Chaos Fragments

Tales from the Drinking Days

Photo by Tom Caillarec on Unsplash

*If you enjoy this pulchritudinous yet sordid tale, you’ll LOVE my short story collection, American Freaks, which you can buy HERE. Just got my first Amazon review.

*If you value my work, please consider going paid. You’ll gain access to ALL my writing as well as my serialized novel (1-2 chapters drop every Thursday). You’ll also have access to locked Notes, locked posts, locked comments, etc.

**This is what I’ll call “fictional memoir,” like my fictional memoir, Two Years in New York: Before, During and After COVID. What does that mean? It means 98% of this happened in real life…but I changed some minor stuff around, removed some stuff, played with it just a tad. But basically: This happened. It was 2004. We were 21.

~

The night the shit went down I was with a friend I’ll call Greg. He was in inch taller than me, dark-haired, an active alcoholic (like me) and a junkie needle-user with Hep-C, and had a tattoo on the juicy, fleshy part of his lower lip where it gets pink and gummy; he liked to tug his lower lip down and show off the strange ink.

Anyway, I was living in Ojai at the time, where I grew up, the small mountain town a little east in the mountains from Ventura, along the coast, where I was born, a couple hours north of Los Angeles. We were 21 years old, dumb, drunk and punk rock.

One night Greg and I went to a punk show in Ventura. Weeknight. We both had to work the next morning; hilariously, I worked at a prestigious tennis club in Ventura which required me to be in my car by 4:30am to get their by 5 and open the place, full of rich aristocratic hedge-fund managers, CEOs and golf-playing investment bankers. Greg worked at a restaurant.

The show was at Skate Street, a punk and skateboarding venue. The band was called The Lower Class Brats. Hardcore shit, a fetish with the sartorial style of A Clockwork Orange, songs about random violence, a packed show full of young, sweaty dudes with liberty spikes and mohawks who wanted to break shit and instead came here.

After the show Greg and I—drunk—jumped into my plastic white Saturn and drove the 25 minutes east along Highway 33 which took you from Ventura to Ojai, away from the sea and towards those glorious, snow-capped distant mountains. Ojai always felt to me, even then, like a warm pair of arms embracing me in a tight, safe hug. I was covering one eye with my hand while I drove, too often seeing three or four lanes on the two-lane, empty road. It was after 11pm.

Somehow along the drive—both of us smoking Marlboros, our windows all the way down, Lower Class Brats blasting on the stereo and me doing somewhere between 90 and 100 MPH the whole way—Greg and I decided (Lord knows why) to get some beer in Ojai (why we needed to go all the way back to Ojai first never made sense to me) and then drive to L.A.. There was, I recall, a feeling of tension in our decision. Something, I remember sensing, was going to happen.

Shit was going to go down.

~

We got to Ojai and hit the familiar liquor store near where I lived with two other punk rockers with no direction in life. We didn’t stop by the house, though. We got a handle of Vodka and a 12-pack of cold PBR. We grinned in our stupidity. Life felt so fun and easy and fast back then. No real responsibilities. Sure, we had fulltime jobs, dead-end ones, but we just did our routines and that paid our meagre bills. Other than work, everything was open to us. The sky was always blue. At least that’s how we thought back then.

As I drove us back south along Highway 33, the empty road ahead of us, the yellow divider and the shoulder like some appearing and disappearing test, drinking our PBR cans cold in our palms, I remember feeling so fucking alive that I was almost physically vibrating; I could barely even handle so much aliveness. I was like a high-tension wire. Youth, man. It’s really something profound, even when it sometimes feels mundane when you’re in it. We didn’t know how lucky we were, how good we had it. We took everything for granted, expected so much from society, our parents, all of it.

By the time we reached Ventura again it was well after midnight. At the split, the Y on 33 where you can go right transitioning to Highway 101 going north 300 miles to San Francisco, or left onto 101 going 100 miles to L.A., we briefly hesitated, suddenly thinking…San Fran-fucking-cisco?, but then I veered left, seeing four lanes when there were only two again, and we headed towards the City of Angels.

But we never made it to L.A.

Instead, we ended up pulling off the highway somewhere in Thousand Oaks, about an hour south of Ventura and still a little north of L.A. We were along some hills. Random empty roads, and then soon random empty residential neighborhoods. When we drove slowly down one random street, strings of large, fancy homes with big lawns along it with the half moon bright and white and shining down deliciously above us, Greg said, stop by that car.