A Mid-Summer's Daydream

By G. B. Absher

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

A misguided attempt to discover something about myself.

Something genuine worth smiling for.

It may be convoluted.

It may be conspicuous.

Hell, it might not even make any sense, but that's for you to decide upon and for me to not care about.

In the end, I'm only 23, and this is just a jumble of writings and typings, every so often in the moment, and I'm proud of it.

Tha year was 2010, and I'd recently graduated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477149973

G. B. Absher

About the Author As for me, I’m an LA-based twenty-seven-year-old student of business and design. I work at a hotel and a surf shop, and I write feverishly in my free time. I previously published a work titled A Mid-Summer’s Daydream. I’m rewriting it.

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1

AND SO IT STARTS

I call Wes around midnight just about after Grant and Max show up. Now usually midnight’s no time to be calling a friend you haven’t spoken to in a year, but then again, Wes is no usual friend; and it just so happens that Steve had alerted me to his return to the LA area not but three days prior.

Steve is a bit of a wild spirit. I worked with him at the shop for some time, and he was that kind of asshole music guy who you weren’t really sure had acquired more general knowledge than you, but he definitely had an air about him that led you to believe that he did, especially about the music and movie industries. This is not an uncommon attribute among many of the wayward souls of his condition. He bought turntables and vinyls and prided himself on the number of good obscure bands he listened to. Fucked-up girls were attracted to this and the asshole he personified. But for all of it—all the LA parties, all the LA girls, all the music, all the shows—Steve was isolated. A life of isolation grows heavy in the heart and hardens the soul, and upon meeting Steve the first few times, one wouldn’t be hard-pressed to envision his heart heavy or his soul hardened. He’s a character though, and although there is hardly any scientific evidence behind it, I am of the belief that characters attract other characters. It is this reason, in part, that lends to the fact that Steve and Wes being roommates did not in the least bit surprise me.

A year or so back, they shared a two-bedroom, two-bath second-story unit just off Lincoln and Venice. Their building was on Penmar, a street with a quaint and not-altogether-wealthy demographic on which financial stability was more or less dictated by the width of the street between any two given intersections. In person, this is as quizzical as it sounds. Steve and Wes lived on the block where Penmar got the skinniest. From their second-story balcony at the back of the building, they were privileged to a lovely view of the back alley and some of the more disheartening backyards in Mar Vista.

Wes didn’t mind it so much. He’s a small-town man, very in touch with nature, and he’s a vagabond. In fact, since the last time I’d seen him, he’d spent six months traveling across the country. By car. By himself. And apparently without a razor.

Or so his story goes, but I never would’ve guessed it when he answered the door. Two knocks on the small red door perfectly centered on the small light blue box house. The house is on a street with lots on only one side, and that side of the block looks particularly squashed together because of it. Instead of facing a similar row of skinny single-story homes, the door looks out across the street and over the intrepid Ballona Creek. In reality, intrepid is hardly the word one would use to describe the fickle Ballona. It trudges drearily along from its origins in the LA city basin down its miles and miles of concrete-coated river valleys until it finally ends its pompous run in the Pacific Ocean via the marina. At this particular hour, it’s illuminated by the orange-tint streetlights that throw long shadows and give the whole place a somewhat industrial demeanor, to the point that when Wes finally answers the door, Max and Grant and I are only too happy to scuttle inside.

There’s a slight instance when Wes seems a bit different from his normal self—a sense of eagerness is behind his eyes. Or maybe it’s just the year and a half it’s been since I’d seen him. Nevertheless, we feel safer. Part in due to the lovely, cozy, and tastefully not lavish living room we now find ourselves in. It turns out that Wes is house-sitting for a surfing friend, Chris, whom I’d met once or twice. Chris was no older than twenty-seven and a construction site foreman. Pictures of him and his beautiful wife (he had met her a couple years prior while backpacking through the Nordic countries of Europe) litter the bookshelves and counterspace.

Wes feels obliged to give us all a tour of the humble abode he’s inhabiting while Chris and Mrs. Chris Nordic are off traipsing through Central America on vacation. It’s small. But for being so small, the place is a beautiful home. A beautiful one-bedroom, one-bath home looking out over the concrete Ballona Creek valley. Wes informs us that Chris built a lot of the furnishings throughout the house: a couple bookshelves, a chair, a padded wood bench that looked sort of like a futon, and a tall desk that I’m particularly fond of. The writing surface is four feet by two feet and comes up to about my chest. It is made of a heavy wood and stained a dark mahogany brown, and I want it. Probably because of my unexplainable attraction to all things mahogany. Or it could have been the fact that I’ve just never seen a desk like this before. It looks sort of like a movie prop. I imagine it’s the type of desk Ebenezer Scrooge would slave away at, sitting atop a high chair with bottles of ink, quills, and parchment all strewn across it and the ground in the surrounding vicinity. The desk is truly a work of art.

Another sight to behold awaits us in the backyard, which isn’t so much a backyard as it is a patch of grass next to a high-gated driveway no one used that opened out onto a back alley. But on that petite patch of grass, Chris had erected a rather conservatively sized wood deck, just big enough for one of the lovelier daybeds I’ve ever seen. Lovelier still, on a kind of high shelf next to the daybed, are a number of potted plants one could compare to a beautiful batch of budding roses. Metaphorically speaking of course, because the rosebuds are actually fuzzy bulbous marijuana nugs, and the thorns are actually pretty little marijuana leaves or just more nugs. And instead of breathing in and smelling the familiar rich aromatic perfume that makes girls weak in the knees and tempts passersby to stop and appreciate, we breathe in perhaps a more familiar scent that evokes giggles and giddiness and eventually grumbles from my stomach. It’s about time for a spliff.

We’d rolled two in my room at my parents’ house, and they’re at this time procured from the chest pocket of my favorite flannel. In sets the welcoming rotation… Wes proceeds to captivate us with all the crazy mind-boggling details of his journey, highly animated as only Wes can. He draws us in, and as he’s telling stories of the two weeks he’d spent sleeping in the back of his car in the pouring rain—of the fourteen hundred dollars he spent on gas, of the incredible flatness of the Midwest, of the flight to Puerto Rico, all of it, piling one on top of the other—he begins to take in the gravity of what he’d done as if he were experiencing it anew. Looking into our awe-shocked, stoned faces, his eyebrows would periodically rise, face rapt in astonishment at his own statements, only emphasizing the point further.

He was a man my age, born the same year and a month and a half apart. Wes wasn’t born in Los Angeles though. He was raised on the country slopes and mountain plateaus of the Sierra Nevada in the township of Bishop. There are a number of tiny redneck mountain towns you pass through on the road to Mammoth, and Bishop’s the last. It’s not much. A population of a few thousand. A mile or so of highway blossoming with old-timey brick and wood storefronts, mom-and-pop restaurants with names like Joe’s and Lucille’s, and ski and snowboard chalets.

This was Weston’s element—the place he called home and always came back to with childlike nostalgia. He breathed easy in the mountains, the country where the rodeo still came with banjo and fluted fanfare, where everybody knows the words to Neil Diamond songs. He hunted deer with his brother in the woods in the fall, and he shot quail for fun with a shotgun. And when the sun went down over the peaks on the horizon, darkness truly descended, and the sky was a blanket of a million stars.

Los Angeles is an adventure, and he lived his life here as such. With some new intrigue around every corner, some new person to meet and seduce with his peculiar rough mountain charm, with his silliness and his witty goof, with all those eccentric mannerisms his face possessed. Weston, the charmer. The Jim Carrey of the Sierras. He’s our boatman tonight. He sits with us and smokes spliffs and really lives out his stories. Physically, with great posturing. And we do the same, I suppose.

Wes had moved back home to Bishop for four months and saved up approximately four thousand dollars working restaurant jobs. Then at the prime age of twenty-two, he put the backseats of his Ford Explorer down and slid in a twin-sized mattress. Heading east, he’d pushed foot to pedal with a small bag of supplies and didn’t look back. Somewhere along the way, a beard sprung up on his face. It’s not there now though. He’s shaven and clean-cut, but he shows us pictures of when he’d returned and lived in San Diego for a spell, working at the Wave House in Pacific Beach. He looked like a mountain man in the photos, with his hair grown out long.

But wait, I digress. This ain’t about Wes. This is about us—Max and Grant (and soon enough Mike) and me—and this fucker of a field trip we’re about to embark on. Leave it to a spliff to get me ramblin’ though. And what’s wrong with rambling? That’s right, nothing. So we ramble, and pretty soon, our mouths taste like cotton balls. So we head on over to La Cabana on Lincoln and Rose. It’s late, but that place doesn’t close ’til two, and the tacos are dank and cheap, and the chips and salsa are free. And the beers ain’t too expensive either. But at two, they close up shop and kick us out. We drop Wes off and head home for some shut-eye before our flight in the morning. LAX > CLT > LGW. It’s hard to sleep when one’s so excited; thank God for beer and spliffs.

2

LONDON: ARRIVALS

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We arrive at Gatwick International Airport at 7:20 a.m. London time, nine hours ahead of Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and all things familiar. Our eyes open to the voice of the captain welcoming us to the United Kingdom. I squint out the window at the approaching terminal, then over at Grant and then at Max across the aisle. We all look like shit. All things considered though, I feel remarkably well rested. It was probably the Ambien Max gave me before the flight, because it definitely wasn’t the handle of duty-free whiskey we’d poured into our endless train of ginger ales courtesy of the lovely stewardess, Ms. Beverley, who looked like she could be my godmother—you know, in that motherly, yet not immediately relatable sort of way. What happened to all the hot stewardesses, the vixens of the sky? Oh, that’s right. We’re on US Airways. All the attractive flight attendants are busy canoodling Mr. Moneybags on Virgin Atlantic and Air France.

There’s a buzz in my head, a buzz that I’m quite sure isn’t from the whiskey. Although now that I think about it, the whiskey could also explain this new warmth nuzzling my core. But it can’t explain the giddiness. As we walk through the terminal to the train platforms, strapped with backpacks and duffel bags, the little child inside me is somersaulting and zigzagging through fast-paced businessmen and vacationing families, running circles around police officers donning yellow vests and batons. It’s a feeling the likes of which I had never felt before. A freedom and a correlated lightness I notice in all our steps. Despite the forty-pound pack digging into my shoulders, a yoke has been lifted up and thrown by the wayside. Is it the passing of my collegiate years? Is it the distance from home, or should I say the distance from our attachments at home? Or maybe it’s the previously pending, now present two-month absence of phone service at my immediate fingertips. An iPhone on airplane mode for two months becomes simply an iPod with a camera.

Whatever the yoke, the feeling of it no longer there is immaculate. Eyes darting from this sign to that, to the pausing at funny spellings and comma placements, we find our way over to the currency exchange, then the ticket booth, and finally to seats on a train into Central Station. It’s a pristine train, pairs of clean red captain’s chairs facing each other on either side of a stiff, clean royal blue carpeted floor and clean light gray walls with knee-to-ceiling windows—an environment that, to me, bears striking similarities to some Star Trek vehicle’s interior. If only all the dreary-looking morning rush-hour English folk were wearing tight solid-color long sleeves and black pants instead of their dreary-looking English clothes. Oh well.

The windows are my favorite part of the train. An attraction to the ability to focus on something for a second, maybe two, before it’s gone and you’re immediately intrigued by the next curiosity down the line. The only constant all the way to London Central is an inclination towards masonry and brickwork (at times it feels like we’re flying through old movie sets of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or one of those Harry Potter movies) in most of the railside structures and the weather.

It’s muggy. Big surprise, right? It’s only early July, the heart of summer, and what are we greeted with as we exit the terminus out onto Wilton? Why, a light drizzle of course, and a hot drizzle at that—not so strong as to prevent Max from lighting his first cigarette on foreign soil, a Marlboro Red. Max is usually a Camel Blue kind of guy, but the Reds were going for $22 a carton at duty free. Welcome to Europe.

3

A LITTLE PLACE CALLED WESTERN

It was to be my second and last year at UC Santa Cruz. Since our university was on the quarter schedule, classes didn’t start until late in September. As far as housing was concerned, Mike got in on a house on King Street with Max and Grant and some buddies, and he found me a room at his summer neighbor’s house on Western Drive. A few of his summer roommates were moving into the house as well. The residence at 440 Western was an absolute beat-up, old jalopy of a house. The property owner was a middle-aged hippie who invested the majority of his monthly take from rent on riding the doldrum rollercoaster of medium—to low-risk stocks and equity groups. It wouldn’t be overly presumptuous in the slightest to think that he gave little more than a damn about that place or its general upkeep. As I was moving my bed into my tiny room under the staircase, an immediate awe of my new home soaked over me. Not at all like the old home, and not likely to ever resemble any house I would inhabit ever again. A pinnacle. Even from the street, the place looked more like a used-up and worn-out crack house than a center for adolescent education.

The gutters over the two-door garage were full of moldy old leaves and rotting through in some places. The paint was chipped, and the wood siding was warped and moldy here and there and over there and around that corner and everywhere. Everything you could see from the street—the house, the driveway, the concrete, that miserable bush, the pathetic muddy patch of grass with cars parked on it—everything seemed to be covered with perpetual grime that soaked deep into the property’s pores and refused to be scrubbed out. The inside was much of the same in that sense. You’d be hard-pressed to find a corner of that house that wasn’t housing cobwebs, a light sprinkle of mold, and a few long-legged spiders. The entire place was carpeted, save for the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the front door’s landing—all of which donned dirty, gritty, sticky linoleum. My room was six feet by ten feet on a good day, with a short deep cupboard for a closet. A decent-sized window looked out onto an eight-foot-high weathered-looking wood fence four feet away and the shrubby dirt side yard in between. Beautiful. The window’s sill and shutters were covered in a thick layer of damp dust. Since the stairs were directly above, a part of the already-small ceiling came down to meet the wall at an acute angle, and when I first stepped through the doorframe, the smallest finger of sickly claustrophobia tickled my soul. I closed my eyes and breathed it in. But not too deep, mind you, because of all the mold and that strange smell. I barely knew any of these people.

In the fall, in all, there were eight of us. I think. There were those of us that actually lived there: Dylan, Conor, Matt, Kameron, Dillon, Alex, BB, and me. But the ranks of boy-souled, eager-eyed twenty-something-year-olds that came and stayed and passed through those hallowed halls week to week, passed out on those two stadium-seat situated couches in the living room (the back couch was set atop an old bed frame, and when you sat in it, you sank, and it gobbled you up like a cushiony, pillowed Jabba the Hutt), taking showers in those rotten cesspool bathrooms—there were almost too many to count. It was like some hippy hostel up Highway 1 just before San Fran. Old friends of anyone in the house made it a habitual rest stop. Dylan, Kam, Conor, and Matt were the patriarchs—the oldest, the knowing weathered willow trees—and I got to know their vagabonding friends quite dearly. Dylan and Kam had graduated two years prior with degrees in molecular biology and computer programming, respectively; the same freshman class as Conor and Matt, but the latter two had taken their time with it. They were both still students, but not for much longer. Conor was to graduate after fall quarter with a degree in literature and Matt after winter with some science degree, who knows. They’d all lived at 440 the year before. And the year before that. And the year before that too, I think.

Then there was BB, Boom, and another Dillon—Mike’s old roommates from his summer living at 426 Western. They were all a year older than I and finishing up their last year as well. All smart cookies. And then there was me and the dog Lizzie, and we all called home that excuse of a two-story, two-bedroom, two-bath, two-car-garage family house up on the hill at the northern edge of the suburban west side of Santa Cruz. It’d been ages since it had housed any actual family though. Since those wonder years, the two-car garage had been converted into a two-bedroom commune suite inhabited by Dylan and Kam. Attic storage space upstairs had been converted into rafter-exposed closets, and traditional closets had been converted into more bedrooms. The master bedroom was a triple, with Matt sleeping in the closet, which was just big enough to hold a twin-sized mattress. Conor slept above BB, literally, on a huge homemade loft bunk that turned BB’s bed into a cave of sorts. Still, it was a cozy room with gritty old carpet, a high, sloping ceiling, a tiny balcony, and a record player sitting on top of two big ole’ eighties’ wood speakers that threw a lot of bass and stood up to my waist.

The balcony looked out over the overgrown lawn, a lush jungle of knee-high grass that Lizzie loved to romp and systematically poop through in a grid pattern. Lizzie was a golden retriever with flowing long golden locks, and when the fall was still ripe and the sun kept our cushy little coastal town in the high sixties and low seventies, why we all got drunk in the afternoon and shaved her hair into that of a lion’s, leaving it long around her face and shoulders and with a little puff at the end of her tail so she looked like Aslan. BB even teased her mane to give it more volume. Lizzie looked incredible, and oh, so pretty. Whorishly pretty and slender from always having someone to play with and always running away and running around in circles and up and down the steep beach cliffs whenever we took her up the 1 to go surfing.

We all surfed in that house, except Alex Boom, who played lacrosse and grew up in Cleveland where they didn’t have beaches. And BB, who was a girl. The surf in Santa Cruz is some of the best on the west coast, especially if you don’t mind wearing booties and 4/3s all year or dealing with crazy, methed-out locals that surf way better than you. Part of the appeal of surfing up the coast a little bit instead of in town was the comparative lack of said meth heads. Fuck meth heads. They’re usually assholes. They could turn a beautiful day out at Steamer’s Lane into an hour-long, tweak-twitching diatribe about how they’re going to punch everyone in the face, especially if you look at them or even look at their wave, or if you’re at the peak and they don’t know you, or for any other number of reasons that would make a small-town tweak surfer tick. And so we’d always stray north, away from the crowds and into the wilderness of empty beaches and lazy point breaks. Peaks that generally broke to the right, but every here and there a left would be hiding, and if it was peeling at the perfect stride like it sometimes did, it would give a young goofy-footer like me the ride of his life. Something to pump down the line on before stretching into long turns. And it was always good and usually held up in big swells, nothing like the quick, dumpy horseshit I grew up on in LA. It was immaculate, and if a session carried on past sunset, so be it because the waves don’t turn off when it’s dark; they just get sharkier. The water would turn pitch-black and sparkle under the still-bright sky of twilight, and every kelp head and playful baby seal seemed ominous.

Mike and Matty loved afternoon seshies though, so it happened a lot. Not Matt from my house mind you, but Matty from the house on King Street who lived with Mike and those other rapscallion bastards: Grant and Max and Taylor, and Minh and Chloe. Mike and Minh and Taylor were my age, the babies of the house. Everyone else was a year older, except Chloe who was two years older. Their house wasn’t unlike mine really. It was still gritty and grungy, just less so. Maybe because they had hardwood instead of carpet, or because they had an old kitty named Cricket instead of a dog, or maybe they were cleaner; or maybe they cared more. Regardless, we were all the best of friends, both houses. It’s just that theirs was the clean house, so that’s the one we always raged at.

4

LONDON: FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

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Sloane Street is right in the middle of that part of London you always see in cheesy romance films. Or an Olsen twins’ flick. Everything’s white stone. And if it’s not white, it’s just off-white stone or black marble. I’m not sure if it’s the time-zone delirium or that all-consuming hunger high you get when the only thing you’ve consumed over the last twenty hours is an airplane chicken salad, ginger ale, and a third of a handle of whiskey; but I feel high and dreamy like I’m in a fairy tale. It’s a feeling often striven for, but rarely duplicated, especially in this magnitude. The people driving cars only drive nice ones. Really nice ones. And if they don’t drive, they’re whisked away in sleek tiny black cabs or towering red buses. Everyone looks wealthy, those damned British with their pounds sterling and their stupid traffic laws.

We pass by Inna’s place of residence twice before realizing it’s not a department store, and with all due haste we swing the glass door wide. It’s heavy. The desk clerk must think us to be a bit out of place with our shorts and our backpacks and duffel bags, struggling against momentum to pull the door open. If he thinks us humorous, he hides it well. We walk in like the confused little boys lost in the big city that we are, all big-eyed and still somewhat taken aback by it all, and when we cautiously approach the desk, he doesn’t miss a beat.

And who are you here to see, sirs? It’s very English and kind of trails off at the end.

Maxwell, the ambassador, picks up the conversation, while Grant pockets the phone map; and I busy myself keeling over and grabbing my knees from the walk. We’re staying with Inna at apartment 603, chimes Max. Sir Desk Clerk smiles endearingly and with a grain of humor; I barely catch it.

And what’s her last name then? We have to smile too. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure it’s because everyone present, desk clerk included, has little or no idea how to actually pronounce it, and there couldn’t have been too many Innas in the building expecting guests. Ms. Rabotyagina, as it is, is busy at work for most of the day, but left the key to her place with our new friend. I wasn’t previously aware, but apparently the six-hundreds in this building are the flats at the very top. There’re stairs to the left and a gold-doored elevator to the right. Guess what we took.

It’s not until we get to Inna’s door that this newly discovered feeling of trust and charisma for humanity sets in. This girl’s never before met us. We had talked a handful of times online via couchsurfing.com, and now we’re here at the door of her sixth-story Kensington penthouse, key in hand. Of course it’s then that we also realize that the Brits don’t exactly make doors and locks the same way we do. For no reason apparent to us, there’s a doorknob smack-dab in the middle of the door with a lock and handle down and to the side by the frame. Fancy-schmancy. It’s a three-minute job, no big deal, and we’re in. Penthouse may have overshot the description, but not by much.

The place is luxurious. London single-living luxurious, a little hollow-feeling with bare white walls, but the carpet makes it cozy. The door opens on a comfortable foyer with a big coat closet and a skinny euro-flat kitchen. There’s a small hallway that leads to the grand bedroom and the living room on either side. Score? Yeah, score! What the hell have we stumbled into? We take off our shoes and shove all our shit into the most inconspicuous corner of the living room and head back across to the master bedroom where there’s a balcony. A petite brick thing with no door out to it, so we have to step through a low-framed window, which isn’t as simple as it should’ve been; but that’s London for you. Max takes down another Marlboro Red, and fuck it, we all do, suckin’ in the sweet cancer and holding for the head buzz. I lean hard on the gray slab guard so my head’s out over Sloane, and I look down, letting out all the smoke as the red double-deckers hustle by and the loud bustle of the