When I entered she was looking down writing checks. I sat down across from her and didn't say anything. She kept crying like I wasn't there. Like it was none of my business.
I said, “Amanda?”
“Yes,” she said like she wasn't crying.
“Are you all right?”
“I'm okay.”
“You don't look okay.”
“I graduated college.”
“I know, I'm proud of you.”
“Yeah, but like…”
“’Like,’ what?”
“I've been going to school since I was five.”
“Well, it's over now. Make money, buy IKEA, and a flat screen television.”
She paused and said, “I'm okay.”
She wasn't going to say it. She was worried. Her life had taken on a new meaning. She had a received new status that could never be taken away. A person with a bachelor’s degree. She was white collar. If she wanted she could make more money than her parents. She would make more money than the people she grew up with. People would look at her differently. She wasn't a loser, she was educated. But she had lived for 26 years as a poor blue collar girl surrounded by poor blue collar people. She had transcended them, and by transcending them she had said that somehow their life was not as good as hers. She didn't hate their life. They wanted her to be successful. They wanted her to become a person that was financially capable of taking care of herself. And this was the era of jobs that required training.
There were other worries though: she barely knew anyone that had graduated college. She had very little idea of how one lived being white collar making good money. She didn't know what her life could become. But it was deeper that, she had always been a child, never fully responsible. But now she was condemned to be responsible, she was an adult and educated. She was a person that knew how to do something, that knew things about the world, people she had never met before would be impressed when she announced that she was educated, would instantly assume that she was a responsible hard working individual. There is something scary about being assumed responsible. At least when one is assumed irresponsible there is nothing to live up to, but assumed responsibility creates a tension in oneself that you must behave to certain standards.
Amanda was crying. I could do nothing to make her stop and there was no apparent reason for her to stop. She had nothing planned, she had all evening to cry. Amanda had a new life. A new status to become and new money to be made. It was something she had to deal with alone. I left the kitchen and went back to checking blogs.
Four
I was going to New York City early the next morning to be interviewed with several other writers for a hipster magazine aimed toward females. I had never heard of the magazine. Everyone kept telling me it was very popular and the article would sell books. I didn't care what the magazine was or if they sold five or five million. There was a need to escape Youngstown. There was a need to get on a Greyhound and travel somewhere. Things had gotten bad. Amanda's dad was laid-off. The car had broken down. My job wasn't giving out raises. The news said every day that life was getting worse. It was a hard year. Gas hit over four dollars a gallon. Huge banks, considered Gods on the American landscape, had collapsed. Trillions in wealth had been lost. I lost my little quarter raises. A lot of people lost their 401ks and a lot lost their jobs. Amanda had good credit but she couldn't even get a loan for 3,000 dollars. In ‘07 they were sending her letters in the mail to get business loans. Those letters no longer came. Things had changed very quickly.
I had been to New York City several times before: one time before I was even a writer. I went there as a person with barely any money. I was escaping then too. I was escaping a woman I hadn't seen in years. Her name was May. There was this moment May and I had in a bar on New Year’s 2001. We were drinking with friends. We kept saying with sincerity that we couldn't imagine being without each other. That our fate was linked. That we would die knowing and holding each other. That we loved each other and life would not make that different. We disappeared from each other's lives. I would look around the room and she was not there. I would come home from work and she was not there. When the phone rang, it was never her. She was gone. She had gotten married and had a child. I was still not married and without child. I was still adrift, still stumbling. Her sister said May wasn't happy. May wouldn't sleep in the same room as her husband. They stayed married for the kid. Maybe because they felt like that was what life was supposed to be. The woman I loved so much was gone. We convince ourselves of crazy things sometimes. When I would walk through the mall I would always look for her, hoping to see her pass by. I didn't want to talk to her. Didn't want to touch her. There was a desire to be with her. I wanted to see her alive, her being, to see that thing, that made me fall in love with her. It is not easy to fall in love. It is nice to be reminded of what it takes for such a thing to happen. But perhaps what she did that enabled me to fall in love with her would no longer be there, or what was in me that enabled it would no longer be there.
I left May and went to New York City. I didn't have friends in New York City so I slept in my car on the side of the street. I parked my car on the Bowery. The Bowery was always mentioned in novels so I thought it was the place to go. I walked around and looked at the tall buildings. I walked Times Square and walked all the way down to Ground Zero. Ground Zero didn't look like much then. It was mostly cleaned up. People always tell their 9-11 story. I've never told mine because I don't have one. I was going to college, woke up to the sound of an alarm. Went to the living room and my mother was watching it on television. It didn't seem real. I didn't cry. America was attacked. Life had always seemed capable of getting worse.
The last few trips to New York City were for readings. I read at the KGB Bar to crowded rooms. They weren't all there to see me. They had nothing else to do. For one reading it was snowing outside. It was pretty. The reading was taped and put on Youtube and had over 6,000 views. I was starting to become slightly famous. I didn't feel famous. My books had been translated into German and Polish. But it didn't make a difference in my life. Some money had come in that year. Around 2,000 dollars. It was money badly needed and spent quickly on car parts. I had four books published, been reviewed in Bookslut by a writer that appeared on The Today Show, had a good blurb by a famous comic book artist that had a movie about him, and was even mentioned in The Guardian. But there was no difference. I was still cooking at a restaurant. I wasn't even a shift manager. I was getting paid a little more than minimum wage. I was so poor I got the Pell Grant to go to school and when I went to the hospital they gave me care for free. I was a starving artist even though I didn't want to be. My diet consisted of double cheeseburgers from McDonalds and what I could steal from the restaurant where I worked. Strangely, I was never overtaken by misery. The people I worked with were on drugs and drank a lot. They didn't have any real hobbies or love for life. From writing to playing the ukulele, I had hobbies that boosted my self-esteem and gave me something to be proud of. I had a small fan base that would write me emails telling me I was a worthwhile human. There were reasons for me to keep existing. I also had shelter, an air-conditioning unit, heating, and indoor plumbing.
Things weren't so bad.
I was going to New York City again. The last time I was in New York, it was to do a reading. The reading went well. Hu Chi, Humphrey O'Mally, Desmond Tondo, Lucy McCartney and John Walters were there. All semi-famous writers with literary dreams. Not dreams to make it big like John Grisham, but dreams to earn money, have a fan base, and announce themselves as writers and not as dog walkers, office workers or MFA teachers. There was a girl there I was going to meet that had contacted me through Myspace.com. Her name was Lin. She liked my books. She was my first female fan that wanted to meet me. I felt like Norman Mailer. I didn't expect her to show up to the reading at all. She was pleasant, intellectual, and ambitious. She had a job working for television. Lin was from Minnesota. She had attended an arts school and decided to try to be a New Yorker. We went to a Korean movie about a man with a gun for a penis, and then we went drinking. We had a good time. She had read Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil. I found it very attractive that she had read Knut Hamsun. We rode on the subway drunk back to her place in Queens. Lin had a personality that went well with mine. She understood sarcasm. She understood that humans were absurd. We could sit on the subway, one of us gesture to a person, and the other would know perfectly what the other one was thinking, that the other person was funny, weird, or sad.