7 AM, Saturday. An indecent hour — no, an obscene hour. Nothing but a flight or a medical emergency should rouse a freelancer in New York at 7 AM on a Saturday. This time it’s the former. I think.
The sky outside is bruise-dark and the window’s laced with ice crystals. The first thing I really know is that an iPhone alarm is going off. I don’t own an iPhone. Dimly remember borrowing Rachel’s, plugging it in the kitchen, setting myself a ridiculous and indisputable wake-up time. I mean. I have to go to GDC. No matter what else, I have to go to GDC.
There’s some kind of surrealistic death-vice wrapped around my head. Oh-oh-fuck-ouch-okay-okay. Last night we thought we’d go to the old neighborhood, take the L train to our old stomping grounds in Bushwick, to say hello to the old friends, to retread our old habits as a way of sending me off again. The pain of this grotesque and offensive morning hour is familiar. I know I’ve been here before, the bender before the business trip, but you always forget how much it hurts, how much it sucks, to stumble split-lipped and parched and boxed in the face by whiskey and radiator heat among luggage, grabbing coats and cords and the last little wisps of your portable life on your way out the door. If you’d remembered, you probably would have never courted it more than once.
Um. What. Oh, yeah, right, I’ve got to go, I’ve got to get going. Airport, a hazily-realized destination in this absurd and immoral misty numb skullfucking hour. Rachel’s in the kitchen, undressed, unsure whether the alarm is her fault. I don’t really remember what we slur and mumble to one another, half-dressed, half-buried in the crushed and spangled bits of whatever. I make a few laps of the apartment. We hug.
Anytime I leave anywhere I do an inventory: Netbook, charger, passport, bank card. That’s really all I truly and deeply need in the universe. There might be keys or clothes or pen-scribbled directions on a shred of notebook paper, but the whispered mantra — netbook, charger, passport, bank card — lets me know that the things I need to stay alive, to meet my obligations, to create my ongoing existence and immediate future, are relatively (relievingly) few. I carry my house on my back, I think to myself, inordinately satisfied that I’m stumbling through white-hot hangover pain quietly into the apartment hallway and then deliberately down the stairs into the frigid cotton-blue morning, toward an amenable taxi hail. I am a professional game journalist.
Ha, ha. Ha. Back in the day, in, like, 2008 or something, some fan on the Destructoid forums demurely and appreciatively decided to try to make a Wikipedia page for me. I’ll never forget the text: “Leigh Alexander is a professional, female game journalist.”
Bleh, ugh, fuck, ow, what did we do last night: Manic conversations in the dark. Wild hugs from people who suddenly seem a lot more dear because of the liquor and the disorientation and how long it’s been since I was home-home-home turn the music up I’m home. Conversations that seem, in peculiar Bushwick clapboard and candlelight, immediately important and joyful and engrossing — removed from context, in more light and with less booze, they would have been abridged, boring, unwanted, never would have happened.
Where I am from we get drunk together all night, most nights, and then sometimes by day on the sidewalk we just pretend, behind our sunglasses, that we don’t see each other, because we don’t feel like talking. We just get tired. It’s not personal. There’s a tacit agreement you make with the people you drink with and yell and sing and jump up and down with all night all weekend, with the people to whom you tell your life story and your deep secrets across toilet seats and in damp, weird alleys: When we see each other in the aching, wincing morning, we won’t have to say hi.
Like, last night I remember being asked a lot about the difference between life in London and home. Everyone asks me, because it’s an easy way to make conversation with someone who you don’t know very well, except for that you used to see them every weekend at the local most nights for a handful of years and now you heard they went away.
“Yeah, like, London’s been really good for me,” is what I usually say, this time to my friend’s old roommate’s boyfriend who is in a cool band, or someone like that. My voice at the local has a coldness, a sibilance, that I don’t tend to hear in myself when I’m in London. “It’s like, quieter? There’s like, no nightlife. The bands suck and the food sucks. People, like, don’t dance in bars. Nobody’s outgoing. But, like, people in London are much more likely to invite you to their house. Shit closes at, like, 11PM in London. So you have people around for dinner. It’s more intimate.”
My work, the things I really believe in — being a video games journalist — was just basically more stuff I could gesticulate sincerely about to near-strangers I’d known for years in bars and bathrooms, and never really talk about to anyone. Rachel is flatly disinterested in video games. At best, she barely tolerates them. She liked L.A. Noire because she’s into serial killers. No one has seen more episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in their after-work unwind time than my Rachel. My best friend will read my articles if I beg her to, but for the most part it’s just not her thing.
While I was in Brooklyn this crevasse slowly opened, bits of lost nights and skull-drum early mornings falling in, between my professional life and my personal one. But the people who knew me well testified that no matter what I did until two and three and four A.M., I was always up with the sun, bag-eyed and frizzy, bandanna-wreathed, doing a news shift, back when that was my fulltime calling.
There are a few people back home that understand what I do. Only a few. Most of the time, though, I’m in walkup kitchens taking shots and painting my toenails while someone smokes a bowl and plays Nickelback videos and we laugh. At home it’s easier for me to share my facile ideas about the differences between this city and that city than it is to talk about video games.
Or rather, I can easily talk about them. It’s just most people don’t really care.
Here is me, raising my little smoke-scratched voice over the DJ’s subtle mid-1990s pop spin. Couple shots later, I’ll ask the DJ to play the Thong Song. I always do (they never play it). I say things like, “I feel like people in London aren’t so, like, showy in person as we are. Like, girls there only dance from the waist up. No one, like, drops it, in London. But if a British person is being candid with you, they really mean it. You’re really their friend. No one in London says they’ll call you and then, like, doesn’t call you.”
I remember when I met my boyfriend in London. The first morning we woke up in the same bed, I sat up suddenly, gaining my bearings, like a hostage coming around, like an animal waking up in a trap. And I turned to look at him, and he was smiling at me. Even though the sun was up, he was still glad I was there. At one point, in those early days, he said something like what did Brooklyn do to you.
“I gotta get going,” is a thing we say to one another a lot in Brooklyn. “I have to work tomorrow. Yeah, I just… gotta do some shit. Yeah, I got an early flight, or whatever.”
I tell the cab driver I’m going to JFK airport, and just like that, my best friend and her roommates and her dog and our friends and the years of our lives I’ve just cruised through in a zoetrope of drinks and pop beats and loud hollow conversations are flickering away in the rearview. I put my temple against the chilly window, close my aching eyes against the burnished dawn. My headache feels like I’ve taken a spray of powdered glass to the frontal lobe.
Every time I make my flight to something like GDC, I feel like I’ve successfully tricked someone: maybe the Authenticity Police. More likely, whatever squad that goes around checking to see if people masquerading as adults are really adults. Yess, fooled you, I think, buckled into my economy seat in my tights and bright sneakers. I try on thoughts like I’m on a business trip. I suspect this shit will never go away.
That last night I wetly maneuvered a tiny bar toilet full of broken tile, graffiti and smashed glass, as the very foundations of the place throbbed with forgettable music. I shivered in a parka my mom got me when I was seventeen, that still looks good, I think. I shivered on a bedroll on Rachel’s kitchen floor while she was otherwise engaged in her bedroom. I blacked out before I could hear anything going on.
The following afternoon I’m on a plane arriving in San Francisco. I can see glittering sea, and jutting forested mountains and cliffs, from the airplane window. By the time I land the hangover is gone, and it’s implausibly warm and bright enough to make it genuinely hard to remember the last time I really felt the sun on me. At baggage claim I go out onto the curb and just kind of throw my parka on the ground and light a cigarette.
Two minutes later a police lady comes and tells me there’s no smoking, but points me to a special designated zone. She’s very kindly about it.
I don’t go to the zone. I just grind the rest of the cigarette out in the street. Then I check into an incredible hotel and order a ton of room service just because my card passed the minimum daily incidentals reserve and that feels like a miracle. The menu says there’s a “boat of prawns” and so I order that and the sense of slipping into the other half of my double life is so freaking delightful that I squeal.
Walking into a hotel room that’s mine and someone else is paying for it will probably always make me squeal, two beats shy of actually jumping up and down on the bed.
“Leigh Alexander is a professional, female video game journalist.” Ha.