Drift Novel.com
by Sara San Angelo
In 1991, when my younger sister was 16, she ran away from home. A few months later, she came back and got me. It wasn’t because our parents beat us or were crackheads. We actually came from a pretty well-to-do family. My dad was the vice president of a company. We lived in a big house on a golf course and had a country club up the road. I even went to a catholic school for 6 years. I guess the universe just had other plans for us.
I suppose it started a few years earlier when we met those bad boys that lived downtown in our city. If you’ve ever been to Charleston, SC, it is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been to. It’s over 300 years old and was the site of the first shot of the Civil War (Yeah, we started that too, after South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union). Walking around the historic downtown area is like walking through time to 1770, with opulent mansions and cobblestone roads around every corner. From every vantage point on the small peninsula, you can see the ocean. The Charleston area is literally a bunch of islands connected by bridges. And there are plenty of century-old allies to duck into and get away from the tourist. But I digress…
These boys called themselves Back Alley Ruckus. It originally was a band name and there is still vehement disagreement as to who came up with it (James, Chris and Rich all claim credit, I believe). They listened to loud punk rock music and squatted in abandon buildings. They didn’t have a care in the world. It turns out most of these guys came from o.k. families too. Definitely not the kind of stories you hear on TV about homeless people. They just didn’t buy into to the paradigm, the one where you go to college and then slave your ass off the rest of your life in some crappy job just to buy a bunch of crap you don’t need. Their time was best spent having fun and seeing the scenes.
And they were smart too. They knew all about world events and the crazy things happening out there in the so-called “real world”… one I was just dipping my feet into. So we all became friends and by the time I graduated high school, (I advocate getting an education above anything else) I was drinking with them in back alleys and blowing my mind with great music and all things mind enhancing. All the while, our networks grew and there were literally hundreds of us haunting market tables after hours and making ruckus in the back alleys.
Upon graduation from high school, my dad wanted me to go straight to college. I disagreed, vehemently, if I remember correctly. I felt that getting a job and some real life experience, at least for a year, was better than being thrust back into another school with another bunch of wackos, all away from their parents and exhibiting no restraint. I think if parents gave their kids a choice, they wouldn’t waste four years of money on keg parties and strippers.
Anyway, my dad was just doing what his paradigm had told him, bless his heart. Needless to say, some stuff happened (too long of a story for here), I moved out and Julie ran away.
My apartment became a meeting place of the minds, as distorted as they may have been at the time. We wrote poetry and created masterpieces and knew we were invincible to the outside forces of Greed and Materialism. We were the enlightened ones. Of course, the neighbors didn’t feel our vibe and I was kicked out shortly after. After a couple of stints of couch surfing, I ended up squatting as well. When I look back on it now, it was like slowly falling to the bottom but the bottom wasn’t as bad as they said. It was actually quite liberating. Then Julie came back and told me about a whole ‘nother level.
She told me of a huge community of people our age out there doing the same thing we were. It seems a large percentage of our whole generation had the same idea. And it wasn’t just the punk rockers, it was the hippies and the rednecks and the dorks and the goths and any group you could think of. With nothing left to lose, I jumped in with both feet.
We went to New Orleans first (pre-Katrina…God Bless all those who have stuck it out since) and I saw for myself a whole generation of kids who threw off the invisible shackles of materialism and riches. It was reminiscent of the movement their parents started, but then sold out for an empty promise of “success in the real world.” I often wonder how the great movements of the 60s, where the mantra was “turn on, tune in and drop out” fizzled from view to be replaced in the minds of that generation as “turn on the TV, tune out nature, and drop into a cubicle.” Of course there are many out there who held firm, and dropped out and off the grid for good. There are many lessons to learn from them.
So there we were, gathering by the hundreds at the river, passing the bottle and telling stories and exchanging information from other parts of the world.
We were under the surface of it all, and no time was that more evident than during Mardi Gras, watching a river of a million people coursing by while sitting on the curb drinking their leftover Hurricanes and Kamikazes. Nothing that happened up there was of consequence to us, unless it involved the even-higher up horse cop. His job was to peer beneath the surface and pluck us out like fish, so as not to upset the chaotic flow that poured so much money into New Orleans.
That was my jumping off point on a great journey.
I did this on and off for about 8 years. Then I felt it was time for the next great journey, going to college and getting my writing degree, which I did about five years ago. I have written all my life and always knew I was going to write a book. I just didn’t know what it was going to be about. Of course the Universe has it's plan for all of us.
