The Caterpillar ("fictional memoir")

Growing up in Southern California *(free to read and comment!)

Photo by Philippe Gauthier on Unsplash

*I’m trying out a new little stack exclusively about writing and book editing called WRITING AND BOOK EDITING: THE PROCESS. I’ll focus on short, clear articles on these two topics. Click HERE if interested. Consider subscribing either free or paid!

~

When I was a teenager and into my early twenties, there were three males who changed my life, all for the more interesting, none exactly for the better.

The first was the guy who pulled me into the punk scene and introduced me to hardcore music and alcohol, which became my dark, rebellious lover for a long, intense, tortured decade. The second was the blond spiky-haired kid who was the first guy’s best friend and who subsequently became my best friend for two crucial, life-altering years in high school (2000 to 2002).

The third, though, still sticks in my mind more than any other person of my young life. Even now, in 2024, at the age of nearly 42, I think about this guy often. Somehow, through three decades, this dude has been spiritually cemented in my mind as some kind of Christ-figure. As in: The coolest of the coolest of the cool.

And yet: I also feel sorry for him and wouldn’t trade places with him for a million dollars.

*

Born on the last day of 1982, in Ventura, when I was eight—1991—we moved 12 miles inland from the coastal town along Highway 101 to the 8,000-population hippie-tourist mecca of Ojai, one of the most sought-after areas not too far north of Los Angeles. It was a small, sleepy town, not much to do for a kid growing up in the pre-smart-phone 1990s.

Through softball as a boy I met a kid I’ll call Brian. He happened to live next door to a kid named Eric. At 12, we three hung out a lot, learning to skateboard on Brian’s long, sloping salmon-pink driveway along Rice Road a half-mile from my place. We also rode around on Eric’s step-dad’s moped. Ditto BMX. And soon, for me and Brian anyway: Surfing.

I knew things were different at Eric’s than they were at my house or Brian’s. Eric’s house was tiny, for one, and his parents were divorced. His dad was some biker down in LA who he never saw. Mom was sober. He and his little brother shared a small room. His step-dad, who he hated, physically hit them. We rarely went over there, and if we did we did it when Rand wasn’t home. The man was scary, 6’1, huge arms, a hard-drinking, cursing behemoth who took zero bullshit from his skateboarding, already rebellious pre-teen step-son.

High school was the big divider: Brian and Eric went to Nordhoff, Ojai’s sole public high school, and I went to Villanova, one of the myriad expensive private rich-kid schools. The friendship, by then tenuous anyway due to our ages, peer pressure, social cliques, girls, etc, crumbled.

My turbulent, anarchic high school days are well-covered in my autobiographical novel about that time, The Crew, which you can buy here by clicking this link.

*

After high school—around 2003—I reconnected with Eric at Solimar Beach one hot summer. I’d been there surfing all day. It was July, filled to the brim with tourists, locals from Ventura, Oxnard thugs, Santa Barbara rich folk, bikini-clad girls getting tans, and beefy motorcycle dudes, including Hell’s Angels. (Read my piece on dealing with the Hell’s Angels here.)

Anyway I was sitting there in my white 1993 banged-up Ford truck, windows down, listening to Thin Lizzy’s 1977 classic album, Bad Reputation, when this noisy blue 1970s blue VW van slides into the slot along the rocky, uneven dirt lot right next to me. The van’s engine thrummed, shaking the whole van. Gray smoke wafted from the exhaust pipe.

When I looked over I recognized the face instantly. Eric. Only now—it’d been five years since I’d seen him, so he’d be 19—he looked completely different. He looked like a rock star: Shirtless, tight blue jeans with Van’s shoes, he had long curly black hair dripping down well past his shoulders. His eyes were dark brown, that familiar-unfamiliar gaze of his, flat lips with a blueish tint, and that pug-nose he had.

His window was down. “Eric?”

He caught my eyes. Pulling his long, thick wilderness of black hair off his face, he said, “What the fuck? Is that fucking James Collins?”

“The one and only,” I smiled.

We jumped out of our cars.

He came over and we slapped skin, the cool-kid way of saying, What up, Dawg?

“Fuck you been up to, man?” Eric said, crossing his tan muscled arms across his chest. His chest was flat and hard. He worked out, that was evident. He wasn’t a big muscle guy, but had the body more of a runner.

I sighed. “I dunno, man. Barely made it out of high school. Trying to get out of this fucking town, ya know?”

He laughed, throwing his head back, and had such a mischievous, phlegmy cackle that insecurity and self-consciousness surged through me. “Why leave Ojai, bro? It’s paradise here?”

I shrugged, feeling embarrassed. Was Ojai cool now? Had I somehow missed the memo?

“By the way,” Eric said, glugging the can of Natty Ice which had somehow appeared in his tan hand, and then burping profoundly loudly. “Call me The Caterpillar. Or just Caterpillar. No one calls me Eric anymore. That fag is dead, along with the name.”

I smiled, gazing at him. He reeked of pot and earthy arm-pit body odor. Suddenly he reached into his van and pulled out two 24-ounce cans of Natural Ice, or, as he called them, Natty Ice. He popped the clips and handed me one. It was cold. We clinked our cans together and drank. It was around 3pm, mid-July. We were 19 and 20. Our whole lives were ahead of us.

*

We started hanging out. I was still technically living with my parents, but barely. My room was at the farthest opposite side of the long house we’d lived in since I was eight. Most of the time I was gone. I went in and out as I pleased, day or night. My folks and I rarely spoke. I already had several tattoos. The anger, the resentment, the fear were already thickly lathered across my heart by then. I was pissed off and looking for an outlet. I’d been like that since I was 14.

Caterpillar and I hung out often. There was something about him; he’d managed to perfect the vibe of cool. He marinated in it. He might as well have been Led Zeppelin-Fonzi. Leather jacket. Vans high-tops. The long thick curly black hair he perpetually had to wipe off his eyes.

The thin, flat lips, the greasy almost black eyes, the dark tanned skin, the pug nose, the way he drank his Natty Ice or forties of malt liquor, the fact that he rarely wore a shirt, the fact that he drove his VM like some kind of demented Neal Cassady expert madman, his California Golden State flag tattoo on his upper left arm (his only ink), the fact that he went by The Caterpillar—because, I found out, he “Caterpillared his way” out of every seemingly inescapable situation—the fact that he in fact lived in his blue VW van, the fact that girls of all ages wanted to fuck him. (This I never fully understood except when contemplating his Degree of Cool.)

He didn’t work. He didn’t have much money. The money he did have his parents gave him here and there, or his dad down in LA when they drank together. He really was some kind of Neal Cassady type, or something similar at least. He came from a very different background than me. Working-class. Alcoholism. Dysfunction. Domestic abuse. He had no career ambitions. He wanted to live all his life in Ojai, going to punk and hard rock shows in Ventura, LA and San Francisco when he could. He was friends with the guitarist of one of the biggest and most respected underground hardcore bands in the greater Ventura/Ojai/Oxnard area.

Sometimes we drove down to LA together in his van and slept down there. Sometimes he picked me up and took us to Casitas Springs or Oak View where we hung out with his semi-famous guitarist friend. They’d smoke endless cigarettes, snort cocaine, play old faded 12 inch records of classic Thin Lizzy albums or else Bad Brains or Agent Orange. They were one-third punk, one-third hard rock (think Motorhead), one-third record/music nerds.

Other times we visited his mom’s house. She’d divorced the asshole. It was just his mom, his much younger sister, and his younger brother. We’d drink beers in his little brother’s room and listen to Deep Purple, smoking pot and lying around, wondering when we’d finally start that rock band and become famous.

*

As time went by we grew apart. For one thing, in 2004 I moved first to Santa Cruz and then, in 2005, to San Diego. But also, it had become clear to me that Caterpillar didn’t think I was cool. He started to make fun of me, of my “bad” tattoos (some of them were), of the way I dressed (not punk or hard rock enough), of the way I talked (not cool-speak), of the girls I dated (too old, not thin enough), of the fact that I hung out with the tough working-class kids in Oak View, etc. He felt he’d taught me things—how to snort coke, why Thin Lizzy mattered so much, how to properly inhale an epic bong rip, how to approach girls, how to drink without blacking out—and I’d failed him, becoming some weirdo uncool “fake.”

And so, because of this metaphysical and sociological rift between us, and because I'd fled town anyway, we stopped being friends. When I was in town visiting I’d occasionally see him; he’d usually chin-jerk nod at me in classic Southern California style, sometimes slap some skin, chat for a moment, and then move on. I heard growing rumors about him, now 23 years old. That he slept with dudes’ girlfriends. That he’d gotten his ass kicked several times by angry dudes he’d pissed off. That he stole from people. That he’d done a stint in jail. That he sometimes blacked out and did crazy shit. That most people didn’t like or trust him but that he nevertheless had become some sort of local legend.

In 2008 a mutual friend of ours died of bone cancer. The friend was 25. He’d just moved to the Bay Area, where I’d moved seven months before him. I lived in Ocean Beach, San Francisco. The memorial was down south, on the beach. Brian and I both went, driving down together in Brian’s car. (Brian, too, had moved to San Francisco years prior for college.) At the memorial there was a rock band playing down on the sand using generators. A single-engine Cessna plane flew over the water at dusk and dropped the friend’s ashes. Caterpillar was there, of course, and he smiled and laughed the whole time. I never saw him without a beer in his hand. He seemed cooler than ever before. He saw me multiple times but never even nodded, let alone spoke to me. The message was clear: You’re dead to me.

*

Over the years—as I moved from San Francisco to Oakland to Portland to Philly and back to Oakland, getting sober in 2010—I’d see Caterpillar when visiting Ojai during Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. He looked the same, talked the same, acted the same. Always had some gorgeous girl with him, usually too young by a lot, often taller than him, and often with a boyfriend. A beer was always sitting in his right hand. The same jarring, self-consciousness-inducing laugh. The same cool-kid dark beady eyes. The same curly long black hair. Often shirtless; still the hard tanned chest and torso. Van’s shoes. Etc. Fonzi was getting cooler and older.

For some reason I never stopped thinking about him. One might even call it an obsession. I wanted to know why exactly he’d rejected me. True, I’d never been precisely “cool,” but I’d also never been a total loser. In high school I’d dated one of the hottest, most popular girls on campus. I’d been tough, punk and rebellious, wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and going to raunchy, wild, explosive punk shows every other day. The nerds feared me. Even the jocks thought I was a little intimidating in an unexplainable way, even if they weren’t afraid of me and could kick my ass if they wanted. I had guts, balls, zest, gusto, courage.

But it wasn’t about that. It was, I later learned, about being part of The Group. Most of the people I knew in Ojai had all grown up intimately together; their parents had known one another and they’d attended the same grade schools, the same middle schools, and the same high school. They came from roughly the same socioeconomic class. I’d moved here, to Ojai, when I was eight, already behind on the intimacy tribal level. My parents were rich. We had a big house, a pool and jacuzzi. They’d all bonded at a very young age. I was an outsider, always had been, always would be. Just the way it was. My friends after high school had been the outcasts, the weirdos, the misfits, the rebels, the kids who hadn’t fit in with The Group. Not the cool big-truck-driving guys or the jocks or even the hardcore kids or the rock dudes. We were the punk weirdo aliens. Never cool enough; never good enough.

*

Brian’s dad died of a rare skin cancer in 2013, when I was 30 years old. We’d kept in touch but, despite both being in the Bay Area, we weren’t good friends anymore. I hadn’t seen or heard from Caterpillar in years. I didn’t even know he knew Brian anymore. I’d grown up with Brian’s dad almost as a second father. I was invited to the memorial.

But, sure as shit, after the church memorial, back at Brian’s mom’s house, in Ojai, in walked Caterpillar, long black hair, same eyes, same lips, same nose, same everything. The tight blue jeans, the Vans. He wore a black Motorhead wife-beater. We were all outside in the backyard. He came out, looked around, clearly saw me, and completely ignored me. Didn’t nod or wink or acknowledge or anything. Nada. Zero. Nuthin. He was there for probably an hour and not one time did he look my way.

I don’t know why that hurt so bad, but it did. Probably always will.

Since then, I’d seen him every few years in Ojai. In 2020, when I was living in Manhattan and Covid was raging, my parents left Ojai and bought a house in Santa Barbara, up a steep hill overlooking the entire city. Since then, I’ve rarely gone back to the town where I grew up. The last I heard, through a mutual punk friend, was that Caterpillar was in prison. I can’t substantiate that claim, but it sounds realistic. Once, sometime in early 2022, when I was still single and dating, by then living in Santa Barbara caring for my cancerous father, I walked into a trendy Ojai coffee shop, The Farmer and the Cook, and bought some tea. As the older woman rang up my order, I realized in an instant that it was Caterpillar’s mother.

Not recognizing me, I told her who I was. She stared at me a moment, squinting, then smiled. “Oh yeah. I remember. How are you?”

I filled her in on my life. She told me she’d been sober for 35 years. She said that “Eric” was struggling, balancing on the head of a metaphorical pin about whether to get sober or not, go full in, do AA, etc. By then I’d been sober 12 years. I thanked her for the tea and the update and wished her and her son the best. When I left I felt vaguely emotional. It felt somehow like the end of an era. I was 39 years old, Caterpillar 38. We were nearing forty.

How had time passed so quickly? Why was I still, even then, even now, so strangely desirous for his approval? Why did it matter so much to me? Why had someone so superficial, so attached to external appearances—the antithesis of everything I’d come to respect—made such a profound impact on me, emotionally, psychologically, sociologically?

There was something so warm, so heated, so nostalgic about recalling those days of 2003, 2004, hanging out with Caterpillar, his coolness so egregiously apparent and overdone. Maybe it was because he was so thoroughly himself, so hopelessly his own weird self-created image. Maybe it was because he’d seemed to make Being Cool into an artform. He could teach classes on the shit. Maybe it was the way nothing ever seemed to faze him, at least outwardly. Maybe it was his tough-guy yet relaxed, confident persona, dating girls with big dudes for boyfriends, getting his ass kicked and going back for more as if it meant nothing. Maybe it was because it was so obvious that due to the abuse he survived he hated himself and turned that outward into coolness.

Sober now 14 years and almost 42 years old, I grasp the deeper truth. Caterpillar had gotten the shit kicked out of him as a kid. He’d come from serious dysfunction. His mother had once been a drunk and his step-dad an abusive asshole. Whatever little boy had once existed inside him had been repressed, out of a need for survival, into the deepest depths of his psyche. He morphed, changed, transformed into a character, a 2003 Neal Cassady, a pseudo-rebel pseudo biker-type pseudo-bum pseudo asshole pseudo rock-n-roll star-wannabe pseudo cool kid extraordinaire. Being “cool” had been his armor and he wore that shit well. It hadn’t been about power and true confidence; it had been about fear, insecurity and weakness. He wasn’t unique; he was a follower. He became what he did because he wanted, like all of us, to be accepted.

I understood. I’d done the same thing from age 17 to 27, from my first drink to the day I got sober at the age of 27. Rich kid doing the wannabe tough-guy routine. I got into fist fights. I screamed at girls. I told people to Fuck Off. I was perpetually drunk, perpetually angry, perpetually superior.

But underneath it all I was a terrified, scared little kid, desperate for love, attention, acceptance, affection, forgiveness. As a kid I’d felt trapped between my father’s emotionally detached indifference and my mother’s intensity, strictness and control. Things at home hadn’t been terrible…but they hadn’t been easy or perfect, either. And so, like a lot of male kids, I picked up the closest mask which seemed to fit my metaphysical face. Angry punk rock shithead. For Caterpillar, it had been rock-n-roll demigod.

To this day—in this very moment—I can’t help but think of those old days as “good times.” In truth they were and they weren’t. We had fun, we were experimenting, we forged close bonds, but we were trapped in terror, too. We didn’t know what adulthood was, what it meant, why it seemed so scary and inevitable. We didn’t want careers. We didn’t want to become our conventional, boring parents. We wanted to run loose and be free. We wanted to chase anarchy to the ends of the known earth. We wanted to fuck and drink and snort. We wanted to do all of it, and right now.

But in the end, all we did was fool ourselves. We rode that figurative train way too long. As far as I know, Caterpillar is actually even still on that train. Maybe not. I haven’t seen him in probably six or seven years by this point, maybe longer. I have no idea if he’s alive or dead, in prison or walking around free, in Ojai, LA or anywhere else, homeless or in his van or in an apartment.

All I know is that I made it. I hope, for his sake, he does or did too.