Why I'm Staying

(Genre: Dramatic Monologue, Lyric Essay)

You might be surprised how well I’m doing. Not just personally, not just emotionally, but financially too. You’d be surprised how well I’m doing, I’m sure. I heard the way you said “Altoro?” when I said I’d moved to Altoro, California as though you were sure I could never do well here.

Well, as it turns out, I’m doing very well here. I am just a little bit surprised myself, I’ll admit. I didn’t know anything about this little town before I came here. Well, I only knew it was hidden in the Silicon Valley and that it’s mostly populated by computer programmers, and code writers, and that there is a rumor that the inventor of the internet lives here.

And as it turns out, this is all true of Altoro. Well, I’m not sure about the inventor of the internet because I’ve met a few men who claim to be him. But one thing I’ve learned since I left the East Coast is that people can describe towns and cities to you, but you can’t really know until you’re there. When someone says ‘Oh yeah, that town up in the mountains,’ you can see it, you can imagine a little town up in the mountains, but you’d never guess what it’s like to be there. You’d never guess how deep that statement really goes, that description…

I only say this, because when someone once described Altoro to me as a town primarily populated by computer programmers and code writers, I never imagined how that would feel, to be here, to live here, among those people.

You see, this town is populated by linear thinkers, by real code writers. It is a town just stuffed to the brim with people who must think about each and every symbol in each and every code that makes up the entire internet. You can imagine how exhausting this is for them. Or maybe, you can’t. Maybe you never thought about how deep that runs.

I discovered this accidentally. I was parking my car one afternoon outside the grocery store. I have starting cooking, which you may be surprised to learn. Back East, I wasn’t even interested in cooking. It was out of the question, really. I never had the time. I only realized after leaving the city… that New Yorker’s do about ten times as many tasks in one day than the average human being. It’s a severely exhausting strategy, but it was all I had ever known. Anyway, I cook now. This is just one of the many ways in which I’ve changed and also one of the first ways. But it’s an important one because it brought me to the grocery store that afternoon. I was going to buy tomatoes, and cilantro, and whatever goes into fresh salsa. I was making fresh salsa. I know you’d hardly believe that of me.

Anyhow, I pulled into the parking spot, the windows of my car down, music pouring out. The woman beside me, who was presumably coming or going, she stopped and looked at me as I was turning the engine off, gathering my grocery list and re-usable grocery bags.

“Excuse me…” she said. “Yes,” I responded. “That music, you were listening to music…” she looked confused but I assumed she just wanted to know who it was. “Yes, I was listening to Sarah Harmer; she’s Canadian, a lovely voice right? She has this wonderful song; I forget what it’s called…Oh, basement apartment. The song, it’s called ‘Basement Apartment,’ and it’s got wonderful lyrics, about the smell of bleach seeping through her door…that reminds me, bleach!” I scribbled it down on my grocery list. “Anyway, I love that song because I once lived in this horrible basement apartment in Redhook and I remember the smell of bleach being awful.”

By this time, I had gotten out of the car, and was resting my elbow on the woman’s car window. She was still just staring at me, sort of slack-jawed and bewildered. Then, a smile. I smiled back at her and continued…

“You should look her up on iTunes, or LimeWire, or even just go to her Myspace page. She’s got something like 10 albums. Some are better than others, but they’re all decent. Oh, I should ask you, you look like you come here a lot. Do they have stamps at this store? Or do I have to go to the Post Office?”

“No,” she said. “They don’t have stamps here. You must go to the post office for stamps.”

“I hate that. Don’t you just hate that? I always forget to get stamps unless they are on the grocery list, which is why I just love when you can get them at the grocery store.”

“You’re not from here, are you?” She asked sort of excitedly.

“No, I just moved here from New York. I only sort of accidentally ended up in Altoro because I found this really cute little cottage in the back yard of these super nice people. And anyway, I was a curator in New York. I curate art shows and now I don’t know what I want to do. I’m sort of, you know, swimming, swimming in it. Feeling it out.”

She seemed fascinated by me. I could feel it. I’m very intuitive, you know this about me. But I’ve never really had anyone respond to me like this.

“What do you do? You’re driving an awfully nice car, here. You must make a killing at whatever it is.” I said.

“I’m a programmer. I… program. I’ve never met a curator before. Only, other programmers,” she responded in a dull voice.

“Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. I’ve got to get to my groceries,” I patted her on the arm and made my way towards the entrance.

“Wait!” she called out. “Thanks, for the music. I’ll… I’ll listen to it.”

“Oh no worries. Be well!” I called back.

See, initially, I was a little taken back by her fascination with me. I was a little creeped out to be honest. But part of me, a small part of me, was flattered. It seemed I offered her something without even knowing. Yes, there was the music. But it seemed something more to her. I noticed it again at a gas station. A man was paying for his gas in front of me and fiddling with some change. I was on the cell phone leaving a voice message for my father.

“Ok, so tire pressure. What’s it all about, Pop? How do I know how much pressure I need? Because I haven’t put air in my tires the entire way since New York and I feel like I’m driving on soggy donuts. But I’ve been too afraid to put air in the tires because I don’t want to put in too much, you know? It’s because of that movie, where he’s changing a tire and it explodes in his face. Oh my god, can you imagine? So what’s the deal, how much do I put in? How much air? Call me back!”

He was sort of stalling in front of me, the man paying for his gas. He was sort of just standing there with two quarters in his hand. Finally, I leaned forward took a quarter out of his hand, set it on the counter in front of the cashier.

“There you go. It’s 40 dollars and 25 cents.” I said.

“Thanks. It’s just that, you’re not from here are you?”

“Nope, just moved here from New York.” I smiled at him.

“Oh. What do you do?”

“Um, well, at the moment, nothing. I was a curator. I curate art shows in museums and galleries before, but now, I’m not sure. And you?” This conversation was becoming entirely too easy for me. It seemed the same as every conversation I ever had here.

“I’m a computer programmer.”

“Oh, ha. Seems like everyone here is.”

“I’m not.” Said the cashier, sort of angrily.

Come to think of it, the cashier was the first person I’d met who wasn’t a computer programmer. Not that I’d met many people, just my landlords, the woman from the grocery store parking lot, and the man now starring at me in that same slack-jawed manner as they all had.

As it turns out, the cashier, whose name was Tad, was actually the only person in all of Altoro who was not a computer programmer. You may ask now, what about the people who worked at the market, what about the people who work at coffee shops and bars? They were freelance computer programmers. And they were not very good at serving coffee and cocktails. They were slow, and obsessed with proportions.

Tad explained to me, frustrated and clearly tired of telling people in the gas station that while being incredibly intelligent, programmers were a different breed. They were linear thinkers. They were quite strictly this, born and raised. See, Altoro was in fact the town which was at the epicenter of web-based technologies in America. They were the people who had really come up with HTML. If you’re not familiar, HTML is the hidden code of which the entire internet is made up of. It’s everything. Even this email you’re reading, it’s presented to you by HTML. And it had taken a quite linear train of thought to create HTML. I learned this from Tad.

Now, Altoro was the home of several generations of purely linear thinking programmers. All those who were not linear thinkers had been, well… sort of forced out. There weren’t many jobs for them. Rent was high enough that only people with one foot in the computer programming or code writing world could really afford to live here.

So I realized then what there fascination with me was. I am, as I’m sure you’ll agree, quite far from a linear thinker. I’m visual and abstract if that. And so, it seemed my train of thought, my speech patterns, my gesticulation was all too much for them. But I could see in the flicker of excitement in their eyes that they liked it.

See, linear thinkers work entirely with a process of thought which follows known cycles or step-by-step progression where a response to a step must be elicited before another step is taken. And with me, well, how do I explain? If they were dancing, it was something like a march. And if I was dancing, I was, well, drunk and doing back-flips and a tango to the side with jazz hands and a baton.

And the way the brain works, is that it sort of has these pathways, these tunnels that we use over and over. Mine go every which direction and are totally random. I do everything differently every time. But these people have been writing codes, programming computers, thinking linearly for almost three decades now. Their pathways are worn in. And when I spoke to them, their thoughts took a step off the beaten path.

So, as I’m sure as you might have predicted by this point, I became a masseuse. The only masseuse here in Altoro. It was a logical step for me. You remember, for a few years back in the 90’s I had that stint working as a sports medicine therapist, right? Well, anyway, I’m not certified in the state of California, but business has been booming and shows no real sign of slowing down.

I started off with three clients. You remember that woman from the grocery store parking lot? Well, her name is Cindy. I knew I could reel her in if I could find her. As it turns out all it took was returning to the grocery store at exactly the same time in exactly the same spot one week later. See, that’s how linear people think. They find a code that works, they write it, and they stick to it. Cindy is real great and sort of addicted to massages at this point. She has one every other day.

And then that guy from the gas station, not Tad, but the man who was struggling with the quarters, Gary. He was my second client. Again, he got gas every other day at the same gas station, Tad told me. So I showed up and I just said, “Hey, Gary. You look a little tense. Do you seem like you could use a massage. It’d be great for you. You can lie down, take a load off, I’ll put some music on and we can just chat while I give you a good rub-down.”

He was hesitant. But just by having someone offer him something so strange, his mind was sent spinning and he just sort of stood there with his change in his hand, his bottom lip hanging away from his teeth. To be honest, he looked more relaxed already.

I came up with the idea for offering massages because I knew that people who sit at computers all day were prone towards musculoskeletal disorders. They really needed a good massage the most out of all working professionals. But really, it was a way of keeping them a captive audience. I needed a way to get them relaxed and follow my stories.

With Cindy, who was a sort of somewhat lonely character, I focused on her lower back. She was single and sat unusually straight in her chair at work. She said her mother, who was also a programmer, once told her the highest paid programmers and engineers were attracted to girls with good posture. So, with her I massaged her lower back gently while I told her stories about my hitch-hiking romances.

“So I just wandered in to town just before dark and I didn’t have any real plans but I knew I probably needed a campsite because it was sort of cold and a fire was the only way I’d stay warm and so this guy walks by, right? Really tall. And I say to him, ‘hey, do you happen to know if there are any campgrounds near here?’ and he says that he thinks there might be some up by his cabin and do I want to get high. So we hop in his pickup and ride up the mountain, but first we stop at this crazy glass blowing shop where they sell the most amazing bowls…”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhh...” says Cindy. See, she needs this. Her mind just doesn’t take those pathways naturally, they never would. Cindy comes from three generations of programmers. Her peak romantic experience came when she traded office chairs with the cute Asian guy in the fish-bowl office next to hers. And what with being a linear thinker, she builds her understanding of things based on progression. You can only imagine how these stories excite and expand her mind, and also overwhelm. When I am in a session with Cindy I must be very careful not to go into territories that might cause her to spasm.

My third client was Tad, the gas station cashier. As it turns out, it is very hard for Tad, being the only other non-computer programming resident of Altoro. He complains about it quiet openly with me now. Truthfully, I feel sorry for him. He’s fallen in love with several women who stop to get gas or ask for directions, other non-programming types. But they always leave within minutes, pull away and go towards some other town with multiple industries, go on living their non-linear lives.

I now have over fifty-something clients. Some I see almost daily. Others can only truly handle my services and company on a monthly basis. They are mainly first generation programmers and I don’t blame them. I’m very cutting edge with my massage technique. Some people are opposed to change, to trying new things. It’s not their fault, it’s just human condition.

And as for me, well, I’m happy. I’ve found a real niche here. I’ve always got people to talk to. Everyone is very interested in hearing about my past careers, my many lovers, sometimes they even ask for me to read them my poetry. And I do, because they appreciate it. Some of them, they even need it. And that’s why I’m staying.