t be told by one story. It needed three stories. It needed “Three Stories in One.” Since I made a noble effort of illustrating the whole thing, getting distracted at fifty-six pages, I have a clear idea what they look like, and I like to revisit them. I can’t just pick up the last 10-15 pages because comparing my style to the style I had seventeen years ago is like asking Michelangelo to fill in some of the gaps on a cave painting. I’m proud of the work I did, but I’ve made some improvements.

This time, I thought hard about these faces as I worked on them. Since everybody’s based on a real person, I concentrated on features I remember most and spent a lot of time erasing. Luke didn’t look like that. Amber didn’t look like that, and Wendy didn’t look like that, except for the parts that totally did. Amber smiles with her eyes (still does), Wendy always looked annoyed at me—but with affection. Luke was robbed for the Best Dressed in the Class of ’93 (I mean that sincerely). Naturally, Jeremiah looked exactly like that in 1991. Boone really did have that playful smirk when she was up.

And now we need to have a quick word about Boone. A few years ago, Boone transitioned into Severian, a woman. I have not spoken to her as a woman, I have not even seen photos. I’m not even sure I got her name right. The only conception I have in my mind of Severian is when she was presenting as Boone, and the only reason I know about the transition at all is because one of our mutual friends chewed me out for dead-naming her in my last “Three Stories in One” post. Once I knew, I don’t refer to her as Boone anymore.

Last summer, I presumptively wrote my memoirs, each chapter representing the most influential figures in my life. And she was, without a doubt, going to be a very important. I did not dead-name her once, not even in my first draft. I believe that you should be who you need to be. A trans woman is a woman, period.

That said, I’ve spent a lot of time debating this in my head, and I’m not going to change Boone’s name or gender in “Three Stories in One.” The reason I won’t is because Boone is not Severian. Boone is a character based loosely on Severian when she was sixteen. While Severian was throwing bullets at elaborate Lego constructions with her buddy, Matt, Boone was picking up cheerleaders and playing meaningless board games with them.

On the same token, Luke is not a complete bastard, only kind of a bastard. Wendy was not a good driver back then, but at least she wasn’t driving her sweet Karmenn Ghia like it was the Batmobile. Amber was perky, but she was more than just a smile and the attention span of a hamster. (What I remember most about Amber was how kind she was to me. The popular girl treated me as just another student she was on a first-name basis with, not a nerd on the lowest rung.) And if I suddenly found myself, on my bike, in the middle of the Indy 500, I’d be a smear. At the risk of grandiosity, “Three Stories in One” is a historical document.

To be clear, if Severian tells me that “Three Stories in One,” particularly my decision to leave Boone as is, is offensive to her, then I’ll stop making these posts. I hope she doesn’t. I hope she appreciates it for the playful, teasing nostalgic spirit that went into these illustrations.

I’m not George Lucas. I tend to let things go when I’m done with them, but sometimes present circumstances demand that you change the past. Once again, I’m not going to. They were a product of their time.

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Trigger Warning

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This post has a pretty big trigger warning on it, for reasons that will become apparent very quickly in the next paragraph.

This past Thursday, during my commute home, so about four o’clock, I was sexually assaulted on the DC Metro. I won’t tell you exactly what happened because I’ve been reliving it pretty steadily for the past week, and I don’t feel like immortalizing it. I can tell you what happened after. I was in a crowded train, and I screamed at the guy, and nobody saw or heard a thing. They didn’t mind looking at me until I looked back, then it was the floor or the person next to me. I was sexually assaulted in front of dozens of people, and no one saw anything. 

My attacker sat down in the closest available seat and stared at me, who was standing by the door. When a couple got between us, he changed seats, moving through the crowd like he wasn’t even there, his eyes always following me. I knew right then that this guy was going to follow me home. Sure, I picked this place because it was right by the stairs to the mezzanine at my stop, but there was only one exit, a long escalator ride, and no Metro personnel in the station at all. This guy could assault me again or worse, and no one was coming to help me. When we reached my station, I waited until the door was closing, then I slipped out and went home.

I still spent most of the evening with the blinds closed, hoping that he didn’t backtrack to my stop to find me. When I woke up the next day, I wondered if he wouldn’t be waiting at my station for me when I would have to go back to work on Tuesday. Maybe he remembered which train I was on and which car I’d chosen, and he’ll be waiting for me when I get out of work. 

I feel like I should underscore how utterly alone I felt when I got home Thursday. I was the only other person in a crowded train car, and when I thought about who to talk to about this, I was reminded that I had no one to talk to. I have texting friends, and I reached out to a few of them, and they got back to me after an hour or so. Nicole was in bed in Romania. I called my mom, which I’d rather have avoided, but I had to speak to someone with a voice. One of my friends did call me several hours later, and she was a godsend, but for the first hour or so after the incident, I was on my own, and I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. 

With the exception of the few of the friends I’d reached out to on Thursday, as well as an HR rep I spoke to on Friday, I hadn’t told anyone about this. I’m not ashamed—violated, but not ashamed. This wasn’t my fault. The reason I’m avoiding it is because I hate how everybody looks at me. I hate the catch in their voice when they process it. They’re not doing anything wrong—it’s a natural reaction to hearing something awful like this. But I still hate it. 

I felt alone on the Metro. I felt alone at home. And I felt alone because I’m a man. This is not someone who believes that men have it worse than women, but they don’t warn a guy this could happen, do they? No, they don’t. In fact, unless it happens to you, the only thing you are likely to hear about male sexual assault is how goddamned funny it is. From “Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison” in Office Space to Ving Rhames getting hilariously raped in Pulp Fiction, to little kids make dropping-the-soap jokes, male sexual assault is fun for the whole family.

Victims are made to be overly feminine, like the “bitch” trope in prison (Ben Kingsley had a bitch in a Marvel short that can be seen on Disney+)    . The reason why is that a real man would never let that happen to them. Fuck that, I don’t want to be a real man. Real men are assholes. Besides, what was I going to do? Was I going to punch or kick the guy into unconsciousness? Wrestle him down and present him to the non-existent Metro cops? What if he had a knife? What if he kicked my ass back even harder? I couldn’t count on concerned citizens coming to the rescue, that’s for sure. 

I’ve chosen not to go to the police with this. It will accomplish nothing. I left him on a Maryland-bound train. I don’t have any details on the train itself that would lead them to the guy. The suspect was wearing a Covid mask, a hat, and a black parka. In this city, he’s invisible. They will never catch him, there will be no justice, and he’ll do it again. But I will not spend hours in the station telling and retelling my story to be the thing they joke about in the break room. My HR rep is kind of angry with me for this decision, and she spent most of Friday trying to talk me out of it.

I don’t spend a lot of time wondering what I did wrong because I didn’t do anything wrong. He came from blind corner behind me. He didn’t make a sound. There was nothing I could have done to prevent it, which is both a relief and a reason to be terrified. (On Friday morning, when I was still paranoid, I asked myself aloud, “Is this what it feels like to be a woman every day?”) I’m an overweight, forty-six-year-old, pale dude. This could happen to anybody.

But what makes me really sad is that I don’t really put a lot of thought into my appearance anymore, but on Thursday, I put in the effort. I wore a dress shirt that matched my beloved sweater vest and my business casual shoes, and I braved the frigid air walking from the train to my office because I knew that, when work was over, it was going to be the perfect weather for my corduroy blazer, and I looked good and I felt good, and I never want to wear those clothes again. There’s the part of me that notes it was the one thing I did differently that day. No, I don’t think the person who attacked me was attracted to me. This kind of thing isn’t about sex. It was about scaring me, and well done, sir. 

It’s not the physical act of what he did that has kept me trapped in my apartment for the past week, it’s the helplessness. The things I thought I could count on to stay safe—bright lights, public spaces, crowds, back to the wall, all failed me. And the recent break-in showed us that you can lock the house all you want, but if the locking mechanism fails in one of your windows, they’re coming in.

I’m grounding myself by writing a novel about the oldest characters I’ve created and reteaching myself how to ink and preparing for my inevitable comic book, but this weekend, I couldn’t. A lot of the initial horror of what happened has faded, and I was able to go out and buy a latte (I was concerned that the barista was my attacker because he was the same size and skin tone to my attacker) Mostly what I have is mild agoraphobia, and I don’t know if I could do that again. 

I’ll be fine. I’ll work from home this week and see if I can use the Metro again soon. There was a bit of a tug of war between my supervisor and HR about this, including the question, “Can you Uber into work?”; which stunned me in its tone-deafness, but HR won. My supervisor was demanding more information, and I think she was looking forward to having something to gossip about. I’ve discovered that I’m less willing to let things in my apartment slide. If my socks don’t both make it into my laundry basket, I now pick up the stray immediately, as opposed to letting it enjoy its freedom for a couple of days. There’s been little housekeeping projects I’ve been putting off that are now getting done.

Don’t worry, I’ll leave the apartment again. I’ll ride the Metro again. I won’t be watching out over my shoulder anymore. It might take a while, but I’ll be fine again. I got two cats counting on me.

Don’t You Know That You’re Toxic?

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I smoked an average of twenty cigarettes a day from October 1994 to May 2007. I was not a person who smoked, I was a smoker. And I was all in. I’d had a total of three Zippos in my life, and I had a hip pocket devoted to pack and lighter (currently for the cell phone). I followed the lead of top intellectuals like Denis Leary and sang the praises of smoking. And while I became much less of an evangelical about tobacco after cancer took a beloved aunt, I still enjoyed it.

I tried quitting, but I never wanted to, so every attempt was a failure. Sure, they made you cough, and sure, if enough time passes without having one, you turn into the Incredible Hulk. Sure they turned my fingers and teeth yellow, and sure they were just pumping carcinogens into my lungs, I wanted to keep doing this. I was young. I was immortal.

I enjoyed the taste of the filter on my lips. I enjoyed the pageantry of lighting a cigarette. When I was in college, anybody I knew who had a Zippo pulled elaborate stunts with them to light a cigarette. Not me—I flicked open the lighter, ignited it, lit the cigarette, and flicked the lighter closed. It was out and back into my pocket in less than five seconds. According to some, my technique wasn’t necessarily the coolest, but it was up there. I enjoyed a cigarette in my hand. I wasn’t so much holding a cigarette, as much as the cigarette was an extension of my fingers.

I was the kind of person who would say things like, “You want a cautionary tale about smoking? I bring you George Burns.” (To my Hastings College contemporaries, substitute “Darryl Lloyd” for “George Burns.”) At the time of my being the most militant about smoking, I was no better than any Trump fan. Give me irrefutable proof that the tobacco corporations were breeding and cultivating the perfect piece of toxic waste to make you keep sticking toxic waste in your mouth until you died, and I’d make up excuses. I can’t remember any of the excuses because when I had my epiphany about them (several years after I quit), I purged every single positive thing I could say about big tobacco.

I didn’t quit smoking because of the horrible things it did to me. I found out about the horrible things it did to me because I quit. For example, I’ve never had a masculine musk, and I do sweat a lot, but in the middle of August with the A/C broken was Drakkar Noir compared to how I smelled as a smoker. You can’t smell yourself when you’ve caused permanent damage to the inside of your nose. When it grows back, and a smoker is nearby, you know it. You know it before the get within ten feet. It was a Doppler effect with smell. I smelled like that. All. The. Time. How could anyone stand to be around me? How were women ever attracted to me?

I have been a non-smoker for fifteen years. I can’t say I haven’t smoked in fifteen years because I’d had two cigarettes since, a little over ten years ago. They were both really horrible, and I have not wanted to go near one in the past twelve years. One of the cigarettes was a blatant attempt to start a conversation. It worked. Cigarettes used to be really good for that. I had a lot of friends whose relationship with me could withstand five-to-ten-minute bursts every hour, and that was about it. Smoking was a solitary or a social activity, depending on how you were feeling that day. There was something magical about that. I wanted to capture that.

I was full-on smoker when I created a number of my enduring characters, and as a result, many of them were full-on smokers—in the stories I wrote during that thirteen-year period of my life. In stories I’ve written about them since, they’d either quit, or I’d completely forgotten about the smoking thing. I wrote one story last year where I paid lip service to tobacco for continuity’s sake, but otherwise ignored it.

Smoking is intertwined through much of my early oeuvre, but it’s not crucial to the story. I only call attention to it as a set piece of something cool happening. (Girl puts a cigarette out in boy’s coffee. Boy, eyes on the girl, drinks the coffee.) I’ve started writing scripts set in the time period where most of these characters would have been smokers, and I’m choosing not to write the smoking. The way I see it, I have three choices.

One: I can add tobacco to the contemporary stories. It wouldn’t be hard because I’m still in the draft phase, and I’ll be going over them several more times.

Two: I can go back into the classic stories, some of which have been quasi-published, and strip the smoking out. That would mean removing non-essential but still fun scenes and exchanges. The boy meets the girl when he creeps out while bumming a cigarette from her. This is the most important relationship in this series of stories. So I’d have to completely rewrite it.

Three: Or, I could leave the smoking in the classic stories and not include it in the contemporaries. I don’t have to explain it. Let the smoking and non-smoking characters be alternate universes. Whatever. The important thing is, this requires the least effort. Why do I want to be giving this vile habit anymore thought than I’d already put into it?

The world is evolving, and I am there for it. Popular opinion has turned against tobacco, Homosexuals have the same marriage rights as the rest of us. You cannot function without a cell phone now. The creator of the most beloved contemporary series of children’s novels is currently on blast for being anti-trans. Dr. Oz is not Senator Oz. The legalization of cannabis in New Mexico kind of ruined the screenplay Shane and I wrote about the hunt for a vicious pot dealer on the Navajo Reservation. It took us days to figure out how to fix that.

There was a time, not that long ago, when public opinion was generally cool with cigarettes. I used to smoke in my dorm room. You could smoke while you were eating at restaurants. There were ashtrays in hospital waiting rooms. Can you imagine? That’s when these characters were born. And while some of these stories have been rewritten from the ground up (one twice), they are still a product of their time.

I am definitely going with option three, for nostalgia’s sake.

Totally Sketch

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When I was 22, I decided to learn how to draw. I started with stick figures, then I started fleshing them out. I learned to ink, and eventually I even learned to color, first with markers, then with watercolors (with pastels when I was feeling it. It took years for me to draw a decent person, but at the time, I was so excited with every breakthrough I made. I illustrated two comics of my own and two comics for a pair of untalented writers. I gave up on drawing comics, but I illustrated 56 pages of Three Stories in One.

But in 2015, a few months after we got back from Doha, after all the excitement of finally being home after so long, I crashed, and I stopped writing and drawing. When I got my mojo back, I tried drawing again, and I got frustrated. I went through looking at the stick blobs I would get so excited about to every imperfection completely ruining the art.

The joy I found in the act of drawing and painting was gone. I created for the destination, not the journey. I also ran into the problem of what I want to draw. I had no inspiration. I still did my yearly self-portrait, and maybe for about a week or so, I’d get a wild hair and make some stuff. It’s been 2 years since I’ve drawn for fun.

I just treated it as a thing I don’t do anymore,’like drinking too much or watching rock concerts at crowded bars. I’ve been encouraged to pick it up again—my parents ask after the art nearly every time we chat.

Slowly, over the course of weeks, I thought about what I could do to jumpstart that again. I found references, I bought a sketchbook that I could live with if the paper was being torn by an eraser.

I thought, if I learned how to draw with a pencil and eraser, then by God, that’s what I was going to use. I had sacrificed precision for speed, and I was going to use that. If I wanted to skip to the completed drawing, then I was going to take my time, erase some things.

Saturday, I said, “It’s time.” I sat with my sketchbook for an hour, learning to draw faces and figures from the ground up. I repeated it on Sunday, same thing with the eraser.

I feel like the old prizefighter training to get back into the ring.

Blackjack Anniversary

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My neighbors are all women in their late twenties, and they have the priorities people their age have, like dating and FWBs. We have a picnic table in our backyard, and they like to hang out there when the weather is good, sometimes with the company of gentlemen callers. A handful of times, when I’m taking out the trash, they will invite me to sit with them. A handful of those times, I’ve taken them up on it. I never say anything, I just listen.

On one occasion, the subject of September 11 came up. They weren’t kind. They treated it as an overrated, overhyped spectacle that people needed to get over. If I really wanted to make them awkward, I could have told them where I was that day, but I’d probably no longer get invites to enjoy their show. Plus they’re kids. When I was twenty-seven, I wasn’t a kid, but twenty-seven-year-olds now are kids. Prior to September 11, 2001, I was pretty flippant about Vietnam and the people affected by it.  

I wasn’t offended, and that’s because I’ve been writing a novel where two twenty-six-year-old women fall in love. They’re in Battery Park, New York City, and the subject of the 9/11 Memorial comes up, and it occurred to me as I was writing that the Twin Towers on fire looked just like a movie. If you were a kid, say five years old, when this happened, how would you be able to tell the difference? Maybe I should ask a Baby Millennial/Geriatric Zoomer.

My main character: “September 11 is Generation X’s defining moment, like Vietnam was for Boomers.”

Love Interest: “What’s the Millennials’ defining moment?”

Main Character. “Look around. Take your pick.”

If disaster and disaster came my way just as I’m becoming an adult or trying to settle down with my young family, and if the people in power don’t represent your viewpoint anymore and are legislating hard against people like you, somehow two buildings falling down doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

September 11 is old enough to drink or, in select states, purchase cannabis. What’s happened is that it, like every memory, grew hazy with time. September 11 was bad, but twice as many Americans died in Iraq fighting a war that was proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be manufactured by people who profited immensely from it and were never punished. Almost that amount died in New Orleans when a hurricane they should have been prepared for ravaged a US state, and many more died because relief efforts were so poorly planned. And so on, to this decade, when a virus spread through the country, killing almost a million people, which could have been contained if leadership wasn’t incompetent. Now we have mega-billionaires bending the country to their will and a reactionary minority preparing to take rights away from all of us.

All that in mind, what does 9/11 mean to me? It’s not the worst thing to happen to this country in the past thirty years. Why do I feel something heavy in the pit of my stomach every time I see the date on a calendar? Is it because I was there? Because everybody’s memory of September 11 is one tower burning while a plane crashes into the second, while mine is from a different angle, on the ground, looking up buildings so tall, you couldn’t see the top, now covered in flames and smoke.

My experience with COVID was disappointing, to say the least. I was hoping to be bedridden for a few days, but all I got was a headache. But twenty-one years ago, for about four hours in the morning, the world was on fire. Strangers would grab you and yell in your face that they destroyed the Pentagon! They’re taking out the bridges! And the guilt. I actually believed I could run in there and help people. I didn’t care how or what I did, I thought I could help. Instead, I ran. I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, but that was probably the smartest.

This essay doesn’t have a clear thesis. Like September 11, there’s no lesson to be learned here. It reveals nothing about our humanity. My generation likes to think they’re jaded, latchkey kids who’ve seen it all. But we were spoiled. America won the Cold War and was riding high when we were young. We were the punching bags of the Boomers until Millennials came along with their avocado toast, and that’s really as bad as it got for us collectively. (Individually, I know a lot of Gen-Xers who’ve suffered unfairly in life, but as a whole, we’ve done pretty well.) Our innocence died on September 11, and as a result, the subsequent generations never really had any. Maybe that’s why I go back to that day, again and again, starting in August every year. It was the morning that changed everything, even for the Millennials and Zoomers who don’t realize it.It was the morning America got so scared that it went completely mad and hasn’t recovered since.

Imagine growing up in that.

A Groovy Kind Of

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I am very loose with the work “love.” I can say I loved my ex-wife, or that I love my family, or that I love The One That Got Away, and they all mean different things. There’s friendship love, either squealed at each other at bachelorette parties, often accompanied by the word “bitch.” There’s the “I love you, man,” accompanied by the most distant hugs imaginable, because God forbid anyone thinks you’re a homo.  

From the way we differentiate between loving someone and being in love with someone, the word love has many different meanings, like “aloha.” I am in love with a number of people, and it’s not because I want to marry them. I have my friend, the princess, who I will love until the day I die, and all I want to do is cuddle with her. I’m in love with The One That Got Away, and her I want to marry. I’m in love with my Best Man, Shane, my brother. I’m in love with the one who brought me out from party to party in New York and made me feel cool, and that’s mom love. I’m in love with my best friend in 1999 and 2000, and the only thing I want from her is to lie in bed together with a dictionary, spending the entire evening looking up the dumbest word.  

Same word, completely different meanings. So when I tell you I was in love with her from the moment she forced herself into my conversation, it wasn’t because I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen (though, to be fair, she was), but because she radiated artistry, sensitivity, and mischief. She was a very tactile person, holding hands, stroking forearms, using one another as chairs, and it was easy to confuse a guy who’d never had a girlfriend in high school. However, expectations were set and revisited, and things were great until I started to run with a crew that viewed sincerity as a character flaw, and she was sent into exile, which wasn’t the punishment it was supposed to be because she had many friends across all disciplines, and I don’t think she missed us.  

She wasn’t gone from my life, though, and we kept bumping into her, and I wanted to keep bumping into her, but there was still a part of me that saw her as the enemy. I was awful to her. She continued to extend the hand of friendship, and I repeatedly slapped it away.  

That was college. After college, we became closer. During a celebration of a relative’s accomplishments, I told her that I was married, and I loved my wife, but I loved her too, for different reasons, and I didn’t have the language to explain, but she understood. That’s probably why I fought so hard against her. She understood me, and I didn’t want anyone to. But ten years after graduating, I wanted it more than anything in the world. 

We talked to each other rarely over the next several years, but any doubt I had about our relationship was dispelled when I visited her at her home a couple of years later, and we spent a couple of days having the kind of drama-free relationship we’d always wanted. We went back to communicating rarely, and I saw her one more time before we went back to communicating rarely.  

In May of this year, while “suffering” from COVID, I wrote my memoirs. I have known a lot of people, and I have done a great many things, so I wrote it down. I broke the book down into nineteen particularly influential individuals (my ex-wife gets two chapters). I sent her her chapter. I wanted her to see what she meant to me. I wanted to tell her how in love with her I was, but not in that way. I wanted her to understand me, more than I wanted anybody to understand me. So she read it. She had no notes. She read the rest of the memoirs because I wanted her to know everything about me.  

Now we text every day.  

For reasons I won’t go into, I’m taking what is probably my last vacation. I stopped by to see my sister in Colorado, and then I retreated to my cabin in the woods, where I was visited by the friend I was in love with. With a brief exception, we sat on the cabin couch and talked about ourselves, our past lives, our present lives, not very much about our futures, our impending disasters we had no control over, our regrets, our mistakes, our triumphs. We also talked about TV and movies. We talked a lot, is what I’m saying. I’ve become touch averse in my old age, but she got through my shields like she always belonged there, holding my hand, playing with my hair. This was our entire relationship in a nutshell. I had no idea how much I needed this. 

I live-blogged to her the rest of my vacation, the writer’s retreat with my old friend Shane, running into those people from my past who crossed social boundaries to be my friend, how I’m feeling, etc. I’d rather be sprawled out on the couch, my head on her lap, recounting the events of the day rather than sending her a text. When I think of her, I think of warmth and companionship, and never romance. It’s the perfect relationship for someone ace.  

Now that we’ve so clearly spelled out what we mean to each other, what does our future look like? I don’t know, but we have the rest of our lives to figure it out. She’s not going anywhere. 

Home Again Jiggety-Jig

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When I arrived in Albuquerque, I had a few hours to kill, and I explored a neighborhood called Nob Hill, close to the university campus. I breathed in the mountain plants and beheld the adobe houses everywhere, and it had been twenty-four years since I’d spent more than a few days here, but it still felt like home.

As I approached Gallup from the east, the shapes of the buildings—the gas stations and auto parts stores and restaurants—were all the same, even though they are all different businesses than they were in the twentieth century. I drove in a car I thought of as invisible i.e. it’s so generic that it can follow you for miles and you’d never notice, and I coasted down Coal Avenue, my favorite place to go when I’m downtown. An entire block of the street was gone. Aside from that, it looked great. The coffee house that had opened up after I started college has been renamed and expanded, and the ratty, crumbling apartments that had housed several of my friends have been given a fresh coat of paint. On the other hand, the department store across the street is exactly the same, and so is the Crashing Thunder Art Gallery a few businesses down. The New Mexico souvenirs store now sells CBD products.

On day two of my return to Gallup, I started to entertain fantasies about quitting my job and settling down there. The dating scene is terrible, but I have no interest in that kind of thing. I have three friends there already, which is more than I have in DC. This would be a good place to retire.

By day five, I’d had a chance to look around. The elementary school my dad taught at is gone. There’s not a molecule of it remaining. My middle school had been expanded by erecting these Borg-cube-like buildings. My high school has been completely rebuilt, though the roof is still that familiar zigzag shape, making me suspect they built on top of the original. Lots of familiar buildings have unfamiliar storefronts, Comics, Cards & Games, for example, had been replaced by a sign that simply says “Waxing.” However, from a distance, Gallup looks the same as it did when I grew up here. The Gal-A-Bowl hasn’t changed its cheesy sign, El Sombrero is still there, the courthouse is a masterpiece of Southwestern architecture (just don’t look at the modern office buildings springing up around it).

If I look closer, the stucco on the house I grew up in has been replaced with aluminum siding, the Pic-A-Flic video store I once relied on is now a payday loan place. The theater where I went to the movies by myself for the first time at age nine (Godzilla 1985) is now boarded up. A lot of businesses are boarded up, actually, while other businesses, mostly the ones downtown, have been given facelifts. Gallup in 2022 looks like the Gallup of 1994, but it’s not. It can’t be.

Even the people I’m seeing are the same, but not really. My friend from high school kept up her enthusiasm and her bright smile, but she’s an accomplished professional now, not a giggling cheerleader. And then there’s Shane. Shane is a special case because we’ve led parallel lives that occasionally intersect. When I met him in Gallup, he was an artist and fixture in town who went to bed in the same studio where he created his paintings. When I pulled up to his place in Gallup last week, I found an artist and fixture in town who went to bed in the same studio where he created his paintings. But when I looked closer, I could see many differences. He has two children now, one of whom is twenty-four and living in New York, like I once did. He has less hair. Money is no longer the precious commodity it once was. There are hundreds, as opposed to dozens, of paintings leaning against the walls. If I moved down here, I’d have to navigate a Frankenstein recreation of the city I grew up in, and I don’t think I’m ready to do that. On my way to my hotel, there is a sign for a diner that was once a Gallup landmark. The diner itself is gone, now a weed-infested parking lot. The ghost diner speaks to me. It says, “Don’t look back.”

The More They Stay the Same

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May through August of 1998 is known to me as My Summer in Purgatory. My plans for my post-collegiate future were pulled out from under me, and I was so tied up in graduating and working almost full-time that I didn’t make alternate plans, so I moved in with my parents. And my two sisters, who had been doing fine without me there, thank you very much for asking. I spent most of the time being drunk and stoned, being needlessly … well, me … to a wonderful young woman who has moved onto bigger things and beyond. I was offered a hand out, and I took it, and decades later, here I am. I’ve visited Gallup a few times since then, but over the years the city has been completely rebuilt and redesigned while also remaining the exact same. Here I am, twenty-four years since the last time I’d spent more than a couple of days here, crammed into a coffin of a hotel room ten miles from town, and it still feels like home.

I’m here on a writing retreat with Shane. We want to take a 156-page screenplay and expand it out into a four-to-six-episode TV series, and thanks to his networking from being a successful painter and having once been married to literary intelligentsia, he has contacts, and he might be able to get it in front of people. If he doesn’t, that doesn’t bother me. The whole goal of this trip was to work with one of my oldest and best friends on an art project together like we used to do. We have met that goal. We have written a solid first draft of the pilot, and we’ve finished more episodes. What it needs is a fine polish, and then we’re ready to send this butterfly out in the world and see where it lands.

It’s about a hitman and his sidekick and the people they pick up along the way searching for a ruthless drug dealer in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1995, a time and place Shane and I know very well. And the thing about Gallup is, it’s weird. I know, I know, you think your hometown is weird. You’ve never lived in Gallup. It’s a curious cocktail of mixing cultures that don’t mix well, but can get along to get along. The characters, who have impressed some of the contest readers who’ve seen it, are what we’re focused on. The hitman is a professional, but he’s emotionally unstable, and pops antidepressants and anxiety meds like Pez. The sidekick is a hitman in training who doesn’t want to kill people and dresses like a 1995 rapper. The point man is a Reservation resident who acts chill but is shifty. The victim is a cute redneck girl once kidnapped by the drug dealer, and who hangs around the hitman so she can get her bloody revenge. The waitress is a high-class girl in search of adventure. Nobody knows what’s up with the drug dealer. That’s something we have to work on.

Sorry, didn’t mean to bore you. I’m proud of what we’ve done together.

Shane has been a resident of Gallup for years, after living around the country and even outside our country. The town has a certain gravity. It draws people back, like a few of my friends from high school (and me) in the years following. They all scattered to the wind, but a few more came back as adults. And I don’t mean adult like me, where I have a job and failing eyesight, but otherwise I haven’t changed. I mean adult as in married, with children, and buying houses. This was where they wanted to raise their families. Shane knows more of them than he can count. I know two of them.

The first was the cute cheerleader turned cute mom and high-ranking school administrator from my last post. She’s the one who informed me that the narrative I had where I survived high school by being invisible was not remotely true. I’d been seen.

I knew she was in town, and I had expected to see her, so that didn’t blow my mind as much as the next guy. Shane called for a break during a particularly unproductive stretch of hours, and he drove me to the UPS Store to see someone who really wanted to see me. I’m terrible with faces, so I knew that, unless he told me who it was, I wasn’t going to guess. And he took me up to the pass-through and pointed his chin at a guy wearing a COVID mask. I shrugged, and someone called his name, and I remembered everything I talked about in this entry:

https://jrmhmurphy.com/2020/10/25/which-way-the-wind-blows/

tl;dr: If 1998 was My Summer in Purgatory, 1992 was My Summer of Adventure. The Lost Boy was a really good friend when his crew was away, but as soon as the crew returned, he ghosted us. I was heartbroken at the time, but as I got older and met more people who were popular when they were young, the more I understood why.

On the other hand, a member of the crew I ran with that summer was an easily offended, vindictive bitch, and he very well could have unilaterally exiled the Lost Boy.

Either way, the last time I saw him up close was when he tried to explain to me without explaining to me why he had to leave us behind. But once I heard that name, those sharp, manicured eyebrows could belong to no one else. Shane got his attention, and he came over, and they chatted. Then Shane said, “Look who I brought!” The man I used to know as the Lost Boy called out my name and ran out from behind the counter to tackle me with a hug. He looked the same—compact, in shape, no wrinkles, not a single gray hair. The only change was his mullet. He used to have the kind of mullet that would make Billy Ray Cyrus look like Sinead O’Connor. It was business in the front, very long party in the back. And now he had a respectable middle-aged-man haircut. He asked me where I was and what I was doing, and he was excited to hear I was still writing. He reminded me that it didn’t matter if I wasn’t a New York Times Bestseller, I was writing.

Beyond his sexy cool, he was one of my most enthusiastic cheerleaders. When we were hanging out alone, he was always encouraging me to write. At the time I believed that I could tell the story, but I couldn’t think of what the story should be. That’s why I was working on an idea with the vindictive bitch as opposed to my own, which I wasn’t sure I had. But my friend believed that I could come up with my own. He also had a female friend he thought would be a good match for me when the school year began (but that went away when he did). He knew I was bound for bigger things. That hadn’t changed in the slightest, even though it is literally thirty years, summer-to-summer, since we had known each other.

He gave me his number. I’m going to shoot him a text.

Gallup, New Mexico is a weirder-than-average town close to Arizona and three Indian Reservations. It’s a place where magic happens. I’ve set two novels and a screenplay here. It will always be home.

Social Influencers

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I didn’t enjoy high school, but my senior year in high school was kind of nice, actually. People stopped bullying me, Severian wasn’t around to bring down my mood, I made new friends, a new comic book shop opened, and this cute cheerleader started following me around. She hung on my every word and often arranged to be where I was going to be. She manipulated events so we could be coeditors of the school paper. I had enough presence of mind to recognize that these weren’t romantic overtures, just someone who was fascinated with me for some reason, like Jimmy, who had a man-crush on me.

She also met Shane separately from me and followed him around too. It wasn’t until I was telling him about my new cheerleading friend in school that he told me he also had a new friend, and our descriptions of her matched up, and when one of us said her name, we knew.

I lost track of her after graduation, and I found out, like, 12 or 13 years ago, that she was back in Gallup. When I saw her then, I was really depressed and feeling gross, so it didn’t make much of an impression. This time, I was alert and content and feeling confident, like I have been during this long vacation I’ve been on, so we went out to drinks and caught up with each other’s lives.

She told us that, even though she was a cheerleader in a popular crowd, she felt miserable and like a fraud. She had admired me through most of school, and she wanted to soak up some of my mojo, whatever it was. She told me that I was a goth back when goths still wore colors (I don’t agree with that assessment), and she had to learn to be like me.

When she met Shane, she was enamored of him, as many women are. According to Shane, she made a move on him, but I never trusted his interpretation of events when it came to women (because his interpretations tend to consistently fall under the category “She Wants Me”).

It’s weird for me to hear I was a formative influence in someone’s life. I don’t think of myself as making much of an impact on this world. She told Shane and me that if she hadn’t met us, she would have been shallow and unhappy. Now she is relaxed and herself and successful and in a good place. I guess I did have an impact.

Momma Raised a Quitter

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I used to have a drinking problem. I’d say I was an alcoholic, but I wasn’t addicted. My problem was that I started out with one drink, and I’d keep drinking until I ran out of alcohol. This was a real problem whenever I cracked open a bottle of wine. It wasn’t that I set out to be a binge drinker, but I was on a medication that kept alcohol from affecting me until I was about five or six drinks in, then I would go from sober to drunk in seconds. I loved drinking, though, so I kept doing it.

I loved how numb it made me while being simultaneously awesome (or so I thought). It turned off the part of me that should know better, so I was a free man. In that way, drinking was like having a manic episode. And I loved the taste of a good beer or wine. And I can’t stress this enough, I didn’t need it every day. I just needed it whenever. Whenever turned out to be most days.

Say what you will about my ex-wife, she made a lot of really positive changes to me. She found me the psychiatric help I needed to be better, she researched Chantix, the quitting smoking drug that makes you want to commit suicide, and she encouraged me to quit drinking, at the beginning of July 2007, after I fell flat on my face at a party and almost hit my head against something. I didn’t go to AA or to a doctor for help, I was just determined to do it. I half-assed it, though. I used to sneak drinks here and there and kept a bottle of mouthwash in the car (that I shared with Kate, so I had to really hide it) to shake suspicion.

This was bad, and I’m honestly not sure how I got away with it as long as I did. I mean, this is the kind of thing people who were addicted did. I didn’t need it every day, just once or twice a week—whenever I could, basically. So for the month of July, I snuck around with drinking. Finally, at the end of the month, Kate was going to be out of town for the weekend, so I could have a whole bottle of wine to myself in privacy, as long as I could get rid of the evidence.

I’ve told this story before, but something clicked in me as I took that bottle off the shelf and placed it gently in my shopping cart. It reminded me of all the times I quit smoking where I’d have one or two, just to take the edge off, then I was a pack-a-day smoker again. It asked me who’s really losing in this situation, me who definitely wasn’t quitting, or Kate, who thought the man she trusted and loved was being honest with her. It asked me how long I intended to keep this up. And mostly it asked me what kind of a man couldn’t keep promises to the woman he loved. So I put the wine back. As I’m fond of saying, I don’t remember the last drink I took, but I clearly remember the first drink I didn’t have.

Fifteen years later, the only drink I’ve had was when a bartender in London didn’t understand my order of club soda and got me a vodka and soda. It took one sip to figure out the mistake (the bartender didn’t apologize, she just doubled down on her logic, which is who goes to a bar to get a club soda?). Do I miss it? I wish I could have a glass of wine, I love a good red. I hadn’t experimented in whites before August 2007, but I’m sure I would have loved them too. I liked beer. I liked standing around with a glass of scotch, not really enjoying it, but feeling classy. I don’t miss being drunk, and I definitely don’t miss hangovers.

I don’t really pride myself on my impulse control and willpower, but in the same year, I quit smoking and drinking, both of which I was dependent upon. Maybe I do have it in me.