Bus Speed
Fall 2008
The apartment was on Ridgewood, just off Lyndale, a few blocks from the Walker Art Center. I could see the Spoonbridge and Cherry from the right angle on my walk. For a guy who’d been sleeping on a studio couch and then his dad’s basement a few months earlier, having a real address in a real city felt like someone else’s life.
It was sparse. I slept on an air mattress for weeks until I could get my bed there. My computer sat on a card table — that was the first thing I moved, which probably says something about me that’s been true since I was twelve. Every other week I’d drive back to Algoma to see the kids, and each return trip I’d bring another load ratcheted to the roof. The apartment filled slowly, the way a life fills — one trip at a time.
Even with everything moved, the one-bedroom was bare. So I started buying antiques. Not expensive ones — I was still stingy from my poor days, and $55,000 a year in Minneapolis didn’t stretch the way it sounded in Algoma. But I’d find a side table at a thrift store, a wooden chair at an estate sale, and slowly the place started to look like it belonged to someone with taste, or at least someone trying.
Ashley Halbach from Digital People got me the job at Patterson. Fifty-five thousand dollars. To me, at that time, it was a fortune. The best job I’d had before that paid thirteen dollars an hour. Zak Brown from The Creative Group had told me good Flash developers could make seventy-five an hour, which sounded like Monopoly money. But I was just glad to be there. I wanted to be in a city with art and design and all the other things I’d missed until now.
The traffic was insane to me. Green Bay traffic is two cars at a stoplight. I drove the first couple of weeks, white-knuckling it on I-35, but then started taking the bus — even though it took twice as long. One bus, then a transfer to the light rail, then another bus out to Mendota Heights where Patterson sat in an office park. An hour and a half each way. I’d sit with my sketchbook, breath fogging the pages, watching the city scroll past the window. It wasn’t efficient, but it felt like learning the place through my feet and my eyes instead of just passing through it.
On weekends I walked. Uptown bled into Kingfield. Kingfield into Lyndale. Lyndale stretched south and changed character block by block. Northeast was a different world — studios, old industrial buildings, strange pockets of creativity tucked into places you wouldn’t expect. The North Loop still had rough edges then. I didn’t want to skim across the surface. I wanted to feel the seams.
Then Reggie died.
My old Subaru Legacy — I’d driven him from Green Bay to Minneapolis and back more times than I could count. That Christmas I loaded him up with gifts for the kids: arts-and-crafts kits in wooden cases, handcrafted wooden games from Creative Kidstuff in Linden Hills. Things that felt lasting. Not plastic. I’d barely made it to Hudson, Wisconsin when the brakes gave out. I pulled into a bank parking lot and sat there. Called Dad. No easy answers. I was still close enough to turn back, so I did. I wept in that parking lot — not for the car, but for the kids I wouldn’t see that Christmas. For the distance between us that I’d chosen on purpose because I needed this city, needed this chance, needed to stop being the guy from the small town who never left.
The drive back was white-knuckled, nursing the emergency brake down every hill. The Lyndale exit was the worst. Reggie got me home. Barely. And then my wallet was gone too.
That was Reggie’s last ride. After that, I took the bus for real. My first morning was a comedy of errors — deep snow, a missed stop, a trek through snowdrifts. I arrived at work with a beard full of frost, my coworkers laughing as they welcomed me in. They understood.
I took the bus most mornings after that. It felt right, in a strange way — being carried through the rhythm of the city among strangers. When I needed wheels, I borrowed an old Taurus from a friend. But mostly it was me, bundled up, waiting at the corner, breathing in the cold, letting life unfold at bus speed.
The apartment near the Walker lasted about a year and a half. Then I moved to a cheaper place on Harriet and 34th, in the LynLake neighborhood. El Meson was right there for Spanish food. The Kingfield Farmers Market on Saturday mornings. It was less glamorous than living near the Walker, but it felt more like mine.
Those first months, I missed the kids constantly. Every other weekend in Algoma, each Sunday departure a small grief. But I knew — the way you know things you can’t fully explain to your children — that in order to become someone worth becoming, I had to take this chance. The distance was the price.
The apartment was sparse. But it was in Minneapolis. And Minneapolis was the door I’d been looking for.