I spent the majority of my life in the small seaside sanctuary of Santa Barbara California. My mum and I moved there from Long Beach (“inflamed boil on the buttocks of the world”) when I was three. She had just remarried, less out of love than to provide a decent life for me. She succeeded in that respect but paid an emotional toll that I only later came to appreciate.
We settled into a house on a couple of acres of land in a wooded enclave called Mission Canyon. Back in the day there were no fences dividing one property from another- trees and undergrowth stretched out in all directions, broken only occasionally by a road or driveway; there were even a couple of creeks which to me were as mysterious as the Amazon. For a boy and his dog it was an untamed and unclaimed frontier waiting to be explored.
And explore we did. Apart from the unwanted interruption of school, I spent nearly every daylight (and many night time) hour of my youth climbing trees, making forts, trekking up streams, swimming, building tree houses, shooting pellet guns, catching lizards, snakes, assorted bugs and in general loving the hell out of living in such an unbelievably cool place. The only problem, although it didn’t seem so at the time, was that I did it all alone.
Those canyons behind Santa Barbara do not lend themselves to neighbourhood block parties. There are no “blocks” or indeed sidewalks and the houses tend to be spread out at random and isolated from one another by the aforementioned trees and brush. It was 15 years before I met my first neighbour.
So there I am, an adopted, only child growing up in the woods with just my dog and parents for company. Socially school was a challenge. It wasn’t that I was shy, quite the opposite, I was an attention-starved extrovert who later mutated into the class clown who had a problem with authority. My particular handicap was that I didn’t understand group activities; I wanted to simply expand my solitary pursuits to include others. I would ask kids if they wanted to come back to my place and read.
I know this has “deranged psychopath” written all over it but for some reason, as tempting as it sometimes seemed, I never went down that path. I managed to acquire a reputation for being smart, cynical and academically lazy; that, coupled with good verbal and written skills, made me just interesting enough to my peers to keep me from becoming the type of dejected loaner you see the neighbours describing on the evening news, “Mark was always such a quiet boy…”
I stuck around Santa Barbara until I was 19- living with my pot-smoking girlfriend until she dumped me and went back to Mississippi to get knocked up. I spent the next year and a half in Long Beach, staying with my second set of parents, going to college, working as a photographer on the student paper, drinking a lot and fucking my philosophy professor’s daughter.
Somehow I managed to get accepted to Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, so back I went. Eight years, a wife, a divorce and countless weirdness later I fled to San Francisco where I was pretty content until I moved to London and entered a previously unknown circle of hell. OK, so that’s a bit of an oversimplification but I need to keep the narrative rolling along.
Today I find myself in Santa Barbara again. Not to live, no indeed, considering that the average home price in this place is now over a million bucks and that most of the jobs are in the service industry, I don’t think I’ll be making the move back anytime soon. No, I am here because my mother has cancer.
Two weeks ago she sent me an e-mail asking how I was, if my knee still hurt, what the weather was like in whatever city I was in and oh, by the way, I’m going in for Chemo tomorrow.
No phone call, no warning, nothing, just “I’m going in for Chemo.” I sat, open mouthed, staring at the screen until I realized that her “tomorrow” was my “today” and I had no idea which hospital she was in or how to get in touch with her- it was 2:00 in the morning her time anyway. By the time California woke up I was supposed to be on a plane for Spain.
In my hotel room later in the evening I managed to get in touch with my dad and he gave me the run down. Mum had a 2.5-pound tumour in her abdomen; it was isolated, lymphatic and treatable. She was on day one of a three-day course of Chemotherapy and she would be back home after that. She was looking at six more monthly sessions, with all the horrors that entails but at this point the Oncologist was cautiously optimistic. I was so completely unprepared for even semi-good news that I simply had no idea how to handle it; I just sat down and cried.
I spend my professional life addressing and mitigating Worst Case Scenario situations. My own personal mantra is “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” I never, under any circumstances, tempt “worst.” It can always get worse; it’s my job to make sure that when it does my team and I have the tools and skills to avoid a complete meltdown. I’m so blinded by this mentality that on those rare occasions when something doesn’t go supernova the wheels come off my bus. Good news, it would seem, disrupts my fragile mental state.
Much to my surprise, I didn’t catch the next flight to California; nor the flight after that. After being assured that mum’s condition didn’t warrant frantic action, I finished up the project in Spain, few to New York and then on to LA; arriving in Santa Barbara a few days after she was released from the hospital.
I’m still here. My mum is fragile but progressing, her tests are looking good and we just hired a care assistant to give her and my dad a hand with the cooking and cleaning. I’ve managed to escape for a few hours to sink into the shadows and soft chairs of a funky café by the beach. There is a giant paper mache sunflower on the ceiling, a cloth covered elephant in the corner and a weird mix of folk rock and inde world music on the stereo. Sitting directly to my left, in a velvet-upholstered throne complete with carved lion head armrests, is a woman who I would happily spend the rest of my life with. Best that she doesn’t know- I’ve had enough humiliating rejections for several lifetimes. She’s packing up her laptop now. Another small heartbreak in an ocean of missed opportunities.
I didn’t begin this to bemoan my romantic insecurities or go into agonizing detail about my mum’s current condition. I wanted to talk about being back in the place I first called home and how utterly disorientating it feels to be a visitor on my own turf.
Adding to my lost at sea feeling is the fact that I have not one single friend remaining in Santa Barbara. This could be partly my fault. I pretty much loathed everyone I went to school with and in my later life here my friends were probably best described as volleyball and beer buddies. Although my wife and I spent our entire married life in Santa Barbara, we were too busy fighting, fucking and moving house twice a year to establish any reliable support base.
I do remember hanging out with one couple: she was a therapist of some kind and he worked at the Post Office where, if memory serves, he used to pour honey into the sorting machines.
Returning this time under, as it were, duress, I decided to take the bold step of writing up a personal add and posting it on Craigslist under the heading Strictly Platonic. I wasn’t looking for a relationship or a quick fuck. I just wanted someone, preferably someone with a wicked sense of humour and breasts, to hang out with in the evenings.
The responses were underwhelming but as it turns out, that wasn’t a bad thing. I have ended up spending a lot more time in caretaker mode than I anticipated. I would have probably felt immensely guilty passing my evenings enjoying myself.
I’m reprinting the add here because I kind of like it and who knows, someone might know someone who knows someone who, in a couple of months, wouldn’t mind spending an evening or two sitting under a giant paper mache sunflower with a guy trying to find home.
Billy No Mates
I can’t help but thinking it’s a bit odd that after living in Santa Barbara for 26 years, when I make return visits the only friends I have in town are imaginary.
Sure, it would be easy to blame myself. I move around a lot and since my tracking bracelet was removed I can be pretty difficult to pin down. Still, you’d think that someone, a classmate, an ex-girlfriend, that guy named Jack I used to work with at a gas station who would stick radiator hoses down the front of his pants before he went out to fill up cars, would take the time to search through my Interpol files for my last known location and send me a birthday card. No such luck.
It’s exceptionally disorientating to be a tourist in what was, for so long, my hometown. I’ve become one of those annoying people who drive around, point at a new office building or bank and say things like, “Hey, that used to be Sparks skateboard park! Wow, that takes me back, I remember when JP and I would get tanked up on Dr. Pepper and ride our bikes all the way to IV, just to watch whatever dude was shredding the half-pipe. Of course we never had the money to get in so we’d try and sneak over the fence until one day…” and on and on until my passenger begins to moan and claw helplessly at the window until their fingernails bleed.
I traded in Santa Barbara for San Francisco and then, in a very hostile takeover, I swapped the perpetual fog of My City By The Bay for the omnipresent overcast and dull grey skies of London- where I remain. 5800 miles NE of the closest decent burrito and surrounded by people who think that a bunch of grown men kicking a ball around in a field is the pinnacle of all human endeavours. I’ve been seven years amongst the savages and it’s only constant denial and nightly uncontrollable weeping which keeps me from plunging into the Thames with stones in my pockets.
But I digress.
I swing through Santa Barbara a few times a year to see my Parental Units and wander aimlessly along East Beach hitting myself on the head with a plank and shouting, “why did I ever leave?!” Just before I lose consciousness a little voice from my past whispers, “because you never made more than $12 an hour, paid $1500 a month for a stucco broom closet under the freeway and were sinking into the lifestyle of a perpetually poverty stricken student.”
Now I find myself making another pilgrimage to my hometown and I will be damned if I’m not going to at least make an attempt to connect with someone, anyone (nearly), in Santa Barbara who can come reasonably close to catching my drift.
I feel it only fair to warn you that I’m not looking for a one, or even two, night stand, my soul-mate, a romantic trysts, marriage, children, or a house with a two-car garage and a white picket fence in suburbia. I live in LONDON for God’s sake! If I want to fish, I’ll do it in a local pond. I simply want someone to meet me at Sojourners so that we can have a latte and complain that they put too many sprouts on their sandwiches.
In the spirit of full disclosure I best you give you a bit of a run-down on who you might see over the rim of your coffee cup: I’m pretty much a run-of-the-mill 41 year-old near-sighted, tall, thin, balding, geek. I don't drink which makes me a pariah on both sides of the Atlantic and the things I do for fun revolve around paintings, photographs, bookstores and spouting witty cynical barbs when disguising politics over dinner.
My baggage contains a marriage (no kids), a divorce, my fair share of broken hearts, a massive amount of European travelling, left-wing rabble rousing for doomed causes, too much time spent in university, a long run of being a photojournalist and various weird, terrifying, utterly humorous, tedious and thrilling bits that make up a normal real life. (Please note that none of those bits contain piercings, tattoos, prison or strange associations with men in overcoats who answer to the name of "Guido.")
Since we’re attempting to manage expectations it would be good if you are within spitting distance of my age and have about as much blood under the bridge. You best be able to write since this will, for the most part, be a very long distance friendship. Holding your own in a rapidly changing conversational environment will be a necessity and knowing the difference between Monet and Manet (but finding Impressionism itself a pedestrian movement which served as little more than a transitional phase and whose seminal works are best suited for adorning sitting room walls) will keep you off my internal “do not call” list.
Right. That about covers it. I’m LA at the moment but I will be in SB between ---- and --- I have a good deal of family stuff to take care of (mum’s been in the hospital- thus the reason for this trip) but I figure I’ll have some evenings free to do whatever passes for fun in Santa Barbara these days.
I’ve attached a couple of photos so you will be able to recognize me across a crowded, restaurant, dance floor or Politics and Aesthetics in 20th Century Modernist Art lecture- you should probably do the same.
OK,
-Billy-
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