Pre-Existing Condition
On my
resume, I list that I worked for the company Nantucket Homes between July 15,
2005 and July 15, 2007. That is not
exactly accurate but it is a nice round date to use. This company is my father’s business. He fired me and rehired me several
times. I spent a month not working before
I left. I had been planning it for a
while. I had about $26,000.00 saved up
in my bank account. Many friends came to
stay at my apartment in Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival from July 20th
through the 22nd. We had a
house party the night of the 20th with a keg and it was a pretty
good time. I had bought a tent from a
sporting goods store and we had set it up in our backyard concrete patio In
between the apartment building and the six-bay parking garage. We smoked bowls inside the tent, and after
smoking so much and drinking so much beer, I was one of the several party-goers
to vomit before the night’s end.
Drama
that is unnecessary to delve into. What
matters is—why did I want to leave Chicago?
I had only worked for my father.
The job did not provide me much social interaction beyond the
sub-contractors we would hire for our projects.
My co-workers and I rarely met except at construction sites, where they
were supervising work. After work I
would go back to my apartment everyday and smoke bowls. I was also working on my first novel—a story
about a dozen or so young people in Chicago going out partying and wondering
what to do with their lives.
On the
weekends my roommate Joe and I would sometimes go out to bars and
unsuccessfully meet girls. There were a
few close calls, but we were entire failures at this enterprise. We would go to the Ginger Man Tavern,
Schuba’s, Delilah’s, the L & L Tavern, Guthrie’s, and various others, never
meeting anyone we could ask to return back to our apartment to smoke with us
and sleep overnight with us. After a
while, Joe stopped smoking and I was the only one.
I would
also go running a fair amount. I would
run down Addison St., underneath Lake Shore Drive through a tunnel, and down
the Lincoln Park bike path, usually to the overpass at North Ave., but
sometimes further, as far as Navy Pier, and on at least one impressive
occasion, to Millennium Park. I felt as
if I was in pretty good shape. However,
Joe and I did not get along so much all the time, which was probably my fault. A year before the Pitchfork Music Festival
party we had a problem, for example. I had gone running and decided foolishly not
to speak to him for the rest of the night.
Somehow we managed this odd arrangement all the way to the Hungry Brain,
another favorite bar of ours, and somehow we parlayed this into talking to two
girls. At one point Joe went to the
bathroom and another guy named Matt, friend to the two girls, arrived, and upon
his return, Joe asked me if we should just get out of there. I flicked some beer from my bottle at his
face and then he punched me and stormed out of the bar. It was the low point of our friendship.
But
that was in 2006 and a year later we were getting along quite well and the
summer just seemed, I don’t know, promising.
But our lease was up in September 2007 (we had extended it by five
months after our initial sixteenth month run).
We were at a crossroads, and rather than continue on this path that had
been so repetitive and deadening to me, I thought about this road trip. I had it mostly planned out by the 4th
of July. I would escape the grip of
working for my Dad. I would leave
everyone I knew in Chicago behind and go back to seeing old friends who had
better ideas of what to do with themselves in various other parts of the
country. The money was there. I gave no thought to my extended future.
Sam
decided he would move to L.A. with Kelly since he had a friend living out
there. We planned out complicated paths
cutting through the United States. My
relationship with my father grew more and more careless as I stopped worrying
about going to work for him forty hours a week.
He finally fired me and offered me a lucrative severance. I packed all of my stuff out of my apartment
and dropped it off in my parent’s house.
My LCD flat screen television, my stereo—everything I could fit in my
car. I left the essential items to
travel with inside the apartment.
Two
nights before I left my friend Chuck wanted to have an appropriate farewell
blowout. Joe was out of town, at a
wedding. It was an unceremonious goodbye
between us, none I can remember. But
Chuck told me to meet him in a bar with his sister there and her friend. We had a margarita or two and then we got in
a car, and none of us had any cash on us.
I was saving for my trip and I didn’t want to spend anything. I ended up giving my last forty dollars in my
wallet for a cocaine fund—Chuck was going to meet his dealer friend named
Dream. We rode a cab even though none of
us had any money and Chuck’s friend Mike waited at the corner for us and paid
off the cab driver. We met the dealer,
bought the coke and went into the night club there. It was $10 to get in and Mike paid for us,
again. He had two Latina girls that he
wanted to spend the night with, but we went out into his car parked a couple
blocks away to do some of the coke before we went back into the club. In the course of this, I went outside to pee
in an alley and a woman drove up in an SUV and just stared at me going, and
then stared at me walking back to the car.
We went back to the club and the bouncer wouldn’t allow us in because he saw
some white powder still in or around Mike’s nostrils. He promptly threw a fit and the girls talked
to us outside briefly and then we got back in the car and drove around, it was
about 3:30 or 4:00 AM at that point.
They wanted to find a bar still open in Wicker Park, but I told them it
wouldn’t happen, and it didn’t and we spent another thirty minutes walking
around there aimlessly. Finally I
convinced them to go back to my apartment, which no longer had a stereo,
which was pretty much empty. They did a
little more of the coke and thankfully left soon after that and I went to bed
just wanting to die the whole time.
I don’t
remember what I did the next day. Maybe
I picked up my new pair of prescription glasses that I bought on Broadway in
Boystown, across the street from Reckless Records. I thought the frames were cool. But looking through them hurt my eyes a
little bit. I could see clearly through
them, but it strained my eye. It’s
difficult to explain. They just didn’t
work as naturally as other glasses. I
was sure the prescription was correct though as I had just had a recent eye
examination at the ophthalmologist for this very intended purchase. I still have the glasses but now I mostly
just consider them uncomfortable and it was pretty much a waste of $300.
There
were also the Kanye West-style big bug-eyed, thick white framed glasses, that I
considered super cool, even though they didn’t have a prescription like my
regular Ray-Bans which would always fall of my face whenever I leaned it
towards the ground. But I had bought
those earlier and it is not worth getting into.
They were just a cherished item to me, and they had cost about $13.
I don’t
remember what I did the day before I left.
Probably just packed my car and made final preparations. Whatever I did, it wasn’t good enough,
because the security deposit came back $100 short because I had left several
items there that I had presumed my parents would remove from the premises. But there would be a big rainstorm in the city
a couple days after I left, and there would be a big mess in our basement, with
most of the flooring destroyed, and their attentions were obviously focused
elsewhere. I just wanted to be out on
the road, staying in hotels, smoking bowls, swimming in pools, drinking at
bars, meeting people, having real life experiences. I wanted to be with my friends again and have
it be like it was before—when everything just worked out for us because we had
exuberant attitudes. Sam said we could
get to L.A. and just start writing our own television show and get paid six
figures. He said it was so easy. All you had to do was write crap. I didn’t really know Kelly’s story. I think she had dropped out of NYU after her
freshman year or something. She really
seemed to love Sam and would trust him with all of the details of the
trip. I had met her a couple times and
talked to her on the phone once when I had wanted to ask out this girl who was
a secretary for the creative writing workshop studio that I had taken a class
at in Chicago. Thankfully when I went to
ask this girl out she wasn’t there, because I later found out she had a
boyfriend and it was completely out of the blue and would have been a totally
awkward rejection.
The
next day, August 21, I left for Memphis.
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