It was to be my second and last year at UC Santa Cruz. Since our university was on the quarter schedule, classes didn't start until late in September. As far as housing was concerned, Mike got in on a house on King Street with Max and Grant and some buddies, and he found me a room at his summer neighbor's house on Western Drive. A few of his summer roommates were moving into the house as well. The residence at 440 Western was an absolute beat-up, old jalopy of a house. The property owner was this middle-aged hippy that invested a majority of his monthly take from rent on riding the somewhat dull-drum rollercoaster of medium- to low-risk stocks and equity groups. It wouldn't be over-presumptuous in the slightest to think that he gave little more than a damn about that place, or it's general up-keep. As I was moving my bed into my tiny, den-sized room under the staircase, an immediate awe of my new home soaked over me. Not at all like the old home, and not likely to ever resemble any house I would inhabit ever again. A pinnacle. Even from the street, the place looked more like a used-up and worn-out crack house than a center for adolescent education. The gutters over the two-door garage were full of old, moldy leaves and rotting through in some places. The paint was chipped, and the wood siding was warped and moldy here and there and over there and around that corner and everywhere. Everything you could see from the street, the house, the driveway, the concrete, that miserable bush, the muddy pathetic patch of grass with cars parked on it, everything seemed to be covered with a perpetual grime that soaked deep into the property's pores and refused to be scrubbed out. The inside was much of the same in that sense. You'd be hard pressed to find a corner in that house that wasn't housing cob-webs, a light sprinkle of mold, and a few long-legged spiders. The entire place was carpeted, save for the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the front door's landing, all of which donned dirty, gritty, sticky linoleum. My room was maybe six feet by ten feet on a good day, with a short deep cupboard for a closet. A decent sized window looked out onto an eight foot high weathered-looking wood fence four feet away and the shrubby, dirt side-yard in between. Beautiful. The window's sill and shutters were covered in a thick layer of damp dust. Since the stairs were directly above, a part of the already small ceiling came down to meet the wall at an acute angle, and when I first stepped through the door-frame the smallest finger of sickly claustrophobia tickled my soul. I closed my eyes and breathed it in. But not too deep, mind you, because of all the mold and that strange smell. I barely knew any of these people.
In the fall, in all, there were eight of us. I think. There were those of us that actually lived there; Dylan, Conor, Matt, Kameron, Dillion, Alex, BB, and me; but the ranks of boy-souled, eager-eyed 20-something-year-olds that came, and stayed, and passed through those hallowed halls week to week, passed out on those two stadium-seat situated couches in the living room (the back couch was set atop an old bed frame, and when you sat in it you sank and it gobbled you up like a cushion-y, pillowed Jabba the Hutt), taking showers in those rotten, cesspool bathrooms; there were almost too many to count. It was like some hippy hostel up the 1 just before San Fran. Old friends of anyone in the house made it a habitual rest stop. Dylan, Kam, Conor, and Matt were the patriarchs; the oldest, the knowing, weathered willow trees, and I got to know their vagabonding friends quite dearly. Dylan and Kam had graduated two years prior with degrees in molecular biology and computer programming, respectively; the same freshman class as Conor and Matt, but the latter two had taken their time with it. They were both still students, but not for much longer. Conor was to graduate after fall quarter with a degree in literature, and Matt after winter with some science degree, who knows. They'd all lived at 440 the year before. And the year before that. And the year before that too, I think.
Then there was BB, Boom, and another Dillon; Mike's old roommates from his summer living at 426 Western. They were all a year older than I and finishing up their last year as well. All smart cookies. And then there was me and the dog Lizzie, and we all called home that excuse of a two-story, two bedroom, two bath, two-car garage family house up on the hill at the northern edge of the suburban westside of Santa Cruz. It'd been ages since it had housed any actual family though. Since those wonder years, the two-car garage had been converted into a two bedroom commune suite inhabited by Dylan O'Carroll aka D-Buns and Kameron Niksefat aka Nikse. Attic storage-space upstairs had been converted into rafter-exposed closets, and traditional closets had been converted into more bedrooms. The master bedroom was a triple, with Matt sleeping in the closet, which was just big enough to hold a twin-sized mattress. Conor slept above BB, literally, on a huge home-made loft bunk that turned BB's bed into a cave of sorts. Still, it was a cozy room with old, gritty carpet, a high, sloping ceiling, a tiny balcony, and a record player sitting on top of two big ole' 80's wood speakers that were super bass-y and stood up to my waist.
The balcony looked out over the overgrown lawn, a lush jungle of knee-high grass that Lizzie loved to romp and systematically poop through in a grid pattern. Lizzie was a golden retriever with a long, flowing golden locks, and when the fall was still ripe and the sun kept our cushy little coastal town in the high 60's and low 70's, why we all got drunk in the afternoon and shaved her hair into that of a lion's, leaving it long around her face and shoulders and with a little puff at the end of her tail so she looked like Aslan. BB even teased her mane to give it more volume. Lizzie looked incredible, and oh, so pretty. Whorishly pretty and slender from always having someone to play with, and always running away, and running her face off whenever we took her up the 1 to go surfing.
We all surfed in that house, except Alex Boom, who played lacrosse and grew up in Cleveland where they didn't have beaches. And BB, who was a girl. The surf in Santa Cruz is some of the best and funnest on the west coast, especially if you don't mind wearing booties and 4/3's all year, or dealing with crazy, methed-out locals that surf way better than you. Part of the appeal of surfing up the coast a little bit instead of in town was the comparative lack of said meth-heads. Fuck meth-heads. They're usually assholes. They could turn a beautiful day out at Steamer's Lane into an hour-long, tweak-twitching diatribe about how they're going to punch everyone in the face, especially if you look at them, or even look at their wave. Or if you're at the peak and they don't know you, or for any other number of reasons that would make a small-town tweak surfer tick. And so we'd always stray north, away from the crowds and into the wilderness of empty beaches and lazy point-breaks. Peaks that generally broke to the right, but every here and there a left would be hiding and if it was peeling at the perfect stride like it sometimes did, it would give a young goofy-footer like me the ride of his life. Something to pump down the line on before stretching into long turns. And it was always good and usually held up in big swells, nothing like the quick, dumpy horseshit I grew up on in LA. It was immaculate, and if a session carried on past sunset, so be it because the waves don't turn off when it's dark, they just get sharkier. The water would turn pitch black and sparkle under the still bright sky of twilight, and every kelp-head and playful baby seal seemed ominous.
Mike and Matty loved afternoon seshies though, so it happened a lot. Not Matt from my house mind you, but Matty from the house on King Street who lived with Mike and those other rapscallion bastards; Grant and Max, and Minh and Chloe. Minh and Mike were my age, the babies of the house. Everyone else was a year older, except Chloe who was two. Their house wasn't unlike mine really. It was still gritty and grungy, just less so. Maybe because they had hardwood instead of carpet, or because they had an old kitty named Cricket instead of a dog, or maybe they were cleaner, or maybe they cared more. Regardless, we were all the best of friends, both houses. It's just that their's was the clean house so that's the one we always raged at.
