I hold onto two memories from the summer after I graduated from college. The first, my San Francisco sublet—a fog-lit, one bedroom on the corner of Larkin and Jackson that smelled of cigarettes and steamed bok choy. The second, a road trip that began with a phone call from my friend Mari, inviting me down to her childhood home in Los Angeles.
I scrawled directions across a PG&E bill and called Marco, our mutual friend, who, critically, had a car. We planned to leave Friday morning. We planned to take the coast.
Neither of us had taken Highway 1 to Los Angeles before. We bargained for an eight-hour trip, counting on spontaneity to milk every ounce of freedom we could from what we had begun calling our last summer—the last summer we might still pass as students, the last summer we’d be without real jobs and grown-up responsibilities and student loan repayments and everything else that lay in our futures.
That Friday morning, I opened my door to an unexpected pouring of sunlight. Over six feet tall, legs thin as a bird’s, Marco greeted me in a white T-shirt and sunglasses. I threw my bag into his hatchback and we sped off toward Golden Gate Park.
It was nearly 2 p.m., at a cliffside café overlooking the bleached tides of Big Sur, when we realized we had no idea where we were going.
“Marco, I forgot the directions,” I said. The wind tossed our hair around like socks in a dryer.
Marco shrugged. “We’ll just call Mari.”
But we didn’t have her parents’ number. Nor did we know their first names, and with a surname as common as Green, we doubted we could get much from 411. In those disconnected days before cell phones, that lost era before GPS tracking, the dark years preceding Blackberrys and MapQuest, we quickly debated our options. Did either of us know anyone else in Los Angeles? No. Should we turn back? Hell no!
“It’ll all work out,” we told each other, slumping back into the car.
To call Highway 1 a highway at Big Sur is a joke. The curves and hills conspire to keep you at a steady 20-mph crawl. By the time we unraveled our way onto a semi-straight path, the sun had begun its dramatic exit, pouring paprika and saffron into the suddenly still sea. We discussed and rejected Plans A, B and C all down the coast, at Morro Bay, Pismo Beach, a lone gas station somewhere between Santa Barbara and Highway 101.
When we finally saw the sign welcoming us to LA County, we broke into a mock cheer, but both of our eyes carried obvious baggage from the drive. Mine were zoned out at the blur of lights rushing alongside the freeway like an electric stream, which is when I saw a road sign in crisp white letters announcing: Van Nuys.
“That’s our exit!” I screamed. Seeing the street name, I had a sudden recall of writing it down; I had made Mari spell it.
Marco swerved across two lanes of traffic onto the exit ramp. We pulled into the first gas station we saw. Cheap motels to the left, fast food joints to the right, this city was as ugly and horrible as I never imagined. Didn’t Los Angeles have a beach? Marco bought a map, which we spread across the hood of the car parked under a flickering streetlight filled with an aviary of massive flying insects. The light cast a stale yellow glaze over the map as we scanned the various districts, each colored in distinct dusty pastel hues.
We knew two things: Mari lived in a part of town called Sherman Oaks, which we quickly located awash in dirty lilac ink, and we knew where we were. I traced my finger from the freeway along Van Nuys, squinting at the millions of little cross streets that separated us from the dirty lilac.
“Mulholland Drive!” I shrieked. “We turn on that.” I remembered this only because my favorite band at the time referenced the road in a song. “Marco,” I commanded, “you drive, I’ll direct.”
I like to think some mystical, magical force was guiding us through that city of 4 million as we drove up and down the suddenly hilly and suddenly less ugly terrain, taking a right turn here triggered from a vague memory of having scrawled down the street name, and taking a left turn there for no other reason than it was in the general direction we needed to go. Or maybe things do just work out when you let spontaneity milk summer’s freedom. When we entered Sherman Oaks and came to a crossroad that my foggy recall thought might be it, we took a left, just because.
It was after midnight, and the neighborhood was a sonata of streetlight buzz and crickets. Not two houses down stood Mari’s brother’s red “I wanna get laid” Corvette, which Mari had on occasion borrowed and brought up north.
The car was parked in front of a stately white two-story house with ivy growing up two tall trees. It was the kind of house that certainly had a pool in back, and it was the only one on the block with lights still on. The faintest wail of Pearl Jam drifted out from an upstairs window.
Marco turned off the engine and we sat for a moment, windows rolled down, the cool summer air surrounding us in calm, as only summer night air can. We had a whole weekend ahead of us. There was a city to explore, although we already felt an overwhelming intimacy with it.
Our doors clapped shut, one after the other. A shrill dog barked twice. We ran to the door and rang the bell.
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Julia Bourland Chambers is the author of The Go-Girl Guide: Surviving Your 20s With Savvy, Soul, and Style (Contemporary Books, 2000) and two other books. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and two girls.
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