MEGA
San Ramon and the Bay
Braggart made his pitch on the bus into the city, “I know a place. It’s a shelter, we can stay there for the night. Don’t worry about it, it’s a safe place.” he said, sounding cocky.
The Irish guy next to me was having none of it.
“Are you sure you want to stay with him?” he said, scrunching up his face, a look of dread in his eyes.
The old bus violently smashed up and down as it traversed the San Fran streets.
“Yeah, I’ll be alright.” I said, not completely convinced at my own answer.
I decided it would be good to have him around, if only to shield me from whatever was roaming around the city early in the morning.
Me and Braggart were the last ones off the Amtrak bus.
I detected the worrying signs of impending, catastrophic life changing events as I tightly held the straps of my backpack and marched forward with Braggart in tow.
The Mission District, Crack and Disease and Chaos.
We walked up to the entrance of the shelter where we were met by a volunteer/security guard and bag searched.
Inside I wasn’t expecting much but maybe a little more than what was on offer. An arsenal of cheap plastic chairs, most occupied by the drugged up homeless of San Francisco.
It’s obviously a bad situation to live on the streets but when the alternative is sleeping on a plastic chair in a room full of other people sleeping on plastic chairs, it made sense why the streets of America were full of the forgotten.
This was supposed to be help. Looking around, it didn’t look like it.
A lot of them were older black men, a healthy percentage of whom were on crack or something similar. It was sad to watch the whole room hunched over in the cheap plastic chairs groaning and grunting their way through the mental haze.
We didn’t have the heart for any more of it and went back out onto the streets.
On the way out of the Mission District a woman approached us swiping her hands frantically, we sidestepped her and walked away leaving her in some other universe.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got a plan.” I looked down to see Braggart holding a broken pen out like a knife, he was prepared to use it to stab the next crackhead we encountered.
Looking at him holding his pen out like a knife with a look in his eyes between steely unhinged and bad puppy, it was becoming even harder to take his, “I just ran out on my wife and kids cause they don’t love me.” story seriously.
We made our way in the general direction of the hostel, stopping every five minutes so Braggart could have conversations with random people.
He gravitated towards those outside 7-Elevens asking for change. It was possible he was trying to learn some tricks for his new life, that from the look of things seemed destined to be on the streets.
After sucking all of the info he could from the homeless population of San Fransisco I finally managed to get him back on the leash and inside a Carl’s Jr.
I ordered the largest meal on the menu – a cheese, bacon and beef giant. My stomach was still rebuilding itself after three days of pretty much no food. I attempted a few small bites of the burger and then let my former seatmate and current puppy/bodyguard have the rest.
I was hoping it would widen his gut some more so his rope belt would stay up for longer periods.
Why was his belt a rope? I never asked him. I didn’t want to know the answer.
The darkened night gave way to the bluish hue of morning as we made our way closer to the hostel located atop one of San Francisco’s many steep streets. I was done with the madness, I just wanted a bed and unconsciousness.
When we arrived, the receptionist gave me a bunk early but I could only enjoy unconsciousness for a few hours. I woke in the early afternoon to sounds of a hammer. A repairman was in my room smashing away at one of the dorm beds.
I screamed some profanities at the sorry looking worker who apologised, quickly finished and then ran away.
Jeff turned up that night and drove me straight into the seedy heart of San Francisco to pick up where we left off. Tired or not I didn’t care, I had my Jeff back.
Jeff put some Taylor Swift on and the song that came out of the speakers became our anthem.
Taylor Swift’s 22
We’d play that song on repeat on all our drives around the Bay.
I was in a good mood, it felt like things had come full circle. I downed drink after drink at the small cocktail bar we found ourselves at and started talking to a bit of a weirdo.
She was small, under five feet and had a boyish look with eyes so wide you’d think they’d been yanked violently open with heavy machinery. She wasn’t unattractive, just odd looking…
We were outside smoking up some cigarettes when she began angling for a threesome. I was vaguely interested, before it hit me what that would mean.
The weirdo lady got in the car anyway, falling around the backseat like a ship in a storm while we sped off for some fast food.
We did the right thing and drove her back to her place, where she probably slept it off and woke up the next morning without a clue how she got there.
We pulled in late to the mediterranean styled cul-de-sac in San Ramon where Jeff and his parents lived. For the next two weeks the sofa of the converted attic would be mine to make my own.
Jeff’s family were a mysterious quantity. I would be around the house and one would appear suddenly before disappearing just as fast.
The first encounter between me and Jeff’s mom was an awkward one. I was just standing around eating a pancake and drinking a soda when she entered the kitchen from the garage.
Silence. Ten seconds. A ten second silence. Ten seconds doesn’t sound long but when you’re eating a pancake and drinking a can of soda in someone else’s house and you don’t know if they know why you’re there, it’s a long time.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
“Hi!” I said to Jeff’s bemused mother.
“Hi, you’re Brad?” Jeff’s bemused mother asked me.
“YES. I’m Brad.”
Jeff’s bemused mother became less bemused.
I felt comfortable in that house, despite a few of these strange standoffs. Maybe it was because Jeff felt like a brother to me, or maybe a wife? Yeah, why not, let’s go with wife.
Me and Jeff fought a lot, so I guess it was some kind of marriage.
You know it’s forever when you argue over where to eat, when to buy cigarettes and when not to buy cigarettes. The dilemmas of youth. When you reveal the darkest things about yourself in the early morning hours in a deserted beach parking lot.
On my last morning in San Ramon I woke up to Jeff looking at me. It wasn’t unusual, most mornings I’d wake up with him staring at me, like an excited dog patiently waiting for their owner to wake up.
“You haven’t done anything touristy yet.” he said in a regretful, guilty sounding voice.
There were a lot of things I had passed on already while travelling, the tourist MUST DO!!! attractions, but I was attracted to the Golden Gate’s boldness and felt it deserved some time, so I agreed, “Let’s go see the bridge!”
And we did, we saw it and we walked on it, then went to drink again.
That night we ended up at a bar somewhere near the Golden Gate. The bar was packed full of nice and dumb looking people.
Everybody looked nice and they also looked dumb. I don’t know why they all gave me that impression but they did.
A guitarist played Billy Joel cover songs in the corner while we drank pints of cider at the bar.
Jeff started talking to two English women, both were friendly but sadly they looked badly smashed up…
“They are NOT coming with us!” I whispered to Jeff.
It was a pre-emptive strike against myself. In an hour alcohol would make them both attractive, and I had to take precautions against it.
The Bay Area had been unkind to me when it came to great romances. I didn’t want my one sex tale from the Bay to be an act of drunken desperation.
Why had it been this way?
We had been to bars and malls and bowling alleys across the Bay Area but I found no great love in any of them.
‘Maybe my masterful skills of seduction have dried up.’ I sometimes thought to myself after leaving another pickup spot with only Jeff by my side.
I would always dismiss the notion a moment later, of course.
The English women and Jeff talked away and I took a long scan over the bar. An ocean of nice and dumb people being nice and dumb. There was nothing here for me.
I was bored.
I pulled Jeff away from the English women and we left.
We drove to get some fast food and then on to the train station.
Jeff had paid for all the gas and a lot of the meals and drinks for the last two weeks. I suddenly appreciated his generosity when he needed cash to pay for gas and I realised I hadn’t taken cash out again.
Jeff was a bit pissed, he even had some shoutiness for me and called me, “So selfish.” which I was.
I decided to give him my jacket – it was a nice one – it was my form of repayment and thanks. I loved the jacket but I was going to Mexico anyway and I wouldn’t need it. I preferred to leave it with Jeff, someone I liked, someone it would look half as good on.
We sat in Jeff’s car in the car park of Emeryville Station after our final night of alcoholing and stared out through the windscreen. Jeff, pondering what to say.
Goodbyes are hard, advice and goodbyes even harder. He was going for the advice and goodbyes. He thought of something to say, said it, and I forgot it, but I wouldn’t forget him or the time in New York and the Bay Area.
I left the car, said goodbye to Jeff and headed towards the station with a tear under my eyelid. It didn’t jump out over it and fall but it was there, hidden somewhere.
Amtrak came through with a free ticket for my train to Los Angeles. Another sorry for the fuck ups gesture.
Breaking down in the middle of the mountains and deserts of America was a memory, a great memory. I was being compensated for something I had enjoyed immensely, ‘Great deal!’ I thought, as I boarded the free train to Los Angeles.
LA and a Blur of Crack
The train from San Francisco was very determined to let everyone know that it was a…
“Non-stop train to Los Angeles, seriously get off if you don’t want to go non-stop to Los Angeles, this is a NON-STOP TRAIN TO LOS ANGELES!”
‘Alright… but I thought this was supposed to stop somewhe…’
“NON-STOP TRAIN, THIS IS A NON-STOP TRAIN TO LOS ANGELES!!!” came blaring out of the crappy speaker system again, cutting off my thought.
When the warnings finally ended I started to doubt if I really did want to go non-stop to Los Angeles. It was too late though, the train was already on the move out of Emeryville.
A few hours later the world outside the window had completely changed.
Has the train become a spaceship?
Have I been transported a billion light years across the universe to some weird exoplanet?
Would I meet a new love?
Would we fuck like animals in the red dust?
Would we have mixed-species children who one day would grow up and ask us how we met?
Would I have to explain that I didn’t know, that I had been on a train in a place called California on a planet called Earth and the next thing I knew I was in a red desert world and that’s where I met your mother, would that happen?
No, it wouldn’t. I did learn however that the empty spaces of California were eye burningly beautiful. The terrain outside the window was so strange and vivid, so different from anything I had ever seen.
Golden tinged rolling hills rising above valleys of red dust all of it set against a bright blue sky with the odd wooden electrical pole or farm to remind you what planet you were on.
It was a treasure.
The scenery knocked me out of my overthinking and drugged me into peace. I was in the empty spaces of California and I was free.
It was slow jazz on a warm summer night. Silent showers of pear drop rain. The tanned curves of a blessed woman. Porcelain trumpets and glass violins. Dancing monkeys, psychedelic wine. I was feeling fine.
. . . . .
Time felt distorted as I got off the train at LA’s Union Station and onto the Red Line to Hollywood. I sat at the back of the old, dirty train car and thought of food and sleep in a blur. I was trying to stay awake when something out of the corner of my eye caught my attention.
An old man seated in the middle of the car started flirting with a young woman. She was pretty and the classic LA stereotype that I had in my mind. What I was witnessing didn’t connect with that stereotype though, because she was playfully flirting back.
There was something about the scene that had an effect on me. It would have been usual to see her brush him off or scream for help but she didn’t, the old man flirted and the young woman flirted back.
Two strangers, one an old man and the other a beautiful young woman flirting away.
A train full of people I’d never see again scrolling through their phones with others engaging in chit-chat.
A few staring off into space.
Me snuggled up at the back of the train car with my backpack, needing a cigarette, tired and bemused and on my way to Hollywood.
The first hostel I stayed at was a dank one with no real life. Located just across the street from the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and Dolby Theatre. The same theatres they give little gold statues to people for pretending to be other people and to other people helping the people who pretend to be other people.
I did make a friend there if only for a day or two, a guy from Africa who looked happier than a dog eating a lollipop to be in Los Angeles on vacation. He was nice, so nice he even carried my leather jacket for me when I left the hostel and moved to another.
The new hostel was a big improvement, I met a new person or a new group of people every night while I sat outside smoking on the courtyard’s cream sofas.
Like a cat waiting patiently for the dead fish to drift ashore I would sit in anticipation for my next friend, lover or enemy.
Hollywood, California provided many friends, lovers and enemies.
Most nights an adventurous episode would start from that weirdly chilly courtyard.
This chapter is another difficult one. Los Angeles provided me with many stories –
Riding every roller coaster at Six Flags.
Drunken drives in strangers’ cars.
Paris Hilton casually walking into a club then back out 30 seconds later while I ate a slice of pizza next to it.
Lots of stories, but I only want to tell four of them. They all center around me, a girl, that girl’s boyfriend and cocaine.
I’ll separate them out again like I did for the New York chapter. Four stories over four nights – Smash, Crack, Bat and Mash and I’ll finish off the chapter with a bonus story I’ll title Brad Nicholls and Margaret Thatcher ‘’’’ ‘
Smash
I had never tried cocaine before but I wasn’t opposed to the idea and it would probably be better than snorting any more sugar from the free coffee area, that for some reason I had started doing once the topic came up.
I was with Bright and Smiles.
Bright was the love of my life, at least at the time I was convinced she was. She had tanned skin, long legs and a face that was the perfect mix of cute, sexy, pretty and sweet. She could have easily been a beautiful descendant of Asia or of Latin America. Her personality was a bit wild too which was all the more seductive.
[The moment I first saw her I was in love.
She had walked into the courtyard a few days earlier in a summer dress, holding a cocktail. Before my eyes could even focus in on her completely the words, ‘She’s mine!’ had been screamed from my subconscious, it was a direct order.
Time actually stopped, like a scene in some dumb romantic comedy. Time stopped.
When time restarted I noticed her boyfriend next to her.
Smiles was a genuinely good person. The only problem with Smiles was that he was with the girl I was currently convinced was the love of my life, but that was the only stain on Smiles, I liked Smiles. He was the best example I’d ever met of the happy Australian dude, never without a baseball cap and a shining smile.]
Later that night after scheming for cocaine and landing on a strategy to get it, Smiles went to bed and left me and Bright alone.
Bright had already ripped my heart out of my chest and had it hidden somewhere. It was only natural for me to return the favour. Especially since for the last few days she had been giving me all the signs that something similar to my instant love was being felt by her too.
With Smiles back in their dorm room, we went upstairs to the empty lounge and laid down together on one of the large sofas.
She nudged her body against my arm…
“Aaa a a a a a
ahmmmm
ahmmmm!!!”
I lifted my arm and she snuggled into me.
She looked at my lips.
I kept cool but the pounding of my heart was so loud it could have created an echo around the room.
Maybe it did, I was deaf too and blind to anything but her. There could have been a cigar smoking bear in the room, playing a banjo while fucking a pig on the back of a crocodile. Wouldn’t have mattered.
Minutes later we were on a sofa on the other side of the room making out. The kiss confirmed everything, I’d never kissed a girl like that and felt so much magic.
“I just couldn’t help myself.” she whispered.
After being interrupted by another guest who knew both of us and her boyfriend, Bright came to her senses and went to bed.
I paced the courtyard for hours and smoked enough cigarettes to ruin a hundred pairs of lungs. I was devastatingly, madly, uncontrollably in love. Fucking hell was I in love.
Crack
We found our cocaine through Smile’s friends who were also in Hollywood and staying in a nice hotel nearby.
We took a taxi there and drank some cocktails in the bar before going up to their room for the deal.
Smile’s friends were a nice bunch of people, these Australians were all so nice.
Smile’s ex-girlfriend was among the group, she was another stunner and was very friendly to me, ‘Were me and Smiles some kind of type that a certain group of beautiful women were attracted to?’
I took a rolled up bill, approached the desk and snorted my first line of cocaine…
Wooooooooo
O
O
O
Oooo
O
O o o o o
Whatta drug.
We filled a little plastic bottle up, secured the blue plastic lid and headed out to a nightclub.
Something was strange inside the club. Where was my dislike for these places? I usually hated them but tonight was different.
Cocaine, what a drug.
I was confidently and effortlessly flirting with Smile’s current girlfriend and ex-girlfriend, I was so high I could have been effortlessly flirting with Smiles as well.
The stupid EDM beats of the music sounded better, somehow they finally made sense. The strobe lights had an extra depth and dance to them. Life was better this way.
Cocaine, what a drug.
I don’t remember how the night ended.
Bat
He appeared on the sofa next to us and started to talk as if he’d been with us all night. We were all too high from another session of coke not to talk away and involve him. He was a smooth talker too, he was so smooth and I was very high. I didn’t sense anything wrong with him.
I excused myself to the bathroom, “Smiles, I’m gonna go do a line.” I said.
Smile’s passed me the little bottle with the magic dust. Sliding it into my pocket I headed for the hostel’s ground floor bathroom.
My nose monstered above the fat line and I quickly wrecked the powder into my bloodstream.
Everythings better when your blood’s got cocaine in it.
‘I shouldn’t get too used to this.’ I thought, as I left the bathroom with 18 times more energy.
Back in the courtyard our new friend was interested in having a turn, I passed him the bottle and he went for the toilet.
Half a minute later I heard the smacking of a baseball bat and loud yelling.
“NO NO NO, WHAT THE FUCK DID I TELL YOU LAST TIME!” the heavyweight boxer of a receptionist yelled across the courtyard as our new friend ran across it.
He was holding the baseball bat out getting ready to hit a home run with our new friend’s head.
He got closer to me with the bat, it took a few seconds to realise he wasn’t about to smash my head in too.
He was aiming soley for our unlucky new friend. I jumped up knowing my beautiful cocaine was about to run out the courtyard door.
“Give me the bottle.” I whispered to him.
New Friend did the right thing and handed it over before running for his life.
“What is that?” the receptionist looked down at the bottle I was holding, knowing exactly what it was, “Just don’t let me catch you with it again.” he said, before going back inside.
We were more careful with our little blue bottle from then on.
Mash
We exited The Viper Room and got into a taxi heading to Compton with a gangsta we met inside the club.
“I know she’s your girlfriend but I just have to say, you are so beautiful!” Gangsta said, taking Bright’s hand and kissing it.
A surge of adrenaline pulsated through me.
’Never mind her boyfriend, GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF OF HER, THE LOVE OF MY LIFE! THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!’ I screamed in my mind, completely calm and collected.
I remembered a nice restaurant a guest from my first hostel in Los Angeles had recommended and gently slided the plan from going to Compton with this new enemy who was now giving Bright a scalp massage to that restaurant instead.
Soon after arriving at the restaurant and getting a table our Gangsta friend disappeared outside, never to be seen again, which was convenient.
“What happened to that guy we were with?” Smiles asked me.
“You said something that upset me!” Bright said.
“What did I say?” I said
“I don’t remember, but I know it upset me.” Bright said.
“OK.” I said.
“Can I headbutt you?” Bright asked me.
“OK.” I answered.
“I want some mash potato.” Bright said.
“Can I have some mash potato?” I called out to a passing waiter.
I got her mash potato.
Brad Nicholls and Margaret Thatcher
I crossed the street from the hostel and entered the pharmacy on a mission to find cologne.
It was a mistake. As always, whenever you begin changing and overthinking in any seduction, the games already up.
I could tell Bright really liked me. I knew, she knew, Smiles even knew, I think he knew, he should have known. But now I was about to throw it away by investing in it too much.
I chose an expensive cologne and took it to the counter, “I’m so sorry.” the cashier said to me, looking genuinely so sorry.
Her big blue eyes strained with sympathy.
“What’s happened?” I asked, expecting bad news.
“MARGARET THATCHER IS DEAD.”
I tried hard not to burst out laughing. Not because I didn’t care at all that the longest serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century had popped off and I didn’t care at all, but it was the way she said it.
“It’s okay, she’s not my mum.” I said, sounding like an arsehole.
“Oh, ok.” she beamed and finished ringing up my cologne.
‘Everyone in this town is acting.’ I thought, as I crossed the street back to the hostel with my new bottle of expensive cologne.