It was a quick decision in my mind. Simple. I wanted to live with my friends in Santa Cruz. Like college again without the proper schooling. I didn't want to go back to Los Angeles. My parents protested of course, but I waylaid their anxiety with talk of looking for a real job. That seemed to be enough. I was going to live in Santa Cruz. Nothing felt more right.
Of course Mike was cool with it, he was as stoked as I was. Monster was more hesitant. After all, it wasn't just the two them sharing the new place. Her friend from home, from high school in Laguna Beach, was transferring up to Santa Cruz in the fall. Turns out his name was also Mike, but everyone called him Mikey. "I mean, I'm cool with it, you staying here, but what are you going to do? You can't just live on the couch," she said.
"I'll help with rent," I told her. "And I have my mattress still."
"Where're you going to put all your stuff?"
"The hall closet maybe? I don't have much."
"Well, you're going to have to run it by Mikey first. He'll be up on Tuesday."
The original plan was that Mike and Monster would split the master bedroom and Mikey would take the second bedroom to himself. I was auxiliary. Extra baggage. But so was Nick for that matter.
Nick had lived in a tent in the backyard of Mike's old house on King Street the previous year. That crazy year. Nick worked with the kayak rentals on the pier, and he always let us take them out for super cheap. Since the lease started on the first of September, he had watched over the place on Grandview for the first two weeks or so, living free of charge pretty much. That was his way. He was a happy-go-lucky coaster with a big smile and big wild frizzy hair. He had a couple years on Mike and I, and a handful on Monster, and he looked it too. Not in his eyes, but in the face surrounding them. He was a bigger guy too, in the way that hurt if he sat on you, and slightly suffocated if he laid on you. Come to think of it, he just about suffocated me when he sat on me too. But he was harmless, and he meant well. A big grizzly teddy bear, the kind you win at the fair for your girl, and he smoked 50/50 spliffs, half weed, half tobacco, which is a beastly spread for anyone, especially without a filter or even a crutch like the way he always rolled them in his lap with his pouch of Bali Shag that got all over the place.
Actually, what am I saying. He rolled more 10/90 spliffs which were nearly all tobacco and just a pinch of weed. To make the stuff last, you know. They were heinous on the throat and heavy on the buzzing light-headedness. A big boy, Nick, who like to conserve his weed. I'll say this though, he wasn't fat, just big-boned in a very literal sense. He rode a big old 8'0 shortboard when he surfed and he rode a mountain bike everywhere, regularly up the steep section of Western before the bus-stop and the old house at 440. He was strong, and he smoked grizzly spliffs and devoured food and was sleeping in his bamboo big chair that looked like a satellite dish a little and just barely held his weight. It lurched and made noises near snapping whenever he shifted himself in it, but it always held true, and when he rustled to when we first swung the doors open at 903 Grandview he nearly fell out of the damned thing getting up. I hadn't seen him in months. Not since school. At first glance, he reminded me of a young Santa Clause for some reason. Clean-shaven. Disheveled. Bubbly and red in his big nose and his thick arms and his face from all the summer sun.
"Oh, hey you two! Let papa bear get his paws on ya!" He came up quick and grabbed us, one under each arm and squeezed. He shook Mike a little harder than me, but I still had to catch my breath when he let go.
"Hey there, big guy."
[stop]
