You took U.S. Highway 101 North for two hours and got off on Odin Street, near Highland Camrose Park, south of the Hollywood Bowl, west of Runyan Canyon Park, and then you took a left on Alta Loma Terrace and there, near the end of the cul-de-sac, was her—Jed’s—apartment.
At the time I lived two hours south, in San Diego. This was 2005. I was 22. Jed was 19. We’d been part of the same punk rock crew a few years before, in Ventura, 90 miles north of L.A. Then we’d all split off like a shotgun blast, some of us going to college, some of us getting into hard drugs, some of us moving out of town or even out of state. I ended up in San Diego with a buddy, sharing a tiny one-bedroom apartment to save money.
Jed and I’d had a tumultuous friendship from the start. She’d been 16 and me 19 when we first met in 2002. She’d been the friend of a girl whom my roommate, Rat Face, was dating at the time. Jed was short, thick, blond and covered in tattoos. She had wild, blazing blue eyes. She was intelligent, a voracious reader of authors like Charles Bukowski and Tom Robbins—quintessential punk-hipster fare—and she wore old thrift store dresses or else tight ripped jeans along with scuffed Converse high tops.
Like me, she fancied herself as some sort of nascent writer. She wanted to be the female Bukowski, with a pinch of Kafka perhaps. She’d been born and raised in Carpinteria, Southern California splendor, but not really. Dad was a nasty alcoholic who split when she was 12 and had been living in his van since then. Mom was a slutty bartender who sometimes brought home men half her age. A series of stepfathers damaged her sense of self-worth. Unsurprisingly, she chased after selfish, angry men who didn’t give a shit about her.
And yet, Jed and I had a weird, surreal, somewhat ghostly kind of bond. We genuinely cared for one another. We both drank too much. I’d grown up in Ventura, gone to public elementary and high school, and then taken community college classes while surfing, going to rabid punk shows in Ventura and L.A., dated around, left home at 18, worked fulltime at a prestigious tennis club (which was hilarious given my character and lifestyle), became slowly estranged from my parents, got badly-done stick-n-poke tattoos on my arms, hitchhiked around the Pacific Northwest in the summers, and in 2005—at 22—I moved to San Diego with my buddy Flint.
It was around then—spring, I think mid-April—when Jed reconnected with me. This was pre-smart phone. Before Facebook was ubiquitous. I had one of those old flip phones. One day, hungover, around 11:30am, sitting outside in our little shaded patio, I received a phone call. The area code was Ventura, 805. On the fifth ring I pressed “accept.”
“Yeah?”
“Is this James Wagner?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
Silence, medium-breathing, and then a slight giggle.
“It’s me. Jed Bollington. From back in the day.”
I sat forward in my chair. I leaned down, snatching my just-opened can of Budweiser. Plucking the case of Marlboros from my shirt pocket I slid one between my lips and used my red bic lighter to blaze up. I inhaled the lovely, stinky tobacco. I loved the way the smoke crept lazily down my throat. I’d always craved that feeling.
“Jed Bollington,” I said. “No fucking shit. How’d you get my number?”
“I was at this club in West Hollywood—where I live now—like four nights ago and I walk to the bar and guess who I bump into.”
“Who?”
I inhaled the tobacco and took a nip off the Bud. I was starting, slowly, to come alive again. The fifteen beers and two shots from last night clung to my gut like a machine gun barrel poking my stomach. But it was improving.
“Emily Stantan.”
“Seriously?”
Emily Stantan was an older goth chick I’d briefly dated when I was 20. Black-haired with short, violent austere bangs. She liked to dress up like a punk rock Snow White. She wore ruby-red lipstick. She’d been hot and half-crazy. Wild in bed. Superstitious. Into Tarot and astrology. Not cognitively intelligent, per se, but incredibly intuitive and emotionally smart. I’d left her for another woman, Lana Richardson.
“Dead serious,” Jed said. “So we chatted for a while and then your name came up and Emily said she still had your number. We weren’t even sure you still had the same digits. Anyway we exchanged numbers ourselves and then split off and danced all night.”
“That’s wild,” I said.
“Extremely.” She paused. “So. How are you?”
I filled her in on my life: Mesa Community College in San Diego, my complex dating life, the books I’d been reading (Kerouac’s On the Road), my roommate, etc. She filled me in on her life. When we all split off as a friend group a couple years ago she’d taken her life savings, which her mother had helped her save since her first job at 14, and moved to West Hollywood. She found a little second-floor apartment right off Highway 101. She was living a very imaginative, rich inner romantic existence, she said. Reading Bukowski a lot, especially his novel Hollywood. Listening to Elliott Smith. Going to punk shows occasionally. Trying to write. Being alone; feeling alone. I related to that.
*
Two weeks after we reconnected I drove the two hours north a la 101 to visit Jed. Back then I had this big white Ford truck, a used thing from 1999 I’d bought for $2,500. It was a gorgeous day out. Traffic was light. It was a Friday at 2pm. Windows down, the air blasting my face, I played Guns n Roses’ album Appetite for Destruction full volume. I allowed my imagination to soar: I saw myself as Axle Rose, singing in the band in front of thousands of people. I was a rock-star-god. Famous. Loved by all. Chased by women of all ages.
At Odin Street I pulled off the freeway, using her directions. Soon I was taking a left onto Alta Loma Terrace. And then I found the apartment: 313. I found a parking spot along the curb. There was a sign with complex instructions referring to when you could park and for how long but I ignored it. I sat there a minute, anxiety suddenly fluttering inside my stomach. It’d been two years since I’d seen Jed. What would she be like? Would we get along? Would we have anything to say? Would we end up in bed?