My mother would be gone for stretches, back on the dating scene. My father tried his best to fill the void, but, at times, he would become enraged by the protracted and expensive divorce process. Whenever that happened, it would seem to me as if our roles had reversed. I had to be assertive and stand up to him, to reason with him.
It’s painful to write this, though not so much because the events of this period are painful to recall as because they’re in no way indicative of my parents’ fundamental decency—or of how, out of love for their children, they were eventually able to bury their differences, reconcile with respect, and flourish separately in peace.
This kind of change is constant, common, and human. But an autobiographical statement is static, the fixed document of a person in flux. This is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a statement but a pledge—a pledge to the principles they value, and to the vision of the person they hope to become.
I’d enrolled in community college to save myself time after a setback, not because I intended to continue with my higher education. But I made a pledge to myself that I’d at least complete my high school degree. It was a weekend when I finally kept that promise, driving out to a public school near Baltimore to take the last test I’d ever take for the state of Maryland: the exam for the General Education Development (GED) degree, which the US government recognizes as the standard equivalent to a high school diploma.
I remember leaving the exam feeling lighter than ever, having satisfied the two years of schooling that I still owed to the state just by taking a two-day exam. It felt like a hack, but it was more than that. It was me staying true to my word.
7
9/11
From the age of sixteen, I was pretty much living on my own. With my mother throwing herself into her work, I often had her condo to myself. I set my own schedule, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I was responsible for everything but paying the bills.
I had a 1992 white Honda Civic and drove it all over the state, listening to the indie alternative 99.1 WHFS—“Now Hear This” was one of its catchphrases—because that’s what everybody else did. I wasn’t very good at being normal, but I was trying.
My life became a circuit, tracing a route between my home, my college, and my friends, particularly a new group that I met in Japanese class. I’m not quite sure how long it took us to realize that we’d become a clique, but by the second semester we attended class as much to see each other as to learn the language. This, by the way, is the best way to “seem normal”: surround yourself with people just as weird, if not weirder, than you are. Most of these friends were aspiring artists and graphic designers obsessed with then controversial anime, or Japanese animation. As our friendships deepened, so, too, did my familiarity with anime genres, until I could rattle off relatively informed opinions about a new library of shared experiences with titles like Grave of the Fireflies, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, The Vision of Escaflowne, Rurouni Kenshin, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Trigun, The Slayers, and my personal favorite, Ghost in the Shell.
One of these new friends—I’ll call her Mae—was an older woman, much older, at a comfortably adult twenty-five. She was something of an idol to the rest of us, as a published artist and avid cosplayer. She was my Japanese conversation partner and, I was impressed to find out, also ran a successful Web-design business that I’ll call Squirrelling Industries, after the pet sugar gliders she occasionally carried around in a purple felt Crown Royal bag.
That’s the story of how I became a freelancer: I started working as a Web designer for the girl I met in class. She, or I guess her business, hired me under the table at the then lavish rate of $30/hour in cash. The trick was how many hours I’d actually get paid for.
Of course, Mae could’ve paid me in smiles—because I was smitten, just totally in love with her. And though I didn’t do a particularly good job of concealing that, I’m not sure that Mae minded, because I never missed a deadline or even the slightest opportunity to do a favor for her. Also, I was a quick learner. In a company of two, you’ve got to be able to do everything. Though I could, and did, conduct my Squirrelling Industries business anywhere—that, after all, is the point of working online—she preferred that I come into the office, by which I mean her house, a two-story town house that she shared with her husband, a neat and clever man whom I’ll call Norm.
Yes, Mae was married. What’s more, the town house that she and Norm lived in was located on base at the southwestern edge of Fort Meade, where Norm worked as an air force linguist assigned to the NSA. I can’t tell you if it’s legal to run a business out of your home if your home is federal property on a military installation, but as a teenager infatuated with a married woman who was also my boss, I wasn’t exactly going to be a stickler for propriety.
It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time Fort Meade was almost entirely accessible to anyone. It wasn’t all bollards and barricades and checkpoints trapped in barbed wire. I could just drive onto the army base housing the world’s most secretive intelligence agency in my ’92 Civic, windows down, radio up, without having to stop at a gate and show ID. It seemed like every other weekend or so a quarter of my Japanese class would congregate in Mae’s little house behind NSA headquarters to watch anime and create comics. That’s just the way it was, in those bygone days when “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” was a phrase you heard in every schoolyard and sitcom.
On workdays I’d show up at Mae’s in the morning, pulling into her cul-de-sac after Norm left for the NSA, and I’d stay through the day, until just before he returned. On the occasions that Norm and I happened to overlap during the two years or so I spent working for his wife, he was, all things considered, kind and generous to me. At first, I assumed that he was oblivious to my infatuation, or had such a low opinion of my chances as a seducer that he didn’t mind leaving me alone with his wife. But one day, when we happened to pass each other—him going, me coming—he politely mentioned that he kept a gun on the nightstand.
Squirrelling Industries, which was really just Mae and me, was pretty typical of basement start-ups circa the dot-com boom, small enterprises competing for scraps before everything went bust. How it worked was that a large company—a carmaker, for instance—would hire a major ad agency or PR firm to build their website and just generally spiff up their Internet presence. The large company would know nothing about building websites, and the ad agency or PR firm would know only slightly more—just enough to post a job description seeking a Web designer at one of the then proliferating freelance work portals.
Mom-and-pop operations—or, in this case, older-married-woman/young-single-man operations—would then bid for the jobs, and the competition was so intense that the quotes would be driven ridiculously low. Factor in the cut that the winning contractor would have to pay to the work portal, and the money was barely enough for an adult to survive on, let alone a family. On top of the lack of financial reward, there was also a humiliating lack of credit: the freelancers could rarely mention what projects they’d done, because the ad agency or PR firm would claim to have developed it all in-house.
I got to know a lot about the world, particularly the business world, with Mae as my boss. She was strikingly canny, working twice as hard as her peers to make it in what was then a fairly macho industry, where every other client was out to screw you for free labor. This culture of casual exploitation incentivized freelancers to find ways to hack around the system, and Mae had a talent for managing her relationships in such a way as to bypass the work portals. She tried to cut out the middlemen and third parties and deal directly with the largest clients possible. She was wonderful at this, particularly after my help on the technical side allowed her to focus exclusively on the business and art. She parlayed her illustration skills into logo design and offered basic branding services. As for my work, the methods and coding were simple enough for me to pick up on the fly, and although they could be brutally repetitive, I wasn’t complaining. I took to even the most menial Notepad++ job with pleasure. It’s amazing what you do for love, especially when it’s unrequited.