Going Home Again
IT WASN'T THAT long ago that kids moving back home were considered losers and the parents were considered failures," CBS.com reported in January, commenting on the estimated 65 percent of college students that were homeward-bound after graduation. In that same article, David Morrison, who spends his time tracking "the spending habits of young people," assures readers that the stigma is gone. Unfortunately, Mr. Morrison's message has failed to reach a crucial demographic: the ladies.
A short girl with asymmetrical blond hair approaches me at a bar in the East Village. We exchange generic biographical information; I probably inquire if she comes there often. She gives me her number, then asks for mine.
"9-7-3," I start.
"Oh, do you live in Jersey City?"
"No, out in the suburbs, with my
parents."
"Oh. Why?"
When I call her a few days later from Warsaw, she doesn't pick up. Doesn't call back, either.
I moved back home to New Jersey two days after graduation. I walked into the foyer of my parents' split-level house carrying everything I owned (mostly CDs and school books I failed to sell) stuffed inside a couple of oversized black garbage bags. Feeling charitable, I kindly volunteered to take the small bedroom from my younger brother. After all, I wouldn't be staying long. I'd find a good-paying job. I was a college graduate!
For several months, the change left over after my mom asked me to buy some cheese or milk at the store became my primary source of income. Our large and quickly growing lawn also netted a fat 10 bucks every time I mowed it-sometimes 20, depending on how sorry my father was feeling for me that day.
Several dozen ignored resumes later, I was disillusioned and depressed. After a few dozen more, I just wanted to dance.
Every time I got a few bucks together, I took the PATH into the city before my parents got home from work, thus avoiding seeing them for days at a time. The bodega on the corner of 2nd Ave. and 5th stocked an unusually cheap bottle of Olde English that I would ritually chug between parked cars, after which I would stumble around the corner and semi-rhythmically toss myself around the basement of Lit until I sobered up. Often, I would get home after 5 a.m., bleary-eyed and reeking of beer, collapsing into bed just as my parents got up to leave for work.
IT'S 4 A.M. and I'm talking online to a film-major friend who graduated a semester after me. He too has moved back to his parents' house in the suburbs. Neither of us is very good at handling the perceived/actual humiliation/guilt of opting out of Harsh Economic Reality.
"I just don't want to still be living at home when I'm 30, not getting anywhere with my career and just being a big fucking loser for the rest of my life."
"Dude, calm down. You only graduated six months ago. I've been home for a year- you don't even know how it is yet!"
"My parents keep talking about me getting an MBA, but I think something will happen with that P.A. job from Craigslist. I really want to make something happen already. Richard Kelly did Donnie Darko when he was 25!"
"None of those magazines replied to any of my resumes again. I mean, not that I'd want to be review assistant for fucking Blender anyway."
We go on for hours, complaining of nepotism and jealously discussing the outrageous first-year salaries of our investment-banker friends. It often gets ugly and pathetically, if grandiosely, self-deluded.
"I don't want to be famous; I just want the money," he says.
"I don't care if people know my face; I just want to be respected," I counter.
At 22, we both live with parents who pay to keep us alive, as well as for the bus tickets that permit us to venture into the big city to try and make something of ourselves. Except we mostly just get drunk and talk about what we really wish we were doing: scripts, albums. Just not tonight.
Now a year after graduation, I wake up every day in the smallest room of my parents' house, flag down the commuter bus that stops on the corner and steel myself for the fifty-minute drive to my part-time job in the city. I walk out of Port Authority and hit 8th Avenue. It smells like piss. I tense up, and my pace quickens. At least for the next few hours, I think I am on my way to being someone else. o