“Bop-bah! This is the sound of settling! Bop-bah! Bop-bah!”
Rather than settling, this is the sound of a phone call from my mother waking me up. For the first time this trip, I didn’t need to set an alarm—my uncle Steve can’t talk until tomorrow due to work. My plan for today: sleep in, grab coffee somewhere, relax, and hopefully catch up with some friends tonight.
I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling taxes.
My financial situation has grown complicated over the last several years1—with no job, two trust funds (one of which was emptied to pay for my condo, but still exists with a zero balance for some reason) and a minor bevy of investments, my taxes are almost certainly beyond TurboTax’s capabilities2. As such, I mailed the paperwork to my mom, and she took them to her people. Now, I need to get the tax forms back, sign them, and send them along to the IRS. After discussing our options, my mom decides to FedEx the forms to my hotel overnight.
One day, the word “simple” will re-enter my vocabulary. It will be a glorious day.
Today, though, I’m awake, and, with nothing else to do, I guess I’ll head to a coffee shop and get some writing done.
Last night, I asked Joel for a coffee shop recommendation, and he told me about a place in his neighborhood that he likes. I plug its address into my GPS, and it turns out to be further away than I expected, but, lacking any knowledge of other coffee places within several days’ drive, I decide to investigate nonetheless. After a drive through a suburban neighborhood, I pull into the coffee shop’s parking lot and immediately get the impression that I’ve made the right decision: The shop lies on the shore of Lake Austin, providing a nice view, and while it’s busy, there’s no line when I walk in. The barista and I banter as she prepares my drink: She tells me that she was zoning out when I arrived, and comments about how tired she is. I suggest that some coffee might help, as though nobody else has ever made this joke3.
As I settle down at a table, nobody knows that I do not belong here. For them to notice, it would take a careful inspection of my t-shirt, which features the logo of Seattle’s Crocodile Cafe, or a glance at the buttons pinned on my messenger bag. As I pull out my laptop and get to work, I begin feel at home in this strange place where early April means 70-degree heat.
Besides Joel, only a few people in this city know I don’t belong here. I’m looking forward to seeing two of them tonight.
I tell people I’ve lived in Seattle for seven and a half years now, and I’m only partly lying.
I took a detour along the way.
During the summer of 2004, as I took the last class I needed to earn a degree in Journalism, I began to prepare for life after college. One day, while I looked for a future beyond Seattle’s University District, I got distracted and ended up on SPIN magazine’s website. On a whim, I clicked the jobs link, and discovered that the publication needed unpaid interns for the fall semester. I threw together a packet of my finest music journalism from the student newspaper, plus a couple of my better non-music pieces, and sent it off, never expecting to hear back.
But hear back I did, and after a phone interview, I received an offer to be an intern in the offices of one of the nation’s premier music magazines, which I, having wanted to live in New York for several years, eagerly accepted. My non-essential belongings went into storage in Seattle, I arranged long-term parking for my car in the garage of the apartment building which I was moving out of, and found a six-month lease on a tiny furnished studio apartment in Manhattan. Before I even really knew what had happened, I was gone.
SPIN had hired four editorial SPINterns4, as we were called, and in my first few days there, I met two of the other three. As for the last, Andrea, our schedules meant we might never meet—each SPINtern worked only two days a week, and we didn’t overlap. The four of us started exchanging emails before we even officially started working, though, and towards the end of our first full week of unpaid employment, Andrea and another intern named Lindsay—a guy, despite the spelling—suggested we see a band called The Thrills on the eve of my 21st birthday.
I didn’t know the band, but agreed to go along, as did the fourth SPINtern, Peter. We planned to meet up, buy tickets, grab drinks and perhaps food, catch the show, and then go to a bar in time for my first legal drink.
After work, I took the subway down and loitered outside the venue while listening to my Napster-branded mp3 player. Minutes after I arrived, a girl showed up and started talking on her cell phone while standing 20 feet away from me. I suspected she was Andrea, but wasn’t sure. Complicating things was the fact that this girl was cute, and if she wasn’t Andrea, I didn’t want to seem like I was hitting on her—”Excuse me, are you the girl I’m looking for?” can function as either a sincere question or bad pickup line.
Ten minutes passed, with the girl on her cell phone and my headphones firmly lodged in my ear, before I spotted Peter crossing the street towards us. The girl noticed him as well, and moments later, Peter introduced Andrea and I to each other.
While I’m awkward around attractive women who I perhaps should know5, this was the only time in the four months I knew her when Andrea appeared shy. Minutes after midnight, the four of us wound up at her favorite drinking establishment in the West Village, laughing as she told a series of off-color baby-in-a-blender jokes.
Those first few weeks, we SPINterns, with occasional appearances by Lindsay’s girlfriend, formed a tight crew. Then, one night, Peter and Andrea left a SPIN party together, which made sense, as they lived a block apart. It made even more sense the next night, when Lindsay spotted a hickey on Andrea’s neck during a poker game, and the idea of we four SPINterns conquering New York together began to fall by the wayside.
The last time I saw Andrea was at another West Village bar, as the four of us left a karaoke night to go our separate ways. It was a bittersweet time: Our SPINternships had concluded, and while Lindsay and I still had one last company party to attend, it felt like saying goodbye on the street was the moment when an era that never really started came to an end.
Night falls, and I head down to a bar on Austin’s famous 6th Street, the Jackalope, which Andrea described as one of the few places to imbibe on a weekend6 without being subjected to either country music or a Creed cover band. I arrive first, and by the time she shows up, I’ve already grabbed a table and a vodka tonic. After discussing the type of things we’re supposed to discuss in this situation—what we’ve done in the four-plus years since we saw each other, what brings me to town, and so forth—we discuss something else entirely: a guy named Sam.
In one of those small-world situations, I discovered last year that Andrea and I have an unexpected mutual friend: A guy she used to work with in Dallas relocated to Seattle and now volunteers at 826. Because of this, our conversation turns to the nature of modern life, and how the only reason Sam, Andrea, and I know that we all know each other is that, when I went on Facebook to friend him, the site noted that he and I had her as a mutual friend.
I posit the theory that connections like this have always existed—the world is no smaller than it used to be, we’re just more keenly aware of these things. Twenty years ago, nobody who moved to a new town possessed a complete list of their old friends, and since the odds of someone I know from New York who now lives in Austin having worked with someone I know from Seattle when they both lived in Dallas are so infinitesimal, none of us would ever have discussed it. Had this happened in the ’90s, we still would have all known each other, but none of us would have known we all knew each other.
Andrea and I talk some more about how weird it is to have a list of all our friends publicly available7 until it’s time to relocate to the Velveeta Room, a bar down the road which is apparently one of the key venues in Austin’s stand-up comedy scene. We’re attending an open-mic night in which Andrea will participate, and while we thought we arrived early, the show starts soon after we settle in.
At some point in the proceedings, a body plunks down into the chair beside me, and I turn to see my friend Matt now occupies said seat. Most people could realistically sneak up on me when I was paying attention to something else, but Matt is not one of these people—Matt is probably the least stealthy person I have ever met. He may have managed to walk nearly the length of this club without somehow drawing attention, but I think it’s more likely that he genuinely appeared out of nowhere.
I met Matt about a year ago, when he began tutoring at 826. He arrived at roughly the same time that we were assembling a softball team, and our captain swiftly recruited him. This turned out to be a shrewd move.
To call people “freakish” would generally be considered an insult, but with Matt, it’s the most apt description, and even he would agree. This man has been compared to Animal from The Muppet Show on more than one occasion—in fact, he’ll make the comparison himself before we leave this bar8. He made some of the most ridiculous, acrobatic catches I’ve ever seen at softball practice, while the rest of us merely tried to not knock over the beers we’d taken on the elementary school baseball field that we’d climbed a fence to access.
With both Matt and Andrea present, I suspect that I will get a story out of this evening. I am soon proven correct.
A few comedians later, Andrea moves to the seats next to the stage in anticipation of her five minutes. The comedian on stage is of some ambiguous ethnicity, talking about his wide-set eyes and building up to a joke about how they’re a sign of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. After the comedian delivers this line, Matt turns to me and says—in a manner that the printed word cannot possibly do justice—a sentence I most certainly did not expect to hear this evening:
“So, yeah—my girlfriend’s pregnant.”
I’m caught off-guard by this. I’m guessing he was as well when he first heard the news, but he seems used to it now. As tactfully as possible, I ask what their plans are, and he says they’re keeping it, which raises two more questions in my mind.
The first, most obvious question to ask is when the baby is due, as this is the kind of thing one asks people who are expecting babies. The second question is the more interesting one to me: Matt left Seattle some time late last summer or early last fall—I can’t remember when exactly. I hadn’t heard anything about him planning to leave, and didn’t know until his change of cities popped up on my Facebook feed. As such, I don’t know if his girlfriend’s pregnancy had something to do with him leaving town—it’s possible that they had a long-distance thing going on, he knocked her up while one of them visited the other eight months ago, and that’s why he moved. The timing works out about right. Hence, the second question I need to ask is whether this pregnancy had anything to do with his departure from the Pacific Northwest.
Of course, I have never once said what I meant to at any moment of even the slightest significance. This is how my brain works9, and unfortunately, my brain chooses this moment to merge the two pressing questions, both of which are related to time, into one:
“When did this happen?”
A normal person would ignore the phrasing of this question, and answer the implied question instead. A normal person would reply that his child was due on April 16th or October 5th or whenever. But Matt is not a normal person (and this is one of his most endearing qualities). So, when I mistakenly ask “When did this happen?”, Matt answers “January 3rd.”
I immediately realize that, as today is April 2nd, this cannot possibly be the due date.
My mind is at least mildly blown by this series of events, but remains intact enough to know that Matt knows the exact date of his child-to-be’s conception, and nobody ever knows the exact date of his child’s conception. I tease him accordingly, pointing out that, if the act that led to this conversation happens that infrequently in his relationship, perhaps the long-term prospects with this girl are dim enough to make having a child with her a bad idea, but he interrupts.
“We went to the doctor, and he said it was the first week of January,” Matt explains. “And, well, my brother was visiting then, staying on our couch. So I know it was either really quiet in bed, or really loud in the shower.”
My brain explodes.
Two minutes later, I’ve recovered enough from this cerebral detonation to notice Andrea taking the stage. She opens with a joke about how she doesn’t mean to brag, but she’s seriously the most hyperbolic person in the whole country. The joke falls flat, and she fills the awkward silence by saying that if we didn’t like that, she’d just go with dick and fart jokes the rest of the way.
Which she kind of does.
I’m familiar enough with the art of stand-up comedy to know that every comedian has a stage persona that may or may not be similar to who they are in real life, but Andrea’s stage persona—a complete mess who can’t get a date—strains credibility for me. She tells one joke about a guy buying her a drink at a bar, and then insisting that he’s not interested, just that he looked at her and thought she needed a drink. She gets the laugh she aims for, but not from me.
My problem is this: Less than two hours from now, in another establishment a few hundred feet from here, Andrea will make a comment about “boob confidence,” which will lead one of her friends to ask about her boob confidence, which Andrea will answer by stating she has fantastic boob confidence. And this is important for three reasons:
- Andrea has great boobs.
- Andrea has enough self-confidence to realize that she has great boobs.
- Andrea does not take herself so seriously, nor is she so aloof, that she will not talk about how great her boobs are.
In other words, Andrea could reasonably be considered a catch. The men of Austin (should) know this, she knows this, and I know this. As a result, I can’t laugh at her jokes about her inability to get a date.
It’s either that, or it’s the fact that she’s feigning a problem that I have for real.
Following Andrea’s set, the comedy rapidly declines in quality. After a few more comedians, she turns to me and declares that we should be leaving. As I close my tab, a woman on stage spends her time yelling about how much she hates her husband and how horrible he is in bed.
We—Matt, Andrea, two of Andrea’s friends, and myself—relocate to a nearby bar called Mugshots, where the night continues. Andrea and her friends climb in a photo booth that proves to be broken, and then we all grab drinks and head to the patio out back, where we’re joined by a couple more of Andrea’s friends. A little while later, I learn that quite a few of the other comedians from the Velveeta Room have gravitated to this bar as well.
This appears to be “the scene.”
Conversations erupt, aided and abetted by the alcohol we all continue to consume. One of Andrea’s friends accuses me of being a hipster for listening to the Arcade Fire, but before my initial exasperation passes, Andrea leaps to my defense. Another one of her friends rants about the men’s bathroom situation—”There’s a toilet, a urinal, and a sink in there. That’s three places to pee! Don’t fucking lock the door behind you if you’re the only one in there.”—as bands that made up a significant portion of my college soundtrack emanate from the jukebox inside.
As we drink, Andrea rants about a plot point from Sex and the City—something about someone being dumped via Post-It Note after her boyfriend snuck out in the middle of the night—and how she never fails to wake up to the sound of a one-night stand trying to sneak out. It’s too loud, she insists, with all the fumbling for clothes in the dark and hopping around trying to get dressed, not to mention the shifting of the bed and all that jazz. A debate ensues—You’ve never been so drunk you didn’t wake up? You’re not a sound sleeper? You’ve never slept with a ninja?—while I remain mostly silent but completely amused.
The debate concludes, and I ask Matt about his plans for the future. He and his girlfriend don’t plan to get married, but he expects to be a stay-at-home dad. She’s a psychologist who’s making good money, he says, so he’s going to focus on raising the kid while she works. I suspect that, as long as he doesn’t overstimulate the kid in its first six hours on Earth, he will make a fantastic father.
At some point after these two moments, I realize that this night is both entirely typical for someone of my age, and something I need far more of.
My friends at home are funny and artistic and altruistic and generally good people to be around. But I realize now that they’re far too stable for me: All but one of my friends are married or engaged or at the very least in long-term, cohabitating relationships. Many of them are older than me, and this is fine, but as I listen to Andrea discuss the series of men she’s bedded and Matt contemplate the curveball life has thrown at him while we all imbibe heavily on a Thursday, it sinks in that this is precisely the kind of night I don’t get at home, that I’ve never really gotten at home, but that I crave. This is normal for someone of my age and relationship status (or lack thereof), and my life sorely lacks normal.
Weezer’s “The Good Life”—a four-minute, seventeen-second complaint about the state of Rivers Cuomo’s social life in the wake of leg surgery that left him bedridden—blasts from Mugshots’ jukebox as I try to close my third tab of the evening. Moments later, as Matt, Andrea and I leave the bar, Matt asks what we’re up to next. It’s past 1:00 A.M., which means that by mortal standards, there should be no “next.”
We are not mere mortals.
“I was just going to go back to the hotel,” I say. “But I could be up for food, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Matt replies.
“Just hit the kebab stand,” Andrea comments, waving at a shack across the street.
“Meh,” I shrug. “I was thinking something more along the lines of pancakes.”
“Well, there’s Kerbey Lane,” Andrea says.
“Kerbey Lane?” Matt’s interest sounds piqued.
“Kerbey Lane,” Andrea affirms.
It appears we are going to Kerbey Lane.
Matt walks off to the car he’s borrowed for the night from his girlfriend while Andrea rides with me and directs me to the restaurant, a typical college-area 24-hour diner. When we arrive, it’s maybe one-third occupied, and at least four-fifths of that third is younger than the three of us. I feel mildly old and more-than-mildly depressed. Being surrounded by college kids always has this effect on me. Luckily, bacon tends to fix it.
By the time we settle our checks and leave, it’s past 2:00 in the morning. Matt departs, while I give Andrea a ride home. In her building’s garage, she reminds me of her stand-up performance tomorrow night, and invites me to come along. I tentatively agree, and then turn my car around and head back to my hotel.
By the time I pull into my hotel’s garage, I’m already thinking it unlikely that I will laugh with Andrea tomorrow night.
What I know, what she doesn’t, is that tomorrow will be the flip side of the coin that is my life. Tonight, we drank and laughed and ate late-night breakfasts, but tomorrow, my uncle will tell me about the life of my murdered father.
Tomorrow will be a different day entirely, as tomorrows tend to be.
- Again, I’m fully aware I have stupid problems.
- Come at me, Intuit.
- Can we talk about how funny I am? I’m hilarious.
- This horrible name led to many bad jokes amongst us interns. Were we supposed to call company parties SPINdigs?
- Or attractive women I do know. Or attractive women I don’t know, for that matter.
- Even though today is a Thursday.
- Coincidentally, Andrea was one of my very first Facebook friends. The other SPINterns’ colleges got access to the site before mine, so I friended them first thing.
- When a comedian does a bit about the idea of having a “spirit Muppet,” Matt whispers to me that he’s Animal. I respond that I’m Cookie Monster.
- Or doesn’t.