In 2015—when I was 32—I bought a small 999-square-foot house in the town of El Cerrito (“Little Hill”) just north of Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area. I bought the house with my parents but my ex came along for the ride. In that sense she—the ex—and I bought it “together.” (She was 30.)
In 2018 my ex and I split up after four-and-a-half years. We’d lived in the house for 2.5 years as a couple. That year I spent crying, recovering from the breakup, working hard, paying off debt, and preparing to follow my literary dream of moving across the nation to Manhattan. On March 26th, 2019, I did just that.
You all know my story by now: A solid, fun, intense year in New York City, followed by the rude, harsh, abrupt disruption that was Covid-19, followed, in the summer of 2021, by what turned out to be my father’s terminal cancer. As fate would have it, I lasted only 2.3 years in New York. And yet I wrote an entire memoir about that brief period, which I plan to publish in the relatively near future.
From 2019 to 2024—five years—I rented my house out for income. I could live in Manhattan, a not inexpensive city. Additionally, of course, I was editing books for money, as I’d been doing since 2013. My father’s cancer journey lasted just shy of two years. Mom and I were his caretakers; I was doing this on and off fulltime, but Mom was always there.
Dad died at 4pm on June 2, 2023. One year ago now. Shocking. Life, death and the surreal passing of time.
*
Fast-forward to now, late spring of 2024. I am 41, married, Dad is gone, I’m living in Lompoc, and Britney and I are planning on selling my house and moving to Spain by the end of the year.
I’d gotten a real estate agent. They were handling everything, including the repairs, upgrades, and removal of old stuff. When I left the Bay Area in 2019 I hadn’t had a concrete plan with regards to NYC. Such is my risk-taking nature. Instead, I moved some stuff into the basement and detached garage and left other stuff in the house and took a plane to Harlem where I’d snagged an Air BnB, a little one-bedroom 3rd-floor walkup apartment on 103rd and 2nd Ave. The apartment was rented out by a talented Brazilian artist; his surreal paintings hung on the orange-painted walls.
Six months later—then in a different Airbnb in Hamilton Heights on the westside—I decided to stay in New York. Doing it entirely remotely, I hired a property management company and hired half a dozen Bay Area friends to move all my stuff—minus a couch, a table, a dresser and some bookshelves—into the basement and detached garage. I had them padlock the garage; off limits to potential tenants.
And that was how I survived—in large part—in New York. I worked editing books. I wrote intensely: Never had I been more creatively inspired than when living in Manhattan. I’d started coming regularly to NYC in 2006, when I was 23, and ever since then the city, the Writers’ Mecca, had called my name.
*
And now—at the very end of May, 2024—my wife Britney and I drove up the 4.5 hours from Lompoc to El Cerrito, along Highway 101. We stayed with a good friend of mine at his house off 98th/Golf Links in East Oakland. When we visited my house it was strange. I’d driven past it slowly a few times over the years when in town visiting friends—Britney had driven by it two or three times, too, since 2022—but I hadn’t been inside the house since I left in early spring, 2019.
The house looked exactly the same on the outside. The same old, dying plants in front. The same baby blue wall color. The same bright white vinyl siding. The same cracked, fat-based brick chimney. The same 2018 roof I’d had installed. The same side stairs. The same curving driveway. The same ancient, beige gate.
Inside it was covered in thick plastic; the contractor and his guys were doing work on it. It smelled musty and stuffy, and I saw dust particles in the gleaming sunlight. It felt like being in a plastic bag. Immediately, memories flooded back to me: My ex and I moving into the house in early July, 2015; working with our real estate agent back then (now dead, I found out: Cancer); getting Lucius, our medium-hair Tuxedo cat, from Berkeley Humane; all the hikes I did up in the Nature Reserve up in the hills behind the house; my red 2000 Honda CR-V I drove back then; the mixed feelings of both contentment and restlessness; the fights with my ex and that last final night, the day after my 35th birthday on Jan 1st, 2018, when it all came crumbling down like a Jenga tower.
Nine years I’d owned that house. So much had happened. So much had changed. I was a man now, in all senses of the word.
*
We arrived to my Oakland friend’s house the night of May 31. We stayed up chatting with him and then passed out. The next morning—June 1st—we took our time and then I drove us to Piedmont Ave (a fancy area in Oakland) and sipped English Breakfast tea while my wife got her French Bob done at a fancy hipster haircut place across the street. I literally watched her getting her hair done as I listened to music on my air pods, sipped piping-hot tea, and people-watched (and dog-watched; dogs were omnipresent). I saw the signs on nearby businesses that sounded beyond desperate: NO CASH IN STORE. Crime and looting had been on the rise. I’d heard about it endlessly on my political podcasts. (Locals all said it was more or less true, if somewhat exaggerated.)
After her hair was done—she looked fantastic—we walked up and down Piedmont. I walked into one of my all-time favorite bookstores—Spectator Books—while Britney talked with her step-mom on the phone outside. Fifteen minutes later—and $60 lighter—I walked out with two thin new hardbacks: Paul Auster’s Baumgartner and Salman Rushdie’s new harrowing memoir, Knife, about his brutal stabbing by a religious psychopath while on stage at a writing forum about keeping writers safe from harm (oh, sweet irony), on August 12, 2022. Knife had just come out this year. I’d always been curious about Rushdie and knew the basic idea—Satanic Verses, running from the Ayatollah’s Fatwa in the late 80s—but had read only a few small snippets of his work.
After that we ate at Café Chiave, which used to be Trieste Café, where since 2012 I’d eaten and met with sober friends. (A famous house up the street had been donated to AA and I’d gone to hundreds of meetings there in the past.) Being with Britney in the Bay Area was always interesting and surreal: Like anyone being in the city they’d come of age in (I grew up in Ventura and Ojai but lived in the Bay Area for a decade from 2008-2019, ages 25 to 35), everywhere we went, walked by, drove past, etc, I had a memory connected. There, I would tell my wife, I once got wasted and got arrested. And there, I’d add, I started going to AA. And there, I would quip, I hit bottom and got sober. And there, I’d say, I used to eat every night. Etc. The Bay Area felt less like a city and more like a spiritual appendage, another part of my own body. We were attached, the Bay and me, like a child to his father. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the brutal, the pretty and the ugly: I’d grown up in so many ways in this town.
That night we met up with my good writer friend, Allison, and her husband and eight-year-old son at the classic Zachary’s Pizza on College Ave. We had a good 5-way conversation. Laughter and stories abounded. It felt somehow like coming full-circle.
*
The next day—Sunday June 2nd—we caffeinated and talked with my buddy at his house in Oakland where we were staying. Then we drove out to my house, a 25 minute drive along 580 and then 80 to Potrero Ave. How many times back in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, had I done this precise drive? I shook my head remembering those days.
And then we were back at the house. In the back yard, looking into the open garage which was absolutely packed with junk. There was also stuff in the basement I’d left; mostly huge plastic containers of books and old journals.
I started pulling stuff out of the garage. Britney was tired. She grabbed a few things from the basement and then said she wanted to leave. It was fine. This felt like work I needed to do alone, anyway. My buddy who we’d stayed with came. She agreed to go get the U-Haul in nearby Richmond for me, which was helpful. She and my buddy left. He would drop her off at the U-Haul and then head back to his place, eat and rest and then come back later. Soon Britney pulled up in the U-Haul. She parked it along the curb in front of the house. We kissed and said goodbye and she left, back home to Lompoc 4.5 hours south.
Once more, I was alone.
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