The first time I fled the nest I must have been 19 or so, still wet behind the ears, and in need of different scenery. It was nothing particularly extravagant. It didn't require me to learn a second language. I didn't need a passport. I didn't have to line up a new job. I made like Fievel, and headed west. A good high school friend of mine, who we will only refer to as Vlade, had gotten into a pickle here in Nashville, and moved out to California to dodge the static as the situation simmered. He actually grew up out there. "When I was growing up in Cali, I was seven-years-old and went with my family to one of Rod Stewart's soccer games", I heard him claim on a few occasions. I even asked him about it again as I wrote this, and he still assures me it's the truth. With my first crummy j-o-b at Blockbuster no more (I was late one too many times, at least they didn't know I'd jacked shelves worth of VHS movies [before DVDs became popular]), I decided that Nashville offered nothing for me during that Summer. I had no responsibilities. No illegitimate kids or high school sweetheart. No career goals or motivation to do anything except live my life, my way.
I was good friends with Vlade, and either he invited me to come visit, or I asked him if I could. He was staying with his folks, so lodging and rations were taken care of. The plan was to just go out there and see what happens, maybe find a little job and just kick it (we did much more of the latter). As I recall, my dear mother payed for my Greyhound ticket, because I'm sure I had spent any money I had saved on teenage shenanigans. The night before I left, a girl I had been spending a lot of time with stayed the night and tried like hell to get me to make with the whoopee, but I kept it in my pants. I wasn't very experienced sexually, but it had been instilled in me by my mother and grandmother that sex was something spiritual and sacred, which I didn't fully understand, but believed in. After some hot & heavy second-base (rounding third) action and little-to-no sleep, she dropped me off at the Greyhound station early in the morning, and I boarded the bus with a few bags and an acoustic guitar, and a vessel full of anticipation.
I must have been so excited. I had my discman, Radiohead's "OK computer", Far's "Water & Solutions" and "Tin Cans With Strings To You", "Dredg's Leitmotif", and maybe even Tool's "Lateralus". These were all amazing albums to listen to during the large part of the bus ride that took me through the desert. It's as if those albums were the soundtrack specially scored for my journey. I remember buying a knockoff brand of Carmex called "Lip Ex" halfway along the trip that somehow turned out to be even better, nurturing my lips like a kiss from Aphrodite herself. It's all of the little things that remain engraved in my memory, which there's not even enough room to write, since after all... this is a memoir, not a novel. I I remember it being 102 degrees at a stop in Yuma, AZ. I remember eating a lot of fast food, and taking birdbaths in bus stop sinks to keep from smelling like a yak burp. I remember while the bus was boarding I'd sit in aisle seats with my backpack in the window seat and pretend to be asleep in order to bogart two seats, because nobody would wake me up on the off chance that it was another person's seat that I was about to sprawl myself across. I remember anticipating how much better the mexican food would be in Cali. I remember the radio stations being infinitely more kickass once the bus approached the West Coast. I still have poems and sketches that I drew during the ride, which took an uncomfortable two days total to travel. At one point our Greyhound driver fell asleep and ran off of the road, which created an awkward silence until we got to the next bus station. Scary. "I'm sorry folks, in all my years as a Greyhound driver, that has never happened...", he announced over the intercom, as if an apology could resurrect a busload of crumpled skeletons. I remember using calling cards to call the girl back home after every few stops, back before everyone and their children had cellphones. I remember the way the desert skies and landscape looked from the window, how vast and infinite it seemed, as if the bus could extend wings and transport me to another solar system. I couldn't wait to set foot of that damn bus though.
Santa Maria, CA was the destination. Comparable to Brentwood, TN, I think the closest big city must have been Santa Barbara. Upon my arrival, it was great to see Vlade after many months. Him and his folks picked me up from the station, and we headed back to their condo. I unpacked and unfolded the collapsible mattress that would be my bed for the duration of my stay. Little things were different. There wasn't so much litter on the streets. The sun seemed to burn clearer. The air was laced with an oceanic twist. Nobody had twangy southern accents. Hardee's were called Carl's Jr- I was like "what the fuck?". The architecture was different. Newer. There were also In-and-Out Burgers, Del Tacos, Whattaburgers, and Wienersnitzels (restaurants we don't have in Nashville). The climate was a cozy. The barbecue was a different style. The beach was only a short drive away. My muscles were in atrophy from the bus ride, so it was a bonus that the condo had a hot tub. I also had a mean case of blue-balls from fooling around with the ladyfriend back home, which I don't know how I bared during the two day bus ride. By this time the soreness was excruciating. I recall telling Vlade "Hey man, I gotta go upstairs and do something about these swollen testes! Cool?", and of course he understood that I had to take care of bidness. It was the most exquisite relief (release) I had ever felt. Now, finally, I was ready to unwind.
During my visit we took a trip to Pismo Beach, and caught a farmer's market in San Luis Obispo. Vlade's neighbor usually had really good weed, and although I was taking a break from smoking at the time, I'd grab some beer or whatever liquor we had laying around and we'd and go over there to hang out. I taught myself to play guitar, and also practiced playing bass during my visit. At night we would fall asleep listening to the Coldplay album "Parachutes" (their best), which was some of the most beautiful music I had heard before. I remember his neighbor had a porn magazine with a close-up on one page of a girl's vag, and the clit was so big that it had what was appeared to be a penis-head on it, which became known as the legendary "wenis". Pretty weird. One day I saw some pills in Vlade's mom's medicine cabinet, and we concluded that it was generic vicodin. I think I ate one or two of them, drank a little to catch a buzz, but then proceeded instead to sleep for a day or two straight without so much as getting up to piss or eat. Turns out the pills were amitriptyline in the wrong medicine bottle, so it's no wonder they knocked me out cold for so long. We would go to the hot tub and dismantle life, conversing, theologizing and philosophizing the world into smithereens. We talked about girls, circumstances back in TN, beliefs, traumas from the past, and at some point I even told Vlade that I wanted him be my firstborn's godfather (once he's born, of course). We would put in applications during the day and eventually get hired at a division of Lockheed Martin that handled supplying electricity to AZ, but by that time things were getting tense at the condo with his parents for whatever reason, so I decided that my presence wasn't helping things. I was only in Santa Maria for about a month before I felt that I had overstayed my welcome, and I was just about ready to go home. I had a girl waiting for me back home, and was starting to miss my other friends already...
It was time to return home.
Right before they dropped me off at the bus station, we ate at a mexican restaurant with a salsa bar, and I got a burrito the size of my forearm. The salsa was en fuego, so about an hour or two into my ride back to Nashville, I had a digestive fiasco bubbling, and bolted to the bathroom on the back of the bus. Not a pretty situation. I had arrived in Cali with blue balls, and left there with a red ass. Such a colorful way to come and go. Since that first travel westward, I've been back to other towns/cities like Santa Maria; from Turlock to Santa Cruz, Oakland to Long Beach, San Francisco to Berkeley, San Diego to etc. during tours doing hip hop music, as well as recording an indie-rock album with my band, Vessel, all while meeting all kinds of different people along the way. Mustache parties which led to naked hot tub parties, flying kites from the roof and sleeping in our recording space at Soundwave Studios, excellent sushi, independent movie theaters, black & white rooftop parties on Haight Street which were broken up by cops using percussion/flash grenades, pools at natural hot springs so hot that they'd boil you alive, dodging bullets to hit up taco trucks, filling medical marijuana prescriptions, sleeping on strange couches, rolling blunts on subway trains, finding skateboards unattended (yoink!), and buying alcohol for minors, and random hip hop shows are miscellaneous adventures that happened to me, when I happened to Cali.
But I'll never forget the first one, in Santa Maria, CA.
No comments:
Post a Comment