Maps and letters and, finally, the dreaded white longjohns

Another meetup with Antonio, my boyfriend from long ago. It’s been so fun and something I couldn’t have seen happening for years. What’s been cool is it affirms why the whole thing happened in the first place: we are friends. We have the same absurd sense of humor, we care about the same things, we love to read, we love movies, blah blah. We haven’t seen each other since 2011 (funeral of our mutual dear friend Brett), and our entire lives have changed since then – so much has happened to both of us. It’s kind of cool to get confirmation of why we dated – because for years it’s not been clear – and also why we had this mystifyingly hard time breaking up. We both look back on it like “we should have broken up a couple months in – it clearly wasn’t going to work!” But, you know, that wasn’t at all clear at the time.

He brought more detritus with him this past weekend. Stuff I have never seen. We sat at the bar and then on the waterfront poring through all this stuff, marveling at how young we were.

A college student and her law school boyfriend. WHAT is that sweater, Sheila.

I have no memory of being in any way glamorous back then. But damn I guess I was.

He also had letters I wrote to him, so many letters, including letters from my first months in Chicago (which I can’t wait to read, even though I’m horrified. Weren’t we supposed to be broken up? He put me on the plane to Chicago from San Francisco. He was probably already dating other people and I … well, I went slut-insane almost immediately upon arrival in Chicago. I met him my first night out, after all. So … hadn’t we moved on? But there are all the letters, and I am sure he was writing me back.) Another wild thing about the letters were the addresses. Addresses from the past. Addresses, in some cases, leading to buildings that no longer exist. My progression through Chicago. Melrose to Ashland to Wayne. And his address on Joice Street in San Francisco (the apartment, incidentally, where I put my hand-made poster of Charles Manson up the chimney. To be found by future residents, I am sure, and one can only imagine their horror.) I haven’t brought myself to read the letters yet, but he gave them to me.

An amazing relic is the map upon which we planned our life on the road, where we basically divested and moved into a Westfalia camper van. We lived in it for MONTHS. I totally forgot we did this map thing but it all came rushing back when he unfolded it.

I gasped. We were sitting by the water and spent some time examining the map and all our little markings, reminiscing, sometimes saying “wait, what happened there?” We saved up for a year to do this, putting extra money in a coffee can we kept in the freezer. Literally, dollars and quarters. It was bare bones. We splurged two times during our time out there in the wild: we stayed a night at Chico Hot Springs in Montana, I think, and we stayed in a motel in Moab – my God, that post is 20 years old, wtf – . We stayed a night with some of his relatives in Colorado. We stayed with an old friend of his in Boulder for a night. But other than that, we roughed it, sleeping in cramped quarters, taking cowboy baths, cooking over an open fire, and washing our clothes in buckets, hanging them on the van’s bumper. We lived at campsites, and sometimes just pulled our van over into a clearing on the side of an empty isolated road. We didn’t go on the interstates if we could help it.

And there it all was on the map. We wrote a “key” on the side of the map in the planning stages …

And as we made our way across the country, we’d put little markings along our route, putting down our impressions or things we saw. “Hawks.” “Mule deer.” Devil’s Lake was, appropriately, “scary”.

We tried to piece together the timeline. What happened to me in Los Angeles? (Newsflash: Nothing good.) Did I really come up to San Francisco to “visit” on the weekends? (I did.) Weren’t we broken up? (Yes.) I told him the story of the van breaking down and how I made the decision to move to Chicago. He had no memory of this part of it. “And then, I called you and told you what needed to happen. 1. You needed to pay to have the van fixed. 2. Once it was fixed, you needed to sell the van. 3. You needed to then give me the money so I could move to Chicago.” We were crying with laughter. Unreasonable demands from a desperate woman with $20 in her pocket and no bank account. He had blocked this part out. I remembered his sighs of exasperation on the other end of the phone when I told him what he needed to do. I don’t blame him for being exasperated! Meanwhile – and this is no excuse for my behavior then – he was working at a corporate law firm, living in one of the most expensive cities in the country, and making shittons of money doing soulless work (he finally left to become a public defender, his original dream all along). But he HAD the money and I had NONE and so “here’s what needs to happen.” And he DID it.

He had no memory of taking me to the airport. I left San Francisco with two suitcases of clothes, and left everything else behind in the garage of the woman I had been staying with in the Valley. I can’t even remember what I did with that stuff. I think it was eventually sent to me and as I opened the boxes, seeing archaeological remnants of my life with him, I was overwhelmed with a sense of revulsion and I threw it all out. I have written before about living in my first apartment in Chicago and having no stuff at all. A pot to cook food in, a mattress on the floor, some clothes in the closet. Literally nothing else. Blank walls. No shades or curtains. It was glorious. Unfettered by stuff: I loved it.

It’s been healing meeting up with him. We don’t just talk about the past. We fill each other in on everything that happened since. We are both living intense lives with intense problems right now so we talked about all that too. We drank Bloody Marys and it’s amazing how everything is okay. The thing I’m most conscious of is … we are friends. We met when I was 16 and he was 23 (we met because I got cast in a college show when I was still in high school – Picnic by William Inge. It was major for me. Antonio wasn’t a theatre major but he did plays and was friends with all the people I befriended: Brett, Liz, Joe, Brooke, etc. Brett, Liz, and Antonio actually crashed my high school graduation. My senior prom was a bit of a disaster, and my date – my first real dating experience – refused to come over to my house to take the obligatory pre-prom pictures. My poor parents. Liz, a senior in college at this point, was so excited about my prom and living it vicariously. She called me to tell me to have a great time, and I said, “he’s not coming over to take pictures”, so she and Joe raced over to my house and posed for pictures with me. They were amazing. They made me feel so much better.) Point being: Antonio and I were friends for years before we started dating. We were friends immediately. We are still friends. Relationship or no, we are natural friends. I have spent years considering this relationship – which in my mind lasted a decade but, in reality, lasted about 3 years – as a mistake. Now I can just see it made sense that eventually we would think our friendship meant something else. We made each other laugh so hard we would collapse in a ball on the ground. It was real. It seemed to be love. And it was, just not the kind we thought it was. So it’s all okay. We both acknowledge it would probably have been best if we had broken up before the whole thing even really started. But what are you gonna do.

I was mostly struck by this photo he pulled out of me on the side of the road somewhere (Minnesota, judging by the hay bales) during our trip. You can see the curved tracks of our van, pulling in somewhere. There is nothing else around. It’s clearly not a main road. I couldn’t stop staring at this picture. Granting the fact it’s practically a propaganda poster for Gen X, I look happy, first of all. And confident. Maybe I was and didn’t know it. I have no idea who that is. It’s also wild to me: this person has no idea that in two months and change she would be living in Chicago. As far as she was concerned, she was moving to Los Angeles. She had no idea the van just off-camera would break down in the Valley, and she would demand her ex-boyfriend – currently her boyfriend taking the picture – fix it, sell it, give her the cash (lol). She knew the relationship was probably over, but she had bigger problems (moments of dissociation so profound it was indistinguishable from suicidal ideation, which is why I always say I had no business going off the grid, I should have been in a hospital.) She also had no idea – and neither did he – that he would be married a year and a half later. (The letter he wrote back then informing me he was moving in with her is directly connected to the one and only time I did ecstasy. I regaled him with this story as we sat by the water. Tragedy eventually turns to comedy.) But there I am, blissfully (?) unaware of the immediate future, drinking the coffee we boiled in a pot over an open fire, wearing a crazy “outfit”, washed repetitively during our off the grid times, in the aforementioned bucket. Our clothes would literally freeze into the shape they were in hanging over the bumper and we had to peel them off. It was cold at night, cold during the day. My white longjohns under the cargo shorts were my uniform. The longjohns make their appearance in almost every photo from that time. I’m not proud of it but nothing can be done about it now.

I’m still not sure who that person is. The person in the photograph is not at all my memory of who I was then. I don’t have a memory of being this person, certainly not then. Maybe, like Mitchell said, “You were unhappy and happy at the same time.” We had saved up for our trip for a year. We skimped and saved. We “went without”. We didn’t take a two-week road trip. We were “out there” for months. It took a lot of planning since neither of us had any money. And here we were actually doing it. There was a triumph in that. I look triumphant.

I think often of the great line from Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

“Happy” might be a stretch. But it doesn’t hurt to add nuance to memory. Shades of grey. Narratives don’t serve – and sometimes damage – when set in stone.