Desperation Vacation

      
              It was early May when I found an apartment I could sublease for the summer near the NC State campus. My funds were running low as I waited for pay checks to come through and loaned Dan money as he waited for old pay checks that never got sent out. I didn’t have the money for a security deposit or first month’s rent. I haggled with the renters and made up other apartments as leverage to talk the price down by about 500 dollars, get the first month for free, and pay to have it fully furnished.  It was 10 times nicer than anywhere I lived in college, and 100 times nicer than InTown Suites, but moving into an apartment complex full of college students definitely felt like a step backwards.
               I had six days before I could move in and I couldn’t afford more nights in motels. Dan and I loaded up the car and drove to Occupy Raleigh where we were considering setting up my tent and doing some urban camping for a few nights. I got there and it wasn’t so much “revolutionaries fighting ‘the man’ for social change” as it was a “gathering of old homeless men drinking malt liquor.” While we were technically homeless, and I enjoy a 40 oz. with friends in the park as much as the next guy, we still weren’t quite to the point of accepting ourselves as hobos.       
              Dan and I sat on the curb with our heads in our hands and our backs turned to the bars where we had been spending our money. We started wondering how we got ourselves into these demented types of situations.We were masters of surviving on a budget, but we had been going out  and spending with the false certainty that the missing money would show up the next morning. I knew Dan was good for it and I wasn't as broke as my bank account said. There were big pay checks on the way that would solve our problems, but that didn't do much to fix the current situation.
               I didn’t have the money to put a roof over my head for the next six nights, but I did have the gas to get us up to my friend Aaron’s apartment in Baltimore where he was throwing a Cinco De Mayo party. I saw the opportunity to turn desperation into a vacation. Aaron had been trying to get me to come to the party for weeks, but I didn’t have the money to go. Now that I didn’t have a place to stay and I wasn’t working the next few days, there weren’t many other options other than driving to Baltimore to act like a Mexican hooligan with one of my favorite people to drink with. Without a second’s hesitation, I sent him a text telling him to get ready, hopped in the car, and headed north to the land of crab cakes and football.
                Baltimore went pretty much as expected. Aaron and his girlfriend talked about poop entirely too much the perfect amount, Dan got lost jumping around Baltimore rooftops, and Aaron tried to convince me to move in. He had a five story house with three balconies, a rooftop view of downtown Baltimore, and plenty of bars within a stone’s throw. Everything I owned was already in the car parked out back and I was toying with the idea, but I had seen too many episodes of “The Wire” and I figured the allure of the crack game would eventually have me slanging rocks on the corners of West Baltimore.
                The Cinco de Mayo celebration was in full swing when I got a call from my boss in Raleigh. The staff was going to be cut, Dan and I would be picking up all the extra hours, and I would have plenty of work. Once again it seemed like all the pieces were falling into place. I came back to Raleigh and put my name on a lease for the first time in two years. I would be making decent money and there was a fun girl that always wanted to hang out with me. I had spent way too long thriving on the chaos of my lifestyle. It looked like for the first time in a long time I’d finally have some stability …. but stability isn't anything to blog about...

“Where all is one and one is all, to be a rock and not to roll” – Led Zeppelin 

Strapping into the Raleigh-Coaster

            It was the second night in Raleigh when Dan and I met up with our friends Zack and Rob at a girl’s apartment Rob had been hanging out with. He met the girl the night we all went out in Raleigh on the way down to Panama City and I vaguely remembered her. I walked into the apartment and noticed her roommate precariously sitting on the edge of the railing of their second story balcony. When she told me her name was Ashleigh I immediately remembered meeting her the last time I was in Raleigh. I had watched her bounce around the bar breaking necks in little blue shorts. At some point I had a quick conversation with her. She told me how she spelled her name and I remembered thinking it was cute that the “leigh” in her name was spelled like Raleigh. I don’t know how often I’ve thought this about the best looking girl at any given bar, or how often I would even recognize that girl if I saw her again, but I remembered thinking that she would be a fun girl to date. It only seemed right that she’d be the first girl I meet when I moved to Raleigh a month later. You know the type of girl... Beautiful, independent, fun, and totally into guys that are at a point in life where they are homeless, unemployed, don’t have a car, and are recovering from a minor drinking problem. Sometimes the best things happen at the worst times. The next day she messaged me saying I should come out with her and her friends that weekend. A week later I was hanging out with her almost every day. Maybe Raleigh wasn’t going to be such a bad place after all…..
          .....Or…..maybe it was… Dan and I moved into a place called InTown Suites that rented one room apartments for a week at a time and was littered with the dregs of society. It was infested with drug addicts and hookers we called the InTown Suite-Hearts. The one neighbor we met asked us if we sold drugs and offered to prove he wasn’t a cop by lifting his shirt and showing us that he had “Fuck Tha Police” tattooed across his chest. Apparently he didn’t think his facial scabs and 5 rotting teeth were convincing enough.  Due to nightly walks home at 2 A.M. while living in various ghettos in Pittsburgh, where delivery drivers would refuse to come to my neighborhood because they had been robbed so many times, I actually didn't feel too uncomfortable around these types of people. If you try to look mean and walk like you're on your way to kick someone's ass, you can avoid trouble in most any situation. Unless of course you're a girl, in which case your best bet is to smell as offensive as possible. I had only planned to stay for the first week until I signed a lease on an apartment, but due to some unforeseen circumstances I ended up calling it home for the next month.
            I met with one of my bosses and learned some unsettling news. They had just hired two new people before I decided to come up, it would take three weeks for the paperwork to go through before they could pay me, and I could expect anywhere from 1-40 hours a week. Dan and I went back and forth over what the next move should be. We still hadn't unloaded the car and we were considering jumping back in and driving to LA where we might be able to get jobs as valets at the Trump golf course. I could brush elbows with millionaires until I found a way to become one myself. If the job was only going to be part time in Raleigh anyways, we could move to Miami and take the part time positions we had been offered there, but that was just the same problem in a more expensive setting.
              The point of the journey was never to settle down in an average city with a boring job just to make enough money to live a boring life. The point also wasn't to go back north with my tail between my legs and nothing but stories about how much fun I had while I failed to make it. If there was a point to the journey, other than to see if the grass was really greener on the other side, it was to experience as many facets of life as possible until I landed myself in a place where I could say to myself, "I like this. Let's do this for a while."
             It was decided that the best course of action was to stick with the job I had in Raleigh and work to climb up in the company that I was already on great terms with. I had found an industry I loved, but my job was way too easy and I knew I would get restless if I didn't move up in the near future. I started looking for another job to hold me over. This was the first point in the trip where having only one car between Dan and I became a significant problem. I needed a car to get any sort of job I wanted, but I needed a job to get a car.
              While looking for additional employment my boss told me I shouldn’t be on the job hunt because work would pick up soon and he would need me full time. It felt great to throw out a stack of job applications for positions I knew I would hate. The job was sending me to events all over the eastern Carolinas and the work was a blast. Having a job that paid me to make trips to events I couldn’t afford was a perfect fit. I was getting all the hours they could give me, but it would be one 40 hour week where I would lay off on the job search and miss interviews to go to work, followed by a 4 hour week of canceled events where I felt like I needed something more consistent. I would end up spending the next 3 months in a limbo with the company budget as my bosses and I tried to figure out whether or not I had full time work and a promotion. The promise of a full time job doing the work I loved was always on the horizon, but the world was spinning too fast for me to catch up with it in time.

"For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."  -Steve Jobs