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He pressed the gun harder against my forehead. It hurt a little. He pretty much closed his eyes completely. The tears flowed like rivers. I waited for it. This was the ultimate Punk Rock Thing To Do. Rebellion, baby. Fuck it. Why not? Life was dumb, paper-thin and pointless anyway, wasn’t it?
Joanna Basker lived in a tiny studio apartment on East Santa Clara Avenue, between Palm and Oak streets in Ventura, California, an hour-and-a-half north of Los Angeles along the coast. Across the street was Don’s Liquor, which I went into every time I visited her. The studio was miniscule; perhaps 300 square feet or so, with a tiny kitchen, a little cot for a bed, a record player, a box of records, and a small T.V. There was also a little bookshelf brimming with beat-up, ragged, musty-smelling classics, The Brothers Karamazov, The Last Tycoon, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, etc.
She was my age—25 circa 2008—and worked at a job I’d connected her to before I myself had been summarily fired for being a dumb alcoholic; she worked in childcare at the fanciest tennis club in Ventura.
We’d met through my high school punk rock buddy, Jared Richardson, who’d been dating her for five years from just after high school until about 2006. Jared and I’d had a love/hate friendship ever since grade school. We’d gone to the same public elementary school in Ventura, and then, surprisingly, the same expensive private Catholic school in Ojai, east of Ventura in the majestic mountains, the little hippie town of 8,000 my folks had moved us to in 1991.
During high school it’d been hardcore punk rock, drinking, parties, drugs and girls. The two punk buddies I’d run with knew Jared through a mutual friend. So we reestablished our always-previously-strained friendship. His folks didn’t like me. Never had. I never knew why. They lived in an expensive beach house in Silver Strand, near Ventura. In 7th grade his parents bought him $150 Nike shoes and I hated him for it.
But during our teens we also bonded. We did wild shit, for example me driving us back from a punk show on a weeknight, totally wasted, 17, so drunk I was seeing triple and had to cover one eye with my palm to attempt to see “one” road and then having Jared steer the wheel while I casually laid back and just pressed my Doc Martin boot to the gas pedal, Jared telling me when to push hard and when to use the brake. How we survived is beyond me. And not just that night but most nights. Most days, too.
Anyway, after high school things got interesting. We were 18. We both said—quite literally but also symbolically—Fuck You to our collective parents. I started working at the front desk of the fanciest tennis club in Ventura, which was amazing given my constant drinking. I was punk rock on weekends and combed my hair and put on the black and gold uniform Monday through Friday.
Jared worked the overnight shift loading merchandise at Walgreens in downtown Ventura. We’d both decided on community college versus “real college,” as most of our high school classmates had chosen. They all went to Stanford and Harvard and Berkeley. Idiots following “the system.” Capitalist chumps, or so we thought back then. We were wide-eyed, anarchic kids. We didn’t know a goddamn thing. But it was fun.
So Jared worked the overnight shift. He drove up to Humboldt one day for a few nights, visiting a mutual buddy from high school, another punker dude we knew named James Hertel. While there, the second night, he met a woman at a Lower Class Brats show. Joanna Basker.
The two miscreants started dating from a distance, either of them driving up or down to see each other, sometimes for a whole week at a time. Joanna worked as a busser in a steak restaurant up in Humboldt, smoked a lot of pot, and read old books alone in her rented room. She hated it there and wanted to flee. She’d been born and raised in Redding, California. She was thick with a large bosom and had a funny mix of white trash, intellectual and musical genius within her. She wore a “Chelsea cut,” aka her head was buzzed all the way down except for bright red bangs in the front only.
Finally, she decided to move in with Jared. Combined, they made enough to get their own place. They rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment on Harris Street in the Ventura ghetto, aka Ventura Avenue, where the Latino gangbangers were always driving around in their lowered or lifted Lincoln Continentals, windows down or up and tinted, blasting gangsta rap. At nights shots were frequently fired. Mexicans commonly lived 10 in a two bedroom. They filed out like ants. But it was cheap. And it was not living with their parents.
*
Through Jared, of course, I met Joanna. I found her attractive, if not strange-looking. She had deep royal-blue eyes, sensitive, plush pink lips, was borderline fat, and was surprisingly smart, thoughtful, intense and different. What, I thought, was she doing with the pathetic likes of Jared Richardson?
The first time Joanna and I met was at a Missing Twenty-Third punk show at the Ventura Theatre. We met at subsequent shows after that. But it wasn’t until the first time I actually visited the couple at their trashy, cluttered, stinky apartment that we finally had the chance to talk.
The apartment was perhaps 500 square feet. Tiny, crammed kitchen, little bedroom, mini-bathroom. The place reeked of pot, spilled rancid beer, body odor, sweat, and hair products which Jared used to spike up his foot-long blue mohawk. One of them was always drinking a forty, usually Old English or Steel Reserve. They both smoked pot every day. Joanna smoked Marlboros, too. Music was constantly playing in the background on the record player, usually classics like The Germs, Agent Orange, Misfits, Channel Three, T.S.O.L., etc.
That evening when I came over I sat down on the couch, this time The Adolescents playing on the record player, Jared almost immediately said, “Hey man, you want to move in with us?”
I stared at Jared hard for a moment, then glugged from my fresh, just opened, cold Old English forty, which he’d placed in my warm palm. Then I glanced at Joanna. She gave me a look which seemed to hold some sort of hidden promise, some kind of mysterious secret.
“Here? Or somewhere else?” I asked, drinking again. I’d stopped even going to community college classes by then. Already I’d shot heroin, done more coke than a Columbian drug-lord, been arrested half a dozen times, gone to jail three times and become estranged from my family. I’d moved out and lived with another punk friend in Ojai. I hated the commute to Ventura five days a week.
“Here,” Jared said, popping the clip on a forty of Steel Reserve. He chugged half the bottle down in one stellar gulp.
“Yeah,” Joanna said, her feminine, attractive voice rising which possessed a certain edgy toughness to it. “Just pay the utilities, man. $250 a month. Sleep on the couch.”
I considered this. My rent now was $400/month for a room. But I hated the commute, and I hated living in Ojai. The price was right. I’d be closer to work. Living with friends. I said yes.
*
Two weeks later I had moved in. It was a Friday. Jared worked Monday through Thursdays only. So he was home. Joanna worked 9-5 M-F. I worked M-F 8-4. Friday, Saturday and Sunday that first week we drank all day, laughed at stupid mutual jokes, reminisced (me and Jared) about high school, played a billion punk records, and left the house only twice, once for more booze, and once for a short, pot-induced desire for the beach.
Finally Monday arrived. Joanna and I went to work. Jared slept in. All day I thought about being alone with Joanna. Jared worked the overnight shift; 8pm-4am. I imagined what she and I’d do: Listen to records, drink, talk about deep stuff, take a walk around the dangerous neighborhood. I smiled, thinking about it all.
But that night, after spending a few hours with Jared, Joanna said she felt exhausted from work. It’d been a long day, she said. I felt disappointed. Yet, I didn’t fully know why. This was my good buddy’s woman. I was living in their apartment. Careful, I told myself. Careful.
This continued for the next few weeks; Joanna always had an excuse: She was tired from work; she felt sick; she was on her period; she wanted to go hang out with her girlfriends. So we never hung out.
Until one night we finally did.
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