The Lost Months (Part One)

The span from mid-August 2016 to late-January 2017 marked the only period in my life since my first year of college when I was unemployed for longer than a month and without a full-time job or a clear path forward as to when I’d be employed again.

It started out fine--fun, even. I’d completed a bucket list, lifetime accomplishment when I finished my MFA in Creative Writing and left Oregon on a high of not only earning the degree, but having successful creative endeavors to show for it and a lot of new friends.

I followed it up with a summer working for CTY. First I made good on a long-time ambition and curiosity in working a session as a writing instructor in Los Angeles. Then I spent a second session revisiting old grounds in more ways than one, a dean of residential life for the first time in nine years, and back on the UC Santa Cruz campus. I worked under Heather.

And then there was the whirlwind. A flight east to visit with my sister and brother-in-law months before their daughter would arrive, to go on a bachelor party weekend in Saratoga Springs with my closest friends, and to road trip through New England, crossing off Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine from the list of states I hadn’t yet set foot in. I flew back west and Heather and I began a winding cross-country road trip, seeing old friends and crossing off more states, visiting tourist attractions, watching season one of Stranger Things in hotel rooms. I drafted prose poems at night or while Heather drove, which would ultimately become my second chapbook, Distance Traveled. We settled into a month-long rental in a North Carolina mountain town to go through final wedding preparations and sort ourselves out after our time on the road.

We got married.

I don’t gloss over any of this in summary to minimize its importance, but rather because these are all separate stories, some of which I’ve blogged about before and some of which I might blog about down the line.

But on to those lost months—September to January. I call them lost not because they were all bad or tragic, or even forgettable, but in the gap between working, and between getting married and getting pregnant, and without any certainty of where our lives were headed they stand out as something distinctly other in my life.

As I began collecting memories from this period, they quickly became too plentiful for just one blog post, so I’ll break this up into at least a couple. Here goes with first.

The Lost Months (Part One)

We moved to Myrtle Beach. Another one-month rental in a timeshare-style apartment, rented out as an Air BnB—a one bedroom with a view, between a tiki bar and a convenience store, straight through to the Atlantic Ocean.

*

I was eager to write. Conscious that, in this time when I wasn’t keeping hours in an office, I should make the most of it. Produce pages. Revise. Submit.

*

The election loomed. Impossible to ignore in social media postings and advertisements anywhere we looked.

*

We visited the boardwalk. A part of the draw of a stay in Myrtle Beach was the cut rates during the offseason. There, we had Ski Ball and Down the Clown games to ourselves for hours.

*

I watched Luke Cage, drawn into a super hero world simultaneously more stylish and grittier than the normal Marvel fare, better than the vast majority of the Marvel movies.

*

I got a call, offering a phone interview for a college teaching gig I’d applied for on a lark when we were on the road. It felt like a step forward, in no small part because I thought myself fundamentally good at job interviews, having gotten the job most times I got to the interview stage before, and having seven years of conducting phone interviews myself under my belt.

*

I stayed up late watching horror movies. An October ritual. Late, because Heather didn’t like them and I didn’t want to monopolize the TV when we both might watch. In particular, I watched the first five Paranormal Activity films, purchased in a cut rate box set.

*

I got my full-length short story collection in order and started submitting.

*

I recorded podcasts. I’d started the project in grad school and, like so many endeavors, banked content. I started banking again, recording two or three episodes in a sitting, on the premise that I had time then that I might not have again anytime soon.

*

I pushed the interview out of my mind. Still weeks to go. I could feel myself begin to psych myself out, and it felt like the sort of opportunity it was better not to overthink.

*

Hurricane Matthew had directly impacted our wedding weekend. It had hit Myrtle Beach, too, of course, and we were lucky not to face perceptible damage to where we stayed. Except when maintenance workers arrived with their gauges, they reported water in the walls. They installed a dehumidifier—an enormous and powerfully loud beast of a contraption.

*

We had dinner with old family friends of Heather’s—a long-time married couple. When it came up I was a wrestling fan, the husband moved straight into Carolina wrestling talk of Ric Flair and The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express.

They served some of the best home-made ribs I’ve had.

*

I got an email. My first chapbook, The Leo Burke Finish had been accepted for publication.

With little other affirmation of my writing since leaving Oregon, that email was a light—a tangible step forward, not to mention a couple hundred bucks advance at a time when I had no income.

*

The interview came. I paced the apartment, thinking myself to be taking advantage of the phone interview format. I often walked when I thought about things, a natural pairing.

Except, as I gave my second long-form answer, I found myself short of breath.

I’d conducted enough phone interviews—well into the hundreds—to have heard people breathless before. I usually came to the conclusion they were nervous.

I got a question I should have been prepared for, but wasn’t, about a unique class that I’d offer the students.

I’d understood the position to be more cut-and-dry, teaching classes I was assigned, mostly composition and the occasional workshop.

My heart sank with that unmistakable feeling that this opportunity for a genuinely appealing job—the only job I’d been offered an interview for since graduating—was slipping away.

Heather and I went out to dinner after, in what was to be a celebratory meal at a small chain restaurant we both liked a lot and were lucky enough to find ourselves in walking distance of one of at that Air BnB.

We ordered happy hour cocktails at the bar before we got our table.

I got drunk. More miserable with every sip. Checking my phone on the prayer that maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe the interview had gone better than I thought—not just better, but so well they’d rush to offer me a campus interview for fear I was entertaining other offers, or might forego that formality altogether and offer me the job.

I got no emails.

*

Election Day came.

We’d cast our ballots absentee in Oregon, in lieu of a more permanent residence, much less one we’d been in long enough to register.

I assumed the outcome.

As I have a tendency to do, I sought to commemorate the evening with an equivalent indulgence in something fictive—the way I might re-watch Rudy or The Longest Yard rather than actually watching the Super Bowl, or reread A Christmas Carol in December.

I suggested we rewatch the tail-end of season four of Parks and Recreation, centered on Leslie Knope’s campaign for city council opposite rich buffoon Bobby Newport—a scenario that mirrored the real election in ways more funny, less grave in their consequences. A story with a happy ending.

Heather didn’t want to watch, feeling it was too close to reality. Feeling that watching Paul Rudd’s Bobby Newport almost win would be too disheartening, itself, on a night like that.

We watched news coverage on and off, particularly as Donald Trump gained momentum. I washed the dishes and watched some of the episodes of Parks and Rec I’d intended to. To add levity. To soften the blow of what was happening.

Like millions of Americans, I started crunching numbers to see what it might take for Hilly Clinton to still win.

States disappeared from the map.

I did a load of laundry in preparation for leaving Myrtle Beach days later. We’d fly out for a couple nights in Las Vegas, then a week in San Diego before Thanksgiving and our next long-term rental in Asheville.

The major news outlets started calling it. Trump had won.

As I hauled a sack of clothes back from the laundry room to our door, I passed a man, and we said friendly hellos. The thought occurred to me. Here in a red state, he may be happy with this turn of events. Or like me, he may have been hanging by a thread, incredulous, putting on a brave face to a stranger.

He might not have been following the news at all.

And as this next short-term move loomed, no job prospects and the specter of what was to come for the country looming overhead, it occurred to me I might be putting on a brave face a lot for those months ahead. Maybe years.