No Place Like Ventura

SHE HAD BLUE HAIR AND STAINED TEETH. Was it coffee? Cigarettes? Who knows. They were perfect. Every morning she’d plaster makeup on her face and the sun would bounce off her pasty face. But it was the pimples on her breasts I remember the most. Every blackhead was like a little bead of joy. I’d trace my fingers over them like I was connecting constellations. Someday I would find an angel.

Of course she ended up in the hospital. She was a manic depressive when I met her and 5150’d when we separated. I went to go visit her at the clinic in the middle of wine country. She’d swallowed an entire bottle of Ibuprofen and still looked pretty good. A little gaunt maybe, but gaunt looked good on her. She hardly ever ate. Our grocery bill would’ve been cheap if we moved in together.

“Get out of my face. I don’t ever want to see you again,” she said.

“Don’t say that,” I said. “It’s just the benzos talking.”

“I mean it. All you do is hover. All this hovering is giving me anxiety.”

“But I’m here for you, babe. You’ll aways have me as your safety net.”

“I don’t need a fucking safety net. And don’t call me babe. My dad is picking me up at the end of the week and taking me back home to Ventura.”

“I can drive you.”

“I’d rather choke on my own vomit.”

So I fell into a sort of spiral after that. Who can blame me? How would you feel if the love of your life said she never wanted to see you again, that your codependency fostered her self-destructive tendencies? Anyway I put on a lot of weight. I was going out every night and treating myself to fancy dinners by myself. I maxed out my credit cards and I ended up missing one rent payment. So the landlord hauled my fat ass out to the curb. This is San Francisco we’re taking about. I’d be lucky to find a tent to sleep in. The only solution was to move back in with my old man in La Jolla, San Diego, a measly four hour drive from Ventura. It hurt that much more, knowing she was still so close to me. Peggy, was her name.

My old man was in real estate. He flipped houses. Back when I wrote screenplays he used to buy them from me for a hundred bucks a pop. Said nobody else would pay for them, so I grudgingly accepted his charity. Mom died when I was four. She had an epileptic seizure in the bathtub and drowned. Growing up the house was real quiet. My old man fought in Vietnam. I used to hear him talking to ghosts while I was sleeping. He cursed a lot. He laughed when I first moved to San Francisco, said I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body. He was right. I dropped out of school and delivered edible marijuana for eight years. When I moved back home I asked him for a job. I expected to be made a supervisor or something clerical. Instead he had me stripping out old drywall. Said it would strip off my love handles. The worse part was I didn’t lose any weight. I just got bulkier. I took up boxing on weekends. Everyone there thought I was a seasoned MMA fighter. Then during my first match this former Navy SEAL wallops me square in the face and I black out. I show up at work with a black eye and the guys in my crew get to calling me Panda.

“Hey Panda where’s the PVC pipe?”

“Hey Panda where’s the shingles?.”

“Hey Panda, did you take my Cliff Bar?”

“No,” I’d say. But the truth was: I did. Thieving became my new passion. Small things that nobody would really get mad about. A pencil. A tape measure. A $2 scratcher. Somebody’s pain pills for back spasms. It was the pain pills that truly did me dirty. I enjoyed the rush of petty theft, but nothing compared to complete numbness. I’d nod off in the car before and after work and dwell on Peggy. She lived with her father now. He was a Harley Davidson mechanic. She said he used to sell heroin until finding God and becoming a full-time Christian. He belonged to a Christian motorcycle club, Sons of David. Then I got to thinking: What if I bought a motorcycle? So I did. It was a used Honda Rebel, straight from the dealership. The bike looked pretty normal sized on the lot, but once I hit the road it was clearly too tiny for my massive frame. At turns it would wobble, and kids skating on the sidewalk made elephant noises at me. I looked like a circus animal riding a unicycle.

I stopped at a 7/11 to pick up some hot dogs and WD-40. Two Hell’s Angels outside sneered at me and asked how far up my ass could I fit that bike. They were both spindly and clearly meth-heads wearing oversized leather vests. I threatened to beat both their asses, thinking I had a hundred pounds on them combined. They backed off. Then as I turned around one of them clocked me in the back of the head with a socket wrench. When I came to I was running down the street with my pants off. Apparently those Hell’s Angels robbed me, stripped me half-naked, and stole my motorcycle. A police officer stopped and cited me for public indecency. Then she noticed my my chewed-up tongue and called for an ambulance. At the emergency room they gave me a CAT scan and an EEG and determined that I had suffered a seizure. They suspended my drivers license for three months while they decided if I was epileptic or not.

Sans license I rode with my old man to work. It was hard hiding my pill-popping from him, which had become a full-blown habit. I’d sit in the front seat in his Cadillac and stare at the dashboard absolutely bonked out of my mind. He never said anything. Then one day he pulls to the side of the road and says “son, I’m dying.” It turned out that the old man had liver cancer and was hiding it. It had spread to his lungs, his thyroid, his bladder, his tits – even his tits! I’d never seen him cry before like that. I didn’t know what to say. Instead I looked out the window and stared at an abandoned airstream trailer out in the fields. It was rusted and tipped over on one side. I imagined an escaped convict or a mental case living inside there. Then a man crawled out of the side of the trailer and I understood why: He was wearing a dirty bathrobe and had a tumor on his face the size of a grapefruit. It was round and purple and hanging off the side of his left cheek. We met eyes and he managed a smile. Then my dad repeated my name and I turned and he said “you’ll do it, won’t you?”

“Do what?” I said.

“Scatter my ashes at the poppy fields,” he said.

 He meant the poppy fields in Lancaster, where he grew up. He said he became a man there, losing his virginity at nineteen to a girl he barely knew in a field of blood-orange flowers. The girl ended up becoming my mom. I said I wasn’t so sure, seeing as I might not be able to drive.

“Then call a cab you lousy bitch,” he said.

“That’ll be over a thousand dollars,” I said.

“I’m leaving you my business,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of cash.”

I considered the cash for a moment. But here’s what I thought of instead: Waiting in the car for my dad while he got plastered with his VFW buddies. And the joy on his face when he beat that DUI charge and took me out for milkshakes at Jo’s Diner. Every year on the anniversary of mom’s death he would take me to the race tracks, which was also my birthday. Once I bet on a Pony and won four dollars. So I committed the rest of the year to creating more precious memories with my old man.

Turns out I didn’t even have a year. He died within the month. During that time he was mostly in hospitals and pissing blood by the bucket full. We didn’t go to any ball games or build birdhouses or nothing. He just went. Suddenly I had this big house to myself. At night I started seeing ghosts. Vietnam vets who I never met charged through my dreams with napalm coming off their breath. I brought this up to a dream specialist who charged by the hour. She said the dead soldiers represented duty deferred, meaning I was forgetting to do something. The ashes.

So the next day I hired a driver with a limo to drive me four hours to Lancaster. The driver was a young aspiring actor in LA. When we arrived I was expecting a lush orange oasis of blooming poppy flowers. Instead it was practically a graveyard. Poppy holocaust. The driver mentioned it was off-season, and I wished he’d brought that up before we left. Nonetheless, I scattered my old man’s ashes. It went by a lot faster than I thought. I didn’t even have time to cry. Walking back to the limo I found a pair of worn Chuck Taylors on the ground. They were the exact size that Peggy wore. I had a vision then: Showing up at Peggy’s doorstep unannounced with this pair of old sneakers and rekindling what we once had. She always said I was predictable, not sporadic. This would knock her on her ass.

I’d never been to Ventura and found it peaceful, quaint. Kids going around on bikes. Antique shops run by old ladies. I bought some gifts for Peggy: A World War II army canteen, Sonny Bono records, used Ninja Turtle action figures, the kind of things we used to look for at the Salvation Army in our glory days. I paid the limo driver and told him to go home. I would stay here and find a job. I would find a bungalow by the ocean and live there until I was old and had a long gray ponytail down my back. I would do this with Peggy by my side. I sat in a park and pictured this all vividly in my mind. As the sun was setting I gave her a call. She didn’t pick up. I didn’t have her address. She deleted her social media profiles months ago. So I had nothing to do except sit around and drink tallboys until I fell asleep. When I woke up a police officer was poking me with his night stick. Someone had gotten into my shopping bags and taken all my stuff. My wallet was missing too. The officer told me to beat it or he would haul me in for vagrancy. So I went up the street, and passing by me in my absolute misery was Peggy.

Her hair was cut short and back to its original auburn brown. She was wearing a black sweater and a knit skirt. She’d gained some baby fat, but it was her for sure. She gave me a hug and seemed happy to see me.

“Let me buy you breakfast,” she said.

We went to a nearby diner. I confessed I didn’t have my wallet, but she covered everything. We sat there with French toast and coffee, perfectly still. There was a calmness to her that I’d never known before. She said that since moving home she found God and splits her time between working on a kale farm and volunteering at a clinic for infants of drug addicts. I told her my father just died of cancer. She grasped my hand like it’d been pierced. Apparently her dad had died recently too of a motorcycle accident. His bike was sideswiped on the highway by a Mormon family on vacation and it sent him flying off the Pacific Coast Highway. We both struggled with our tears. Already I could see our mutual loss as tinder for a rekindling. At that moment it all came back to me: The girl who worked behind the bagel counter, the boy who would come in everyday until finally working up the nerve to ask her out for a late-night showing of The Graduate. I asked if we should ask for a box and go back to her house. She withdrew her hand. “I’m engaged,” she said. She showed me a ring hanging around her necklace. I asked who it was. She said it was youth pastor who led a prayer group called Jesus on Wheels at the local skate park. They met shortly after moving back here and got engaged three months later. Suddenly I was very angry. The thought of another man inside her drove me into animalistic rage. I threw my coffee against the wall. The waitress told me to get the hell out. I leaned over and called Peggy a name that shouldn’t even be in my vocabulary. She stabbed me in the shoulder blade with a fork. Good ol’ Peggy.

 Fork still in flesh, I reflected on the romance that lasted about a year before the fighting. The empty glares. The disastrous Mexico vacation. I thought of a line by Joyce that goes: Gazing into the darkness, I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. I pulled the fork out and stared at its bloody prongs: I would never have Peggy. Then: Did I ever really love her in a meaningful way? Those flames were extinguished. My feelings felt as hot as leftover French fries.

I walked down to the pier where early morning fisherman were still catching crabs. An oncoming boy on a bicycle told me to move it, so I did, and this caused me to bump into a woman holding her baby. The baby dropped to the ground and everyone was scrambling to offer support. “You stupid drunk,” the mother said. I said I was sorry over and over again. Then I put my arms around her. “Get off me you fucking nut,” she said. I didn’t know what I was doing. My body was on acting on pure basic impulse. Three guys tried pulling me off of her but my grip was too strong. Then an aura of panic came on me like an impending storm. People were yelling but I couldn’t make out their words. My mind was detaching itself from my body, and it occurred to me that I was having another seizure. My arms went soft and I started tilting over the ledge. I was plunging headfirst into the ocean, life escaping me, and my body felt light, as light as air.