We said goodbye to Annie’s parents in the morning, and I wrote them a letter to say thank you for everything: thank you for the food, thank you for the hospitality, and thank you more than anything for creating the rare delight that is my friend. We set off back to Oakland in the morning, full of breakfast and with a clear sky overhead. First, however, Annie wanted to show me Las Gatos and the area she grew up (which was news to me because I thought we were already in Los Gatos but whatever).
We drove along forest-hemmed roads, very large and fresh and tree-trunky and potently American despite the (for once!) lack of signage or flags. Big wooden ripe-for-haunting houses with sweet wooden porches sat back from the road and watched us cruise by, radio on. I was wearing a pair of rectangular red sunglasses that Annie gave me: I looked like a bit of a tit in them but they made me feel like less of an aesthetic dullard, which I always do when I stand next to Annie with her cool ‘if Neo from the Matrix was gay and evil and liked bowling’ ensemble.
Annie was very excited to show me the town she grew up in, which was obviously very sweet. The girls passed a joint back and forth between them as we drove slowly down the main street – a laid back, clean place with a charming post-cowboy mountain-town feel to it. It looked nothing at all like my own hometown, but there was a similar feeling: that things were quiet here, and safe, and that for a teenager it would be a perfect training ground for gentle adventures and minor lawbreaking before moving into the bigger, darker, weirder world beyond.
Annie, sitting in the front, turned around in her seat every hundred metres to point out another treasured spot from her adolescence.
“That’s where Lindsey Pittsburgh felt my boob,” she said, pointing to a handsome last-century cinema. “And over there’s where I saw Jason Garcia’s boner.”
We got out of the car and walked past a million parked Teslas to get fat burritos from a Mexican place Annie used to eat at when she was a kid.
“That clown painting used to terrify me,” she said, pointing to a gloomy and totally incongruous portrait of a black and white harlequin. “I was fascinated by it.”
We ate and walked and looked at an old wooden mansion that was supposed to have ghosts in the attic, and Annie showed me a bookshop she used to hangout in. She told me tales of her innocently delinquent youth and her struggle to fit in – both in school and out. Annie’s attention deficit has always far outshone my own (I spend half an hour in Annie’s company when she’s unmedicated and I begin to doubt I even have it at all), and as we got back into the car and drove up into a sleepy estate to visit the house she grew up in, I tried to piece together all the stories shared by Annie and her family over the past week in order to form an image of my friend’s formative years.
“I never stopped just making shit,” said Annie, as we sat parked outside her childhood house like feds or burglars casing the place. “Every day I was painting or writing or making poems or whatever, it was like I couldn’t stop. It was like I had all this insane stuff inside of me and I just needed to get it out in any way I could. I miss how creative I used to be, sometimes.”
“You still are,” I said.
“Yeah but it was just… more. I wouldn’t even sleep, I’d just stay up all night reading about the weirdest shit and doing these crazy projects. Everyone thought I was this little fuckin’ weirdo. I used to just hang out with my brother’s friends. I could relate to them better and they thought I was funny.”
I thought about it all, watching the pines flash by out of the window. All that energy and creativity and drive, and yet forever in trouble in school, forever getting booted out of classes and bollocked for disruptions. It made me feel tremendously sad for misunderstood teenage Annie, and I wished I could have been there in those years to be her friend. That said, I wasn’t much like I am now when I was 14; whereas Annie was into art and culture from a young age, my prevailing concerns in those days were A.) whether anyone fancied me, and B.) figuring out how to conceal an end-of-science-class spontaneous erection, so… we probably wouldn’t have had too much in common. Maybe we met at the right time after all.
*****
Back in Oakland we dropped off Tayler at the flat (tired and sick of listening to us yap), chucked our bags down, and headed out for our final evening.
First stop was the docks, and a giant arcade and bowling alley called Plank. We drank a beer outside (my stomach bubbled hatefully at every sip – near death – the invariable end of another annual booze-week together) and then played the arcade games. We had a couple of races on a giant Mario Kart, we tossed basketballs into a hoop against the clock (I was depressingly shit), we shot zombies with crossbows, and then we ran out of money.
“Okay boys, you’re gonna love this next stop,” said Annie, as we left the arcade.
A short walk down the harbour we came to two strange buildings, totally out of sync with their modern surroundings: a log cabin, sitting all alone in a sandy expanse set away from the promenade, and twenty metres away across the sand, a bonafide logs-and-paint saloon, ancient and lopsided.
The cabin had an iron statue of a dog beside it, wolf-like and huge. Intrigued, I read the plaque out front and discovered with real surprise that it was Jack London’s home. Or rather, half of it. The original was built in snowy northwestern Canada, miles from anywhere during the 1898 gold rush. In the 1960s the cabin was taken apart: half the logs were used to recreate a (presumably quite a bit smaller) version in Oakland, while the other half were used to build a version in Dawson City. I peered in through the grill in the locked front door and saw a camp bed and tools and a dusty workbench – nothing more, pretty bleak – and I thought, not for the first time, that adventures today are quite different from adventures in the past. My wildest, most hair-raising travel stories would have been a standard Tuesday morning for some of the writers of centuries gone by.
That said, I’ve not yet read anything by Jack London. He’s been on my to-read list for some time now, but still, without knowing more about him beyond a reputation for outdoorsmanship and adventure, I couldn’t connect with the cabin – feel the awe – as much as I’d have liked. I know that, when I get around to reading his books this year, I will feel it, however, so I tried to store the experience in a little room of its own in my memory, so that I can take it out and marvel at it when I have more context for it.
The little log saloon, however – that I felt. The place was built in 1883, which by European standards makes it pretty new; I think my sharehouse in London is older. That said, the scuffed-up, square saloon looks ancient in a way that a London townhouse just doesn’t. Precariously, dizzyingly lopsided indoors (the bar itself is at a 15 degree angle – the whole thing sank into the mud in the 1906 earthquake), guests sit on a slant and place their glasses on upturned barrels. Soldier and sailor hats – all genuine – hang from the clustered ceiling like bats, along with dollar bills and old notes. Heinold’s First and Last Chance, the place is named, after the sailors shipping out who would pin a few bucks to the ceiling of the place to pay for their first beer when they arrived home from the sea. Jack London spent his time there as a child, doing his homework among the boozing sailors and merchants, and Robert Louis Stevenson used to frequent the pub as well.
We had a swift one outside, but we couldn’t hang about – the sun was setting, and Annie had a viewpoint in mind. We drove up through Oakland and into Berkely, and wound past the fraternity and sorority houses that had amazed me a week earlier. Up a winding hill with the sun dipping, we passed an enormous college football stadium on the way up into the pines, and I gawped at it through the passenger window. Five minutes later on the brow of the hill, high up above the city, we parked up on a dark, windy hilltop overlooking a sea of sparkling lights.
“Holy fuck,” I said, tumbling out of the car in amazement.
“I know, right?” said Annie. “I always liked coming here to watch the sunset.”
You could see everything – Berkeley, Oakland, the glittering skyscrapers of San Francisco, the lone sweeping spotlight of Alcatraz, and far away, stretching across the blue-grey sea to distant hills, the Golden Gate Bridge. Three cities in one view, twinkling together at the water’s edge, with great powerful bridges joining their island pockets of civilisation – and above it all, domed over everything, the soft blue sky fading into orange clouds, tumbling towards the great red orb dipping below the horizon.
We put a blanket down and sat and ate crisps. We talked a little, but not much, and when Annie left me to go for a pee in a bush, I sat and sighed and felt the breeze and the slightest wobbly thrill of up-high vertigo, watching the twinkle of it all, while in my head a Kerouac passage played over and over:
All that land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge all the way to the west coast – and all that road going – and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it – in Iowa by now the children will be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The north star must be drooping and shedding, her sp—
“Yo, will you open my bag and pass me the hand sanitizer? I just took a shit by accident.”
I blinked, slowly, and turned my head from the starry scene to look at Annie.
“What.”
“I was peeing and then I took a shit, I dunno boys, c’mon, pass me the hand sanitizer.”
“You just took a shit… right now.”
“Yeah.”
“Over there. Behind those bushes. On this beautiful hilltop.”
“Yeah dude. Just happens like that sometimes, y’know.”
I was determined to be outraged, of course, but Annie’s total nonchalance made it hard. In the end I could do nothing but shrug it off and tell her she wasn’t allowed any more crisps from the bag.
*****
Annie drove me to the airport in San Francisco the next day. She briefly suggested I could take the train, however I saw this as a massive betrayal and she soon relented and agreed we could drive. It was a sunny blue day as we drove over the Bay Bridge, and I played a weird eclectic selection of music from my Spotify as we cruised along. We sang together, here and there, and talked about traffic and life and everything else.
“Before I leave, I just wanted to say – now that you’re thirty, you ought to start being kinder to your body,” I said, as we neared the airport. “Keep an eye on your drinking.”
“Don’t lecture me, Daniel,” said Annie, in her special don’t-lecture-me voice.
“I know, I know. It’s just, I had my own problems with it, so I’m just trying to pass on what I learned.”
“I know. It’s all back to normal now though,” she said. “Quitting the vapes, and no booze for a while.”
“Same.”
We pulled up outside the airport listening to Queen’s ‘You’re My Best Friend’ – which was right at the end of my chosen playlist and I was really debating putting on because of how embarrassingly earnest it is… but in the end I decided to hell with it.
I got out and took my bags, and I hugged my friend, both of us speaking at once.
“Thanks so much for coming for my birthday. Love you so much boys.”
“Hopefully I’ll see you next year,” I said, lost in my own plans. “I don’t know exactly when because of money and everything but maybe if I’m careful and I save up for six months I can—”
“Say it back,” said Annie, frowning at me.
“Oh, fuck. I’m sorry. Love you too, of course. You dick head.”
She got back in the car and waited to pull out into the stream of traffic, and I walked into the airport, looking back every few steps to wave. Once inside, I stopped by a bench (with a confused man sitting on it) to wave and wave – Annie waving too, like the airport car-crash scene from Dumb and Dumber – and eventually I swung my arm in a silent, grinning ‘get outta here!’ motion, and with one last mad arm-flap, she drove away.
And, as always, as soon as she was out of sight, I became aware of a sense of levity I hadn’t even known was there, but upon reflection I realised had been there for the whole ten days: a breezy, comfortable teenage lightness. And now, as I stood and with my bags and passport, already I could feel the ‘real’ world fading back in: thoughts of work and money and progression, of having a ‘real’ job, of taxes, of pensions and savings accounts and heating bills and – ah, all of that grayscale rubbish.
Back to the world where people are normal and sane; where they don’t get overexcited and twerk upside down against walls, where they don’t talk a million miles per hour and fall over while putting their boots on, where they don’t cuss like a sailor at the slightest inconvenience, where they don’t use four-syllable words and poetic imagery to describe their last wank – and they don’t take accidental shits at sparkling viewpoints.
It’s always sad to say goodbye, but ah – I’m just glad she exists at all. The world’s a little bit brighter for having that loony wandering around it.