Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-06-26- 6:43 p.m.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

It’s the day after college graduation, and I’m at a party being thrown at the apartment of four former drama majors, all of whom just matriculated a little more than twenty-four hours ago. Everyone is about two drinks beyond drunk; the boys are wearing old t-shirts and jeans with Birkenstocks, the girls have on either far too much or far too little makeup and are wearing their best “evening out” skirts. Of course, it isn’t my college graduation, at least, not anymore. I’m in Chicago, visiting my brother for his graduation.
Everything is just like I remember, down to the firecrackers and the cocktails of V-8 Splash and flavored vodka in coffee mugs. The conversations amuse me most; I can barely resist laughing when a girl comes up to my brother’s roommate and talks to him about how she has always “respected” him as a person and as an intellectual. I’m surrounded by endless variations on the theme. Everyone wants one last fuck before they head out into the real world.
I’m not much of a traveler. My last vacation for purely recreational purposes (that is, not because of some sort of obligation such as a wedding or 80th birthday of a grandmother) was in the spring of 2000, to Chicago to visit my brother at college. I’m leaving out the odd weekend in Atlantic City and one disastrous night in Boston with a girl from Austin I imagined might make a suitable girlfriend based on one New Year’s Eve. Those were all unplanned, and lasted less than forty-eight hours, and didn’t involve taking any days off of work, which is my main criteria for a vacation anyways.
It isn’t that I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve lived in Israel, spent a month in Italy, traveled the Cote d’Azur. I’ve been to Cancun (and not on Spring Break), toured nearly all of Canada, and I’ve been to Disneyworld. I just haven’t done any of it recently. I like to fashion that it is because of my own preferences about travel, namely that I don’t like to go anywhere if I can’t spend a reasonable amount of time there. I just hate feeling rushed. But the truth is more that despite my lease, my friends, my favorite restaurants and bars, I feel as though I am rather rootless here in New York. I want so much for this place to be a real home for me, someplace it is hard for me to disentangle myself from. Ever since the fall of 1998, when I was cruising from couch to couch while looking for a new apartment, I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that I’m no more than a couple of bad weeks away from fleeing the City, head down and defeated.
It is a big deal for me to take Thursday and Friday off from work. It is a big deal for me to go to Chicago for four days, to take it on faith that when I come back, everything will still be here.
And what I found was that not only will things stay the same at home, but things have stayed the same in other places as well. It is a funny feeling, like being twenty-one all over again. Everyone places me immediately; I suppose I look so much alike to my brother that all his friends whom I’ve never seen know me immediately. But there is something missing for me. It isn’t that I’m established and they are not, or that they are celebrating and I am not. It isn’t that four years is such a long time that we have nothing in common or nothing to talk about, or that they are hard drinkers and I’m not really anymore. It isn’t that they are about as free to do anything in this moment as they will ever be in their lives, and that I’m going to be going back to a life of rent and work and grocery shopping in a couple days. It is parts of all those things, to be sure.
It is something more that drives me at two-thirty in the morning to the spare bed in my parents’ hotel room instead of my spot on my brother’s couch. I go because as comfortable as it is (and it isn’t bad), I can’t face the idea of a third shower in the bathroom he and his three roommates share. And I don’t blame them for it; at twenty-one, I think my shower was far more disgusting in fact. It is just that while I can have a nice time visiting myself at twenty-one, it just isn’t a place I’d feel comfortable living anymore.
Congratulations Xander, Class of 2002

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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