A Gaucho is "an Argentinian Cowboy"

APRIL 4th

The way we saw it, if we were going to be doing all this driving anyway we might as well take the scenic route when we could. The way we saw it, California’s highway 1 is one of the most scenic routes in the country. I mean, The Decemberists wrote a song about it and a kid I went to high school with was in a movie called Down the P.C.H. which was not very good but did have that guy from Weeds in it. They showed it at the movie theatre where I worked and that was all it took to grant my aspirations to loft themselves. “Someone from this town was a in a movie. I can also be in a movie.” We can blame that guy for my deciding to get an acting degree. But I digress – The way we saw “it” aka The Pacific Coast Highway aka California One/The Youth & Beauty Brigade was driving as much of it as we could stomach, crossing from NorCal to SoCal, two parts of the same state engaged in a needless and fabricated rivalry that vaguely has something to do with average humidity and water rights.

We were headed toward the very place where I “earned” that acting degree by juggling on the beach for a show I assumed, based on my college theatre experiences, would be mildly attended. Spoiler warning: my assumptions of audience attendance are about to be broken, then pulverized, then blown into glass, then shattered. We stopped by the Bixby Bridge (the one from the Big Little Lies intro that is so far from Carmichael-by-the-Sea that anyone actually making that commute to take their kids to school every day probably relished the face they could send their kids to school via Zoom, but I digress) and ate peanut butter sandwiches and did some yoga.

The year prior I had tried to take the scenic route from Grass Valley to Goleta as we were doing now but mudslides had shut down much of it and to get over to the 101 (or 101 if you are north of San Francisco. You don’t add the “the” until you trickle out of The Bay, but I di–) via a road so winding it may as well have never been paved. It was a tangled headphones of a road that wound over the hills and plopped you out near an Armed Forces Base (I never bothered to learn which one) near SLO. Luckily my routing was not so re-directed this time and we pulled into Santa Barbara in the early morn.

Much of my booking this tour had been sending e-mails and hearing no response, following up and hearing no response, and taking that no response as the response it was intended to be – an unsounding “No, thank you”. But I thought that a bit odd from my alma matter, who always seemed to be eager to show off their alums. Well, it turns out I didn’t have the clout I thought I did and the possibility of maybe doing a showcase or something like that was a large enough conflict they couldn’t possibly respond to my e-mail. But, I had an ace in the hole (an expression I’m just realizing seems like a mixed metaphor. Where are the holes in cards? But I d)

Much of my experience at UC Santa Barbara was navigating my sheer brokeness. I had a little financial aid, which covered tuition and half a textbook, and a couple of jobs that paid a pittance of my cost of living in this beachside community. A library clerk, a record store snob, a tour guide (my favorite – I did 100 tours of the campus in a year to get my name on a plaque on a wall in the admissions office). I scraped whatever I could and budgeted as best I may. If I had rehearsal I would pop into the little food court on Pardall and order a $5 Foot Long (this was in the era of the $5 Foot Long) from Subway and stretch it to two meals: lunch and dinner. I can probably credit my failure to take up smoking to the fact that I couldn’t afford luxuries like a pack of smoke. 

Because I couldn’t afford things like rent on a beachfront property I had to get creative with where I lived. One opportunity Isla Vista offered, to qualifying individuals, was a troop of housing co-ops. Rent capped at $500ish dollars, all you had to do in exchange was endure 19 housemates. I grew up with 5 brothers and a sister in 1 house so I figured I was up to the task. I was not. None of my brothers were New Age Festival Kids with perfect teeth and dread locks. Like any circus, it had its characters – a stoned out of his mind physics major and his skittish Boxer puppy, the dreamy-eyed girl whose breasts were always threatening to spill out of her blouse and who had to make a tar black tea every morning so her brain would produce serotonin, the van life pioneer who made a mint working for Google and enjoyed nothing more than lounging nude in the driveway, and Chad – and I learned to navigate their idiosyncrasies and music taste. 

My roommate-roommate was a childhood friend I’d known and unknown several times in my scant two decades on this grimy balloon of a planet. He was dating a girl who also went to UCSB and moved down so the relationship would work out. It didn’t, but he met the woman who is now his wife and the mother of his child in that co-op, so overall a win for Dusty (who, quick digression – the most positive person I’ve ever met. A real Billy Goat of a boy, finding the glue to munch on in every tin can life throws at him. I can’t hear the bass line from Call Me Al without hearing how sto-o-o-o-o-ked he got. He also liked dubstep, loud, at 10 in the morning, but whenever the thumping bass wrenched me from sleep he would be standing over me with a gargantuan bong and even larger grin. One of The Greats. I was not often a great roommate. Freshman year I crashed into the cinderblock closet I shared with another teenager to watch an episode of LOST and didn’t clock that he and his girlfriend were in the room until the first commercial break. I didn’t clock that they had been in the middle of sex until many years later. Aaron, Claudette, you have my belated apologies).

Anyway, the best part of living at our co-op (named for Steven Biko, the anti-apartheid activist. I am painfully aware of how not-Black the dozen and a half of us were) was that the garage was a well known indie venue in the Southern California music scene. Bands would scuttle through there all the time, play a show, get far too drunk, then splosh all over our living room floor. I knew I could count on the BIKO garage to host me.

Remember the spoiler warning about assumptions? I was able to get in touch with a person lviign there about doing the damn thing in that there garage, but there was not what I would call a concerted effort to encourage people to come see the show. Now, I don’t know if it is just getting older, or the rise of social media, or what but the raucous campus I remembered was quiet as a rectory when we stopped by that April. I anticipated throngs of tanned, stoned youths soaking up the last remaining drops of 67 degree sun of Spring before the brutal 72 degree sun of Summer came blazing in. This was the town that torched the Bank of America building to protest Vietnam and, years later, torche couches in the streets to celebrate Rebelution playing one more tune. But not so much, no. It was quiet. It was eerie. But if there was one thing I didn’t want to be it was the person in their mid-twenties soliciting teens to get off their phones and experience the world, man. But dammit, I had a show to put on.

Inspired by a friend who I did not know in college but who lived in Santa Barbara, I doodled a flier on some blue-lined paper and made as many duplicates as I thought we needed at the house of print & copy, then doled them out to disinterested teens. We doled them out to disinterested teens on the streets, we doled them out to disinterested teens in the academic buildings, we doled them out to disinterested teens at restaurants. If you were a teen in Isla Vista and generally disinterested in anything on April 4th, 2019? Thank you for letting me dole.

So many of the stories in the show I was doing, CLOWNFISH, happened in those formative years in Isla Vista. To recount them all here would be redundant and I’ve digressed and reminisced long enough for this entry. I’ll just say I did scrounge up nearly a quarter as many kids as I lived with at BIKO to do the show in their garage and I slapped a sticker up there among the greats. I also revisited a bathroom that left a profound mark on me and left my own mark there.