*Update on my father. Still retching and sleeping a lot due to oral chemo. He’s taking three weeks off from work for his 15 radiation treatments. (He’s amazingly still working remotely on his computer from home 10-15 hours/week.) Due to a cancellation he did his first 45-minute radiation treatment yesterday. Thank God, because his gurgling cough (due to the sinister growing lung tumor) was getting worse by the day. Finally, some temporary salve, both physically and for the soul. My mom—now his primary caretaker—can breathe a momentary sigh of relief.
I’ve been living with my girlfriend in Lompoc an hour north of Santa Barbara and my folks. It’s been almost two weeks. Things are going well; our love is deep. I’m learning that we’re two potent, stubborn, sensitive personalities. But our bond is grooved well and we’re able to push through the psychic jungle, so far at least. I haven’t officially moved out of my SB apartment yet. I gave my thirty days’ notice a few days before February started. I’ll be out by March 1st. Slowly over the course of this month I’ll be bringing stuff back to Lompoc with me. I’m here in SB to walk dogs and visit my parents two days a week. Now more than ever it feels important to see my father.
Below is a fun little memoir piece about my first drink of booze, circa the year 2000. It’s incomplete right now; just a fragment.
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FIRST DRINK
I was a wild animal, split right down the middle, as if by horrid, psychic lightning, on one hand in some kind of love with my mother—in the Freudian sense—and on the other, feeling the deep, dark need to break from her silver, shackling chains, to rebel, run away; in short, to symbolically murder her and grotesquely sever our deep bond forever.
We were in the shed of Jenna Jones’s backyard, not one mile from the campus of our sacred college-prep Catholic high school, in Ojai, California, a small mountain-hippie-artist town an hour and a half north and inland from Los Angeles, a place where ex rock stars and movie directors retired in old age, among the jagged, snow-capped Topa Topa Mountains, verdant fields, and row upon row of orange groves.
The year was 2000. I was 16—a bright-eyed, naïve, insecure sophomore at St. Andrew’s Prep, one of the lowest fruits on the tree in the region, in terms of wealthy private high schools.
It wasn’t just me and Jenna. Her friend—a girl I knew from school, who I’d always thought was half ugly, half attractive—Andrea Bartell, a girl who would later go on to become a cop in Colorado, was with us. The way we attained the pint of Peppermint Schnapps is sketchy in my memory—Jenna’s older brother?—but I remember that we’d had it. This would be my first drink, ever. I’d grown up with a very strict, and yet harshly codependent, mother. An emotionally detached father, a replica of his own dad. He was the math, science, chemistry, rational, practical side of the family. My mother was the writer; the creative mind. I had much of both, but if pressed, I was more my mother, less my father.
The reason for the meeting in the shed was to get drunk before attending our sophomore year dance. There was no way, according to Jenna and Andrea—best friends—they’d be going to that silly-ass school dance sober. Not if they had any say in it, which they did.
Jenna’s folks were still at work. It must have been around 5, 6:00 in the evening. The dance must have been an hour or so away. The house was a small, humble craftsman, bundled up against the quiet, residential street, safe and homely. My friend, Tommy, lived just around the corner, but I hadn’t told him I’d be here.
I wanted this to be a secret. For some reason, even though it was high school, and rebellion, to an extent, was seen as cool and accepted, I felt this shame about drinking, as if I was crossing some invisible social boundary, scaling some mammoth wall. Hell, I believed in waiting to have sex until marriage still at that point.
Behind the house and off to the side of the street, half covered by bushes and sycamore trees, their branches and leaves lightly swaying in the gentle Ojai breeze, was the shed. We’d been inside the house, drinking water, laughing, giggling about who knows what. Jenna and Andrea were sort of the rejected chicks at school, yet cool and tough in that underground sort of way.