Bull City

Oh the places you'll have to go

This is my last year in Miami.

Next June, I’ll be moving to Durham, North Carolina, so that Ben can go into oculoplastics, which is what happens when a little girl is sitting in the back seat watching Paw Patrol on her iPad, and her mother isn’t paying attention and slams into a median, and the little girl breaks the bones around her eye socket while also rupturing her eyeball. 

Like a popped grape.

If a plastic surgeon tries to fix it, the girl will end up pretty, but blind. If instead, an ophthalmologist does the repair, the girl will see, but in the mirror, she’ll see that she’s ugly. 

Oculoplastics is when physicians fix both.

I was telling this to my friend, Natalie.

“That’s really cool,” Natalie said.

“No,” Ben interrupted, always interrupting. “That’s NOT what oculoplastics is.” 

“That sounds really cool though,” Natalie said, “you should do that.”

I’ve tried asking Ben what he thinks oculoplastics is, but every time he starts explaining, I find myself thinking about what life in Durham will be like, and I end up just nodding along to his garble of “BLAH which is NOT orbital surgery and so the little girl would instead go to BLAH BLAH BLAH.”

“Ohhh, that makes sense,” I say, having decided that my explanation is better.

But regardless of what oculoplastics is/n’t, Ben and I will be moving to Durham, North Carolina, and I wish him well with whatever it is he believes he does.

I never imagined myself in Durham.

I’m 35 and have lived in San Diego, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Austin, LA, NYC, and Miami, and in each one, I became aware of some insurmountably negative trait of the people or city that caused me to leave.

I wonder what I’ll dislike about Durham.

Probably the “bull” thing. 

Bull Cider, Bull Brewery, Bull Car Wash, Bull Inflatable Toy Rental Depot, the list of bull-named small businesses never ends and that’s because in the late 1800s, a guy named John Green was launching a tobacco company in Durham and was looking for a logo while eating Coleman’s British Mustard and on the jar was the logo of a bull and he thought “cool, that’s a sick bull,” and so he named his company Bull Durham Tobacco, and the entire city fell in line. 

If it’s not this virus of the bull, I imagine I’ll dislike something else. Maybe the Durham people — I’ll find that their southern charm renders them too agreeable. Boring and polite.

Like in Japan.

Where the food was excellent and the nature was amazing and everything was safe and clean and on-time. And I hated it. How they were so deferential and considerate. Muted.

I like chaos. 

India and Vietnam. Middle Easterners and loud noises and yelling and confrontation. 

A maid in rural China banging on my door about check-out times, shouting “You late! You leave now!” grounds my nervous system as if to say “Dear child, you’re home.”

And so I guess I hope the Durhamites are not like the Japanese.  

My first original thought.

But even if they are, even if Ben and I don’t love it, I imagine we might stay.

And I think that’s because 35-year-old me is different from 22-year-old me who leapt from city to city, trying to over-optimize his time left — time that is now not only inherently less but also noticeably faster. 

Proportional theory, it’s called, where, as you age, each year feels shorter, as a smaller additional percentage of your life. For me, 1/34 (2.94%) will have felt longer than will 1/35 (2.86%). If you’re nine years old, losing one year is a huge deal. At ninety, it’s not.

And 37-year-old Alex in Durham will know all of this, along with the fact that the more he ages, the harder it will be for him to change course — aging is being the captain of a ship moving faster across the sea with arms that grow heavy and a wheel that stiffens and your job, while a heroin-like complacency thickens in your veins, is to watch your should’ves/could’ves fade into the horizon as your no-longer-possible paths fly past.

And then, from time to time when a ghost of one of those untaken paths whispers through the fog to tell you that you’re weak for letting your vestibular disorder prevent you from doing standup, or that you’re poor for being too scared to co-found that B2B SaaS startup, or that you’re a shitty brother/son for abandoning your family out west, you should do what I do and reach for the black tar while gazing beyond the rail to try to remind yourself that your vestibular disorder led you to Ben, that the CEO of that SaaS startup hates himself, and that your family wants what’s best for you, and you should do this not because you’ll actually believe any of it, but rather because you’ve learned that attempting to believe it is the only way to engender even the tiniest amount of hope around your ship and its flawed captain finding their way back to some true north. 

And sometimes, far out at sea, that hope is all you have.

Maybe, for me, right now, I have to hope that that north is Durham, where, though today, the Durhamites seem too Japanese, an older version of me, with 50 years in Durham under his belt, will no longer blame his environment for the closure he lacks within.

By then, the few hairs on 85-year-old Alex’s head will all be grey, trying their best to cling to follicles being eaten away by some sort of skin disorder. Eczema, or perhaps cancer.

Ben and I will be sitting in a booth at Bull City Brunch about to order bull-shaped pancakes and a waitress named Daisy Mae will walk up. I’ll be wearing the hospital gown I stole from the cancer treatment center because I’ll have learned that you have to lean in quite hard to get people in Durham to have a real conversation.

“Havin’ a good mornin’ fellas?” Daisy Mae will say, ignoring my gown.

“No…” I’ll whisper as one of my old-man eyes, probably the left one, leaks from epiphora, an old-person eye condition that Ben will have refused to fix because he’ll have said that it’s not oculoplastics. “I’m dying,” I’ll continue. “Stage 3 cancer.”

Daisy’s face will fall a bit. 

“It hurts.” I’ll sigh. “Everywhere.”

She’ll look to Ben for support.

“He’s fine,” he’ll say. “Alex, leave the poor girl alone!”

“Please,” I’ll say, looking up while reaching for her. “He wants me to die. He wants the money. Help me,” I’ll plead as my arms shake, which will freak her out. She’ll jolt, spilling a pitcher of water onto my hands, “My hand!” I’ll scream as if it burns, falling out of the booth onto the floor in my gown. Daisy will shriek and run away crying while the now-silent Durhamites all stare. Meek and afraid.

I’ll bring my gaze up from my now wet cancer clothes to lock eyes with Ben, who will hate me for this performance. But then, I’ll smile, having accepted that, though time whittles us down, it often lets us keep the parts we need, that our ships are usually on the right path, and that there’s something nice about being the only real bull among a herd of sterile mules in Durham, North Carolina.

Hello friends.

1. Does anyone have anyone I should meet in Durham when I move there in a year?

2. Were you annoyed that this piece was shorter than the others?

3. If I have a real-life actual crazy person stalking me who I’ve already gone to the police about, should I wait until I’m certain he’s not going to kill me before writing a piece about him, or does the fact that we’re not sure about him killing me make the piece more fun to read?