Part I: Escape from the American dream

Now, I want to sit down and tell my story, about how I completely transformed my life, or rather how my life transformed me – it was more of a passive experience. Does anybody have an idea of how difficult this has been? If it were easy to change, everybody would be doing it, but then again its not so easy to stay the same either.

Of course, it’s all been done before, but let me tell you, it was no small thing, except we had no choice – something deep within me led us there like lambs to the slaughter – it was imposed upon me from someplace deep inside, some troubling dream bubbling to the surface, that hammered the soul day and all night while I slept and fought, until I gave up and broke down and fell right into it, helpless and panting, and then I imposed it on him. I consider myself one of the lucky ones and for his sake I hope he does too.


So, it happened, but not all at once – took years off our lives, this transformation. But I figure it’s worth it because trying to play by the rules and live the American dream and pop Prozacs (or what was the name of my brand?) wasn’t the answer. Instead, one should do something to change the situation – but most of us seem content enough with our cocktails of pills and booze because we are so much more fortunate than those poor people in Africa after all.

Let me tell you something: (!) I recently went to one of the poorest parts of Kenya, where everybody lived in shacks or huts or what-have-you, and they were laughing at our people, laughing with derision: ‘My brother moved to Texas some years back and lives in a big house, but he has the saddest life, he writes me often and he never never sounds happy. So I told him to come on back here to our village, but he said he can’t because once your kids get used to that life over there, become American, you can never bring them back – I feel very sad, very bad for him because he sounds so alone there in his big house’.


I didn’t know it either, about the sadness and the empty life, was just living up there in Yonkers – met a guy lived across the street, his bedroom window faced mine and we used to watch each other at night, skilfully avoiding mutual eye contact, in our isolation-box apartments on opposite sides of the same street, mirror images of each other’s ridiculous lives like zoo animals opening the blinds when we were both safely in our pyjamas (we had a mutual understanding that it was to go no further into tawdriness), both seeing the same shrink and never introduced! we kept dutifully on while the doctors and insurance companies and pharmaceuticals kept sucking it up and performing alchemy with the chemicals in the little gaps between our nerves: make us feel more American, make us little golden androids in the big wet dream.…but there is no point in continuing down a path we didn’t end up taking because you never really know what’s down there and you don’t care…


I don’t even remember how it finally happened…I do, but it’s not that interesting. Maybe we waved at the sidewalk one day rather awkwardly and there was a stilted conversation. Since we’d been watching each other for the better part of two years, the awkwardness now seems a bit strange, but since we were both months (and months) into sexual frustration, we didn’t let the silence between us get too much in the way; we quickly became quite used to it.

He dribbled back and forth with his guy-things out of his place and into mine little by little and scattered them around, marking his territory on my warped wood floors with the symbols of modern male consumerism – always lots of wires spreading across the room and up my walls like gray and white tendrils. My cat took to sleeping in his great-black shoe. Those

Victorian monstrosities up our street used to be the summer palaces of the New York City rich and now they were cracking up into scores of rumbly boxcars for young, mobile, college-graduate hobos like us, jobs too ridiculous to describe (it’s like they keep having to think up stuff for our generation to do and can’t come up with anything good).


Perhaps in the end that’s why we never returned from our month-long language study. That’s it – we never talked about what we did and there was no plan to get lost over there, but somehow we both knew and followed this thing to its logical end – even the idea seemed to be cast in finality, Caesar silently crossing the Rubicon: ‘hey, wouldn’t it be nice to spend a month learning Italian?’…‘yes, honey, it would’.

Friends and loved ones and we believed we just needed a month-long break from the grind of our decent hard-working career paths. There is no point in musing on what really went on in our heads or why; by now we had been living together and continuing to gaze at each other in our pyjamas for the better part of two years and it probably was just time. Would have been more difficult not to do it (that’s what people don’t understand – that it takes more energy to fight against things). We just thought would be better for us to communicate with each other in Italian – that way we could always be misunderstood.