A Guide to (the Costs of) Getting Lost

by Linnie Greene

I moved to Oakland alone, less than a month after I married my Modern Love, Mike. This had always been the plan. I deposited half of the money from our wedding, holiday checks from relatives, and the wages from my last few shifts at the bookstore in my bank account and boarded a plane, loneliness hovering on the opposite coast, waiting for me in my shoebox room.

There were reasons for going. My seven-month sublet would be with one of my best friends, the rent rock-bottom for an apartment in the Bay, and things besides loneliness lived there, too: a few scattered publishing houses, a small but formidable literary scene, succulents growing in sandy soil, public transit, reputable newspapers, the sunny existence of Rebecca Solnit and Joni Mitchell and Joan Didion under all those palm trees, California sirens whose words have always been my rafts.

On the last few hours of my flight, I finished, for the second time, my signed copy of Lydia Davis’s Break It Down, the only book I could squeeze into my carry-on. When Mike was in the hospital a couple of years ago, we fell in love over the titular short story, in which a man tries and fails to quantify loving and missing, a brief tryst whose sum is best measured in thoughts and hours. He told me he read it in the hospital bed and missed me. Reflecting on love and risk, the narrator says, “It’s hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, All right, I’ll take it, I’ll buy it … Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing … So I’m just thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like $1,000, and how you can come out with an old shirt.”

I read that story again somewhere over the Sierras and thought about the price of loneliness. Arriving in Oakland, I picked up Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and tried to quantify that, too: how much would it cost me to amble, to wander, to cast about while I wait for a job and my husband and the certainty of solidness, familiarity?

1. Peace of mind: $2

Without regular income, and with only so much money in my bank account, I relied on my feet and a pair of Walgreens cushion inserts, which keep my legs from feeling brick-heavy at the end of a trek to the far ends of the city. Underneath bridges, at night, when a man is rolling towards me on a Razor scooter shrieking about Jesus, I pony up my Clipper card and pay $2 to get on the bus, carrying armloads of groceries of a Goodwill lamp.

2. Books: $78

I spent my first two days panicked: there were only a few pages left in the book I checked in my big suitcase and all I do between writing, eating, and walking is read. Sometimes I combine these things, to varying degrees of disaster. I had gotten rid of nearly everything back home, except the box-full that will be shipped to me eventually. At Mrs. Dalloway’s, I bought Jocasta Innes’ The Pauper’s Cookbook for $20. At the downtown Oakland Goodwill, I bought Charles Portis’ True Grit, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a Modern Library paperback of Picasso’s sketches, and John Bellairs’ The Curse of the Blue Figurine with an Edward Gorey cover for $10.

At Pegasus Books in Berkeley, I bought Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling for $17. At Diesel in Rockridge, I got Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies for $31. In coffee shops and public parks, between job applications, I have finished three books. This is the kind of spending that would make my mother angry, but I have needed books now more than any time before. I made my living as an independent bookseller and I believe that this money will eventually come back to me. Through a job. Or a book deal. I got a library card, so that will help.

3. Beers: $18.75

A $5.75 Burning Oak Black Lager from Elmwood Café, where I read 80 pages of the Solnit book with a dead phone, waiting to meet a friend at a reading next door, unsure how to get home. $14 for two sour beers at Lost & Found, an aptly named beer garden where I met my roommate and a dear college friend. We sat in a small outdoor booth and talked about our hard weeks, whether we have biological clocks, and where I should go to seek employment.

They tried to orient me to the neighborhood. The most salient image of the night is a shuttered, graffitied burger place that reminded me of something my husband would photograph. As for groceries, I lived on the gift cards to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s I got in my Christmas stocking.

4. Misdirection and discovery: $1.80

I walked ten blocks down Broadway in the wrong direction and had to take BART four or five stops south. I peered into lots of coffee shops on the way and found the post office, where I mailed by fellow a card with a cat that says “Hang in There!”

5. A map of the Bay that I’ve hung next to my bed and a pair of cushioned shoe inserts for my lace-up boots: Free

Thanks to a Walgreen’s gift card my friend Johanna gave me.

6. Wonderment: Free

The woman who frightened me when she approached me at the bus stop, only to find out that she wanted to talk about the free yoga at the senior center, her childhood in Texas, and the rash of young black men killed by police. Streets that peter out into dead ends, and open up onto hills stacked with houses, reflecting the afternoon sun. Jacaranda trees raining petals on College St. Pride when I take the right bus without looking at my phone. 68-degree weather. The thought: “Maybe I can do this.” The knowledge: “I can do this. I am waking up every morning and doing the damn thing.” Strong calves. A full heart.

Cost for lost & waking hours since landing at SFO: $0.44/hour. Not too bad, when you break it down.

Linnie Greene is an essayist, book reviewer, and fiction writer. She has had or will have words with The New York Times, Electric Literature, and The Hairpin, among others. She has three cats and an affinity for pizza.

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