nag champa

“Look at this hippy. Hey hippy, you fucking stink.”

I grab my bottle of Nag Champa, which has come open and leaked all over the couch, and wonder how this happened, because I figure most people find the scent pleasant. I do. I have been carrying it around all fall for exactly that reason. It is concentrated oil, and a little goes a long way, and what I know standing in their living room with the wet ring spreading out from under my hand is that it is never coming out. Not this year. Not next. The spill is embarrassing at first and then satisfying, my mark left on the room. I’m not using patchouli and I’m not even particularly dressed like a hippy. I step to the next room to grab a Pabst Blue Ribbon and wonder if I’ll ever fit in.

I started college in Laramie, Wyoming in 2002 and was so stinking happy to be out of my hometown of Gillette I could have sung from the roof. Which I did, that very first night, after watching my Dad pull away in his Jeep Comanche and feeling the swell of tears in my eyes and the heat of preemptive longing in my face. My grandpa was raised here. His grandfather’s name is on a town in the southeast corner of the state.

Contraband beers in hand, we stand on the eighth floor patio of Orr Hall making jokes and yelling down at the other students trying to parallel park. Someone below will read our whoops of glee as a threat and this will be the last night we’re allowed up here, but it doesn’t matter to us now: we are free.

I made my first friends on the smoking bench. I lived on the second floor of Orr Hall with a view of the corner from my window, and the moment I saw a pack of cowboy killers whipped out I ran down the west stairs and rushed up to introduce myself. The feeling of not fitting in started to melt away as I found my tribe. I started Food Not Bombs as my big push in the last of my teen years, taking a shopping cart from Albertsons and walking it the twenty-odd blocks back to the dorms full of cookies and trays of vegetables we had found in the garbage, beautiful and intact under the plastic. They started spraying bleach soon after, but again it didn’t matter: our thoughts couldn’t be policed.

At Campbell County High School, back before the city split it into two campuses, my locker was in Hick Hall. Far west side, out by the ag wing, where they were putting up a trailer in the lot and boys practiced roping between bells and hardly any teacher ever came down that way. I never went to it. Not once in three years. I told myself it was because that hall was nowhere near my classes and I was walking in from my car anyway, which was true, and which was not the reason. The building told you what you were and you were expected to agree. I wasn’t a hick. Later I wasn’t a punk. I never dated anybody in a band and I didn’t stay. So the Sheridan kids startled me. They said hello to each other, and then they said hello to me, and I kept waiting to find out what it was going to cost. It never cost anything, but that didn’t matter then: we had more friends to meet.

Sometime during my second year I moved out of the dorms and into a basement apartment on Ninth and Grand. The carpet in the bathroom was soaked with piss and the whole place smelled like it. It didn’t matter, because here I could smoke inside. Here I could do blow off the two pieces of furniture I had amassed. I could spill Ramen with cheese on the floor because I couldn’t afford groceries during summer semesters when financial aid was slim. I could become paranoid and depressed and lie on my side feeling my stomach round out because I had stopped exercising in favor of partying.

The Laramie kids were nice at first, and they mattered to me because they generally knew about house parties. Every Friday we would gather and I would call up my buddy Craig to figure out the locations. We started calling ourselves Grand Central Station and we traded coordinates like war generals: Fourth and Shields, Eleventh and Kearney, and one time we gave everyone Seventeenth and Grand and then laughed when they realized we’d sent them to the dorms. Back to School Sweater Party, Short Shorts Party, Sunglasses Party, Brad and Tiffany Party, Geriatric Party. The parties lured in the punks, and I’d been deemed a hippy.

I went to their shows. Basements and garages and back rooms, standing up front in the heat with my ears ringing, for years, because I thought that was how a person came to belong to a place. I knew the songs. I knew which of them played what. I would have told you they were the best thing about this town.

During the Short Shorts party I looked up to see a few members of a local popular band come through the door, and the women around me began to fawn. The party grew and grew. Men had gotten the memo that the girls would be dancing in short shorts; women had gotten the memo that we would be dancing. I DJ’d from my antique record player credenza while my roommate grabbed a bottle of Febreze and sprayed it right into the crowd.

Laughter and mist intermingle, and through the haze I hear the hiss again. “Fucking hippy.”

And they came anyway. That is the part I have never worked out. They said it in the kitchen and turned up the next Friday, on my floor, drinking what we had bought, dancing to records off my credenza, and I was the one with the address. I gave it out. Then two weeks would go by and one of them would ride past me on a bike and call out, hi Jen, like nothing, like we were friends, and I would feel it land somewhere in my chest and carry it around for days.

Now I am standing in an empty room in the old schoolhouse across the street from my house. Six hundred square feet, six hundred and thirty-six dollars a month. Enough for chairs in a circle. Enough for the writing group I have been talking about for a year and not starting. I ask the woman showing me the space about the heat and the wiring and whether the windows open, and I do not ask her the question I am actually asking, which is who is on the other side of that wall. Through the plaster somebody is running the same four bars over and over and not getting them.

In September of 2020 I came back to Laramie for four months while I waited on a lease in Fort Collins, and I tried to keep anyone from knowing I was here. I had a house with a twin bed and one chair in it. That was the whole inventory. I had been gone ten years, I had not come back on purpose, and I did not want to be seen.

I see him at Reed’s, which is what I call it, though the sign has said Ruffed Up Duck for a long time now and calling it Reed’s is how you let a room know you have been around. His brother has been dead five years. He is celebrating, somebody says. Getting married. The second time, I think. His eyes are glassy and he looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.

He knows me. Almost twenty years after the couch and he knows me.

How are you really doing, I say.

He says he’s okay. He looks like he might cry and he says he’s okay, and I can see that I have put my hand down on something, and we barely know each other and he is not going to open it for me. His friend has something and the three of us crowd into the bathroom and nobody says a word about any of it. When we come back out the bar is still going. Somebody is buying him another round.