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You got steel, son, my Uncle’s talking’ / takes a champion to walk and keep walking

When I moved to San Diego, everything I owned fit in my hand-me-down ‘84 Toyota Cressida station wagon: futon, stereo, CDs, computer, and clothes. I’d been frustrated with my parents, with living at home, with high school, with Phoenix. Phoenix, Phoenix, Phoenix. I abhorred the sweltering city streets of the six-month summers, the dirt and dust, the paucity of culture drawn tenuously between hick and gangster. Phoenix straddled a purgatory of boredom and apathy, one long enduring anti-climax. Unlike the namesake, my rebirth lay elsewhere.

My high school was an inner-city school in the center of a district tall and thin. One mile wide and ten miles long, my end was the North, the suburbs, and to the South, central Phoenix. Although inner-city, replete with inner-city funding and security, gangs, drugs, fights, and both kinds of weapons – those that drew blood and those sprayed it – we didn’t lay claim to the toughest educational facility in town. South Mountain probably took that dubious honor, but we will weren’t soft. There were people you didn’t fuck with, no matter what. Omar. Cody. Joey. A slew of guys – and girls, who stashed double-edged razor blades in their mouths for slap-fighting – that I never even knew the names of. Tough guys that put tougher guys in hospitals, in comas. Worse, even.

When I left Phoenix, the taggers were just starting to migrate north into my neighborhood. They’d be followed by the wannabe gangsters, then the real deal, if a black market was to be found.

I’d just graduated two days earlier and received the responses to my college applications.

• Occidental: Primary candidate.
• Tulane: Full ride.
• Clairmont-McKenna: Check.
• UCSC: Check.
• UCSD: Check.
• UC Berkeley: Deferred.
• Stanford: Denied.
• Columbia: Denied.
• No application to any in-state school: Check.

I’d lived almost a quarter of my life in San Diego. My father’s father had taken his family on annual vacations from the Yuma sun to temperate San Diego, and my father expanded on the tradition, buying a house in Mission Beach back when houses could still be afforded there. I’d lived summers there since I could remember, and worked them since fifteen. San Diego was comfortable exploration. Plenty of trouble to be found, and I already knew my phone number. But not much else.

I knew nothing I wanted or expected, only what I was exhausted with: Phoenix. Apathy. Stagnancy. Sedentary lives. Lack of change. Inertia. The co-efficient of static friction.

I was dealing with a different sort of friction now, a lesser force, my boot mashing the accelerator and burying the speedometer of my coughing rustbucket. There was the gaping maw of the Pacific beyond these dunes, beckoning me, teasing me, a summer fling promising a full-fledged affair.

My summer friends from years past would be gone, back to their respective locales, and the locals I knew rotated on a yearly basis, just permanent enough to not be considered itinerant. I knew nothing of the San Diego beyond Mission Beach, beyond attenuated debauchery and tourism jobs punctuated with drinking, body surfing, and post-curfew make out sessions with girls in from Texas-Arizona-Jersey-Boston-Elsewhere. It was as if I had hiked this trail a thousand time before, but never ventured to the undergrowth I’d always tread around. Now, I was destined off-piste.

I slammed the accelerator down again, gently padding the blistering metal outside my window. Good girl. We’ll be there soon.

Someone, someone I hadn’t met yet, would later tell me: never go from anything, go to something. If I did know anything at all, it was that I was going to somewhere other than Phoenix.