Anatomy of a Small Town

As most of you know, I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. I’ve been told that it’s idyllic, mostly by people who find a town with 2 coffee shops and 2 colleges quaint and think that having a store called America! on Main Street is adorable. Mostly, Annapolis is fucked. It’s the kind of place that can only really be described as Gilmore Girls if David Lynch directed it (i.e. Twin Peaks with more gay men).

I assumed that every small town was filled with “eccentricities” and strange 50 year old drifters who buy 18 year old girls wine. Then I moved to New York. New York is tame, my friends, when you compare it to Annapolis. My craziest night out in New York has nothing on the Saturday afternoon I spent in downtown Annapolis last weekend. Well, I think I started to realize that something was not normal in the lovely DTA (downtown Annapolis) when I started calling it The Hellmouth and quoting Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a near-regular basis.

There is something not quite right with a town where it is perfectly acceptable for a young girl to attend someone’s 48 birthday party in a house filled with college students, and then to realize after the night was over that she herself was conceived in that basement. Or that at 17 and, never having seeing any, I knew where to get heroin.

It’s the sort of town that feigns cosmopolitan status because of its proximity to Baltimore and Washington DC (and, you know, the fact that it’s the state capitol) but all that this really means is that Annapolis gets good drugs.

If you grew up in Annapolis you probably spent most of you time drifting between City Dock Cafe, 49 West, and Moes while looking for a place to drink. If someone’s parents were out of town, or if you hear about a college party, you were lucky. Often you met up with some boys and spent the rest of the evening smoking cigars in a playground. Struggle of the Burbs.

The two colleges in the town, St. John’s and the Naval Academy, lend it a strange air. during the winters all of the coffee shops are filled with college students and high schoolers while the bars are frequented by young men in uniforms. In the summers the tourists flood the streets and ice cream shops, the townies return home from college, and odd St. John’s drop out can be found working at CVS.

My parents stayed in Annapolis after college. They both graduated from St. John’s and out I popped sent to wreak havoc and anchor them in the New England of the south. In High school I enjoyed going to St. John’s parties and shouting “I AM YOUR FUTURE” with the other hapless children of Johnnies. At one party I met Zeb, he asked me what life as a townie was like and told me that he planned on dropping out of college to create a “traveling gay nightclub.” If you don’t leave Annapolis after graduating college, you will never leave.

The Naval Academy is boring. Plebes are only interesting when they are getting blow jobs in alleys from girls who go to the Catholic school or are sneaking older gay men onto the academy grounds. It’s rare that you find out that a group of Naval Academy dudes dropped out to live on East St, do dope, and sleep with girls from the local public school (this is a thing that happens quite frequently to the rest of Annapolis though).

One of my first weekend’s home from college, I live in the big city y’all, I was driving down route 50 with a friend mine who was struggling to get out of Annapolis (he has since made it all the way to Baltimore) when I brought up Bruce Springsteen. After screaming the praises of The Boss we decided that all we wanted to do was to write about Annapolis the way he writes about Asbury Park. But, in all honesty, there’s too much madras and Lily Pullitzer for anyone to reach Springsteen status here.

At the annual Navy v. St. John's croquet team