“Well,” I replied, jamming my laptop into its case along with the little owl-shaped dish where I kept my keys on my desk. “I just got fired. So we can go NOW.”
“Are you serious? Why?” Hannah asked.
I shrugged. “Let’s get out of here.”
We went to a restaurant, and then a bar, and then another bar where I proceeded to spend the rest of my last week’s pay on Fireball Bombs and shots of Patrón XO Café.
“Unbelievable.”
“That’s retarded.”
“You’re gonna find something better, don’t worry about it.”
I called my parents. They didn’t believe me. My mom cried and my step-dad tried to console both of us with his British accent.
"Don't worry," he said. "It'll all turn out right in the end." For a second, I wanted to believe him.
I started to dial my ex-boyfriend’s number and changed my mind.
He would only be relieved that his timing was perfect. Who would want to date an unemployed loser like me?
I woke up early on Monday even though I had nowhere to go. I reached for the phone and dialed the number for the New York State Unemployment Department in my pajamas. I fiddled with my hair until Tammy, the operator, picked up.
“I got fired,” I blurted out.
She didn’t care.
“What’s your social? Where were your last five places of employment? Do you know the consequences of a fraudulent report?”
Tammy had Hurricane Sandy victims to worry about. She probably had five mouths to feed at home. She probably hated her job as much as I hated not having a job.
She signed off on a check for $175 every two weeks. It was less than I made working retail three days a week. My stomach flipped over at the thought of hanging my head and asking for my job back as a cashier at Urban Outfitters.
Over the next few weeks, I would wake up and text Hannah and make her perform subtle acts of guerrilla terrorism at the office.
Steal all the string cheese. Hide the mouse pads. Eat all the gluten-free crackers. Take home the padded manila mailing envelopes. Send.
I had spent the past year trying to figure things out. Trying to plan everything, trying to micromanage, trying to be better than what I thought I could be. I juggled school and an internship and my impending graduation. I got a job that paid nothing, so I got a second job on top of that. I paid my dues. I started at the bottom. I worked 13-hour days and I gave up eating food and sleeping and seeing my boyfriend. And then, my boyfriend left me. And my boss let me go. And for the first time in thirteen months, I had no idea what the next move was.
I watched Mulan one night as a part of one of my Netflix binges.
"Be a man," they told her, and she climbed to the top of that wooden post with weights around her wrists faster than anybody else. Hadn't I tried that? Hadn't I?
I applied for ten jobs a day, everyday, but nobody bit.
“I’ll pass your resume around at work to see if anybody is hiring,” my friend Rachel offered over our sixth grilled-cheese-sandwich-and-Intervention-marathon date that week.
I networked with everyone I wasn’t too embarrassed to tell what happened. I was terrified to see half of the people I was friends with, because I didn’t want to disappoint them. I didn’t want to hear them say, “I told you that you weren’t cut out for this.” I didn’t want to not-hear the things they would say when I left the room.
I stopped calling my parents and my friends from back home because I didn’t want to have to lie to them and tell them I was okay. I was only okay when I was distracting myself long enough to forget about my dwindling bank account. I was forced to grit my teeth and withdraw from my savings when I hit $64 after buying a bagel for breakfast at the deli counter below my $2400-a-month apartment. I felt like there were hundreds of people rooting for me to become a comedienne or a writer or SOMETHING back in Texas and California, and I had failed all of them.
I wanted to call my University and tell them that with all of their tests and pop quizzes and attendance policies, they didn't prepare me for this. I wanted to blame my parents for giving me everything and not teaching me how to live without a paycheck. I wanted to get in everyone's face who had ever believed in me and say, "YOU WERE WRONG. I'M NOT ANY OF THOSE THINGS. WHY DIDN'T YOU SUPPORT ME LESS SO THAT IF I FAILED IT WOULDN'T BE A BIG DEALl?!" But I didn't.
I wanted to call my University and tell them that with all of their tests and pop quizzes and attendance policies, they didn't prepare me for this. I wanted to blame my parents for giving me everything and not teaching me how to live without a paycheck. I wanted to get in everyone's face who had ever believed in me and say, "YOU WERE WRONG. I'M NOT ANY OF THOSE THINGS. WHY DIDN'T YOU SUPPORT ME LESS SO THAT IF I FAILED IT WOULDN'T BE A BIG DEALl?!" But I didn't.
Instead, I let Eric come down from Philadelphia and buy me drinks. I helped Rachel move into her new apartment. I started taking up Clay and Hannah's invitations to re-join the living. I listened to my step-dad, and I tried to breathe a little deeper every time I inhaled. It wasn't always perfect, but I tried.
And then Max started taking me on adventures, each one grander and crazier than the next. He described himself as an imaginary friend, and he was. He had a personality like Iron Man on sixteen cups of coffee, which he always drank black.
“Maybe I could be a janitor?” I asked him half-heartedly in line at Shake Shack for the fifth time that week. “Or a stripper. Or a bartender. Or one of those sex-hotline operators.”
“You’re a terrible dancer,” he said. “And you’re being ridiculous anyway. Stop being so cranky.”
We went to the Natural History Museum and climbed inside a giant replica of a whale’s heart. I folded my legs Indian style like I did when I was small, and listened to the rhythmic thud of the blue whale’s heartbeat until a guard asked us to leave. We sprinted home to grab blankets and snacks and stretched out in Central Park to watch the Shining with five hundred other New Yorkers in the summer heat. We devoured hot dogs and walked around the reflecting pool at Lincoln Center. He kissed me on 72nd Street and Columbus Avenue with a mouthful of Grey’s Papaya, surrounded by rats.
He took me to bars and parties and museums where we drank too much and stayed out too late. We bought finger puppets at the Chelsea Market and sang the White Stripes at karaoke. We wrote postcards to our parents from Jupiter and Pluto at a physics conference led by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s students at a bar in Brooklyn. I sloshed my way back to his apartment, babbling about molecules and atom expansion and dwarf stars and Mercury in Retrograde, and he laughed and helped me order a pizza on Seamless.
We ate coffee ice cream and watched documentaries about the Bermuda Triangle and meth addiction in Wyoming and whether or not Stanley Kubric directed the moon landing. He introduced me to the film Road House with Patrick Swayze and I think I found god. We bought coloring books with his discount at the MoMA after giving more creative titles to all the paintings in the newly-opened Magritte exhibit. We spent hours walking up and down the length of Manhattan, making fun of tourists and joking about Paul Shaffer’s sunglasses.
We ate coffee ice cream and watched documentaries about the Bermuda Triangle and meth addiction in Wyoming and whether or not Stanley Kubric directed the moon landing. He introduced me to the film Road House with Patrick Swayze and I think I found god. We bought coloring books with his discount at the MoMA after giving more creative titles to all the paintings in the newly-opened Magritte exhibit. We spent hours walking up and down the length of Manhattan, making fun of tourists and joking about Paul Shaffer’s sunglasses.
I still had tiny explosions of panic, usually when I was alone. I saw my bank account drop again, this time to 58 cents, and I cried in the Staples Print / Copy Center where I had ironically just spent my last pennies printing copies of my resume that I was sure no one would ever see. I ate leftover Thai take out and watched Eternal Sunshine on repeat. I read every Clementine von Radics poem I could find and had to physically restrain myself from copy & pasting each and every one of them into an email to every guy who had broken my heart in the past five years. I would forget to eat, and then I would eat five cupcakes in a row from Sprinkles to counter-balance it. I tried to hide the crazy from Max and all of the people I interacted with by telling really bad I-just-got-fired jokes. I dubbed this period in my life “FUN-employment” and pretended to be having the time of my life running around New York City, watching the Statue of Liberty light her torch from a mini-golf course in Battery Park, or scoring free-tickets to see the xx play at Radio City Music Hall without any means of supporting myself. I loved every single minute of free time, but I was also completely frozen with panic.
One night, Max and I ventured down to Williamsburg to watch Goldfinger with a live band playing the James Bond intro music along with the film. We ate hipster food sold in tiny carts along the outskirts of the industrial park, like Honey Buttermilk Biscuit ice cream and popcorn drizzled with lime and cotija cheese. I stuck a temporary tattoo to my upper arm and drank Brooklyn Summer Lager beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in the moonlight. Afterward, we walked around until we found a bar that served garlic mashed potatoes and Shiner Bock in cans so that I could show off the Russian fur trader cape I had purchased last year at the Brooklyn Flea.
Somewhere between the strung up Christmas lights that read “Save Domino” on the side of the old sugar factory building and the Bedford L train, I started freaking out. My heart rate increased to fifty times the BPM of the blue whale’s heart at the museum. I couldn’t breathe. My fingernails were digging into the palms of my hands and I wanted my black flats from Target to hold me to the sidewalk, but I didn’t know if they could.
“I’m a mess,” I said simply.
“I know,” he replied.
But then, something really rare and really beautiful happened. Something that hardly ever happens on the subway in Manhattan or in Brooklyn or in Queens. A tiny miracle that only graces the broken New Yorker in their hour of need; the New Yorker who moved from another city to follow their dreams, only to end up dejected and heartbroken, the New Yorker who was born here and waited for decades to find out if this is where they’re meant to be, the New Yorker who visits and falls in love with the place and is searching for a sign that they should stay.
We descended into the nearly deserted subway, and suddenly I felt the roof open up and the floor fall away and a guy in a beat-up American Apparel sweatshirt began playing the first few chords of Blackbird by the Beatles, my absolute favorite song.
And that’s when I fell in love with New York City for the very first time, amongst the giant subway rats on the tracks, and the homeless people sleeping on the stairs, and the dirty air rushing past us in the wake of a Brooklyn-bound train, and a skinny little hipster singing the only words that my heart needed to hear:
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.
