III. A Low

Despite my low grades, record of truancy, and recent suspension, the high school administration let me graduate.

I then followed three friends to rent a house in the city in a suburb of LA county. Here strangers lived in track houses as far as my eye could see and I would commute to a community college and sometimes attend classes and fail three classes. Here we threw parties in our 1970’s track house and brought home acquaintances who we met on campus or at the grocery store and they brought their friends. Many nights I hid in my room and tried to sleep on my bed (only a thin mattress pushed against a corner) to the roudy shouts of strangers drinking in our kitchen.

Before my three friends and I moved in we helped clean and repair the house. The previous tenants lived in the house as if it were an indoor campsite. They let their who knows how many cats take lots of leaks in the carpet. When we met the neighbors, they tolds us that the previous tenants were a mother and her grown up daughter who got lost in drug use and emerged into the light of day less and less often.

The landlord, my friend Killian’s dad, received rent each month from the mother and daughter and never heard a complaint, but was shocked along with us to discover the dilapidated state of the house. We worked with him to tear out carpet that smelled of urine and roll fresh paint on the haunted walls. And when Killian’s dad left for the day we’d sit in an empty half painted room and smoke a jay, the haze of smoke making it even harder to make sense of our new surroundings.

I never fully moved into that house. I too only camped. I too wondered how to find my way to the light of day. Even in the light of day, I struggled to see the light of day. The warmth of the sun warmed only my skin. My heart, or what I knew of it, felt something like a black hole, a vacuum, a chilly thing that drew in heat but seemed to retain none of it.

I landed a job. Both my roommate Creighton and I landed a job at a sporting goods store where we worked in the ski and snowboard section. Creighton worked on the sales floor and I worked in the dimly lit rental and repair shop. There I often listened to music and day dreamed, all frustrated attempts to think lovely thoughts. I waxed snow boards and skis with disinterest and the quality of my work often fell under the scrutiny of my managers.

I often took breaks and visited Creighton and the other sales people who talked with customers among the racks of new snowboard jackets and clothing from the sexiest of surf brands, beautiful merchandise I could no longer afford.

For weeks I admired a button up shirt. Back at the house, my portion of kitchen cabinet remained dark and empty as I ate one meal a day at the Green Burrito, too proud to ask my parents who said I wasn’t ready to move out for any financial aid. And that shirt conjured visions I’d seen in the surf magazines I read growing up. The handsome adventurer pro-surfer taking an evening out to dinner with other good looking men and women, they cheers around a teakwood table in a dim Balinese lodge after a day packed with watching each other get buried shirtless in pristine turquoise barrels.

I snuck the shirt out of the store when I left that day.

I hung it up with pride above my bedroom door and showed it to Creighton when he got home. Creighton knew I liked the shirt. I talked to him on the sales floor about wanting the shirt. He looked at it with a disappointed but congratulatory expression. “That’s smooth, Nate,” he said. I can’t believe you pulled it off.

This was the second thing I’d ever stolen. The first thing was a tube of Neosporin from a drugstore one day after my fight to prevent the scaring and infection of my stitched eye brow. Either I didn’t have any money then. Or I didn’t want to spend it. But now a much more expensive item hung in my room. And I beheld the shirt that I thought could bring my life to life and make me more like the guys I saw in the surf magazines. But as the evening turned to night, the sight left me with a deep sense of emptiness.

The emptiness turned to what had become the familiar feeling of shame. I’ve heard that guilt is the feeling of, “I’ve done something wrong” where as shame is the feeling of “I am something wrong.” I felt guilt in what I’d done. But a feeling of shame came to prevade my everyday.

I’d become something strange in a now strange world of strangers and asphalt beneath a cold dim summer sun and within a pitch black inner night.

The next day, I conducted the more complex and risky operation of sneaking the shirt back into the store and returning it to the rack.

Every weekend I made the hour long drive back to Wrightwood in an ongoing attempt to save what I now saw as a disappearing culture of friends. Many of my friends could only return to Wrightwood sometimes, on breaks and holidays. And when they did return, they brought their bright eyed interesting group of college freinds. And together they told stories of new adventrues with new inside jokes.

One day I played a game of frisbee golf with my friend Tanner. Tanner visited from college and I figured a time to hang out with him after many phone calls. We walked through a grass field towards our disks that landed somewhere in the distant woods and we tried to have a normal conversation. Tanner never had any fear to say critical and true things. He noticed something off in our conversation. He noticed something off about me. He said, “Nate, you seem…” he searched for the right word, “detached.”

That word, “detached”, it scared me. It scared me because it was true. I did feel detached. That was the vocab word. My mind no longer seemed to exist in a natural way. It did not seem to work on my behalf. My mind seemed like a birds nest, but the birds had flown South or North or I’m not sure where. And Nick wasn’t the only one to say it.

Creighton would say it. He’d say, Nate, when I talk to you you nod like you heard me, but I can tell you didn’t hear me.

Or my instructors would say things. I started training on a course to be a firefighter. It’s what the cool kids from my upbringing were doing. I didn’t know what I wanted to be so I went along with it. I took an EMT course as part of the plan. At the end of a major test, my EMT instructor told me that at moments during the test I showed that dear in the headlights look.

Until now nobody told me such things. A friend’s mom during a board game I played with them one evening said, Nate, I don’t remember you this checked out. You’ve always been so quick. That’s what I remembered too. I remember jokes lighting up in my brain. Easy solutions coming to mind. Vast and effortless dreams taking me away before I drifted off to sleep at night.

It was shock.

Shock had shocked my mind, like a bolt of lightning that set fire to a tree and set the forest ablaze, and ashes blew in the wind.

I felt shock at what life was now and how little it resembled what life used to be — shocked that my urban room with a mattress on the floor and strangers in the kitchen felt like a prison cell inside of another prison a cell called everywhere. The freeway signs and community college classrooms appeared as holograms in a not real world. I looked around at a prison of not real.

I didn’t know the people who visited my house. I didn’t know my home town. I didn’t know my family. My family likely did not know me. And nobody told me that this was life.

In no way did life resemble the life I recalled as a boy. I recalled a world where light poured in through the interstices of pine needles. The air warmed my soul then. The shadows of the woods spoke of mysticism the and a realm beyond. The mountain peaks shown themselves as a horizon to somewhere good then, to a realm that promised more adventure and more life. But now I lived on the other side of those mountains and the world appeared dull and dead.

I searched. I saw a book by a Buddhist monk called the Dalai Lama on Tanner’s mom’s coffee table one day and I asked him if I could borrow it. Later I sat cross legged in my room in imitation of the monk and shut my eyes and emerged five minutes later wondering what I was doing.

I listened to music, The Beatles Sergeant Peppers, Jack Johnson, all my favorites, with such care and attention in hopes to learn where beautiful things came from.

I watched the tree in our city front yard from the living room, or I would lay beneath it on our patchy dead lawn.

All of it said, we are illusions and there is nothing here.

I didn’t want to live anymore.

Every weekend I worked at a pizza place in Wrightwood, a second job, and it made no financial sense as I burned gas money driving back and forth from the city. I worked there as part of my attempt to recover the world I once knew.

One afternoon I worked in the pizza kitchen and rolled out a slab of dough using a wooden pin, and what looked like light walked through the door, and it was Jonah our delivery guy.

I never hung out with Jonah. I knew he liked some of the same things that I did. He played paintball and soccer and he snowboarded. But he never came to our parties. He always came to work on time. He talked about his girlfriend as if she were a good friend. They liked doing things together like hiking. He seemed to enjoy doing good work. He spent time with his family. He didn’t use as many swear words as the rest of us did.

Jonah annoyed me because he was not like me. In high school he associated with a group of people who I knew as the Christians. They were different than the Mormons who hung out in choir and theatre. They were different than Catholics. Catholics made up the more interesting population in my view. We drank and smoked and used swear words. Our religion seemed way darker and more mysterious, having altars and incense, leaders in robes and bleeding saints. Catholic Jesus was way more bloody in our religion. Their Jesus played acoustic guitar and ice breakers at Bible camp.

But I saw a glimmer of light in that goodie tooshu, Jonah, as he returned from his pizza delivery run. So I asked him, “Jonah, can I go to church with you some time?”

He looked surprised and as he seemed to think back to what his Bible camp leaders advised him to do when something like this happened. With a look of serenity he then said, “Of course. It’d be great to have you.” And my heart felt at home.

In the hierarchy of places where I expected to find answers to my disillusion, Christianity occupied the lowest place. But I had arrived at my lowest place.