Moving Out, Moving To, Moving On
By Matt Nathanson | August 5, 2008
Category: The Wasteland
At approximately 11:15 PM on Saturday, August 2nd—the last night I was spending in my apartment of three years—a Yamaha motorcycle, metallic green, crashed at high speed into the side of my soon-to-be-former three-story walk up, waking my sleepy corner in Brooklyn with a sudden and explosive pulse of sound.
It had been stolen, and the thief had been, alas, a terrible driver. For some reason I instantly thought his name was Raul. (He looked like a Raul.) My landlord was quickly on the scene, screaming at the guy in Spanish. Slightly dazed, but not on so many drugs that he didn’t know to get the fuck out of there, Raul took off on foot, down my quiet block, leaving the bike toppled like a metal cow in the middle of the street. The cops arrived within 90 seconds (my roommate timed it) and proceeded to chase.
When the collision occurred, my three story red apartment building didn’t quite wobble, but registered the impact with a sort of pump-fake, a controlled and deliberate shifting of weight. It was in that moment that a chapter in my life ended; that moment, not the four hours I had spent lugging past-its-prime IKEA furniture into and out of a U-HAUL; not the awkward hug-handshake I gave my roommate who is moving to Boston for school; not the final cigarette I smoked secretly, and snubbed out mournfully, on my fire escape. A moment of collision, of disorienting noise: that is how chapters end.
I’m sitting here ruminating on roots and rootlessness—on leaving my home—not knowing where I packed my suspenders (the one pair I have, bought years ago, whipped out occasionally to tie together a fancy outfit or shine ironic in a post-ironic world). Are they still in Brooklyn, lost somewhere under a radiator? Are they back on Long Island at my parents house, the temporary holding spot for most of my stuff while I find another apartment? Are they at my girlfriend’s house, under her bed with the other flotsam she benevolently agreed to make room for – without any fuss or demand? (Thanks, Pav, by the way.) Why does this matter, after all, because who needs suspenders? What if they are lost? So what? So what?
I think 97% of people need roots, need a place to go home to and know it’s their own. There’s nothing more human than a meticulous attachment to space, to the womb, to our private fortresses of solitude. But what’s scary about not having one isn’t about losing storage for our Peugeot bicycles, our suspenders, our collective drech and paraphernalia. It’s not about leaving our fortress; rather it’s about losing, once and for all, our solitude. After all, what is an apartment if not a quiet place to read, to occasionally jerk off, to smoke cigarettes on fire escapes and just not give a crap about the movements below?
But then again some people have seemed to sever all ties, at least all prolonged ties, with “place” completely. I have a friend with whom I work that, between shoots of our TV show, simply wanders. He doesn’t pay rent, he doesn’t own a “microwave,” he just goes to festivals. Cheyenne Days in Wyoming, River Boat Days in Sioux Falls, the intriguing Frozen Dead Guy Days (where locals of Nederland, Colorado celebrate a corpse that was cryogenically frozen “with a lot of ice” by his immigrant family about fifteen years ago)…my buddy has been to them all. What he has, instead of a home, are stories, adventures, anecdotes. Right now he is in Alaska, mixing it up and generally causing trouble, and not thinking about what’s going on back home at all. It seems every time I call him there is the blare of a jukebox, and of faceless girls baring their anonymous breasts and screaming some party epithet in the background. Sounds awesome, right? Right?
Right? Somehow, snubbing that cigarette on my fire escape, I thought of my buddy in Alaska and also of the T.S. Eliot line, “With all the other masquerades/ That time resumes,/One thinks of all the hands/ That are raising dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms.” What is the masquerade, living like we don’t need a home, or fooling ourselves that – because we have one – we are safe? I suppose the answer would be different, depending who you ask.
My job sort of whisks me away to Denver or to Hawaii every couple of weeks, so not having a permanent NYC address only means the minor annoyance of getting Amazon.com shipments redirected to my office. But when this job is over, I wonder what I am going to do. I think I need a neighborhood, proximity to the park, keys to a mailbox. But do I? “I’m leaving” was my answer, when most people asked what I was doing this weekend, “I’m moving out.” Not moving, because moving implies a point A and a point B, a start and terminus: but, rather, just moving out. Out of what, into when, through whichever: these questions will come in time. Maybe one needs to just move “out” and not move “to” to truly move “on.” Or maybe I’m overthinking.
Regardless, there is something fitting and less ominous than you’d think about a motorcycle colliding with a building on the 1,067th (and final) night of my residence in Park Slope, Brooklyn on a warm summer night, thick with the buzz of streetlamps and traffic nowhere in sight. As ephemeral as catastrophe can ever get, the police quickly lost Raul (my fugitive, my Magwitch), and cleaned up the mess. Soon it never happened, a bleep on the Brooklyn radar, almost no damage to the building façade and only marginally more to the bike itself. It’s as if a message was delivered to me at 40 MPH, slammed into the side of my home with celestial force and precision. A message, the opposite of that delivered in Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, but with the same vacuous nihilism. A message that simply said: goodbye.
August 6th, 2008 at 8:51 am
i liked this a lot, matt. it’s something ive thought about many times, but never so eloquently.
reminds me of this poem by mark strand:
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
August 6th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Good Stuff. My co-worker Raul limped in late this morning…
August 12th, 2008 at 12:58 am
thanks man
August 12th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
This one really hit a chord with me. I believe one that you and Jock know of me too well, the nostalgic search, seeking adventure or some sort of solace.
Jock introduced me to that poem of Strand’s several years ago and it has stuck with me ever since. As soon as I read it, I felt a resonance I had felt since childhood and still do to this day.
The idea of a “home” has been very odd for me. I’ve never felt as though I’ve had a home, never grew up in a home that anyone owned and most weekends were spent with a backpack going from friend to friend, family member to family member’s house. College was my little sanctuary away and even now at my house I rent in 239, it seems temporal, so much so, that I still have most of my essentials in one pack that I take with me wherever I go. I guess in the back of my head I feel like home is where I put my pack (hat) down. I tell myself that this is the way it should be, to be a vagabond of sorts, but I am unsure if that is not my trying to convince myself that I am not lonely from it.
I know I’ve written too much for a comment, but this really states a lot of what I’ve wanted to say but could never as eloquently state. Moving Out, Moving To, Moving On, Moving Read. Well done Matt.