It was 1AM in the morning, and I waited for the F train at 57th street. I spent the last 8 hours on my feet bussing tables at Benihana. I was commuting back to Woodhaven, a deep trek that had proven to be an odyssey that I had hoped to navigate unscathed. This was a decade ago, when I was new in the city, and I was for the first time experiencing the alienation of being a transplant. I was 21 years old. I had been living a life that consisted of weekdays in literature classes at Hunter College and weekends in the kitchen at Benihana, grueling over the early evening rush. I lived with roommates, a couple that was generous and receptive enough to welcome a vagabond. I moved to New York City to be closer to my partner who had been attending Hofstra University during the time.
As I waited for the train to arrive, I thought about what had led me to that station in life. I felt the late summer air rush through the tunnel, an indication that my train was to arrive. This wasn’t anything like what I had imagined.
*
In Ketchikan, there wasn’t much to do but watch movies. In a city that rains for most of the year, you have to have something to sink your teeth into. There wasn’t a manual that existed to prepare you to move to Alaska. Neither was there one that existed to get you out.
I remember the moment when my father barged into my room to tell me that “We’re headed to the Last Frontier.” I was 15 years old living in Virginia. I was on my computer, watching fail clips on YouTube, and enjoying the lull of summer. I had spent the past three summers in surgery, recovering from an ailment in my ear that caused deafness. He opened the door, and I took my headphones off. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from my father. “We’ll be moving in the winter.” In my teenaged state, I expected that there was little to do, little to see in a “drinking town that had a fishing problem.”
*
When we moved to the way, way Northwest, I took to filling up the gray days by locking myself away in my room, watching movies, and imagining myself in the colorful pastures that existed outside of the GroundHog Day-of-a-town of Ketchikan.
I was 18 when I first watched “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.” I didn’t read the book that the movie was based on, because I didn’t like spending my days stuck on words. I was at the 2 and a half year mark of living Alaska. I had made a couple of friends. We were the youngest children in our respective families. We silently commiserated in the shadows of those that had paved the path. Perhaps, we had all carried the curiosity and confusion about what was to follow for our lives. But to deal, we had our beloved movies. It got to a point where I had spent most of my evenings in the basement of one of their parents’ place, finding an escape on the screen in front of us.
The movie’s opening scenes feature the city lights shining as Nick’s “Yugo” drives toward toward the Lincoln Tunnel. I watched his car drive toward the skyline. Norah waits for a bus with her friend before getting into the thick of the concrete jungle. But even with it being less scenic, one could tell that the strange and inexplicable are to follow. We are made aware of the fantasy. For me, it was was an escape to join our protagonists, both bound for Brown University and Berklee College of Music, and live out the rest of their twee teen twilight.
In a pivotal scene toward the end of the movie, Nick and Norah are alone at Electric Lady Studios, that Jimi Hendrix had built. Norah tells Nick, “the world’s been broken into pieces and it’s everybody’s job to find them and put them back together again.” Nick replies, “Well, maybe we’re the pieces. Maybe we’re not supposed to find the pieces. Maybe we are the pieces.” Up until that point in my life, the pieces had been fragments of my experiences moving through different lives.
We all took a liking to “Nick and Norah . . .” because there was an element of freedom that the teenagers experience in the movie. But I imagined myself in New York City. I thought about the untethered control of navigating Manhattan and Brooklyn without a curfew. The fantasy of being there with my friends, who all loved music and participated in crusty scenes – be it the annual Winter Talent Show at Kayhi or The Blueberry Festival concert extravaganza. We were punk kids dressed in mod attire. We skanked at high school dances. When we weren’t watching movies, we stared at the walls, bored, as we waited for the whole infrastructure to melt. We were trapped, and we wanted to find a path to our true homes. We looked for an adventure that would take us far away. We wanted to know where was Fluffy.
*
From the moment I had stepped foot on Revillagigedo, I had wondered what had brought me there. The first Filipinos that had set foot in Alaska were called Alaskeros. They worked seasonally in the canneries, hailing from places like Washington, Oregon, or California. Filipinos had found their way to Ketchikan and planted their roots. They paved a path. They created a homes and community to belong to, in the midst of snowy winters and slopes that carried the weight of the future. But I wanted more.
I had to leave my father and my mother. I didn’t want to end up in the canneries. I didn’t want to build a house on the hill. I was over the gray winters that had tricked me into believing my imagination was enough. I had my eyes set toward lit windows that illuminated over the Hudson. I had a plan to get myself out of Ketchikan.
As a Filipino kid with the desperation to fit in, I had spent that last year in school trudging my way to graduation, jaded and unconcerned. I had been rejected by all the schools that I had wanted to go to. My boss at the Fish House had offered me an offseason job to work as a deckhand on a boat headed to north. I declined the endorsement of an Alaskan politician to start the process of attending a military academy.
I listened to the places that my friends were headed to after graduation, I wondered if there was something missing in me.
*
I looked around at all the tired faces in the car. I was surprised there were this many people on the train at that time of the morning. I had wished I was at a concert. I put in my earphones and drained the hum of the F train as it made its way toward Queens.
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