2004-08-23 - 9:39 PM
I was happy. I was sad. I was in Santa Barbara.
Nikki, it had already been established, is a fabulous travel partner. She doesn't require gratuitious rest-stops, switches back and forth for shotgun easily and without much care... If anything, I have to climb into the backseat before she's close enough to the car, just to make sure of fair distribution. You can wake up from extended travel stupor in the back, lips cracked and dry, and there's a smile waiting for you in shotgun, and a bottle of water waiting right next to you. She's utterly and completely likeable, making it easy to temporarily ven-diagram your social circles with little fear of conflict or stupidness. She runs, fully dressed, into the ocean.
Andrew, also, is an excellent partner for the road. Sings along to dorky music, drives to get there without the expense of the journey. Which is to say, we stop when one person is hungry and the other two don't care, we stop when one needs a bathroom. If efficiency mattered, by god, we wouldn't be on vacation. He's also got comfortable silence. It's easy, sitting next to him, to simply not say anything when we've run out of stuff to talk about. Kind of blip off into our own worlds, and if the energy of the car drops too low, he simply flips the music on instead of making "I've got legs!" conversation.
The ride to Santa Barbara was pretty much without event, save Andrew walking up to a restroom, thereby interrupting the midnight blowjob taking place outside the door. We arrived around 5:30 in the morning, the parents were packing up the minivan. We said hi, hugs and introductions were made, aaand... we pretty much passed out as dawn started breaking.
Saturday started out kind of slow. Billy, Jerome, Eric, the three of us. We wandered around downtown a lot. Hit metro, got our geek on. Nikki recognized things and was praised for it by the other 5, all geeks. We saw AVP, which I think mildly annoyed J, who wanted to see Napolean. In the end, though, I'm of the opinion that SB newbies need to be in the Arlington theater, no matter what's playing. And Andrew was sort of against the movie.
My binary clock just made an LED constellation of a Giraffe. Moving on.
At some point I was starting to burn out a little, spending the day with 6 people. We tended to walk 2x2, so I'd drop back a couple steps to make sure I was in the back two, usually with Jerome, who's easy in the "I haven't seen you in a long time, but we don't actually need to talk" kind of way. 10 years does that to friends. Eric eventually left, Jerome with him, making us 4. Then we switched around a lot, but I couldn't be in the back anymore. Just sort of in a rear corner.
We walked to the beach and wandered around in the sand and seaweed, around the time the sun was going down. I heard a very low thump,thump, and Nikki mentioned something about hearing drums. In the back of my head, a dinging sound.
"Yeah, drum-circle. We do it on the beach, every other saturday. People just go there and Jam, man. It's cool."
We ambled over and the 4 of us stood there and watched. probably about 20, 25 people either making the circle, sitting down around and outside of it, or dancing inside of it. Congas and bongos and cowbells, all sorts of drums. Every 20 minutes or so it would cycle, each person with a drum thumping a tentative, soft beat, none of them in sync, everyone searching for the vibe, the voice of the hour. Then two would sync up, then a third would join in. 30 seconds later the world was in rhythm, mad, wild tribal beats, liquid with energy and life. An old spanish guy bouncing like drugged out teenager at a rave, but in a more "high on life" sort of way. A content, happy smile on his face. Heather's dad was there, but didn't see me. Kelly wasn't there, I wished she would be. She was wild and crazy and free the way the drums were, and I missed her. I turned my back to the circle and watched the long row of palm trees, silhoutted as darkness fell, swaying in the lightest ocean breeze, and I was happy. There are moments, a small handful of perfect moments scattered through the last couple years, where I've been with people who mattered to me, and the silhouettes of palm trees swayed gently in the wind, and every time I have one, it links me to all the others, multiple versions of me standing in multiple slices of space and time, all connected, all in the same place. In front of me, some girl used the beat to give her boyfriend a dorky little lapdance about 20 feet away, and the moment ended, so I turned back around and watched the liquid beat thrive a little more.
Billy, Andrew, Nikki and I, we stood there and watched until we were done, and went back to Billy's house, lounging around. There was some talk of charades, a new, extroverted nightly exercise of their house, where a bunch of people show up and interact with eachother.
PH34R.
Honestly? I was a little scared to. I was trying to judge my fellow roadies' reactions to the idea, they seemed indifferent. I didn't want to be a wet blanket, but more people were starting to show up, and my personal bubble was starting to suffocate. Jerome ran away to a movie with a girl, and I silently cursed him. I felt edgy, cornered, but a little ridiculous for feeling so. Not knowing what to do, I walked outside to smoke a cigarette, and Nikki and Andrew followed me. Carefully, neutrally, I expressed a certain lack of commitment toward the idea of staying around with these people, a few of the new ones not even remotely being part of my comfort-zone. They seemed to agree, and with the blatant rationalization that we had travel to do tomorrow, we went back to my house, copy of Ferris Beuller in tow. Billy looked sad we were leaving, and my heart cracked for the poor bastard, like I was leaving a brother behind on the field of battle. I told him to come with us, but he couldn't. There'd be nobody left to watch and make sure armageddon didn't occur in his bedroom.
Saturday night, around 10. Upgrade was with us now, idly checking behind doors to make sure my father wasn't going to leap out and icepick her to death at the drop of a hat. Ferris Bueller's on the TV, 3 of us on the couch, Upgrade is on the interweb across the room, her elitist disposition egging her on to calling people horrid, dirty names simply for being intellectually challenged.
The day had gone strangely for me. It had been so much fun, but I'd been around lots and lots of people, all day long. Sitting on the couch next to two others, for no particular discernable reason, was now too much. At some point I realized this, watching the movie and mentally comparing myself to Cameron. I was becoming Cameron, just like I did so often in high school, shutting off and freaking out, without a clue as to why. So I went outside again, and sat on my back porch and leaned against a chimney, watching a raccoon's eyes shine radiant and curious at me before I took a drag off a cigarette, and it disappeared behind the back fence, into the darkness.
There was only one thing that had ever gotten me through this, ever pulled me back from skirting introvert hell with consistency. Playgrounds. My playground, where I'd smoked and waxed philisophical, bitched and frowned and laughed with the Jungle Gym Boys, let my inner child out of his box to stretch and roam for a while. But almost as instantly, my heart had sunk, because I couldn't figure out how to get there. A block and an eternity away, I couldn't go alone. I'd tried that before, it only ever made things worse. I didn't want to take everyone with me... Andrew and Nikki are both fantastic people, but they're not... It's not that they wouldn't belong, or anything, but that I didn't want to go with people who didn't understand what it was to us, and lacked the will to explain it along the way. Also a degree of reservation, sharing that aspect of myself with them, conveying it to people I had not grown bonds of that magnitude with.
I went back inside, they were dozing on the couch, Upgrade still upon the computer, the perfect medium for anti-social socializing she has artistically perfected. I put my hands on her shoulders and leaned forward into her ear, half whispering, half mumbling, so as not to wake the other two.
"Want to go to the playground?" Please, please, for the love of all things Nintendo, please say yes.
"I'd love to." I wonder, now, if my sigh of relief was strong enough that there will be a tornado somewhere in Shanghai.
"Now?" She nodded and signed off, and we left, grabbing sweatshirts and smokes.
The steel mesh of the jungle gym was wet with dew, so she sat on my lap, occasionally switching from leg to leg as one went numb. I buried my head in her neck, under her chin, and looked sideways past the trees at shooting stars. We spoke softly, barely above whispers, mumbling, occasionally breaking the awesome stillness of the night with shrieks of laughter at gloriously dorky and meaningless things. But mostly it was soft. Sometimes I would try to say something, try to convey something that part of me wasn't ready to say out loud, and my eyes would sting. I would feel her lips on my forhead, or by my ear, and I would just stop, put my arms around her, and squeeze. She'd squeeze back. I turned her around to face me once and just hugged her, minutes on end I just sat there and held her in silence, in the jungle gym, on my playground, and I was happy. Really, genuinely happy. I try to tell people, sometimes, just why I love Heather the way that I do, to the degrees that I do, because I feel like most people miss out on most of it. Socially, she's outspoken, random, sarcastic and goofy and abrasive, strange beyond all reason and fun beyond all description of the word. So people like her, enjoy her, develop minor dorky crushes on her because she's so brutally authentic. But I can take her to a jungle gym in the dead of night or crawl under a blanket with her after an endlessly long day, and feel like someone understands me, and amidst all the caustic, sharp bravado with which she'll attack the world at large, I'll feel safe with her like I do so rarely with people, and loved.
That's why I love Heather.
We went back to the house around 1. The two left behind were dead asleep on the couch. We went into my room and I took off my shoes, she mentioned being wide awake and not tired at all, crawling into bed with me. She took my hand and wrapped it around her, and was asleep 15 minutes later, with me hot on her heels.
The next day, it was noted that the tourist experience for Nikki and Andrew still wasn't complete. How to remedy this? Freebirds (burritos of international acclaim) on the beach. Afterwards, I emptied my pockets into a brown paper bag and walked toward the water with Billy. Ankles, definitely. Knees, possibly. Within 15 feet I couldn't stand it anymore, I set into a run for the water. Behind me, a voice. "Oh my god, Alex is running!" Reminded me of Elena. I grinned maniacally as my feet hit the water, impairing my speed. I puddlestomped, two massive splashes and I was up to my knees, one more and I bellyflopped gloriously into chest-deep salty glory. I let my eyes open underwater, taking in the experience, the blue-green murky with sand that didn't sting, in my head because the ocean had missed me too. I stood up, my friends on the shore standing in a line, staring at me and smiling. They probably had seen something missing in me over the past day, something that was back, a vitality, a relaxation, I'd found myself again. Sploshing out, I chased heather around in circles, sopping wet. "Give us a hug, eh?" She shrieked and giggled and ran, so I turned to Nikki, who smiled at me and stepped forward, leaning into me.
She gives fantastic hugs.
Eventually everyone but Jerome, dry for reasons known only to himself, wandered fully dressed into the ocean. Frigidly we splashed and body-surfed, bellies scraping against the sand, then floated, idly bobbing in the waves.
Eventually we went back to my house, and gathered our stuff together. Sunday afternoon, after all, last day before school starts. Wandered outside and stood in the driveway, starting the goodbye process. Something felt wrong, something unfinished, something important I was forgetting.
"Dude," Andrew had said, watching me stare in confusion at the sidewalk. "Do you want to say goodbye to your house? This is going to be the last time you see it..."
To quote a famous and dorky man, it was a lot like being hit in the head by a lemon wedge, tied to a gold brick. Memories flew past with horrid speed, years peeled back in my head and the paint of the house went from forest green to rusty reddish brown, cars entered and left our driveway. Jerome's oldsmobile, Billy's corsica and tempo and jeep and motercycle, Parker's volvo. A thousand adventures had been spawned from this very driveway, a hundred saturday mornings spent with a box of cereal and saturday morning cartoons just inside. Christmas trees and easter egg hunts, movie marathons from the futon, burn marks on our ceiling, matchstick rockets in the kitchen. Burning pine branches in the backyard for good luck. Hammocks and roosters and tents, cardboard rides down the back slope, 18 and half years of life, 4 years of vacation, terror of an infinite degree that I had almost left without knowing it was my last time.
They noticed my pause. "Do you... uh..." He'd said tentatively behind me, "Do you want a couple minutes to go inside, say goodbye to the house?"
I frowned, a couple minutes wouldn't do it. A couple hours wouldn't do it.
Maybe a couple seconds would.
Between Billy and Dave and I, when words had utterly failed us, when emotions were too abstract even to become thoughts one could attempt to articulate, to convey and solidify in the cornerstones of our souls, there was always another way, and that other way had always succeeded. This in mind, I shook my head and mumbled something casual, and choked back a little. Slowly, I walked up to the house and raised a fist, gave a pound to the first and only real home I'd ever known. The garage door reverberated, the springs of it's inner workings vibrated and sent shivers through the door, and the house gave me a pound back. I held it there a couple seconds until it felt right and complete. Then I turned around, we said our goodbyes. And I left.
Twitch.
The ride home was much the same as the road there. Rest stops and gas stops, smoke breaks and fast food. We made good time, in no particular hurry. Nikki slept in the back for most of it, Andrew and I sat up front and talked, or sang, or sat in silence. Every now and then I'd look back to see if she was awake. Such an adorable sleeper, except for once when both hands were on opposite shoulders, like a vampire.
About 2:30 in the morning, a familier driveway. Got out, stretched. Came in, passed out. And thus summer ended.
-Alex
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