Why I Wouldn’t Want to Be in My Twenties Right Now
When the young can’t make mistakes, we all lose.
“I’m just 23. Jesus Christ, you know how lost that can be.”
It’s not going to be the same.
Not for the boys coming up now. The world has moved on. The city has moved on.
I’ve moved on too. But I was supposed to. I was supposed to move on and leave my seat vacant for someone else to take. Another passenger, swinging themselves into the spot I used to occupy, among the battered buildings and swaying streetwalkers and the dealers chanting a constant refrain of rock, powder, down. That’s crack, cocaine, and heroin to the uninitiated, a language I had to learn quickly and have never been able to forget.
Young men need times like this. Places like this. WH Auden used to say that we make our own traumas, that children look for traumatic experiences so that their life can become a serious matter.
But trauma is looking for you too. As it reaches for you and you reach for it, if you’re lucky, a spark jumps between you both. Adam reaching for God and God reaching back, trailing glory, and scowling down from the ceiling.
Somewhere along the way, the world got antiseptic. We’ve always been just a little too good at protecting ourselves. I’m among the very oldest of millennials, and I fear for the generation that’s emerging into adulthood now.
It’s always a struggle to become an adult. Every day, I meet those who never quite made it. But now, it seems even the struggle has been taken away.
The streets were always wet.
It was sticky in a way I had never encountered before, like the black tar pits that pulled down prehistoric monsters so that 40,000 years later, tourists could look at them while their bored kids took videos of themselves dancing. From all over the province and the country, the lost and the damaged descend on a few miserable blocks close to the port in the warmest big city in Canada. Many of them never leave.
I saw them for myself. Fresh-faced kids full of group-home bravado would show up on the block, pudgy and wide-eyed and wearing their best, snapback caps and down jackets and stolen sneakers that wouldn’t last a week. Months later, I’d see the same kid, leaner and hungrier and warier, having found that the abuse they fled from had gotten there before them.
But they’d stay because that’s where the drugs were. If you had the childhood they did, you’d do the same.
Hemingway moved to Paris because it was cheap.
“Such was the Paris of our youth, the days when we were very poor and very happy.”
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Affordable rent can be relied on to draw artists as well as junkies. At 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, he began his first novel, writing in an apartment without running water between visits to the bar next door.
The building is still standing. These days, it costs 12,000 euros per square foot to live there. Half a million buys you an apartment the size of a suburban garage.
I was never Hemingway, and Vancouver will never be Paris. But for a while, the city, so beautiful and so lost, was still accessible to artists and idiots. It was a place where you could get by, could eat, could have a roof over your head, even if that roof was in the worst part of town. You had to earn, but you didn’t need to make a lot.
I lived in a tiny room high above the street. A golden Buddha sat in a glass cell on the building opposite, eye level with me when I stood in the window and listened at noon to the fanfare that blared from the Pan Pacific Hotel downtown. Oh, Canada. Shouts reached me from the street below to remind me the world was still out there, this new world I had flung myself into without any idea what it might offer, except that it would be new.
At night, the walls flared blue — sparks from the buses, losing their grip on the cobwebbed cables that run overhead.
I put myself in bad situations. I needed to. I was at the age where, if men were lions, I would have been chased out of the pride. I needed to see the bottom of this world, the worst-case scenario, the dank alleys and dark doorways where people vanish into the blackness, and weather-stained missing posters flutter like pigeon wings. Vancouver noir. A craving for the luminous darkness that is as hard to explain as it is impossible to ignore.
Hemingway’s been dead for a long time.
Europe in the aftermath of World War One was a unique place and time, and comparisons with a vanished world can only take us so far. So let’s look at some more recent numbers. In 1977, the average hourly wage for Canadians was $24 when adjusted for inflation. In 2016, it was $27.
Over the same period, the average price of a house has gone from $210,000 to $490,000.
Or let’s look at my heyday, the early 2000s. It cost me $450 a month to live in the very worst part of town. It could have been less, but I paid extra for my own bathroom. Beyond that singular indulgence, it wasn’t a life of luxury. Sometimes, my groceries were a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter.
But the point is that I lived. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was possible. In your early twenties, you can live off nothing but red wine and rainwater and rust.
Even that may be too much to ask now. In the US, in 2005, the majority of young adults lived in their own homes. That was the most common living arrangement for young people in 35 states. By 2015, that was still true only in six states.
I was 20 years old when I moved into hell.
I clawed my way out of the pit. No contacts, no money, no family or friends. Me against the void. This is the dark heartbeat that keeps young men alive, that sends them off to kill or be killed, to risk everything to know themselves.
I took a job in a windowless subterranean warehouse, paying $9 an hour. The accident rate was horrendous. My coworkers were either kids like me, recent immigrants like me, or convicts — all of them men. There was a running joke in the breakroom that the place represented step thirteen of the twelve-step program. They would hire just about anyone.
I worked there for 20 hours a week, stacking grocery products on wooden pallets and loading them into trucks with the constant time pressure worked out by some Satanic efficiency expert ticking away inside my head. Move too slow, and you were fired. Somehow, I was just quick enough.
And that made me lucky. Because back then, even at $9 an hour, barely more than minimum wage, I could afford to live. $5-$10 a week was enough to buy dry pasta and sauce. The rest went on beer.
And all the time, I was writing, writing, writing. Kicking aside sheaves of handwritten paper anytime I brought someone home, sure that any day now, my big break would come. My time was always just around the corner.
I never quite realized, not until it was more or less over, that my time had already come.
You can’t do that now.
Wages have risen, but rents have gone parabolic. No young man without skills or connections could hope, in twenty hours a week, to earn enough to rent his own apartment anywhere in Vancouver now or any of its empty suburbs. I went from hell to heaven in a matter of months, and I never realized at the time that I was stumbling through a gate that would be closed behind me.
Vancouver still opens its arms to thousands of newcomers every year, but they don’t get to live as I did. They don’t get to work as little as possible and spend the rest of their week trying to get published and trying to get laid, in that order.
So what? Maybe I lived a charmed life for a while, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. The gap opened up for a moment in front of me, and I was just quick enough and just lucky enough to take it without falling into the tar pits that lay all around.
The drugs. The women. The dark hallways of the worst buildings in the worst part of town, where broken people howl under the indifferent moon swimming above the blacked-out mountains.
I grew older, and I moved away from all of that as you should. I started thinking of the future. I started making real money. I somehow ended up with a career, and then another one. Six years after I moved into a tiny cell in the worst part of Vancouver, I found myself buying an apartment in the city.
But some of my most treasured memories are attached to those first few years when I was able to forget who I was away from anyone I knew. I was freer then than I’ll ever be again, freer than any person has the right even to hope to be.
Those of us who’ve seen that kind of light can’t help but hope that others see it too.
But when I look at the brutal economics today’s 20-year-olds face, it seems that light is extinct. It appears that young people now need to devote their whole being to making money from the time they’re teens, or else fall by the wayside altogether. It seems there’s no room for the kind of freedom I enjoyed, to spend a few years wasting time until something halfway decent comes along.
But those wandering years are the making of a man. Without them, I don’t know if it’s possible to come to full adulthood. And this isn’t a tragedy only for those younger than me. This is a waste for all the whole world, one that it may not forgive us.
Because when you have a generation that has never dared do anything that might harm its future earning potential, you have a generation that has never lived. And someday soon, the world will be run only by those who never made a mistake.
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