Oh, Jesus. Thirty-seven years old. Thirty-seven years old and unemployed. Again. Not the 37 part but the unemployed part. Between jobs, we say. We don’t say we’re unemployed or out of work, and we definitely don’t say that we got fired. If we got laid off, we’ll sometimes say that. But, for the most part, we say we’re between positions, between jobs, between things. We, the people in our apartments during the daytime, that is. We, the neighbors that stream Netflix movies on our laptops at all hours of the night. We, the people who not only look forward to wine stores that offer free wine tastings but require it to occasionally leave the apartment to socialize. We are the citizens in the windows; the ghosts of the waking hours. We are the ones who have the time to watch the crows bathe in puddles of roof water, to watch the garbageman perform his entire task, to watch the old shopkeeper sweep cigarette butts from the sidewalk in front of his store every afternoon. We are the people who have the time.
But to say we’re “between” things implied there were things at both sides—both behind and ahead, past and future. It was optimistic on the part of the speaker to assume that there would be some form of a job for them at some point in their future. Behind, most definitely, but ahead, that was pure speculation. Odds were, there would be something coming up. It might not be the coolest job in the annals of employment, but it would keep a roof overhead and the belly from grumbling. But still, it was an assumption to think that a job would most definitely be in the future. It was wishful thinking. Pure speculation.
This would be my 74th wishful thought. Seventy-three prior bouts of wishful thinking had kept me afloat and entertained for the better part of the past 18 years. But this upcoming 74th job—this thing at the far end of my “between things”—would be different from the others. It would be my first job as a resident of Seattle. Although it took me 36.9 years to do it, I had finally figured out how to unfasten the glimmering shackles of the Golden State. And I moved 1,100 miles north before it noticed that I was gone.
“From where?” always seemed to follow that disclosure.
“Los Angeles,” my reply.
And then, without hesitation or prejudice to the person speaking, followed the age-old question: “Ummm … why?”
My first few weeks here in Seattle prompted my explanation of “wanting a do-over.” I would describe in great detail how I had grown to abhor my hometown of Los Angeles; that I had to get out before it was too late. So I proudly explained to my new neighbors and inquisitive people in bars and bookstores that in a two-week period I had made the decision to move, quit my job, sold my pre-owned luxury car back to CarMax for a lot less than I bought it for, sold all my furniture at a garage sale, found an apartment in Seattle online, mailed a deposit check, and then split. I packed the remainder of my clothes, my fishing poles, a rug, my TV, my Ruger 357 Magnum, and my laptop into a rental car, strapped my new mattress and box spring to the roof, drove the 20 hours up to the Emerald City, and arrived the day before my 37th birthday. The do-over. Life reinvented in 14 days. Adulthood refurbished.
Then, at about the one-month mark of this same question, I realized that their “why?” didn’t really pertain to why I wanted a life do-over, but why I chose Seattle to do it over in—Seattle instead of anywhere else in the continental United States. The rain, they say. It’s always raining here. Why would you choose to leave a place that’s always sunny for a place that’s always gray and raining? I never had a good answer for that. I had my reasons—my many reasons why I chose Seattle—but these new people in my life hadn’t earned the right to know me that well. Maybe if we’re still friends after a few more months, then maybe I’ll tell them that Los Angeles had been ripping my heart out for years; that Los Angeles had slowly been shaving off pieces of my soul and replacing the bare patches with celebrity endorsements and pre-owned Lexuses and more internal conversations than external ones. Maybe at that few-month mark of friendship I’ll also tell them that I needed to scare the shit out of myself; that I had grown too complacent with my existence and needed to shake things up by moving to a state where I didn’t know a single person and had no job lined up—and with just under $3,800 in my savings account. I wanted to test myself, see if I could do it; see if I could just pack up and start over someplace new. I wanted to redecorate my existence. If I had revealed that much to these friends who had made it to the few-month mark then I would also tell them that I chose to quit a $75,000-a-year job in a terrible recession just to make the Seattle move possible. I would, of course, omit the fact about the Human Resources department discovering my bachelor’s degree in communications was just four nicely typed words on a resume. And I would also probably leave out the part about that company urging me to quit on my own accord before they fired and most likely brought me up on criminal charges for false representation. That bit of knowledge would be reserved for the one-year friends. The corporate world is a sham anyways. No one wants to tuck in their shirts.
But the rain. The rain. The question left unanswered. I moved to the rainiest city in the States simply because I came from a city that never saw rain. That’s why. There was nothing symbolic behind it. I wanted to be an umbrella type of guy. I wanted to wear scarves with my coats. I wanted all four seasons. So I traded in my sunglasses and T-shirts for fingerless gloves, thermal underwear, and a sinus infection. But I was glad to make the leap. Life is short and, in Los Angeles, summer is long.
The seasons, all four of them—a concept I had never known outside of film and television settings. Back in L.A., the winters were a lot like the springs and falls and autumns: sunny and mostly temperate. On the other hand, the winters of Seattle were like the winters of some Nordic Thor-laden fable, especially to a grown man whose only experience with snow was the fluffy white flocking we put on our artificial Christmas trees as kids (which we also learned some years later caused cancer). That first winter in Seattle was a real eye-opener to the reality of cold. The air outside would turn to ice by 2:00 in the afternoon, and the 90-year-old radiator in my studio apartment gave off as much heat as the stack of books next to it. But where the radiator failed the lack of bed bugs made up for—I’d rather stay cold and unbitten than warm and harvested any day.
For the most part, I guess you could say that I got lucky by moving into the Consultay Apartments in Capitol Hill. Finding that place online was just pure blind luck, too—which, in Christopher-talk, meant it was the second-to-cheapest apartment in the weird part of town. The building was three stories and constructed in the 1920s. It rented mostly to students from one of the nearby colleges. The average age of tenant was 22. Aside from the bearded divorced guy on the first floor and the milfy alcoholic woman who lived in the basement apartment, I was the oldest tenant roaming the halls of that forty-unit complex. The types of guys I knew back in Los Angeles would probably have paid an extra $250 in rent just to live next door to a bunch of cute college girls nearly half their age. But I wasn’t one of them. These girls only made me feel older. And lonelier. The young ladies of this peculiar Millennial Generation were just like the throngs of aspiring Hollywood celebrities that I thought I had left behind—with their loud, loud, cackling conversations inside small cafés, graciously allowing everyone in the room the pleasure of hearing an audible version of their Facebook status updates. I came from the older generation of Gen X—the early model of what they’re based on now. Sure, we may have slacked and whined a bit during the ‘80s and ‘90s, but we got our shit done when it needed to be done. We knew we had to fight to survive, and we did. We were the last real generation to remember a childhood without cell phones and computers, and it showed. We were cut from different casts, our two worlds. The Millennials and the Gen Xers had nothing in common, and neither of us wanted anything to do with one another. We were like werewolves and vampires or the Sharks and the Jets.
But it was a simple glass of Pinot Noir in the apartment courtyard that turned the whole situation around for me. While wallowing at the plastic patio table surrounded by nothing but brick and window, I struck up a conversation about zombie escape plans with a neighbor named Bryan. Bryan then turned me on to our adorable neighbor Mary Beth, who was a student and dead-ringer for Shirley from Laverne & Shirley. The three of us started to meet at the patio table for wine, cigarettes, and conversation a few times a week around twilight. Then Mindy, our eccentric neighbor with a flair for camouflaging her weight and insecurities behind gaudy outfits and peacock feathers, started hanging around the courtyard with us. Seth, the apartment manager, started showing up with a six-pack. Steven was a once-in-awhile. And, finally, 20-year-old linguistics major Regan, whom we called “the moocher” for his perfectly timed arrivals at the rolling of the joint, rounded out our cast.
Within a month, the courtyard patio became the communal meeting ground for our every-other-day “jazz, grass, and wine evenings,” where age ceased to matter once Stan Getz was on the iPod. We cast out our age prejudices and created a brand new generation at the Consultay Apartments. We created our own temporary generation—an indeterminate layover period where we all chose to dwell in the bedrooms of our lives. It felt like we had all decided to pause time, pause our potential, pause our futures—together. It was a period of life that could have been scribed by Armistead Maupin, where it was just as easy to get high with a neighbor as it was to say hi. It was the college experience that I had never experienced. The apartment became my dormitory, and the city my new campus. Instead of condemning that younger generation I detested so much, I simply adapted to them like a wolf with housedogs. I was growing backwards, shaving off maturity one month at a time. Those pre-owned cars and 401(k) concerns were drifting further and further away, month after month. I was no longer nearing 40 … I was nearing fuck yeah.
But even the path to Fuck Yeah had its problems. My savings account had become a part of my tenancy that I referred to as, “That was so October.” I had to find some work; put a little meat on the rent check. I was barely three months into my new life in Seattle, and my $3,800 surplus had become $2,200 in credit card debt. It seemed the past 90-some days of lounge, libation, and security deposits had taken a heavy toll on my finances. But with a plethora of exotic job experience under my belt, I felt confident I could find some kind of decent employment in my new city—once I really applied myself to looking. Luckily, Craigslist had a Seattle page on their website, so I perused the job postings and sent out four #6 Resumes, four #3 Resumes, a couple of #1s, and topped off the day’s search with a wildcard: the new hybrid resume that I had been working on, which briefly highlighted almost all of my various seventy-some jobs.
A full week of Internet job-hunting passed without any returned calls or emails, so I drafted a few more resumes—tailor-made for the Pacific Northwest—and sent them out. I had always assumed by being a very small fish in a big pond called Los Angeles I would automatically become a relatively medium-sized fish in this midsized pond of Seattle. But this was not the case. Living in a miniature metropolis with two large colleges meant having to compete with wave after wave of recently graduated 23-year-olds. My elaborated marketing and advertising experience was no match for a punk kid who was eager to learn and “excited about the possibility of growing with a company.” I got a few callbacks the next week and landed a couple of interviews, but those resulted in not having enough html-coding experience—a qualification I could not justifiably lie about because I knew the hard way that I would be expected to perform that duty. Times were beginning to get tight by that first week of November. It wasn’t as bad as those dire days of 2002 or 2005, but it was starting to get close. I still had about a thousand dollars of wiggle room left on the Visa; that was at least a solid month’s rent and survival right there. But I was quickly bottoming out, and I had made a solemn vow not to return to Los Angeles with my tail between my legs—for at least a year.
The malls were just beginning their ambush of holiday music, which prompted two thoughts as I shopped for a decent shirt to wear on interviews: A) I’d have to worry about buying Christmas gifts at some point, and B) The Christmas season meant plenty of retail jobs.
I was already downtown so I walked west toward the water and stepped into Macy’s department store. And low and behold, along with their own ambush of holiday harmonies, they were just then starting to hire their seasonal-employee sales force. Almost always, any job involving a cash register and customers was one that I would avoid at all costs. But I knew a little something about department stores and their holiday hiring tactics, as well as a simple way to make a solid week’s paycheck without having to do any work. It was a little backdoor trick I developed in my 20s, and it almost always worked at the higher-end department stores, especially about this time of year. But you could use it only once per store nowadays, what with all the computer records and such. But it was simple: Get hired for a temporary Christmas sales position, which is usually pretty easy to do when you hit them right at November; boast of your prior sales experience in men’s clothing or home furnishings, so you’re assured a solid position on the sales floor; attend the paid week of training, which almost always took place in a large casual room with a giant dry-erase board and a dozen other aspiring salespeople; and then you quit at the end of the paid training week—I prefer doing this part over the phone. No suit and tie, no cash registers, no customers, no confrontations—but $340 of cold, hard cash on its way to you in the mail. Next month’s rent would be halfway there just for sitting in a classroom mildly stoned for four and a half days, watching multiple “safety in the workplace” and “proper customer experience” videos on a TV, and pretending to learn all the discount key codes on the cash register. It was just like summer school, only air-conditioned and better dressed.
But that was that. I got my $340. The December rent fund was looking better, and Macy’s was forever out of the loop. But I still needed to find work. I could probably pull the same scam at Nordstrom, but I couldn’t bullshit the attire. You needed some fancy threads to first get the job at Nordstrom, and all I had were a couple of vintage blazers, a V-neck sweater, and some slacks to a suit that never made it out of Los Angeles. It would cost me more to dress for the part than what I would take home in a week. So I went back to sending out resumes from the “home office” for the next couple of days.
The gods of employment soon took pity upon me in the form of another seasonal job, but this time for a boutique flower store on the wealthy side of town. It seemed that new hybrid resume I had sent out to a couple of vague “hiring Christmas workers” ads showcased my past floral experience (totally genuine and unadulterated, for the record). I was hired along with twelve other semiqualified ex-flower-store employees to set up floral Christmas decorations inside ritzy hotel lobbies. The pay was decent, the work was occasional, and the job involved working alongside a bunch of older married women who needed some extra money around the holidays—the easiest variety of coworker to keep pace with.
Thanksgiving at the Consultay Apartments was a drunken blur of neighbors, food, and wine, and just what I imagined Thanksgiving to be like for Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald during their first expatriated year in Paris. But that was about the last I saw of my neighbors until December rolled around; it seemed every hotel in Seattle wanted their lobbies ready for Christmas during that one week between holiday storms. My new coworkers and I mostly worked late at night, when the hotel guests were up in their rooms or out on the town. It was a nice feeling to be working again, but it was an even nicer feeling to be working in a position that required no critical thinking whatsoever. This decorating gig fell into perfect harmony with my new growing-backwards philosophy. All I had to do was wrap garland over stairwell banisters, hang designer decorations from Christmas tree branches, and find that one broken bulb in every string of lights that prevented the entire thing from lighting up. There were no deadlines, no angry customers or clients, no cash registers, and no early morning commutes. It was just me and the midnight ladies hanging glittery shit from trees.
December started to get even more interesting after Alex moved into the apartment. Alex—short for Alexandria, but don’t ever call her that—was a tall sexy mess of spiky black hair, Parliament cigarettes, and punk rock. She moved into the unit that overlooked our little patio courtyard, and she climbed down from her window one night and joined us for drinks and introductions. We moved the party up to Bryan’s apartment for the after-dark portion of celebrating Wednesday, and he fired up Rock Band on the Xbox, and proceeded to wrap his customary bandana around his forehead before setting up the drum kit. I had never had an issue before that night being a 37-year-old dude strumming a pretend guitar in front of a room full of younger people I barely knew, but now with Alex there watching it just seemed so much more pathetic.
“This is kind of gay, man,” I confessed to Bryan as we smoked a joint by the whirling wall fan in the kitchen. “Chicks don’t dig a grown man who plays a plastic musical instrument.”
“You’re not that old,” he replied. “And you look much younger than you are.”
“I was talking about you. You’re 31 and you’ve got a bandana on your head, and you’re about to sit down at a pretend drum set. She’s going to see us make complete assholes out of ourselves, tonight, right here in your apartment. Maybe Wii bowling or tennis would be a little more … appropriate for her first visit here.”
“But …” Bryan pulled a series of quick puffs from the dissipating joint. “But Rock Band is where I shine. She’s fine with it; she’s into it.”
We burned through a few songs and a few more bottles of wine, both of which flowed easier as the night progressed. Then I laid down my trusty three-quarters-size guitar and sloppily excused myself to run upstairs to my apartment and grab some more pot; it had been my turn to roll one since Green Day turned into Led Zeppelin and my plastic bass turned into a plastic guitar. As I unlocked my front door, I suddenly noticed Alex standing right beside me. She must have been just inches behind me the entire way up. And she was taller now than back at Bryan’s. She was actually gargantuan, standing almost eye-to-eye with me and I’m six-and-a-half feet tall. She was definitely the tallest and probably the cutest woman I had ever invited into that apartment—actually, she was the only woman I had ever invited into that apartment.
“It looks like an office in here,” she said after taking a seat on my mattress. There was nowhere else to sit.
“Big fan of minimalism. I like to go light.”
“The word ‘Spartan’ comes to mind,” she replied to that. “Works for me, though. You should see my place. At least you have a rug.”
Over the course of the next 15 minutes, I learned that she had just moved down from Alaska, would be attending school the following semester, and would be turning 23 years old in a couple of months. I’m not entirely sure who instigated the first kiss, but a first kiss on a bed almost always leads to something more. Over the course of the next 15 minutes, I learned that her breasts were extremely large and angelically beautiful; I learned that no kiss, past on up to the time of this writing, would ever compare to the passion and fervor of her lips and tongue; and, finally, I learned that no other bare, pink pussy, again both past or present, could ever taste so much like candy.
“Dude, she’s 18,” said Seth, the apartment manager, the next day when inquiring about seeing us swaggering down the hall together the night before. “She’s just starting school. She’s not even a freshman yet.”
“I think you’re mistaken,” I replied, not even recalling seeing him in the hall the night before. “She said she’s going back to school. Look at her! There’s no way she’s a teenager.”
Seth then took me to his first-floor apartment, where he brought out her tenant application and thereby proved without a doubt that Alex had just turned 18 years old. “Man, you didn’t fuck her did you?”
She was half my age. She could have been my daughter. I was dropping out of college when she was being born. Had I lived in Alaska, I might have gone to high school with her parents. As all these thoughts ran through my head, I couldn’t help but smile a little. It wasn’t necessarily a proud smile, but more of a grin of recognition. Because my theory was working. I was growing backwards faster than I had anticipated.