Monster (fiction)

Wild and Young in San Diego

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

It was in that moment I knew I was a writer. I knew I’d write down what happened. I knew no matter what went down—short, of course, of death—it was always a story. As long as I had stories I’d survive, I’d be alright; I wouldn’t feel emotionally impoverished.

~

You never imagine you’ll take homeless street kids into your apartment, but then you do it.

In 2006—when I was 23—a buddy of mine and I moved four hours south from Ventura, California to San Diego. Theoretically—geographically—it wasn’t that far of a move, and yet it felt like traveling from one country to another.

We were opposites in most ways, my roomie and I. His name was Devin. He was 19, I was 23. He was originally from Goleta, I from Ojai. We’d both landed in Ventura, involved in the punk scene. We knew some of the same people. Devin was tall and thick, half Mexican half white, always wearing tight torn black jeans, a black beat-up motorcycle jacket, and with black medium-length oily hair, a devilock like the members of the 1970s punk band The Misfits had, a thick coiled strand of hair creeping down his face almost to his nose. He had huge black mutton-chops across his cheeks.

I, on the other hand, James Verraggo, was short, thin and from a wealthy family which I tried my damndest to keep secret. To make up for being a filthy bourgeoise I acted harder, tougher and crazier than everyone around me, pulling wild pranks and doing insane shit when I was drunk, which was often.

Devin and I ended up in a small one-bedroom apartment on Thomas Street about thirty blocks from the ocean in trendy, college-infested, Pacific Beach. It was not a good fit. We knew nothing of San Diego, its neighborhoods and areas. We just wanted out of Ventura. We stuck out like two bad sore thumbs. I, too, wore a leather jacket, complete with silver sharp studs. My septum had been home-pierced and it was crusted and infected. I already had a few terrible tattoos which I’d gotten in various random parlors along Main Street in Ventura. We’d both barely made it out of high school. Neither of us had any genuine inkling of a career, girlfriends, family, money, responsibility; adulthood seemed as far away as success.

I’d started working at a tourist shop selling absurd clothes in nearby, gorgeous La Jolla. Devin sold costumes at a Halloween store which was somehow open year-round. We each had a mattress in a corner of the single room. When not working we drank forties, listened to punk music or else my mom’s old hand-me-down vinyl records on the old turntable, or else we walked around P.B. looking for parties, girls or trouble (often all three).

I was still surfing a little at this point and sometimes I’d drive down the thirty blocks along Garnett Ave and I’d throw on the old 3/2-millimeter wetsuit and I’d hit Chrystal Pier. Half the time Devin and I didn’t talk or else didn’t get along. I felt estranged from my family and from my old friends in Ventura and Ojai. Like I said: It seemed as if we’d become aliens somehow, as if we’d entered a totally foreign country, as if we’d magically transitioned from one ghostly form to another. It felt new, totally different, surreal even. Almost like an out-of-body experience.

*

We met the street kids on Garnett Ave one night around 9pm. It was late April, warm spring air, the local San Diegans and college kids out and about with their board-shorts and collared shirts and their flip-flops and their tall, six-pack-stomached bodies, the girls with their short skirts and blond hair, blue eyes. They all looked strikingly the same, a monoculture which pulsed with superficial sexuality. Girls’ thick perfume and guys’ male cologne nastily wafted, omnipresent on the street. Beach bros and beach bunnies, most of them going to San Diego State, the boring white conventional kids we abhorred. It was everything we hated, everything we stood against, everything we rejected. Already, only a month into our new apartment, we knew we’d break the lease and leave before the year was up. There was just no way.

That night, as we passed a gaggle of trendy blond locals—some guy, drunk, saying, Yeah, bro, he, like, totally fucked her in the garage—I saw the two miscreants down the block. They were typical street urchins: Those kids we all know about who are always off in the background, blurry to most of us; the kids who hop freight trains and shoot heroin and who have dropped out of polite society.

Unlike the locals, these were kids I’d often felt drawn to. I hadn’t yet read Kerouac’s On the Road, or hitchhiked across America—that would come in the summer, a few months away—but I knew intrinsically that I wasn’t exactly conventional, wasn’t part of the “normal” crowd, wasn’t ever going to be some standard all-size-fits-all kinda man.

I tapped Devin’s leather-jacketed arm, making him focus. He looked at me with a question in his eyes. I jerked my chin at the two kids. I saw something mushroom in his dark eyes. We walked down the block, approaching them. A yellow taxi rushed past us on the street. Someone honked loudly for way too long. A bar across Garnett was playing Sweet Home Alabama, the sound drifting out of open windows. A car’s tire clinked metallically against an awkward manhole cover, ka-clunk. Some kid yelled, Fuck that, John! The usual, typical P.B. noises on a Saturday night at 9pm.

We were suddenly upon the two people. They were around our age, early twenties. A couple, it seemed, a dude and a chick. Punk rock, for sure. They reeked of cigarettes, body odor and the feint whiff of mulchy trash and riverbank mud. These kids had been thumbing and train hopping, no question. Two bulging packs with steel frames sat next to them. The guy wore torn blue jeans—absolutely filthy—with ancient black Doc Martin combat boots. For a shirt he wore a white sweat-stained tank-top. His upper body—torso, shoulders, arms, half his face, cheeks—was covered in ink, what mostly appeared, with a few exceptions, to be badly done “prison” stick-n-poke tats. He had thin lips, brown intense eyes, and long fingernails etched with dirt.

The girl was attractive: Small, thin, wearing tight black jeans, white Converse high-tops, a leather jacket. She had a nice six-inch bleach-blond mohawk, the sides buzzed down as far as possible without shaving. Ruby red lips, blue eyes and piercings all over her pale face (ears, nose, cheeks) completed the picture.

“How’s it goin?” I asked the dude.

He looked up. He hadn’t actually noticed us until that moment. He had a hand-rolled cigarette between his thin lips, spittle inking the light white rolling paper. His eyes brightened. He might have been on something but I couldn’t be sure.

Jerking his chin he said, smiling, the cigarette bumping up and down, “What’s up?”

I glanced at Devin. He shrugged. He was eyeing the girl. I was, too. We both wanted her, that was obvious. But the dude.

“We just saw you guys and figured we’d come over. We’re swimming in a sea of frat-boy jackasses here, man.”

The dude laughed at this, his smile curling impossibly high, upward, like a professional clown. As the smile went up, the cigarette aimed down.

“No shit, huh?” the dude said.

Silence for a moment and then Devin, in his characteristic rusty deep voice, said, “Where you guys from?”

The dude cleared his husky throat—which sounded like a big-rig switching gears on a desolate highway—and said, “I’m from Denver, originally. Monster here, she’s from Idaho. Boise.”

“Monster?” I said, disbelieving. The girl looked tough but kind. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

The dude cackled. “Yeah. Everyone calls her Monster cause she gets wasted and rips your head off.”

Devin and I caught eyes again and chuckled.

“I’m James,” I said. “This is Devin.”

“Bones,” the dude said. “You know her name.”

“Hey,” Monster finally said, in a thin, sexy high-pitched voice.

We both nodded at her.

“Yeah,” Bones said. “Got my name from breakin bones in fights back in Denver, mostly Nazi scum.”

“Hardcore,” I said.

“Make no bones about it, I’m hard, son,” Bones said.

We all laughed.

“How long you been in San Diego?” Devin asked.

Bones shrugged, rubbed his arm and glanced at Monster. Smirking, pursing his thin wide lips, he said, “Since this morning. Came in on a freight from Oakland. Took damn near three days. Long haul, lotta stops on the hot-shot.”

“And you’re just sleeping on the street?” I asked. I felt naïve, innocent, and like I was breaking some code of coolness, asking the wrong—perhaps sensitive—questions.

“We find our spots,” Bones said. He inhaled the last of his rolled cigarette, blew smoke out his big broad nose, coughed into his hand, reached into his bag and started rolling another smoke.

I leaned towards Devin, tapped his shoulder, and whispered into his ear, We should invite them back to our place.

He nodded in agreement.

Why not? P.B. was dull. Nothing ever happened here. San Diego was boring as a whole, with its beach bros and blond bimbos and military people and dumb, trendy college kids. We needed something to drum up drama, get some action going, drop a boulder into the placid pond that had been our lives for the past month. An interesting life was a much more enjoyable experience than a disciplined or ordinary one. Being ordinary was my biggest fear. Being “like them.”

“You guys wanna crash at our place? We live like 15 blocks east of here, right off the main road,” I said.

I think Devin and I also had the same thought: Monster.

Bones eyed us for a long, eternal minute, finishing his cigarette and then puffing on it. He burped, sniffled, ran his beefy tongue round his lips, and said, through the smoke he’d just blown outward, “Maybe. Why do you want us to stay with you?”

“I think we should do it,” Monster suddenly, unexpectedly piped in.

My soul smiled. I eyed Devin. We both faced Bones.

“You’re not cops are you?” Bones said.

“What?” I laughed, glancing away for a moment. “Fuck are you talking about, man. We’re punx, just like you. From Ventura, up north. Just trying to survive this dumb thing called life. Just like you.”

Bones still didn’t seem fully convinced. “You’re not gonna try to rape us or anything are you?”

This made me step back laughing. I held my gut. “C’mon, man! You’re huge, anyway! I’m tiny compared to you. If anyone needs to worry about that it’s me!”

This cracked him open, finally, like a walnut between a vice. He grinned loudly. Glancing at Monster he jerked his head and said, “You cool?”

“Yeah,” she said, eyeing me.

He leaned across and cupped his hand around her ear and whispered something for a half minute. She nodded. He said, “You sure?” She nodded again.

Shrugging he said, “Alright, dudes. We’re in.”