It took a couple weeks for the glamour of living in Atlanta to dissolve into an unguided groove of monotony and bad habits. I was a twenty year-old Liberal Arts student who took a semester off from school and drove from Jersey to Atlanta to move in with two roommates. Bud went to school in Atlanta and he went back for classes every fall. Ace wasn’t the school kind of person but he was street smart. He always had some scheme to make money quick and wanted to exploit the opportunities he saw in Atlanta for young business men. I envied Bud's stability and sense of a direct path. and I envied Ace's motivation and relentless pursuit of opportunities. I’m not sure what my plan was. I guess I just hoped it would present itself as I went along. I didn’t have an exact reason and even now I’m not sure what made me leave. I told people that I wanted a change in scenery; there were new opportunities, a chance for a new experience. I wonder now if that break-up had any influence. My mom had moved to Douglasville, Georgia a few months earlier. That was the anchor which allowed my options. Whatever reason I gave, I didn’t look back. It was enough for me to put school on hold, leave everyone I had known, drive 16 hours through 7 states, and rent a $1300 Budget truck that would later ruin my credit.
I maxed out my credit card on the Van that my friends and I named Betty. I had less than a hundred bucks in my account and a wad of cash in my pocket. That wad deteriorated through the weeks but before I left Jersey, I was able to get a job working at a restaurant in Atlantic Station (This is where all the rich people and celebrities went to be rich). We moved into this cheap three-room townhouse. Our fridge was old and often empty. It was stained yellow in the back and no matter how much we cleaned it we always found a dead roach hidden in some corner. Poor things must’ve starved to death. We only kept sodas, juice, and small meals in the fridge, never any groceries. My roommate stole cups and silverware from his school and to save money we snuck in and ate in his school’s cafeteria, even though none of us had a meal card. We would take food home from like cakes, bags of breads, and jugs of juice. Conservation became important when my wad of cash dwindled down to a couple twenties. My bills and debts stayed the same. Month by month making the rent became more difficult, especially with the unnecessary spending that at the time seemed very much necessary. We couldn’t afford to pay late rent, so at the end of each month there was a chaotic scramble to assemble our cash to get it in on-time.
My roommates and I had one great thing in common, we smoked, a lot. Everyone that came into our house did. We smoked everyday, a couple times a day. A cigarette after work, a blunt already rolled when I got home, a wake and bake in the morning and a personal stash in my drawer. Every house I went to there were blunts in rotation. In our house it got so bad that we had to establish rules and sanctions to keep the house civilized. Everything was an ashtray. There were tobacco guts on the tables, burn marks on window sills, ash and cigarette butts in cups and plates, malt liquor cans and bottle under chairs. The rug was soft cream-colored rug was blackened in some areas, stained with red juice and shed itself in small hairy clots. It was messy and this is how it was every night. We often had guests over that only contributed to the mess. It was chaos, and I didn’t care. For me, there was a part of my soul clouded in smoke that felt comfortable in this mess, and I was proud of it. There was nothing expected or required of me where I was. I had time to live in my own consciousness and ignore whatever was going on around me. It was an emotional high of understanding and desire. It was the desire for life I inhaled that only gave me a greater hunger for fulfillment and cycled itself so much that there became a gap between my consciousness and its manifestation. I decided later to devote myself to closing that gap. My roommates saved the hard liquor bottles and displayed them at the top of our cupboards that rounded the kitchen. Smirnoff, Bacardi, Majorska, Grey Goose, Patron, V.S.O.P., there were so many that we ran out of space. At some point in time you stop being proud. Girls. I’m sure they all knew about each other but we had a house, alcohol, music and weed. As long as that was the case they would keep coming. But I was a little different from my roommates. My morals were still unflustered by the freedoms that our independence allowed. I smoked in my room and read books, wrote essays and bad poetry. I never slept before 3:00 am. One night, I sat in my bathroom room with the door closed. The entire wall above my sink was a mirror. I shredded a small bag of kush into a green leaf. I licked the ends of the blunt and rolled it tight. There were 6 clear glass bulbs above the mirror that burned bright like white hot magnesium. I was sleepy but couldn't sleep. At that time I never wanted to sleep. I let the blunt hang from my lips waiting for my all black cricket lighter that I had bought in North Carolina to spark. It was just about dead but it sparked one last time and the blunt burned. That first pull squeezed thick curvy strands of smoke that got caught at my nose and clinged to my hair. I pulled till my lungs were full. Then I breathed. The smoke circulated in the closed space and gathered a cloud above my head. I had nothing to do but stare into the large mirror at the cloudy room behind me. My lighter was dead and I had a Black n’ Mild ready after the blunt was done. I usurped the embers to the Black. I was dirty but had no intention of showering. It satisfied me enough to blow smoke at my reflection at a face I had recognized less. My hair grew thick and dry and my moustache curled over my lips. The hairs on my chin were knotted like mad and twisted in every direction. I wasn’t looking for any meaning in the moment, I just couldn’t look away. I woke up late every day but early enough to walk next door and get a five dollar bag of cheap mid, a fifty cent dutch to roll it up in and 2 fifty cent hostess cakes for the munchies. Candy lady next door had everything you needed.
I lived in the dirty part of Atlanta, Magnolia Park Apartments off of Martin Luther King Blvd. It’s a short walk from the Atlanta University Center where Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College and Spelman College meet and where I met a lot of cool people and great friends. Everywhere around these schools however, is littered with poverty. There is a lot of homeless people, prostitutes, con-artists, drug dealers, and young gangs. It’s just a good thing that I never had any money. But everyday some unrest stirred in me. There is imbalance here, and situations should be addressed. There is so much money invested into the wealthy areas of Atlanta and nothing into the poorer areas. Everyday something inside me grew. An existential frustration of the way things are and a logical understanding of how things should be. I studied Emerson and developed my own personal strength through a structure of morals and idealism while still keeping basic a realists perspective of life. I studied Barack Obama and for the first time like many others became excited in a leader that shares to the ‘tee’ the same ideals that I do. I built a strong relationship with myself, asking questions and probing people and factors in my life that made me who I am. I continuously questioned religion and my own religion for answers that I’ve been looking for before I even knew I was looking for them. This brought greater understanding and a strong sense of faith that secures me beyond worldly worries. These things never left me.
I visited my mom every other week for the weekend. Each time I felt like she could smell the guilt on me, or maybe it was just my clothes. She cooked for me and cut my hair and we played dominoes outside on the back porch. I mowed the lawn and raked leaves. This was a world away from where I was. So peaceful that we waved to our neighbors as they drove past and took long walks in the evening. The backyard was like a forest, lush with rustling trees that did not let light touch the floor. There was a large fish pond beyond the woods that ended the quiet stream of the forests sandy creek. Tiny toads hopped away clumsily in the sand and frogs stopped croaking when you walk pass. Once, I passed the trees and looked to the far end of the pond and saw a great white Herring fly from the edge of the pond bending its long legs as it flew. There was a young willow tree at the edge of the water on the east side. I thought, “How cliché, a writer under the willow, envying the lake.”
I would later decide to leave Magnolia and live with my mother for the spring and the summer. I paid her rent for a room upstairs and at night I laid on the roof watching the stars. I still never slept before 3:00 am. I caught a glimpse of a shooting star once. It cut through the night in a flash and fizzled away before I could take it all in. As amazed as I was, I later questioned how amazed I should be. Is it worth remembering? To anyone else would it just be another star? I’m stuck within my own universe of everything I know and everything I believe. I've always questioned my understanding. The things I think are different, therefore I am wrong. I've strenghtened my foundation to that the things that I believe are true as long as I believe them, but I still room for the flexibility of understanding.
At the end of the summer I decided to go back to school in N.J. I'm still in debt but everything that I experienced and learned in the past year applies to everything that I care about. I didn’t know what I had accomplished in Atlanta until my classes started again. And the hunger that sat in my consciousness finally found relief.
