Losing Face at "Leather and Lace"

              I finally got the promotion I was waiting for. Good news, right? Wrong. This is when the series of unfortunate events began to get more twisted and sinister than I ever could have imagined. When other jobs I had interviewed with called me I told them I was all set for work. Days later I was told our budget was suddenly cut, work would be slowing down, and the season would be cut short…. right after I killed any headway I’d made on my backup plans. I had a new title for my job and some more responsibility, but I wouldn't be receiving the hours I had been expecting.
             Dan got the job in Charlotte and would be moving there soon. I had planned for either Dan leaving and me getting the promotion, or Dan staying and not getting the promotion. Dan leaving, me not getting any more hours, and being without a car was a scenario I didn’t even consider. The one upside to this was that Dan getting the job gave me the confidence that I would get my shot one of these days, but I was seriously running out of patience. Whatever pride I had left would need to be swallowed as I sunk to new lows in my attempts to pull things together. I was…in a word…fucked. I had spent the summer barely working enough to get by and waiting for the full time job that was always right around the corner. I couldn't fake the confidence anymore. Who was I kidding? I felt like a clown.

I don't mean to get excessive with the bitching about my life on this blog. I would like to say that after the few short weeks it took to lose my money, girl, only mode of transportation, one of my only friends south of the Mason-Dixon, my ability to sleep for more than two hours at a time, my health, my sanity, my dog, and any hope that stability in Raleigh would come soon, that the “Debaucherous Descent” had finally hit rock bottom and it was time to bounce back. Sometimes you feel like you hit rock bottom and bounce right back. Sometimes you hit rock bottom and you start drilling into the bed rock.

It was back to square one. The plan was to move in with my boss and, once again, go for any job I could find in his neighborhood to supplement my income until I had enough to buy a car and figure out the next step. My life was like the Greek myth of Sisyphus. I was eternally damned to keep pushing the boulder up the hill towards my laughably simple goal of stability and car ownership, only to have it tumble back to the bottom when I was about to reach the top.
 Dan wanted me to move to Charlotte to work on his team. Raleigh was a great place when I had a little money and the ability to get around, and I still wasn’t ready to just give up and start over again in a new city.  No disrespect to Dan and his mad amounts of managing skills, but having him as a boss when he only got the job because he was having his stroke of good luck while the timing for me was all wrong would be a tough pill to swallow.

In the end, my decision to move to Charlotte wasn’t much of a decision at all. It’s weird how the most trivial things can happen at a vulnerable time and completely change the rest of your life. My boss had to register his car and get a license plate for it. He wouldn’t have a car for a few days or so, and I wouldn’t have one to borrow to continue my job hunt, get to interviews, or even move my stuff out of my apartment. It seemed like all the forces of the universe were telling me to get out of Raleigh.

"Just a song before I go, a lesson to be learned. Traveling twice the speed of sound, it's easy to get burned". - Crosby, Stills, Nash

If life has taught me one thing it's that the second best asset you can have when you're down and out are reliable friends. The best asset you can have are reliable friends that owe you favors. I had loaned Dan money for months and he was happy to return the favor in Charlotte now that he was on the up and up. 

I drove to Charlotte because I could work there that week and I couldn't in Raleigh. I didn't know if I was gone for good, or if I would come back to work in Raleigh the next week. I would like to say I left Raleigh the way I remembered leaving all the other places: with the sun on my face, "Free Bird" blaring out the windows, and looking forward to the adventures that lie ahead.

But, since brutal honesty has become a theme of this blog, I'll admit that my departure from Raleigh was different.  I didn't drive with the soothing melody of Southern Rock in my ears and the excitement of moving somewhere new. There was no "Free Bird" coming out of the speakers. Just the muffled rage of late 90's rap-metal. I left Raleigh at night in the middle of a thunderstorm and feeling like a chump while listening to Limp Bizkit and trying to convince myself that I “did it all for the nookie”.  

          Sure, some of the major problems in my life were working out. I had managed to save a little bit of money, but it was always one step forward and two steps backwards. If there was a point where it seemed like a culmination of everything that had gone wrong had come together in one moment, it was the morning after I arrived in Charlotte and drove to pick up some food. I was driving when I felt the tire on the car deflating and pulled into the nearest parking lot. I got out of the car to see a massive tear in the tire. I still had all my belongings in the car from moving out of my apartment the night before. Then I realized where I was: the parking lot of the beat up shack that is Leather and Lace Strip Club…. with a flat tire… and everything I owned in the car.  It was just a flat tire, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The wheel was rusted on and I knew there wasn't a spare buried beneath all my stuff in the trunk.

Yes, that is a pregnant stripper that chain smoked cigarettes. Classy lady...

I couldn’t think of a more poetic setting for the end of the “Debaucherous Descent”. It was so perfect that I almost wanted to give up right there. The only problem was I didn’t even know what giving up would consist of at that point. When your life gets so embarrassingly fucked up that you don’t even know how to give up there’s only two things you can do: cry like a pussy or laugh like mad man. I laughed. I laughed hysterically. I laughed harder and louder than I’d ever laughed in my life. I laughed like Walter White when he realizes his money is gone and the cartel is on their way to kill his family:

For no reason whatsoever it was the happiest I had been in a month. Call it a decision to accept the idea that I could no longer control my fate, or call it pure insanity. I had seen the highest highs and some of the lowest lows in the past year of my life, and it never correlated with hard work or lack thereof. I had spent almost as much time regretting decisions as I did thinking every choice I had made panned out perfectly. I didn't care anymore. I had no fight left in me.  I put forth an honest effort at living a stable life with the resources I had, and I failed miserably. I made a decision. If my life was going to be unstable and chaotic beyond my control, I was going to embrace every second of the madness. I would spend the next months moving around as much as I could. It was back to the "go-for-it" mentality and time "to get reeeaaal weird with it".

  

 "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything".  -Tyler Durden, Fight Club