Joshua JW Vick

This is Mini-van Country

                So I’m at a party this semester, it's a little past 2 a.m., and I overhear a conversation between two drunk guys. I say conversation but what I mean to say is debate. One of the guys is spitting it out straight, coming hardcore with his hip big city lingo (he was from New York I gathered) and diverse knowledge of the underground rap scene. “Underground is where it’s at,” he says, smashing a fist into an open palm.

                The other guy isn’t sure what to make of his opposition. Clearly, he is more interested in exposing the first guy as a freak-show, a party oddity that must be expelled. He doesn’t debate to be correct, as his stance on the rap industry reveals; he merely debates to demerit. “I hear ya bro. Underground, that’s right.” He looks at me for an affirming eye roll.

I stay unbiased.

The first guy is excitable. Nearly twitchy. “You don’t hear me man. Where are you from? I’m from New York. Do you know where that is? Where are you from man?”

The second guy starts in, “Mesick. It’s a small town near Traverse…”

“That’s what I thought. What you don’t understand is that Michigan is in a pop culture black hole. A warped dimension containing incumbents with no comprehension of the remaining universe. Underground here is a sewer, not a collective of under-appreciated cutting edge intuition.”

“Oh yeah, why don’t you bless me with your omnipotence then?”

“Don’t even start to condescend, hillbilly,” he says, sensing an attack on his credibility. “It all started with Wutang. Wutang is forever. They started the movement and revolutionized the hip hop culture now and for always.”

“But I’ve heard of Wutang,” the second guy counters. “Am I supposed to be hearing them down in the sewer?”

I think the first guy is going to push the second guy he is so agitated. “No, you don’t understand. You don’t hear Wutang. You don’t sense the movement. You don’t see the before and after. You listen to it and you drop it while elsewhere we’re living the reality they drew up.”

His girlfriend has been standing at his side the entire time. She is nodding her head in agreement, echoing different words as he says them, like he is a cult icon and she is murmuring his teachings. “Blueprints,” she drones. “Wutang lives.”

The second guy is relishing in the overconfidence of his opponent. “What are you talking about, man? I hear the same music you do. I don’t care where the hell you’re from. Music is music. You either connect or you don’t.”

“You people were pushed out from under a rock,” the first guy adamantly responds. “You guys have Octoberfest in September for Christ’s sake, and you don’t even drink real beer. You put on a bunch of party hats that say Octoberfest, drink Bud-Light, and run around in your undies, trying to grab each others asses all night.”

“Not even October yet,” his girlfriend murmurs.

“What are you talking about, man? Now you’re just making no sense at all.”

“You see me, bro. You looking at me? This right here is one hundred percent Irish blood. We drink real beer and we drink it all day. When we have Octoberfest, it’s in October and we drink real Octoberfest beer.” This perks my attention. I had mistaken the first guy as Jewish, like the Hebrew answer to Eminem. Now he is more like a cheap version of Everlast from that rap group House of Pain. The Hebrew Nation is preparing a statement at this very moment, refuting any affiliation to the first guy.

“You’re drinking Budweiser, man. How is that anymore real than my MGD?” The first guy’s girlfriend looks up at him, finding nothing adequate to murmur in response. I’m only now realizing why this reasonably attractive girl is paired up with this bozo from New York.

“Nothing but a cavedweller, you’d never understand.”

“Cavedweller,” the girlfriend, confident again, repeats.

“There aren’t any caves up where I’m from, man. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Again, he checks to me for affirmation. I remain neutral.

“It’s a metaphor man. Don’t they teach you that shit up at this school?” I had heard through the grapevine that the Hebrew Answer was a grad student here at CMU. Suddenly, I’m baffled by his entire argument. I look up to the second guy, no longer neutral, and roll my eyes.

All the while I am imagining a bar fight going down in my hometown of Atlanta, Michigan, a fight that most likely started over a harmless debate over who the superior Nascar driver was between Jeff Gordon or Dale Earnhardt. One man makes a measly comment about Gordon winning a race that day and the next moment both men are breaking off the ends of long neck beer bottles ready and willing to slit the other’s throat to maintain the honor of their favorite racing icon.

To me, the only things that hit home are the metaphor and the person who used it. I find it funny. No matter where you come from people will try to tell you you’re missing out on something better, as if somewhere else on the planet people are blessed with a more enlightened glimpse into the purpose of our existence.

When I first came to Mt. Pleasant, I was the definition of innocence. I graduated 17^th in a class of 47 students. I was a virgin who had his first kiss at the age of 16 with a 13-year old 8^th grader. I received a minor in possession at the age of 17 but had it revoked because the breadth of my drinking experience as a teenager was a shared can of beer stolen from my best friend’s mother. Even though we both promised to never tell anyone we drank it, somehow everyone in town knew that we had and that it was the first and only taste of beer for both of us. My mother was the Youth Group teacher at our church for about 20 years. She, alongside my father, taught me everything I knew about God, religion, the soul, and the right ways to live life. For this reason, I grew up a very stoic Christian with deeply entrenched beliefs and ideals. My parents had a tumultuous, but still very loving relationship. They were married at the age of 18 and had been together ever since. I always dreamt that there was a girl out there that was as perfect for me as they were for each other and that by going to college I would not only ensure myself a future career but also enable myself to find this mystical “One” I was pursuing. From the beginning, there was always a plan and I never had a reason to question its pertinence within my life.

Seven years down the road my perception of the world is far different. When I came here, everyone was quick to point out my obvious naiveté and upbringing. I was called a hick, a hillbilly, a piece of small town white trash, a cavedweller, and pretty much anything else that would imply that I had lead a very shallow-ended, narrow-minded life. For the first two years of college, I locked myself away in my dorm room and made friends only with the people who lived either with or near me. I went to class most of the time, and went home every other weekend. The only places I ever “went out” to were the movies with friends from home or for fast food. I felt like a joke in the eyes of my peers, as if I didn’t belong in the world outside Atlanta, Michigan (population approx. 1,500).

I don’t ever want to be considered a whiner, so to speak, but I’d say the moment it all changed is when my mother died of breast cancer. I was 20. She died for no apparent reason other than perhaps genetics and maybe also from other extraneous uncontrollable causes. I had just moved off campus in a single act of desperation. I was lonely. I knew things were going on in this town that I had never been a part of and I needed a change of scenery. This is when I was reborn, so to speak.

When mother died my foundation crumbled. My faith in God had been decapitated. My sense of belonging within the world had collapsed and my faith in humanity ceased to exist. I perceived every single human being on the planet as a superficial slime-ball seeking nothing more than self-preservation and upward mobility. I was given a large sum of life insurance money. The money had been left to me by my mother to help compensate for the expenses of college. Even in death she was still trying to navigate my ship. I used the money instead to learn about alcohol and depression.

In high school I had been a three-sport athlete. And though it was a small school and our sports teams were for the most part mediocre while I was a member of them, I was one of the dominant athletes in our town during my tenure there. When I started experimenting with alcohol, my weight blossomed from a healthy 185 pounds to a ripe 240. I stopped being an athlete and instead became an overweight sloth. While in Atlanta, I generally had a good reputation with the opposite sex. Now bigger, less confident, and deeply depressed, I had no relationship with females whatsoever. I stayed this way until the following summer, when I reached a fork in the road that diverted a path towards either suicide or towards an exceptional personality change. I obviously chose the latter.

I started to run feverishly, eat less, diet more. I ran 3 to 4 miles a day, even though I was severely out of shape, and had never been inspired to run before. I ran until I fell to my knees, or until I was so weak I vomited. My weight dropped astronomically and my confidence reciprocally soared. Though many perceived this change to be a better, healthier lifestyle, I was no longer the same person I had once been. Gone was that one special girl, that fantasy I had always kept about being someone else’s soul mate. I no longer wanted to wait for sex. It had become as trivial to me as it was to the college community I was a part of. As soon as I was once again able to speak with girls, I started to have sex with them. I would get drunk, start talking with a girl, and eventually we would be “at it” – no protection, no cares, and totally void of all emotional attachment. Among all these changes, the most prevalent of all was my relationship with God. I no longer viewed him as a loving, nurturing creator of all things but instead a bored and deviant prankster who meddled in our lives only when it proved entertaining. I not only lost an incredible amount of weight during this time but also most of my optimism for life as well. My initial plan was one that had been carved out on my tombstone since the day I was born, and I now held that pursuit in contempt, and scorned the very people who sought to maintain its existence.

This is where I want to pause. This is no autobiography or self-gratifying proclamation. The point is that we change a great deal in our lives. The people we see ourselves as in the future will most likely not be the people we will someday be. Our surroundings and the people within them change us as much as our perceptions do. The problem with all this constant change in our life is how do we ever know ourselves? And when do we know when we have lost our way?

Since that summer I have gained and lost weight nearly in unison with the changing of the seasons. I have stopped and started drinking alcohol 20 or more times. I have fallen in and out of love with two girls both of which said they would love me forever and now will never speak with me again. There are many others I have dated and many more that I have had fraudulent relationships with. I have seen myself continually changing and learning throughout the entire time, but I have yet to find out who I really am and what it is I want to do with my life.

Just a lil’ FYI. I graduated with a teaching degree in May 2005. As of now, I am certified to teach English in the secondary classroom. I did the entire student teaching experience and I learned a tiny shred of what it’s like to be out in the “real world”. For a semester of my life, I was out there doing it, standing naked in front of a classroom of high school seniors, pretending as if I knew the best way to teach them how to effectively read and write.

When I walked down the aisle graduation day, I stepped up to the podium and shook hands with people whose faces I had just seen for the very first time but for some reason was supposed to be very honored to have met that day. Michael Rao, our president and fearless leader, sat back and nodded approvingly as yet another one of America’s fine minds progressed another rung up the professional ladder. I took a few steps and a photographer, some guy that probably used to work for Candid Camera, snapped a quick shot of me sporting my killer graduation dregs and a newly acquired piece of paper (estimated in cost at roughly $60,000). I sat back down in my seat as another row of graduates rose to make their way down the aisle towards Central Michigan immortality. Then, I unrolled the valuable piece of paper, expecting to see a piece of fine parchment that will probably end up in a frame someday. Instead, I discover a very standard, yet polite, congratulatory letter from the Central Michigan Alumni Association (the graduation status of my peers and myself was still “under review” until the final grades came out and that is why we did not receive our degrees just yet).

This is the moment I had supposedly been waiting for my entire life. Here I had been slaving away over open books for six, that’s right six, years, studying for meaningless tests, making valid points in phony papers, and shaping my own personal philosophies for the day that someone will interview me and ascertain my personal market value. Finally, the day had come. This is where the story hits a turning point. I was half expecting a pastor to meet me and a single female graduate at a table on the far end of the gymnasium. “Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife? Do you take with this woman two kids, one boy, one girl, a mortgage, a dog, a dog house, dog food, aluminum siding, a two car garage, a swing set, a pool, a paved driveway, a basketball hoop, a white picket fence, a vegetable garden, an extra one hundred fifty two pounds, a receding hairline, and a fully loaded, all leather interior, dark blue minivan carefully equipped with child seat, backseat DVD player, and child proof locks?” That’s how it is supposed to work, right? I graduate; they hand me over the keys to my very own mini-van. My future is on the straight path to middle-class suburbia now, another well rounded, productive American citizen.

But life is much more complex than that.

We are led to believe we are on this path of righteousness. We are led to believe that because we have an advanced education our lives are more valuable, more marketable than those who choose to not go to college. Then one day we are given infinite insight into a collective knowledge the rest of the world has known all along but refused to share until this point: life is a roller coaster and sometimes the track leads to an abyss of nothingness. Most college students pick a major and follow it because that’s what they are required to do. Few of us actually know what we are going to do with our degree after college. I graduated with a specialized degree, one that can lead to many alternatives but mainly leads to just one: teaching. After years of procrastinating, late nights over-consuming liquids to the point of poisoning myself, hours upon hours of self-posturing and fretting over my appearance, it came down to a moment of truth and I was not prepared to venture forward. The illusion that had always been my future was suddenly an usher impatiently waiting for my ticket. They simply do not prepare us for the adventure that is a life of complete independence.

After I graduated I had the spring and summer to decide how to pursue my career. I applied for jobs at a few high schools in Michigan and a few in North Carolina. By and large, I did not take the pursuit of a financially stable career that seriously, and eventually, the only opportunity I was offered was down in North Carolina, right smack dab in the middle of hurricane country. I had a decision to make that would quite possibly affect the rest of my life.

At the risk of labeling myself a naïve, self-absorbed man-child, I have to admit I was scared. I had the spent the past six years of my life concerned about my social, familial, and sexual lives that I had set my professional life on the backburner. It was something I had always been moving towards, albeit slowly, but had never truly intended to make it there. Now at the destination I had pursued for so long, I found myself questioning myself and the rest of my life. After living a life so far filled with beer bongs, strange women, and countless 3 am visits to Lil’ Chef, I couldn’t talk myself into believing I was ready for the “real world”.

I recently started school this fall as a graduate student in the Creative Writing program here at Central Michigan and I work at Staples, “the Office Superstore,” to help pay for bills and expenses. The other day I was driving to work at 7:30 in the morning en route to another fun filled day of small business catering and personal electronic satisfaction when a kind of illumination suddenly came to me. I was currently on Broomfield Road traveling east and approaching the stoplight at the Mission Road intersection. Traffic was heavy with career oriented go-getters, all well groomed, well-rested, and well-prepared for another day at the grindstone. It was as if my Grand Prix was immersed within a sea of mini-vans, a group of people not too distant from myself who had actually taken that solemn vow on graduation day, people who had seen the light and stepped towards it as opposed to hiding in the shadows instead. At the stoplight, I looked around and counted at least 6 minivans surrounding me on all sides. Then to my right, I noticed the parking lot at O’Kelleys/Wayside, which was still packed with the cars of people too drunk to drive the previous night.

I felt like a missing link caught between two different worlds. My sense of responsibility to my loved ones and myself found me embarrassed, as if I were an imposter, an anomaly that had temporarily evaded an inevitable destiny. How did these people do it? Where did they find the courage? And who were these people before they metaphorically became our parents?

The illumination came at this point, but is more easily explained another way.

One of my best friends down here in Mt. Pleasant, a wonderful human being by the name of Eric Ross, has been an engineer here in town for three years. He is a month and a few odd days older than I am. Originally, Eric hails from Wisconsin, a state close in proximity but by perception a million miles away. He graduated from school there and came all the way to Mt. Pleasant to begin his career as an engineer. Once in awhile he makes the trip up through Northern Michigan and across the Upper Peninsula to see his family and friends from home, but for the most part he is no longer a part of his original life.

                One of my first memories of Eric is playing basketball with him. At first glance, he doesn’t impose a threat to opposing ball players. He isn’t short in stature, but he isn’t tall either. He isn’t weak, but isn’t bulky. He is friendly, jovial, and lacks even the most-minute trace of conceit. However, it is evident instantly from the first bounce of the basketball that he is a gamer. He moves to all the right spots, makes all the right passes, and catches the ball with an experienced intent. His face changes from a smile to a focused grimace, and immediately, anyone playing the game is either pleased to be teamed with him or frustrated to oppose him. He and I played together for a few days in a row and eventually we became immersed within the same crowd of people, drinking beer on the weekends, going to movies, or having dinner together on special occasions. After getting to know him, I learned very quickly that his personality was very much like his game. Eric is very serious about the way he lives his life. He makes all the right moves in life, just as he does on the basketball court. He makes wise decisions, economically and financially stable decisions that take precedence over any form of socially skewed alternatives. After we had begun to know each other a little, Eric pulled me aside one day and said, “You were one of the first, man. I was alone in this town for a full year and you were one of my first friends. Thanks a lot.”

                In hindsight, the remark overwhelms me still, and nearly awakens, but not quite, the lost soul inside of me, the one that remembers when I too was lonely, also an outsider caught in a strange place. Suddenly I feel inept, incapable of matching a shred of such bravery, such thoughtless obligation to oneself to persevere through adversity. As opposed to becoming engulfed within a culture he had never been a part of, Eric stayed himself throughout, never straying from the person he was and eventually wanted to be. Maybe there is a dark blue minivan laying somewhere down the road in his future, but it is a future he has chosen to pursue and he is out there doing it, staking a claim to reach out and take what is rightfully his.

                It is amazing how some people can manage to push through any amount of wreckage while others simply pull off the road and turn off their cars. I feel as if I’ve been waiting for years for the maintenance crew to clear the track for me.

I went to the bar last night with a group of friends. We have made it habit to attend the bar every Tuesday and Thursday night of the week. We generally all attend the same parties on the weekend, probably on both Friday and Saturday, and we will do this the entire semester until half of our group graduates and we are forced to create a new routine from scratch with a completely different cast of strangers.

It was a Tuesday and we are at least an hour or so into an evening spent drinking $1.00 pints at O’Kelleys.

“Where the fuck are Chris and Luke tonight?”

“Swiping the sand out of their vaginas. Something about midterms, being sick.”

“Damn. And what about J?”

“Yeah, he said to say what up to all. Gonna be a puss tonight and will make up for it on Thursday.”

“Jesus, this place used to be packed on Tuesdays. What’s going on anymore?”

“It’s still early, man. Most people are still at home catching the end of the ‘Real World.’”

“Hey Lyons, want a nipple for that beer? You’ve certainly been milking it for awhile now.”

“Hey fuck off man, I used to out-drink you all the time. Got a girl this year, falling a little bit behind schedule that’s all.”

“Fucking whipped more like it. Never thought I’d see the day when a woman would tie Nick Lyons down.”

“What are you talking about man? You know my past. I’ve been with twice the girls you have. Don’t start that shit again.”

“Man, check that girl out in the white skirt. Damn, I’d like to hit that.”

“Yeah whatever, Vick. Not when you’re too busy chasing round you-know-who.”

“Fuck that. I keep my women on lock down.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Yeah. Me, neither.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You guys are full of it.” Pause. Pause. Pause. “Why? What did you hear?”

In the back of my mind there is an Energizer bunny banging at a drum and a voiceover somewhere else inside of me that says, “It keeps on going, going, going, going….” And I’m thinking of nights like last night and many other nights quite like it and I’m trying to rationalize that I’m young and this is me having the time of my life before the rest of my life begins. And I keep hearing the voice of a good friend of mine always telling me, “Life is short, have fun” or “You’re way too serious, Josh Vick,” and somehow I try to use that as motivation, a kind of fuel that burns away any of the anxiety I may be feeling in reference to the rest of eternity.

While my friend may have a point, we are young, we are inexperienced, I should probably just relax and enjoy the ride, I can still hear that beating drum and that incessant voice repeating like a broken record over and over inside my mind, “It keeps on going, going, going, going.” And though I am young and ‘full of life’ and ‘living each day to the fullest’, I just want to run off into traffic, smack dab in the middle of the street, and scream, “When the hell does it stop?” That’s when traffic stops, temporarily, some guy gets out of his car, throws his coffee at me, and swears, “Get the fuck out of the road, asshole!” Right then I’m burnt by the truth in his words, knowing all to well that this is the same resounding answer to the same question that continues to plague me each and every day.

                I went to therapy for awhile, just like many other college students. My girlfriend and I had broken up and I was angry and depressed and in need of someone impartial to confide in. I made an appointment with the counseling center at Foust Hall and soon enough I was seated across from a tall, gray-bearded middle aged man. He started out with some very basic questions such as “How can I help you?”, “How are you feeling?”, and “What is it that brought you here today?” Eventually, I was smack dab in the middle of a long-winded story about my exgirlfriend and I and how her decision to end our relationship had left my emotions in shambles. After hearing my story and stifling away a plethora of misplaced yawns and beard scratches, the counselor decided it best for me to take a short, standardized test that would best enable him to ascertain the stability of my emotional psyche.

The questions on the test were pretty standard. “Had I ever lost a loved one?” “Had my family had a history of psychological difficulty?” “Had I ever been abused or mistreated as a child?” Other less obvious questions were included as well. “Did I have a problem with test anxiety?” “On a scale of 1 to 10, how depressed did I consider myself?” “Had I ever thought of injuring myself or terminating my own life?” All of these questions came with some sort of numbered system, one demanding that I rate the relevance of each specific issue within the spectrum of life.

After I finished the test, the counselor used a separate sheet of paper and tallied up the numbers I had assembled. He pulled out another sheet of paper, this one a standardized assessment module, and revealed to me what my answers may or may not have indicated. According to him I was “off the charts” for not only depression but also stress and anxiety. This led him to make one of two different surmises: 1) I should begin taking some antidepressant drugs to decrease my depressive moods, or 2) I should begin to attend a psychological clinic where a specialized therapist could help me form a plan to rejuvenate my life. He also recommended that my nightlife, which had been previously touched on in my anecdote earlier, be considerably reduced. He felt that the excessive drinking and organized chaos within my life were treading me towards an irreversible path of destruction.

I came to the counselor’s office that day not much different than when I had first come to CMU. Though I had no idea what I was getting myself into, I had made the journey with the best of intentions, hoping that somehow and with a little help, I would make myself a better and more successful person. And yet, just as before, I left that day more confused than ever before, lacking any sort of idea what I was to do next. Someone had spoon fed the answers to me once again. Someone else told me how to fix my own life and I had taken their advice and fallen flat on my face. After yet another dosage with the humility syringe, I found myself a little more bitter and little more pessimistic.

                What I think I’ve found in the past few years is that life is the accumulation of a great many wonderful and sublime events. Life is a not a paved road leading to a set destination. We do not consequently do everything the way we are “supposed” to. We do not go to school, find the girl, graduate, and drive off in our brand new mini-vans. We get drunk, lose ourselves, lose our innocence, lose our integrity, find ourselves again, rise to the occasion, exceed expectations, fall flat on our face, get back up, and dust ourselves off. The bottom line is that I, and many like myself, am entrenched within a misguided subculture of American life that is lost and confused in the wilderness. Routine and monotony conquer all in a system that is not exactly safe but for some reason still sustains this illusion that if we are not one way than we are subsequently incorrect. Some people follow that safe track to the future, one that pulls you from state to state, country to country, away from your natural ideals and loved ones. The same people, no matter how organized, no matter how dedicated, also become lost and confused. We assume ourselves to have a set place in the universe, a defined path to the future, an ideal and utopian notion that simply does not exist. One day you’re pounding away dollar pints at the bar, or arguing the prevalence of underground rap in middle Michigan, and the next your standing in an aisle, holding a letter from the Alumni Association, wondering where the hell they parked your dark blue minivan. Every day we make decisions about what we do within our world, within our time, and it does not seem feasible in our day and age to rest on the laurels the future may or may not hold. Today is our future and we make it up as we go along. And while that feeling of panic that sits in the back of your throat is new and different and blatantly unsatisfying all at once remember that it isn’t a choke or stifled scream. It’s an emerging shout of rejuvenation, one that cries out into the depths of the night and reaches out to a world that should no longer be scripted or ever once be taken for granted again.