Santa Barbara.
I once wrote a poem where I compared the light in Santa Barbara to palomino horses galloping down the arroyos into the sea. It was a wild image, and I'll stand up for it to naysayers and meteorologists and simile-haters alike. Now, however, I just want to play a game with that city's initials: Santa Barbara, Silver Barnacles. Salamander Barbecue. Second Bassoon.
When I first thought seriously of describing Santa Barbara again, I wrote, “It would be an interesting post, but I’d much rather talk about pirates.”
You can’t always choose your memories or obsessions, though. Santa Barbara, that affluent city between the Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific, was the place I grew up—not in the sense that I lived there as a child, but in the sense of what is sometimes called (yech) ‘blossoming.’ I feel a bit like Winnie the Pooh, having had episodic adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood—except that my friends weren’t ornery owls and gregarious gophers. And my Hundred Acre Wood was Isla Vista, the tiny, packed, overpriced borderland between the University of California and the rest of the world. Isla Vista is a town that stinks when the sun goes down of sweat and cheap vodka, where the streets closest to the sea are packed from Tuesday to Sunday with scantily dressed drunkards who wander from house to house, searching for something they can’t name.
All right, I’m being melodramatic. I can’t help it—Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean writer whose works abound with paradox and dead-ends, might have invented Isla Vista. When I think of it and Santa Barbara (and I apologize for any confusion that might arise from how I lump them together), I think of driftwood fences, cold water, and substance abuse. I think of Pirate, the homeless man who lives off of the UC students’ excess booze, and speaks with a gruff, nautical growl. When I was a freshman, he tried to impress me by lifting his eye patch and smoking a cigarette out of the empty socket.
A lot of things happened to me in Santa Barbara. I made friends and lost friends, learned how to craft essays, rode an orange bike up and down the seashore, drank bloody marys, ran across beaches full of snowy plovers, became a feminist, became a caffeine-addict, saw a few brush-fires, climbed a few mountains, slept on a few dorm room floors.
The Pacific surges against the dark horizon, and the cliffs that line it erode a little bit more each year.
The hobos and the crazy people epitomize Isla Vista. When Greg and I were twenty-two, just after we graduated, we rented an apartment where, for six months, we were routinely awakened in the middle of the night by the man who lived downstairs hurling himself against our door. He pounded the door so hard that a piece of wood around the jamb cracked away from the rest of the plank. When we called the police, the man defended himself by saying that we were always “tapping on his walls.”
I suppose someone who hasn’t been to Southern California might not know what I mean when I say that So-Cal has its own special kind of despair. It’s a glitzy, narcissistic kind of despair—maybe it’s not a despair at all, but a type of recklessness. I’ve seen a young man throw himself against the hood of a moving taxi and yell, “Fuck yeah!” as he bounced off.
Isla Vista can be sweet, too, with its unrestrained hordes. Election night of 2008, people yelled “Obama!” across the town until three or four in the morning, and were always echoed by an equally exuberant “Obama!” from somewhere else in the dark. The UC won a free Coldplay concert because, out of any college in the nation, the highest percentage of us voted. My friend Evan spent that Tuesday grumbling about being the only Republican within city bounds.
Isla Vista is a city of bike theft. Everyone flits about on two wheels, and individuals with mad eyes leap from bushes offering to sell purloined bikes for five dollars. I spent my first two years of college walking places, but finally caved and bought a swift orange Beach Cruiser—which is still the only concrete image I have for the word “freedom.” It got stolen on the day after I graduated, as if to emphasize that, when one door opens, another closes.
In another instance of subtext from the universe, the bittersweet lyrics of “Scarborough Fair” drift down from the apartment above me as I write.
“Remember me to one who lives there…
She once was a true love of mine.”
So good evening, fellow travelers on this murky highway of words. This is, I suppose, only a partial post—a fragment of what it could be, but a wee bit more than nothing. I find this fizzling ending somehow appropriate for December 30th--one day short of December 31st, the fizzling end of the year, when it's goodbye to 2011 already and guten Tag to the Year of Our Lord two thousand o-twelve.
I promise to come back and talk about pirates later.
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