Agorafabulous! (17 page)

I felt bad for the guy. He clearly had some kind of Edgar-induced PTSD.

“My dad said he was shocked. He said I could come back and get an internship in the city. I got out of there. I would’ve just ridden my bike away with my stuff on my back, but Edgar drove me to the bus station. And he said the craziest shit to me the whole time. It was like he wasn’t even talking to me. It was like he thought I was someone else.” He twisted his hands nervously.

I put my hand on his back.

“Jason,” I said. “You’re free now. And he’s still back there, and you never have to go there again. Neither do I.”

“I’m so glad you left,” he said.

“Me, too. I learned some stuff, though. Like how to make coffee for two hundred pretentious hippie fucks.”

We laughed together, and fell into a companionable silence. I looked at the Manhattan skyline, with the new, big empty space downtown like a gap where two front teeth used to be. The view was still beautiful, maybe even more so because you were acutely conscious of what was missing and it made you appreciate what was still there. The Chrysler Building shone in all its Art Deco glory, and the Empire State Building, and the bridges and the tugboats.

“I could maybe live here,” I said, breaking the silence.

“You should come to NYU,” Jason said with an eagerness that warmed something inside me. “You’d love it.”

“My grades aren’t good enough,” I said.

“You should try anyway. We could hang out. My friends would like you and I bet you’d like them.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

We ate dinner at a Malaysian place in what used to be a lamp factory. He took me back to Penn Station, and I hugged him good-bye.

“We should do this again,” he said.

“Definitely,” I said.

I walked down to my train, and rode all the way home without listening to my tape. I never saw him again.

Best Little Psych Ward in Carolina

I ended up in Asheville, North Carolina, the way a lot of people have historically ended up in Asheville, North Carolina: I went crazy. Because of its various rehabilitation institutions, Asheville has long been a destination for the addicted, the depressed, and the clinically insane. In 1936, author F. Scott Fitzgerald placed his reportedly delusional wife, Zelda, in Highland Mental Hospital in the Montford section of town. In the early days of her residence there, he famously stayed at the luxurious Grove Park Inn and chased young tail all over the hills. She spent time in and out of Highland over the next several years. One night in the spring of 1948, she was locked into a room where she was scheduled to receive electroshock treatment. A fire broke out in the kitchen and spread throughout the building, and she burned to death, as did eight other women.

Before it became a mental-health oasis, Asheville’s real claim to fame was tuberculosis treatment. By 1912, when famed osteopath Dr. William Banks Meacham built the popular Ottari Sanitarium, Asheville was already known as a “health resort” for the TB-afflicted. The Ottari was more like a hotel than anything else. It had mahogany furniture and fancy Persian rugs, and the whole place was built in the Spanish–mission style. Meacham lost everything during the Great Crash of 1929, and the building was sold and converted into apartments. I once visited my favorite professor from Warren Wilson College there. She was a hot lesbian with an equally hot pro soccer player for a girlfriend.

I’d always wanted to go to college in North Carolina. For one thing, it was right next to South Carolina, where we spent a week’s vacation each summer. For another, it was packed full of history and pretty scenery and friendly people. Those academically competitive New Jersey teens who do not get into good schools in New England often end up at Chapel Hill or Duke. We’d visited Duke and Chapel Hill when I was in the ninth grade. Duke just seemed like a younger version of Princeton, in a shittier town. (Durham has come a long way since the mid-nineties, when I first visited. It’s now home to some of the hottest restaurants in the South.) By contrast, Chapel Hill seemed fun and exciting, and there were handsome boys everywhere. But back in high school, my grades hadn’t been good enough for Chapel Hill’s rigorous admissions standards for out-of-state students. After Emerson, they still weren’t good enough. I set about looking for another North Carolina school that appealed to me, and found one five hours west of Chapel Hill, up in the Blue Ridge section of the Appalachian Mountains.

The college was called Warren Wilson, and its advertising materials read, “We’re not for everyone . . . but then, maybe you’re not everyone.” That was enough to get me interested. It appealed directly to my twenty-one-year-old narcissism.
I’m
not
everyone,
I thought.
I’m me. I’m special. They
already get that
and I haven’t even applied yet!

Surprisingly, that tagline was actually correct. Wilson wasn’t for everyone. Sure, it had a hippie aesthetic like Hampshire or any one of those crunchy schools, but at Wilson you had to work. Not necessarily academically—I learned a lot when I was there, but I wouldn’t call the curriculum rigorous. No, you had to literally
work
. Like, with your hands. Everyone on campus was assigned to a work crew, and if you didn’t work at least fifteen hours per week, you risked getting booted out of school.

The work crews were numerous, and I read through the list with a combination of excitement and confusion: Auto Shop (what kind of college had an auto shop?), Plumbing, Painting, Blacksmith Shop (was this some Colonial Williamsburg shit?), Maintenance, Carpentry (ooh, Jesus-y), Locksmith Shop, Landscaping, Chapel (ooh, extra Jesus-y), Farm (farm? They had a fucking farm?), and dozens more.

Not only did you have to work on one of those eighteen thousand crews, you also had to complete a hundred hours of community service in order to graduate. This was about as different from Emerson College as you could get. Back there, “community service” was about as popular a concept as discount shopping. Emerson College was full of people who focused with laser-like intensity on only one thing: their outfits. Even with all its hippie trappings, this college Down South seemed like a place where you could actually learn applicable life skills. Plus, it cost about 40 percent less than Emerson did. I applied and got in. I even did a solo road trip to visit Asheville, and I immediately fell in love.

When I met with the admissions counselor, it was on the porch of an old farmhouse in a rocking chair. She told me that the school had originally been founded as a Presbyterian mission school for poor farm boys in rural Appalachia, and had later expanded to include girls. It eventually became a college for aspiring teachers, and then added other courses of study. In 1952, it quietly desegregated, two years before
Brown v. Board of Education
. It was one of the first undergraduate colleges in the South to do so.

I enjoyed hearing about the school’s history. I’d like to say it made more of an impression on me than the pickup trucks with the shirtless farm boys in the back, or the swimming hole with the rope swing and the naked hot girls and guys sunning themselves. I’d like to say that, but I can’t.

I came back brimming with stories of how awesome my new school was going to be. I left out the parts about the hot naked people and left in the parts about history and work and all those other buzzwords parents like.

My mom and dad were excited but nervous. Asheville was eleven hours away by car, and a middle-of-the-night emergency call would be a bit more difficult to handle. I assured them that wouldn’t happen. With the advance assistance of the Warren Wilson Counseling Office, Dr. Morrison, and a lovely female talk therapist I’d been seeing, I located a psychiatrist in Asheville (there seemed to be thousands) as well as a psychologist (there seemed to be tens of thousands). I also found a pharmacy where I could pick up my prescriptions.

“I’ll be fine,” I told my parents as I loaded up my car one early August morning. “Really. I promise.”

“We know,” said my dad.

“Just call us every day this time,” said my mom.

“Okay,” I lied.

The school turned out to be just as fun as I’d hoped. On the downside, I got assigned to the maintenance crew. I quickly established myself as the worst dormitory bathroom cleaner on campus, if not the entire world. I could devote an entire book to the colonies of shower-curtain bacteria I nurtured through neglect, but I’m not sure there’s a market for that sort of thing. The live experiment didn’t test particularly well among my dorm-mates.

On the upside, the campus was gorgeous. I had the run of thirteen hundred acres of organic garden, farm, woods, and landscaped grounds. A river bordered campus, and the students kayaked down it in nearly all weather. There were miles of hiking trails. We ate fresh food from the garden, and even beef and pork from cattle and hogs raised on the farm. The classes were interesting, and the 750 students were a mix of international students of color and domestic white kids. Some of the latter bore unfortunate dreadlocks and had been kicked out of boarding school. Others had been raised on small family farms all over the South. Others were post-rehab sober kids. Some were angry anarchist punks. Some were quietly devoted to a life of service as teachers or social workers. Nearly all the students were weird in one way or another, and many were broken little birds on the mend, just like me. Even though I didn’t drink or smoke pot, I fit right in.

The first year passed largely without incident, aside from one of the dormitories burning down (only one person was hurt—she busted her knee when she jumped out of her first-floor window). I formed friendships, some of which solidified into strong bonds. I slept with a few guys. I read cool books. I hiked on the trails. I drank a lot of tea. I went to my new therapist and my new psychiatrist regularly. It was all so relaxing that I only had two or three panic attacks the whole year. And I didn’t feel depressed at all, not even when the recovering crack addict I liked started banging my friend instead of me. There were plenty of moments when I felt genuinely happy. Inexplicably, I didn’t go through a lesbian phase.

I spent much of the summer in Kentucky, completing my service requirement by volunteering at a migrant outreach center run by nuns. One of the nuns had definitely gone through a lesbian phase, and was inarguably still going through it. The fact seemed to make her angry, and she was even more short-tempered than Edgar the angry peacenik. Thankfully, she was not my only boss. The other two nuns in charge were marvelous, smart, capable women who took the edge off Sister Bitchface. That trio of alleged virgins did a bang-up job of running a free health clinic, free food pantry, and free clothing closet. My time with them remains one of my most pleasant memories. I even left with some respect for Sister Rage-a-lot. She wasn’t nice, but she worked her ass off. I saw in those women the best of what the Roman Catholic Church provides today. I spend a lot of time thinking about the bad the Church does in this world, but those women showed me some of the good.

I returned to Warren Wilson in August and began my second year at the school. I had moved my way over to the Writing Center crew, so I tutored students instead of occasionally pushing a mop around their bathrooms. I was also an R.A. for freshmen, and distinguished myself by only hooking up with two of them. (Not at the
same time
. I’m a class act.) I was twenty-three and they were eighteen, which sounds really gross in retrospect but was highly entertaining at the time.

Once, I was away for my childhood best-friend Gretchen’s wedding and couldn’t do my R.A. shift. Another one of the R.A.s helpfully took over. When I was on my way back to Asheville, I had a brief stop at the Charlotte Airport. A funny feeling tickled the back of my brain, and I sensed that I ought to check in with my supervisors and dear friends, Karen and Chauncey. Karen was a badass blond social worker and recent Warren Wilson graduate. Chauncey was a gay, bearded Atlanta-born bear who was still figuring out what he wanted to do with his life. All he was sure about was that he really liked books. As it turned out, his bibliophilic inclinations were correct, and he’d eventually become the head librarian at a hyper-conservative Christian college in a neighboring state. But that was a few years away. Today, he was dealing with another issue entirely.

“Hey, Chauncey,” I said when he picked up the phone. “Is everything okay back at school?”

“Oh God,” he said, sounding exhausted. “Oh God. Shit went nuts as soon as you left.”

Karen got on the other extension, and demanded, “Sara, you didn’t sleep with Brett Ferris, did you?” Brett was one of our eighteen-year-old charges. He was the tall, handsome, athletic scion of a well-connected Southern family. He would’ve gone to USC, UNC, or Duke, but he was the family fuck-up. A lot of the kids at Wilson were the family fuck-ups (ahem).

“Enough with the freshmen-fucking jokes!” I said. Karen, Chauncey, and our friend Dylan loved to make fun of me for hooking up with two frosh. And to be perfectly fair, I didn’t actually have actual, you know,
sex
with either of them. It was just oral sex, which as a lapsed Catholic I simply considered a very entertaining abomination against Christ.

“He just got kicked out,” Chauncey said.

I had trouble keeping up with the story as both of them jabbered excitedly over one another. The gist was that Brett had gotten incredibly intoxicated, hardly an unusual experience for him. What was unusual, however, was his reaction. High on a combination of mushrooms, acid, and booze, Brett stripped off all his clothes and ran naked and screaming through the dorm at three
A.M
. He ripped open an unlocked door on my floor. Thankfully, the girls who lived there were out at a drum circle summoning Gaia or whomever one summons during drum circles. He emptied all their drawers into the hallway, threw their mattresses across the room, and peed on just about everything. He ran back out into the hallway and slammed the fire alarm before returning to their room to hide. When Karen found him, he was incoherent. The fire department arrived along with an ambulance. Brett managed to punch a firefighter before being strapped down to a gurney and hauled off to the hospital. When he sobered up hours later, he denied taking any drugs. Unsurprisingly, blood tests said otherwise.

“I miss all the good stuff,” I said, genuinely disappointed. “Why did Gretchen’s wedding have to be
this
weekend?”

“It was actually kind of awful,” Karen said.

“God, I wish I’d been there,” I said wistfully.

And no, by the way—I never had hooked up with Brett Ferris. In fact, once I’d gotten the young gents out of my system, I fell in love with a more age-appropriate fellow. His name was Carl, and we soon became attached at the hip.

I’d never loved someone so much. Back at Emerson, most of the straight guys were consumed with writing the perfect haiku or making the next great underappreciated black-and-white shaky-cam opus. This guy was into literature, but he was also into manly stuff. He was strong and smart and funny, and he knew how to do lots of cool things. He could change a tire, and the oil in his car. He could build things. I met his parents and his older sister. We even talked about having children, or anal sex. It was a real deep kind of love.

Eventually, it soured in the way that these things do. We just weren’t right for each other. We didn’t fit. He drank a lot, and I didn’t drink at all. He exercised a lot, and I didn’t exercise at all. He worked hard at school, and I didn’t work hard at all. He was a saver, and I was a spender. He was a partier, and I was a napper. These things and more were cause for frequent disagreements. I called him to break up with him, but I got his voice mail. So I broke up with his voice mail. It wasn’t the most sophisticated use of communications skills, but I wasn’t the most sophisticated gal. He appeared at my door after he got the message, drunk and sad. I didn’t change my mind. He went to get drunker.