When I was 18, I left the skinny part of Maryland and woke up in a place paved over with asphalt, girded by concrete, nourished by it. I awoke fascinated by the mechanized hum, disoriented, wide-mouthed before the man-made angularity, the downtown steel visible from the top floor of the college library. I woke up that September in the middle of the great flowering of the American Dream. I woke up in the suburbs.
There were strip malls crammed with a Blockbuster Video, a Hair Cuttery, an H&R Block, maybe a stand-alone Chi-Chi’s in the parking lot. Others had take-out Chinese places called Golden Wok or Golden Dragon, Dollar Generals hanging on like old scabs, liquor stores. There were always liquor stores. Some sold good wine but most sold vast stacks of warm beer, half-pints of Hennessey, plastic-bottle vodka, endless lottery tickets printed out on crink-crank printers. You slid your money and your older brother’s driver’s license to a Korean man or that Korean man’s teenaged daughter or his short and grumpy wife. They took your money from behind translucent bulletproof glass and you went back to your dorm room to drink your Natural Light until the ceiling spun. There were Korean men, but there were also Chinese men, and the difference was that Korean writing has circles while Chinese writing looks like a game of pick-up sticks repeated into infinity. There were Indian men and Pakistani men and though they didn’t look all that different, it turns out they are not the same. There were dark-haired, sun-starved, shadow-bearded Jewish guys in white dress shirts and black slacks with pleats in front. There were lots of Asian girls and also Muslim girls with scarves on their heads who may as well have been from Jupiter. There were, of course, black people. Black girls ran the front desk at Susquehanna Hall, where I lived. They had scholarships and studied hard and laughed hard and had enough attitude to fill refrigerators. The black guys were tall and dark and moved in their baggy jeans like dark princes, hair cut very close to the skull or else worn in dreadlocks captured in elaborate cloth reggae hats that crowned their heads like broken-down beehives.
There were people who looked like me but whom I did not know, could not know. There were alternative white kids who pierced their noses and lips and, from what I heard, their nipples. There were science-fiction kids who argued over whether Star Wars or Star Trek had the more fully developed world. The Women of Diversity had a whole hall to themselves. There were gay boys, sleek and shiny and scented. There were girls in glasses who read poetry and liked it and who drank coffee and liked it. I had just woken up in the suburbs, but these people had been waking up there for their entire lives. They came from places called Arbutus and Glen Burnie and Catonsville and Crofton and Odenton and Columbia and Bowie and Laurel and Greenbelt and Silver Spring. They came from the great paved-over America, the land of housing tracts named for forgotten trees and ruined creeks, the land fought over and won by 7-Eleven, Exxon, Taco Bell, Dunkin Donuts, Payless Shoe Source, Best Buy.
Amazingly, overwhelmingly, you could choose, all the time. At the university where I found myself, there were a thousand classes to which they assigned numbers and for which someone had written descriptions printed up in a thick booklet made of cheap paper. I’d selected mechanical engineering as my major but didn’t know why. What was Linguistics? Language and Scientific Value? Fluid Dynamics? The Philosophy of Religion? Computational Methods? I did not know. I did not know about a lot of things, and so I played it safe. I took English 100, History 100, Political Science 100, Precalculus. We were 18, 19, fully grown but clueless. I admired, then, 20-year-olds who read books, who knew how to pack bowls, who had been to New York or the Grand Canyon, who knew what sex was like.
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