Inside

Who was I kidding? I made a lot of bold claims in my life, but the one that I had trouble with was simply getting out of the apartment. There was a time when I was a teenager living in Italy that I had faced the “threat” of my high school friends coming by to my apartment to scoop me up and take me off base. This was a couple of Filipino twins who had lived at the other side of the Support Site base. When they had hit me up on AIM chat, I began devising ways to keep from having to go off base. I lived on the first floor of an apartment complex with a 3-stairs that led to our door on the right. I imagined myself as Kevin from Home Alone, plotting to keep from intruders stopping by. In a panic, I ran to the kitchen, opened the front door, and I splashed an entire container of Vegetable Oil onto the stairs, hoping that this would keep from my friends making it to my door. Imagine the disappointment that I felt when I heard a knock on the door. “There’s something on the stairs man,” one of the twins said. “Yeah, I think it ruined the bottom of my dunks,” the other twin said. “Yeah,” I said. “I can’t go off base because my mom said so.” The twins laughed and carefully navigated down the slick marble set, off into the sunset, where I had later learned in life that they ran into my older sister and her friends and they partied with the local Neopolitans after the Azzuri had secured the World Cup championship.

In Ketchikan, to go outside meant a lot of things. There were forests that I could hike in. There were pizza joints, all vestiges of 80s Alaska that I could go get a slice. The only thing that separated me from my apartment and these places were that I didn’t know how to drive. Now that I was unemployed and that my father didn’t have a reason to drive after schools, I started to feel as if I had no motivation to go outside. I wanted to make friends. I wanted to experience new things. But I was too afraid to get behind the wheel. For years, I had made it an effort to blame my mother for this. Once upon a time ago, when we were just a new Filipino family in the folds of the American Landscape, my father was stationed in San Francisco. It was a little base that was called Treasure Island, a now abandoned site on Yerba Buena Island where low-income housing and music festivals take place in its modern age. On a drive from San Francisco proper toward Treasure Island by way of the Bay Bridge, my mother navigated with all me and my older sister and brother in the Ford Escort. Driving steady in the slow right lane, a car decided to swerve into her lane, which ignited a panicked chain of events that my mother described as the time “We almost died.” I don’t remember much of that incident on the Bay Bridge, but what I did know was that in Ketchikan, as a 15-year-old curious about the world and wanting to connect with the many places and spaces it had to offer, I was afraid to learn how to drive because I didn’t want to die. For much of junior year, I began to retreat in my room of the lowly-lit condominium. I didn’t want to drive, nor learn. So the next best step was to find friends, friends who could help me get around and connect me to the places I needed to be.