Growing Up

Facing Change

I just got back from a few days in the Bay Area. My wife and I are selling my house in El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley. I bought the place in 2015, almost nine years ago. Going up there and getting my stuff was fairly emotional, spiritually and physically draining—it took me seven hours of hard labor clearing out my detached garage and basement of my personal things; mostly books, manuscripts, etc. Since 2019 the house has been rented out. This enabled me to live in Manhattan, Santa Barbara when my father was dying, and, up until now, in Lompoc with Britney.

We stayed with a good friend of mine in East Oakland. It’s a nice house he inherited from a close older friend last year. I have many memories of living in Oakland so it’s warm to my heart. And yet: The city is in total disarray. Crime is out of control. Ditto homelessness; trash is omnipresent. Oakland is a funny town: I know way, way too many people who’ve been held up at knife or gunpoint. Amazingly, this is pretty normal in The Town (Oakland’s nickname). Yes, it happens that often. Early in the wee hours, around 2, 3, 4am, we heard the cars doing their wild “side shows” a few blocks or a half mile away. Crazy kids. (Burning rubber, racing, etc.)

I really do love the Bay Area. It’s very nostalgic for me. I moved here with a woman in January, 2008, after a six week trek around Europe. I had just turned 25; she was 21. We started out in San Francisco, at Lawton along La Playa, across the street from Great Highway and the sand dunes of Ocean Beach. I remember thick morning fog. I remember the cool, delicious coffee shop two blocks down on Judah, where the Muni-train flipped a U-turn and stopped, pausing before arrowing back like a sling-shot, returning to downtown, Market Street, etc.

I remember my first Muni-ride. A short, thick Asian man was the driver; ignorantly, I handed him a crumbled $5 bill and he laughed, pointing to the coin slot. I didn’t have coins. He gestured to sit down anyway. I remember the job I got driving a delivery van for a medical laundry service on Stanyon Street off Haight by Golden Gate Park. I drove all over the Bay Area, picking up bloodied blue surgery clothes and delivering fresh ones. It was mildly disgusting and quite stressful. Parking was often a disaster. I hated it. And I took classes at City College of SF, the Ocean campus, continuing to chip away at my AA credits so I could eventually transfer to a four-year school. (I’d barely escaped Catholic, college-prep high school.)

I remember staying those first rugged, exciting three weeks on my buddy’s couch, the two-bedroom he rented with a friend on Lawton/La Playa, and then I found us a cheap room ($500) in a 5-bedroom second-story apartment in the Inner Sunset at 24^th and Fulton, across the street from Golden Gate Park. I remember the shock on my girlfriend’s face when she discovered that it was a nudist household; I hadn’t read the “fine print.” We lived in that room for two or three months, stepping out our side window and across a gap onto the roof where, in the sunset, we’d stand on the roof holding hands and drinking Carlo Rossi. I remember Chet Baker and Miles Davis records spinning on my old thrift-store turntable. I remember riding my bike everywhere.

Our relationship died around June, 2008, about five months after moving to the Bay Area, and a year-and-a-half together in total. We’d met in San Diego. She was an English Lit major at SDSU and I was living in North Park, drinking and writing alone a lot. I felt lost back then, semi-estranged from my family back in Ojai (five hours north) and caught somewhere between punk rock and sophisticated writer. I worked at a dead-end retail job in the Gaslight District. We met through work. It clicked quickly and easily.

I could go on and on about those early days, about the first year in San Francisco, all the moves I did (I moved five times alone just in 2008), about the novel I started writing (my first), about the insane blackout drinking, about the lostness and self-loathing and the voracious exploration and reading, about all those visits to City Lights Books and Green Apple, all the time I spent down at the beach amongst the sand dunes. But I won’t.

Instead I’ll just say: I found myself, metaphysically, in the Bay Area. Growing up in Ventura and Ojai had been confusing at best, full to the brim with anger, punk rock, drinking, escaping, screaming at my parents and at a god I didn’t understand. Those days are blurry, fast and torrid. It wasn’t until we moved to the Bay and then five months later I found myself alone, single, and on my own, living in a city I craved yet did not understand, that I began to unspool that indefinable “self.”

Two good childhood friends of mine died that year, 2008. Craig, of bone cancer at the age of 25, the other in a motorcycle accident with no helmet in Ojai, 24. And there I was, the wild child of my friends, the one who’d done the craziest things while drunk, the one who’d spat in a cop’s face (literally), the one who’d driven 100 MPH along the shoulder of the freeway once (101), drunk back to Ventura from LA. Me. Michael. That guy. I was alive. They were dead, but I was alive.

All the women chased, the Pabst Blue Ribbons drunk, the bars blacked out at, the hungover mornings, the live music, the bus and Muni rides, the hanging on Haight Street and in Golden Gate Park, the trips to Oakland and Berkeley, the BART rides, the punk rock, the fear, the love, the joy, the relationships and breakups, the tears and the victories. I grew up there. I got sober in 2010, snagged my bachelor’s degree (at last!) in 2013, got in my first long-term sober adult relationship in 2013, bought a house in 2015, wrote many books between 2010 and 2018, and finally left the Bay Area in 2019 for New York City.

And then, after five years, I returned, to clean the house out so my wife and I can sell it so we can move to Spain. Who’d have known in March 2019, when I left for NYC with no plan, that I’d live there for 2.3 years, that I’d be there when the global Pandemic hit, that I’d live through terrifying times in East Harlem, that my father would get sick with cancer and I’d return to Southern California; Santa Barbara, where they’d moved (from Ojai) in 2020? Who’d have known that I’d meet Britney, fall hopelessly in love, get engaged, get married, live with her at her house in Lompoc?

Now, 41, married, Dad gone, selling the house, a new plan, a fresh path unfolding. The nature of life, of reality, is incessant change. The snake keeps shedding its skin, growing new layers. I’m sincerely grateful for my decade-plus in the Bay Area. It is still one of my favorite places on Earth. (That said it has changed a lot.) I no longer share my youthful radical Lefty politics. I no longer have any desire to live in rough-and-tumble, crime-ridden Oakland. I am not a White Hipster anymore, if I ever was one to begin with (yes and no). I am no longer “punk” (though I have a punk spirit!).

I am me, Michael Mohr, adult man—author, writer—who tells the truth to the best of his [subjective] ability, who looks life and death in the eyes and tries to be real. I am deeply aware of my strengths and weaknesses, my flaws and faults, my Texas-sized ego, my insecurities and profound self-consciousness. For so long when I was young I tried to act like someone I wasn’t, tried to wear a metaphysical mask which made you think I was extra masculine, extra tough, extra cool, extra wild. I don’t wear that mask anymore. I don’t need to lie anymore, to you or, most potently, to myself.

So, yes, on one level my Bay Area Years were my Self-Lying Years. But I had to go through those layers to get to the core of who I am, to cut away the cracked stone and metal of my ego-fear-unresolved-childhood-issues. But I got to that fundamental core. I hold my own heart in my hands now. I see myself for what I am. Very smart, sometimes wise, highly sensitive, a good writer, fairly lazy sometimes, a mix of both selfish and giving, an addict, sometimes too self-promo-y, sometimes too aggressive, sometimes wildly out of line, often kind and thoughtful. In short, I am a good man. Not perfect, not great, not better than anyone.

But good.

And part of what led me to myself was living in the Bay Area. It was a building, so to speak, which I had to enter, spiritually and experientially. I walked through that door and came out the other side both the same and different.

Isn’t that everybody’s story?