My First Failure at Adulthood
My external map roams all over the Southeastern United States and a little bit West too. It is this map that shaped me, made me go from shame to begrudging pride. We were a family that moved a lot during my childhood; I didn’t have anything resembling a hometown until we landed in South Carolina in 1989. Our stints in other places were often short-lived. Aurora, Colorado for at least two years. I want to say Kentucky was a bit longer, but I mostly remember the strange earth house we lived in. This house is distinct to me in that it was entirely underground–built into a low hill surrounded by trees–except for the front. It was heated by a woodstove and it was also the first place where I heard Bon Jovi on the radio.
We moved because the company my step dad worked for was Fluor Daniel, a multinational engineering firm. It was through this company we lived in Kentucky, Colorado, and finally, South Carolina. My sister and I were used to moving in the middle of school years, off to be the new kids again. We never liked it; any new city was viewed as suspicious because we figured we weren’t likely to be there long anyway.
My memories of people before South Carolina are fuzzy. I remember our homes more than I do faces. I know that I had a best friend named Lisa in Aurora, and another named Stacia in Paducah. There was a shared love of Jem & the Holograms and a-ha records with Stacia. Sadly, I only remember the outside of Lisa’s house from a sleepover, not much else.
The unintentional wanderlust of my childhood became a habit I kept once I was able to leave my parents’ home.
It was not unusual to find me scribbling the names of possible places to land: Seattle, San Francisco, Tempe, Arizona for some reason. I plotted out my adult years in high school–an act that seems remarkably laughable in hindsight–in a series of cities. Okay, I would live in Austin for two years, maybe three, and then I’d move onto New Orleans or maybe I would go up North for once. I imagined my adulthood much like my childhood: peripatetic, forming no real bonds, keeping an eye to the next city. Looking back, I can see with the exception of New Orleans, I wanted to avoid most of the South entirely. New Orleans was the closest I was willing to live near Greenville.
Real talk: I hate Greenville. In the 25+ years since I left, and many many visits in between, I will never make peace with it. The Greenville of now is pretty different from the one I flipped off in the rearview mirror as a teenager, yet it makes no difference. There is a meanness in that place, a black hole with a gravitational pull for its young. So many of my classmates stayed in town, even moving back from out of state universities.I felt sorry for them until it happened to me too.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t finish college. I didn’t even get close.
I could probably dedicate another newsletter to how I lost my way in high school, barely graduated, and was lucky to have been accepted into the one school I wanted: University of New Orleans. I didn’t even bother looking anywhere else because it was located in a city that loomed large in my psyche my entire adolescence. I could tell you that I didn’t even really want to go to college, but I figured it was the thing I was supposed to do because so many adults made a big deal out of it. But that’s for another time.
Basically I ended up back in Greenville for a couple of years, tail between my legs, angry that I hadn’t been able to survive on my own in New Orleans. I blamed everyone but me. It was my parents’ fault that they moved me around so much; it was my dad’s fault he left me as a kid. It was every finger but the one that should have pointed back to me. These were also the years my drinking started to escalate; the indignity and shame of having to return to the place I hated most just kindling for that particular fire.
Much like those who had returned or never escaped, I signed the lease on a decent apartment and found a shitty job.
I like to tell the story that I made a beeline from New Orleans to Atlanta because it sounds much nicer than “I totally failed to be a real adult in a city where the bars are open 24 hours and I don’t know why I sound surprised by this now that I’m saying it out loud.” I didn’t want to tell anyone how embarrassed I was by not ticking the “Real Adults Finish College” box. I tried but I didn’t like it. I preferred Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a dingy touristy bar right around the corner from the apartment I lived in. I skipped classes to walk around the Quarter or lurk around Anne Rice’s house on First Street. I drank shitty wine with gutterpunks and generally had a wonderful if blurry time.
My parents were nice about my resentful return. I crashed in my high school bedroom, looked up all my hometown friends, and told myself I’d be back on the road soon enough. Okay, so New Orleans didn’t work out like I had hoped. I’d land on my feet soon enough, ready and refreshed to choose another city. I swore to myself I wouldn’t be here long, even as I went out for another night of drinking with my fellow black hole victims. Over bottles of beer, we talked shit about the city that had trapped us, pined for futures outside of the Upstate. We filled ourselves with nostalgia, and drank it like Budweiser. As I knew too well, it was easier to blame something else than yourself.
Some good came out of those years. I ended up working for the couple that would take me to Atlanta, where I would live for a decade before leaving the country altogether. I suspect Lesia, one half of that professional couple, saw that I couldn’t–didn’t–want to stay in Greenville. For the offer to take me along to a new life in another city, I couldn’t be more grateful.
My first attempt at being a grownup going pear-shaped aside, I didn’t really feel like my own adulthood, my own march to forming the kernel of who I’d really turn out to be, started until November 1999. I was terrified I’d fail yet again as I drove out of Greenville, crossing my heart to never ever have to come back. It had shamed me too deeply to have happened once, never mind the specter of a second time. I didn’t know it yet, but I made the promise stick. Atlanta was on its way to be my forever home.