Another Camping Trip

Another Camping Trip   

                President’s Day weekend, 2008, my parents flew into Southern California with the intention of visiting me.  I’ll get into that whole experience later, but there was some question about whether I would spend that Sunday night and Monday with my family, or with my friends in the area who were planning a camping night in Malibu.  I chose my friends, and the reasons will be delved into at a later segment.

                So I drove back into L.A. (again, later delving) on Saturday night and rested up, doing my usual routine of amusements including bowl smoking and television watching and late dinner eating.  I don’t know what I spent the next morning and early afternoon doing—maybe I wrote some more of my second novel.  I am almost entirely sure that I smoked a bowl or two during that period as well.  But then I packed up my car, making several trips from the second floor apartment across the courtyard to my car parked on Rose Ave. 

                For a few weeks at that point, my roommate had been experiencing resistance from the building manager.  There had been an incident a while earlier where I had heard a loud slamming noise and screaming and shouting coming from the back of the building, in the resident parking lot.  Apparently my roommate had opened his door onto the building manager’s car and then had slammed it back shut as a way of voicing his disapproval of the building manager’s closeness of parking (an issue that will crop up for me personally a bit later).  I heard this guy shout, “You’ve got a real attitude problem, you know that!” And I heard my roommate screaming something back at him.  When he entered later on and I asked him about it, the scene was described.  But since that incident, the building manager had played closer attention to my roommate, and to me.  He had asked who this friend was that was always coming and going, more frequently than the other guests.  Brett answered that I was just his friend, and of course the first excuse that came to my mind was that I could claim I was “more than friends” with him, but I do not think Brett would have wanted that discussion to happen. 

                Regardless, I packed my car in peace and comfort, lucky to have gotten a parking spot right in front of the building.  Certain nights, usually on the weekends, coming back later than 9:00, I would have to park several blocks away, which would equate to a five or ten minute walk, sometimes with laundry or groceries in tow.  It was one of the most annoying aspects to my L.A. experience, that non-residential parking.  That day though, February 17, 2008 (my friend Andres’s birthday, I always remember, because it is exactly two months before mine) everything was wonderful.  I got my car packed up with everything, got onto the I-10 W freeway and headed for the Pacific Coast Highway. 

                I had only been to Malibu once before—very early in my time in L.A., on the lookout for Lindsay Lohan because my older brother had told me that she probably lived in Malibu—and I only went to a Mexican counter service restaurant, La Salsa, which had several choices of salsa to take from a bar and which was very good.  But this time I was a bit early, and I knew I was meeting with Sycamore and Molly and that if we were going to eat, it would probably be vegan.  So I stopped at the KFC nearby where I thought I would be turning to head for the campsite and went in and ordered a Triple-Crunch Zinger sandwich combo meal and ate that while reading the Hunting Accidents: A Brief History of Guided by Voices book.  I mention this because it was a moment of perfect bliss and happiness at the time. 

                I called Sycamore and he directed me towards the campsite at Malibu Creek, which they eventually arrived at first due to my own inability to follow their directions and my failure to do my own research before leaving.  I showed up not too late though, and I set up my camp.  Shortly after I finished, Erin and Nathaniel arrived and began setting up their tent.  By the time we were all settled we had started drinking and we were setting up a grill to use for veggie burgers.  We sat like this for several hours.

                I brought out my iPod boombox and played a variety of songs, including “My War” by Black Flag, which I had told Sycamore and Molly I wanted to cover.  We were going to be in a band together, for a while, and that will also be discussed later.  Sycamore told me to turn the song down to a lower volume and I found that to be somewhat wimpy on his part, but I complied.  Later I put on New Order and told everyone that I wanted to smoke when “Bizarre Love Triangle” came on, but I don’t think anybody else wanted to.  In fact, I don’t think I ended up smoking that night at all, nor the next morning, surprisingly. 

                I do remember getting a call from my friend Mike, who I think was just giving me more specific detail about his upcoming trip in March to visit me.  We talked for about thirty or forty minutes, me getting drunk, smoking cigarettes, walking through the woods in Malibu, him in New York, potentially buzzed, in his apartment. 

                At some point we all went to sleep, and I remember it being quite cold that night.  In the morning we woke up and I think we had some sort of vegan quiche or something, breakfast that was probably more appetizing than the veggie burgers.  Nathaniel, Sycamore and I hiked around the area for about a half hour, trying to give ourselves enough time to vacate the premises by Noon.  At one point we crossed a small creek to get to a more interesting area.  We actually had another whiskey and coke in the morning.  We were close to getting kicked out at Noon, but we left before any very unkind words passed. 

On the way back we stopped at some shopping plaza in Malibu and got a cup of coffee at a Coffee Bean there.  We walked around for a while and I remember seeing a particularly tall girl that I found quite attractive.  We went into a hipster clothing store that also sold CDs and saw the LCD Soundsystem album Sound of Silver and Nathaniel and Sycamore talked about how they were thinking about buying it and I told them I had it, it was great, and they should just burn it off me.  Not too long afterwards, we headed back.  And I think this was the day I stopped with Sycamore and Molly in Santa Monica too, and we stopped in another Coffee Bean so Molly could use the facilities, and then we went into some hipster shoe store where Sycamore bought some $70 eco-friendly walking shoes.  I thought some of their items looked kind of cool, but I wasn’t in any position to be spending the kind of money that store advertised.  We parted shortly thereafter, and I drove back to Palms, and I unloaded my car in several trips, and one guy in the courtyard nodded at me a couple times, and apparently the building manager had also noted me coming and going quite noticeably that day.