I woke up the other morning with a raging sense of ‘what the fuck should I do today?’ I was tired and lazy, but determined not to rot on my couch. Steve was preparing for an overnight job in Santa Barbara and asked if I wanted to come with. Perfect. It had been a good year or so since I’d been north of Ventura and I was excited to get back up there. Suddenly, the responsibilities started to creep up – dust bunnies taunted me from underneath my furniture. My computer begged me to stay and touch up my floundering screenplay. There were plenty of reasons to stay home. None sounded very sexy, though. Fuck it, I thought, while shoving some clean panties and a ridiculous amount of toiletries into my travel bag.
I always forget how close Santa Barbara is. I laughed at my 90 minute ETA while googling thrift stores along the way. My first stop was a Goodwill in Thousand Oaks that was filled with a reliably comforting stale smell and very friendly clerks. I scored a 60’s lamp and felt glad that I wasn’t dozing off while watching Girls for the millionth time.
I got tired after a couple hours of digging and forged onward. Santa Barbara is a charming, Spanish revival laden, mountainous dreamland. I arrived at the Presidio Hotel, a budget friendly hotel that’s perfectly basic and conveniently located. Steve and his coworkers were posted up at a bar nearby and already sounding like they’d had a few. I freshened up, did a little ~transcendental meditation~, and drove to the Press Room. To my utter dismay, the boys had wandered across the street to a student filled Irish bar. I ordered a margarita (maybe an odd choice for an Irish pub?) but it was so expertly made that I had two. It could have also been the Dubstep blaring over the speakers. Glazed over in disassociation, I glanced out the window to see a man in a black cowboy hat, black leather fringe jacket, and very tight black leather pants standing outside. It was time to get some ‘fresh air’.
I stood outside the bar, buzzed and curious. The freakish cowboy approached me.
“How are your tits holdin’ up?”
I laughed and looked down at my chest.
“Has gravity been good to ’em?”
My jaw dropped as I searched for a response.
“I’m not wearing a bra, so…you tell me!”
He laughed and took my hand. He pecked a gentlemanly kiss on it. A woman in her late sixties, grinning underneath sunglasses, yelled out something.
“Don’t worry about him!”
The Cowboy, who’s name is muffled in my head under his thick accent, looked at his companion.
“Don’t mind her. That’s Miss Piggy!”
I gasped. She cackled. He continued.
“And I’m her Kermit.”
I felt relieved, in a way. It seemed this woman was charmed with the frisky cowboy and unbothered with his particular brand of chaos. Maybe she was an even bigger freak than he was. Eventually they made their way into the bar to terrorize some kids that were playing pool, and I got the sense that they did this often. Transfixed, I observed them from afar as I returned to Steve and his pals. A sense of longing crept inside my heart. Santa Barbara was sleepy, sure. Bro-centric, of course. But damn, it is beautiful. And even more so, it has characters. Even more beautiful, it has character. People engage with you, and boy, they are weird. Another young man approached us, his teal eyes sparkling. He had brown braided pigtails and a button down Western shirt on.
“Any of you motherfuckers play pool?”
Jesus, I thought, I wish!
“Uh, no, sorry”, I replied, as his eyes penetrated the depths of my soul.
I was as frightened as I was intrigued. No one ever approached me at bars in LA. Eventually, we made our way to the Press Room.
It’s too often felt like eccentric characters have dwindled from the cities. I saw the tail end of this when I moved to San Francisco in 2006. It was a shell of its former bohemian weirdo self. Los Angeles can sometimes feel bland like this, unless you walk around downtown or any main drag of Hollywood. Creatives and artists are no longer on the fringes of society, they are popular kids whose only talents are in marketing. I see young people with kooky style but often wonder, in true Get Off My Porch fashion, how authentic they are. They grew up with thrifting being trendy and access to any clothing style they wanted via the internet. Their freakishness came too easy.
The entire twenty four hours that I was in Santa Barbara, I fantasized about moving there and being a local weirdo. I sat at a bougie bakery that was worthy of a Nora Ephron movie (Helena Avenue Bakery, highly recommend) and read a miniature collection of Cookie Mueller’s essays. Now there’s an iconic freak. I let the sun cover my skin and prayed that my coffee would kill the margarita hangover. Looking around at the other patrons, I noticed that their preppy, upper middle class looks weren’t inciting the same charm from the crowd of the night before. Freakiness hides in the day, perhaps. Or maybe they’re just better at covering it up.
SANTA BARBARA RECCS:
Helena Avenue Bakery, 131 Anacapa St C
Press Room, 15 E Ortega St
The Presidio, 1620 State St