Never Never Land

The night before I had to leave, it was raining. Giant droplets pelted me on the fire escape, drenching every article of clothing I had on. It was freezing, I had to chew every breath. The cold metal bars of the fire escape dug into my spine as I smoked cigarette after cigarette, hoping to suspend time, to keep the night lasting forever. Inside, the fire was roaring as my two roommates played video games. The glow of the television giving me the slightest bit of ghostly light. I could see inside the window at what I was losing; the dart board, the fireplace, the silly knick knacks piled high. I would miss this place, my own personal Never Never Land. San Francisco. I had more adventures there than anywhere else in my life, and that apartment especially was one of my favorite places to be.
The day I moved in was similar to my last night. The rain drops felt like tiny daggers piercing our clothes. I had just turned eighteen and had just essentially run away from home. Like a kid in an after school special, giving my parents the figurative finger as I hopped into my crazy boyfriend's car and sped away. When we got to my new home, a duplex on the outskirts of the Sunset district, I could tell I was going to love living there. Our apartment was the second floor, and luckily my minimal amount of belongings were able to be brought up in one trip. The apartment was huge. My friend, Will, had already been living there for about a year, so the apartment was already full in a very 'early-twenties-boy' style. After no one but a twenty-one-year-old boy living there, it was a mess. The worst was the shower. Every bit of grout was black. The smell was as if, well, you know. But it was my new home and to me, it was beautiful.
As a few weeks went by, I started to understand my surroundings. I had started to walk through the city every day, looking for work. I would wake up early, well early to my standards at the time, so at about 10AM. The city seemed to sparkle at me as I walked through the streets. People walking down the street would smile at me. I was in heaven. The air smelled better, the sun shone brighter (even when it was foggy), the food tasted better.
After wandering the city, pounding the pavement and trying not to get lost, I would get home around 8PM and be exhausted. Will and Jason would usually be sitting on the couch, playing video games and planning on how they could fit a pool table in the apartment, and more importantly, how to get it into the apartment (fun fact, they never figured it out). At about 10 every night, our floor would start to vibrate and bounce with the overbearing sound of bass radiating from our downstairs neighbor's apartment. This was probably the only real down side to our new home. It was our landlords apartment, so we couldn't yell at him. The techno beats would echo in every part of the apartment, killing our eardrums. He would start it promptly at 10PM every night, then finally stop it at about 3AM. There was no escape.
With all of us staying up all hours of the night, we started to get a little loopy. The next few weeks, in our sleep deprived stupors, we started to come up with fantastical ideas on how to use the apartment. The fire escape became our smoking patio. Our fireplace also became a stove of sorts, so we could have hot chocolate and roasted marsh mallows most nights. The best thing we used was our dart board. When Jason's dad came to visit, he brought the house a bit of a strange gift, a set of throwing knives. We were super excited until: 1.We realized we both didn't know how to use such things and 2.There was no where for us to practice to learn such things. One excessively ridiculous night, however, we came up with a glorious plan. We took a large piece of cardboard and nailed it to the wall, then on top of that, put up our dart board. In our infinite wisdom, we believed this would be the best way to protect the wall. Then we began to practice, kind of. Our throws were terrible, ricocheting off of the dartboard, and coming back to almost hit us. We made gashes in the cardboard, going completely through, into the wall. That side of the room started to look legitimately like frightening horror movie style murders had occurred there. It was wonderful. We would practice three nights a week, throwing to the beat of the music below us, rarely hitting the dart board, most of the time even missing the cardboard.
When Jason's mom and dad came to visit, we had just been there for a week. His parents were wonderful people, sweet in so many ways, and still intimidating. Jason's dad was a military diplomat and he lived up to what kind of thoughts get conjured in your mind, mustache and all. His mom was just very sweet, until you let your guard down. Then she would use that opportunity and say anything to completely throw you off, joking or not. That visit is when me and Jason's dad really bonded. The second night they were there, we brought out the cards and beer. As we played poker, I felt something I had been missing for years, this sort of family camaraderie. As the night progressed, I started to get tipsy. I also started to win. Jason's mom, getting drunk faster than the rest of us, lounged in a chair giggling to herself. Jason and Will started to get bored with the poker game and sat next to her, making fun of her alcohol induced rosy cheeks. When the night ended, it was just me and Jason's dad playing. I won the last hand and I was absolutely excited, and kind of drunk. Jason's dad, sober as a judge, just smiled at me as I jumped up and down. I could tell he was laughing at me, but it was a nice sort of laughter. As everyone went to bed, it finally dawned on me that he had let me win. I blushed to myself and went to sleep, knowing he did it to make me feel good in that sort of “fatherly” way.
After the first month of living there, the charm started to wear off. The techno keeping us awake all night meant I was waking up later and later to go find work. After I would get home from searching for work each night, I would search Craigslist for hours hoping to find something. I was running out of options, and running out of money. I had gotten to the point where I wasn't able to afford to help with buying groceries anymore, and while Will didn't care, Jason started to get annoyed and told me I couldn't eat “his food,” that his mom had bought for him, which meant I had no food to eat. I started to live off coffee from a local Starbucks who felt bad that they couldn't give me a job and about two packs of cigarettes a day (Will barely spent his money so he would buy cartons of cigarettes for the house and tell me to smoke them so they wouldn't go stale, which was a total lie. I think he just felt bad that I was struggling so much.) About once a week I would steal a handful of cereal or a hot pocket in order to not fall over from lack of food.
Finally, one night after searching endlessly, I found an ad for a canvassing job with Environment California. It didn't look like a job I wanted at all, but with rent being due soon, I had to take what I could get. It was exactly as I had suspected. We would meet up at 5PM every day, walk around different neighborhoods asking for money to support our cause, then meet back up and tally up the money, then be done at 11PM. This relieved a little bit of the tension in the house, but not to the point of saving my relationship with Jason. I had started to sleep on the couch and fight with him endlessly. Most nights, I would get home and go out to the fire escape and smoke until he finally went to bed, then set up my “bed” on the couch. He would leave for school before I would wake up and I wouldn't see him until I got home from work, thus the cycle would continue.
My boss took pity on me. Her name was Lizzie, known affectionately by her friends as “Lizzie the Lezzie.” After work one night, she asked me to come out with her and her friends to a bar. I told her I wasn't 21, but she didn't care. She let me use her passport which, surprisingly enough, worked. The bar was a lesbian bar and full of dancing hipster girls. One of Lizzie's friends bought me a drink, which I sipped slowly, letting the burning sensation coat my throat as I took in my surroundings. After standing against the wall for a half an hour, Lizzie came up to me, already drunk, and started hassling me to dance. I tried to say no, but she insisted by yelling, “You and your boyfriend are on the rocks. Besides, you’re too cute to be straight!” She pushed me into an Australian girl and I started to stumble around in a slightly dance-y, “epileptic on meth” sort of way. When I got home, Jason was waiting for me. He had my things from his room and told me we should stop pretending we were dating anymore. The fantasy was almost over and the lost boys were finally starting to grow up.
I continued to struggle after that. The job was getting worse by the day and I wasn't getting nearly enough money from it to afford much more than rent. I was spending more time out on the fire escape every night, smoking and writing, trying to remember why I had come up in the first place. I still loved San Francisco with all its crazy and excitement and I still loved my apartment, but my money issues were starting to outweigh the fun. I tried calling family members, begging for advice or any connections to work they might have had up there, but it proved useless.
I was scrambling around when my grandmother called me to let me know she was loaning me three hundred dollars so I could pay my rent and eat a meal. She just told me, as kindly as she could, “Just don’t tell your mother.” I felt so guilty about it that I could barely enjoy the fact of having another guaranteed month in the wonderfully cold San Francisco. I spent the entire time trying to get to know every inch of San Francisco. I can honestly say this is when I truly fell in love with the city. I wound up seeing parts of the city most people wouldn't and met people I never would have had a conversation with if I had had a consistent job.
The homeless people of San Fransisco are the friendliest people I have ever met. There was one 14-year-old girl who had been living on her own since she was 11. She talked to me for an hour while we waited for the rain to let up in order to walk where we were going. It started with her asking for change, and when I told her I had nothing, she wanted to become my friend and let me know how to get food for free around the city. The next, and my last, week in San Francisco, I was able to eat two decently sized meals a day.
At the end of March in 2007, I finally broke down and called my parents. There was nothing left for me to do but admit defeat. My relationship with Jason had fallen apart, my friendship with Will was extremely strained, I was weak with malnutrition, and I had no way of paying for the next month's rent. My parents, who had originally felt that if I failed it was my own fault and I would have to get myself out of trouble all on my own, panicked when they heard my voice on the phone. According to them, I sounded weak and distressed. I had been crying, but I had no idea how bad it was. My mom calmed my down and promptly said she was going to get me. When I got off the phone, a small sense of relief, and a huge sense of regret filled me. I was going home to warmth and food and friends, but I was leaving. I had gotten so used to San Francisco, feeling at home with every person who walked down the street.
As I sat out on the patio that last night, feeling the rain and the cold; watching the lights flicker in the distance; hearing the cars blaring by; I could think of only one thing, "If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!" I wanted to stay in Never Never Land forever, but it was time for Peter Pan (that’s me) to grow up. It was time for Rufio to take over (that being Will) and for Hook (that’s Jason) to keep terrorizing the rest of the Lost Boys. The adventure was over for me and it was time to go home and … marry Wendy or something? (Or at least give all the thimbles back)