Author’s Note: This is chapter 2 of a story in progress, that I am currently calling, “retreat.” To read the first part CLICK HERE. If you would like to support this story please consider subscribing for more updates or leaving some thoughts in the comment section. I appreciate everyone’s input and support.
If there’s one thing that can always make me spiral it’s a trust fund baby with a shattered iPhone. Of course, they could fix it if the wanted to—hell, Daddy has already sent them a replacement which now sits dormant in the bottom of their shabby-chic desk drawer from Anthropology. But they like it better this way. The cracks in their screen spread out like mica, and sometimes when they get anxious or a little too high in their warehouse parties, they pick at it like they used to when they were children on the playground.
I never wanted to admit to this kind of person that I was a failure. After all, how do you say to someone that you failed in becoming them? The thing that comes more naturally to them than anything in the world—more easily than falling asleep— has become your lifelong work. How do you admit you’ve been way out of your depth?
In order to avoid this, one must also become adept at dodging questions. At each of the dead-eyed parties I attended, before I moved away, moving towards what felt a lot more like death with every passing day, I avoided any and all questions of, “So what’s next?” Whenever asked what’s been going on in my life, I tried to deflect and derail conversations— suddenly finding myself interested in the dirty dishes in the other room or finally experiencing the effects of the shoebox shrooms I had taken hours before.
“I’m still figuring it out,” I’d answer with wide comical eyes.
I’ve always had the sort of elastic face that stretches and distorts into any number of satirical effects. It’s gotten me out of trouble, or rather, discomforting situations countless times. It’s hard, I think, to stay very mad at a Muppet— and harder still to take a cartoon character seriously.
When Wolf arrived at the party I knew I was saved. This was obviously not his real name, but you can’t exactly ask your drug dealer for their government-issued license when you meet them. He fit in here, even in his oversized sports apparel clearly gotten from some bin sale. He looked enough like the rest of us, only there was a little less curation in what he provided. While his hair was wild and unkempt it looked like it was that way from sleeping on a single flat drool-stained pillow, as opposed to the sea-salt texturizer mousse which occupied the rest of our quaffs. He too had an air of mystery to him, the kind that old Howie Glynne would try to imbue into his own personhood whenever he wrote a personal essay for class. But unlike Howard, Wolf actually did all the things he talked about.
I once heard a story from Wolf about a rave he went to a few years prior where he dropped his phone into a porte-potty. “I was so fucked up on E,” he told me in the corner of an apartment neither of would ever afford, “that I actually reached back in and pulled my phone out.”
“You did not,” said one of the girls in a Peter Pan collar in disbelief. “Swear to shit. I mean, I had ten tabs on me, you know how much that could make me?” The room howled, he was such a badass. And it really was a great story, only I couldn’t shake the feeling that it both added to his allure and ruined his chances of ever really fitting in with the rest of us. Peter Pan collar might let him finger her on their battered couch later that night, part of her rebellious phase, but she’d never bring him back to her family’s cottage on Martha’s Vineyard. He was great for a party, but not much more. Something like a chaffing dish set up by the caterers. Never something you’d actually want for your own house.
Wolf liked me a lot. I’m sure he liked most of his patrons. The yuppie crowd was probably much easier to work with than the real addicts out on the streets who we tried ever so failingly to emulate. Unlike them, we didn’t have the same problem, we just wanted to know what it would be like if we actually did. We were merely testing if there was something more powerful than ourselves. Not unlike searching for God, or more realistically someone or something to tell us “no.” But we were always on time with our payments, I was much better at paying my plug than I was at paying my rent or utilities.
Me and the rest of the coastal elites huddled into a dorm room on the fourth floor were the perfect customers, we invited Wolf to our parties—therefore expanding his revenue and customer base, and we were always understanding when he cut our stuff with baby powder or baker’s flour. Just good little boys who would never complain. At least not about this sort of thing.
Still, I felt like Wolf and I had a special connection. Even though I played the part a little better than he did, we were both outsiders at the end of the day. He’d heard me mispronounce canapé and look shocked when the classmate from Back Bay mentioned his father’s name.
Actual people in the know never do this sort of thing. To actually be one of these elites is to never question your place. There’s no shock in lineage when you yourself hail from greatness.
I remember my first time visiting a city overseas, my friend advised me to “not look like a tourist.” One should never look up, never stare on in awe at the world around you, because when you do, “that’s when the pickpockets come.”
I suppose then, that I was the perfect mark. A visitor from a far-away place trying fruitlessly to make sense of this strange world, and trying to do so without calling attention to my otherness.
“How’d your Scooby snacks treat you,” Wolf said to me. We had a little joke going about the Scooby-Doo gummy snacks from when we were younger. “The blue ones are always the best.” I’d reply. And they were, only I wasn’t talking about fruit snacks and we all knew it. Looking back, this comparison might have been a little embarrassing—slightly put on. But so much about those years are unsettling in hindsight. So much of my life was.
He’d gotten me a “rush order” delivery of my blue candy the week before it all went down. Just in time to make the landslide of my life slow down for a minute, or rather, helped me speed up the time between days that I longed to throw out. It is no wonder then, that I’d mostly used up the entirety of my supply between the calls with my different advisors and student services—not to mention my landlord.
“How about the rest of it?” Wolf continued. He had an easy kind of way of cutting through the bullshit, or perhaps he was just less interested in the performance aspect of it all unlike the rest of my friends. He had of course known about my sudden ejection plans, I had told his as much during our last meeting, when I asked if he was ever willing to make a “special trip out to the boonies for your favorite customer.” Wolf didn’t have a car, and he didn’t think that a bus would be worth it. “Sorry man, there’s already more stressed-out college kids here than I know what to do with.” And it was true, I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to fuck up his bag.
“I’m still just figuring it out I guess.” This was the public relations response I had crafted and regurgitated time and time again at the party. It was a contortion of the emotional truth that I offered a comfortable out. It allowed the other party guests to halt their line of questioning, which at that point they were likely finding to be really quite straining on them anyways—an act of emotional labor that turned out to be entirely too tiresome at a party spent mainly on bathroom sinks. The thing is, logistical questions like these are very frequently an ill-fit for this brand of social situation.
No one, it seems, wants to spend their precious cross-eyed hours discussing how you fucked your life up, or how you felt life was unfair. Life was unfair, and it is unfair, and it will be unfair, and Azalea Banks is playing, and this coke is so good, and you’re wasting your time, and you’re wasting my time, and I really think this will be your year, and I really think it’s ok if it isn’t, and I really want to dance, do you want to dance?
Wolf cared very little for sitting on a bathroom sink or disappearing auspiciously for an hour into some adjoining bedroom—something that often felt like the VIP section even at a party where everyone was already angling to be that kind of thing. Occasionally he’d go to a window and smoke a single cigarette out of it, but never in the way that asked you to come over to him. Never in the way that looked good for a photo or warranted its remembering for a story. He was just smoking. And he was just asking me if I was going to be alright. And somehow, even there with his complete lack of pretensions I was still unable to tell the truth. I was still unable to say the words, I’m scared.
To set the record straight, I did try to stay in the city on my own accord. I did try to make it work on my own— without the comfortable safety net of scholarship dinners and University-sanctioned “enrichment expeditions”—this is a fancy way of saying field trips payed for by anyone who actually paid their tuition. Tuition money which I had never had to think about on my own before. After all, I’m a trust fund kid too, just in a different, arguably more pathetic way.
But I couldn’t find a job if my life depended on it. And I suppose, when it really comes down to it, it does. And still, after countless hours on job boards, the best I could show for myself was a couple hundred personalized resumes and an email inbox that was now mostly full of spam proclaiming the “One Prostate Shrinking Secret you NEED to Know.” If the scammers really wanted me to click on their links then they should have sent me something like, “Pay for Your 1-BR Boston Apartment Though You Still Can’t Find a Job You FREELOADER,” or “Hey, Remember When You Signed That One-Year Lease, and You Were Scared Shitless at the Price? Well, Imagine How Scary It’ll be Without Any Income AT ALL. Also, Maybe Your Prostate is Too Big, When Was the Last Time You Actually Had it Checked Anyways?”
But leases are a lot like hearts in that they are meant to be broken—and also if you do break one you will very often have to answer to a very hairy and very Italian man named Nicky.
Nicky was my landlord, a man in his 30s or perhaps 40s, though he had that prematurely aged look that comes to men who aren’t married who often forgot sunscreen but never forget that last nightcap before bed. He was a good Italian boy, more than happy, maybe even excited, to take over his father’s business and maintain their crumbling Baba Yaga of an apartment building. The building slanted queerly as if it had been built on a sinkhole, maybe this whole city was.
Whenever it rained the water would pool up under the door in the corner of the apartment entryway making the grey office-surplus carpeting squelch like a kitchen sponge. For days after the rain, my shoes would sink in a good inch-and-a-half into the stagnant water, and with my socks now drenched, I couldn’t help but wonder how this musty swamp must be affecting the overall health and safety of my building. Black mold, spores, fungus, mushrooms—I suspected I was breathing them all in every night. But much like how we are told we swallow thousands of spiders nightly, I couldn’t manage to get myself to care. If I was going to die, it might as well be from the poor maintenance of this apartment. I thought, at least then I’d make the 6 o’clock news—at least choking on asbestos was noteworthy.
Still, Nicky was out of his depth when it came to the upkeep of that apartment building, and perhaps even more than your standard issue do-nothing landlord type. The pipes had a terrific knack for freezing well into April, and the smoke alarms would alert the entirety of the units to evacuate over a single bag of popcorn. Every year, as the apartment fell further into disrepair, our rent increased and increased and increased. I would say we were paying more for less, but I suppose that is entirely a matter of perspective, and in fact, we were merely paying more for more. More charm, more personality, more character—words which here mean cockroaches, water stains in the popcorn ceilings, an an odor you couldn’t quite place.
I suppose I didn’t help this matter much, as I took the renovations of my home into my own hands, opting for a DIY approach to most things. I had been told once that our living space is often a reflection of our own emotional or mental state, so a builder-grade beige box studio was simply not going to work for me. This was the reason I was unable to write, nothing about myself, my own habits, my own startlingly empty well of motivation. No, these issues were purely external. Still, it was nothing a can of paint couldn’t fix.
Perhaps that is why Nicky seemingly always had a soft spot for my antics. We shared a common landlord sentiment in that you can very often paint over the things that may require a bit more work.
I found a can of paint for a local hardware store in the premixed section. It was evidently a color that proved unpopular. I thought of the smarmy Soccer Mom who came back to the store to return this gallon of paint. I imagined how she talked down to the teenager in the paint kiosk, a boy no doubt paid just over minimum wage. “This is the wrong color, I asked for Sunset Puce,” she’d spit. He’d mix up another nominally different gallon for her, and she’d be on his way, proud of her ability to handle things.
It didn’t matter much to me what the color ended up being. Just so long as it wasn’t the same sad beige. The color, which came as an utter surprise, was not Sunset Puce, nor was it simply Sunset, it wasn’t even a neutral shade, one of the ones an actual landlord would select. It was a shockingly vibrant teal. A color which, to that point, I had never gravitated towards. But I had already bought it, and opened the can with the side of a metal fork stolen from the dining hall, so I made my peace with teal, told myself it was reminiscent of Mykonos or some Greek Island, and got to painting.
This project, like many others, started promisingly enough, but I lacked the follow-through to see it to its end. I painted the entirety of one wall and then made sweeping vertical stripes on another. Then with the roller, I continued the paint onto the linoleum flooring that I so hated. I had convinced myself that a monochromatic look would make the entire room feel cozy, enveloping me in a way like the ocean. This, surely, would get me back on track.
As quickly as I had started, a surge of manic desperation, any and all energy dissipated from my body. I knew I’d need to purchase another can to get the job done, but the prospect of matching the color soured me to the whole ordeal, besides what if I became like the Soccer Mommy, I knew I too had a streak of entitlement in me. So, instead, I left the job for another day. Good enough, I thought to myself. The crooked shelves used to display empty bottles: good enough. Pile of garbage—what started as my attempt at a compost bin—on the fire escape: good enough. Broken light fixture replaced with a brow cardboard bag: good enough.
Why commit any more energy than the purest bare minimum?
I ended up selling most of my things to a pawn shop down the road—which is a fancy way of saying, I brought one large farmed print to the man at the front desk and then got overwhelmed by whatever a “provenance” was, and left the majority of my belongings in a cardboard box across the street. With the money I had raised I would be able to afford my last month's rent— which of course, is a fancy way of saying: with the money I got from selling my bed frame I purchased takeout for a week and a single candle that smelled like patchouli and Palo Santo.
I’ve never been especially mindful of my money. Naturally, I’ve tried the obligatory budgeting apps and created spreadsheets with tabs for things like “me time” and “little treats” but they never seemed to work. I would always find myself at the end of every month with an empty bank account and a credit card bill that I could never fully settle. Who was going to explain to me the difference between my card’s limit and the monthly balance? Besides, savings have always been a far-off luxury for a person like me. I’d watch as my paycheck drained in its entirety every month, while nearly everyone I knew went on yet another vacation or ate from the newest cocktail bar in the city. I know the correct line of reasoning here is that I should just keep my eyes on my own paper, so to speak. That I needed to stop comparing my life to everyone else’s. And that’s all fine and good, but let’s not pretend like that clarity of self is not in and of itself already a luxury in its own right.
It’s hard to feel happy for someone else while you are holding the sticky broken mess of your own life in your hands. Hard to feel excited about the positive turn in someone else’s life when the hallways of your own seemingly all lead to dead ends.
I almost feel bad for Nicky. This is impressive, because at the end of the day, he was in fact a landlord. Still, I can acknowledge how my negligence resulted in a loss of income for him. And as someone who was now much more intimately interested in my own bank account, I can see how this would be distressing.
But the real reason I feel badly is that even under the circumstances that I left my apartment, Nicky still had the decency to ask how I was—or if I needed help finding a new apartment. He was, and this is the worst part, genuinely concerned for my well-being.
“I’m sorry to see you go,” He said, although he wasn’t.
“You were always such a good tenant,” He said, although I wasn’t.
The last time I talked to Nicky I told him I was taking a gap year before going back for my Master’s degree. This was squarely a lie, but it was the type of thing that people did, and so I figured it might work. The rich kids I knew were constantly taking gap years it seemed, or going on some self-exploratory mission in Rishikesh. I used to roll my eyes as they talked about the spiritual experiences they pilfered during these retreats. It was one thing to believe in the power of meditation, but an entirely separate thing to go on a poverty tour in order to get back in touch with your “humanity.”
“Well, when the gap is done what are you going to go to school for?” He asked. And in a way, I suppose I told him the truth.
“I’m not sure yet. Hopefully, I’ll know it when I see it.”
Hopefully is one of those fabulous words that reveals a sense of desperation even without meaning to. In the same way that saying “no complaints” seldom means just that. They are both leading phrases that beg the listener to follow up. But through whatever laws of courtesy we have all subscribed to, very few people actually delve deeper. It is too uncomfortable to know more than that, to know how tenuous someone’s hopes are, or to participate in the understanding that perhaps things aren’t turning as we all planned— and that perhaps no one really has any control in that sort of thing. Instead, the response is always: “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You always do.”
Except for when you don’t, but no one wants to have that conversation. Not at this party, not at this dinner, not tonight, not again. We were all having such a nice time, why did you have to bring it down? When did you become so negative? When did you become so difficult to be around?
So I went away.