1980
When I was two years old I pooped in my yellow terry cloth
bathing suit because if I had to be taken to the bathroom I would miss
the spectacular event of having everyone; kids, moms, dads, aunts,
uncles, grandmother; all swimming in the water in Mobile Bay together. I
knew this perfect moment couldn’t last.
1982
When
I was four years old my father heard a splash. He set down his book and
his beer, looked out into the darkness and I wasn’t there. He ran out
to the end of the wharf and looked into the water. A clip-on light shined through the pale green, and he saw me, standing on the bottom, looking back
at him through the surface. He says he dreams about this, his
only recurring dream.
1985
When I was seven years old I saw the Journey of Natty Gann. Gave me vagabond dreams.
1987
When
I was nine years old I realized that if my parents died I would have to
live with my Uncle Emil, who was strict and had big eyeballs, or with
my Aunt Helen Marie, who was a Catholic nun. I packed a handkerchief
full of my necessities and nostalgias and tied it to a stick like Winnie
the Pooh. I began running away regularly to a patch of woods by the neighbor's house and trying
to figure out where the world began. I wished I was an
orphan, and felt guilty.
1989
When I was eleven years old I
begged my father to send me to Space Camp, over and over and over. He said no and
no and no.
1992
When I
was fourteen years old my brother and I got a letter from my father
saying that he’d gone to live somewhere else but couldn’t say where. I
started high school a couple of weeks later.
That same year
someone gave me a little white pill to crush up in gym class. A new world. I smashed it every day on the toilet paper dispenser and breathed it in and felt better.
1994
When I was sixteen years old I
raced Jay Eslava across the Mobile Bay Way and through the tunnel into
downtown. On LSD. I was topped at 114, and he flew by me. Nick
Davis was in the car with me, and never asked me on a date again.
1995
When
I was seventeen I got my diver’s certification and went to Australia
and New Zealand with a school program. I dove on the Great Barrier Reef but didn’t see any sharks. Those I found on land.
1996
When
I was eighteen I went to college and met Cindy. She taught me how to
spin a car by speeding down the lacrosse
field, pulling the emergency brake and turning the wheel.
That
same year I checked out the only book on yoga from the college library
and woke up at six every morning to meditate for an hour.
1997
When
I was nineteen years old I was arrested for a fake ID in South Dakota
as I came out of the Gold Pan Saloon. It had saloon doors, sawdust on
the floor, and I’d won money playing the Hell’s Angels in pool. I was
bailed out and spent three weeks in Rapid City waiting for my court
date. The day after, I drove to Colorado.
1999
When
I was twenty years old I went to Thailand, India and Nepal for five
months. I turned twenty-one in a small monastery village called
Tengpoche. I visited the monastery, where a young monk accosted me and
tried to make out in the gift shop. I ate a yak cheese pizza for dinner.
2000
Later on that year I started a newspaper. I was reading a book
called Toxic Sludge is Good for You, which read, “the price of freedom
is eternal vigilance.” We named the paper Vigilance and slept under our
desks. We drank red wine by the magnum and hallucinated from lack of
sleep. During the first paper, painstakingly cut and pasted together, I
had been awake for five days and I could actually see particles of air. I
was so sensitive to sound that I jumped if the door opened. One day a
lady came in the office and I jumped and she said, “Oh my god, I just
saw your aura, and it was black.”
Later that year I
flew to Manhattan to visit my brother and a few friends on the east
coast. I hitchhiked out from the Lincoln Tunnel. I rode with a Chelsea
gallery owner, a plumber with five kids, a college student, and a
veteran trucker. The last wasn’t going my way so he got on the radio and
found me a ride, delivering me to the doorstep of the next
eighteen-wheeler. The driver was twenty-years old and had just lost the
family farm. He told me that he doesn’t like delivering liquids because
if you have to slam on the brakes, all of the weight comes in a wave to
the front of the tank, and can snap your neck. He drove me all the way
into downtown DC.
2001
When I was twenty-two I
rode a freight train. Ben Thomas and I caught a boxcar in Portland,
Oregon, and two trains and five days later we were in Sacramento. We
drank whiskey and smoked tobacco and slept on foam and cardboard. We
never took off our boots. We were spotted by the railroad police in
Eugene, Oregon and had to army-crawl through a ditch to get to our next
train.
2002
When I was twenty-four I packed up my
dog and drove to Alabama. I helped my mom box or sell everything she
own for her migration to Arizona. Then I left to meet a ride in Los
Angeles down to Mexico. I delivered a couple cars and hitched the
distance. My last ride was a riotous trucker who had made his living
running drugs until he’d been arrested. He told me his
father shot his uncle over a sour deal. He said guys get shot and rot in
the deserts of Mexico all the time. People just disappear.
We
sang to a Steve Earle cassette at the top of our lungs and chain-smoked
the whole way. He let me out at an overpass at three a.m. He gave me a
card with his cell number and said if I ever needed a ride and he was
within a hundred miles, he’d come get me.
Weeks later I
was still in a motel off the highway in Los Angeles; my ride to Mexico never
came. I turned around and hitchhiked up the coast of California toward
home, me and the dog and Highway 101.
2004
When
I was twenty-six I went to Spain. It was November. I knit scarves with
buttons and sold them in the alleys. When I came back in January, I was
penniless, and took a nannying job in New Jersey. Five months later, I
wrangled a few bags over my shoulders, tied a kerchief around my neck,
pedaled my bicycle to the commuter train and moved to New York City.
2006
When
I was twenty-eight, I decided that I didn’t want to ride the subway
anymore, and bought a ticket back to Port Townsend, Washington to pick
up the bicycle I’d had for ten years, and had left with a friend. I
liked being back in the stillness and the trees so much that I didn’t
get on my return flight. I went back to New York five months later to
collect my things.
2009
When I am thirty-one I
start to worry that I’m going to forget my life. I begin to think in
time lines. In years. I have a hard time recalling my twenties. I stew
over things I should have done, bang my head for all the errors in
judgment.
Later that year, I start to feel a little
perfect. A convergence. I start to think maybe mistakes aren’t mistakes,
but hard times. I stop worrying. I remember what I’ve done.
2009
