Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [3]
I loved her for that.
After two years, Liz and I independently came to the same obvious decision: it was time to live in the same city. Though used to the distance, we no longer wanted to deal with it. When I called her one night and told her about my realization, we agreed that I would to move to Los Angeles as soon as I finished up my classes and passed my master’s exam—the PhD was put on hold.
I graduated at the end of January 2002, and less than a month later my things were packed and I was on a cross-country road trip to Los Angeles, set to move in with Liz. I arrived on her front step with a newly purchased, prized possession.
“What is that?” Liz said.
“It’s an original drawing by Wesley Willis. It’s the shoreline of Chicago and Wrigley Field.”
“Well, it’s not coming in the house.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because it’s huge and ugly. Wait. When did you buy that thing?”
I thought about lying, but I knew she’d see right through it, so I felt compelled to tell her the truth. “Uh, last week, just before I left Chicago. I wanted something to remind me of the city and I thought this was perfect.”
Shaking her head, Liz asked, “How much did you pay for it?”
She knew that I had about three dollars in my bank account and a total of sixty-seven dollars of credit left on my Visa, because she’d had to pay for my U-Haul trailer and other moving supplies. Though I’d just told the truth, I used this opportunity for a little lie that I figured would keep me out of trouble. She was pissed that I’d bought this ugly-ass drawing, and she would have been even angrier if she knew how much I’d really paid for it.
“Uh, twenty dollars.”
“You paid twenty dollars for a shitty ink drawing on a giant piece of tagboard? What the hell were you thinking?”
I have no idea why I lied. I mean, the thing actually cost me fifty dollars, so a thirty-dollar lie wasn’t going to make a difference. What I didn’t realize then was that the cost of the thing didn’t really matter. It was the fact that I’d spent money when I didn’t have any to spend, at a time when we were preparing to start our adult lives together as a couple. I was still living in the fantasy world of graduate school, where student loans were used for records and beer. I had no idea what it was like to be a financially responsible, unselfish adult.
My philosophy around that time was perfectly summed up by a T-shirt I saw on a homeless man on the street outside of our apartment during my first week in Los Angeles: The Working Man’s a Sucker. I didn’t have a car, so I’d drop Liz off downtown each morning to make some money for us, then I’d pick her up later that evening. Every day, her first question was “Did you find any interesting jobs today?” I had a new excuse each time, but I didn’t really need to tell her what she already knew: I spent my first few months in Los Angeles actively trying to not be the sucker mentioned on that shirt by hanging out with my other unemployed friends and attending tapings of The Price Is Right.
In June of that year, after more than a few arguments about my motivation level, and a little over three months after my daily fake job search began, one of Liz’s friends recommended me for a job at an Internet company in Pasadena. I interviewed, and in their desperation to get a warm body in front of a computer screen, they offered me the job. My grandmother was appalled when she learned I went to work in shorts and flip-flops, spent most of the week playing foosball, and that Friday afternoons were dedicated to drinking beer at my desk. If only she’d known that I was writing ads for breast enhancement supplements and penis enlargement pills…
There was no real hope of advancement at my job. It was an hourly position, and I sort of just showed up and found novel ways to occupy my time until I could clock out for the day, earning salary increases that barely kept up with yearly cost-of-living adjustments. I didn’t hate what I was doing, but I didn’t love it.
Meanwhile, Liz moved