Cool Kids
It was nearing seven P.M. when I pulled into the empty parking lot overlooking the Pacific Ocean, eight miles north of Arcata, off U.S. Highway 101 in Northern California.
My red 2000 Honda CRV—sixteen years old now—rumbled heavily off the highway and pulled into the lot. No one was here. I was alone. The ocean shone in flashy waves, rolling, crumbling, crashing, like some sea of jewels in the approaching summer dusk. It was late August. I’d been driving south from Portland, after having spent an intense ten days with old friends and attending a writers’ conference at the Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel for a weekend, ostensibly the reason for my visit. Really it had been to get away from my life down in the Bay Area, take a well-needed breather.
The reason for the stop—I’d been driving for almost seven hours—was to give myself a moment to make a decision. The plan had been to take two days on my way back to El Cerrito, my home with my girlfriend across the San Francisco bay from the city. The choice to take two days had stemmed from my desire to process the time in Portland. I’d met with four friends. One, Melissa, had been wonderful on one hand, emotionally exhausting on the other. We’d known each other for seventeen years, since sophomore year of high school. There seemed to always be an undulating, rollercoaster-like phenomenon when we got together in the flesh, which happened every two years or so. It was like a good commercial novel: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. Only the climax in this case often went south.
I swung slowly into a space lined with white, my own little parking box, though I could have parked sideways had I wanted to. It was deserted. I eyed that green dented sign, white reflector lights around it, down the highway, on 101: Arcata, 8 Miles. Nick. This was the reason for my stop. I’d planned on car camping for the night, like I’d done millions of times before. Trinidad, just north of Arcata. I’d stopped at the usual places, like Patrick’s Point campground, some RV parks. All full. The summer crowd. This had happened last time, two years ago, but I’d slid into one last vacant spot.
So it had come to this. Potentially meeting up and crashing with my old buddy Nick. He lived in Arcata, on Miller Lane. We’d met in High School, in Carpinteria, north of LA, where we grew up, he a freshman, me a senior. Me and my best friend had taken him into the punk scene as wild, lurid teens. Soon Nick and I had developed our own unique, fresh friendship that had lasted almost a decade.
We’d drink Mickey’s forties on the Carpinteria Valley Community Church roof at midnight on a school night, hurling the empty bottles, hearing the green glass shatter, drive around town in his old 80s Mercedes his parents had bought him second-hand, drink brew out of a cut-off section of faded hose, one of us on the roof, the other flat on their back on the concrete, taking a whole beer in less than twenty seconds. We’d skateboarded together, ridden bikes, hiked around the so-called Hundred Acre Wood near high school in town. We smoked pot together, went to parties. I gave him his first beer. Punk shows, girls. Chaos.
And then, somewhere along the line, we’d started to lose touch. I’d begun to get the distinct impression that he was changing, like some feral, struggling butterfly, wanting, needing to break free and fly away. Our friendship had always been different. We’d had our own code of communication, even, unexplainable to anyone but us, never spoken in front of others. He’d befriended hardcore skateboarders, Northern California bros, the kinds of dudes that smoked pot first thing in the morning—“wake n’ bake”—and who wore flat-brimmed baseball caps, had tats and wore necklaces and never shook your hand; they fist-bumped and slapped sacred skin. They said things like “bro” and “dog” and “fer sure, bra.” They stood very erect and padded their shoulders with posturing. It was all about looking and sounding “cool.” Women were one hundred percent about looks; it was about pussy. Never anything else. If you cared about anything else you were a fag. In other words: Not my people. I’d once, in a different way, been that guy, in punk rock form: Blackout drinking, psychic fighting, posturing, trying to be tough and cool and “one of the guys.” But now, almost thirty-four years old, six years sober, I was in a different space.
I cut the engine and all sound ceased, save for a flock of seagulls gliding across the low orange horizon, squawking, wings gloriously outstretched, not flapping for a single second, just riding the breeze like some mini animal airplane. Opening my door, the cold air rushed in. I welcomed this with gusto. Portland had been in the triple digits. A hundred and four one day. A wretched heat wave that had forced us either into nearly freezing, clear lake water, or else into an apartment with no A/C.
I had to decide whether or not I would contact Nick, try to stay at his place. I’d called him several times, possibly as many as half a dozen, over the past few years and had never heard back. Last year, while in Carpinteria visiting family for Christmas, I’d bumped into him. It was awkward. I was at a coffee shop in town and he walked by. He approached and we talked. He told me he’d been out of cell service for much of the year, on some Humboldt pot farm, helping to pick the plants for the season. Harvesting. He was living half in the real world, half in some fairy land of Northern California foggy delusion. But more importantly, he told he his mother, who’d never liked me, had recently died of breast cancer. I was floored. I told him I was sorry for his loss and mentioned a guy we both knew from town who’d hung himself. He shooed the comment away: “Yeah, a lot of families have experienced tragedy here.”
There’d always been this thing, both with Nick and with Carpinteria kids, where I felt like I’d eternally never be cool enough. Some of the people we both knew had never fully accepted me. No matter what social group it had been—the stoners, the bros, the punkers—I had always more or less fallen through the proverbial cracks. I think what had been hard for me about Nick slipping away from my grasp had been the fact that I’d seen the real him, the sensitive, self-aware, kind young man inside. And to see him over the years morph, transform into some newer, different version of himself, externally for other people—the cool kids—was painful for me. I had always been the deep, emotional, intense writer guy.
Troubled and gnarly in my teens and early twenties—known as a fanatical punker with a flair for drunken blackouts, extreme driving and outrageous behavior—I had hit my “bottom,” spun out and gotten sober before my twenty-eighth birthday, having gotten all the tattoos I’d ever get, slept with all the women I ever could, made all the major inebriated mistakes I was able to, and driven myself into the biggest, deepest trench of failure that was allowed for a human being to dig himself into.
As I sat there, I noticed the wall of gray fog like some omen rolling through town. It sat on the horizon and rolled along the highway behind me. I checked my phone and realized two things: I’d at some point (I recalled this vaguely) deleted both his phone number (which I’d had for over a decade) and his Facebook friendship. Now, with the cool ocean air rushing in, the seagulls yawping in the background, the fog mounting, and the sharp stench of rotting seaweed, I scrolled through a Facebook search, typing his full name in. Nothing. The social media institution could not locate him. Maybe he’d blocked me? I tried scrolling through my phone again for his number: His name did not pop up. There were three options: Say screw it and hit the highway, drive the remaining five hours back to the bay tonight, get there around midnight; keep driving and hope to find another open campsite somewhere along 101; or option three: Randomly drop in on Nick, out of the blue, without calling first.
It was risky, just dropping in on him. For numerous reasons. He might be a different guy. He might be an asshole. He might be weird or unkind or mean. He might be totally thrown off the beam, confused that I had simply materialized out of thin air. Anything could happen. On the other hand, maybe he’d be stoked to see me. Maybe we’d hang out, go get dinner in town, talk until five in the morning, like me and a buddy up in Portland had done. I hadn’t seen or talked to Nick—other than that awkward moment in Carpinteria last year—in several years. The last big trip had been in 2012—four years ago—when I’d bought my CRV in Carpinteria and driven it back up to Portland, visiting the same friend as this trip. On the way north, I’d taken I-5 to Highway 299 West, from Redding, a winding road going across the Shasta-Trinity National Forest that cut through California’s upper belly like some carving knife.
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