I was getting ready for Argentina this time last year, early June. The gloom was in the air in Santa Monica, and it was winter in the South. America de Sud. I told myself that it was somehow fitting because I was going down there to write a book about Winter. A strange winter, a difficult one, that took all of a year to plow through. From Santa Cruz in the early fall, right up to the next October autumn. With a long cold winter in between. Yes, it's about a low, but hey, I had fun too.
This book is about Winter, true, but truer still I pray this story rings with the coming Spring. That Spring, the one in the book didn't come until the summer. 'til the lease was up in Santa Cruz and I moved back down to LA. In the summer, and sometime in July like pressure looking for release, I found it. Or I should really say it was given to me in the female form of my good friend Lili. And probably not in the way that you immediately pull away from that. We were at a bar with some friends--bare with me.
So we're at this bar and we're drinking and talking just over the music in a dim-lit bougie hole-in-the-wall place by the pier in Santa Monica. We didn't see each other often, like we used to in high school, so we always had a lot of catching up to do, and she's the kind a gal that's definitely fun to catch up with.
She always had her mystery men. She'd secretly faun over and flirt with them. But that life was a separate one, of more meaning and importance to her, than the one I used to be privy to. Back before Paris. But anyways, that's why I think she was so interesting in a way. She always had some greater secret, some cunning that she's devised behind her eyes. And well, you know me, dear reader. I've always been one for a secret or three.
Miss Lili sometimes (rarely) had some for me. Sometimes it's just so simple of a thing to say that can start some whole master ball rolling. If it were marbles, this would be the slammer I'm talking about. It takes two things to send you that high: one, high pressure built up like rocket fuel, and two, a catalytic ignition. Or hell, if the pressure's high enough, all it takes is a release valve; an escape route.
That's short sighted, but oh well. Lili was studying abroad in the fall. Studying "International Relations." Uh-huh. That night at the bar she said, "Come to Paris and write for a bit."
[stop]
What were those weeks like? Remember!
I can feel the seed sprouting in the sun here on the terrace at Boulevard. Oh, this Sutton Place. There were girls. There was drugs and festivals, and two jobs up North, and living at home down South (see Running Away), me and my bicycle and my surfboard. And of course my trust Ford Explorer Sport, the White Mamba. And at the end, it all coming to a head, and release. It's like Igby Goes Down. Gag. Somebody punch me.
