Sometimes Free HBO just ain't enough...

It had been floating around the back of my brain all day as I left Los Angeles, but with the tangled webs of disconcerting freeways to negotiate on my way out, and views that belted the meaning of awesome into me once I'd escaped, I had successfully managed to let it go untended.

I hoped it would remain that way.

It wasn't to be the case, however, not this time.

The Pacific Coast Highway. Highway number one. Nu-mero. U-no. It’s the highway that runs along the coast from south to north on the west side of the United States. And that’s all I know. I’m sure there’s more to know about the highway, more interesting or historical facts, but I didn’t know them. Still don't. What I do know is that it’s number one, and surely that’s significant. Besides, Bob Dylan’s album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ (which resonated from my can-like rent-a-car speakers) gives any road a feeling of constant reinvention and nostalgic poignancy.

Perhaps this was just a projection of my own state of mind.

I was making my way to Seattle from L.A.

In a white Rio Kia.

A hot ride.

Kind of.

“Why don’t I just pay for a flight to Seattle…” My mum’s voice, tinny through the skype speakers as I spoke to her from my rowdy hostel in L.A. She had traced the M1 all the way from L.A to Seattle with her finger, a map laid out on the kitchen table in her Warrandyte home. And, along with my Dad, most probably, had made the usual concerned sounds at my plans to drive a rather long and windy road in a far off country where they drove on the wrong side of the road. “It will be very lonely, Hon Bun…” she said.

But there was no way I was backing out of this. Even if this trip resulted in plunging me and my Rio Kia off the chaotic cliffs that hugged the highway, into the raging sea below because I realized was never more alone than as I was at that moment, or (less romantically) buggering up the left hand/right hand turns resulting in having to pay an excessive excess on the insurance, I was willing take the risk.

It was day one. Los Angeles to… somewhere between L.A. and San Francisco. I was planning to make it to San Fran but it soon became obvious, as most of my driving plans would during the trip, that it wasn’t going to be possible. So once I had made it out of the sprawl of L.A. that extends into the horizon and beyond… and then further again… and after a missed turn, a splatter of pee on my shoes in a lemon orchard and a succession of gasp worthy vistas, I found myself in the small costal town of San Simeon – the name of which only served to remind me of an obnoxious Australian comedian.

The town is made up of a collection of reasonably priced motels on a rough costal bend of the highway, an overpriced mini market and a café/restaurant that boasts free coffee with breakfast deals in fluro orange writing. It’s the gateway to Hearst’s Castle. And it’s the cheap sister town of Cambria, a delightful and picturesque town filled with French bakeries, quaint bed and breakfasts and other expensive white people pursuits.

But San Simeon was my price range and the motel I’d settled on proudly advertised ‘wireless internet’, ‘pool’ and ‘Free HBO’. Say no more!

I checked in without a problem, lugged my heavy backpack up a flight of stairs to my room and sniffed at the complimentary little soaps. I opened and closed the bar fridge; turned the shower on and off; adjusted the orgami towel feature; then, I shifted my suitcase to a more appropriate corner of the room.

I sat on the bed.

…

If there had been a ticking clock, it would have tocked. But instead the glowing red lights of the digital alarm clock beside the bed flickered over without a sound.

Alone.

In a starkly clean and sterile-y comfortable motel room, with nothing

but hours of dark night approaching. Now, I was faced with something.

All day it had been niggling at me, like a small child tugging on a sleeve. You know it’s there but you’re just a bit busy right now… trying not to die on the US roads and thus fulfilling your mother’s greatest fears.

I was staring at something in my minds eye and instead of attending to it…

I took a walk on the beach.

And there it was. 

Even as I was pretending to take photos of the sea, with a camera that I didn’t actually know how to use, that annoying little brain itch identified itself.

I wanted to write.

Ugh. <insert dramatic sigh>

For those who aren’t encumbered by such arty or crafty urges, or maybe don’t believe in the urgency of the so called “creative juices”, I’ll try to give you some idea of how this feels. (Please note: this ‘insight’ is not profound and it’s as moist and sloppy as “creative juices” suggests).

As a metaphor, think of your dog taking a vom in the living room. You understand that you need to attend to it, and if you don’t the stench will only get worse. But realising you want or need to write is similar to that sinking feeling that accompanies the thought of cleaning up the dog spew - the time it will take, the energy it will suck, and combination of cleaning product and doggy vom odor that will follow you for the rest of the day – when really, you’re quite happy just watching your free HBO.

It might be different for other people.

But me and words, at this point... we were not friends.

I had left Australia specifically to get away from words. And here they were. On the beach of San Simeon.

God. <insert Napoleon Dynamite type inflection>

In Australia, I’d tried to end the friendship. I’d tried hanging out with other people. I distracted myself with good-looking boys and wonderfully wine-infused ladies.

I’d tried to not roll words around my head, listening to possible sentences, descriptions, stories; nor did I let them run in chaotic streams, making bad poetry or haphazard prose as I rode my bike or as I drove the nine flat hours from Melbourne to Adelaide.

I’d tried drinking to sodden them, to make them pliable, modly blobs of bloop. 

Then, I tried working with them professionally.

This wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.

I ran at them with fury and frustration. It was like working with a lover. All personal disagreements, annoyances and fiery, fierce disappointments I encountered with words came fumbling out at the workplace. And it got awkward.

Words demand attention and a specificity, to which my flippant heart and, pretty much, ADHD brain isn’t naturally inclined. I’m doomed with a poet’s integrity, a goldfish’s attention span and a burning need to wriggle if asked to sit in front of computer for long lengths of time (which, as a “writer”, you sort of have to do).

“When do we get to dance?” My body would whine, scrunched on a chair in front of a computer away from the sun. My dreams of opening a hibiscus farm on a tropical island were stretching further and further away, as I was held for ransom by words in my ‘writerly’ and Melbourne-wintery cave.

It was like cheap port, when you’re 15 and in a park – sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, particularly when you’re crying and puking your guts up and your best friend’s holding your hair back.

It hadn’t always been this way. We were at one point in our lives necessary and healing for each other – words that is – we were at ease with our relationship. We would spend holidays together and would sometimes stay awake late into the night almost addicted to each other, exploring new territories and etching a love story on each other’s souls. Words never made me lonely. They were better company than a glass of red wine. Sex was fine, but words were there long past the hang over, or the broken heart, or the mislaid trust.

Working together, on a professional level, however, that was the final straw. We thought it was meant to be, but we wore each other out. Scathed and scarred we went our separate ways. At least we tried to.

But here in San Simeon, after a long drive, several syrupy Starbucks chai lattes and time to get lonely, I found myself once again playing with floppy, elongated sentences, flowery descriptions of life on the road (… life? It had been at least six hours) and terrible metaphor lathered upon confusing simile. It was a tentative beginning but with nothing to prove and no one around to read them, words and I slowly started to repair ourselves, together.

So much for the free HBO. Fuck it. 

Thanks to Matt Ford for the proofing and thoughts before publishing. XX

May you one day carry me home... but not just yet.

Before she left, she had wandered her hometown like a tourist. Directionless, spoilt, and with a slightly bewildered look on her face, as if she had no idea where the fuck she was.

But she knew how it worked, how this city functioned, more or less anyway. She knew where the coffee was good, where to get a pretentiously delicious breakfast and, if she wanted to, where she could watch, with beer sparkled eyes, a boy play guitar… or a ukulele.

And that’s all she needed to know.

Right?

So why did she feel like a stranger here?

It felt like another country, and she, a foreigner in it. This feeling had, at one stage, given familiar sites a mystery, made them ripe for further investigation. In her minds eye, she would be equipped with a big, magnifying glass, a bloodhound and a ready-to-seek-out-truth! attitude... in the back streets of Brunswick.

But this time, this strangeness; this listlessness (or perhaps more pertinently, this too-many-lists-iness) was different. Adulthood had fallen on her like a pound (or ten) of flour that was not yet scones or profiteroles, just a weighty bag holding an abundance of something she didn’t know what to do with. Not even the ‘creative class’ of Collingwood with their aggressive sense of ‘cool’ gave her the little thrill it used to. She was tired of pretending she was one of them. It was expensive and exhausting.

So she left.

She had dreamt of going to L.A. since she was a lonely teenager. She justified being a bit shit at maths back then, with the rationale that she would one day be a Hollywood star and had no practical need for trigonometry or Pythagoras. A future in Hollywood stardom was also a comfort when faced with other teenage girls and their aggressive sense of schoolyard popularity.

Alas, she did not arrive in LA with the blaze of Jon-Bon-Jovi-singing-on-a-rock-like glory she had imagined she would at 14. She was a failed TV writer, with pair leggings and heavy backpack … No bright lights and certainly no need for ‘shades’. The future was just a tired sense of elongated time that lay out before her like a long, dreary paddock where north and west were vague memories.

She was set for “true discovery”. At least, that’s what she fucking hoped. If there wasn’t true and authentic discovery here, this trip was going to be a compete disappointment. She was overseas in search for herself. At 30, at the height of her Saturn Return, she was a walking, talking, dressed up cliche. And she had nothing except a one-way plane ticket... and a fridge in her parents’ garage. At 22, this would be paradise. At 30, there was a niggling fear that she had in fact fucked it up, this ‘life’ business, and potentially, irrevocably. The least she could do is be a success at being completely lost. Dear lord, she had to be good at something.

Once the jet lag subsided, she ventured out into the wilderness of LA. After such a long time fantasising about the place (and seeing it projected into the collective imaginations through movie screens and television dramas), the city had a strange familiarity to it. Walking around this city felt like walking onto a movie set where the kitchen looks real enough but the taps won’t give you any water. A city made of plywood and stage flats, L.A. was a town where the grimy film that dulled the windows on Melrose Ave appeared as if it was a hot film set, not to be meddled with by burly grips or coffee hinged First A.Ds. Even the homeless people looked as though they were styled extras in a movie.

With a camera on her hip and a wildly pink paisley scarf draped scandinavially around her shoulders, she, herself, was most certainly costumed and in character. Today! she was a “traveller” (her ‘character’ however, looked more German than Australian. And she couldn’t help but assume that those who met her were slightly disappointed that she was less exotic, and considerably more twangy, than they had first hoped).

As she moved through this staged city as an acted version of herself, she was suddenly hit by the sweet scent of spring flowers. Unless this was some weird Truman show, smell-a-vision movie, these flowers were real. Amongst the smog and the insurmountable fumes of exhaust that were pummeled into the air by monster cars and people who had forgotten how to walk, she would be stopped, every now and then by a waft of florally loveliness. She was literally and metaphorically, stopping to smell the roses… and chrysanthemums.

Everybody’s garden had flowers. Some gardens were tangly and unkempt jungles of overgrown weeds or plants. Others, anally clipped and retentively mown, symmetrical and terrifyingly organised. But they all had bosomy blossoms, billowing before her – and it made her want to illiterate… and smile. There were hibiscuses and germaniums and bougainvilleas. Poinsettias, magnolias and jacarandas. A gentle burst of jasmine and wisteria too. Along with the piss and the dog shit, something sweet and sincere pervaded the streets, and the nostrils, of West Hollywood.

And where was the plastic surgery?

She wondered.

Flowers were one thing, but she had expected the people to be ugly, vacuous, Barbie, bad-porn-like “beautiful”.

Where were the pec implants, the chin jobs, the lipo, the nip and tucks, the puckery duck’s beak like puckered lips? Maybe everyone just had really good work. But their lazy, ruffled skin, the mismatched, comfortable wear, the friendly Gaga-esque weirdoes (who directed me to ‘drop my no bread’ policy for a night if I was to have dinner at the Argentinian steakhouse because ‘the bread was to die for’ - how did she even know I had a no bread policy!!)… suggested no such signs of ‘work’. They were real.

And when I bought my first espresso, I believed the hip boy behind the coffee machine when he said ‘have a good a day’. Everyone said it, so maybe I just wanted to believe it. Maybe I needed to. Either way, I decided it was sincere.

It was here that the author realised she had clunkily moved from the third person to the first. She was no longer ‘she’ but ‘I’ – in inverted commas. ‘I’, of course, suggesting a more authentic voice. If authentic is, in fact, a gradable adjective. Fitting, don’t you think? Meaningful? That we move from the third person, a disaffected, detached voice (one that the author might hide behind) to the first, to ‘I’, that assumes a more truthful (if truthful is a gradable adjective) reflection of an experience?

Yes, I think so. *she thought smugly*

And so, after the real coffee, I flung my pink paisley scarf around my clichéd shoulders, called to my metaphorical bloodhound and jumped into my literal hire car. I was headed North up HWY 1 and if the people in L.A. were real with their crooked smiles and flowery flora... maybe… juuuust maybe, there was hope for this trip yet…

Thanks to Jesse Cotton for the proof and the thoughts before publishing. X