TEN MONTHS part 1: Downward Spiral

From May 2000 to March 2001, life had taken on a new level of hopelessness. I'd just graduated college and had no place to live. I was squatting in the dorm until the end of May. Bowie and I were looking for a place to live, and we both worked as coffee bitches.

One day I met Bowie at his shop Downtown. We were looking forward to just hanging out instead of apartment searching. One of his coworkers, a lithe cutie, sat in the window sill, somewhat silhouetted against the light pouring in. We all chatted for a few minutes, then Bowie and I left. I asked about her.

"She said you're cute, too."

"Huh."

"Her exact words were 'I want to cuff him to my bed for five hours.'"

"That's good to know."

"She lives with her boyfriend and their two kids."

"Oh well."

Later that week, Bowie called and then put her on the phone. Even if I wanted to talk to her, it should be clearly evident that I have no game. What the hell was I supposed to say? "Sure, I'd LOVE to help you cheat on your boyfriend."

A few minutes of awkward conversation later, I asked her to put Bowie back on. "Not cool, man."

His coworkers started asking if I was gay.

"No, he just has something called a 'conscience.' I don't get it, either."

Bowie did apologize for the whole thing a few years later.

What compounded the stress of that summer was the four of us (Bowie, Chris, Carlos and myself) being approached at the big comic convention by a guy who wanted to do a comic with us. Each of us live in separate boroughs/cities, work full time, and odd hours at that. Just getting us in the same room proved difficult. We had limited communication with the client as it was, just trying to figure out what he wanted. He took the guys out to dinner one day in Hoboken (I had to work), and fleshed out some ideas. They reported back with the details. We decided to play to our strengths: Bowie would pencil, Chris would ink, Carlos would color, and I would write. There wasn't a schedule or anything, so we took our time.

My friend Justin was staying in the dorm for the whole summer, so I stashed my stuff in his apartment. Lynne was going home to Hawaii for the month of June, so she offered her room. Her apartment with the two Naomi's was out in Woodside, Queens. The living room had bright red "Elmo" carpeting. The worst part of every night was sitting in the Grand Central subway station at 1 AM waiting for the hourly 7 train. The platform was horribly depressing. Renovations had just begun on the escalator. Aside from the few florescent lights, the place was a black cave. There seemed to have been a leaking sewer line, because there was a pervading stench of urine. Most nights, it took an hour for the train to arrive, and another hour to get home from there. I reeked of coffee; I was coated with it. Lynne's keyboard soon had a layer of coffee grinds (which made her highly pissed).

Lynne came back to find her room in disarray. She was not happy, and rightfully so. I cleaned my crap out from her room - which wasn't much, as I was living out of an over-sized duffel bag. That night was obscenely hot. I tried sleeping on the love seat in the living room, but it was an absurd proposition. I striped to my shorts, put a sheet down on the carpet and sprawled out. (Insert LOLCat Caption: Diskomfert. I haz it.)

What made things even less enjoyable was working at two different stores, and had to deal with two sets of high-strung miserable fucks during my first summer in the city.

There was the shop in Midtown that was only open on weekdays, a wide open space catering to business executives who panicked when the carafes were out of "strong" coffee. One section was devoted to brewing coffee, cold drinks, and snacks. There were over a dozen carafes lined up that had to be refilled at great frequency. The other side was for espresso and its many variations. A third, smaller station was for selling beans & grounds. Garbage duty sucked because you'd have to walk around the block to the loading dock to get a rolling trash bin, and it STANK (as expected). The bins were never cleaned out, so there was ever-growing residue to wipe off on your skin & clothes if you weren't careful.

On the weekends and many nights, I'd work at my first store on the Upper East Side. It was a different kind of hell. Here, the clientèle generally consisted of idle rich snots. You know the type: people who have inherited their wealth and never worked a day in their life, expecting everything to be served upon a diamond encrusted platinum platter. Think "Paris Hilton," but with education and more modest clothing. There were a few exceptions; Katie Couric and Matthew Broderick were semi-regulars and were very pleasant to deal with. Some of the non-celebrities were nice, too. The store itself was a cramped, microscopic hole in the wall; the kind reserved for misanthropically-hosted comic shops. With two coworkers (sometimes three), we were constantly tripping over each other. There were lines of customers out the door, because the distance from the door to the counter was only 10 feet. When the throngs of nasty, impatient customers marched through the door, my view of humanity was at its lowest (at the time, anyway). I earned every fucking cent of that $7/hour.

It was around this time when my manager decided to hook me up with one of his "sistas." Avery, a sweet, well-meaning 35 year old gay man living in the Bronx with his mother, decided that at 21, I should not be a virgin. Far be it from me to argue with that sentiment. I talked to this girl, whose name I don't recall, on the phone. She was 19 and had two kids.

Insert "car screeching to a halt" and/or "record needle scratching" sound effects....here.

At the time, kids were just way beyond my comfort zone. We spoke a couple more times after that, but I wasn't interested.

As for the apartment search, Bowie and I continually ran into brick walls. The aunt he was living with became somewhat vindictive. The other problem was that I had somehow gotten a bad credit rating. It confused me, because I had NO credit, not a negative. It would be over a year before I'd even have a checking account, let alone a line of credit beyond student loans.

My next encounter with flirtation was three weeks before I moved back to Bumblefuck. The coffee shop was giving away a trip to San Francisco. An attractive woman in her early 30s had walked in and, after ordering her coffee, asked me if I had ever been to SF. “No, this job really doesn’t give me the opportunity to travel much.” A barista working for less than six months makes $6.25/hour. At 35 hours a week (considered full time at Timothy’s World Coffee), I could barely pay my bills. I never had much money for comics. Airfare and a hotel were out of the question.

“Well, if you’d like to go there sometime, let me know.”

‘Waitjustagoddamnminute,’ I thought. ‘Did she just offer to be my sugar mommy?’

And before I could think of anything else, she left the building.

A few other thoughts floated in my head. When did I become this sex object? In college, no woman would give me the time of day, and now there are a couple of them, with kids, that want to fuck my brains out. Why is it that the ones you do want don’t want you, and the ones you don’t want do want you? Am I really that hot of a commodity?

Nahhhh, that’s just crazy talk. In a few hours, while you’re sleeping on the floor of Lynne’s living room, you’ll forget all about the surge of actual self-esteem, and get on with your usual everyday misery.

August rolled around, and the lease on Lynne's apartment was up. I helped them move to a new place in Astoria, and Lynne asked me to leave for the sake of our friendship. I called up my former classmate & roommate Christian. His house in Edison, NJ had ample storage space, and he was happy to help me out. That Saturday he and a friend pulled up in a van at Newport. Justin let us in, and we put my life away. Monday, I got a train ticket and put in for a leave of absence at Timothy's World Coffee. I said my goodbyes, thanked and apologized to Lynne, and left on Wednesday.

3.5 hours and 200 miles later, I stepped off the train with two over-sized duffel bags, and the dark cloud of defeat hanging over me. Dad picked me up at the all-but-abandoned, glorified shack of a train station in Amsterdam. On the drive home, I assessed the situation:

All my friends have moved away.

The one local place I could make new ones has gone out of business.

I don't like my family.

No means of transportation other than my parents (never learned to drive).

All of my stuff is packed up hundreds of miles away.

No job.

No money.

No fun.

No life.

No hope of ever leaving.