Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (27 page)

My first Biodiversity class was that night. I was the first to arrive, and I eagerly introduced myself to a young woman my age who walked in next. We had a nice chat at first, but the
tone changed dramatically when she asked where I was living—a question whose ubiquity no one appreciates until you’re secretly living in a van.

I clasped my trembling hands under the table, looked down at my desk, and muttered, “Off campus,” which was true but deliberately misleading.

“Oh yeah? Me, too,” she said. “I just moved into an apartment off of West. Whereabouts are you?”

“I’m on Ninth Street,” I said with surprising aplomb, having prepared myself for this very conversation.

Disaster was averted after a few more classmates ambled in and I resorted to taciturnity. I realized then that as long as I had to keep the van a secret, my experience here at Duke would be nothing like my memories of college life at Buffalo.

— Day Thirty-five of Vandwelling Experiment —

.............

SAVINGS: $830

I
WAS LYING IN BED
in the van. It was 2
A.M.
on a cold February night. Moments before, a nearby Ninth Street nightclub had turned off the bowel-shaking, thigh-grinding techno music and purged itself of its scantily clad patrons. Hundreds of students briskly walked from the bar and past my van to their apartments. I knew that even the slightest squeak from the bed could give me away, so I stayed perfectly still and covered my face with my sleeping bag to muffle the sound of my breathing.

A drunk male in midstride exclaimed, “Isn’t this the van from
The A-Team
?!”—a snarky comment to which his entourage responded with uproarious laughter. Two girls sat on the curb next to the van, one of whom was sobbing sloppily because she just got dumped by her boyfriend. “Sweetie, you don’t know it yet, but this is
good
for you,” her friend said admirably. “You’re so much better than Steve!”

The students continued to flood past the sides of my van.
Someone walked into the rear of the van face-first. Another braced his arm against its side and vomited into the parking spot next to me.

My one recurring thought:
These people are all getting laid tonight.

I’d been living in my van for four weeks, and the experiment, so far, had been a complete success. I was debt-free, the van was still a secret, and my brain felt like it’d been properly exercised for the first time in years. In my Biodiversity course, I was reading wilderness philosophers: Aldo Leopold, Roderick Nash, William Cronon, and Jack Turner. In Self in the World, I was having stirring debates over Blackboard and doing everything I could to prepare for class discussions. To give myself a creative outlet, I started a blog called
The Spartan Student,
which no one read except for friends from back home (if just out of kindhearted support), but in case some stranger happened upon it, I kept my school and identity a secret. All compartments of my brain were on fire.

Yet my experiment was no peaceful sojourn on Walden Pond. I spent nearly every moment in a state of anxiety about my financial situation. I only had about $800 left from my savings, yet I still had to pay tuition.

I knew I’d have to cut back on all costs until I found work. The only bill that I had any control over at this point was food, so I decided that I’d eat as little as possible—just cereal or oatmeal for breakfast, a banana and peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and a light pasta dish for dinner.

But after the first week on my new diet, my hunger was constant. And my light, meager meals did nothing to calm the gurgling, clawing, “I’m going to put you through a world of pain if you don’t feed me” feeling in my gut. After just a week at Duke, upon weighing myself at the gym, I noted how I was already five pounds lighter. While I shaved in front of the mirror in the locker room, I saw how my ribs rubbed against my skin for the
first time in years. And while I thought it might be nice to one day admire a set of chiseled, baby-smooth abs, I knew I had to start eating more when I saw a bunny on campus and was tempted to hurl a rock at it so I could devour it raw. There was only one thing on my mind now:
I need money.

I got a part-time job as a research assistant for a professor in the business school. For six hours a week at $11 an hour, I made copies, fetched library books, and performed other menial office tasks. I also had to scroll through and assemble data from about five thousand businesses on a Microsoft Excel worksheet, which caused red lines to web across my sclera and my vision to blur. But the money wasn’t enough. Once, upon walking to the van in the middle of the night, I saw an old pizza box on the lawn—how long it had been there, I wasn’t sure. I opened it and saw a few mangled slices.
Has it come to this already?

My mother, still in denial about my van plan, began to grow suspicious when, in our e-mail correspondence, I repeatedly failed to address her question regarding the whereabouts of my new home. I thought it would be silly to have to sustain a lie like this for the whole semester, so I resolved to mention the van casually, sandwiching my admission between mundane, everyday details, hoping she might think living in a vehicle was a mundane, everyday thing, too. “Hello mom,” I wrote. “I’ve been playing basketball every day. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve been eating quite well, and I’ve been sleeping in my van—which is quite spacious. All is well, Ken.”

Her response—evidently restrained—communicated to me her most prominent concerns.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Sistine Ilgunas

Date:
January 28, 2009

Subject:
Re: check

how do you clean yourself? Where do you park the van?

To:
Sistine Ilgunas

From:
Ken Ilgunas

Date:
January 29, 2009

Subject:
Re: check

Hey mom,

I park the van in the parking lot, silly. I’ve been taking showers at the gym. Classes are going well—the professors brought cheese and wine. Everyone has been really nice. Too-te-loo.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Sistine Ilgunas

Date:
January 29, 2009

Subject:
Re: check

how many people are in your class. What will u say when someone asks, hey ken, where do you live? how many other students live in their van? just interested.

To:
Sistine Ilgunas

From:
Ken Ilgunas

Date:
January 30, 2009

Subject:
Re: check

There are about 16 in my class. When people ask where I live, I say I’m still looking. I doubt few if any other students sleep in their van. Later.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Sistine Ilgunas

Date:
January 31, 2009

Subject:
Re: check

Hi Ken,

You worry me & you know it. Please let me give you some money. If you are so upset about it you can pay me back. Please get an apart. or roommate or something. Your life must be so stressful the way you are living. How do u form friendships when u live the way you do? I feel so sorry for you. You go to this fantastic school & you are living like a homeless person. How
do u explain your life to new acquaintances? Dont you have any self worth? You are always welcome to borrow money or have money from me. Why cant u take help from your family? I am always here for you.

Love, momxxxooo

PS: Do you want me to pay your cell phone bill it came in today? I will.

My poor mother. None of this made any sense to her. And of course I understood why. My mom, as a girl, shared a small apartment with her parents and two siblings in blue-collar North Tonawanda, New York. My dad grew up in a house crowded with seven brothers and a sister in Motherwell, Scotland, an industrial town. My mom was embarrassed that her mom had a chicken coop in the backyard. My dad got fruit for Christmas. They grew up in industrious middle-class families who knew that you could make it by working hard. She and my father had spent their lives working so they could provide better lives for my brother and me. They upgraded from apartment to home, from city to suburb, from middle class to a few echelons higher in the middle class. All that hard work. All that climbing. All that moving up. And all that time and money invested in me, so that I could move up, too. And this is what their son lives in…

I am a member of the “career-less generation.” Or the “screwed generation.” Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won’t get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don’t have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We’re the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents’. Strangely, I seemed more okay with this than my parents. Not being able to afford an above-ground swimming pool and a kid wasn’t some heartbreaking tragedy to me.

For some, it’s hard to think that the direction of success is anywhere but up the socioeconomic ladder, especially when
success is largely measured by security, comfort, and wealth. But maybe progress can point in funny directions. Must we measure our success by the size of our homes and salaries? What if we got healthier, lived more sustainably, and became more self-reliant, albeit in tighter dwellings and in smaller families? Isn’t that success, too?

I thought about my mom’s offer to pay for my apartment rent. It was tempting to think about a warm apartment and lavish feasts, but I couldn’t accept her offer. I was determined to graduate debt-free, and that meant I couldn’t take out loans of any kind, whether they came in the form of gifts from loved ones or food stamps from the government. Perhaps I took the implications of accepting a gift too seriously, but I couldn’t stop the alarms from ringing in my head whenever I considered taking a gift. I didn’t think of a gift merely as a gift but as a debt with a bow wrapped around it. The exchange may seem harmless, but I knew my accountant within was always diligently at work, carefully recording in his ledger my gifts and loans and debts, none of which could be truly forgotten until they were paid back.

When we accept a gift, I thought, sometimes we don’t just acquire a debt but an identity. Taking a gift can be like taking a sizzling-hot brand to the backside. The giver gives us a marking, a bubbling scar that only the brander and branded can see. It’s a mark of dependence.

A couple of my fellow rangers at the Park Service told me that every year, after the summer season ended, they’d apply for unemployment checks. They’d apply even though we’d been paid extremely well during the summer—well enough, I thought, to be able to live off our summer savings for the rest of the year if we lived modestly. Yet one ranger told me that every winter he would go on vacations to the Caribbean, and from his lawn chair on the beach, with a piña colada in hand, he’d call his unemployment officer and tell the officer that he’d been looking for jobs but couldn’t find any, feigning exasperation about how “times are tough.” With the unemployment checks, he could
travel wherever he wanted, buy nearly anything he wished, and didn’t have to work for eight months of the year. But is freedom from work really freedom? Is our money—no matter how we acquire it—a ticket to freedom?

I thought that if I accepted money from the government or a friend or a family member, I’d be permitting someone to draw the edges of my identity, too. Perhaps this would be an unnatural way to go through life, always being so unreceptive to others’ generosity. And I worried my policy would wear on my family relations, but I didn’t want to head down a slippery slope, as it’s always easier to ask for the second favor than it is the first. Best to abstain from all offers of financial support, I thought. I knew my mother didn’t have anything malicious in mind, but I wanted, once and for all, to be on my own, even if it required that I remain cold and hungry.

While waiting for the bus (connecting Duke’s East Campus to its West, which is free to students), I noticed an advertisement stapled to one of the benches. It was put there by the neuroscience department, which was seeking study participants to undergo cognitive tests for $10 an hour. I went online and signed up for every test I could. I spent the next couple of weeks taking cognitive tests and also being zapped by electrodes, pricked by needles, and dazed by pharmaceuticals. (Shamelessly, I donated three of my four primary bodily fluids.)

Bringing in additional money always put me more at ease because I knew it was the only thing keeping me from Dumpster diving or, worse, dropping out of school. Yet I still always felt like I was one mishap, one mistake, one doctor’s bill, one unforeseen cost from going bankrupt. At one of these studies, I discovered another flier that advertised Duke’s MRI studies.

The MRI studies paid $20 an hour to participants who were willing to go into an MRI machine to have their brains scanned. At first, I was reluctant to sign up. I felt like I’d be selling my body for money if I did something like that. It seemed little better than bartering a kidney to pay a gambling debt or turning a
trick to make a car payment. But I justified that I’d be helping science, and that I wouldn’t be making money for the sake of making money but for the sake of feeding myself.

Even though the consent forms for the MRI tests assured that there were “no ill effects reported from exposure to the magnetism or radio waves,” the following sentence warned, “However, it is possible that harmful effects could be recognized in the future.”
Harmful effects could be recognized in the future?
What the hell does that mean?

For my first study, I walked to the radiology lab, took off all the metal I had on me, and lay down on the bed. A middle-aged female technologist with a Russian accent strapped a breathing belt around my waist and clamped electrodes around my left index finger with which she’d shock me with low voltage at key moments during the experiment. She hooked up an “eye tracker” on my plastic helmet that would collect data when my pupils dilated. She stuffed plugs into my ears and snugly packed a pair of headphones against the sides of my face.