The Lost Months (Part Two)
I tried NanoWriMo.
For the uninitiated, that’s National Novel Writing Month, the annual November endeavor in which hundreds of thousands of writers aim to write a novel—or at least fifty-thousand words of something like one—during the month. I’d never done it before on premises including that I didn’t have the time and that productivity was rarely my problem anyway, so I wasn’t really in the target audience. Aiming to write that much—roughly two to four times my regular clip for literary fiction felt as though it invited sloppy, rushed prose.
And yet, entering a third full month of unemployment, at that point childless, with so little by way of tangible obligations or so much as a social life beyond hanging out with my wife—if I ever were to indulge my curiosity in NanoWriMo, wasn’t that the November?
I dove in.
I started writing a novel about going home and returning to an old basketball court haunted by an old friend. It was about the sport and about love and about nostalgia and probably other things.
Like most endeavors with measurable metrics, I set a schedule to stay ahead of pace. Two thousands words a day would get me well clear of the fifty-thousand-word bar, even if I had to miss a day here or there.
*
We went to Vegas. Heather and I had been there before—a long distance couple meeting in a spot that regularly offered cheap flights in and discounted hotel rooms to lure tourists. We’d been there once during my MFA program, too.
One of those visits, I’d grown intoxicated on Wild Turkey, Heather buzzed on margaritas, and we’d joked about eloping until it wasn’t a really joke anymore. We never got to the alter, but we’d talked about it enough that, had either of us pressed the matter, I suspect we may have done it.
Here we returned, married.
On the Lyft ride from the airport, I got an email that I’d had a story accepted. My favorite story that I’d been disappointed hadn’t won a big story contest I’d submitted it to in the spring, and that had failed to find a home in the top journals I sent it to on the next round. I’d opened things up from there, sending it to good journals housed at colleges and universities—a solid tier, but a tier I’d placed work at before. At least it found a home, and on the over-long ride—most of it stuck in traffic, I clicked through Submittable to withdraw the story from its simultaneous submissions elsewhere. I was thankful for the long ride in that sense, even as I grew car sick from the stop and go and staring at my screen. I hadn’t meant to work—aside from NanoWriMo—for the few days in Sin City and this ride felt like an interlude when I could take care of what I needed to to rest easier the rest of the while.
We stayed near Fremont Street, rather than the Strip. We’d always liked the simpler, less pretentious air there, not to mention the lower prices and the oddball element that tended to poke its head out closer to where more people lived, or the tourists were return visitors, fewer first-timers out for glitz, glamour, or a wild night inspired by The Hangover.
*
I checked my email. Less compulsively than I had in those days immediately following the phone interview for the job. But still often. Still with that singular purpose in mind of seeking a job, or the more likely confirmation that those specific hopes had been dashed.
No email came.
*
We went to the Heart Attack Grill—a spot I’d wanted to visit for years but never gotten around to. A spot with a gimmick of making customers wear hospital gowns, waitresses clad in nurse’s uniforms. A scale out front and a promise that anyone weighing in at over 350 eats free.
They only had burgers on the menu. Fine for me—what I’d planned to order anyway, but nothing Heather would eat. We settled on a Denny’s a few doors down instead.
*
We flew to San Diego. Where Heather used to live. Where we’d had our first date and where we’d gotten engaged.
We checked into the Air BnB we’d reserved for a few nights and were underwhelmed.
The place was something like an in-law apartment, but unlike the bulk of our rentals, didn’t necessarily look like it had been cleaned. There was a mattress on the floor for a bed. Half-used bottles of ketchup, spicy mustard, and Italian salad dressing in the fridge. Other indications that someone lived there on the regular and merely cleared out when the space was needed to make an extra hundred bucks off tenants.
We grinned and beared it. We hadn’t come to San Diego to stay inside after all. We revisited Black’s Beach and the Mexican restaurant and sushi places we liked. We headed to Lucha Libre Taco Shop, where I found the food awful but the décor immediately charming for the Mexican wrestler masks, championship belts, and signed photographs on the walls.
*
I wrote my contact at the job I'd interviewed for, after it had been a month, when I felt confident I’d been ghosted. The kind of follow up that feels utterly unnecessary for the gut feeling to precede it. I asked if she had any feedback—in part to keep a positive tone, in part for the practical matter that I wasn’t as good at interviews as I’d thought, at least not in this new frontier of pursuing full-time teaching gigs.
To my surprise, I got a response right away. That I was still in consideration. The process was ongoing.
Hope.
*
I had a dream I’d gone back to my old job in Baltimore. And despite my misgivings about doing so--about how much of my life I’d already spent there, the long hours, the parts of the job I’d been so relieved to leave behind--it felt something like coming home.
I told Heather about the dream the next day, walking through a fancy lunch shop that sold gourmet cheeses and pastries and fresh bread. I didn’t suggest that I return to my old employer, but she picked up on the drift, immediately unenthused about the prospect of moving to Baltimore.
*
I watched wrestling at the airport, waiting for our flight back east where we’d be back in time for Thanksgiving with two separate iterations of Heather’s family. It was Survivor Series weekend, and I watched the NXT TakeOver show using data on my phone, anticipating tuning in to Survivor Series live at our next month-long rental in Asheville.
A guy sat down next to me momentarily, at the gate, while Heather used the restroom and asked if I were watching Survivor Series. He was a lapsed fan—oblivious enough not to know that that show wouldn’t start for hours—but conscious that the event would mark Goldberg’s return to the ring.
There were a lot of fans from that era. We shot the shit about it for a minute or two before he was on his way, summoned by the people he was traveling with.
*
The Air BnB was small, and it turned out the wireless was too weak to stream anything without substantial gaps for buffering, too weak to browse the Internet with much consistency. I watched Survivor Series in fits and starts before giving up, vaguely conscious that the main event match between Goldberg and Brock Lesnar couldn’t have run for more than five minutes, and I assumed that Lesnar, booked as a dominant monster, had dominated quickly.
I watched the show from a nearby coffee shop with much better wi-fi the next day. To my surprise, it was Goldberg who had dominated.
I probably should have felt happy about the hero’s victory, but it didn’t sit right with me for the people Lesnar had beaten earlier, and for the promise that Goldberg’s run would continue, though it wasn’t clear that he was really physically up to it.
I had time to obsess about such things.
*
I got obsessed with the Dakota Pipeline conflict, too—DAPL as it was abbreviated. I started scheming a short story about it—a young man, obsessive with it and the fall out of Trump winning the election and coming to terms with his place in the world. There was so much I wanted to say, and so much of it autobiographical.
I couldn’t find a start.
I never wrote more than stray paragraphs. Notes to myself, more than narrative.
*
I finished my NanoWriMo project. Nothing more than a deeply flawed draft and an email from a website with a digital badge of accomplishment.
*
We had a nice Thanksgiving, first lunch at Heather’s grandmother’s house, then dinner at her mom’s. It was good to be around family again, and it settled in that this was not only Heather’s family but, in a post-wedding world, my own.
*
I got the final word, at last, that someone else had accepted the job.
*
We took advantage of our proximity to Charlotte. Hosting guests. Driving back for a Christmas party at a friend’s house. We drove over for to catch a Monday Night Raw live from the Spectrum Center.
*
We didn’t go out much in Asheville—not nearly as much as we’d planned when we picked it because we thought the mountains would pretty in the snow around Christmas time, and when we thought we might move there to settle down somewhere in lieu of a job to dictate where we were going.
It was colder than we expected, and Heather was sick most of the visit. We suspected the funky-smelling heating system in our rental might have something to do with it.
*
I found a gym to get back in the habit of lifting weights after months off. They let me work out for free at first, on a trial basis, before I felt bad about taking advantage of them, besides which I liked the equipment and atmosphere in the weight room.
The manager told me she’d cut me a deal—a mere two hundred dollars a month.
The gym specialized in CrossFit, which I wasn’t interested in. I told her as much—kindly, and that though I liked the gym, two hundred was a lot and I was on a fixed budget. How about if I promised never to go to a class, only to use the weights?
She lowered the price to one-fifty.
I rounded out our last weeks in Asheville going to a Planet Fitness.
*
I reached out, at last and with Heather’s blessing to my old employer, not about moving back to Baltimore, but if there were work I could do remotely—hiring, recruiting, doing logistical odds and ends I’d known other office alumni to do from time to time.
Just before we drove north for the December holidays, I got the word back. There was a job waiting for me. My old job in fact, filling in for a pair of former colleagues going on more or less back-to-back maternity leaves. It was a unique situation, but they could use the help for six-to-eight months.
The soonest any academic teaching job would start would be the following August.
We made plans.
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