In my early 20’s, I used to live downtown in this tiny little efficiency that was so small, its address was 1200 1/3 Park Ave. It was a converted garage and it was completely woodpanelled with real wood, not the fake stuff. Sometimes after a night spent on mushrooms, I would be coming down, staring at the grain in the woodpanel, and I would see things in it — Jesus on the cross, naked women, rabbits, swirling universes. Once, my stepfather came to see my new pad and walked towards the back and said earnestly, “Where’s the rest of it?” It had a long wall heater that popped and ticked and made a big “whoosh” when it lit up and the blue flame travelled up the length of it. I had to relight the pilot on a fairly regular basis and it always felt like I was about to emerge with less hair than I had when I bent down to light it. My fold out couch/bed was right next to it and I was often afraid to leave anything too close to it for fear it would ignite while I was sleeping — although, in a place that small, everything was too close to it. It had a mini-fridge and a moldy, peeling shower and scrolly iron bars on every window and it was $130 a month to rent. It was so cheap that sometimes I would realize with a jolt that it was almost the end of the month and I had better start scrounging up some change to cover the rent. I shared that little place with a big orange stripy cat that had one ear with a chunk missing out of it named Frank, who had very little affection for me and was often fighting in the alley, but would squeeze his gigantic tom cat body between the bars on the window and the open window and stare down at me in the middle of the night. I saw him get run over by a car in the street once. The car didn’t actually hit him — it literally ran over him. He was so freaked out, he shit himself but was otherwise fine and seemed to have immediately forgotten the experience because he often sat his giant orange body right in the middle of the road. I would be driving up the street in whatever old thousand-dollar car I was driving and have to honk to make him reluctantly move his ass. It was one of those Albuquerque apartments that had a landlord and the tacit understanding was that he would leave me alone if I just paid the rent somewhat on time, but there weren’t going to be any improvements made. Sometimes the roaches were so bad that they would wake me up with their scurrying in the cat food bowl and when I would flick on the light, they would flee to their dark netherworld. The sink dripped constantly and I think there was some kind of gas leak because I would often get faint whiffs of sulfur outside as I was closing the forty pound door on whatever old ride I had that wasn’t currently broken down in the circular driveway I shared with neighbors that I never talked to. I think it was somewhere in the rental agreement — I will stay the fuck out your business and charge you almost nothing, if you never ask me to do shit. Deal.
All of my furniture was made of particleboard or 2x6 wood boards and cinderblocks that I thought were slightly fancier because they had a Zia or a thunderbird in their centers. My décor consisted mostly of Catholic prayer candles; calendars from New Mexican restaurants or dry cleaners that featured burly, feathered headdressed Aztec men carrying unconscious, but busty, women; gigantic 400 pound hand-me-down wooden speakers attached to a huge component stereo system; a tiny black and white television; six milk crates full of mostly old R&B records; vintage ashtrays that were usually full of vachas; and an old aluminum advertising tray with crappy Mexi weed, probably smuggled here in a tire — which was carefully separated into seeds, stems, and the smokable remnants, along with all the accouterments of weed smoking: rolling papers; shitty aluminum pipes; a wooden travel one-hitter box with partitioned areas for weed and a fake-looking cigarette pipe; emergency matches; and cough drop or Altoid tins. Always with the old tins. Maybe a plastic bong with a Graffix joker sticker. I smoked at least a quarter a week, but looking back on the awful weed that was available and how much cleaning of that weed one had to perform, it was probably more like a nickel. Shitty weed was cheap and plentiful and my dealer was a fat, uber dorky, Trekkie shut-in who lived a couple of blocks away on 10th Street and was so paranoid, his windows were blacked out with cardboard and foil and he insisted no one ever park in front of his apartment. You had to park down the street, which was never an issue for me because I lived close. He would trap me there talking about whatever while he took his time measuring out the weed on a beige three-beam balance scale that looked like it had been lifted from the middle school science class down the street. I hated going over there but at twenty bucks a quarter, it was a good deal for someone who worked in a coffee shop.
I had never lived alone until this time. I either had lived at home with one of my parents or with roommates or a boyfriend and I liked it better than living with roommates, but I was hardly ever alone. I didn’t have a phone — in those landline only days — and so the only way to see what I was up to was to stop by my little pad and leave a note hastily scrawled on the back of some wadded up Sunwest ATM receipt on my door. Back then, just as it does sometimes now, Albuquerque seemed like a small town in a larger city. All the big city problems of guns and drugs and violence, but with a Mayberry-like connective, somewhat incestuous feel. Almost everybody I knew slept together and worked in bars or restaurants or coffee shops and either worked ridiculously early, or ridiculously late. Often I would find myself just saying, “I’m working mornings now” and everybody just knew that meant you were off by three. The downtown scene was small and there were only a few bars and everyone knew someone who bartended and there was lots of free beer and twenty dollar tips and getting into shows without paying the cover because you knew the door guy. Because of Albuquerque’s size, bands on tour from other cities often played on weekdays and local bands played on weekends and back then, we had loads of good local bands. So many, in fact, that quite a few of them had decent local followings and the bars would be packed when they played. People I knew were doing stuff — lots of stuff, like playing in bands or screenprinting shirts or creating zines or small record labels or opening clubs or little shops — and I was often sort of in awe that people my same age were just doing this stuff. I could never imagine myself doing any of those things because I often made decisions based on a question from someone else that began with the word, “wanna?” “Wanna go to see Mudhoney in Denver?” “Wanna go on a date?” “Wanna come to Istanbul and visit me?” “Wanna go in on an eight ball?” “Wanna go get breakfast?” Nine times out of ten, my answer was “yes.” I often felt rudderless and although I yearned for experience, I often didn’t know what kind or how to create it on my own or decide for myself what I wanted. I just said, “yes” to people who seemed to have a plan.
I read somewhere once that saying “yes” is opening yourself up to God. I must have been filled with the Divine back then because I said, “yes” to pretty much everything. I didn’t have hardly any responsibility, so I could pick up and leave if someone had plans for a road trip, or quit my job when I got invited to fly up to Seattle and I hadn’t asked for time off with enough notice. I could just dump a bunch of Cat Chow in a bowl for Frank and the roaches and split. I don’t ever remember being worried about the consequences or having anxiety about whether what I was doing was a good thing or not. I lived so fearlessly in the present, I once travelled to Istanbul with $200 to see a boyfriend for a month and came back with $20, of which I promptly spent half in the duty-free shop on a carton of Marlboros in the Dallas airport after being stripped searched by Customs upon my re-entry into the U.S.. I had run out of cigarettes back in the Frankfurt airport and I was super freaked out about the customs agents possibly finding a stray pot seed in my luggage. They didn’t, but that valuable experience taught me that you should never wear steel-toed boots and overalls through metal detectors on your solo trip from a country known for its hash and infamous movies about drug smuggling. I’ve always been an experiential learner.
It seems the more I said “yes” to things, however, the more responsibility I accumulated. I said “yes” to an offer to send me to an expensive college in southern Vermont and took on student loan debt. I said “yes” when people asked me to move across country to live with them and then became responsible for getting my ass out of there in a timely manner when that situation didn’t work out. I said “yes” to two marriage proposals and then became responsible for untangling myself from those commitments — one which involved just turning the fuck around in Grants. I said “no” and then “yes” to two pregnancies and then became responsible for another human being — that particular “yes” that has helped guide me into finally making decisions based on something other than myself. It’s also been the heaviest responsibility I’ve ever taken on and one that I am constantly wondering had I fully understood the implications of that “yes” if I would’ve made the same decision. Motherhood, for me at least, has been fraught with a moral uncertainty that I only occasionally reconcile with myself. Regardless of my ethical quandaries, my son is here and now that he’s grown into a teenager, my requests when he leaves the house are: no jail time, no babies, no permanent damage, and stick to the natural shit. We will make do with the rest of it. Luckily, so far, he seems to be better at opting out of things more often than I did. Perhaps the Divine really does work through my yeses.
Sometimes I think that the reason I said “yes” was to avoid responsibility — that I could point a long, shaky finger at someone else if shit didn’t work out. But maybe not. I make more moves these days on my own accord and take more risks and it still feels about the same — 80/20. Eighty percent of the time it works out and twenty percent it doesn’t. I’d consider that a pretty good split. But it hardly ever works out the way I think it will, which is not a bad thing. It’s just a thing.
Still, I miss being so relentlessly present. The more decisions I make and responsibility I take on, the more anxiety it produces and I’m often just a ball of apprehension about when the next painful thing is gonna happen because of my seemingly ill-formed decisions. Doesn’t matter. Shit happens no matter how much you overthink things. The rare occasion when I am able to reach that bit of my fearless twentysomething year old taproot and say “whatever,” that’s when I am the most at peace.
Long live the dumbass kid.
