Penny U

Defying Gravity (or Alabama)

This is what I talked about at a Pulp Non-Fiction event in Wroclaw in 2016. At PNF, you’re supposed to go on stage and tell a true (and funny) story based on a theme – it’s more storytelling than stand-up. The theme for this particular evening was “road trip.” Here’s what I talked about… 

It’s 1991, I am driving. in less than a minute, a car is going to run a stop sign.

It’s 1997, I am standing in Alabama. I had just crossed the border from Georgia. It’s hot and blue, and I have just made a terrible mistake.  

It’s 2003, I am standing in an airport in Poland. I have two large suitcases with everything I own, and I am beginning to panic.

I’m here today to talk about road trips. When you live thousands of miles from where you started, from where you called home for the majority of your life, every day feels like you’re on a road trip, even thirteen years later.

Thirteen years. That’s a hell of a long time. I’m at the point now where I don’t know what I am. I feel weird calling myself an American. And even though I’ve been in Poland, in the same city, for all of this time, I know I am not Polish. Despite greeting me with open arms, even to this day, I know I will never be one of you. This isn’t meant to be a slight on your culture, but in a lot of ways, you’re just too good for me. 

So here I am, displaced and misplaced, like a potato chip stuck between two sofa cushions. 

While I have a lot to say on the subject of being in this state, I don’t want to talk about space today, but rather time.

You all have that friend in your life where everything they do turns terrible and you watch it all unfold on Facebook. Deaths. Cancer. Unemployment. Divorces. Debt. Their lives are endless shitstorms. I’m not talking about the person who naturally gravitates to drama or the assholes, I’m talking about regular decent people who have been cast in a cosmic horror show so the rest of us can feel better about ourselves. 

Back in 1991, I was driving in my neighborhood when I came to a four-way intersection. I had the right of way. Just as I was about to cross the intersection, a car ran the stop sign at a ridiculously high speed from my right. I didn’t even have the time to brake, but I somehow still managed to miss the car by an inch. Looking back, I still don’t understand how I didn’t hit that car. It all happened so fast that it took me a good ten seconds for it to really hit me how close I was to dying.

And when that happens, you start considering the what-ifs. What if I had left my house a second earlier? What if I had my foot on the gas a little more? 

All my life I’ve felt like I’ve been a second away from tragedy and somehow I’ve just kept going. It makes you wonder, is it possible to be born at just right the moment so that every step you make in life will be right? Like I’ve managed to pick up on the rhythm of the universe and I’ve been in step all my life. 

If such a thing is possible, then that means some people are continuously out of step.

And if this is my condition, does all of this happen in sacrifice of space? Meaning I’m always on time, but forever misplaced.

I was a different person in 1997. 

I had flown from Tampa, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia to meet three of my college friends – all women – and spend the weekend. I arrived Friday morning, and the plan was to hang out until Saturday, see a music festival, and then on Sunday we’d drive back to Tampa together. To fill in all of that time, there would be a large amount of alcohol and drugs.

I remember someone handing me a beer when I got to the hotel and the next thing I knew it was Sunday morning. Even though there were two double beds in our hotel room, we still woke up on top of one another in one bed. My friends were fully clothed. And for some reason I was naked. I try not to think about that too much.

Our joints ached from the way we slept and, to be honest, the drugs exiting our systems. There were empty bottles of alcohol all over the place. I was the first to shower, which meant that I was ankle-deep in ice and beer bottles in the bathtub. 

Before we hit the road, we decided to have breakfast at a restaurant. We could barely look at one another. We had either had the best time ever, or we had accidentally done something heinous. It was hard to tell.

It was decided that since I was the least drunk, I would be the one to drive us home. We all stumbled into the car. We didn’t have a map. One of my friends in the back told me to get on this highway here, yeah, now get on this highway here, yeah, and just keep going until we get to Florida, before passing out. And that’s what most of the trip was like, me driving with three unconscious women in the car, trying to stay awake and be responsible.

My friend sitting in the passenger seat had passed out with her head resting on the car door. The window was rolled down and her red hair was blowing in the wind. In my peripheral vision, it looked like a trail of fire. 

And this is how we ended up in Alabama.

Here’s the thing. And believe me, I know how insulting it is for Europeans like yourself to have geography explained by an American, but bear with me for a moment. When you are driving south from Atlanta to Tampa, Florida, you should absolutely not go anywhere close to Alabama. This would be like you driving south to Slovakia and accidentally crossing the German border. You can see how tragically stupid I was. 

I had pulled into the first rest stop inside of Alabama. I remember feeling nauseous. Soon my friends were going to wake up and I was going to have to explain that I had been driving for hours in the wrong direction. 

They woke up one at a time, which meant that I had to relive my shame three times. 

“Where are we?”

“Alabama,” I’d say with the kind of confidence that might trick them into thinking that, yes, of course, we’d be driving through Alabama to get to Florida. 

They all laughed. Of course, they did. That’s what they always did.

We spent a half hour just laughing and enjoying the absurdity of the situation. My heart was so swollen that I thought it was going to explode. Before we got back into the car, we hugged each other. They saw my mistake and embraced it.

Much later in the day, we eventually crossed the Florida border. The two in the back were asleep again, but the woman with the wildfire in her hair was awake.

"You know," she said, “maybe we aren't destined to come home. Maybe Alabama was a sign for us to get back into the car and drive West, drive until there’s no more land, and then push forward to the North. Maybe our true future is in that direction."

I wanted to say that even if our future was in that direction, I would have been too scared to keep driving. Even though this life was feeling like an uncomfortable sweater, we only got as far as we did because I didn’t know where I was going. I’m scared. Aren’t you scared too? Or is it just me? It feels like everyone is brave except for me and it’s so exhausting trying to look like I’m not. 

Instead, I said, “Maybe.”

She sighed heavily. She put her head back on the passenger side car door. The wind caught her hair, but now it seemed like the fire was being smothered.

The sun was falling and we still had hours to go before getting home.

In 1999, I took a “real job” that had me traveling up and down the East Coast, from Texas up to New York. At one point, I went over 30 days without stepping inside my home. I lived in hotel rooms and every day I was in a new city. At night, as I hung out in my hotel room, usually sitting on a bed that was too big for me, helping to amplify my loneliness, I’d think about that drive into Alabama. I was out of sync. 

I thought: My things are packed right here; I could walk out of this hotel room and get in the car and just go. Because this isn’t my life. I’m wearing a suit every day and I still don’t even know how to tie a tie.

But I never left. This went on for years.

I kept falling asleep until one day I never thought about Alabama anymore.   

By 2003, the life I was living felt like a television show that had gone on for four seasons too many, and even the writers were struggling to have it all make sense. So when I finally received an email offering me the chance to work in Poland, I jumped at the chance for my own spin-off.

In all the excitement of moving to Europe, selling and giving away all of my things, quitting my job, and saying goodbye to my friends and family, it never occurred to me that maybe I was making a mistake. It wasn’t until I was standing in the line for passport control at the airport that I realized how heavy my situation was. I was thousands of miles away from home in a country where I didn’t know the language. I only knew two words: Wrocław and piwo. And I couldn’t say either of them correctly. The only evidence I had that I had a job was in that email. For all I knew, I was a few minutes away from being kidnapped and spending the rest of my life in dark places.

I stood there with my two large suitcases and my passport in hand, and I remembered Alabama. I remembered how I got back into the car to drive back to Florida and spent years wondering if I made the right choice. I was supposed to go West, but the thing is, if you go far enough East, you’ll end up where you were supposed to be too. 

The thing about being in sync with life is that it won’t always feel that way. There are going to be moments when you feel like you completely screwed up. Life, like time itself, is not a straight line. It is distorted and wobbly, because our life is shaped by our memories, which in turn become the stories we tell. It becomes so confusing as times, we won’t remember that actual memory of an event, but rather that story we keep telling. 

When you start sharing these stories, you don’t start from the beginning. You start from the most interesting story or even a hook, and then you work your way backward and forward until the shape of who you are starts to materialize.

You’re all going to cross the border into your own Alabama one day. Or maybe you already did. 

Some of you will keep going. 

Some of you will turn around. 

Just remember that no matter what you decide, you will always be right where you are supposed to be. It won’t feel that way at the time but don’t worry. When you tell the story later, it’ll sound like you always knew.

The Penny University Book

There used to be a coffee shop called Penny University in Tampa back in 1995. For a couple of years, it was the go-to place for local writers, poets, and other artists looking to be seen or heard. It had weekly open-mic nights filled with music and slam poetry that I enjoyed as a performer and an audience member. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime places where everything was magic.

(I remember even dragging my friends there while Hurricane Erin was cutting through the state of Florida. I drove on the Courtney Campbell Causeway - a ten-mile stretch of highway that cut across Old Tampa Bay - during the tail-end of Erin as giant waves swallowed up the road. It was gloriously stupid. But we made it. Not even a hurricane could keep us away from Penny University.)

Anyway, I had this hardcover notebook that was gifted to me at the time. I meant to fill the pages with my angsty poetry and deep thoughts, but I ended up passing it around the coffee shop during the open mics for people to write in.

It’s full of poems, stories, drawings, and random thoughts from mostly strangers and some old friends I haven’t seen in decades. That’s a thing at my age, knowing I haven’t seen friends in decades.

The book is an artifact of a specific time in my life. And it’s something that I’ve cherished for almost 30 years. A book written only for me, in a way.

I thought that this newsletter could be a good place to share these pages. You’ve trusted me with your inbox - the least I can do is trust you with my secret library. I hope this is something you like because it gives me great joy.

I’ll post more pages next time.

Coming this Friday to your inbox…

In case you’re looking to relax this Black Friday, you can read this essay on Stephen King and his fiction suit – how to find life, cheat death, and change reality as we know it.

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