I love this computer. My parents gave me this computer when I went away to college in Chestertown. Chestertown, a word that sings to me, a word that either goes up a little with my heart at the end, or else ends its self in short, clipped doom. There is no in-between. I was 21 that year and this was before I knew C-town, before I’d ever visited here. I applied in May to Washington College. Spring was at it’s end, I was spending long days in the sun at the park a block away from the community college I was attending in order to stay on dad’s health insurance. The park was hidden quiet away in a neighborhood. The neighborhood was full with brick houses that had tulips and black shutters and lots of crocus’s and bunches of thickly cushioned green grass, lots of barking dogs. It hid me, a special spot where I could go after class to swing or to write and hide away by the pink flowering buds of lots of springtime trees.
God, I love this computer. It’s old, the keys are all stained, there are literal dust bunnies stuck between the top rows of numbers and all those F-commands I never learned how to work. There are wax spots, melted drips from candles burnt over the years and years that I’ve written perched here over this keyboard. And there are coffee marks, old wine patterns, and inevitable dirt that’s nothing but dark stain now. I love this computer, the dirt-grooves fit my fingers, make the keys feel somehow more smooth. The discolored plastic around the screen is covered with tiny worn images: glued-on horoscopes browned along the edges; taped messages and reminders to me in the form of quotes from other artists, living or long-past; a little picture of myself cut in a circle, staring out from the high cliffs above the Sassafras River the first time that Brandon took me there, dressed in my gray sweater with all the knits and my thick and thrifty second-hand vest. These images, they are small enough that you can miss them if you’re not looking for them, I often do, the way we take in something long known and dear to us all at once. How my computer’s energy is that way—that certain subtle flow of mystique that exists when for so long we’ve come to know something—and how we appreciate it in part by taking for granted that it remains true, or anyway, somehow unchanged.
I had a boyfriend when I first discovered that park near the community college. His mom lived in one of the many suburban complexes that hedge out from the school and define the middle-class roads all along the circuit there, the sprawling corridor between Annapolis and Baltimore running parallel alongside the Chesapeake Bay. This, this placeless place of suburb stretch is where I’m from, this placeless place that’s still a place to me: Where I Grew Up. Joe was his name, the boyfriend whose mom lived near the park, and we met at Applebee’s where he was the bartender and I an upper-middle class white wannabe ghetto girl convinced I was too smart for Academia and stuck on a resentment at my Catholic School Upbringing.
I was waiting tables when he and I first met. I had an affinity for purple and polyester and people with edge and boys that wore hooded-sweatshirts. He saved me from me, from my own kind of common overdose on me, that polyester hot-pants fake-nails part of me, with his Red Chevy and short curly locks, his white-blue eyes and especially his hard-rock guitar.
It is him I credit for getting me to Chestertown, all these years later, I wonder if he knows? The way the story goes is like this: Joe was a rock-star to everyone that met him, and he to himself but the secret was he could only see it in himself shining back from someone else’s eyes. I still wonder about him, especially about his case—the older I get the more it seems to me that this is the story for many of us. He had a quiet charm that came out in his fast smile, a capability to see into the eyes of someone and tell all about their soul, and a heart that never wanted to but that he was convinced was doomed to let everyone down. I loved him. Straight away and from the first second: I loved him. He was one of the two men in the whole span of my life whose inherent, immediate connection to my spirit brightened me for one clear reason: Joe soothed me. He soothed and smoothed me all out on the inside. He had a settling presence and effect on me, like that you might associate with a calming beach wind.
It was not long before he established himself as the one the McMullen family expected to take in as our own, on behalf of me. Back then, at 21, as the oldest of all my cousins (with the exception then of my one who was estranged for a marriage she made happen on her own, sans family,) it was totally common and acceptable to think that marriage was soon to be in my cards. That’s what my good Irish Catholic Baltimore working class lineage and strong strong pride of tribal upbringing had me convinced that I wanted (a good old-fashioned, well-drunken wedding, at the Roland Terrace Democratic Club in the bowels of Brooklyn Park, with a social service career to follow, no less). And if I was anything back then other than an upper-middle class white girl resentful of her Catholic roots, I was also a McMullen, equal parts prideful and resentful, an all-encompassed, gregarious tribe member of the new generation of Mc’s to come. I was even studying to be a social worker, and Joe, to us all, fit the tribe-eyed husband-fine bill. He was at Grammy’s funeral, helped us clean out her old house at 436 Church Street, Brooklyn Park.
I was crushed when the relationship suddenly ended. Of course, that term, suddenly, when used in context with a romantic relationship, is generally anything but…denial, I’d say, is most certainly applicable for its anesthetizing purposes. So yeah, somewhere behind my closed eyes I knew Joe and I were having a few troubles. Maybe I even aggravated them, I mean it’s always been funny to me the way one person’s unspokens are able to pull all out and mix all up with the secret hidden ones that the other person seems to barely know are there. So maybe one of my unspokens was my hot attraction at the time to this other guy Joe. He was a barback at the new restaurant on the docks of Annapolis, Pusser’s Landing, where I started working after getting fired from Applebee’s. I was fascinated with Pusser’s being the place to be. Either way, and as those details are clearly for other stories and you dear reader are now learning to pardon my at times incidental digressions, the first Joe and I broke up.
It was a busy Friday night in April in Annapolis. It was foggy and damp out like April ought to be and the moisture was rising right off the streets of Annapolis and down by the Bay the way only Annapolis can make a Bay stir and sit on the air. And I had just got of work, and the Friday night gold-and-shadows-lit bar crowd at Pusser’s was starting to thump with the arrival of a wedding party from the Marriot upstairs, and Joe called for me at the hostess stand right there next to the bar, next to all the action. And I got on the phone to talk to him about the Dave Matthews show we were going to in Roanoke the next morning. And he said I decided not to go. Which I guess I knew would happen somewhere down deep inside me. And I was the one who said, what? What’s wrong with you, are you wanting to break-up? And he was the one who said yes.
Needless to say it is this fact, the fact of my shock over losing him after fourteen months, which changed something in me. It re-birthed my need to fly. I was broken-hearted, in flux between sullen wine-soaked misery and head-to-the-back-wall-of-the-couch-in-the dark-basement-at-mom’s sulky doom. I made it to class but at work felt embarrassed, everyone saw me cry that night when I hung up the phone.
My dad was the one who saved me: come like a hero up from Virginia where he lived and worked to order some gin and steamers at Pusser’s bar one night as I cocktailed. And he said Sis, (which is what he always calls not only me but my also his youngest sibling, my Aunt Sue,) first thing you need to do is write him a letter, tell him how you feel, then rip it up and turn the page. Then maybe you could think about getting out of here (I was telling him, you know, how it was time for me to hit the road.) Maybe, he continued, you can check out that writing school, the one on the Shore, the one your mom’s always talking about…
What do you know? Less than five months later, (or almost exactly ten years later, depending on the point of time we’re referencing) and look where I ended up…
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