Lester Bangs was right about California
We've all heard about the quarter life crisis. It usually occurs right after the realization that your parents were right, that college really was the time of your life, and, this fact only becomes apparent once it is over. And, like most good things in life, the memory is usually sweeter than the experience; which makes it hard to feel worthwhile managing your boss's expense report when all you can remember from the "good old days" is scattered out classes and Tuesday officially being the best party night of the week.
I used to spend Tuesdays at a bar at the end of Garnet Ave. The kind of cheesy college bar where minor D-list celebrities occasionally surfaced, and where the entire over-21 Greek population of UC San Diego continued the frat party days of freshmen year, trading in warm beer in red plastic cups for $7 jaegar shots. P.B. Bar and Grill was the kind of bar that we always said we didn't want to go to, and, yet, we ended up there three out of the four drinking nights a week. Going there was like going to the same high school party every Friday night of senior year, where you always had fun and never really got to know yourself any better.
The "P.B." stood for Pacific Beach, a small beach commuinity in San Diego known best for its big waves and bigger boobs, in essence, a 14 year old boy's dream. No one who lived there was over the age of 30 (and if they were, they hadn't figured it out yet). The neighborhoods in San Diego are drawn out like the seating chart of a typical high school cafeteria. The popular kids, thought mostly going nowhere, lived in Pacific Beach. The hippies and skaters weren't too far away (remember how the jocks and skaters eventually bonded over their mutual love of drugs and booze?). They were about 15 minutes south, in Ocean Beach. The gays lived in a cheaper, yet prettier, neighborhood close to downtown called Hillcrest. And downtown were the older guys, the guys with money and shiny cars.
I spent my last San Diego summer working downtown at an upscale bar called Visions, while my best friend worked a block away at Stingaree, a nightclub that marketed itself as the Vegas of San Diego. Vegas was right, in that the cover was huge and the bathroom was reminiscient of a Colombian drug ring.
It was the perfect post-graduation summer. Floating from one beer stained PB apartment to the next (I lived in three different places in three different months), partying in the backyards of strangers' houses, all the things that might happen after getting off work at 3 a.m. alive, reeling, desperate... not desperate for meaning. The summer was good. We were just desperate for anything that would keep us going, that would keep us occupied.
Emily and I were always good girls, in a sense. We'd always had friends and boyfriends who liked to golf and wear polo shirts. But, that summer, we made it a point to hang out with the troublemakers. There were a few memorable ones- Kevin, who was the biggest weed supplier in Pacific Beach, and his roomate, Lance, whose lung later collapsed from smoking too much of it. When I first met them, Kevin offered me a half of a brownie, which left me strung out and high for three days straight. There was Andy, a blue-eyed bartender who turned out to be my biggest weakness. Although he could at least hold a job, which was an improvement over Emily's weakness, a boy named Roland, who got fired from more jobs in the three months we knew him than Emily had ever had. And the thing with all these boys... They were always in bands. Bad bands, ones that really sounded more like whiny noise than music.
In the end, it all turned out just like people say, which is a depressing thing for a writer to admit, but it's true nonetheless. We lost interest in the troublemakers, just as they lost interest in us, and we all moved on and around, trying on new people until there was no one left. And then we resigned, to one sleepless fuzzy-tongued night after another, and kept dreaming of better things.
Better things eventually came, but. not in the way anyone hoped. There had been seven of us girls (with others floating in and out) who had stayed close for four years- through screaming fights and boys and all of it, and we were more like sisters really by the end of it all. I personally believe that girlfriends aren't really close unless they've had a screaming (preferably with crying too) fight. The seven of us had had lots of fights, some worse than others, some complicated and deep-rooted, and others drunk, ending in the amicable sharing of a California burritto.
We started to go our seperate ways, not to get away from each other, but because it wasn't easy to stay together anymore. It didn't make sense. The thing that was starting to make sense was the sad truth that as we grow older, sometimes our lives just can't fit together anymore. That it's too hard planning for other people's dreams.
Emily stayed in San Diego, still working at the same nightclub, but the thrill of a new crowd was gone. Sarah and Emily Haight both became unusually serious with new boyfriends, in a way they'd never needed to in college. Rumi toyed with the idea of moving to Japan, but eventually settled for L.A. And Olga and I decided to move to New York.
I used to spend Tuesdays at a bar at the end of Garnet Ave. The kind of cheesy college bar where minor D-list celebrities occasionally surfaced, and where the entire over-21 Greek population of UC San Diego continued the frat party days of freshmen year, trading in warm beer in red plastic cups for $7 jaegar shots. P.B. Bar and Grill was the kind of bar that we always said we didn't want to go to, and, yet, we ended up there three out of the four drinking nights a week. Going there was like going to the same high school party every Friday night of senior year, where you always had fun and never really got to know yourself any better.
The "P.B." stood for Pacific Beach, a small beach commuinity in San Diego known best for its big waves and bigger boobs, in essence, a 14 year old boy's dream. No one who lived there was over the age of 30 (and if they were, they hadn't figured it out yet). The neighborhoods in San Diego are drawn out like the seating chart of a typical high school cafeteria. The popular kids, thought mostly going nowhere, lived in Pacific Beach. The hippies and skaters weren't too far away (remember how the jocks and skaters eventually bonded over their mutual love of drugs and booze?). They were about 15 minutes south, in Ocean Beach. The gays lived in a cheaper, yet prettier, neighborhood close to downtown called Hillcrest. And downtown were the older guys, the guys with money and shiny cars.
I spent my last San Diego summer working downtown at an upscale bar called Visions, while my best friend worked a block away at Stingaree, a nightclub that marketed itself as the Vegas of San Diego. Vegas was right, in that the cover was huge and the bathroom was reminiscient of a Colombian drug ring.
It was the perfect post-graduation summer. Floating from one beer stained PB apartment to the next (I lived in three different places in three different months), partying in the backyards of strangers' houses, all the things that might happen after getting off work at 3 a.m. alive, reeling, desperate... not desperate for meaning. The summer was good. We were just desperate for anything that would keep us going, that would keep us occupied.
Emily and I were always good girls, in a sense. We'd always had friends and boyfriends who liked to golf and wear polo shirts. But, that summer, we made it a point to hang out with the troublemakers. There were a few memorable ones- Kevin, who was the biggest weed supplier in Pacific Beach, and his roomate, Lance, whose lung later collapsed from smoking too much of it. When I first met them, Kevin offered me a half of a brownie, which left me strung out and high for three days straight. There was Andy, a blue-eyed bartender who turned out to be my biggest weakness. Although he could at least hold a job, which was an improvement over Emily's weakness, a boy named Roland, who got fired from more jobs in the three months we knew him than Emily had ever had. And the thing with all these boys... They were always in bands. Bad bands, ones that really sounded more like whiny noise than music.
In the end, it all turned out just like people say, which is a depressing thing for a writer to admit, but it's true nonetheless. We lost interest in the troublemakers, just as they lost interest in us, and we all moved on and around, trying on new people until there was no one left. And then we resigned, to one sleepless fuzzy-tongued night after another, and kept dreaming of better things.
Better things eventually came, but. not in the way anyone hoped. There had been seven of us girls (with others floating in and out) who had stayed close for four years- through screaming fights and boys and all of it, and we were more like sisters really by the end of it all. I personally believe that girlfriends aren't really close unless they've had a screaming (preferably with crying too) fight. The seven of us had had lots of fights, some worse than others, some complicated and deep-rooted, and others drunk, ending in the amicable sharing of a California burritto.
We started to go our seperate ways, not to get away from each other, but because it wasn't easy to stay together anymore. It didn't make sense. The thing that was starting to make sense was the sad truth that as we grow older, sometimes our lives just can't fit together anymore. That it's too hard planning for other people's dreams.
Emily stayed in San Diego, still working at the same nightclub, but the thrill of a new crowd was gone. Sarah and Emily Haight both became unusually serious with new boyfriends, in a way they'd never needed to in college. Rumi toyed with the idea of moving to Japan, but eventually settled for L.A. And Olga and I decided to move to New York.
posted by hotpinkcity at 7:23 PM
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