Three times to California

The first time I moved to California, I was 16 (I dropped out of high school in 10^th grade) and went with friends of my mother and stepfather as a passenger in the drive across the country. We landed in South Pasadena and after some uncertainty, I ended up living with lovely people who’d known me as a child in Philadelphia. I got a job at the Rialto theater, which has featured as a setting in a number of films (the theater in my story “Nights at the Crimea” is based on it), played D&D with the guys I worked with there, met many amazing people, did psychedelics while camping in Joshua Tree, and wrote a lot of journal entries and bad poetry.

 

After two years, I met a woman named Feather who invited me to come work for her. The work was helping to make the wares she sold at the two California Renaissance Pleasure Faires, one in Agoura and one up in the Black Hills of Novato. Between fairs, we ‘lived’ at her father’s import warehouse in southern California, stirring the unguents and edible massage oils in vats like low-rent witches, then camping (almost glamping before that was a thing) at the fair sites for the six weeks of their runs, and a week or so on either side. The weekdays in between were a different sort of pleasure, running about, talking to super interesting people who lived their lives making art of some kind and doing fairs. Between fairs, we floated from one friend of Feather’s to another, living nowhere, just camping here and there. We also drove to Texas to do the fair in Plantersville between Austin and Houston. We had some adventures on those drives.

 

About another two years into this, Feather started drinking a lot and when she drank, she got mean. I got out, and getting out led me back to the east coast to live with my mother and sister and their respective partners for a time.

 

The second time I moved to California, I was actually living in Austin, post-grad school. I thought my graduate degree in creative writing and my two post-grad fellowships working at American Short Fiction meant I should find a job at a magazine. I dunno; that’s what I thought. I went to live with a good friend from college, had fun on the drive in the moving truck with a good Austin friend and the moment the truck was unpacked and I sat down in my new room I thought, oh dear, this was a mistake. I stuck it out for six months, spending all the money saved from my fellowships, not wanting the jobs I was interviewing for, and feeling pretty lonely. The friend I’d come to live with happened to meet the man he would end up marrying shortly after my arrival, so he wasn’t around very much. My other friends there seemed far away and hard to spend time with. San Francisco just proved too windy and cold, both literally and metaphorically. I went back to Austin and have lived here ever since—almost 34 years, minus six months, more than half my previously peripatetic life.

 

The upcoming move to California, to the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas to be with my sister, will be my third. The charm, we hope.