My Misspent Youth

by Meghan Daum

  There are days when my debt seems to be at the center of my being, a cancer that must be treated with the morphine of excuses and rationales and promises to myself that I’m going to come up with the big score—book advance, screenplay deal, Publisher’s Clearing House prize—and save myself. There are other days when the debt feels like someone else’s cancer, a tragedy outside of myself, a condemned building next door that I try to avoid walking past. I suppose that’s why I’m even able to publicly disclose this information. For me, money has always, truly, been “only money,” a petty concern of the shallower classes, a fatuous substitute for more important things like fresh flowers and “meaningful conversations” in the living room. But the days when I can ignore the whole matter are growing further and further apart. My rent-stabilized sublet is about to expire, and I now must find somewhere else to live. I have friends getting rich off the stock market and buying million-dollar houses. I have other friends who are almost as bad off as I am and who compulsively volunteer for relief work in Third World countries as a way of forgetting that they can’t quite afford to live in the first world.

  But New York City, which has a way of making you feel like you’re in the Third World just seconds after you’ve thought you conquered all of western civilization, has never really been part of the rest of the world. In that sense, I suppose it’s foolish to believe that one can seek one’s fortune, or at least one’s sustenance, through rational means. I suppose that part of the city’s magical beastliness is the fact that you can show up with the best of intentions, do what’s considered to be all the right things, actually achieve some measure of success and still find yourself caught inside a financial emergency.

  I have to be out of my sublet by September 1. Even if I tried to assume control of the lease, the landlord will renovate the apartment and raise the rent to $2,000. I told a friend about this the other day, hoping she would gasp or give me some sort of reaction. Instead she said, “That’s cheaper than our place.” A two-bedroom apartment down the street rented for $4,500 a month. A studio anywhere in Manhattan or the “desirable” parts of Brooklyn will go for an average of $1,750. West 104th Street is totally beyond my means. Worse, 104th Street is now beyond the means of most of the people that made me want to live there in the first place. The New York that changed my life on that summer night when I was seventeen simply no longer exists.

  Now, having taken all of this apart, I am determined to not put it back together the same way. Several months ago, on a day when the debt anxiety had flared up even more than usual, I arrived at the idea of moving to Lincoln, Nebraska. I’d been to Lincoln on a magazine assignment twice before, met some nice people, and found myself liking it enough to entertain the notion of moving there. But both times I’d discarded the idea of moving there the minute the wheels hit the tarmac at LaGuardia. Surely I’d never be able to live without twenty-four-hour take-out food and glitzy Russian martini bars. On this latest round of panic, however, I chewed on the idea for a while, decided that it was a good plan, and have pretty much continued to feel that way ever since. I can rent an apartment there for $300 a month. I can rent an entire house, if I want one, for $700. Full coverage health insurance will cost me $66 a month. Apparently, people in Nebraska also listen to NPR, and there are even places to live in Lincoln that have oak floors. Had I known that before, I might have skipped out on this New York thing altogether and spared myself the financial and psychological ordeal. But I’m kind of glad I didn’t know because I’m someone who has had a very, very good time here. I’m just leaving the party before the cops break it up.

  CARPET IS MUNGERS

  Once, when I was desperately searching for an affordable apartment in New York City, I looked at a place that was gigantic by local standards. It had two bedrooms, a kitchen nook, a dishwasher, and a sweeping view of the East River. The building was staffed by twenty-four-hour doormen and had a running track and a garden on the roof. It rented for $400 a month. This was in a rental market where studio apartments rarely went for less than $1,100 a month, and it was unheard of to have sunlight let alone things like dishwashers and running tracks. I was in dire need of a place to live. I had precisely ten days to find something before I’d be forced to put my stuff in storage and sleep on a friend’s couch. But I did not rent the apartment. I did not for one minute entertain the possibility of living there. I did not even look in the closets, of which there were many. The reason is that the apartment had wall-to-wall carpet.

  Carpet makes me want to kill myself. Wall-to-wall carpet anywhere other than offices, airplanes, and Holiday Inn lobbies sends me careening toward a kind of despair that can only be described as the feeling that might be experienced by a person who has made some monumental and irreversible life decision and realized, almost immediately after the fact, that it was an error of epic proportions. Carpet makes me feel the way the woman who married the multimillionaire stranger on national television must have felt when she was on the plane to the honeymoon in Maui, the $35,000 rock on her finger, and her possibly sociopathic husband next to her in first class. Carpet makes me feel the way I felt when I was twelve and “went out” with Stephen Mungers, a boy from homeroom who I barely knew, for a week. In seventh grade, “going out” signified nothing more than a mutual agreement that the term would be applied to the parties involved; no physical contact or verbal exchange other than “You wanna go out?” and “Okay” was required. And even though the situation was entirely reversible, I remember that week as an unprecedented and traumatic psychological jaunt into a self that was not my own. I had, in the context of seventh grade and the various ideas I’d developed about who I was, become “other” to my own self. I felt somehow that I had betrayed a basic premise of my existence. And although I was unsure exactly what that premise was, I specifically recall spending that week practicing the oboe with such concentration and nervous energy that I finally mastered a particularly arduous exercise and decided, with more certainty than has since accompanied more serious matters, that as long as I went out with Stephen Mungers I would be wholly incapable of being the person I should be and, in fact, was. A similar effect occurs when I walk into a house where not one square inch of floor is showing.

  Carpet is Mungers. Carpet is otherness. It is not my house and not the house of ninety percent of the people I know. It’s more than just not my style, it’s not my oeuvre. People always say to me, “Oh, I don’t like carpet either. It makes me sneeze and it’s so hard to clean.” Sneezing and cleaning have nothing to do with my feelings on the subject. If not having carpet caused allergies and presented maintenance difficulties, I would tough it out. It’s really shallow, I know. But I’m capable of being extremely shallow, far more superficial that I’m often given credit for. There’s a lot of stuff I can look past—unemployed boyfriends, borderline personalities, offensive comments aimed directly at me—but when I balk, I balk hard. When you get to a certain age you learn what the deal breakers are.

  But let’s cut to the chase. Carpet is a class issue. I didn’t make it that way, I’m just pointing it out. And I’m not talking about socioeconomic class. Carpet has, since its inception, been the province of the elite. It’s found in high-rise condos and suburban ranch houses. Cheap landlords like to install cheap carpet in cheap rentals so they can raise the price—and it amazes and depresses me that people actually buy into this. But I also realize that many of the people who don’t mind or even like carpet possess the kind of “class” that, in my earlier days, I believed ran in inverse proportion to wall-to-wall floor covering of any kind. In other words, I did not believe that they read books, owned classical music CDs, or were not necessarily members of the John Birch Society.

  That false perception was the result of confusing “having class” with “having to have class.” The kind of class that I associate with wood floors is the kind of class that emerges out of an anxiety about being classy. People who must have wood floors are people who need to convey the message that they’re
quite possibly better than most people. They’re people who leave the New York Review of Books on the coffee table but keep People in the bedroom. They’re people who say “I don’t need to read Time or Newsweek because I can get everything I need from the Times.” They’re people who would no sooner put the television set in the living room than hang their underwear to dry on the front porch. They buy whole-bean coffee and grind it in a Braun grinder. They listen to NPR, tell other people what they heard on it, and are amazed when the other people say they heard it too.

  I am one of those people. My TV is in a room that also contains a pile of magazines I won’t admit to reading, a Kenny Loggins CD I don’t want anyone to see, and a Restoration Hardware catalog from which I want very much to order a Teacher’s College Chrome Plate Schoolhouse light, if only Restoration Hardware was not so wannabe, so postiche. My apartment has oak floors and oriental rugs and, for as long as I can remember, oak floors and oriental rugs have played as great a role in my sense of well-being as the knowledge that after falling asleep I would eventually wake up. I haven’t bought a can of Maxwell House in over ten years. I have an intellectual crush on former Talk Of The Nation host Ray Suarez and a WNYC coffee mug out of which I eat Grape-Nuts but never Total. I use Arm & Hammer laundry powder. The thought of owning a bed that is not a platform bed, i.e. one that has a box spring and therefore requires a dust ruffle, lowers my seratonin level. I do not wear colors any brighter than pale blue or dusty rose. I do not wear panty hose, only tights. I do not wear gold jewelry. I would never drive an American car. I stick to these rules because I am terrified of what would happen if I deviated from them. I fear the “other.” I fear carpet.

  Maxwell House is carpet. Total is carpet. All-temperature Cheer is carpet, as is commercial talk radio, dust ruffles, bright-colored clothing, pantyhose, gold jewelry, and the United States Automotive Industry. Carpet is the road you congratulate yourself for never having taken. Carpet is the woman at the supermarket whom you are glad not to be. Carpet is the house who bought the oddly-named and aggressively bland-tasting Savannahs when you sold Girl Scout cookies. Carpet is the job you held immediately after graduation, before you realized that a career in marketing posed a severe threat to your emotional health. Carpet is the distant relatives you see only at funerals. Carpet is the high school sweet-heart you would have disastrously married had you been born one generation earlier.

  Here is a brief, heartbreaking story about carpet. I once loved a great man. He treated me with that rare combination of adoration and decency best known to characters that were once played by Jimmy Stewart and are now played by Kevin Costner. He showed up at my door with flowers. He embarrassed me in front of the mailman by sending me letters addressed “To My Sweetie” on the envelope. He could have been the one were it not for the sad fact that he could never, ever have been the one. For a brief period during our two-year relationship, I fantasized about our wedding: a Wyeth-esque outdoor affair, tents and mosquito netting, and a string quartet playing Bach in a wheat field. I would wear a 1920s-era lace dress with a dropped waist and go barefoot. Friends would toast scintillatingly. The New York Times would run a Vows column with a headline like “Passion on the Plains.” But such an event would never come to pass. He was, despite his old-fashioned ways and gentlemanly demeanor, a reception hall and DJ type of man. He listened to Yanni. He enjoyed the television show Wings. His house had carpet and he was not bothered by it. He had, in fact, paid to have it installed. Though I believe to this day that his soul, at its core, is as pure and as capable of embracing my required snobberies as is the soul of any man with oak floors, it was shrouded in carpet. It was suffocating in pale-blue shag and our love was eventually subsumed under an expanse of Scotch-guarded fibers.

  Carpet is the near miss, the ever-present land mine, the disaster that looms on the horizon. It’s the efficiency apartment you’ll be forced to move into if the business fails, the marriage collapses, the checks stop coming in, and the wolf breaks down the door and scratches up those precious polished floors. Carpet can be there when you least expect it; some of your best friends could have it. It could be the bad news at the end of the third date; sprawling across the bachelor pad from wall to wall, it’s what makes you decide not to go past first base. When I take a risk, what I put on the line are my essential, uncarpeted conditions. To venture into the unknown is to hazard a brush with the carpeted masses. They taunt and threaten from the sides of the road, their split-levels and satellite dishes forming pockmarks on the prairie, their luxury condo units driving up the cost of living.

  Where there’s carpet, there’s been a mistake. Where there’s carpet, there’s Mungers. The arrangement is temporary. The clock is ticking. Carpet is a rental car, a borrowed jacket you’d never buy for yourself, the neighbor’s key ring, with some tacky trinket attached, that you keep in case she locks herself out. Carpet makes everybody a stranger. Carpet tells me it’s time to pack up and move on. When there’s carpet, every street gets me lost. Every restaurant is a Denny’s. Every room is a hotel room. My feet can’t quite touch the floor. I am so far away from home.

  INSIDE THE TUBE

  They gather in small, blonde clusters at the gate, sipping coffee from the Terminal C Nathan’s Famous, their clean hair swept carefully out of their clean faces. They cannot possibly be real, these uniformed creatures, these girls with matching luggage and matching shoes, these warm-blooded extensions of that hulking, spotless aircraft.

  Neither passenger nor pilot, the flight attendant is the liaison between the customer and the machine. She is somehow blonde even when she’s not blonde, a girl even when she’s a guy. Part bimbo and part Red Cross, she is charged with the nearly impossible task of calming the passenger down while evoking enough titillation to suggest that there remains, even in the twenty-first century, something special about air travel.

  Flight attendants are fetishized and mocked in equal measure. They are both fantasy and punch line, the players in hackneyed sex jokes and the guides through smoke and fire to the emergency exit. Since the beginning of commercial flying, back in the 1930s when flight attendants were required to be registered nurses, the profession has symbolized an unearthly female glamour. Until the 1960s, flight attendants were not allowed to be married. On many airlines they were required to have a college degree and speak a foreign language. Their skin was periodically checked for blemishes, their hair was not allowed to touch their collars, and if they were, say, 5′4″, they could not weigh more than 115 pounds. Until the 1970s they were called “stewardesses,” real girls who were treated like ladies.

  There is no small amount of perverted nostalgia in all of this. When people today talk about what’s happened to flying, about why any given transcontinental flight bears a heavy resemblance to a Greyhound bus ride from Memphis to Louisville, they often claim to be talking largely about the absence of ethereal waitresses serving seven-course meals in first class. No longer does the starchy hiss of the uniform sound a note of almost military kinkiness. Back in the old days, flight attendants were as sleek and identical as F-16s flying in formation. Back in the old days, they may as well have all been twin sisters. There was a time when you could pinch their asses and they’d buy you a martini. These days they will stop serving you drinks when you’ve had enough. If you do anything that they feel interferes with their duties, you could be charged with a felony. There are restraints in the cockpit should such an occasion arise. These days you have your fat ones, your ugly ones, and worst of all, your old ones. It used to be they had to quit when they turned thirty. Today, with no retirement age, there are a few as old as seventy-seven.

  But even now, perhaps even this morning when you boarded some generic flight to some generic airport, you looked at them in search of some whiff of the past—you looked for a cute one, someone who might like you more than the others, someone to whom you pretended you might give your phone number. You wanted to consider these possibilities but chances are those possibilities simply weren�
�t there. She’s not in your league. Her sole education requirement is a GED. She’s some bizarre relic. And, like the fact that your flight was oversold and delayed and some used-car salesman in a Wal-Mart suit inexplicably ended up seated next to you in business class, you are more than a little heartbroken about the whole thing. This is because the sex appeal of the flight attendant, like the sex appeal of flying, is gone forever. As much as you act like you have it over her, you somehow still long for an earlier era, back when there was no question that she had it over you.

  * * *

  The sky is a strange place to be. Eustachian tubes are tested up here. The human lung is not designed for the air outside. The food is nuked, the forks are plastic, the dirty words have been edited out of the movie. There’s a good chance that the flight attendants, who may be hamming it up during the oxygen mask announcement and giggling in the rear galley like sauced-up Tri Delts, have not met each other until they boarded the plane.

  When I board an evening flight on US Airways from Philadelphia to San Francisco, accompanied by a flight attendant who agreed to participate in a magazine article, no one else on the crew has met me or had any warning that I’d be coming along. I tell them that I am writing a story about flight attendants for a glossy men’s magazine (the story, in the end, was killed by the editor because it lacked the prurient details he’d hoped for). After a few requests that I change their names—“I want to be called Lola!”—we are getting along like old high school pals. They’re connoisseurs of bonding, high skilled socializers. If a reporter showed up to my workplace and announced that she’d be there for the next thirty-six hours I’d duck out for coffee and never come back. But there’s plenty of coffee here already. They can’t leave and their ability to deal with this fact is pretty much Job One.