15 August, 2006 | Leave a Comment
People have been teasing me about the fact that I will not name the place where I’m staying right now. It may seem like I’m doing this as a joke. It’s become a joke by this point, but I’m not naming this place for other, more personal reasons. I lived in The Place That Cannot Be Named from the age of 8 until 20 (before that, I lived in California). My parents and grandmother still live here, as well as a few other relatives I’m not close with. My family does not have strong ties to this place and my parents hope to move away in the not-too-distant future. My extended family and ancestors come from all different parts of the country (and most of my relatives are complete strangers to me, because of this and other reasons); as such, I do not identify with any one part of America – there is no part of this country I think of as mine, as home. That’s why I hate when people ask me where I’m from – beyond the United States, I can’t answer that question. I’m from wherever I happen to be living at the time.
There are many complicated reasons why I don’t like The Place That Cannot Be Named. The most important reasons are cultural, religious and political, but I will not discuss these things because I don’t want to and because it would be impossible to do in this format anyway. I choose not to name this place because I do not wish to be associated with it. It was not my choice to live here or to be a part of this culture and refusing to name it is one small act of defiance. If you’ve read this blog for a while, then it’s pretty obvious where I am anyway. I am only here now to visit my parents and grandmother. I see no one else while I’m here and don’t venture out much. I hang out with my parents, visit my grandmother, go to restaurants, do a little shopping, etc. All very low key. Once my parents move away, I have no plans to return.
Putting aside the very complex reasons I just alluded to but do not want to discuss, one thing I really can’t stand about this place is the overwhelmingly bland suburban landscape. I’m in a big suburb right now and this kind of environment always depresses me. I find big American suburbs to be frightening, soulless places.
Perhaps I should clarify that. There are different kinds of suburbs. When I moved to the Boston area, I lived in the suburbs (though still inside the immediate metro area). But many of the Boston suburbs pre-date the Revolutionary War and as such, they are historical towns, proper towns, not bedroom communities that sprung up in the fifties or later. That’s a very important distinction, at least for me. These towns where I lived in New England have a center, a main street containing the town hall, library, businesses, post office, etc. When I moved to Arlington and then Waltham, Mass., I was in awe of this. I’d never experienced anything like it in a suburban environment. A town center? Amazing. Depending on where you’re from, you may not understand why this is a big deal to me.
Growing up in a big suburb in the American West, where everything is new, everything is sprawl, you don’t get this sense of community or place. [These kinds of suburbs aren’t unique to the West, but are found in most regions of the country. Still, the situation is more extreme in areas of rapid growth, areas where there is room to spread and grow.] In these suburbs, there is no town center. These towns [if you can call them that] contain tracks and tracks of houses (often identical, boxy McMansions) and strip malls. That’s what life in these towns revolves around – Home Depot, movie theaters, restaurants, supermarkets, car dealerships. It’s all purely commercial culture. These suburbs have no real individual identity and no history. And it’s not as if most of the residents commute each day into the major city they surround – a great number of people spend the vast majority of their time in these non-towns. Driving up the coast of California a few weeks ago, almost every 20 miles or so in the populated areas we passed, a strip mall with Home Depot, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Petco, etc. etc. would pop up, each one a carbon copy of the previous one. This is what large sections of America looks like now. I really can’t stand this and it’s a tragedy that this is a dominant theme of the American landscape.
I really wonder what kind of effect these suburbs have on the people who live in them. For me, I never felt a strong sense of place growing up. Everything seemed new and disposable and meaningless. Perhaps if you’re reading this and you live in London or somewhere in Europe, living in a place with no history or real culture seems liberating. Perhaps to some people it is, but I can’t stand it. The streets in this state (or at least in Big City and the surrounding suburbs, called “the valley”) are laid out on a perfect grid with numbered streets, making it almost impossible to get lost. It’s like this, of course, because the early settlers deliberately planned it this way. A city like London sprung up organically and as a result, no one can find their way around the jumble of streets and alleyways, etc. I much prefer that.
The suburb where I grew up is emblematic of the kind of suburb I’ve been discussing. The area where I lived was middle to upper-middle class. On the surface there was the veneer of perfection – the big houses, the nice cars, the nuclear families with lots of children, etc. I went to a high school with around 2,500 students. My graduating class contained more than 800 students. [About 99.9 percent of the student body was white.] When the Columbine massacre occurred, I just kept thinking about how that school was exactly like mine – a giant warehouse stuffed with thousands of homogenous suburban American teenagers. That’s a truly frightening place to be.
Like any place in America, The Place That Cannot Be Named has the usual criminal activity and social problems, even gang violence in certain parts of town (drive-by shootings, etc.). And given its relatively small size, there have also been a surprising number of famous crimes, from Ted Bundy to Gary Gilmore, just to name two. But I just want to focus on my specific suburb and not even that – just my neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods that were connected to and fed my high school. As with most of these seemingly-perfect suburbs, there was a lot of dysfunction beneath the surface.
During my time living here, I knew (either personally or as friends of friends) over a dozen people that committed suicide. All of these people were males. The suicide rate for males in this state is the highest in the nation; the state’s overall suicide rate is the 9th highest in the nation. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for those aged 15 to 24 (nationally, suicide is 4th for this age group). Eighty percent of successful suicides in this state are boys/men and the most common method is by firearm (60%) followed by hanging (20%). The suicides I knew or knew of were wide-ranging, including a twelve-year-old classmate of mine who hung himself with a belt. In high school, the captain of the football team shot himself in the heart not long after our team won the state championship (inspiring at least one copycat). The news that someone had committed suicide was not met with shock or horror. There was nothing surprising about it.
In addition, the use of anti-depressants in this state is twice the national average. There are a great many depressed people around here and the reason why is obvious – in a place where so many people have a morally superior religious attitude, there are a lot of people who feel inadequate, who feel they cannot possibly live up to the unrealistic level of perfection that is expected of them. There is so much pressure and many people just snap and go crazy (and this craziness manifests itself in many different ways). Many of the boys I knew who killed themselves were seriously depressed and as a result were taking drugs. I guess, though I have no proof to back this up, that some of them suspected they were gay and chose death over coming out in a place like this.
Besides the suicides, there was a disturbing number of high school classmates killed in drunk driving accidents (often with other students behind the wheel – one girl at my school took her dad’s Porsche for a joyride with three boys from our school during lunch one day and killed all of them in a fiery crash. She was unscathed and then afterwards complained that she couldn’t drive to the mall because her driver’s license had been taken away.). A few of my classmates came from polygamist families but it remained hush-hush because polygamy is illegal in the United States of America – everywhere, no exceptions.
There were also rather bizarre crimes. A boy from our school shot his sister dead; she was also a student at the school. A few years after graduation, a couple guys from our school (who were totally cool and nice, or so it seemed) started committing armed robberies, mostly of bars and restaurants. They were even featured on America’s Most Wanted after one of their robberies ended in murder. They were eventually caught and put in prison. And then who can forget the man who went to the women’s health center at our local hospital with the intention of murdering the doctor who performed a tubal ligation on his wife. He and his wife already had 8 kids and the wife asked for the procedure without telling her husband, which really pissed him off when he found out. He went to the hospital and couldn’t find the doctor, so he took a bunch of people hostage, including women in labor, and before it was over he had shot and killed a nurse. (The guy later killed himself in prison.) This event was turned into a made-for-television movie starring Harry Hamlin.
All of these people came from my immediate area of town, a rather small area in a rather small state. I could go on with other stories, but I won’t. You may think it’s silly for me to be so sensitive about my history in this place and I can understand that. But I’m not perfect (I know, shocking). We all have our issues and this is one of mine. As soon as I possibly could I got far away from this place and these people, but they will always follow me. When I moved to New York, people acted as if I had just arrived from Mars. This is when I began to feel uncomfortable talking about The Place That Cannot Be Named. It was too complicated, it attached a stigma to me that I did not want or deserve. When people find out I used to live here (which isn’t something I broadcast but sometimes it’s impossible not to mention it, especially given that my parents still live here) I have to deal with all the questions and jokes and myths. When you tell someone where you used to live do they laugh in your face and judge you and ask you how you escaped and other extremely personal and/or ignorant questions? Probably not. No matter how far I go – New York, Boston, London, Paris – it’s never quite far enough.
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Sounds a hellish place, I need my history and culture, which is why I love Europe so much. Can’t stand these grid systems, makes the place so dull, far better to have a ‘mess’ of tangled streets…keeps you on your toes.
I can’t help wondering if I am right about the ‘Place’. I was so damn sure after doing my research (oh yes, I am that sad, I did RESEARCH!!!). Guess I’ll never know
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Gadfleye Says:
August 15th, 2006 at 3:00 pmIt’s a good thing that it’s so easy to get a handgun in America (kudos to the NRA, the Republican party, and the bleeding heart gun manufacturers)in order to protect oneself from all these crazies. I sleep much better at night.
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Korova, I didn’t say your guess was wrong, you’ll just never get me to admit anything.
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I understand your feeling uncomfortable about the place that cannot be named. As you know I went to school there and it drives me bonkers my needing to apologise or explain it.
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Thanks Nicole. You’re one of the few people who can understand what I’m trying to say here. And how odd that we met each other in London?!
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Susan Says:
May 30th, 2007 at 9:56 pmIs it Niagara Falls, NY???
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Nope! Much farther west.
