By Jules Suzdaltsev
You spend all that time on life’s side streets and byways, hoping never to find yourself back where you came from, and then before you know it, you’re dripping hot sweat onto the steering wheel of a perpetually dank Subaru Outback in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, mourning the obligatory broken AC and the compacted mass of trash on the passenger-side floor.
The only upside to hell is that it’s rent-free.
What started out as a chilly postgraduate San Francisco bum-around in the autumn of 2011 turned into a carousel of sleepless nights on park benches in London, wild wide-eyed drug abuse in the basement nightclubs of Berlin, the fluctuating dog-day heat and pissing rain of a Brooklyn July, and thunderstorms in the South of France, where, shivering under a bridge, chain-smoking Luckies for warmth, I thought I felt a touch of heaven in the country rain. It didn’t last for long.
One night, lying on the floor of my unlit, unfurnished Berliner apartment, I closed my eyes for just a moment and reopened them on an IKEA twin in my old bedroom. “The Kramer” from Seinfeld poster stared back at me from where he’d perpetually hung for a decade. The dream was over. It was August, and my 17th unpaid student loan bill was making a racket in my inbox. I was back in the Valley, living with my parents.
When I first arrived home, it was too hot to do anything but complain. I panted like a sick dog in the parched, smoggy air. Sweating felt more feverish than regulatory, and my only relief was sprawling out on the cool tile of the bathroom floor. There was AC in the rest of the house, but it came with the price of parent-child interaction.
Moving back home meant moving in with my Jewish-Russian, Tea Party-Republican, anxiously terrified immigrant parents. It’s a mouthful to describe, and three mouthfuls to debate. Between my mother’s fearful Fox News–fueled hate speech about Obama, Hitler, and fascism — all of which she viewed as a left-wing conspiracy — and my workaholic, vitriolic, alcoholic father upholding the long-standing Russian tradition of strict and unyielding patriarchy, complete with an ambiguous, silent father-son relationship (the standard archetype of many a Russian novel), I could barely stand them for more than a few minutes at a time. Their long-winded experiences as part of the Soviet working class left a deep impression on them that they longed to impress upon me, resistant as I was to the lessons from the Old Guard. I’d briefly forgotten their frequent, explosive arguments over everything and nothing. Their anger this time was more habitual than anything, as they too had forgotten the feeling of demanding obedience and coming up empty. My privacy and autonomy were dead hopes, and after having spent the previous five years with both, it was unsettling to feel my heart pound every time I heard footsteps in the hallway. One day my mom found pot in my room, which, honest to God, somehow turned into an argument about the legitimacy of global warming. She left my room disappointed for two more reasons than what she’d already come in with.
Within a week, I bought a dead bolt and barricaded myself away from the endless stress of an expired power struggle. I began having restless, troubling nightmares, defending myself against wrongdoings I hadn’t committed, rumors spread by those who had trespassed against me in real life. I’d wake up in a nervous sweat, endlessly dehydrated in the 80-degree nighttime heat of Southern California. I began finding clumps of hair in the bathtub drain.
Wandering my hometown in a busted green station wagon, the fan uselessly set to MAX, I could see that the Valley was in some secondary stage of rot. Despite being the primary suburb of Los Angeles, a city that can’t help but remind you of how great it’s doing and how far you’re falling behind, an unambitious air of resignation had kept this place immobile. I’d felt it before, lying next to the ubiquitous cement and brick poolsides in my teens, and it was now staring me in the face as I scrolled through my phone looking for a friendly name of someone nearby. Most everyone worth a damn had managed to leave, and the few who stayed had taken on a sycophantic flavor. With nausea I recognized the rest: slackers, stoners, and the philosophically and intellectually empty who had fallen for weed, women, and World of Warcraft. Stagnating without purpose, my old friends had been placated by prepaid McMansions and ever-elusive associate’s degrees from the local community college.
I felt dizzy as I scrolled past the name of an ex-best friend I’d walked in on right as he climaxed all over my then-girlfriend’s tits. The past five years had rendered the verdict on that one — the ex-girlfriend went on to contract gonorrhea while cheating on her latest boyfriend, and the ex-friend went on to do absolutely nothing. It was his friends who had stuck around; it was mine who’d moved on. And although in a grander sense this should’ve been comforting, c’était terrible maintenant.
The stress began to build, and I looked to my old familiars — weed and pussy. But they, too, let me down. I couldn’t smoke or fuck in my house, and doing either in my car was too sentimental. Plus, sneaking back home reeking of sin ruined any potentially sedative effects. The few remaining girls I could call out of the woodwork only served to remind me of my preflight desperation and left me feeling empty. My libido was shit, my appetite was shit, my shit was backed up; and with nowhere to go, I stopped leaving the house. It was during a heat stroke on the bathroom floor that I realized I had to get out of that fucking town — that a shitty job trumped a shitty life.
My parents’ reaction to the news that I was not going to look for an unpaid internship with “The Microsoft” and was instead getting a job so I could move back to the Bay was roughly the same as if I’d told them I was pursuing a career in fast food and crack cocaine. Or at least that’s how they phrased it.
My first interview was with a telemarketing firm a few miles from my parents’ house, and for no discernible reason I showered, shaved, and did my best to hide the stink of despair. The dingy yellowed waiting room on the third floor of a strip mall was packed with other Craigslist applicants, and although I came last, I was the first to be pushed into a brief, hurried interview with a sad, skinny man who’d been dealt a very, very rough hand a very, very long time ago. He offered me a full-time position at minimum wage without so much as a glance at my resume, which was good because I’d forgotten it anyway. My supervisor, Terry, later explained that I was hired because I didn’t seem high, which he took to mean that either I wasn’t, or that I was a functional stoner.
I came to find that most of my coworkers were functional, and barely so. One of the younger guys who shared my cubicle made it a point to announce when he was going to his car for a “lean break.” On one trip he never came back. Five, sometimes six days a week, I’d drive on over, take the shitty, stuttering elevator to the top floor, and stare at a malfunctioning monitor for eight hours, a cheap foam headset uncomfortably pinning back my ears and permanently etching the words “Please enjoy this ring-back tone while your party is being reached” into what remained of my working memory. Time dilation was at its theoretical maximum. I swear I could see vibrating strings in the fibers of my desk.
Two and a half months passed by. My fifth paycheck for a little over $400 was the last of the cash I needed. It had been long enough since I’d been on my own that I wasn’t sure what to do, as though the door of my prison cell had been accidentally left open. I put in my two weeks’s notice, but they told me not to bother. For that I was grateful. I found and packed a suitcase that night. I’d had dreams like this in the past, all ending in frustrating disappointment. I prayed this was not one of them. I bought a bus ticket online for three dollars and called a neighborhood girl to fuck in my car before I left. It was rough and sweaty, as these things are. I lit her cigarette and asked for a ride to Union Station. She said she’d take me as far as North Hollywood. Fair enough. By midnight I was sandwiched between an uncovered, freezing air vent and a smelly woman holding a smelly baby. I fell asleep listening to Alex Segal.
I woke up around brunch time. The woman and baby were gone, as were my glasses, but when I squinted out the window, my vision flooded with endless rows of multicolored houses beating a path up to the Bay Bridge, shrouded in cool gray fog. The double-decker bus broke through the low-hanging clouds, and I fell back in my seat. For the first time in a long time, I felt my brow unfurrow and my scowl drain away. The air was better here, so I took a deep, clean breath, closed my eyes, and dreamed of wide, toothy smiles, bánh mì, and Dolores Park. Hell was four hundred miles in the driver’s rearview mirror, and Market Street was the next exit coming up.
