Nick’s Life: An Interactive Timeline
After twenty-six torturous hours, my mother finally squeezes me out sans epidural in a feat of will power and endurance that she will remind me about for the rest of my life.
I am adorable and annoying but have no memory of any of it. You don’t remember when you were two years old either.
I grow up listening to my mother gossip and my grandmother tell stories, which are kind of the same thing when you think about it. I am consumed by curiosity about the people around me.
Curious about somebody around me, I wander off with a stranger, scaring the absolute shit out of my mother who finds me down the block. I am also never allowed to forget this.
My parents divorce, my father succumbs to mental health challenges and addictions, and I enter what will be forever known as the Lost Years, where I try my absolute best to lay low and disappear in an Inland Empire junior high school hellscape.
My tour of hellscapes continues at Centennial High School where I am a dutiful teacher’s pet but something of a social outcast (nerdy, gay, awkward—see photo). I work on the school newspaper and literary magazine, make an unlikely appearance on The PBS News Hour, and focus on getting into college and out of Corona.
I attend Brown University where I graduate with honors, write an opinions column for the Brown Daily Herald, and shamefully (though shamelessly at the time) steal massive quantities of food from the common room kitchens.
I make my cable television debut on a Phil Donahue (remember him?!) hosted round table on college admissions. I let a couple of zingers fly on live TV and make my family proud.
I take a gap year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, working at a Starbucks where I entertain my regulars—college students and retirees—with fables of my foibles. I am ultimately fired for conduct unbecoming a barista.
On a Eugene Cota Robles Fellowship, I begin my PhD program at UC Irvine, learning as much as I can about Oral History from one of the pioneers and titians of the field. I’ve spent my life thinking about the stories my grandparents told me, and now I write them into the historical record.
I begin work on my PhD Dissertation, “Spinning the Bottle: Ethnic Mexicans and Alcohol in Prohibition-era Los Angeles,” which, in addition to being well-researched and beautifully written, is also a bit on the nose because I was drinking a lot during this period of my life.
I move to San Diego for a PostDoc at UCSD and begin teaching History and Chicana/o Studies at UC Irvine. But, alas, neither my heart nor future are in the academy any longer and I make the decision to quietly flee to a career in marketing.
I get a baby kitten. Her name is Selena and the love is eternal.
The Very Drunk Years. I make a lot of memories at the bars and with the boys during these years in San Diego. Unfortunately, or fortunately perhaps, I don’t remember many of them.
The day after my 35th birthday, I meet Greg and everything changes. Following Greg’s lead, I become a Beyonce fan and begin riding motorized wheel devices.
Greg, captivated by my stories of triumph and tragedy, encourages me to attend a Moth StorySlam in Los Angeles, which I win by telling a story about the relief I felt when my family finally made fun of me for being gay (it’s a long five-minute story!).
We get married at an enormous, three-costume-change event, with two heartbreaking absences: my grandmother, who we have just lost to Alzheimers, and Greg’s parents who decline the invitation.