I lost my life on May 8, 1997.
That was the day of my second prelim exam of the spring. I think that was the political theory exam, the one I was taking for the first time. I’d taken the American exam on Monday for the second time after failing it the previous September. In theory and on paper, I should have taken one or both of them at the end of the second year, so I was already well behind where I should have been. I suppose in a way you could say the day was Monday May 5, because either fail was enough to end my time, but May 8 was also the day I broke up with my second college girlfriend, the one who arguably cost me my career as an academic.
Although to be honest, I don’t know how well I would have done even without her in the picture. I went to grad school with the explicit intention of laundering my college experience, and that is the last reason anyone should ever go to grad school. At no point did I ever have any plans for what was to come after Vanderbilt. All the whys and wherefores didn’t matter by then, though. Two days later, I was back in Birmingham and single and unemployed, with no idea what I would do next beyond signing up for a temp agency and hoping that maybe something could be worked out.
I had my room at home, and its contents, and my Saturn – already with over 125,000 miles on it in four years – and six thousand dollars in credit card debt that I’d managed to keep from my parents. Because I was too ashamed of how things had worked out to face my crew in Nashville – some of whom wouldn’t make it back either – and because I literally had zero friends from undergrad that I hadn’t just broken up with, my sole lifeline was a three year old Power Macintosh 6100 with a 33.6Kbps modem and a dialup PPP account.
At the other end of it was an internet community spun out of a TV show. It included among others a girl in Akron, Ohio, who was technically my third college girlfriend, I suppose – it’s strange to think about, like Joe Namath with the Rams or Conan O’Brien on the Tonight Show, but there was a span of maybe a week or so that we were technically a couple while I was still enrolled at Vanderbilt. I’d driven from Nashville to Cincinnati to meet her halfway for lunch, once, and that was the whole relationship on which my world was hanging by a thread. In retrospect, I don’t know how anyone could think that relationship wasn’t doomed from the start.
Because when I say I lost my life, it’s not really an exaggeration. No friends. No job. No idea what my future would hold, nothing coming tomorrow but $7 an hour in the bowels of a natural gas company’s HR department. That was the point at which you could say with a straight face than I hadn’t made it out, that Vanderbilt was a three year holiday from destiny and here I was back in the same small pond of Birmingham. And not that big a fish, and certainly not with any similar fish around to speak of. And no prospects for the future of any kind.
But that mailing-list-with-a-chat-space-at-one-end gave me a lifeline to some people who became friends, and who threw me a second lifeline, and I seized that one too, and precarious though it was, I found myself pulled up by it by September. I was still bewildered and befuddled and holding a sack of credit-card debt and indentured to a dubious relationship, but I was doing it from inside the Beltway at a full-time staff job with a reasonable income. I was still protean, to say the least. And it was those people, online and in person, who combined to rebuild me anew over the next seven years. A job, a new career, ultimately a wife and the opportunity to move to California, all spun out of that tenuous lifeline made out of a listserv and a MUSH and the RJ-11-connected phone wire into my grad school computer.
It saved me, if I’m being honest. There’s not a great track record for Southern intellectuals consumed with the Southern thing and being stuck in it. There’s a podcast you may have heard of that you can listen to if you want to see what happens when you’re stuck in the sticks with more brains and less need for them than anyone around you. But for someone who’s made a two decade career out of rescuing people one way or the other, this was my moment where some people appeared out of nowhere and said “we’re gonna get you out of there,” and did. And I will always be grateful, because I literally owe them my life.
It would take over a full year before I bottomed out fully with the death of my dad and almost another year after that before I surfaced again, and in that time, the world transformed completely. I went from cassette mixtapes to MP3s, from a pager and a cell phone I dared not leave on to unlimited roaming and free long distance, from I-65 between school and home and work to…well, cross-country by plane and freeway. Chicago and Kansas City and Boston and Vegas and San Diego and Cleveland and Hollywood just by Labor Day 1998, and that doesn’t even count the fact of an apartment in Arlington and a job six blocks from the White House in a field I had never considered working in when I crashed out of grad school.
In a lot of ways, to be honest, I was flung so far and so fast from the explosion of my academic career that I didn’t stop moving for a good nine years or so. You could arguably look at my life and say I didn’t really hit a dull moment until 2006, when I finally had a new wife (!) and a new house (!!) and a promotion at Apple (!!!) that set me up with employee stock purchase and a company cell phone and credit card and two offices with doors, and a new surrogate big sister to smoke cigars and watch soccer with. But that’s where a different story starts.
But nothing in the last twenty years, not one bit of it, was remotely visible from sunset on May 8, 1997. Which just goes to show you never can tell.