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genderjumperAs I quoted from my mom recently, "We got evicted a lot." I don't have a full count of how many places I lived before, say, the age of 4. But there is a bit of an episodic story in recalling those I remember...
Anecdotal awareness:
Staying with a friend: when I was conceived, Mom lived with her friend Sandy (not the Sandy I remember, but a different Sandy). I have always assumed Mom was receiving a favor as opposed to a roommate situation. I'm not sure my mom has ever had a roommate outside of relationships and maybe college. She's rarely been invested in friendships outside the workplace.
A trailer home: Mom always said she loved living there and would gladly live in one again, despite our residing in Tornado Alley. I've never felt secure visiting mobile homes (I've even helped tear out the floor of one and seen how easily they come apart) but I may have felt differently.
Tierney Apartments: last apartment lease until I was an adult. I have no memory of this or either of the prior locations, but Mom says I wouldn't let some guy named Glenn "sleep with" her and that my brother and I liked to climb into the built-in shelves. I only just learned of this place and assume it was the apartments south of Lancaster, though it could have been the ones on the northeast corner (which later became a Food Lion, then a fenced-in Vietnamese Church). I knew at least three people who lived down this path by high school, so it's telling that I never recognized it.
Somewhere in there, I had a beloved spring-loaded rocking horse, that I outgrew so fast it broke under me.
Minimal Memories
Ronnie's: we stayed with Mom's boyfriend in a dark, square house with wood paneling and minimal walls; we were technically in a suburb and it was still pretty rural at the time, located on what I believe to have been Old Mansfield Highway (probably just Mansfield Highway at the time). We were there at least a summer. Some of my earliest memories are here, including eating ice cream with neighbors, walking in on the adults having sex and Ronnie yelling at me, and falling off a neighbor's horse (I remember the gravel rushing toward me but not what happened after... I seem to have broken my nose as a child and this was the most likely time). Ronnie was a towtruck driver, wrinkly and much older than Mom, and at least once we all came along on a late night pick-up; we could barely see all the lights and excitement, but we were not tired. Mom has said we got kicked out because Ronnie's cousin's ex-wife (who had previously been Mom's friend but around this time pulled a gun on her) came back into town and he wanted to be with her.
Johnny's: Without warning or options, we ended up living at my father's house. My father was not a regular fixture in my life, but I knew his name and his face, and since he wasn't really living at home (he was a train engineer and seems to have also been caring for his mom at her house), he let us stay there for a while. It was small, white with baby blue trim, situated on or near 5th Street (I've found either it or an identical floorplan, repainted, online and currently a waxing studio). We shared Mom's bed with her and played in the other bedroom, where I had a big plywood toybox painted baby blue (including my "camel-raffe", a wire-and-rubber animal with the humps of a camel but the head of a giraffe). We spent Christmas there, and Mom showed us how to string popcorn to put on our little Christmas tree.
[Missing?]: I'm pretty sure we were back on our own at some point, though not for very long and I have no memory of it. Mom would have started seeing our future stepdad around this time, and he would be a fixture in my remaining childhood homes.
Madeira?: On or about Madeira and Sandy Lane, my parents rented a nice house with three bedrooms, one bathroom, a fireplace, and a pool (I have no memory of any pool; Mom says it was dirty and our future stepdad -- a pool man at the time -- never got around to cleaning it, but I'm fairly sure we were only there for one autumn anyway). My brother and I shared the south corner bedroom and had the front bedroom as a play room. My high school sweetheart was growing up just a few blocks away in a house with identical layout (plus a two-car garage).
Handley Apartments: When they fell behind on rent, we were forced to spend a month or more living with our future stepdad's nephew, Allen, a mustachioed geek surrounded by tech and hydroponic plants. He split custody with his ex-wife of our older "cousin", but over the holidays he barely came over so we had his room to ourselves. We were there somewhere between six weeks and six months (I'm inclined to assume the shorter end) and it marked several firsts. I walked in on my parents wrapping parents, yet somehow did not recalculate when those very same presents were opened on Christmas morning and labeled "from Santa". My brother started coloring on the wall one night and I somehow rationalized that it was okay and I could join him (we had to clean the walls afterward). I saw my first collecting snowfall (just a couple of inches) and our "cousin" went outside and made a tiny snowman. And, of course, this was my first exposure to cable TV, especially MTV. Whenever it was we moved out, we did come back and visit for several years afterward, often enjoying the community pool. I thought it was a pretty great place to live.
[Another missing?]: If we did leave Handley before the end of July or early August, there must have been another place in-between. Mom and our stepdad officially married that March and Mom got a total hysterectomy around this time as well, so it's possible we spent more time staying over with my adopted or step-grandparents and "home" was fluid. I recall moving into Bright only a week or two before starting school.
Not so Minimal Memories:
Bright Street: quite possibly the first place I ever lived more than a year (it was two!). Two bedrooms (my brother and I got our bunk beds here so we had more room to play), one bath, and TWO back yards! The backmost one, separated by a chain link fence, was overgrown and wild; our stepdad told us he would mow down a path so we could race go-carts in it, but we never had such things. When he finally did mow it, using a gas-engine push mower, he'd have to angle it high and bring down the tall grass, skimming it down until he could set the mower flat; it took hours, but afterward we would occasionally see a horse wander up from the neighboring property (it was a horse farm, still functioning up until fairly recently and once linked to a famous rapper, but now broken up into several properties, most of which are for sale). There are longer stories to be written about the surreal environs (early racial awareness and social skills, learning to live with a stepdad, a succession of dogs being too mean to go outside or dying of parvo, my mom's brief unemployment when we got to explore the neighborhood with her, my brother's reckless accidents and injuries, the missing memory of the time our pseudo-cousin -- the kid from Handley apartments -- gave me first bite of the onions he'd grown in our yard, and my first two years of school and the babysitter nearby...) but several are relevant to the property itself. There was a massive yet climbable tree in the middle of the yard and I discovered a love of moving upward and being high off the ground; I only got about halfway up the first time, but then lightning struck the tree and half of its height crashed down (onto where our tin swingset had sat until mere days prior) so from then on I could reach the charred top! Our stepdad considered himself handy and promised to build us a castle for our action figures; what we got instead was a 4-6 foot brick battlement high enough we could kneel behind it, and while it wasn't anything like the plastic playsets we had envisioned, we played around it plenty.
Mt. Vernon: Whenever I think of "home" from my youth, this is the place I think of. We lived there for eight full years so many of my formative experiences occurred there. It was from the 1920s, pier-and-beam, so shaky you could feel it when a cat ran across the floor, and went through several property changes: the rise and fall of our two-story clubhouse, our stepdad's two private sheds and what he kept in them, how he kept our mom's hoarding in check, two or three porches built and decayed for the back door, the arrival of a small fishing boat, bike-riding for fun and calves, parentification and watching over my hellraising brother, our relationships with neighbors (kids and adults), houseguests, claiming my own space, my seven weeks bussing to magnet school, multiple infestations, and the rotting out of our bathroom/its repair/the hail storm that came immediately after and evicted us for good. For a time, my strongest relationships somehow involved driving past this house the first chance we got. That house still appears in my dreams, but I don't drive past it since they painted the hideous canary-and-brown into a stately gray.
The Lost Summer: It took all summer for the house to get repaired and the landlady to raise our rent, and I spent the first half of it apart from my fam-o for the very first time. I stayed with my adoptive grandparents, who were taking me to physical therapy after I'd recently re-injured my bad knee, and for six or eight weeks I had no care in the world: I finally conquered my "temper" and stopped being so angry, I went on my first date, I stopped playing with toys, and I discovered jazz. My family was housed by the Red Cross, first in a motel and semi-permanently in a project across town. I didn't know until much later that my mom was devastated by our separation, but this time brought a great leap in my independence and forging my own path and brought me peace and solid footing. When I did finally join them, I put my speakers under my bed for better acoustics, my brother and I rode our bikes around the eerily wealthy neighborhoods only a couple of blocks away -- that might actually be my favorite memory of him, because there was plenty of adventure so he didn't have to create his own.
Hightower: I was only at the projects a couple of weeks before our parents found us a new house back on the East Side -- four miles from our previous house further east than I'd ever lived before (past Handley Apartments and just a smidge further than the house with the dirty pool). A tiny bit smaller, still no garage, but it had a carport, one shed and a giant doghouse, and TWO bathrooms (well, one and a half). We were only there about a year-and-a-half, but in that time I met my high school sweetheart (now only two blocks away), started driving, and kinda sorta started being cool as soon as I stopped trying. Took a few weeks to get blinds, which was awkward for making out, but it was a good space. Not having mastered my frustration-accepted-as-anger fully yet, I mostly channeled it into fighting with girls and with my stepdad, leading to some holes in doors (at least not walls!), one uncomfortable conversation with police, and a melodramatic bust-up of my stepdad's twelve-pack.
5058: Not mentioning the street since my mom still lives there. After lots of working and eviction and bounced checks and whatever else, my mom's coworker offered to let her rent-to-own the house he inherited after his mom passed away. We had to move to another part of town, but I could drive myself back and forth and there was no way I was leaving right before my senior year. This place was where my relationship with my mom was strongest, my brother would come and go for months at a time, and I would win the war with my stepfather by deciding not to fight. It was where I got my first and second job, explored ideas and relationships unconstrained, and failed to get into my dream university. We had a houseguest here, as well as a ghost who loved rubber bands and hated Paul Simon, and the most tragic litter of puppies I could imagine.
First Apartment: the name has changed but I bet I'll remember later. An efficiency with a futon, a tall computer desk, and my broken heart echoing off the walls. I have regrets about my time in that place, yet I set my first novel there (I never published it, but I did complete two whole drafts in my late 20s!). I technically went to college, following my best friend from high school, unflinchingly known as "Super Christian Jock Boy" (actually, we were supposed to get an apartment together, but he chickened out; this foreshadowed the course of our friendship). Six month lease and when I left it half-empty for two weeks before cleaning it out, I sacrificed my childhood alarm clock to bugs.
Hunter's Green: fancy newer apartments closer to my job. Pool. Live-in girlfriend who was tremendously depressed and I did not know how to handle it. First threesome went weird (is this also foreshadowing?). Semester off, worked two jobs instead. Tried to transfer to any Tier 1 school that would take me, then one did. When that next path began to open up to me, I found I had barely seen my adoptive grandparents the whole year, so after leaving Hunter's Green I would treat their home as my Texas homebase instead of my mom's (also there was a squabble with my stepdad). But it wasn't home yet.
Water Street: my first NYU dorm was across the street from the South Street Seaport and around the corner from Wall Street, so most nearby restaurants charged too much for a sandwich and closed by 5pm. I might have been the last My roommate was a transfer from Jersey trying to snoop for his brother, who had been accused of assaulting someone. It took me years to realize how fucked up that was, but he was gone most weekends and we barely spoke. I crushed on a lot of people but fell into my six-year monogamous relationship pretty fast with my college sweetheart. A lot of depression, burnout, yearning, reckoning, and reevaluation that year, though I didn't see it at the time. Oh yeah, and I was completely unprepared for that Tier 1 education I'd insisted on getting, and my adoptive grandparents would spend about a third of their retirement fund to keep me there.
26th Street: NYU was desperate for housing and buying and leasing properties all over lower Manhattan. This one was supposed to be housing for dental students, but the top several floors went to students who hadn't been there long enough to request anywhere good. We were across the street from the old mental hospital and some parents got their kids apartments when they found out someone had been stabbed down the block a year prior. I was never as out and proud of my working class background as I should have been, but the class divide was surreal. My second and final roommate was boisterous, lazy, and may have had delusions of grandeur, but I felt I could handle him better than most and I was right. He now works for his father's import company and probably makes more in a year than I've made in my whole life, but in those days he was just the layabout who went through several broken phones and laptops a semester and took Dragonball Z way too seriously. College sweetheart lived down the hall, and her mom insisted I walk her back from the subway every time she came home from work after dark.
Union Square: the best dorm, where I learned to skim and set boundaries, where I loved the city and got tired of the school, then panicked I wasn't ready to graduate. I tried to make an agreement with roommates that I would clean the bathroom if they'd wash my dishes (my stepdad really made me hate washing dishes), but since none of them ever ate at home they fell off pretty fast. There was a little incident a couple miles down the street that you may have heard about, and I supposed that colored a lot of what followed as well. College sweetheart apparently had to defend me behind my back to her parents, who thought I was going to try to move in with them after graduation (I actually thought they were going to offer and I was looking forward to turning them down). I went home and spent another summer with my adoptive grandparents, trying to find a nonprofit position that aligned with my values and would put me partway between her family (north of Philadelphia) and mine.
Forestville: I started my new job on September 10th (specifically so I could see how they handled the anniversary the next day) and found an apartment in the suburbs. Forestville was a revelation to me compared to my mid-Southern roots: a suburb that was primarily Black but not completely forsaken. I hurt my back setting up the king-size bed alone, and had to take PT. I had one semester to settle in before College Sweetheart would join me, and I remembered how peaceful alone time could be. We were on the 9th floor, I think. The halls were dark, jewel-toned and poorly lit, and we finagled free cable for nearly a year by accident. DC grew on me slowly but I loved the organization and my coworkers, though I do think I had a bit of imposter syndrome about my working class background.
1234 Mass: Once College Sweetheart had a steady job, we could afford to move into DC proper and ended up just a few blocks from the White House. Most importantly, I could walk to work, and this final stage of my East Coast Walking Years was marred by knee injuries from not bending them enough. The apartment was delightfully eclectic: some older folks who could be professors or professional dog walkers, quite a few immigrant families just holding it down, and a few (but not too many) early career upstarts like ourselves. The place was incredible, but the walk down L Street (then a haven for streetwalkers getting picked up by lobbyists working late) was disconcerting and I was struggling to figure out why I was so unhappy. I had no friends, my relationship felt stagnant -- like we were going to compromise ourselves to death -- and I was feeling stifled. In the throws of whether or not to breakup, College Sweetheart and I started to explore deeper communication and alternative ways to connect. To start, I would find a sublet and move out for a while.
Cristal Manor: a few blocks away, I took over a room in a house full of young gay men (my room belonged to an actor who was going on tour), soon joined by a self-described "fag hag" who was alternately attractive and unpleasant in my eyes. I never told them about my bisexual feelings and experiences, let alone that I had crushes on two of them (it probably didn't help that when they met College Sweetheart, they couldn't figure out why I was ambivalent to stay with her). I blogged my feelings and my interest in polyamory, and started to make connections back in North Texas of all places. I loved the old townhouse we shared, though it was hard to stay warm in the winter, and got to explore more sides of DC that I hadn't already seen. When my knees were at their worst, I crutched my way through the last month and wound up staying with college sweetheart by default (there was an elevator and not three flights of stairs) rather than committing to a firm decision. I tried, and almost immediately reneged in embarrassing ways. As my organization transitioned away from everything I loved about it, I started thinking I'd rather be a freak back home than try to fit in as a normative "blue stater" any longer. One of my coworkers had told me about polyamory, and I was ready to try a radical change.
My Sanctuary-Prison: I nicknamed the place "Lorentz University", but since I became a stepparent it's been "Cheesecake House". Many of my happiest childhood memories took place here with my adoptive grandparents, and I felt safe here when I felt safe nowhere else. I wasn't here long before caregiving changed my options, and five years later it would change them again. Everything I had loved about this place has been tested, overextended, and exasperated in the nearly 20 years since I returned. I felt ready to leave it behind and start fresh after grad school, but the pandemic has given it new favor as a place that protected us in times of great uncertainty. I still sleep in the guest bedroom I claimed around age 12, giving my nesting partner the private bathroom and keeping the least temperate corner of the house. I'm grateful for this final gift from my grandparents, for all it has done to protect me and people I care for, and I hope I can leave it in good hands when at last my next adventure reveals itself.
Now I need to go back and explain what all this has to do with love, but it took several hours and I need to go to bed!
I sometimes have to go through a whole list of nouns like this to recall what a dynamic life I've had. Some of it's affirming, others borerline fucked up. I've had the headcanon for a couple of years now that my mom is undiagnosed autistic, and I think this is a good survey of how much she hated moving but lacked "adulting" skills until my stepdad came along to smooth out her rough edges. In her own way, I am certain she loved us and prioritized us, but I don't think she'd ever received the kind of support she needed, so she had no idea what it was we were missing (it wasn't a stepfather, that's for sure, however stabilizing his presence became). For better or worse, this itinerant life gave me a strong sense of geography and a broader devotion to my neighborhood or my hometown as a whole than any one house or one street. There's deep love there, even if it isn't always reciprocated.
Anecdotal awareness:
Staying with a friend: when I was conceived, Mom lived with her friend Sandy (not the Sandy I remember, but a different Sandy). I have always assumed Mom was receiving a favor as opposed to a roommate situation. I'm not sure my mom has ever had a roommate outside of relationships and maybe college. She's rarely been invested in friendships outside the workplace.
A trailer home: Mom always said she loved living there and would gladly live in one again, despite our residing in Tornado Alley. I've never felt secure visiting mobile homes (I've even helped tear out the floor of one and seen how easily they come apart) but I may have felt differently.
Tierney Apartments: last apartment lease until I was an adult. I have no memory of this or either of the prior locations, but Mom says I wouldn't let some guy named Glenn "sleep with" her and that my brother and I liked to climb into the built-in shelves. I only just learned of this place and assume it was the apartments south of Lancaster, though it could have been the ones on the northeast corner (which later became a Food Lion, then a fenced-in Vietnamese Church). I knew at least three people who lived down this path by high school, so it's telling that I never recognized it.
Somewhere in there, I had a beloved spring-loaded rocking horse, that I outgrew so fast it broke under me.
Minimal Memories
Ronnie's: we stayed with Mom's boyfriend in a dark, square house with wood paneling and minimal walls; we were technically in a suburb and it was still pretty rural at the time, located on what I believe to have been Old Mansfield Highway (probably just Mansfield Highway at the time). We were there at least a summer. Some of my earliest memories are here, including eating ice cream with neighbors, walking in on the adults having sex and Ronnie yelling at me, and falling off a neighbor's horse (I remember the gravel rushing toward me but not what happened after... I seem to have broken my nose as a child and this was the most likely time). Ronnie was a towtruck driver, wrinkly and much older than Mom, and at least once we all came along on a late night pick-up; we could barely see all the lights and excitement, but we were not tired. Mom has said we got kicked out because Ronnie's cousin's ex-wife (who had previously been Mom's friend but around this time pulled a gun on her) came back into town and he wanted to be with her.
Johnny's: Without warning or options, we ended up living at my father's house. My father was not a regular fixture in my life, but I knew his name and his face, and since he wasn't really living at home (he was a train engineer and seems to have also been caring for his mom at her house), he let us stay there for a while. It was small, white with baby blue trim, situated on or near 5th Street (I've found either it or an identical floorplan, repainted, online and currently a waxing studio). We shared Mom's bed with her and played in the other bedroom, where I had a big plywood toybox painted baby blue (including my "camel-raffe", a wire-and-rubber animal with the humps of a camel but the head of a giraffe). We spent Christmas there, and Mom showed us how to string popcorn to put on our little Christmas tree.
[Missing?]: I'm pretty sure we were back on our own at some point, though not for very long and I have no memory of it. Mom would have started seeing our future stepdad around this time, and he would be a fixture in my remaining childhood homes.
Madeira?: On or about Madeira and Sandy Lane, my parents rented a nice house with three bedrooms, one bathroom, a fireplace, and a pool (I have no memory of any pool; Mom says it was dirty and our future stepdad -- a pool man at the time -- never got around to cleaning it, but I'm fairly sure we were only there for one autumn anyway). My brother and I shared the south corner bedroom and had the front bedroom as a play room. My high school sweetheart was growing up just a few blocks away in a house with identical layout (plus a two-car garage).
Handley Apartments: When they fell behind on rent, we were forced to spend a month or more living with our future stepdad's nephew, Allen, a mustachioed geek surrounded by tech and hydroponic plants. He split custody with his ex-wife of our older "cousin", but over the holidays he barely came over so we had his room to ourselves. We were there somewhere between six weeks and six months (I'm inclined to assume the shorter end) and it marked several firsts. I walked in on my parents wrapping parents, yet somehow did not recalculate when those very same presents were opened on Christmas morning and labeled "from Santa". My brother started coloring on the wall one night and I somehow rationalized that it was okay and I could join him (we had to clean the walls afterward). I saw my first collecting snowfall (just a couple of inches) and our "cousin" went outside and made a tiny snowman. And, of course, this was my first exposure to cable TV, especially MTV. Whenever it was we moved out, we did come back and visit for several years afterward, often enjoying the community pool. I thought it was a pretty great place to live.
[Another missing?]: If we did leave Handley before the end of July or early August, there must have been another place in-between. Mom and our stepdad officially married that March and Mom got a total hysterectomy around this time as well, so it's possible we spent more time staying over with my adopted or step-grandparents and "home" was fluid. I recall moving into Bright only a week or two before starting school.
Not so Minimal Memories:
Bright Street: quite possibly the first place I ever lived more than a year (it was two!). Two bedrooms (my brother and I got our bunk beds here so we had more room to play), one bath, and TWO back yards! The backmost one, separated by a chain link fence, was overgrown and wild; our stepdad told us he would mow down a path so we could race go-carts in it, but we never had such things. When he finally did mow it, using a gas-engine push mower, he'd have to angle it high and bring down the tall grass, skimming it down until he could set the mower flat; it took hours, but afterward we would occasionally see a horse wander up from the neighboring property (it was a horse farm, still functioning up until fairly recently and once linked to a famous rapper, but now broken up into several properties, most of which are for sale). There are longer stories to be written about the surreal environs (early racial awareness and social skills, learning to live with a stepdad, a succession of dogs being too mean to go outside or dying of parvo, my mom's brief unemployment when we got to explore the neighborhood with her, my brother's reckless accidents and injuries, the missing memory of the time our pseudo-cousin -- the kid from Handley apartments -- gave me first bite of the onions he'd grown in our yard, and my first two years of school and the babysitter nearby...) but several are relevant to the property itself. There was a massive yet climbable tree in the middle of the yard and I discovered a love of moving upward and being high off the ground; I only got about halfway up the first time, but then lightning struck the tree and half of its height crashed down (onto where our tin swingset had sat until mere days prior) so from then on I could reach the charred top! Our stepdad considered himself handy and promised to build us a castle for our action figures; what we got instead was a 4-6 foot brick battlement high enough we could kneel behind it, and while it wasn't anything like the plastic playsets we had envisioned, we played around it plenty.
Mt. Vernon: Whenever I think of "home" from my youth, this is the place I think of. We lived there for eight full years so many of my formative experiences occurred there. It was from the 1920s, pier-and-beam, so shaky you could feel it when a cat ran across the floor, and went through several property changes: the rise and fall of our two-story clubhouse, our stepdad's two private sheds and what he kept in them, how he kept our mom's hoarding in check, two or three porches built and decayed for the back door, the arrival of a small fishing boat, bike-riding for fun and calves, parentification and watching over my hellraising brother, our relationships with neighbors (kids and adults), houseguests, claiming my own space, my seven weeks bussing to magnet school, multiple infestations, and the rotting out of our bathroom/its repair/the hail storm that came immediately after and evicted us for good. For a time, my strongest relationships somehow involved driving past this house the first chance we got. That house still appears in my dreams, but I don't drive past it since they painted the hideous canary-and-brown into a stately gray.
The Lost Summer: It took all summer for the house to get repaired and the landlady to raise our rent, and I spent the first half of it apart from my fam-o for the very first time. I stayed with my adoptive grandparents, who were taking me to physical therapy after I'd recently re-injured my bad knee, and for six or eight weeks I had no care in the world: I finally conquered my "temper" and stopped being so angry, I went on my first date, I stopped playing with toys, and I discovered jazz. My family was housed by the Red Cross, first in a motel and semi-permanently in a project across town. I didn't know until much later that my mom was devastated by our separation, but this time brought a great leap in my independence and forging my own path and brought me peace and solid footing. When I did finally join them, I put my speakers under my bed for better acoustics, my brother and I rode our bikes around the eerily wealthy neighborhoods only a couple of blocks away -- that might actually be my favorite memory of him, because there was plenty of adventure so he didn't have to create his own.
Hightower: I was only at the projects a couple of weeks before our parents found us a new house back on the East Side -- four miles from our previous house further east than I'd ever lived before (past Handley Apartments and just a smidge further than the house with the dirty pool). A tiny bit smaller, still no garage, but it had a carport, one shed and a giant doghouse, and TWO bathrooms (well, one and a half). We were only there about a year-and-a-half, but in that time I met my high school sweetheart (now only two blocks away), started driving, and kinda sorta started being cool as soon as I stopped trying. Took a few weeks to get blinds, which was awkward for making out, but it was a good space. Not having mastered my frustration-accepted-as-anger fully yet, I mostly channeled it into fighting with girls and with my stepdad, leading to some holes in doors (at least not walls!), one uncomfortable conversation with police, and a melodramatic bust-up of my stepdad's twelve-pack.
5058: Not mentioning the street since my mom still lives there. After lots of working and eviction and bounced checks and whatever else, my mom's coworker offered to let her rent-to-own the house he inherited after his mom passed away. We had to move to another part of town, but I could drive myself back and forth and there was no way I was leaving right before my senior year. This place was where my relationship with my mom was strongest, my brother would come and go for months at a time, and I would win the war with my stepfather by deciding not to fight. It was where I got my first and second job, explored ideas and relationships unconstrained, and failed to get into my dream university. We had a houseguest here, as well as a ghost who loved rubber bands and hated Paul Simon, and the most tragic litter of puppies I could imagine.
First Apartment: the name has changed but I bet I'll remember later. An efficiency with a futon, a tall computer desk, and my broken heart echoing off the walls. I have regrets about my time in that place, yet I set my first novel there (I never published it, but I did complete two whole drafts in my late 20s!). I technically went to college, following my best friend from high school, unflinchingly known as "Super Christian Jock Boy" (actually, we were supposed to get an apartment together, but he chickened out; this foreshadowed the course of our friendship). Six month lease and when I left it half-empty for two weeks before cleaning it out, I sacrificed my childhood alarm clock to bugs.
Hunter's Green: fancy newer apartments closer to my job. Pool. Live-in girlfriend who was tremendously depressed and I did not know how to handle it. First threesome went weird (is this also foreshadowing?). Semester off, worked two jobs instead. Tried to transfer to any Tier 1 school that would take me, then one did. When that next path began to open up to me, I found I had barely seen my adoptive grandparents the whole year, so after leaving Hunter's Green I would treat their home as my Texas homebase instead of my mom's (also there was a squabble with my stepdad). But it wasn't home yet.
Water Street: my first NYU dorm was across the street from the South Street Seaport and around the corner from Wall Street, so most nearby restaurants charged too much for a sandwich and closed by 5pm. I might have been the last My roommate was a transfer from Jersey trying to snoop for his brother, who had been accused of assaulting someone. It took me years to realize how fucked up that was, but he was gone most weekends and we barely spoke. I crushed on a lot of people but fell into my six-year monogamous relationship pretty fast with my college sweetheart. A lot of depression, burnout, yearning, reckoning, and reevaluation that year, though I didn't see it at the time. Oh yeah, and I was completely unprepared for that Tier 1 education I'd insisted on getting, and my adoptive grandparents would spend about a third of their retirement fund to keep me there.
26th Street: NYU was desperate for housing and buying and leasing properties all over lower Manhattan. This one was supposed to be housing for dental students, but the top several floors went to students who hadn't been there long enough to request anywhere good. We were across the street from the old mental hospital and some parents got their kids apartments when they found out someone had been stabbed down the block a year prior. I was never as out and proud of my working class background as I should have been, but the class divide was surreal. My second and final roommate was boisterous, lazy, and may have had delusions of grandeur, but I felt I could handle him better than most and I was right. He now works for his father's import company and probably makes more in a year than I've made in my whole life, but in those days he was just the layabout who went through several broken phones and laptops a semester and took Dragonball Z way too seriously. College sweetheart lived down the hall, and her mom insisted I walk her back from the subway every time she came home from work after dark.
Union Square: the best dorm, where I learned to skim and set boundaries, where I loved the city and got tired of the school, then panicked I wasn't ready to graduate. I tried to make an agreement with roommates that I would clean the bathroom if they'd wash my dishes (my stepdad really made me hate washing dishes), but since none of them ever ate at home they fell off pretty fast. There was a little incident a couple miles down the street that you may have heard about, and I supposed that colored a lot of what followed as well. College sweetheart apparently had to defend me behind my back to her parents, who thought I was going to try to move in with them after graduation (I actually thought they were going to offer and I was looking forward to turning them down). I went home and spent another summer with my adoptive grandparents, trying to find a nonprofit position that aligned with my values and would put me partway between her family (north of Philadelphia) and mine.
Forestville: I started my new job on September 10th (specifically so I could see how they handled the anniversary the next day) and found an apartment in the suburbs. Forestville was a revelation to me compared to my mid-Southern roots: a suburb that was primarily Black but not completely forsaken. I hurt my back setting up the king-size bed alone, and had to take PT. I had one semester to settle in before College Sweetheart would join me, and I remembered how peaceful alone time could be. We were on the 9th floor, I think. The halls were dark, jewel-toned and poorly lit, and we finagled free cable for nearly a year by accident. DC grew on me slowly but I loved the organization and my coworkers, though I do think I had a bit of imposter syndrome about my working class background.
1234 Mass: Once College Sweetheart had a steady job, we could afford to move into DC proper and ended up just a few blocks from the White House. Most importantly, I could walk to work, and this final stage of my East Coast Walking Years was marred by knee injuries from not bending them enough. The apartment was delightfully eclectic: some older folks who could be professors or professional dog walkers, quite a few immigrant families just holding it down, and a few (but not too many) early career upstarts like ourselves. The place was incredible, but the walk down L Street (then a haven for streetwalkers getting picked up by lobbyists working late) was disconcerting and I was struggling to figure out why I was so unhappy. I had no friends, my relationship felt stagnant -- like we were going to compromise ourselves to death -- and I was feeling stifled. In the throws of whether or not to breakup, College Sweetheart and I started to explore deeper communication and alternative ways to connect. To start, I would find a sublet and move out for a while.
Cristal Manor: a few blocks away, I took over a room in a house full of young gay men (my room belonged to an actor who was going on tour), soon joined by a self-described "fag hag" who was alternately attractive and unpleasant in my eyes. I never told them about my bisexual feelings and experiences, let alone that I had crushes on two of them (it probably didn't help that when they met College Sweetheart, they couldn't figure out why I was ambivalent to stay with her). I blogged my feelings and my interest in polyamory, and started to make connections back in North Texas of all places. I loved the old townhouse we shared, though it was hard to stay warm in the winter, and got to explore more sides of DC that I hadn't already seen. When my knees were at their worst, I crutched my way through the last month and wound up staying with college sweetheart by default (there was an elevator and not three flights of stairs) rather than committing to a firm decision. I tried, and almost immediately reneged in embarrassing ways. As my organization transitioned away from everything I loved about it, I started thinking I'd rather be a freak back home than try to fit in as a normative "blue stater" any longer. One of my coworkers had told me about polyamory, and I was ready to try a radical change.
My Sanctuary-Prison: I nicknamed the place "Lorentz University", but since I became a stepparent it's been "Cheesecake House". Many of my happiest childhood memories took place here with my adoptive grandparents, and I felt safe here when I felt safe nowhere else. I wasn't here long before caregiving changed my options, and five years later it would change them again. Everything I had loved about this place has been tested, overextended, and exasperated in the nearly 20 years since I returned. I felt ready to leave it behind and start fresh after grad school, but the pandemic has given it new favor as a place that protected us in times of great uncertainty. I still sleep in the guest bedroom I claimed around age 12, giving my nesting partner the private bathroom and keeping the least temperate corner of the house. I'm grateful for this final gift from my grandparents, for all it has done to protect me and people I care for, and I hope I can leave it in good hands when at last my next adventure reveals itself.
I sometimes have to go through a whole list of nouns like this to recall what a dynamic life I've had. Some of it's affirming, others borerline fucked up. I've had the headcanon for a couple of years now that my mom is undiagnosed autistic, and I think this is a good survey of how much she hated moving but lacked "adulting" skills until my stepdad came along to smooth out her rough edges. In her own way, I am certain she loved us and prioritized us, but I don't think she'd ever received the kind of support she needed, so she had no idea what it was we were missing (it wasn't a stepfather, that's for sure, however stabilizing his presence became). For better or worse, this itinerant life gave me a strong sense of geography and a broader devotion to my neighborhood or my hometown as a whole than any one house or one street. There's deep love there, even if it isn't always reciprocated.
