I started college here years ago, moving for the first time to the big city. Well, I had lived in cities before, but there is a difference between cities and cities. There is an inescapable sense of claustrophobia that either destroys you or keeps you scurrying about like a rat in the walls.
I lived in the dorms for the first quarter, having no other choice. It was the school's policy, and I think it was their desperate attempt to make sure the students wouldn't shoot each other by the time winter rolled around. It's kind of the opposite, I suppose, of how you're not supposed to give names to your livestock; the nominalized go on to haunt you after they're gone.
After that first quarter, though, which had passed by in the time it took an orange leaf to fall to the ground, I moved up to the north side. Dorm life had been a little miserable, having had to share a room with someone that watched TV until 4 in the morning. And it wasn't even that I really had a problem with; I mean, I stayed up until then my fair share of nights, shooting zombies, and Nazis, and sometimes Nazi zombies. I guess I really just didn't like him all that much. It was easy then to blame it on his being an Engineering major.
My new apartment was a small studio in a neighbourhood where few people spoke any English. My landlord decided that we didn't need a lease, which worked out fine by me. I had no intention of being bound to him, never thinking that the same thought was most likely going through his head. I assumed he had not wanted to go through the trouble of drawing up a contract in a language he hardly understood, much less used.
I took the blue line train to class every day, and at first it was somewhat exciting. My journey to class was something different. It had transformed and even matured into a real trip. I watched the city go by like a movie. It was if I was here in person now, but still watching everything go by on a screen, out of reach.
Eventually, as could be expected, the scenery became predictable: the same skyline, of course, but the same church with a homeless person asleep on the sloop, the same library under unending construction, and the same people in transit, crossing the blue lines of their to do lists. Of all of those people, there was one man in particular that I recognized. He was largely nondescript to be honest. He wore a bowler hat everyday, and that alone was enough for me to recognize him. He got on the same stop as me, but got off downtown, where he presumably worked. Me, I had at least 20 minutes after the downtown stop just to get to campus.
I didn't talk to him at all my first year.
It wasn't until my second year of school that we interacted at all. I had briefly mentioned him to my then girlfriend once, and it was one evening when she was coming back up north with me to hang out at my place that it happened.
It really wasn't anything spectacular. It dawned on Stef who was sitting down the car from us after a few stops. The bowler hat! she whispered to me with a certain ferocity and enthusiasm I couldn't quite place. And before I knew it, she had gotten up and walked over to him, introducing herself.
Their conversation was brief, and Stef looked somewhat disappointed as she came back. She was surely expecting some gruesome tale, but it turned out that Ethan Moreno was just a close to middle age acupuncturist that worked downtown. His pea coat said his practice was stable enough to afford Brooks Brothers, and his business card, which he had handed Stef, sighed in a thin sans serif font that he was bored with his life.
That year, I went skiing in Europe with Stef's family for winter break. It was my first time, and I certainly didn't win any points with her parents, who were content to bomb down the slopes without me, only waiting for me intermittently in hopes of convincing Stef to scream down the family favourites with them. She seemed a little torn, and I told her I'd just meet her at the bottom.
After returning my borrowed equipment, I tried a legit Italian cappuccino at a cafe. I realized that I didn't have any Euros on me too late, and tried to explain to the girl at the counter, hoping she'd understand. She smiled and told me not to worry about it; she would just say that it was her free drink for the shift. I thanked her profusely and went to go sit down and wait for Stef and her family to get back.
An hour later, there was still no sign of them, and I had finished the last English periodical that didn't offer fashion advice and sex tips.
"How was the cappuccino?"
I looked over to my right and noticed that it was the girl from the counter that had helped me earlier. I told her that it was great, although stronger than I was used to. She laughed more than she should have, and I wondered what European humour was like anyway.
We talked for a little bit and she finally said that she had no intentions of hanging out at her workplace when she wasn't on the clock, and asked me if I wanted to go back to her place for a bit. I told her I was waiting for my girlfriend and her parents, but she was insistent and said she just lived close by. I finally gave in, figuring that it had been almost 2 hours since I had left Stef and her family, so why not.
We walked out and before I could protest, hopped on a bus, where the girl spotted my fare. A few stops later, we got off and went up two flights of stairs to her small apartment. And long story short, I'll go ahead and say that we made small talk for a bit before proceeding to fool around a bit, before a sound downstairs caused her to jump up with a start.
"You have to get out of here. My boyfriend's home," she said quick and low.
"You have a boyfriend?"
"Yes, I don't have time to argue. Go. Take the back stairs."
"But." And I wanted to say that I didn't know where I was, or how to get back. And on top of that, I still didn't have any change for the bus. And yes, I did want to know what was going on.
"Look, you tourists think you're here to enjoy us. But you are here for us to enjoy you. Ok?"
I ran down the back stairs and onto the streets. Without money, and with the sun having set, I finally managed to flag down a police car, giving him the slip of paper the address of our hotel was on.
When I finally got back, there was a new air separating Stef and me, and I could tell she felt it too. They never asked where I was, and I wondered if they had seen me take off with the girl.
In any case, our relationship was never really the same after that holiday, and we ended up breaking up by March that year.
By that time, my grades had started to slip a little bit, and my mom called to tell me that her and my dad wouldn't be able to help me if I didn't pick up the pace a bit. I declared a political science major and decided to start focusing more on my studies.
By the time summer rolled around, I got a call from my older sister, who lived a state over. She was going through a bad divorce and needed a place to crash for the summer while she worked things out. What could I say?
She came in mid-June, after I was done with finals, knocking on my door holding nothing more than a camping backpack, a small duffel bag, and her pockets stuffed with a hodgepodge of new and used wads of Kleenex. Turns out she didn't have a car and I had to show her the ropes of how to get around the city by trains and buses.
Judy had never been on an elevated train before, and compared my familiar blue line to the monorail at Disneyland. I told her to stay away from the Goofies and Tinkerbells around here though.
I pointed out famous buildings, important stops, and when I saw the familiar bowler hat of, what was his name?, I pointed him out as well. I even introduced him as a friend of mine, just so I could remember his name. Ethan Moreno. I'd remember it now.
He looked a little confused as I introduced my sister, and I thought he would ignore us completely. He had that look on his face where one expects a candid camera to be in someone's purse, and everyone to suddenly start laughing at you in unison. Once she mentioned her divorce, however, he was trapped, and did his best to strike up small talk with us.
"How do you know him?" she asked me later.
"I just met him on the train." I didn't mention Stef. "He's an acupuncturist."
"Oooo!" Judy cooed.
I ended up being rather depressed that summer, still a little hung up on Stef, and decided to spend most of August hitchhiking across the country, trying to make it to my friend Dane's house in Portland. I told Judy to watch over things for me, which she was glad to do, if only to have her own place, somewhere to herself, even if it were mine.
"I guess you can sleep in my bed too," I conceded. "But no sex on it."
In the end, I caught a ride with a trucker who picked me up out of concern more than anything else.
"A boy like you: in school and with no goddamned sense. Standing on the side of the road where anyone could nab you," he muttered to what must have been a mysterious intangible third person in the cab. He was driving all the way to Sacramento, it turned out, and my month-long hitchhiking adventure turned out to be little more than a 5 day-excursion, having caught a ride some touring band from Sacramento to Portland. They didn't tell me until afterwards that they expected me to pay for gas.
By the time I got to Portland, I had three weeks to kill, since I still wasn't ready to head back home. I ended up sitting in Dane's living room playing video games for three weeks before finally just catching a Greyhound bus back east. I knocked on my own door with nothing more than a small backpack, a gym bag and a pocket full of receipts, feeling as if I had gotten nowhere in the past month, and that any self-discovery I may have made creeping west across the country was erased like a name written in sand as I crept back east.
It turned out that Judy had started acupuncture sessions with Ethan, and was feeling better as a result.
"He's cute," she admitted, "but he's gayer than a unicorn in a speedo."
In the end, she moved out, thankfully, halfway through fall term of my junior year, moving in with some friends she made at yoga class. She was becoming a bona fide new age yuppie. She told me she finally felt in control of her own body through yoga, and that meant she was in better touch with her own spiritual needs and development. She encouraged me to come with her to class, but I pointed out that I had my International Law class during that time.
I continued to see Ethan Moreno on my train rides to school, and even with our mutual connection, it seemed that he didn't feel very compelled to make conversations with me. To be honest, I didn't feel like being buddy buddy with him either, but out of guilt, told him one day that I liked his new shoes. His aloofness sublimated into the air as he thanked me and smiled, but it was still clear that he had no interest in starting a real topic of conversation.
The next couple of years flew by, and I wondered how it was ever possible that it took an entire year, an eternity, to move up a grade in elementary school. I was finding that it was harder and harder to fit in everything I wanted to do. And that wasn't even with regard to non-school related projects.
I had gotten more serious about school, and the time to think about what program I wanted to be in, which department I wanted to be a part of, where I wanted to live after graduation was already upon me, showing up like an older sister in distress. And I could only hope that it would resolve in a same way, with inner peace and flexibility.
Stef had gotten into Stanford for a PhD program in Linguistics, having texted me enthusiastically when she found out with "fuck this snow!". We were friends again, after having not talked for close to a year. There was no animosity, but we had realized that like the brown line and the red line, we shared paths for a bit, but were soon to diverge in our own directions.
My mother even came to visit, and my sister came with us to the famous Mexican restaurant right outside of downtown. She seemed at peace for the large part, but was still concerned with whether or not I knew what I was doing with myself. I told her I was visiting PhD programs over the next month, and not to worry; I was on top of my shit.
On the train ride back, Judy and I noticed that Ethan Moreno was sitting at the back of our car, but we didn't say anything, and didn't point him out to our mother.
So now here I am again, on the blue line, not heading to class nor my studio apartment, but the airport. I'm flying out to look at some schools on the West Coast. Dane says I can live with him in Long Beach, where he moved a few months ago.
And I know I'll be back in a week, but everything already starts to look alien to me, as if the city knew I was deserting it. Something was receding, like newsprint peeling off of the paper, and I couldn't tell if it was the city doing it or something inside of me.
Ethan Moreno sat across from me, as usual, and more than ever, I realized the obvious fact that I had seen this man for almost four years now on a semi-daily basis and we had no idea who each other were. I was comfortable with this fact, and clearly so was he. In fact, it had never even crossed my mind until I was here, on my way out the door. Ethan Moreno had been here poking holes in people long before I cracked my first book spine, and he would clearly be here for long after. In all this time, I realized, we hadn't travelled anywhere at all, but it was, rather, those years with all of their passengers that had click-clacked through us, leaving nothing more than a concrete platform and enough metal thorns on every horizontal surface to prevent even a pigeon from setting down to rest its wings.
********
Don't forget to read my Top Ten Albums of 2009 list if you haven't.
***********
I lived in the dorms for the first quarter, having no other choice. It was the school's policy, and I think it was their desperate attempt to make sure the students wouldn't shoot each other by the time winter rolled around. It's kind of the opposite, I suppose, of how you're not supposed to give names to your livestock; the nominalized go on to haunt you after they're gone.
After that first quarter, though, which had passed by in the time it took an orange leaf to fall to the ground, I moved up to the north side. Dorm life had been a little miserable, having had to share a room with someone that watched TV until 4 in the morning. And it wasn't even that I really had a problem with; I mean, I stayed up until then my fair share of nights, shooting zombies, and Nazis, and sometimes Nazi zombies. I guess I really just didn't like him all that much. It was easy then to blame it on his being an Engineering major.
My new apartment was a small studio in a neighbourhood where few people spoke any English. My landlord decided that we didn't need a lease, which worked out fine by me. I had no intention of being bound to him, never thinking that the same thought was most likely going through his head. I assumed he had not wanted to go through the trouble of drawing up a contract in a language he hardly understood, much less used.
I took the blue line train to class every day, and at first it was somewhat exciting. My journey to class was something different. It had transformed and even matured into a real trip. I watched the city go by like a movie. It was if I was here in person now, but still watching everything go by on a screen, out of reach.
Eventually, as could be expected, the scenery became predictable: the same skyline, of course, but the same church with a homeless person asleep on the sloop, the same library under unending construction, and the same people in transit, crossing the blue lines of their to do lists. Of all of those people, there was one man in particular that I recognized. He was largely nondescript to be honest. He wore a bowler hat everyday, and that alone was enough for me to recognize him. He got on the same stop as me, but got off downtown, where he presumably worked. Me, I had at least 20 minutes after the downtown stop just to get to campus.
I didn't talk to him at all my first year.
It wasn't until my second year of school that we interacted at all. I had briefly mentioned him to my then girlfriend once, and it was one evening when she was coming back up north with me to hang out at my place that it happened.
It really wasn't anything spectacular. It dawned on Stef who was sitting down the car from us after a few stops. The bowler hat! she whispered to me with a certain ferocity and enthusiasm I couldn't quite place. And before I knew it, she had gotten up and walked over to him, introducing herself.
Their conversation was brief, and Stef looked somewhat disappointed as she came back. She was surely expecting some gruesome tale, but it turned out that Ethan Moreno was just a close to middle age acupuncturist that worked downtown. His pea coat said his practice was stable enough to afford Brooks Brothers, and his business card, which he had handed Stef, sighed in a thin sans serif font that he was bored with his life.
That year, I went skiing in Europe with Stef's family for winter break. It was my first time, and I certainly didn't win any points with her parents, who were content to bomb down the slopes without me, only waiting for me intermittently in hopes of convincing Stef to scream down the family favourites with them. She seemed a little torn, and I told her I'd just meet her at the bottom.
After returning my borrowed equipment, I tried a legit Italian cappuccino at a cafe. I realized that I didn't have any Euros on me too late, and tried to explain to the girl at the counter, hoping she'd understand. She smiled and told me not to worry about it; she would just say that it was her free drink for the shift. I thanked her profusely and went to go sit down and wait for Stef and her family to get back.
An hour later, there was still no sign of them, and I had finished the last English periodical that didn't offer fashion advice and sex tips.
"How was the cappuccino?"
I looked over to my right and noticed that it was the girl from the counter that had helped me earlier. I told her that it was great, although stronger than I was used to. She laughed more than she should have, and I wondered what European humour was like anyway.
We talked for a little bit and she finally said that she had no intentions of hanging out at her workplace when she wasn't on the clock, and asked me if I wanted to go back to her place for a bit. I told her I was waiting for my girlfriend and her parents, but she was insistent and said she just lived close by. I finally gave in, figuring that it had been almost 2 hours since I had left Stef and her family, so why not.
We walked out and before I could protest, hopped on a bus, where the girl spotted my fare. A few stops later, we got off and went up two flights of stairs to her small apartment. And long story short, I'll go ahead and say that we made small talk for a bit before proceeding to fool around a bit, before a sound downstairs caused her to jump up with a start.
"You have to get out of here. My boyfriend's home," she said quick and low.
"You have a boyfriend?"
"Yes, I don't have time to argue. Go. Take the back stairs."
"But." And I wanted to say that I didn't know where I was, or how to get back. And on top of that, I still didn't have any change for the bus. And yes, I did want to know what was going on.
"Look, you tourists think you're here to enjoy us. But you are here for us to enjoy you. Ok?"
I ran down the back stairs and onto the streets. Without money, and with the sun having set, I finally managed to flag down a police car, giving him the slip of paper the address of our hotel was on.
When I finally got back, there was a new air separating Stef and me, and I could tell she felt it too. They never asked where I was, and I wondered if they had seen me take off with the girl.
In any case, our relationship was never really the same after that holiday, and we ended up breaking up by March that year.
By that time, my grades had started to slip a little bit, and my mom called to tell me that her and my dad wouldn't be able to help me if I didn't pick up the pace a bit. I declared a political science major and decided to start focusing more on my studies.
By the time summer rolled around, I got a call from my older sister, who lived a state over. She was going through a bad divorce and needed a place to crash for the summer while she worked things out. What could I say?
She came in mid-June, after I was done with finals, knocking on my door holding nothing more than a camping backpack, a small duffel bag, and her pockets stuffed with a hodgepodge of new and used wads of Kleenex. Turns out she didn't have a car and I had to show her the ropes of how to get around the city by trains and buses.
Judy had never been on an elevated train before, and compared my familiar blue line to the monorail at Disneyland. I told her to stay away from the Goofies and Tinkerbells around here though.
I pointed out famous buildings, important stops, and when I saw the familiar bowler hat of, what was his name?, I pointed him out as well. I even introduced him as a friend of mine, just so I could remember his name. Ethan Moreno. I'd remember it now.
He looked a little confused as I introduced my sister, and I thought he would ignore us completely. He had that look on his face where one expects a candid camera to be in someone's purse, and everyone to suddenly start laughing at you in unison. Once she mentioned her divorce, however, he was trapped, and did his best to strike up small talk with us.
"How do you know him?" she asked me later.
"I just met him on the train." I didn't mention Stef. "He's an acupuncturist."
"Oooo!" Judy cooed.
I ended up being rather depressed that summer, still a little hung up on Stef, and decided to spend most of August hitchhiking across the country, trying to make it to my friend Dane's house in Portland. I told Judy to watch over things for me, which she was glad to do, if only to have her own place, somewhere to herself, even if it were mine.
"I guess you can sleep in my bed too," I conceded. "But no sex on it."
In the end, I caught a ride with a trucker who picked me up out of concern more than anything else.
"A boy like you: in school and with no goddamned sense. Standing on the side of the road where anyone could nab you," he muttered to what must have been a mysterious intangible third person in the cab. He was driving all the way to Sacramento, it turned out, and my month-long hitchhiking adventure turned out to be little more than a 5 day-excursion, having caught a ride some touring band from Sacramento to Portland. They didn't tell me until afterwards that they expected me to pay for gas.
By the time I got to Portland, I had three weeks to kill, since I still wasn't ready to head back home. I ended up sitting in Dane's living room playing video games for three weeks before finally just catching a Greyhound bus back east. I knocked on my own door with nothing more than a small backpack, a gym bag and a pocket full of receipts, feeling as if I had gotten nowhere in the past month, and that any self-discovery I may have made creeping west across the country was erased like a name written in sand as I crept back east.
It turned out that Judy had started acupuncture sessions with Ethan, and was feeling better as a result.
"He's cute," she admitted, "but he's gayer than a unicorn in a speedo."
In the end, she moved out, thankfully, halfway through fall term of my junior year, moving in with some friends she made at yoga class. She was becoming a bona fide new age yuppie. She told me she finally felt in control of her own body through yoga, and that meant she was in better touch with her own spiritual needs and development. She encouraged me to come with her to class, but I pointed out that I had my International Law class during that time.
I continued to see Ethan Moreno on my train rides to school, and even with our mutual connection, it seemed that he didn't feel very compelled to make conversations with me. To be honest, I didn't feel like being buddy buddy with him either, but out of guilt, told him one day that I liked his new shoes. His aloofness sublimated into the air as he thanked me and smiled, but it was still clear that he had no interest in starting a real topic of conversation.
The next couple of years flew by, and I wondered how it was ever possible that it took an entire year, an eternity, to move up a grade in elementary school. I was finding that it was harder and harder to fit in everything I wanted to do. And that wasn't even with regard to non-school related projects.
I had gotten more serious about school, and the time to think about what program I wanted to be in, which department I wanted to be a part of, where I wanted to live after graduation was already upon me, showing up like an older sister in distress. And I could only hope that it would resolve in a same way, with inner peace and flexibility.
Stef had gotten into Stanford for a PhD program in Linguistics, having texted me enthusiastically when she found out with "fuck this snow!". We were friends again, after having not talked for close to a year. There was no animosity, but we had realized that like the brown line and the red line, we shared paths for a bit, but were soon to diverge in our own directions.
My mother even came to visit, and my sister came with us to the famous Mexican restaurant right outside of downtown. She seemed at peace for the large part, but was still concerned with whether or not I knew what I was doing with myself. I told her I was visiting PhD programs over the next month, and not to worry; I was on top of my shit.
On the train ride back, Judy and I noticed that Ethan Moreno was sitting at the back of our car, but we didn't say anything, and didn't point him out to our mother.
So now here I am again, on the blue line, not heading to class nor my studio apartment, but the airport. I'm flying out to look at some schools on the West Coast. Dane says I can live with him in Long Beach, where he moved a few months ago.
And I know I'll be back in a week, but everything already starts to look alien to me, as if the city knew I was deserting it. Something was receding, like newsprint peeling off of the paper, and I couldn't tell if it was the city doing it or something inside of me.
Ethan Moreno sat across from me, as usual, and more than ever, I realized the obvious fact that I had seen this man for almost four years now on a semi-daily basis and we had no idea who each other were. I was comfortable with this fact, and clearly so was he. In fact, it had never even crossed my mind until I was here, on my way out the door. Ethan Moreno had been here poking holes in people long before I cracked my first book spine, and he would clearly be here for long after. In all this time, I realized, we hadn't travelled anywhere at all, but it was, rather, those years with all of their passengers that had click-clacked through us, leaving nothing more than a concrete platform and enough metal thorns on every horizontal surface to prevent even a pigeon from setting down to rest its wings.
********
Don't forget to read my Top Ten Albums of 2009 list if you haven't.
***********
