My First Apartment

 

Last night as I was laying in bed waiting for sleep I kept getting flashes of my first apartment. Every time I would close my eyes and start to drift off, there I was. Time had somehow ceased to exist as we know it and I wasn’t just imagining it, I was both 42-year-old me laying in my comfortable bed in my nice, air-conditioned house and 18-year-old me, trying to get comfortable on my grandparent’s hand-me-down sofa in my first apartment in Birmingham, Alabama in the middle of August with no A/C.

I paid $250 a month for that beauty in the year of our Lord 2000 and that felt like a fortune to me. I could smell the odor of the burnt chili-spaghetti I had just made. My granddad told me it was one of his favorite meals: a can of Wolf chili mixed with spaghetti noodles. I ate so much of it that first year on my own you couldn’t pay me to eat it today. But, you know, make me an offer.

I could feel the breeze off that cheap, plastic Walmart fan that did its best to churn up the stale, summer air. I could taste the Rolling Rock that my downstairs neighbor would bring over when we would play my SNES sometimes. I don’t even remember his name. Mike, maybe? We didn’t really talk about much of anything or become friends, but it was nice to not be completely alone sometimes. I think he probably felt the same way. Two boys trying to prove they were men.

I could feel the actual fall breeze when it finally started cooling off and classes started. The breeze in my hair (oh yeah, I had hair) as I rode my dad’s 1973 Schwinn World Sport to my way-too-early English class. I put so many miles on that vintage machine until it was stolen a few years later. But last night, I was right back in that stock saddle, shifting gears on the stem like a real old-timer.

I could feel the exhaustion of a full day of class and then jazz band rehearsal and then a workout and then a shift as the night janitor at the gym. But also the boundless youthful exuberance for more. I don’t really remember sleeping but I remember it was usually on that old couch in the summer because that was the room where I could get the most air flow. I remember late night falafel at Purple Onion or barbecue baked potatoes at Al’s Late Night with Sean and Casey.

I remember it being so lonely almost all of the time. I’d gotten used to an almost constant barrage of friends and family and that spigot just shut off. I was still in my hometown but, except for Sean and Casey, almost everyone I knew had left town for college. I had friends who were still in high school that first year and plenty of family in town, but I wanted so badly to prove I could make it on my own. I could have reached out more that year. Should have, I suppose.

There was a glazed window in the bathroom with those old school window locks on it that were like little metal semi-circles with thumb holds. I would open the window and look down the street while I was brushing my teeth. My street. My new little world.

I owned next to nothing and everything I did have was family hand-me-downs. Almost all of it came from my grandparents attic. Old aluminum pots and pans that had been in a box since 1968. The mattress I slept on was apparently my Dad’s mattress from when he was a little kid. That’s just like, a really old mattress.

And the roaches. The place had flying roaches, an atrocity that I did not previously know existed. The first time I was chasing one of those little guys around the living room with a shoe and it extended wings and flew at my face was the first time I was aware of my own mortality and how fragile it all really is.

I remember driving south on I-65 to visit home and how far away that 20 minutes somehow felt. I remember sitting in my old room with my little brother and him telling me that I could always just come home. I remember choking up and telling him that I didn’t think you could ever really go home.

I don’t know why I felt like I had to grow up in such a hurry. There was no reason for me to move out and start working right after I graduated high school. I didn’t have a summer or take a senior trip to Panama City or anything. Didn’t move into the dorms. Just right into it.

I remember the first few friends I made besides Sean and Casey, who I went to high school with. I remember Julie who I met at freshman orientation. We were the two weirdest, most socially awkward people there. She had big yellow glasses and giant, fake red gemstone ring. I think she went into fashion later in real life which totally tracks. I remember Wages, a trumpet player in the jazz band and several years older than me. Wages was so cool, man. He was the kind of guy who always kind of came off like he was being mean. But he wasn’t, he was just Wages. He was the first guy my age who looked cool with a cigar instead of like an asshole. Years later I would sublease his apartment while he was on tour with The Temptations.

As I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, I was back in that world. It wasn’t longing or nostalgia for “the way things were”, it was a three-dimensional realization that That is just as real as This. Then is just as real as Now.

I am very glad, though, that flying cockroaches are not in my recent memory.