fighting against my environment

Fighting Against My Environment:

An Essay on Escapism

(a rough draft)

Many people find themselves living in the acid-cinged intestine of a metropolis, New York City, at some point in their lives. Some move there for fame, some for fortune; some move there for adventure, opportunity, or the ability to say, “I’m from NYC;” some move there for family or friends, but mainly in search of new people to inhabit those titles. I moved to New York because of a quote in a magazine written in 1976, that I read when I was sixteen years old, taken from an interview with a junked-out poet.

“Basically, I have one feeling,” Richard Hell told Legs McNeil, full of pauses and deep breaths. “And that’s this little voice in my head saying…well I mean the one main feeling I have is the desire to get out of here. And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyze, you know, why I want to go away…See, I always feel uncomfortable and I just want to go away. Just walk out of the room. It’s not going to any other place or any other sensation or anything like that, it’s just to get out of ‘here.’”

The interview, featured in the June, 1976 issue of PUNK, was before my time and full of supercilious ideas about a world I was just beginning to experience. Still, it seemed the truest thing anyone had ever told me, or even had slurred into a tape recorder to be put into a small-circulation magazine that would later be widely forgotten. I moved to New York not only to find Hell, but to exist in a city where I could be constantly entering a new place, perpetually leaving and escaping. Interestingly, I moved to New York because I love being outdoors, and felt like New York City was full of doors to walk through, a million ways to find myself outside.

I escaped every day. I rode my bike through the city as if I were being chased by a great regret, and nothing could stop me from moving as fast as I could to a constantly new location. As long as I never stopped pedaling, I never had a “here” from which to walk away. I was involved in bike-car accidents every other week. Sometimes the cars hit me, sometimes I hit them. With some skill, I hit the cars on purpose to lean against them and go faster through tight spots. I held myself between delivery trucks with stiffened shoulders down First Ave, pingponged myself between double-parked cars and commuters stuck in traffic on Delancey. At the end of the day, though, I always found myself pinned down in my own apartment, punched into an inescapable moment like a time card, stuck in a room in a building in a city. If I stayed still a moment longer the city would have killed me. So I moved. I kept moving for a whole year.

I lived on a sleeping bag-shaped magic carpet that toured me around the world. The brief moments I stopped, I spent my time landscaping and riding my bike, doing security outside punk clubs and searching for food. Those nights usually brought me outside at two in the morning to sit by the harbor and watch the seals until sunrise, my final rebellion of the day against captivity and any “here” claiming my presence. I never wanted to be inside. In one summer I traveled across the United States by plane twice and by land three times, head hanging out the driver’s side window, radio turned up, iced coffee melting too quickly on the dashboard cup-holder. I thumbed my way down, across, up, and back across Europe, walking down dirt roads alongside peacocks and pelicans, miniature goats and wild hens. Even in the winter I slept in my sleeping bag, underneath other sleeping bags, in a room in the Netherlands with an uncloseable window and an unmelting pile of snow by my feet. This fresh air, even with its occasional swollen-jointed misery, blew the urban stagnancy from my marrow, replaced the pollution of my mind with treescapes and windmills.

Before moving to New York, I was engrossed in the vast New Mexican high desert landscape. I had moved from Boston where I had come to embrace the oppression of the nagging urban “here” as a sign of my own expansiveness. I was so big the clouds sat on my shoulders and clogged my mouth like a gag of cotton balls and soot. I was so big I couldn’t take more than a few steps before hitting a building or the ocean. When I first moved to New Mexico I was afraid to open my eyes. I didn’t want to see how landlocked I was – to legitimize my claustrophobia. I stayed in the lowlands, where there is no view. I walked the valleys and rode along the arroyos at night on my bike, when they were drowned in their own shadowy vacancy. But I couldn’t ignore the two mountain ranges, and eventually too I acknowledged the gutted plains that literal eons ago homed bodies of water.

The friends I made could see my eyes in heat behind their shading. That I felt too big for the desert and felt I could move nowhere without knocking my shins into a mountain, knocking my head against the sun. And that really, it was a fear of feeling small – not having the borders of a peninsula, clouds sitting always on my broad-feeling shoulders. There is something in the world more expansive than I am, and that was the real blinding fact.

With some coaxing, I left routine. First to the fairy village Mercedes grew up visiting, a half hour north of Albuquerque – a tiny pore in the mountain skin, it sparked around 4pm when the sun tilted and shone open-faced on the wind-smoothed rocks. And I went to Ghost Ranch where I scaled flats and my soul fit back in my body and I relearned my size: minute. In Cerillos I hiked a riverbed and skipped old washing machine parts across the soft arroyo sands. We prayed for rain that never came, then drowned in monsoons that didn’t stop for months. The arroyos were full of ghosts of drowned children and searching mothers. Once I even knew their names, and would say them when I found myself riding home too late at night, caught in the gaping dark vastness of their sorrows, forbidding them to swallow me.

In the summers, Jason took me up to Pecos for spelunking. We listened to Black Sabbath and hid a case of Tecate in the icy mountain brook, behind a waterfall, for later rehydration. After a day of exploring the wet caves we drifted in the truck back to Santa Fe like a star falling off the sky – so natural-feeling it must have already happened, Eons ago when the rest of the land was as lush as Pecos. We were just able to finally see our descent.

In the relearning of my own size, I relearned place. In those days of wilderness I did not need to escape any room that perpetually followed me. The expansiveness of my lungs in the high mountain desert stretched me momentarily over the plains of spiritual captivity, and I was free. But freedom isn’t something always desired to be found; sometimes it is the pursuit of the feeling that is hungered for. It is the leaving of the place, the escape of the “here,” eyes scanning every room for the exits, the fast ride down narrow streets, that pats our tongues to our palates when we are young. At least, that’s how I was. When I finally found freedom I felt obligated to feel happy and content, but I had nothing more to pursue as a quest. It was the same feeling I had when I rode my bike down the west coast, filling my skin with trees and salt water, mazing my path through ancient trees and cutting steep roads five thousand feet above sharp rocks and glaring waves. When I finally made it home, I felt complete and miserable. I sat on the moldy couch outside my house for days, throwing rocks at passing cars. I knew I could not exist inside a single room, a single house. I knew I could no longer pedal down the same easy streets and pretend to see new ghosts in the arroyos. I moved to a different neighborhood, with fewer trees and more gas station convenient stores. I escaped this new neighborhood with hikes in the woods and long drives in the moonlight that resurrected mountains into the dinosaurs their soils once were.

It was when I could no longer escape the moon that I moved to New York. When I realized that the sky over my head was illuminated with a natural reflecting orb and that peace was unavoidable. There was no trap from which to chew my leg free. In the stars were constellations I hadn’t seen anywhere else, a creamy Milky Way brushing across the sky. There is a vastness is thick in the desert sky. If you focus your eyes with the right lens, more stars come into view and you get sucked into the abyss of white, of glowing, of history leaving its last marks on our retinas. Before I learned this trick, I was mesmerized by the night sky in New Mexico. I glanced up at the sky every so often to discover a new layer, a few new stars jumping out of the past. Once I began practicing the lens change on my eyes, I couldn’t stop. I laid on my roof all night and fell up, tumbled further away from the distant streetlights and illuminated store signs. The Milky Way became a disastrous funnel, and in its eye: the moon, waiting patiently for me, calling me like a Siren. I could have stayed laying on that roof forever. Sleep during the days, stare woozily all night, live in a “here” so wide and open there is no such thing as an exit, just the denial of the moon’s hypnotic presence.

Luckily I got a phone call from the mother of a friend who had moved to New York City and needed a roommate. There is hardly a moon in New York, and definitely no Milky Way. If one stares hard enough, and is standing in Queens or in an abandoned lot in Brooklyn, perhaps that lucky individual will be able to see Orion’s belt and maybe even the Big Dipper. The light pollution settled into my life like a sweetheart, and after a while I forgot there was a place I knew where the sky did not dim to henna red and brighten to heather grey. This was the dismal “here” that was hardest to leave.

Now that I don’t live in New York or New Mexico, and mainly now that I have matured enough to purge the search of a 16-year-old’s guru, I don’t feel the need to escape every place I inhabit. Where I am is where I exist, and the multitudes of places and ways to exist greatly surpasses the places and ways of inexistence. These days I exist under a bridge in Lawrenceville, in an attic in Bloomfield. I exist as a learner-of-things, as a lover, and a friend. I exist in a bedroom full of records and a typewriter; in a park overlooking the train tracks, full of statues of St. Mary; in the markings on trees in Shenley Park. I have placed myself at all these sites and wrapped myself around them, claimed them as my own instead of fearing a place claim me.