San Diego Days

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Photo by Brady Cook on Unsplash

There’s always been a certain madness connected to my life. Especially in my twenties. The Drinking Years, I call them. Let me set the scene for you. It’s 2006. I’m 23. Growing up in Ventura and Ojai, north of Los Angeles, I’d moved with a “buddy”—long story—to San Diego in late 2005. Long story short: The buddy and I made it a year and separated no longer friends. We’d lived in Pacific Beach, of all places, two grim serious angry punk rockers surrounded by bleach-haired six-pack-stomached bros and beach-bunny girls. It was as absurd as it sounds.

That year I’d read Kerouac’s On the Road and it’d changed my life. I saved up money working yet another dead-end retail job, sold my few possessions (including an old drum set I had in storage) and hitchhiked for my first time around the Pacific Northwest that summer.

The fall of 2006—now solo—I found my own little apartment near North Park. I started working for the same guy’s tourist clothing store as I had done before my traveling. Downtown in the gaslight district. I worked alone. They had another little store a few buildings down and there I met her.

She was a wild one. Sort of a mix of punk rock, goth, Bowie-confusion. Wore plaid skirts. Had ink up and down her arms. Her cheeks, which were perpetually bright rosy-red, were pierced. Ditto her septum. Fishnet stockings. She had a boyfriend, and then another guy on the side, she told me. Yeah. That kinda woman.

We talked whenever I was slow at the job; I’d creep on over and start a conversation about my teen punk days seeing shows in LA, or she’d tell me about some guy her boyfriend beat up the weekend before. She seemed to always be warning me and yet luring me. A cheap trick. Possibly not even conscious. Yet I chose to keep going there.

When she—her name was Otta—said she was in dire straits and was being booted out of her downtown apartment, I made a snap-judgment choice which would haunt me. I offered for her to move in with me.

My place was small, just a little 600 square-foot one bedroom on the second floor. It was my place to write and read and drink. I’d go out to bars—alone—and troll for women. Usually I was unsuccessful. A few times some fish bit. I had posters on the walls—Jim Morrison on stage in 1966, sinewy and thin, muscular and handsome, before he became a full-blown overweight alcoholic washup. A blown-up poster of Social Distortion’s album Sex, Love and Rock-n-Roll. Iggy Pop, onstage somewhere in the early 70s, half naked, cut up from hurled bottles. G.G. Allen, ditto.

Two weeks later Otta was living in my place. But not just that. Stupidly—I really cannot explain my twenties—I gave her the bedroom and I slept on the old creaking foldout couch/bed in the living room. During the day we worked. At night we got Mickeys forties and talked about life. I showed her some of my poems. She tried not to laugh. We had drunken sex one night. It wasn’t very good. Her boyfriend never came over. But the guy on the side did a few times. He was conventionally good-looking: Tall, light beard, blue eyes, thin, muscular, jeans and tee. Typical dude. He always seemed leery of me. He rarely touched Otta. Something felt off about him. About them.

One day I got a call from a number I didn’t know. I picked up. Turned out to be my downstairs neighbor. He informed me that my “girlfriend’s boyfriend” was dealing cocaine out of my apartment. He said that people came and went up and down the metal stairs every day all day. He said the people were constantly sniffing. He’d found a stain of suspicious white powder on the stairs that morning. They were always loud until late at night. (I worked late nights.) He’d had enough.

I apologized and thanked him. I worked the rest of my shift. I thought all day about what to do. I wasn’t certain by any means. I had to talk to her, that was clear. Something had to change.

When I parked along the curb out front of my place I felt anxious. It made sense. Confronting people was never my thing. It was awkward, uncomfortable. Sticky. I grabbed my things and walked up the stairs. The lights in the apartment were on; I saw that from my approach. I heard some voices inside.

I inserted my key into the lock and opened the door. It reeked of sweat, booze, beer and body odor. Seven or eight people sat around, on the couch (my bed) and on the counters in the living room. Everyone looked high. Beer cans sat around like trash.

Janis Joplin was playing on the old-fashioned record player, the song Me and Bobby McGee. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…

Otta was not there. The guy-on-the-side was. He grinned dumbly at me with a blank expression which called to mind the Bret Easton Ellis book Less than Zero. Then the toilet flushed. Out walked Otta. She looked good. Short, tight red plaid skirt. Pale legs. V-neck blouse. Cleavage. She sniffled.

“Hey,” she said, smiling at me. “What’s up?”

I dropped my pack onto the ground next to me.

“Who’re these people?”

“Friends,” she said, sounding sort of pouty.

“Are you doing coke?”

She laughed. “What if we are?”

“Are you selling coke. From my apartment?”

“Want a line?” she said.

“Answer the question.”

“Yo!” guy-on-the-side piped up. “What does it matter, man?”

I gazed at him with intensity. “This is my apartment. Only my name is on the lease. It may not matter to you. But it matters to me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Otta said, trying to end the matter.

“Oh, I’m worried about it. Very worried.”

“Take a chill pill man,” one of the random high guys said. He sat on my kitchen counter, shirtless, beige Billabong shorts on, eyes droopy, dirty blond hair disheveled. He looked to be 19 or 20 at most. How old was Otta? Twenty-five, I guessed.

“Get out. All of you,” I said.

“What?” Otta said.

“C’mon man,” guy-on-the-side added. “Be cool, bro.”

“Get. The. Fuck. OUT.” This time I half yelled. The edginess in my voice—expressing some deep inner rage—surprised them. It surprised me, too.

The half dozen of them, except for the two miscreants, left in a hurry. Someone stopped the record. The music died. I stood facing guy-on-the-side and Otta.

“What’s your problem, man?” Otta said, anger now dripping from her voice.

“Fuck you.”

“Hey—” guy-on-the-side started.

“Sit down,” I said to him.

“Let’s talk about this in private,” Otta said to me.

I nodded. I followed her into her room, aka my former bedroom. She closed the door. It was nearly dark in there. I could hardly see a thing.

“Now, what’s all this about cocaine and everything?” Otta said, acting dumb.

“You know what’s going on.”

“Do I?”

I sighed, long and loud and slow. I suddenly felt—at 23—very old and very tired. I’d only been drinking for six years but it had drained me spiritually. I was estranged from my parents. A rebel-outsider alcoholic madman. I had no direction. I chipped away at community college every time I moved to a new city but so far no degree. I couldn’t find a woman. I couldn’t find a real career. Just clothing stores. All I did was drink and write bad poems and read thick books. I felt lonely and isolated, aggrieved and misunderstood.

“Yes, Otta. You do.”

“I don’t like how you say my name. It’s aggressive.”

“Aggressive?”

“That’s right.”

I remembered first meeting her, creeping down to the store on 5^th Avenue downtown. Her boyfriend and guy-on-the-side, her weird-yet-fascinating piercings. Her secretive, mysterious past and childhood. All the things that had both attracted and yet repelled me about her. Freak of nature, just like me. That was probably what drew me: She was like me. A freak. A distant hero of nothing.

“Otta—”

Suddenly the bedroom door burst open so hard and fast it shocked me. The door slammed like a battering ram against the thin plaster wall. It felt like we were acting in some Western flick and a wild cowboy had just booted open the saloon door. Wild west.

There was guy-on-the-side: Insanely, standing, in the door frame, high as a kite, pointing a little black .38 at me, his hands and fingers just ever-so-slightly quivering.

“What is this?” I said.

“Let her go, man,” he said.

“I hadn’t done anything to her. She can go anytime she wants.”

Otta said to guy-on-the-side, “Let’s beat this joint.”

She walked out. The two of them robbed me blind. They took everything they could get their hands on—even some of my hallowed books and personal diaries—and then clomped down the metal stairs. I heard her car start up and then take off, droning slowly away.

The next morning I threw the rest of her stuff out. I knew she wouldn’t be back. I moved back into the room. I changed the locks. I blocked her number. I worked, read, wrote, and drank alone.

It was as if nothing had ever happened. A distant memory. A strange, lucid dream.

I kept living my life that way, like something was going to happen at any moment that would change my world forever.