Time slowed to a crawl over the next six months. My anxiety had for the most part faded into the background, but in its stead lay an insufferable boredom and a feeling of impatience. The prophetic dreams had stopped coming, and I was relieved and somewhat disappointed to conclude that I wasn’t clairvoyant, I had just been crazy for several months. Hurray, I was no longer crazy, but as the dreams stopped coming so did any feeling of magic that I could find in New Orleans. There was nothing for me here. Even during Mardi Gras, when all my high school friends came in town and the streets filled with revelers, it felt like a dead town to me. My real life was elsewhere.
In April I put up a facebook post, asking if anybody in Charleston knew of any apartments opening up or anybody looking for a roommate. I asked Hunter and Lee, separately, but both of their houses were full and I wasn’t sure that’d be a good idea anyway, considering all the drama they’d been dealing with the last time I saw them. A week after I made the post I’d almost given up, but, out of the blue, Joe sent me a private message. He said Kat was moving out, and that they needed somebody to fill her spot, preferably not someone crazy, so I’d be perfect. I didn’t like the idea of living with Bobby, but I liked Joe and Marv well enough so I figured why not? It seemed like serendipity that this person I’d met by random chance was now the only one offering me a place to move. He put me in contact with the landlord, and three days later I’d signed a lease and mailed in a security deposit.
At half past midnight on June 5th, 2018, almost a year to the date since I had left Charleston, I piled my things into my car (my mother’s really, but she felt that I might need it to get a job) and I drove up to Charleston, stopping only once on the way, at a gas station to fill up the tank and keep moving.
Twelve hours later, I arrived. It was 99 degrees in Charleston and even hotter in the Rutledge house. I hadn’t noticed during my visit that there was no central AC, just a few plastic AC units stationed here and there, hardly doing anything. The heat was oppressive and unsettling, but it was not as unsettling as the presence of an unexpected fourth roommate named Buddy, a thirty-four year old alcoholic and cokehead who greeted me at the top of the stairs, cigarette in his mouth and beer in his hand at one in the afternoon. He had a sort of glazed look in his eye that I would later come to understand as a mixture of depression and inebriation, but even in that first glance I had the weird feeling there was someone else in him, looking out as if through a cracked and dusty pane of glass. He shook my hand and introduced himself, then he helped me carry the first of my bags into the living room. With the front door still open and the beer still in his hand he sat down on the couch and took a square mirror from the cushion beside him. Without bothering to roll up a dollar bill he pressed his bearded face to the mirror and snorted a sizable line of white powder, then he looked up at me with white specks all over his beard and held the mirror out to me.
I said, “Nah, I’m good for now. I’m gonna keep unpacking. Thank you, though.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and he did the other line.
The room I was to inhabit, formerly Kat’s, was on the other side of the wall that faced the front door. I learned later that the wall had only been added a few years prior. My room and the living room had once been one room that doubled as a sort of speakeasy, a place where Charleston’s inbred elite would come to drink and do blow after the legal bars all closed at 2 AM. The landlord's son Timothy was living in the house at that time, and he was the bar manager, bartender, and chief coke dealer. When the cops finally stopped turning a blind eye and shut the whole thing down, Mr. B kicked Timothy and his buddies out of the house, built the wall through the middle of the living room, and started renting the place out to college kids.
The side that became my room was gloomy but unremarkable. Dark wood floors with paint stains, cobweb covered windows with no blinds, a fireplace between the windows, a brass chandelier with candelabra lightbulbs, and dark maroon walls that looked like they’d been painted a hundred different times by a series of increasingly inept or indifferent painters. There were sloppy patch jobs marring every smooth surface, there was a noticeable gap between the wall paint and the white molding of the ceiling and floor, and the paint was peeling and chipping from just about everywhere, each gap revealing a different layer of color from years past.
I started piling my things in the middle of the floor, making trips back and forth to my car which was still parked in the driveway, radiating heat. At some point Buddy made his way into my room, fresh beer in hand, and started rummaging through the cardboard box of books that’d I’d set down near the fireplace. He took out a grey paperback called I am the Cheese, laughed at the title, then he took out a little plastic baggy of cocaine from his pocket and started making himself more lines on the surface of the book, which he had set down on the mantel over the fireplace.
“I already know I’m gonna like you,” he said.
I laughed half-heartedly and said, “Likewise.”
I inflated an old aero bed against the wall that ran along the hallway, and I piled the remainder of my luggage in the corner of the room in front of a locked door I initially thought was a closet. It really led to the laundry room, which was the connecting point between the kitchen, the bathroom, and Buddy’s room in the far back of the house.
I left Buddy by the fireplace still drinking and doing lines, and I went up to the third floor to see if the other roommates were home. I found Bobby playing Fortnite in his room. He offered me a hit of his bong and I was foolish enough to accept the offer. I few minutes later my anxiety was back in a big way, and I had to retreat back to my room on the pretense of being tired before the panic attack could work itself up into full force. Thankfully, Buddy was gone when I got down there, and I collapsed onto the Aero bed and began the all-too-familiar effort of trying to calm down and not die of a heart attack. The bed rocked around with even the slightest movement, like laying on JELLO, and in my panic-stricken state it seemed the bed was the physical embodiment of a metaphor for my life. I had lost all foundation and stability, and my attempt at reclaiming that foundation by returning to Charleston was already having the opposite effect. I missed my real bed, my parents, my dogs, my air-conditioning. I had been a fool to think I could come here and become the person I used to be or live the life I used to live. My parents were right: there was nothing left for me here.
Like all panic attacks, however, this one eventually passed and gave way to relief. Since I had begun my new life with failure and resignation, I gradually decided things could only get better from there, which was true, more or less.
TO BE CONTINUED
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P.S.
For more info on the story, see the introduceyourself post I made yesterday
