Humans Inspired – Chapter 3 – Addiction
I needed a place to thaw out from a year abroad and the mind boggling life I was living in China, so rather than going straight home to Texas from Shanghai, I decided to stay in LA for a few days. Though the city is notoriously superficial, I always had a good time in LA in the past. Two sisters named Anna and Rosa from Austin lived out there. I used to visit them in LA in my college days and they were happy to hear from me. They were both social butterflies who always had their thumbs on the heartbeat of the city and Anna, the younger, was a close friend. She’d moved out there originally with Jake, her high school sweetheart, so they could pursue their creative freedom. Anna and her husband loved the networking lifestyle and acting gigs out there. I told Anna I needed a shift from Shanghai and she said she could put me up for as long as I needed.
As I transitioned from a deep, horizontal first-class sleep to a sleepy vertical escalator-laden path through customs, I passed beneath a portrait of Barack Obama smiling over the words “Welcome to The United States of America.” Anna was at work when I got to LA so she’d sent her older sister Rosa to pick me up from the airport. We threw into her trunk my fancy silver metal Rimowa suitcase my billionaire girlfriend Amy had gifted me back in Hong Kong. It was full of the Dior and Dolce & Gabbana button down shirts and expensive pants she had been dressing me in. Despite all this potential to look like a movie star, I was still very much a backpacker with a 5 o’clock shadow. I knew Rosa pretty well and despite her usual cheerfulness, when I got into her car I could tell something really seemed off. I just could not put my finger on it. She immediately invited me into her Hollywood scene but said there would be no time for me to change. When we got to Anna’s house, I dropped off my stuff without showering and went with her.
Rosa told me in the car that the party was in West Hollywood at a guy named Jamie’s house. He was the LA Lakers basketball star Lamar Odom’s best friend from childhood. Rosa said Jamie was living in LA to play a role on Odom’s reality TV show that involved one of the Kardashians, and most everyone invited to the party were working on the production. Rosa walked right in the front door without knocking. She introduced me to Jamie who was holding a lighter underneath a piece of foil with a little brown square on top of it. When I naively asked him what he was doing, he told me he was smoking hash but after countless hash spliffs with Rami in that cheap Chinese motel, I knew that was bullshit. He was smoking heroin. They were all sitting around doing hard drugs. I had seen a lot over the past year but never anything like this.
Jamie invited me into his walk-in closet to show me his collection of expensive watches and flashy clothing. I was clueless at first about why he wanted to show me all that. I had been wearing thousands of dollars of designer clothing for the last five months in China, so I suppose I was attracting that sort of materialism. We all went out to a club where I found myself increasingly bored so Rosa’s boyfriend Jesse suggested we leave. As skinny palm-tree-laden streets faded away out the window of Jesse’s white Mercedes coup, we made our way out to Encino to his family’s mansion. It was a Tuscan villa in the California hills. We only made it to the driveway before the heroin showed up again. At that moment I knew exactly why I had a strange feeling when Rosa picked me up at the airport. She and her boyfriend Jesse were addicted to heroin and now Jesse was offering me a hit.
It was a confusing time for me. I was feeling so burned out from everything that it was a perfect moment to say yes. I told them both that this would be the only time I would ever do this and I would only do it with them if they promised to quit the following day. Of course I knew that was wishful thinking but I figured I might as well make a wishful intention before having a go with something like heroin. As I lit the bottom of the tinfoil I watched the little brown cube slide around the surface and sucked the thin stream of smoke up through the glass straw again and again until I was completely numb. Everything I was suffering from instantly melted away. After an absolutely meaningless conversation, we went to a well-known waffle joint for an extravagant late-night breakfast. Mounds of strawberries and whipped cream felt like a warm blanket as I completely checked out of the overwhelming reality my life had become. It was like I was eating but I couldn’t feel myself eating it. It was honestly the best waffle I’ve ever had.
The next morning, I immediately threw up. After my body got rid of the trash I had put into it the night before I was amazed that I felt completely fine. I had a fat wad of Chinese Yuan in my pocket that I needed to turn into dollars so I got Jesse to take me to a currency exchange downtown. It came out to about four thousand dollars and to no one’s surprise the two of them asked to borrow a couple grande upon finding that out. I knew that money was probably going to disappear but I really didn’t care. They were strung out. They could have Amy’s money for all I cared. Just get me out of LA. Fuck this. When I finally saw Anna and her husband Jake, they told me too late how I shouldn’t trust or hang out with Rosa. A few years later when I heard Lamar Odom’s friend Jamie died from a heroin related infection. In the end I was grateful for the experience because it set me up to never do it again.
Anna and Jake were always solid and grounded people, and they were already planning to go back to Austin to visit their families that weekend. We all caught a Southwest flight together. I started to cry when we flew over Ciudade Juarez. I was finally back in Texas. I didn’t know who I was anymore. All I could think about was my dog, Bailey. Five years ago after studying abroad in Spain, the superficial nonsense of my remaining years in college necessitated the companionship of a dog so I went and adopted one from the pound in Austin. She was a Yellow Lab and we fell in love the minute we locked eyes. Her very existence was the reason I was able to travel indiscriminately and indefinitely. No matter where I went she was the absolute purest living thing I knew of on the planet and simply knowing that she was always there when I came home empowered me to never feel completely alone. I needed my dog now. I had not planned to come home until I had traveled the entire world but underneath all of my bravery and inspiration was the dark underbelly of inherited family trauma and loneliness. I couldn’t relate to humanity anymore and I was falling apart inside. I needed the love of my dog who best represented family and caring to me.
While I was in China, I had arranged for my college friend Silvia to watch and care for Bailey. Silvia lived with her boyfriend at the time and when I went to pick up Bailey from the boyfriend’s house there was an obvious attraction happening between us. I always felt close enough with her to sometimes mistake her for a romantic partner, and she was indeed beautiful. She could always make me feel good about myself even when there was nothing to feel good about, and I had developed an infatuation with her while abroad. In hindsight, there was probably some genuine love there, but I also sensed Silvia was more interested in the fact that I had fallen into some money than anything else. She was the kind of person who needed security and she had a tendency to jump from boyfriend to boyfriend if someone signaled a better deal to her. I wasn’t in a state of mind to be romantic with women anyway. With all the confusion about my girlfriend in China so I tried to ignore Silvia’s obvious flirting despite how much it intrigued me. The more important truth I had to face was that I was down to about a thousand dollars in my Austin bank account. I was already thinking about selling off items from my Rimowa suitcase to finance the coming weeks. I thanked Silvia for taking care of Bailey but deep down I was actually jealous she was spending time with my dog and I felt like she should be thanking me.
My mom was staying at my grandfather’s house near Zilker Park at the time so that became my home base for the next six weeks. When Bailey and I got there, I sat down with Mom and began telling her about what had been going on in China. Despite years of witnessing me landing on my feet, my mom always saw me as a teenager who was liable to get into some kind of trouble. She was always trying to control me from a place of fear and codependency. I knew she would never understand what was going on in China but I so wanted her to get me, to get everything about our family and my place in it. As usual, I failed to make her understand. While I filled the empty unseen space inside myself with love from my dog, I watched Mom’s attitude towards me change dramatically as she played with a new iPad that had ended up inside my suitcase. Despite the misplaced sense of idealism in this family, money and guilt seemed to be the basis of wrong-headed behavior around here.
While I was traveling and living abroad on a shoestring budget, all I had heard from my Mom was how my Dad kept trying to sue and get money out of her. My Dad was a lawyer. He thought the judge who had ordered half of his retirement income to be awarded to my mom was unfair, so he had appealed the decision. The judge’s decision made clear he knew my Dad had always hoarded his money from his family, consistently spending it all on himself. My Mom was living at home with her parents at the time so it appeared to me like he was going after her while she was in a vulnerable state. All of it was overwhelming and made me feel certain I would go back to China.
I was always the backbone of the social scene around me and I could create that anywhere but despite being well-liked, most of the time people couldn’t see what I was experiencing, couldn’t take in or witness my feelings, couldn’t listen and respond intelligently. I had always felt unseen. The feeling increased now, especially because Christmas was bearing down. I was beginning to see that the only way I was ever going to externalize any of my story was to write a book, getting it all down literally on a page. But I also sensed the story was only just getting started. It would be another ten years before I could manifest the gumption to actually write it down. A big part of what I needed to figure out and write about was all this family dysfunction. I sensed the cause of my family’s problems but I did not fully understand it and I certainly hadn’t developed the wisdom to cope with the way it angered and controlled me.
After an empty Christmas, Rami invited me to a party on New Year’s Eve and I proceeded to drink myself into a state of exacerbated frustration. On the way home I passed the condominium my Dad lived in at the time and made an impulsive decision to go have a word with him. When I finally saw his face I wanted to destroy him. I told him to sit down and shut up. I never physically touched him but as I made my way into his apartment I could see he was becoming increasingly uneasy about not being in control of me. While I went on about how he had better stop messing with my Mom he began to grab his chest and act distressed. In my mind I was just there to have some strong words about the way he was treating my Mom, but now I thought for sure I had caused him to have a heart attack.
I knew my Dad had heart problems in the past so I immediately called 911 to request medical assistance. When the paramedics showed up 5 minutes later they walked him over to the cab of the ambulance to check his vitals. While I watched nervously from a distance I saw his face change completely. He was actually smiling and laughing with the paramedics inside the ambulance. I couldn’t believe it. He was acting! He had literally faked a heart attack. By the time I realized what was going on two police cars pulled up and I was put in handcuffs. In the back of the police car I tried every way I could to tell the police officer what had happened but it was no use. I had only been back in the States for two weeks, and for the first time in my life I was on my way to jail.
When we arrived at the central booking facility in downtown Austin, I was handcuffed to a line of other men who were there for various reasons. They gave me an orange prison uniform to wear and while we stood in front of what I thought to be a judge, I found out the guy I was handcuffed to had nearly beaten his wife to death. I knew I had made some stupid decisions, but I didn’t assault anyone and being strapped to a guy who legitimately had felt completely insane. After a few hours of being tied up with a line of actual criminals, they put me in a tiny cell with a metal toilet that doubled as a sink. The cell had only a small square window looking out on the other cells. I was officially in hell.
I tried my best to shut my eyes and sleep. Ever so often the door would open abruptly and someone would throw a brown paper sack with a baloney sandwich on white bread at my head. I had never been held against my will somewhere like that before and I was increasingly anxious. There was no clock on the wall and no outside windows to see what time of day it was so I began counting the minutes between each time the door would swing open with another flying bologna sandwich to my head. I refused to swallow the garbage they were attempting to feed me and after accumulating a pile of 5 more uneaten sandwiches, they finally called my name to see the judge again. No one would tell me anything and I had no idea how I would get out of there. After days of what seemed like an entire week, I found myself reluctantly signing a piece of paper that allowed me to get out on a $20,000 bond. I thought that would get me out immediately but the guard happily assured me I would be there for plenty of time to come as he walked me back to my cell.
I accumulated a pile of 7 uneaten bologna sandwiches when I eventually heard my name being called. I still didn’t know if I was officially being released but while the guard walked me through a part of the facility I hadn’t seen before I began to feel hopeful. When I asked someone what time and day it was I realized I had been there for about 3 days. It felt like an eternity. I didn’t know what was next but now that I had experienced 3 days in jail I knew I could never do it again.
I breathed a sigh of relief as I began to see the Texas oak trees outside the front door of central booking. It was my first and hopefully only time to get out of jail. My mom was standing outside to pick me up and I immediately started crying. We hugged and talked all about what had happened with my Dad but ultimately I was just happy to be free again. It was all incredibly painful. In my mind I had gone to bat for my Mom and wound up in jail at the whim of my Dad’s terrible acting, but the truth is I shouldn’t have been there. Hell, I shouldn’t have been in the US at all. Despite the identity crisis I was having in China, I was living a much better and more interesting life there. Now that I had experienced jail in America, I wanted nothing more than to go back to the ironic freedom I’d known in China.
It turned out the assault family violence charge I had incurred had been designed to prosecute Texas men who were beating their wives. Apparently, by the time these men would get out on bail, their wives would drop the charges out of fear of more domestic violence so the state created a law that would prosecute them anyway. I knew now why I was handcuffed to a line of men who were in jail for beating their wives. My Dad didn’t want to press charges on me but it didn’t matter because the State of Texas had already picked up the case. I wanted to manifest an escape back to China but when I talked to a lawyer, she told me I couldn’t legally travel until I got the charges dropped.
I had no idea how I would pay the lawyer, much less the $20,000 bail bond I had just gotten out on. The whole situation was emotionally unbearable. Falling into money in China had unearthed decades of family trauma. It was all coming out now. Over the next few days I was completely lost about what to do so I went out and drank my way into a state of numbness. One night I was out at a bar and I ran into a guy named Steve who I hadn’t seen since I left town. Apparently Rami had told him all about the billionaire I was dating in China and rather than wanting to hear about any of it, he proceeded to walk over to the bar to order two hundred dollars-worth of drinks for the crowd on my tab. He boasted arrogantly to his friends about how rich I was as he passed out drinks on my behalf. When I saw what he was doing, I was furious. Steve was always in debt to other people for his own multitude of legal troubles and I found myself yet again in another situation involving obscene envy. He wanted what he thought I had, but the truth was, I needed every penny of my money that he was spending.
The next morning, I woke up to a message on my phone from Amy back in China. She wanted to know if I was still coming back. I kept it vague, letting her know that I had run into a situation with my family that might keep me in Texas a little longer than I thought, but that I was working on it. When I checked my bank account an hour later, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The balance had gone from just over $1,000 to $51,000. Despite never giving Amy my bank account information I knew it was her doing. I had never had that much money in my life, and there was no other place that kind of money could have come from. I figured she must have taken a photo of my debit card and found a way to wire transfer it into my account. All the anxiety I was having about how I was going to pay for the legal trouble I was in fell away as I jumped into my grandfather’s burgundy 97’ Camry to drive downtown to my lawyer’s office. When I walked in I told the paralegal that I wanted to pay for all of my legal fees in full. After I did that, the case went away over the next two weeks.
Back in China, Amy and I would sit in private rooms sipping champagne while she watched runway models walk out designer clothing for her viewing. On days like that I saw her spend a minimum of $50,000 on luxury brand dresses so I knew the kind of money I had received was nothing for her. I was relieved that my legal problems had been solved, but now that I was being perceived by the people around me as a “kept man”, they all seemed to want a piece of whatever I had. As everyone’s attitude towards me changed for the worse, I felt increasingly isolated. I started to understand why all those semi famous people I had met in LA were using heroin, and I began to catch a glimpse of what Amy’s life must be like back in China. Maybe what I was feeling now was what drove her to drink so heavily when we were out in Shanghai. She was always able to attract whatever kind of people she wanted but at the end of the day they all wanted a piece of her money, leaving her trapped alone in her world of unlimited means. I began to feel like she was the only person who could relate to the kind of isolation I was experiencing, and I was looking forward to catching my return flight to Hong Kong.
I had come back to Austin to resolve the crisis of identity I was experiencing in China, but all the ideas I had about finding home there had been replaced by an intense downward spiral. My family was a mess, most of my friends turned out to be shallow and superficial, and any chance of finding a sense of belonging there was blurred by my first experience in jail. I felt abandoned by everything I had ever known and perhaps that was what motivated me to cut loose in the first place. I spent the following couple weeks with my dog Bailey, my only true friend, as I geared up to leave Austin for good.
I drank Johnny Walker Blue in Cathay Pacific first class on my way back to Hong Kong to numb the pain of leaving my dog behind, this time with my Mom. On the plane I got a WhatsApp message from Rami saying that he was across the Hong Kong border in Shenzhen doing business with one of the partners in his sourcing company. After landing and collecting the silver Rimowa bag, I took a taxi downtown to get a new tourist visa for mainland China. Another longer taxi ride later and I was across the border. Rami and his coworker Sam were hosting their boss at a KTV Karaoke bar. His name was Sean and he was from Alabama. He had come over to work out some price points with factories in Shenzhen and like most American businessmen in China, was ready to indulge in whatever hedonistic opportunities he could grab.
If you’ve ever been to the manufacturing heart of southern China, then you know that these KTV Karaoke bars aren’t just a place to try your luck at singing along to billboard top-40 songs. Complete with the infrastructure of a regular Karaoke bar, it’s all a front for the brothel it actually is. The marble staircase leading down into the Karaoke lounge had purple velvet ropes on either side of it, and the flat screen TV-laden rooms were lined with a fake purple leather upholstery designed to look like a British men’s club. Korean pop music played on the TV’s in the background and Sean had already taken off his shirt as the party began. Sean was a heavy set guy with a thick southern accent and had ordered a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue for the table. The scotch I had drunk on the way over hadn’t yet worn off so I was happy to keep the rhythm of my impending alcoholism going. While we drank and listened to Korean pop, Sean heard stories from Rami and Sam about the billionaire lifestyle I had fallen into. Sean was nothing short of impressed. He told the guys in his thick Southern accent that he really “aadmaarrred” me as he motioned over to the suited Chinese man tending our lounge. “Brang on the gals!” he yelled. Within about 30 seconds there was a line of 15 Chinese women wearing various colorful dresses standing before us. We were told to pick the one we wanted and as Sean indulged in the company of two of them, I began to feel uncomfortable about the whole situation.
I couldn’t see myself joining in on any of what they were doing so I opted to get a massage in one of their rubdown rooms. I had been on a 24-hour scotch filled travel bender from the US and when I laid faced down on the massage table I immediately passed out. By the time I woke up hours later, I discovered my backpack at the end of the massage table. My wallet still had $500 cash in it. When I went off to find Rami they were all still partying in the KTV room down the hall. It was three in the morning and they knew I had passed out, so when I walked in they were all laughing and happy to see I had made it back. The girls were gone and the scotch was empty. It was time to go home.
A short taxi ride later, we all popped a generic valium in Rami and Sam’s service apartment in the business district of Shenzhen and went straight to sleep. The next morning, I sent Amy a message that I had made it back to China and I was in Shenzhen. She was ecstatic and told me to go to the Shenzhen airport. She was booking me a China Southern flight to Shanghai to come meet her. After another round of first class airplane food and scotch I turned up in the familiar Pudong airport with a big smile on my face. Amy had booked us a luxury hotel room for the week at the Ascott near People’s Square. Stepping out of the taxi to meet her at the hotel, the February air was chilly. I went to the check-in counter and gave them my passport. They knew exactly who I was and said they had a package waiting for me. It was a brand new Dolce & Gabbana leather motorcycle jacket, complete with stylish zippers and a price tag of $4000. When I got up to my room Amy was there waiting. I was genuinely happy to see her and we enthusiastically jumped into bed together again. As we then proceeded to devour the first of a week of room service breakfasts, I felt all of the insanity from Austin melt away.
On our first morning together again, Amy wanted to walk down to Xintiandi, an affluent car-free shopping and entertainment district near the hotel. She said she loved to have the English-style afternoon tea experience and in China you can get any kind of tea you want. As we sat and drank the finest Long Xing (Dragon well) tea in Xintiandi, she told me she needed to go down to southern China to be with her family for Chinese New Year. She knew she wouldn’t be able to see me for a few weeks so she asked me where I wanted to go. I had no plan for what to do when I got back to China. I told her I had always wanted to go to Thailand and without hesitation she arranged a first class reservation on Thai Airways from Shanghai to Bangkok.
As we walked around window shopping we passed by a western style cinema and Amy suggested we go see a movie. A sign for the movie “2012” was listed as one of the big screen films and it started in 10 minutes. She told me she had already seen it but loved it and wanted to see it again. I hadn’t seen a proper movie in a really long time and it was now the year 2012 so why the hell not? While we watched John Cusack run away from the destabilizing earth’s crust, she laughed and laughed throughout the whole movie. At the time I was actually thinking a lot about whether or not the world really was going to end that year and the movie wasn’t a comedy, so I wondered why it had that effect on her. I knew Amy was always aware of a parallel reality that I wasn’t and after the movie was over I asked her if she thought the world was indeed going to end in 2012. She laughed and smiled and said no. Then she looked at me in a way I had never seen before and said “America will fall soon.” It was the first political statement she had ever made to me. Because of the upper echelon 1% of the world that she came from, I believed her.
After she was off to be with her family for Chinese New Year, I decided to go and spend mine at the Sky Bar on top of the Ritz Carlton in Pudong. I still had a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue checked in my name up there and I wanted to see the fireworks. I was expecting a large American style fireworks show but instead every inch of the city was lit up by 25 billion people simultaneously throwing black-cat firecrackers into the streets. As I sipped scotch and checked into my flight to Bangkok, I wondered if the identity crisis from the recent past had resolved itself by my simply showing back up in China. I didn’t know what was next but when I thought about what Amy had said about the fall of America, it started to seem like a better idea to stay in Asia anyway.
The following morning, I took a cab from The Ascott to get my flight to Bangkok. The Thai Airways stewardess wiped my hands with a hot towel and served me a tropical juice as I sank into the massive first class leather recliner seat. It felt like I was in a spa. I got a WhatsApp message via the in-flight Wifi from Amy to check my bank account. I was still using a teacher’s federal credit union bank in the US. When I logged in to the App to check my balance, it had doubled. There was close to $80,000 there and I hadn’t even landed in Bangkok yet. Despite knowing I had that money I had no intention of staying in fancy hotels or living like Amy lived. I was still a backpacker, and I knew the first class experience I was having was all a massive stroke of luck.
On the train from the airport into Bangkok I found a top rated hostel in a neighborhood called Silom and got directions on my phone. I went walking through the narrow urban streets beneath one of Bangkok’s highway overpasses after checking in that evening. I still had a naive mental image about Bangkok from the movie The Beach and wanted to go to the famous Koh San Road, so I took a Tuk-Tuk across town. When I got out a guy approached me with an invitation to a ping pong show. I had no idea what he was talking about but he was the first person I talked to and it sounded harmless. He walked me down into a club where 5 or 6 drunk English guys were laughing and cheering at something on the stage in front of them. It was two Thai women shooting a ping pong ball across the room to one and other out of their vaginas. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was honestly more disgusted by the English guys’ drunken cheering than I was by what they were watching. It seemed like everywhere I went in Asia there were sleazy Western men looking for yet another pathetic, cheap sex thrill. I ordered a beer to go and immediately walked back out into the street with it.
Koh San road was filled with young Western backpackers, beer towers, oily street food, and sleazy businesses like the one I had just mistakenly walked into. I thought I would be instantly having a great time but now I just wanted to leave. I took a Tuk-Tuk back to the Silom neighborhood to another place called Sky Bar. Having just been in a place called Sky Bar in Shanghai the night before, I could see all Asian cities were rather similar. The whole city fell away before me from the huge window in front of the bar. I ordered another round of beer while I tried to socialize with some other Westerners. I was still a young backpacker, but the life I had fallen into with Amy had me feeling like the world of young travelers was old news. I was losing interest in the whole idea and I once again felt confused about what to do with my life. I’d always had the idea that I would just keep going until I had seen the whole world, but as I became more aware that it’s often the same shit wherever you go, I was hungry for something new.
Alcohol seems to flow like a river on the streets of Bangkok and as the effects of my family trauma and jail time in Austin came inevitably back into my awareness, there was rarely a moment where I didn’t have an alcoholic beverage in my hand. One night when I was walking back to the hostel in Silom, I met some guys from China drinking cheap whisky in the street. They invited me to join them. I sat and listened to one of them tell his story about finding work in Bangkok to feed his starving kids back in rural China. I’d never had the ability to be financially generous before and I felt bad for him so I walked over to an ATM, pulled out $1000 dollars and handed it over. “I hope this helps,” I said. I didn’t want to be thanked; I just wanted to help and I was quickly on my way. The next day I passed by the same group of Chinese guys and this time another one of the men was very insistent that I speak with him. He quickly became aggressive as he followed me back to the hostel I was staying in and I eventually had to call the police after he wouldn’t leave me alone. Amy had thrown money at lots of other people’s problems over the years and had told me all about how it always complicates things. I realized I had probably picked a really sketchy place to have been doing that but I needed the experience to know not to do it again.
A few days later Amy asked me to join her in Australia. Her family owned a mansion in Sydney overlooking the harbor and after celebrating Chinese New Year in southern China they were apparently all going there. I knew that I was still a secret she was keeping from her family and I wondered if I would ever actually meet them. She booked me a round trip first class flight from Bangkok to Sydney on Thai Airways and put me up in the four seasons overlooking the harbor bridge. It was my first time in Sydney and it was lovely. Amy told me she wouldn’t be able to come and meet me until the following morning so I immediately went out to a pub for a few pints of beer and a burger. As I walked around The Rocks neighborhood below the harbor bridge, I felt home. Despite how much I loved the vastly different experience of living in Asia, I would never escape loving and feeling close to the Western mentality that colored my reality. I was discovering that the most financially endowed Asian people were all getting out, eagerly buying up everything they could in Australia and New Zealand. I myself was falling back in love with the West as well.
Amy was joyful when she met me in the morning. She got out of a private car in front of the Four Seasons and noticed me spot her from a distance. After the driver took off she ran up and hugged me in the lobby. It was a brisk and sunny Saturday morning and we were immediately off to explore the city together. As we walked around the Sydney opera house we shared an ice cream and talked about taking a trip to New Zealand to visit her friend Sarah who was recently engaged to a Chinese doctor named Jeff. Amy hadn’t seen Sarah in years. They were both from the same part of southern China and she and Jeff lived in Auckland together. I was just getting my bearings in Sydney and honestly wanted to stay there longer, but who was I to say no to a trip to New Zealand? I never imagined I would ever go there and I was highly intrigued.
There was a farmers’ market going on in The Rocks neighborhood and while we walked around trying different food and drink, I noticed a beautiful German Shepard that was off his leash. The owner had a stand set up nearby and was selling coffee. It was obvious the dog was well-trained and friendly so I went up and started petting him. Amy was terrified. She grabbed onto my shirt and hid behind me as if to shield herself from being attacked. The dog was super sweet and began licking my hands but Amy couldn’t handle it. She was totally freaking out. It was at that moment that I saw how intensely Chinese she was. Chinese folks simply don’t have the same relationship to animals that Western people do, and when we were presented with the quite normal encounter of a well-behaved dog off its leash, her fearful irrational response really bothered me. To quote Bill Murray, “I’m suspicious of people who don’t like dogs, but I trust a dog when it doesn’t like someone.” I’d always deeply loved dogs, and my attraction towards Amy had just gone down a notch.
The next day when I arrived at the airport to meet her, Amy was nowhere to be found. She was running late. I found out the flight to Auckland was nearly full. When she finally showed up she was wearing a pink Juicy jumpsuit and she looked like a Chinese Paris Hilton sprinting through the Sydney airport. We arrived breathless at the Air New Zealand ticket counter to find out Amy had forgotten to make a reservation. The business class was already fully booked but there were two seats left in the back of the plane. For what appeared to be the first time in her life, she had to accept a standard economy seat. I didn’t mind at all but she was having a fit. She repeatedly yelled “business class” at the Australian woman at the ticket counter in a rather demanding way. In China things went smoothly for her and she always seemed to be two steps ahead of whatever was going on. In Australia she was a fish out of water. She was also annoying the shit out of me.
When we arrived in Auckland, Sarah and her fiancé Jeff picked us up from the Airport. Jeff drove a brand new blue BMW M3 and seemed eager to make an impression on Amy. Like many wealthy Chinese millennials, Sarah’s parents had bought her a house in Auckland. As we passed one Western business after another on the way to Sarah’s house, I could see that despite being in New Zealand, the experience I was about to have would most certainly be Chinese. When we arrived at Sarah’s house Jeff had prepared an array of traditional Chinese dishes from the part of southern China Amy and Sarah had grown up in. Jeff was a doctor and a bit of a perfectionist. He had meticulously researched how to make the rice and vegetable based dishes but despite his culinary efforts, I found myself craving something closer to the burger I’d eaten the night before in Sydney. This was New Zealand afterall, the home of the world’s best meat.
After dinner Jeff drove us downtown to a building that reminded me a lot of the space needle in Seattle. It was the Sky City Casino and we were going gambling. I had been to Vegas once as a kid but this was my first invitation to do serious, big-spending gambling. We took the elevator to the top floor and Amy went over to the money exchange. When she came back over she handed each of us $10,000 to go play with. I tried my luck at black jack, roulette, and Texas Holdem. It was not fun. I found myself uninterested in all of it. We were the only people there and we were running around like toddlers wasting thousands of dollars. As I watched the money disappear, I snuck Two Grand into my Louis Vuitton wallet and bought myself a forty-dollar double scotch. The manic spending was making me uncomfortable and I was remembering why I left Shanghai back in December. By the end of the night I had drunk myself numb again.
The next day I woke up around noon after everyone else had already eaten their breakfast. They wanted to go to some hot springs outside of town and that sounded like a pretty good cure for the hangover I was experiencing. On the way there Jeff seemed angry with Sarah about something. As we descended into the valley where the hot springs were located, he began expressing his negative feelings through the way he was driving his BMW. He kept accelerating before hitting each speed bump on the way down and by the time we got there I felt like I was going to throw up. Amy and I had our own private thermal spa. As we sat naked together I admired her body. She really was beautiful, but I was finding myself more and more emotionally disconnected from her. After going along with anything and everything she wanted to do in China I was ready for her to be a little more open-minded about the Western culture in New Zealand. She was so fixated on creating a Chinese experience there that I couldn’t relate to any of what we were doing. Her friends were nice but they were fighting about something in Chinese and I really didn’t care to find out about what it was. That moment in the hot springs was the first time we had been alone together since I had flown down from Bangkok, and despite really enjoying it, it felt like too little too late.
When we got back to Sarah’s house they started to play Mahjong, a tile-based Chinese strategy game that reminded me of complicated foreign dominoes. Sarah had an electric table that organized the tiles automatically in the dining room of her house. Jeff tried his best to teach me how to play but I was completely uninterested. I had experienced too much China in New Zealand and I was ready to break away and do my own thing. The next morning, I went off walking alone and found some Kiwi skaters in a nearby park. One of them passed me a spliff and I ripped it as hard as I could. When I came back to Sarah’s house I was nice and stoned. I think Amy had it in her mind that we could live in New Zealand together, but if that meant doing Chinese shit all the time I really couldn’t imagine it. It had been over a week and I told her I was ready to explore more of what New Zealand has to offer. “I’m bored. Let’s get the hell out of Auckland,” I said to her.
We said our goodbyes to Jeff and Sarah the next morning on our way to the airport. We were headed to Queenstown on the South Island and this time we had first class tickets. When we landed we rented an SUV with four-wheel drive. It was the first time I had driven a car abroad since I started traveling over a year ago. Amy booked us a month in the Sofitel, the nicest hotel in town. Every franchise hotel in China was completely over the top, but the Sofitel in Queenstown was much more subtle than the one I had stayed in with Rami in Shanghai. When we went to check in I loved that there was a Steinway grand piano in the lobby. For the first time since college, I sat down and played one of my original off-the-cuff pieces and drew applause from the staff on duty.
Queenstown sits on the shores of a big lake between two large snow-peaked mountain ranges. After we dropped off our stuff, Amy and I walked over to a lakeside restaurant called Pier and ordered some typical Western food. When we sat down outside, she started talking about buying a house in Queenstown, suggesting we could live there together. She told me she already had a place in mind that cost one-and-a-half million dollars and wanted to go look at it in the next few days. I was amazed at what she was offering, but it was overwhelming. We had just gotten there and all I knew in that moment was that she stuck out like a sore thumb. I wondered how someone so Chinese could even consider living in a place like Queenstown, so far removed from China. To her, I was foreign and interesting. So was the romantic idea of living in Queenstown with me. In my mind, she was manic and fixated on living her own projected image of an exotic life. I tried but could not imagine what it would be like living with her there. I still hadn’t even met her family. How could she be talking about buying us a house in Queenstown? Amy had the money and therefore whatever we were going to do together would always be her idea. The manic spending and constant path-altering moves she was making fascinated me, but more and more I could see how my life was in her hands. I was being offered a way out of ever having to work again. I could stay a kept man. I could live in luxury for the rest of my life in New Zealand. Incredible yet paralyzing. I ordered another scotch upon the intense realization that despite having more than I could ever need in the material sense, my life would be out of my control if I stayed with her.
When we got back to The Sofitel, Amy booked us a full week of activities with the hotel concierge. We were all set for a jet boat tour down a shallow blue water river, bungee jumping, a pendulum swing through a massive canyon, and paragliding. Over a year ago when I first started traveling, I remembered feeling inspired by something Anthony Bourdain said – Always “be a traveler, not a tourist.” Now I felt like a tourist, and I didn’t like that. Amy thought I would love all of the adventure tourism in New Zealand, and I probably would have on my own terms, but after realizing her intention in bringing me to New Zealand was rooted in her vision of a married life with me while we produced bi-racial kids, I couldn’t relax enough to enjoy it. Despite the residual anger I was feeling about the recent events with my Dad, something he once said came back to me now. “If you marry for money, you earn every penny.” Amy wanted to buy me, but I wasn’t for sale.
After faking my way through the week, I failed to be a good enough actor to fool her. She picked up on how her extreme wealth had created a toxic dynamic for both of us. I was sick of her trying to mold me into something I wasn’t. I was triggered when she kept making passive aggressive comments in response to my resisting any more ideas of manic spending. When she was in the bathroom I found myself pacing around the room ranting about everything I was feeling under my breath. “I’m not Chinese, and I never will be,” I mumbled. “Just because I’m exotic to you doesn’t mean you can fucking buy me,” I said. “Money doesn’t fucking matter and I’m not for fucking sale,” a little louder now. “I hate your fucking pink Juicy jumpsuit.” Oops. She’s not in the bathroom, she’s standing right behind me. “I understood everything you just said,” she said. She turned around and sat on the bed. I saw I had just hurt her to the core.
I told her I knew I would never be living my own life again if I stayed with her. I said I had held up my act for way too long. I couldn’t go on pretending anymore. I told her there was a time where I genuinely felt like I loved her, but that time had passed. I didn’t love how any of this was making me feel anymore either. The first thing I tried to do was give her back the money she had given me. She refused and acted insulted. I could see I had hurt her even more by trying to do that. Her emotions were so tied to the money she gave me that she started crying when I suggested giving it back. It was the ultimate form of rejection for her. I had broken her heart and I felt awful.
In the morning she was quiet in the front seat while I drove her to the airport. I could tell she was leaving a space open for us to reconnect but when I thought back to the time we almost broke up in Beijing I knew that we would just keep coming to this point again and again. I couldn’t give into it. The energy was gone. The excitement was gone. Only sadness was left as we pulled up to the little airport terminal in Queenstown. As she got out of the car with her bag, she said “You don’t owe me anything.” “Thank you for everything,” I said. “I will forget you.” she said, smiling sadly. She closed the door. It was over.
After I dropped the rental car off, the company gave me a van ride back to the Sofitel. I knew most people would think I was crazy for breaking up with that kind of money but I didn’t care. It wasn’t authentic anymore and it needed to happen. On the short ride back to town I felt myself letting go. When I saw the king-sized bed in my hotel room I dove into a deep sleep. When I awoke sixteen hours later it was the middle of the following day. How did I end up alone in New Zealand? I went down to the lobby and played the piano for a couple hours while I processed everything that had happened over the past month. I really wanted to make it work with Amy but I knew I couldn’t. There was still $65,000 of her money in my bank account. I tried to take comfort in the fact that I never asked for it and tried to give it back, but I was consumed by guilt. What the hell was I going to do with myself now? She had prepaid a month on the hotel room so I decided I would just stay there until I had a better idea.
Meeting Amy was like accidentally getting on a rollercoaster. Now that the ride was over I found myself thinking about all of what I had seen in The Middle East and Asia. I wanted to spread some kind of awareness about what unfolded in Palestine, Egypt, South America, China, and I wanted to talk to someone, anyone about it. Over the next few days I went out in Queenstown by myself looking to connect with whoever would listen to my story. At first it wasn’t happening but one day I walked into a wine tasting room and met an English guy named Jerry who had built a website that allows people to schedule minor league football games online. He was traveling on the passive income he was making off of it and I was curious how he had done that. In truth, I was more interested in the Sauvignon Blanc we were drinking. It was the best tasting wine I’d ever had and pretty soon Jerry and I were touring the New Zealand countryside getting drunk for days. I thought I was looking for a friend, but in hindsight I was just looking for a drink, and the white wine made me feel a hell of a lot less guilty about it. Despite having found a drinking buddy, I was alone medicating the effects of years of emotional trauma in one of the far corners of the world.
After countless bottles of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and way too many Fergburgers, my prepaid hotel room expired. I still had a first class return flight from Sydney to Bangkok so I decided I was going to travel the rest of Southeast Asia. I booked myself a coach seat to Sydney and an overnight van driven by a happy Korean man to get me to Christchurch where my flight was scheduled out of New Zealand. While half asleep in the back of the van, I was fully awakened by a loud bang and screeching tires. When I looked up at the Korean man for an explanation, he looked back at me and said “Wallaby. Happens a lot!” Sadly, we had hit a rather large one and he dented up the Korean driver’s van pretty bad. The next morning, I saw the way more intense dent in the earth from a massive Earthquake in downtown Christchurch the year prior. At the time, fires in Texas had made headlines around the world and now that I was seeing the long unfixed aftermath of a major earthquake, I was really starting to wonder if the rumors about the world ending in 2012 were going to come true.
I was only in Christchurch for one night. I had booked a bunk in a Maori-owned hostel. When I went to check in I told the abundantly tattooed, heavy-set woman that I had a flight I needed to catch in the morning and I needed to use the Wifi. She responded ever so slowly. At first I wondered if she was disregarding my questions completely, but then could see what she was doing. I had approached her at the fast speed that I was used to approaching most people, and she was forcing me to slow down in response. It was the most respectful and effective way I could have received that message and I loved the wave-length of her energy. The hostel had been taken over by migrant workers from Ireland. They were all bricklayers who had come to repair the town in the aftermath of the earthquake, and they were all drunk as hell. I caught a shallow night’s sleep while they partied throughout the night.
After a 3 hour flight to Sydney, I got my connection on Thai Airways to Bangkok. I knew it could easily be the last first class flight I’d ever take so I made sure to enjoy it. I was sitting next to an Australian guy named Robert who owned a factory that made costume jewelry in Thailand. Despite still having a chunk of change in my bank account I had no idea how I would eventually produce an income and I was always curious about how people made their living. I couldn’t believe something like costume jewelry was putting his kids through college. I tried to imagine myself as a businessman, and I just couldn’t do it. Who gives a shit about costume jewelry anyway? I ordered scotch, one after another, and stared out the window for most of the flight.
When we touched down in Thailand I made my way back to Koh San Road to a sleek modern looking hostel in the middle of the backpacker scene. I knew I was going to travel the pacific rim, but I wanted to explore the islands down in the gulf of Thailand first. I took a day-long backpacker-filled bus trip the following morning to the gulf port to catch a ferry to Koh Samui. The famous full moon party was happening and for whatever reason I was going there. I was starting to much prefer drinking alone to any kind of partying. When I saw thousands of people spinning fireballs and dancing to techno music on the beach in Koh Samui, I was pretty turned off. I stayed for all of 15 minutes and the following morning I heard 2 people died in front of the Israeli owned businesses on the beach that night. What an awful experience. Get me out of here.
I had passed up diving in the Red Sea to make the protests in Cairo and still wanted to try my luck underwater. Someone told me I could get scuba certified on Koh Tao island for cheap so I decided to take a ferry over there. The scuba school was an international expat hub with instructors from all over the world. My scuba instructor was from Ireland and his name was also Kevin. “You know, two Kevins don’t make a right,” I joked with him. He had been certifying people for years with his German wife and they were both heavy smokers. Come to think of it, all of the instructors were heavy smokers. Every time they would surface from breathing through oxygen tanks for a half hour, they would all immediately light up on the old wooden boat. The Thai family who owned the boat had built it themselves and it doubled as their home. Each day we went out to a dive site off the northern tip of the Island where the Thai navy had purposely sunk an old ship. My diving class was mostly young Canadian backpackers hoping to spot a whale shark and I didn’t talk much with them. I’m just here to see some fish! The water was a beautiful light blue and unlike Koh Samui, the white sandstone and palm tree laden beaches were super clean. Amy and I had broken it off a month ago. I was emotionally lost in paradise.
On my way out of the hostel in New Zealand, I met an aircraft mechanic named Jarred who had been working at a small airport near Auckland. He had added me on Facebook and now I had a message from him saying he was on his way to Thailand. I told him I was in Koh Tao working on my open water certification. We’d had only the briefest of encounters in New Zealand but a few days later, he turned up in my dive class. He loved Thai food, particularly rice and Massaman curry, and I was beginning to love it myself. Thai green curry quickly became my favorite food in the world. Eggplant finally tasted good! I was always buzzing on spicy food and Chang beer when we went diving.
On my last dive before receiving my PADI open water diving certificate, we went well past 18 meters at the sunken navy boat site. It was probably 25 meters or so when I started to feel really strange so I decided I was headed to the surface. Dive instructor Kevin had taught us to go up slowly and equalize incrementally so I began that process. About a third of the way up I felt like my head was about to explode. I calmed my breathing and descended 5 meters which seemed to help. My sinuses weren’t allowing the expanding air in my head to release and it felt like my eyeballs were about to pop out of my face. I was experiencing a reverse block. I kept trying to equalize but it was happening really slowly and I was running out of air. When I finally made it to the surface I thought for sure I had just gotten the bends, but it turned out a sinus surgery I had a couple years earlier was causing a complication with equalizing. I tasted blood and knew I had damaged my sinuses. When I woke up in the middle of the night choking on bits of blood in my throat and nose I decided it was time to get off this island.
The following evening, I caught an overnight ferry to start my journey back to Bangkok. The boat was stacked with about a hundred backpackers in bunk beds. When we arrived at the crack of dawn on the mainland a stream of young travelers flowed off the boat. On the way over to the bus area there was a couple chatting in front of me in German. Sunlight was just starting to illuminate the tops of their heads when I heard a loud crash and watched the man fly into the air. He had been hit by someone driving full speed on a scooter and now he was having a seizure right in front me. Holy shit! I could still taste blood in my mouth from whatever had happened on my last dive while I held his head and waited for well over an hour for a medic to show up. After hearing about those two who were killed at the full moon party and now watching this I realized Thailand was actually quite dangerous!
After another day-long backpacker bus ride back to Bangkok from the ferry port, I checked into the same hostel I’d stayed in before on Koh San Road. Jordan, one of my best friends growing up back in Austin, sent me a Facebook message that he was going to be in Bangkok the next day. I was really looking forward to seeing a familiar face again in Asia. Jordan was a Lebanese BMX biker and had a collection of tactical arms back in Texas. We both studied in the same International Relations program in college. He was smart and peaceful, and he individually defied every stereotypical thing liberal people seem to think about people who own guns. He liked his rights back in the States but he was getting sick of living there, so he took the first opportunity he could to come over to Thailand with his lady friend Emily.
Many people back in Austin knew about the life I was living through my Facebook photos and Emily was one of them. I had only met her a few times back in Austin but she was always really sweet. When the two of them showed up on the roof of the Hostel, I gave Jordan a big hug. Emily was looking at me like I was some kind of travel celebrity! It was her first time out of the US and I suppose at that point I was a bit of an expert on nomadism. The three of us went out for spicy street food and beers. While I walked around playfully taking pictures with them I felt sad because I knew we would only be together that one night. The lone backpacker’s life was losing its appeal.
I read somewhere that where there are rice patties next to pig farms, mosquitoes often carry Japanese encephalitis, a deadly virus that makes you go crazy while it eats holes in the brain. I knew there would be lots of that traveling through Cambodia and Vietnam so after reluctantly getting a vaccine for it, I took a bus to the Cambodia border. It was hot and dusty there and they put a new visa in my passport as I walked out of Thailand. The border traffic kicked up more dust as I watched trucks full of suffering pigs stacked on top of one another crossing into Cambodia from Thailand. I felt good about getting that vaccine. Now I was headed to the city of Siem Reap in the back seat of an old Toyota Camry that looked and smelled like the one my grandfather had back in Austin. When I got there a couple hours later I saw a sign that said “Happy Pizza.” It was a marijuana infused pizza that I remembered seeing Bourdain try on his show. I had to give it a go. It tasted mediocre at best and did absolutely nothing to my state of mind.
After checking into another cheap hostel I took a Tuk-Tuk to one of the entrances of Angkor Wat, a Hindu converted to Buddhist temple, and the largest religious structure in the world. My sinuses were still bleeding from my last dive in Koh Tao. As I walked aimlessly admiring the overgrown Banyan Trees consuming the weathered ancient structures, I spat red on the ground each time I tasted blood on my tongue. My weathered emotional and physical state was still nicely veiled by Gucci Shades and a D&G shirt. In the morning I took a bus to Phnom Penh and checked into another cheap hostel. The French windows in the bunk room reminded me of Mary’s mom’s apartment in Shanghai and created a subtle awareness of Cambodia’s colonial history. I’d seen a sign in the Bangkok airport that read “Welcome to Thailand: Land of Smiles,” but nobody seemed to smile more than Cambodian people. When I started to learn about Pol Pot and Cambodia’s history of genocide, I realized their constant smiling must be some kind of coping mechanism.
A French guy was standing between my bunk and the open window blowing smoke outside in the morning. When the skunky smell woke me up he passed the joint to me and I took a rip. He said he had just come back from the killing fields and told me to be sure to rent the audio tapes if I went there. After putting on some pants, I took a Tuk-Tuk to the village of Choeung Ek where a Buddhist monument to those who lost their lives had been constructed. As I walked along the museum trail listening to the audio narration I came across a tree with hundreds of colorful bands hung on it. A sign read “Killing Tree Against Which Executioners Beat Children.” I was stoned so it took me a minute to realize that the bands represented thousands of babies who had been smashed to death up against its trunk by Pol Pot’s communist regime. I was nauseated. Trying to fight back my body’s urge to vomit, I glanced at the thousands of skulls and human remains behind the glass of the Buddhist monument there. I was raised on Democratic Socialist ideas but after a stoned trip to the killing fields, Anarchism was starting to sound brilliant.
After a week in Cambodia and a six-hour bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City, I found myself standing in front of the Vietnam War Remnants Museum with a Brazilian couple I had just met. A group of men with missing limbs and various birth defects stood near the entrance with a sign that read “Please donate to the long lasting effects of Agent Orange.” The whole museum was filled with leftover American artillery and the signs describing each artifact read “during the aggressive US war in Vietnam.” Jesus Christ! Southeast Asia made me feel like a mess. I’m not sure why I kept ending up in places that showcased such turmoil, but the more I became aware of how aggressive the “free world” had been in Vietnam, my swing from left to right in Cambodia was forced back to the middle. The whole experience reminded me a lot of how I’d felt traveling through Palestine and Israel, only this time I could afford single malt Scotch.
After a few days numbing myself to all of it with alcohol, I took an old Korean made train from Ho Chi Minh City to the quaint mid-country town of Hue. During the war it was part of the demilitarized zone and I could feel that it was peaceful here. I found a little cafe that makes “fresh” beer out of rice and serves it up ice cold. As I sat and watched the people walking down the street in their cone-shaped hats, I would dedicate one round after another to each time I saw a farmer pass by. The alcohol content was so low that I must have had fifteen of the little cups before I started to catch a buzz. Rice noodles and beef stock kept my stomach feeling good. There was always something about being in the middle that brought me peace. As I learned more components of the geopolitical structure of our world, spending a week at that little cafe in Hue became a monument to my admiration for simplicity. I loved it here and was finding myself much happier watching people than meeting them.
A week later I took the train up to Hanoi and decided to take a trip to HaLong Bay, another UNESCO world heritage site. I knew I was close to China. The rainforest covered limestone islands reminded me a lot of the iconic rock formations Gabriel and I had seen in nearby Guilin last year. The houseboat that took me out on the bay included a kayaking tour to an impressive cave and a trip to a monkey-infested island appropriately named “monkey island.” The calm, green ocean water was beautiful but once again I started feeling like a tourist. I was ready to call it quits. After a short bus ride back to Hanoi, I checked into one last hostel. When I walked up onto the rooftop terrace I saw two brothers from Canada who I recognized from my diving class in Thailand. They were drinking from a massive beer tower and had just bought a couple of 200cc motorcycles. The two wheeled tour of Vietnam they were planning sounded like fun, but when they started telling me about where to buy a bike, I had to decline their invitation. I was spent. No more beer towers, no more hostels, no more stupid tourist photos, no more bullshit. I loved Vietnam, but it was time for a raincheck.
There was a man selling books outside the hostel and I finally bought a bootlegged copy of Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential before taking a taxi to the airport. I was never much of a reader but Bourdain was one of my biggest inspirations for cutting myself loose in the first place. I decided I was going to try to read as much of it as I could on the way back to Austin. For whatever reason they confiscated my tripod during the check-in at Hanoi’s international airport. It actually felt good to be headed home in economy. After a connection in Tokyo, the American Airlines flight to Dallas hit a pacific storm and started falling out of the sky. Holy shit! I was just getting to a part in the book involving sex in the kitchen when the cheap red wine I was drinking became suspended in the air in front of me. As the plane regained its position it came down all over the book, thoroughly soaking the poor quality pages beyond repair. I figured I’d buy another copy later, but in all honesty I wasn’t as inspired by his book as I thought I would be. I wondered how he had been given such a privileged opportunity with his TV show after writing a book that wasn’t at all like the show. I guess it really does depend on who you know. I loved the show nonetheless.
When I got back to Austin my Mom came to the airport with Bailey to pick me up. I was home(ish). Austin was always a place of unresolved trauma that I had been subconsciously escaping, and by now I knew it. I’ve often heard it called “the velvet rut” because people get comfortably stuck there without knowing why. It was a great place to live and perhaps raise children in the future but it lacked the dynamism I needed in my life. My grandfather had no problem with me staying at his house with my Mom so I planned to stay there until I fell into some kind of career, but what the hell was I going to do now?
