Lisa is my ride-or-die this Friday morning, and yes, I had to look up the phrase to see what it means. It feels both stupid and appropriate as she pulls up in front of my house at 8:30 a.m., dark, chin-length bob with bangs, red lipstick, and a broad smile visible as I glance through the living room window. Maybe she’s my ride-or-die because I’d rather die than have to drive us into the Baltimore Convention Center this morning.
We are braving city rush hour to join 10,000 other writers, editors, and publishers at the AWP Writers Conference, the largest in North America—hence the dread. In this situation, the energy of longing, aspiration, and grasping is palpable. And it goes on for three full days.
The internet reveals that “ride-or-die” is a term coined in the 70’s by the biker community to describe a person who offers you unwavering loyalty in times of your greatest risk and need—I like to think this is me to you–but this is definitely the person I need to be with this morning.
“Ready?” Lisa says as I scramble into the passenger seat with my phone and conference folder. My white stucco house with my sunny office overlooking the street appears a bit staid as we pull away, and I feel a little road-trip-reckless. A bit giddy. I’m playing hooky. I’m on the lam!
Adding to the tension this morning is the fact that Mercury is in retrograde, which means that disruptions in communication are likely—wrong time, wrong location, the car breaking down —are all amplified possibilities. (“If you believe that crap”), texts my friend Ted when I tell him I can’t make lunch. He also says things like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah” to global warming.
I have reserved a parking place near the Convention Center, but finding the garage entrance, which is camouflaged and requires a secret handshake to enter, is our first challenge. Once parked and feeling hugely self-congratulatory, we make our way over to the Center where we are suddenly weaving through a stream of people flowing in the opposite direction with wide blue lariats and badges around their necks. There it is. That grasping energy.
We want badges! We want blue lariats!
We hurriedly front up at the welcome desk and are both told that the $100 tickets we bought, which are designated “All inclusive-anywhere/anytime,” are, in fact, not inclusive of our physical presence. If we want to actually walk into the conference, which we can see happening on the other side of the barricades, we need to each cough up another $80.
“Let’s leave, “my r-or-d says.
“Yeah, maybe we should leave,” I say. But we say it to punish the impassive volunteer demanding more money. To show him we won’t be exploited by their Mercury in retrograde miscommunication.
I hesitate. Good money after bad? Or waste what we’ve invested?
Lisa hands over her credit card and pays for both of us over my protests. “You paid for parking,” she says. And I nod, because I intuitively believe my credit card is going to be charged twice and we’ll be even.
We identify the presentations we each want to attend and part company. My goal is to learn more about Substack. Lisa is down the hall at historical memoir.
I settle in to pay attention to my panelists and within 20 minutes, I’m gathering my purse and jacket to make a discreet exit. The panelists are jawboning on about how their careers started, how they met each other—irrelevant anecdotes times five.
Talk to us about us. About our deep desire to give our hearts and minds to strangers and have it feel like good work in the world.
It’s quite the paradox—the grasping energy that is here looking for the means to give itself away. 10,000 writers want to turn life into language. Experience into meaning.
I slip out and search for a restroom, only to discover the line outside the ladies’ room is 15 chatty women deep, streaming out the door. Right next to it is a restroom that is marked “All genders.”
There isn’t a soul standing there, and the door is wide open. I picture individual stalls with doors like those in the co-ed dorms in college. I’m totally good with sharing, I think, forgetting Mercury is in retrograde. I slip through the door only to see six men standing with their backs to me in what appear to be little phone booth cubicles—at least I want to believe that’s what they’re doing. Making phone calls. Six heads turn my way. We are all quite surprised to see each other. I am back out the door as if by osmosis.
I find Lisa again and we are starving but most of the food is in vending machines. I watch writers stand in front of them like puzzled pups, heads cocked, tentatively holding out credit cards, like communion wafers to supplicants, waiting to have them ingested, waving them around when they are not, poking buttons, looking helplessly over their shoulders.
Eventually, we find a free-standing pastry cart next to a counter where the coffee has just run out. There are exactly two dried-up, hard-as-brick rolls in it. We each buy one for $8, then find a place to sit and gnaw on them. I’m laughing now. It’s as if we grabbed the last piece of sustenance as our ship went down and now have to make this roll last until the next tanker spots our raft adrift in a North Atlantic shipping lane.
I run into a talented former student, whom I like and respect a great deal. She has come for all three days and tells us that she sat in on a presentation on failure that was mesmerizing, life- changing.
Longing rears its head again.
I would love to have someone teach me how to alchemize failure. I suddenly realize that is the desire at the heart of everything I write. I am forever attempting to spin straw into gold and buy your love with it.
My Buddhist friend Ned would say detachment is at the heart of meaning. But I think it’s desire. Desire is source energy and this place is flooded with it. It’s why everything in the universe is in motion, from the smallest vibrating electrons to galaxies. Desire is a pulse. Detachment is a pause.
We get back to the garage, but the gate stays stubbornly down. I start to dig out my credit card again, when we see a button to press for help.
A man appears. He makes our gate open, and we are suddenly released into the stream of traffic. We turn on Paca, then left on Greene, and we’re on our way home.
I watch Baltimore disappear, look over at my ride-or-die, grateful for a witness to this day. At home, I will spin this straw into gold for the person who most matters, the only way I know how.
I’ll write about it.
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