ASMR | Santa Barbara 2006

Transcript

Santa Barbara, 2006. In those days I was constantly chasing a good time just out of reach. All I wanted, all I thought I wanted, was to just brush against it.

To finally say I was there when it mattered. There being anywhere. You were always at the happening place, and I was desperate to happen.

I had the swagger, I had good hair, but I was a nice boy at heart. I wasn't practiced at depravity, just a fan of it. I needed a guide, a teacher, a seasoned veteran.

I needed a good woman with bad habits. For my mediocre sins, the God sent me you, to show me how bad I wasn't, and how far good boys can get on charm alone. Farther than some, just shy of further.

I annoyed you because I wouldn't leave. You annoyed me because you wouldn't stay. We didn't have a relationship.

We had songs we sang together when we were drunk, we shared cigarettes, we pissed each other off, I wrote you poetry and you invited me over. You made me things, I drove you places. It wasn't a relationship, it was the taste of something that never left my mouth.

It was a waking dream. April Fool's Day, 2006, I drove up to Santa Barbara, alone. I was warm, not yet hot, following the dust of Ventura's shoreline.

The 101 sent PCH like a screwball down the coast, and I drove with it, with the window way down. It took me hours to rip my way out of Los Angeles, but I made it. To Exit 92, where North Jameson becomes Sheffield Drive.

When I finally got into the city, the sun was pleased to see me. He sat on a throne of ancient wellheads far out in the Pacific. Chewed up piers soaked in the blue water, sand and wooden scrap lined the flattened road pressed into the cliff face.

I navigated away from the preppy arcades to find you, off in the trees in the white sparkle of afternoon. You texted me that morning, are you coming? You asked, yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes, I would come for you.

You showed me the two chocolates, big as your palms and loaded with psilocybin. You handed me a map, and traced out with your finger end where we would journey. Are you ready? You asked me, no, but yes.

Then I got a phone call, a little phone call when I was very far away. The police were on the line, and my sister had been taken in for shoplifting, again. They let her speak, and I, not angry, asked if the pigs had gotten her down.

No, she said, mom was on a plane back to LAX. Where was I? I was north, she was south, and they were taking her to justice.

Well, you had no qualms about letting me go. Your night was already planned out, you'd be enjoying yourself regardless of the company. Maybe it's not about the wrong time, the wrong place, I said.

Clearly we're the wrong people. You're so dramatic, you said. Just come back to me.

Come back soon. My trusty intrepid rumbled over the wide bridge, dead historic street lamps looming over the cracked asphalt that laid south from St. Barbara and her son, King.

I rejoined the 101. I managed to trudge at 70 miles per hour, then hit 80 and didn't apologize. I retraced the hours and miles of painted scrubland until I hit the southeastern slopes of the Santa Susana Mountains.

And then, then another little phone call, when I wasn't so far away. Don't worry about your sister, she's with me now. My mother had landed, had driven to the police station, had saved the day.

Hours ago, in fact. So the choice was, dare I brave Los Angeles traffic for the third time this tedious day? Go big or go home, we used to say.

I wasn't going home. I drove north to Santa Barbara in the crimson dusk, the brown weldings of smog fused with the purple-limbed clouds they'd dragged behind the charred matchsticks of the retreating skyscrapers. The warmth was receding from a balmy 70 into the upper 50s.

The dark chased me to the emptying beaches, and it was there, amid the scents of salt and bonfires that I realized I hadn't eaten all day. So I kept the window way down to snag something fried and easy, then follow the suburban lanterns back to you. We drove to the beach, a parking lot mesa rose high above the fat triangles of rocks elbowing froth from the sea.

Here, you said, handing me the mind-altering chocolate. Oh, but wait. A slow cop shined his lights over my windows.

So we got out like normal people did, wandered off like normal people would, pretended our upper lips weren't sweaty with paranoia, and when it slunk away like a black-and-white hyena, we waited for its laughter to die somewhere in the distance. It's better to do it in the daytime, you told me, but that's for the right people. We ate the chocolates on the mesa overlooking the windy ocean, where the water hammered garbage into sand.

We sat there for a time, waiting for something miraculous. We turned to the car and drove to Hale Park while we were still sane. At least, I think it was Hale Park.

Could have been a cemetery, Burnham Wood, or Montecito. Why not? Wait, did the steering wheel just bubble? No? No? It didn't.

We hid ourselves in the trees. Forty minutes had already passed, and nothing churned in my stomach but nerves and cacao. My arms and knees jingled a little.

Something in the small of my back, the shape of a diamond, was warm, but it was really too dark to see anything. We loaded back into the car and drove to the arcades. On a crowded Saturday night, boys and girls littered the bars and shopping centers.

Illegible banners strung from the rooftops and tangled in flags hung like laundry in Bronzeville 1919. But no memories of my ancestors returned to me. None of the lights chased the statues, and none of the statues stepped down from their monuments to recite poetry or gibber madly.

Fearful ideas stayed locked behind my tingling nostrils. You pulled out a hash pipe, and we removed ourselves from the crowd in an attempt to kickstart the gonzo journey we were destined for. I drove us back to where we'd come from, parked quietly in a mission-styled strip mall not far from your house and a little closer to a long-horizon-lost pier.

Three hours had passed. A few lonely sales clerks were walking aimlessly into the night. You pointed out the small apparel store you had clerked in.

I said I saw it, but actually it was invisible behind the island of birds of paradise and lilacs planted in the middle of the lot. The sodium vapor lamps buzzed, and without my glasses it all bled into a hazy glow of yellow. We stood there, half-high and now bereft of even the strangers shuffling into the Santa Barbara suburbs.

The adobe courtyard was forlorn, and the chill of the California night settled over the broad plaster eaves. You forget how cold the desert gets after sunset when you move away. It's an easy thing to forget, if not for moments like these.

Pitted concrete made up what was left of the sidewalk's edges, stood upon by brown benches that looked like sunken horses. Without my glasses, the street lamps fuzzed past their borders, expanding like electric champagne. You pointed to a thin lane of tiny cottages as we crossed the street and told me it was a community of little people, famous Hollywood dwarves placidly settled into retirement.

Could this be true? I don't know. We found ourselves in another strip mall, or maybe it was the same one on the other side.

The night was done for, and then, then, then a merry trill of sound. What was that? In the corner of the strip mall, not ablaze by hazy bulbs but strung with candles, demure flames whipping and sashaying with the tinkle of silverware on glass, there rose the unseen whine of a violin.

It was a restaurant, and some invisible instrumentalist, like a ghost, was playing out the evening. We stood there, listening, and I looked at you, and we joined hands as I said, Madam, dance, and you said, Dream on. It was an invitation.

And we knew it, at least, I knew it, that someday, many years from then, more years from now, I would be dancing with you in that empty parking lot. You would be teaching me to waltz while someone played a violin and people ate food around the corner. I knew how you felt then, how your skin felt, how your clothes felt against mine, how your hair fell against your shoulders and brushed my cheek.

I knew someday I would be here, remembering you there, with a head still unclouded by a belly full of mushrooms that didn't work, wrong people, wrong place, good time. And grateful for that, I knew that someday we would still be dancing there, somewhere, at home in my mind. I cannot dance, but I moved with you in a sleepy California town, far from home, in a waltz, in silence, for all time.

I knew it. We knew it. I know.