28 Up

[darkemeralds]

tehomet picked 28 as the age I should chronicle in the Age Meme. It was a banner year in my life.

I lived
--The first half of the year, in a cockroach-ridden dump just off the Portland State University campus in downtown Portland. It was horrific.
--The second half of the year, at a boarding house on the Rue Alfred de Musset in Guéret, France.

I drove people crazy? There have been 20 years of my life during which I drove a car. This wasn't one of them.

I was in a relationship with I take it this means a primary or sexual-type relationship, so, the usual: nobody. There was this one French guy, though. Antoine. Taller than me, which was unusual. Lived in Paris. Took me dancing. One of my more picturesque memories: translating the lyrics of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" into his ear. Damn. I really am getting old.

I feared Intimacy, apparently.

I worked
--The first half of the year as the dogsbody and general factotum for the University Honors Program at Portland State University.
--The second half of the year as an English teaching assistant at the Collège Martin Nadaud in Guéret.

I wanted to be Better. Stronger. Faster. Thinner. Prettier. Cooler. Almost anything other than what I was. I did not foresee that self-acceptance would take another 28 years. But it did. Children, don't let this happen to you. Except the slow dancing in a Paris nightclub part. Definitely let that happen to you.

If you want to play, tell me your age and I'll pick a year.

Comments

[greghatcher]

Sure, I'm in, if for no other reason than to encourage blog updates once in a while.

[darkemeralds]

Well, I know you're younger than I am by somewhere between six and eight years, so...let's go for 32. Yeah, 32. Looking forward to your version of the meme. :D

[greghatcher]

That was 1993, the year I finally started to crack magazine markets as a writer, in particular at WITH magazine, and I was working at the Corporate Printshop, in both places making friends I still treasure today.

It was also the year of The Divorce. An ugly, horrible divorce with a lot of bad feeling and anger and bafflement and a couple of moments of real terror, not just for me but for anyone who entered my ex-wife's orbit.

I lived in a studio apartment in west Seattle, a tiny little basement apartment just off of Fauntleroy and Morgan, right behind what is now a dental clinic and what was then a video store and a pizza place that got a lot of my business. I lived there for the next twelve years, filled it with books and comics and movies, and for years my private litmus test for dates was watching how a woman reacted to the library I lived in. if she said, awed, "Have you READ all those books?" it was over before we left; we'd still go out because i am not a jerk but it was just politeness. I excused myself as early as possible.

In the early 2000s Julie saw the books and said "OH MY GOD THIS IS SO COOL!" I married her. QED.

I drove myself, mercilessly. Write in the morning, go to work, come home, write some more, watch a movie or read, fall into bed. Carried on a huge correspondence. Did volunteer work. Work, especially writing, was an anodyne, it kept my mind off the fact that six months previously I had been married and a stepfather and working at a major corporation and on the church board, and now I was single and working as an aproned counter monkey at a copy shop. The church thing even blew up, the pastor was caught cheating on his wife with the secretary and I left in disgust.

And yet, I was suddenly having huge success as a writer and illustrator. I don't think the two were related-- I had written the stuff that initially sold when I was still married-- but it helped to be able to concentrate on it so fiercely. But personally... I felt kind of lost. I'd worked so hard at being a good husband and a good stepfather, and it was all suddenly ashes. I couldn't quite figure out what would come next. So I worked.

I was in a relationship with ... well, let's not count the marital death spiral with lawyers and restraining orders and craziness. I did not date. I was frankly skittish and smarting. I figured I'd taken my shot at being half of a couple and it was over. My friends tolerated me. I had many pen pals and a lot of energy went there. Before the internet became commonplace, it was all done on paper, but even then I had a pretty wide and varied correspondence. Today a lot more of it spills out on to Facebook. Truthfully, though, I've always been this way, since I was a senior in high school using my mother's battered old Royal typewriter.

I feared my ex-wife. Seriously. She was FATAL ATTRACTION crazy. She would call my workplace and make insane threats, she left weird voodoo packages on friends' doorsteps, she mailed odd packages full of red glitter. She fancied herself a witch and though I knew all her talk of casting spells was a load of peanut butter, I was terrified that he'd find where I lived and nail the cat to the door or something. She DID eventually find me and scrawled a lot of weird messages in marker about how the seagulls were watching and the eyes of the red ones knew what I had done. We had the police out for that one. Kids, never date ladies you meet in 12-step programs because sometimes it doesn't take and then they get so addled from whatever substance they're abusing that they think they're demon goddesses. Pro tip.

I worked at many things. Copy-shop monkey. Wrote WINTERHAWK that year. Sold a lot of stories, mostly to WITH. Did some freelance art stuff. Volunteered at AA Intergroup and also at Mediation Services, a juvenile-justice program.

I wanted to be ... you know, I'm not quite sure. Looking back I think what I wanted more than anything else was to figure out what my place in the world WAS. I had been so sure that it was all about being a good family man. And that was gone. It was great being published but it became rapidly apparent that I wasn't going to be able to live on it. (Still can't; it's a reliable source of income, but strictly nickels-and-dimes. It's where leisure expenses come from.) it would be another four or five years before I fell into teaching and knew instantly that was what I would do with the rest of my life. At age 32, I was still trying to figure it all out.

But I was happy. The thing that made the divorce bearable was feeling my personality snap back into its natural shape. I could buy books again, I could enjoy comics and shitty movies and old TV, I could carry on a correspondence with other nerds and oddball intellects and lovers of junk culture. No matter what else happens to me I will always live in a library, and a decade later I married a girl who would enjoy building it up as much as I did. So it all worked out. After all of that, I ended up being a good husband and a family man after all. Really, if you count students-- and we do-- Julie and I have dozens of kids we think of as ours.

Some of us are late bloomers, that's all.

[darkemeralds]

I feel like some of that vast post-PSU gap is now filled in. I had no idea--none--that you'd been married once before, and very little that you had trod the 12-Step road. I spent a certain amount of time in meetings myself, in support of two sisters and a bit on my own behalf at OA.

It may seem odd or even inappropriate for me to say, but there's nothing in this story that feels out of line with the undergrad I knew. Whatever detours you took, your voice is still perfectly consonant with the voice I remember--better honed, to be sure, but I Hear You.

Thanks for sharing this. I'm delighted to be, in some form, one of your pen-pals.

[greghatcher]

Bless you for that. You know, I tend to think of my life as starting in 1986 when I sobered up. It's always kind of weird to hear that the guy I am now, the one that I think is okay, was sort of visible even back then, behind the self I despised.

There are very few friends from before 1986-- in fact, there are only five and you are one, I really CAN count you all on one hand-- that I still talk to. I value your friendship a great deal, always have, and it delights me we're in touch at all.

You actually were out to the old pad at some point in the 1990s, because we went to lunch at Cyclops and then down to the waterfront and watched the parasailers for a while, so we must have covered SOME of this. The reason I remember this is, first of all, it was fun, and second, because when you arrived you used the restroom and, after, thanked me for cleaning the catbox before your arrival. It was so emblematic of how I think of you-- simultaneous elegance, humor, and practicality.

Anyway. Glad we both landed safely, considering how many Scholars people from that time ended up dead or failing out of rehab... the stats on our posse are pretty harrowing.

[darkemeralds]

Dear God--are you sure about that visit? I have a dim recollection of seeing you in Seattle, perhaps combined with a visit to Eric Svaren? I remember books! But I honestly don't remember the catbox (though that does sound like me!) or the parasailing. And I wasn't drunk or loaded in the 90s, ever (or at any time since) so I'll chalk my memory failure up to a generally traumatized and highly detached personality.

The only other Scholars I remained in touch with were Beth Riley, Gayle Henry and Eric. Beth and I are down to Christmas cards (she sends, I read--she's not really online at all though her husband is and I put the occasional pin in the map through him). My friendship with Gayle was a great power in my life for 25 years, declining only in the last few because of distance and changes. I lost sight of Anne-Marie--I find myself "seeing" her frequently in similar-looking women around Portland, and have to remind myself that she'd be 50 now. She's frozen in time for me as a 22 year-old. Someday I'll write her into a novel.

Eric and I exchange comments on Facebook once in a blue moon. I let go of all of that--not lightly, but eventually. If Donna Tartt hadn't already written the definitive 80s honors-program-as-murder-cult novel...well, she did, and I don't have to!

[darkemeralds]

I DON'T STICK PINS THROUGH JONATHAN THOUGH

[blueraccoon]

I'll play :)

[darkemeralds]

Cool! So...what age must I not surpass? (Which is a polite way of asking your current age.)

[blueraccoon]

hee. I'm 33 currently.

[ranunculus]

Ok, I'll bite....

[ranunculus]

What, you want my age??? Err, Middle!?

[darkemeralds]

Forty, forty, tell me about being forty!

[darkemeralds]

In that case, I want to hear about when you were 17!

[pinesandmaples]

I am 27, and I would like to suggest that ages 1-3 might result in some very boring answers.

[darkemeralds]

I'd swear I replied to this comment and asked to hear about your life at...16, I think I requested. But I don't see my reply.

I considered trying to answer the meme myself from an early-childhood perspective: I lived at home, I drove my trike, I loved my daddy...yeah, not all that thrilling. LOL

[tehomet]

I lived
--The first half of the year, in a cockroach-ridden dump just off the Portland State University campus in downtown Portland. It was horrific.
--The second half of the year, at a boarding house on the Rue Alfred de Musset in Guéret, France.

Crikey, what a contrast! I'm glad you got out of that dump. Going to France was the icing on the gateau.

There was this one French guy, though. Antoine. Taller than me, which was unusual. Lived in Paris. Took me dancing. One of my more picturesque memories: translating the lyrics of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" into his ear.

Delightful. *envious sigh*

Thank you for participating.

[darkemeralds]

I have some strangely fond memories of the roach palace. Fond in the same vein as "When I was your age, we walked to school every day. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways!"