For a few months, in 2007, when I was 24, I lived in a 1977 GMC rusty lime-green van. This was in Ventura, California, an hour or so north of Los Angeles along U.S. Highway 101.
I’d been born in Ventura in 1982, raised in the nearby mountain town 12 miles east called Ojai, since age 9, and then, in a fit of hyperbolic rage disproportionate to the actual circumstances, I’d fled home at age 20, circa 2003. I lived in various crappy apartments in Ventura.
I was drinking like a fiend, punk rock to the hilt, had barely survived high school—I’d been expelled three weeks before senior graduation for possession of booze and pot—and was lightly poking at Ventura Community College classes. Despite being a rich kid who’d gone to a college-prep school, I had neglected to even take my SATs. All I cared about back then was drinking, girls, fast cars, punk rock, anarchy, and a smattering of insidious, brilliant books such as Brave New World and 1984 and The Catcher in the Rye, books that reflected either my dystopian or aggressive or resentful feelings.
My girlfriend at the time—Remy—was studying abroad in Spain for a few months during this time. We’d met and fallen for each other in San Diego working mutually at a touristy surf-related clothing store in the harbor. She was red-haired, freckle-faced, blue-eyed, originally from Santa Cruz. We hoped to meet up in the fall in Europe somehow, though I wasn’t working and didn’t have any money. At this point I can’t honestly remember how I was surviving financially. Perhaps I had some savings from my previous full-time job at a fancy tennis club where I’d worked—hilariously and ironically—the front desk. Or perhaps my timeline is slightly off and I in fact still worked there.
I bought the van for $1,500. My friends called it a “kid-toucher” van, because it had no side or back windows and was ancient and rusty lime green and, therefore, looked like “one of those old man creepy vans.” An old punk rock friend decided it should be called Godzilla because on a trip in the van up to San Francisco for a few days, we’d driven slowly along Market Street, our front windows down, blasting the song Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult, the entire van shaking. The name stuck. My van breathed fire. It was a gigantic dragon. It stomped on its enemies. It destroyed whole buildings, skyscrapers. It was panacea for all things Kerouacian feelings I felt back then.
At some point I ended up living first with an old lady on Ventura Avenue. A rough, Latino-gangbanger part of town. Mostly Mexicans. This lady—I think her name was Margaret—was white. I think it’s fair to say she was white trash. She might have been 65. Wrinkled, brunette, with suspicious, pleasing brown eyes. She was an alcoholic, which suited me because I was, too. We drank together, usually thumb-jugs of red Carlo Rossi, the light, highly sweet wine that kicked your ass the next morning. I rarely remembered our conversations.
During the week I worked—or didn’t—surfed occasionally, took two community college classes, wrote in my journal about all my petulant, immature, tortured thoughts, hung out with various old friends, read Nabokov and Dostoevsky alone in my room, called Remy—she was loving Spain—leapt dangerously into my steep imagination, went on long walks, drove Godzilla around for hours aimlessly, thought about death, wondered what the purpose of my life was, etc.
One night a good friend of mine and I went to a well-known Irish bar off Telegraph Avenue in Ventura. My buddy—Scott—met a goth girl there, sexy and black-haired with bangs and ruby-red plump lips, all black, pale face, dark eyes. We got into her car. She said she had a girl for me. She lived off Victoria Avenue. I knew she was drunk. We all were. She had a brand-new Volkswagen Rabbit. Didn’t even have plates on it yet. That new car stink. I remember the Misfits blasting full volume. I remember all four windows down, the cool late-night July air rushing in. I remember being in the back, alone, gazing out the window, listening to Danzig doing his thing, that torturous, angelic voice.
And then boom: The car was suddenly on its side. We’d crashed. Later we learned she’d swerved and then overcorrected, hit the middle-of-the-road divider, making the car roll over on itself multiple times. Three times, I think it was. I was stunned. Couldn’t move. Scott pulled me out with superhuman strength. He was thin, muscular, blond, blue-eyed, Irish and angry. I collapsed on the side of the road. The street was dark and empty. I think it was past 1am. The car was perched deliciously on its side, gray smoke curling up. I couldn’t move. The goth woman was pinned in the driver’s seat, against the street.
Paramedics and cops came. They cut my clothes off. Asked me questions which I couldn’t respond to. I was in some sort of surreal, shocked, stunned state. They shined a bright light in my eyes. Talked fast and seriously. They got me into the back of the emergency vehicle and took me to the ER.
I was fine. I stayed in the hospital three days. I was still drunk half of the first day. Mom came. Dad called. Friends reached out. The guy I shared a room with had just been shot three times in the stomach and chest by teenage Latino gangsters.
“I got off work and stopped at the bar for a beer,” the man told a police investigator. I watched, listening intently. “And then these three kids suddenly approached in a black Lincoln Continental. Then the car stopped. They rolled the window down and I heard three shots. They drove off, lurching, the tires squealing. I felt fine. I kept walking to my truck. But one or two minutes later I felt an intense pain in my guts and then I collapsed. I screamed a few times and the bartender came out. I know the guy. He called the cops.”
It was a wild story. It’d happened in nearby Oxnard. Why had the man ended up here, at a Ventura hospital? Over three days I got to know him a little. He was from Boston. Living here as a contractor working on a big construction building job downtown. Had been staying with his girlfriend who lives in Oxnard. Nice guy. A priest came in a few times. The doctor told him his chances were 50/50. He’d lost a lot of blood. They’d hit his kidney, lungs.
I got out 72 hours after admittance. They’d done MRIs and cat-scans and brain scans. I was fine. Two black eyes, purple pulpy flesh, scars on my fingers, and some PTSD. I was lucky. We all three were. Though they arrested her for reckless endangerment. After the hospital—she was alright—she was going to jail.
*
Because Goth Girl’s insurance refused to compensate me—I now owed $25,000 for the emergency ride to the hospital and the hospital itself—I hired a lawyer who told me I’d get an easy win. He was partially right. A win, yes. But not easy. Nor fast. It wasn’t until I was living in the Bay Area, in 2009, going back to college, that I finally won the money. Forty-eight grand. After all my payouts for insurance, lawyer, etc, I walked away with $16,000. But my lawyer forwarded me as much as I wanted at the time, after the crash in 2007. So I decided to meet Remy in Europe after all. Now that I had money. That crash had been the best thing that ever happened to me. It was a story, which for a young burgeoning unseasoned writer was everything. And it gave me the gift of travel.
I also used some dough to get out of Margaret’s tiny house. The area was beyond sketchy. One day there’d been a fist fight right outside the window. I watched it, intrigued. A white guy screamed at two black men and dropped the N-word. He seemed to be in a state of hysteria. Nobody called the cops.
I lived in a teeny-tiny room. I packed up all my stuff and moved into Godzilla. I had two giant posters in the back, one on each of the van’s walls: KISS, the members with black and white face paint, mouths agape and massive pink tongues exposed like villainous snakes; and Darby Crash of The Germs on the other side, The Decline of Western Civilization poster, the classic 1980 LA punk rock documentary by Penelope Spheeris. I bought a combination couch/bed. It folded out to a bed. I was excited. I felt free. Freedom—a concept, I think, looking back with hindsight, I never fully understood—to me at that time meant a sort of moral nihilism. I wanted the freedom of physical independence, no parents (I was estranged from them), no job, or an easy dead-end job which didn’t mean anything, travel, a lack of spiritual chains.
I’d get up and go to a class. Surf. Work. (Or not.) Walk around various parts of town. Go to a friend’s house and shower. Call someone, maybe an ex. Call Remy. I romanticized everything. I thought I was so tough and wise and cool, living in my van. I could do whatever I wanted. It was the American way. I felt like a pioneer. I’d sleep anywhere, sometimes parked along the curb in residential areas, in front of random houses. Sometimes at parks. Sometimes near the beach. Sometimes in Silver Strand, other parts of Oxnard, usually Ventura, sometimes even Ojai. I was a drifter. A lost soul. All the kids I’d [barely] graduated high school with had graduated summa cum laude from Stanford and Yale and Harvard, were moving forward with their lives, making money, living in exotic places like Manhattan and San Francisco and D.C. I was drinking and living in my van. I felt proud. Underneath all this, of course, was a lethal dose of self-hatred.
Eventually I reconciled with my parents. I left the van at their house while I went to Europe for six weeks with Remy. Switzerland, Ireland, France, England, Italy. It was wild and magical and beauteous. Upon our return we immediately moved to San Francisco. We were both sick of San Diego, the dumb beach culture, the military culture. We wanted something mind-blowing, something unheard of. We relished the history of 1960s Bay Area, the cultural explosion. By mid-January, 2008, we were living in a little studio off La Playa, across Great Highway from the Pacific Ocean and the windy sand dunes. I’d brought Godzilla with me. We both got jobs. Took college classes, she at SFSU, me at San Francisco Community College.
We made it until June, then she left me. I don’t blame her. The drinking had become monstrous, suffocating, wretched. If I could have left myself I would have joined her. We lived in a 9-person two-story alcoholic nudist house on Geary. It was nuts.
Later that year I sold Godzilla for $800 to a touring Black local rapper. He planned to take the van on a nationwide tour. I smiled, imagining Godzilla shaking, vibrating to NWA while traversing America. Why not?
Six months later I finally transferred to San Francisco State. English Literature with a Concentration on Creative Writing. I got my payout, at last, from the car crash two years before. It was 2009. Obama was president. Oakland was cool but still relatively cheap. It was the beginning of a whole other phase of my life.