The only time I fantasize about jettisoning my fast-paced, action-packed, exciting city for the Purell-ed, easy-to-park-your-oversized-vehicle embrace of the suburbs is when I think about how nice it would be to never have to race the motherfucking Zipcar from Target to the Whole Foods hot bar to the Laundromat in under three hours ever fucking again. Strip malls are boring and CHILDREN ARE SO FUCKING LOUD, but there is something to be said for the ability to deposit your car right in front of the window that you will be hawkishly staring out of for half the night to make sure no one so much as breathes on your windshield. I’ve owned four cars. All pieces of absolute garbage, and all purchased with whatever loose change I could scavenge from couch cushions and broken pay phones. They were all junked after a year or two of having been driven into the ground and destroyed by life on a crowded city neighborhood street. It’s totally the worst, and I want to finally own a car with power windows that doesn’t have a fucking tape deck.
Every once in a while I get really tired of the city. It typically coincides with getting really tired of absorbing the projected rage of entitled assholes with purebred dogs, but occasionally I’ll see a horse or a flower through the grease-spotted window of a crawling Amtrak train and daydream longingly about a car I can park right up next to my front door and a pair of elastic-waisted jeans I can pull right up next to my tits as I crush potato chips to go on top of the tuna casserole I am making for dinner. This is not to suggest that I am cosmopolitan, by any means, but I do live in a bustling metropolis where dudes stand over you on a crowded bus with precariously gripped open containers of hot coffee and having cool hair is of primary importance. I am always on the lookout for signs that I am aging disgracefully, and my constant agitation at all of the congestion and noise and close proximity to other actively sweating humans is proof positive that I don’t have long for the Second City. BUT COULD I REALLY MAKE IT IN A SMALL TOWN?
Pro: I would be rich.
When I was hanging out in unincorporated Missouri with my friend Lara, I saw a house for rent for $500 a month. An entire house. For rent. For less than I paid for the glasses I’m wearing right now. Is this real life?! I pay almost twice that every month for a couple of rooms and a kitchen whose sum square footage is probably less than that of your garage. What I’m trying to say is that I could have a house, with a driveway and an upstairs, for the price of half an ounce of La Prairie neck cream. I weep thinking of how little I’d have to work to maintain my basic quality of life in a town like that. Fifty out of the 168 hours of my week are spent mad because work is interfering with all the Internet articles I’m trying to read, forty-nine are spent trying to get some sleep if I’m lucky, ten are spent suffering through some sort of commuting nightmare, eight are pure panicking, eleven are brooding, and the last forty are eating shitting writing reading watching wishing hoping and hating. What is it all worth?! Sure I have money to buy an iPhone, but no time to figure out how the hell to use the Passbook. If my rent was less, I could work less, and working less means I could shave a couple of hours off the time I have set aside for moping and sort out how to set a recurring alarm.
Con: I don’t know how to fix small engines or any other worthwhile small-town shit.
Where would I work out in the middle of the heartland?! I whine and complain about my job a lot, but let’s be real: I graduated high school almost twenty years ago and since then, I have had a lot of jobs and not a lot of higher education. And I can’t go to any more school. That ship has sailed, and I am thrilled to be left standing in its wake. I didn’t like school when it wasn’t weird that I was there, so the thought of sitting next to your daughter in Intro to Psychology makes me want to die for real. I can do fractions, but not when your son, that smug little bastard, is smirking at my gray hairs. Maybe I could go $100,000 into insurmountable debt at one of those quick colleges they advertise on television during Days of Our Lives (I could be a medical assistant, I guess? If I tried real hard?) but I would rather mop a hundred fast-food floors than ever awkwardly try to make friends in another goddamned cafeteria.
Pro: Everyone seems so dang nice.
The first time a Michigan person gave me an enthusiastic “Hello there!” at the co-op, I spent the next five real minutes hiding in the natural-soap aisle checking to make sure I didn’t have watercress in my teeth or a bloody nose or something else to incur such sarcasm from this otherwise pleasant-seeming human on a random Thursday afternoon. Chicago is in the Midwest, and yes, we’re probably way nicer than New Yorkers, but don’t get it twisted—we are still not making eye contact and saying hi to you while you measure out your buckwheat groats in the bulk section of the health food store. Lots of people are theoretically nice, but when you need them to jump your car’s dead battery they act like the text didn’t go through. And that’s fine. We big-city folk understand that “Call me if you need help moving next week” loosely translates to “BITCH, I DARE YOU.” But I might need a hand getting my firewood into the house, and it would be amazing to shout over the fence for Bill and his unironic cargo shorts to come over and give me one.
Con: I can’t be 100 percent sure these people won’t call me a nigger to my face.
Hey, remember that time I stopped in West Virginia in the borrowed Subaru my homegirl and I were driving across the country and a little white child no older than eight amusing himself with a length of wire and an old flat tire wiped the mayonnaise from the corners of his mouth just long enough to call me and my friend “dirty nigger lesbians” as we minded our own business filling up our gas tank? That tiny guy lived in a small town! I was pretty shocked, since the last time I’d let her finger me had been in DC and I’m pretty sure she’d washed her hands after, so how could he possibly know what we’d been up to three states ago?! Also I had showered in Baltimore, so “dirty” might have been overstating it a bit; disheveled I can handle, but dirty?! GIVE ME A BREAK, CALEB. I’ve never had a fistfight with a baby before, but I briefly considered it before reminding myself that (1) jail is real, and (2) in ten years the coal mine would introduce him to karmic retribution better than I ever could.
Pro: Frito casseroles.