How Did I Get Here

Artist: Martin George

Sometimes I look back at my life and wonder: How did I get here?
How did this miserable American make it on this magical journey abroad?

Whenever I have this thought, it’s always the same. Sifting through memories at hyper-speed, trying without precision to locate those focal moments that define us, that change our lives. But instead of getting there, I always end up lost in a daydream about university.

I attended the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I almost never left Minneapolis. I wasn’t a part of any fraternity or club, and the only sport I played was intramural volleyball because my roommate begged me. (The team needed to be equal parts men and women in order to qualify for a spot in the league: I was the missing man.) A few of my roommates were in fraternities and one woman, Emilia, was on the soccer team. The former were certainly the outcasts and intellectuals: the ones the “brotherhood” kept around to boost the GPA at each semester’s end. Odd as it might seem, my roommates and I didn’t really do the whole party thing. We didn’t have anything against drinking it’s just that our priorities lay elsewhere.
Honestly, what I recall most vividly is getting high and playing video games. The two didn’t always go hand-in-hand, but “didn’t always” was a rare occurrence.

Our game of choice was Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Our weed of choice was (sadly) whatever we could get. Our medium of choice was a bong with an ash catcher and percolators: two feet tall, transparent glass, not cheap but affordable, well-made.
Once we finished our classes, or shifts, or whatever it was that prevented us from playing video games and getting high, we would meet on the third floor, in this guy Malcolm’s room. Real cake-eating type from North Dakota.
Inside his room were two couches, a wide flat-screen television, a mini fridge, a coffee table and the most spacious closet in the building. A triptych of windows provided a beautiful view of the back parking lot.  
Three was the sweet spot: enough to competitively engage in Smash and the perfect amount for smoking: the bowl packed just right, no one fiendishly hurrying their way through the rotation. Really, though, it didn’t matter: five, four, three, or two. It boiled down to the same thing every time: a cultural crossover of nerds and stoners, and friends being friends.

So, on any given day, some number of us would end up in Malcolm’s room, and the first thing we’d do was fill the bong with weed. Once the “water-pipe” was full, we would decide whose turn it was to hit it first. It was based on some complicated schedule that I can’t remember now. The second hit was always decided by some game. Sometimes we would do categories, other times we’d do “Marco Polo” or “scifes.” No matter what game we chose, it involved people crazily shouting over each other. There’d be some sporadic drama: one or another of the roommates would throw a fit, as if the second hit was really so much different from the third or fourth. At least then there was still green left. Unlike the poor fifth: fifth was always worst off. (Maybe that was the schedule: whoever was fifth last was first next?)
Once everyone was red-eyed and ready, we’d start up the Nintendo Wii, GameCube controllers plugged into the top instead of Wiimotes.
I always played as Mr. Game and Watch.

Of the five of us, I was easily the best.
It got boring in the end. By second semester really.
But there wasn’t much else to do, especially once winter came. Plus, I enjoyed the smoking more than anything else. It helped me relax. And, perhaps misguidedly, I felt it sparked the sort of creative, triangular thinking that leads you to a better understanding of the abstract and philosophical as well as the pragmatic and every day. Naturally, those discoveries would shift with the ups-and-downs of a high, the come down, and then, ultimately, sobriety itself. But in the moment of their conception, it always felt like I was making some massive finding, unearthing some profound truth.
At some point, the video game just became a way to act social while secretly letting my mind run wild. While they were all focused on the game, talking over each other, bragging, I was off somewhere else breaking down the world. I would go over what I learned in class. (I was an American Studies major with a minor in Japanese Literature. The former allowed me to analyze and comprehend the country I called home; while the latter allowed me the retreat to somewhere beautiful and whacky and surreal. My favorite was Murakami: his stories could be so mundane you’d think you were reading a newspaper, yet others would be so inventive, so bizarre; still, the best part of it all was that no matter how the story ran it was provocative: short story or novel, his work pushed you into his magical kingdom with all its puzzles and riddles.) So sitting there on the couch, controller in hand, I’d consider the situation of all those living in the States: how cruel and systematically brutal life under the U.S. hetero-patriarchal racial dictatorship could be. I’d pay special attention to those who operated outside the norms. I would dream of revolution: of smashing the whole thing to pieces the same way I was smashing my friends with Game and Watch. I would think of ways to combat the problems: rent freezes, carbon taxes, legalized/decriminalized drugs, an end to neoliberal policies like the privatization of everything, dismantling NAFTA, integration, reparations, land restoration, shifting money from the defense budget to social programs, massive advertising campaigns, and strict penalties (think castration) for sexual terrorists.
Stuff like that.
A lot of this was fueled by my own situation of poverty. My family was lower-middle-class. They couldn’t help me pay tuition. I barely made enough to cover my rent, let alone eat a decent meal. (I’d routinely sneak into Comstock’s dining hall and “steal” most of my meals.) I didn’t even consider the option of paying my tuition.
I took out loans at the start of the school year, but they weren’t enough. I still owed some three thousand dollars. I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay it at the end of the year; that I would have to take at least a semester away from university, if not a whole year. It tore me apart. The fairytale was over. This was adulthood.
That’s probably why I got high so often, probably why I read so much. It helped me cope. When I was sober, I just felt depressed. I was depressed. I wanted to cry, to rage. I wanted to fight. I continued to do well in school and it only made it hurt worse. When teachers told me how beautifully written something was or how intriguing my analysis was, it broke my heart: I had found something I really loved. I was good at it. And now I was going to have to leave it all behind because of money. Because of fucking money. I felt strangled. Like I couldn’t breathe.
But when I was high, when I was reading, it was absolutely different. I found I could handle the stress or, at least, imagine it a way. The panic wasn’t so strong, I wasn’t so tense. I could concentrate better. I could focus. I could think instead of panicking, instead of anxiously trying to ignore the problems confronting me. It helped me deal with the inevitable transition ahead.

That’s probably why I smoked so much weed, played so much Super Smash.

 *

It’s usually at this point in the daydream when the scene shifts.
And, all of the sudden, I’m in a taquería back home in Cleveland. I’m no longer nineteen. I’m probably somewhere around twenty-three. I’m no longer depressed. I’m not so ready to rage against the capitalist machine, but I’m still willing to speak out against it and help build a city that strives for better than its ugly status quo. I’m surrounded by young people and refugees.

By now I’ve learned to handle the trials and tribulations of life better; how to manage the reality of living with racial capitalism, misogyny, sexism, homophobia, transphobia; how all of that existed both within the microcosm and without in the macrocosm, but that within everyone’s own microcosmic sphere none of it existed. Within your bubble, depending on who you are, nothing society deems bad can affect you. It doesn’t matter who you’re friends with, what your sexual partners look like. It doesn’t matter if you smoke weed, if you spend all your time playing video games, or watching anime and other cartoons. It doesn’t matter if you listen to the Beatles and the Grateful Dead and David Bowie on an old record player you bought at an estate sale. It doesn’t matter if you spend every Saturday at the local philharmonic orchestra, or if you went bicycling or ran or hiked, whether you played basketball or soccer or some other sport. No matter what you do, no matter who you are, in that sphere of yours, none of it means a thing.
So there I am, working at a taquería with men and women; gays and lesbians; metal heads and emos; stoners and hippies and new age progressives; broke hipsters and affluent ones; artists and musicians, gamers and athletes; people speaking Spanish and Burmese and English; black and brown people and white people and plenty of Southeast Asian refugees. It was a no judgment zone: We were all freaks to somebody somewhere. We were all misfits and outcasts somehow. How could we judge anyone else without judging ourselves? Judgment was but a form of self-hatred. But we didn’t hate ourselves: we loved ourselves. We had our niches, our communities, our groups. We supported each other. One coworker might be a gay man of color who cosplayed once a month and another a white metal head covered in tattoos, and still the two would discuss over drinks the quality of graphics in the new Borderlands or the direction Death Note was heading. (Not a good one, I’ll tell you that for free. It wasn’t nearly the ending I was expecting.) One might be a mixed bilingual woman with plans to attend John Hopkins med school and the other a white mother who worked part-time as a cam girl, and nothing would interfere with their discussions of Game of Thrones or that new song by The Weeknd or anything at all womanly.
It was a place where you could exist how you wanted to. Even though it was a job where we were underpaid by a business that fronted as local and down-to-earth, it was nevertheless a place where you could explore your freedom.

So, anyway, this is the place I come to after my days at university smoking weed and playing Super Smash and considering the world. Whenever I wonder how I got here, it’s always the same: first the days at university, then the taquería.
But it’s never just the taquería that I’m thinking about or, rather, daydreaming of. It’s not a general picture of the place that comes to mind. It’s always a specific incidence; always the same specific event, the same person.
It’s a Tuesday morning, one of the slowest days of the week. It’s a lot of standing around, a little prep, some lighthearted conversation. I’m rolling burritos and topping the tacos. A woman, who goes only by the letter B, is working alongside me. She’s into women, but she isn’t interested in transitioning. Her body feels right: it feels like hers. That’s all she really knows or cares to know. Defining anything else isn’t worth it.
I can feel that.
She turns to me and says: “What’re you doing tonight?”
We don’t typically hang out outside of work, unless we’ve finished a shift together. We have some mutual friends and get along, but we never really make plans. It’s one of those let work friends be work friends situations. Maybe it was always the fear that work would be the only thing we talked about, like all those other coworkers who tried to spend time outside of work. Having no plans that night, I answered:
“I have no plans. What’s up?”
“Do you remember Marcellus?”
Of course I remember Marcellus, I tell her. Marcellus was the “man.” He was funny, brilliant, friendly. He brought something to work that no one else could. You always looked forward to a shift with Marcellus. Until, out of nowhere, he quit. He didn’t say why; he didn’t even come in his last two weeks.
“He’s throwing a party tonight. An art opening or something like that.”
An art opening, I think to myself until it clicks. Marcellus was an Art History major who did these trippy oil paintings. They were never on canvas, always glass or wood or furniture, anything unusual.
“Fuck yeah,” I said. “What time?”

I remember the art opening like it was yesterday.
B and I arrived around 10 pm. We greeted Marcellus with big hugs, took a tour of the house, introduced ourselves where necessary, and appraised the gallery. The event was as quirky and genius as Marcellus: works of art lined the wall, recycled tuna and chickpea cans ran zigzagged from a string throughout the house, empty wine bottles and rotting fruit paired sculpturally on windowsills, eye-sprouting-potatoes in pyramids. Drinks were served upon entry: boxed red and white wine, or PBR. There was a room for getting high and the back patio was open to those who smoked cigarettes.
We were there for about two hours, when I met him. We were talking about the future of the planet (which somehow manifested as the risks of artificial intelligence) when he approached.
“What a time to be alive,” he said by way of introduction, before launching into artificial intelligence and everything there was to know and fear about it. He studied computers in the hopes technology could pave the way toward a better future. And he talked about them as if they were human beings.
He joined the conversation seamlessly. He was eloquent, philosophical, a bit nihilistic, young, free-spirited, and exceedingly smart. After artificial intelligence, we talked about the role of pop culture in influencing the opinions of society, the meaning and consequences of a shared national culture, and the possibility of using genetic engineering to revive the woolly mammoth. Then we trended in a banal direction, toward topics such as Harry Potter, Taylor Swift, which hand you use a fork with.

It’s at this point, the moment I recall the heated discussion about which hand you use a fork with, that the daydream snaps. This is the moment I stop and think: How did I get here? How did I end up here, at Marcellus’s art opening, remembering a conversation about table mannerisms?
And that’s when it all sinks in: It was him.
That night was the first time I met him, the man who would push me to travel the world. And that’s when I know the answer: It was him. It was that night: that’s how I ended up here, this magical miserable American abroad.  

See more at @the_wandering_nickel