You Can’t Ask Alice Anything Anymore.
Like, I’m in Beach Town.

This is how I felt when I woke up this morning, as if I’d teleported from Atlanta to here, rather than paying half-a-thousand dollars for a UHaul and packed it up in the rain with Marshall, then drove in tandem with him, communicating via walkie-talkie - down I-20, up I-95 and over to here - eight hours in all through the un-air-conditioned mug, my drugged cat in the seat next to me never quite drugged enough to stop meowing in slurred bewilderment, his third, shining eyelids draped halfway across his glazed, tearing eyes, turning around and around in his plastic blue carrier, asking me, it seemed, the same thing I was asking myself this weekend, “Why is this? What is this?”
And as if we hadn’t arrived here in the twilight on Sunday and unloaded it all from car and from truck in several hours; Marshall and me, hefting bureau after desk after box of books up the narrow steps and around the corner into my new, tiny apartment till the sweat ran not rivers but sheets (Sheets are wider than rivers) down our faces and our backs and our fronts.

I woke up this morning alone, and I miss Marshall terribly. Otherwise, I feel not-yet-sad for my old life in Atlanta and not at all settled in this one; I feel instead like I’m in limbo. I, who usually have a ravenous energy for nest-making, am finding it hard to work up the energy to unpack and settle in. I don’t feel like this place where I know no one can really be my home. I feel dread at the prospect. This is not the right foot, Henshaw.

I may very well talk to no one in person today and I’m feeling very lone-tree-in-the-foresty. And very numb. Did I say that, Henshaw? That’s where the first sentence in this entry comes from; there’s this pulp novel that I and a million other teenager girls tore through from the 70s called Don’t Ask Alice. It purports to be the actual found diary of a teen drug addict, and in one entry, after you’re supposed to believe she’s been in recovery back with her parents safe in suburbia with kittens and shampoo and baking, one entry suddenly begins with the sentence, “Like, I’m in San Francisco.” Because she’s back off the wagon, man! And, being there on the side of that road, she’s also really stoned and listless as she writes. (The book’s forward says some of the entries like this one were found on paper bags and such; the ones where she didn’t even have her diary with her but was instead rolling around Golden Gate Park with dozens of other dope fiends.) Cautionary tale. Adventure travel can be not experiencing everything, but rather the opposite ‘cause the new place does not feel real, so watch out. Different topic, Henshaw. I digress; I apologize. Haven’t talked to anyone in a while. I know it’ll improve.

Because yeah, I have this big old To Do list that in many big and small ways includes shifting my identity over: getting a student ID and parking pass, getting a North Carolina driver’s license and voting card and working toward Becoming a Resident. Which is just the thing, I know. Just the thing to make me feel better, like there’s this process and I’m in control of it – charged up instead of just a plug yanked out from la vida.

It’s my last Saturday in Atlanta, so of course I woke up feeling like I should do something momentous. This of course, paralyzed me from figuring out what I wanted to do. So Marshall and I made blueberry pancakes kind of like any other Saturday, and now he’s installing his old cd player in my car because he got a new fancy i-pod-ready one. That and he’s that kind of great. He was looking forward to doing this today, so hooray for him. I was looking forward to just being inside, mostly; it’s so blazing hot.

You Are a Grown-Up Now. Go.
We were listening to Monster, that REM album, and were talking about what it reminded us of. Marshall said it made him think of moving into his first real apartment away from home here in Atlanta and thinking, “My god. I’m a real grown-up.”

Me: I’m just seventeen or so and hanging out with Jessie, one of my two best high-school friends. We’re going to see REM at Starlake Amphitheatre in Pittsburgh. Now, this was a huge deal because Jessie’s parents let him use their minivan and see, they were the sort of parents who didn’t trust their son to do anything; one time when eight of us ordered the “Tons of Fun for Everyone” 32-scoop ice cream dish at Kings, Jessie ate the most in conventional growing-boy style and then got sick in the car later and his parents grounded him when he got home because they would Not believe that he hadn’t been drinking even though we were the types of kids who got off on making chocolate layer cakes and dancing around to “Don’t Let’s Start” by They Might Be Giants late into the night more than anything else. They didn’t see this in him and this infuriated me.

Anyway. So, this was a big deal, right? The summer before, I’d gotten my driver’s license and had scraped the side of my dad’s car driving the two of us to go see Jeff Buckley and Juliana Hatfield play downtown, and so the notion of Driving the Family Car to a show outside of Pittsburgh’s South Hills' suburbs had been gathering something of a fearful stigma with the two of us.

We get to the amphitheater and did I mention it was raining and had been all afternoon? Jessie and I get a spot on the already-muddy lawn there in the drizzle and then Luscious Jackson comes out to open and they play that “Naked Eye” song which we both get excited about and then it’s pouring and we’re dancing in the rain and feeling like we’re teenagers and Living Life for Real. And then REM comes on and it’s still raining and Michael Stipe makes some joke about, “Is everybody wet out there?” and Jessie and I both swoon some. It’s then that the frat boys come.

Now, I know that “frat boys” has become just sort of a catch-all term for beer-guzzling beefy young men with no sense of the subtle or artistic. It’s not very interesting for those of us who would like to imagine that people – all people – are more complex than that. However, these were literal frat boys, about ten or, in the most sparkling version of my recollection, at least three-dozen or so. Maybe the very such brothers who had the term coined. This band of young men arrived in a pack and parked themselves and their coolers of beer, already very depleted, right behind these two nerdy artistic kids (us), there on the lawn. They then proceeded to seize the moments between songs to engage in lusty chants such as, “We are! Penn State! We ARE! Penn STATE!” All in all, an exercise in camaraderie and true, platonic-ish love among young men - love that challenged the very descriptor “fraternal.” By the middle of the show, about eight of them had linked arms, shoulder to shoulder, chorus-line-style, and in this way, they swayed during “I Don’t Sleep I Dream,” crooning along with the chorus: “I’d settle for a cup of coffee, but YOU! KNOW! WHAT! I really neeed!” The same with “Strange Currencies,” the unrequited heartsong of the album.
Makes one think, really, about the limits of brotherly love.

And again, I stress: right behind us, this was. Spitting distance. No, closer: Pissing distance, really. I know this because several songs later, I felt a drizzle on the back of my ankle distinctly warmer than the water that had been pouring from the sky for hours – and I turned around to see about six of the young men, still in Rockette formation, performing their epic number: pissing as one. I don’t remember what song was playing, only that after shouting, “What the hell?!” to them, -well, sort of to them; it was mighty loud you see and I might’ve said it while turning my head back to Jessie and then hissing, “We need to move up. They’re peeing. They’re peeing!” This love of confrontation that comes through in all I do really has been a lifelong passion.

Later that night Jessie and I trudged back through the fields to the minivan to find out that we'd left the headlights on. No battery. Which, in an over-sheltered teenager who's already up against his curfew, translated to: complete panic. We found someone with cables who helped us out though, and drove on home.

The degree to which that evening seemed like such an epic adventure makes me think of all the ways we were protected to a fault back then: A group of us dorky-types were really excited to be running the school's literary magazine. For about four months. Then at a fundraising rock/art show, some kid threw a snowball which broke a window at the rec center. After that, our leadership was taken away. There were rumors of drug use, we were told by the principals who called us in for our individual talks. Things were just getting too riotous and raucous and other words ending in "-ous." My older sisters and friends and I share stories of arriving at college to find peers with years of leadership experience on us. Kids who already knew terms like "management style" and "fundraise" and how to implement them to become temporary mini-dictators of campus. We were just psyched that no one demanded a hall pass from us. Maybe that's part of why I was so drawn to rock shows as a teenager. Especially to snarling, loud, barely-in-control-sounding albums like Monster. Our adventures at Graffiti or one of the other downtown clubs were our first and only moments to experience the loudest version of the larger world thre was, and to prove ourselves against it. At least that's how it felt at the time.