Is it running away if you always intended to come back?  I never really understood that whole concept… probably because I usually didn’t go back to where I ran from.  Time passed after that evening at Bette’s, I hung out with the girls at Milk, She Bar, The Planet, adding Radar nights to our event calendars once it turned out to be a success for Marina and Kit.  I had my nightly fucks with whoever caught my eye that night.  Family dinners and daily coffees continued.  Work was going well, I was by then doing more trims than shampoos… but that urge didn’t go away.  Was I getting too settled?  Was I flipping out over having a normal life for the first time since I was 15?  Not that my life was ever very normal compared to most people…

Maybe that was what was freaking me out… normalcy.  I mean, when you’re a kid, you always want what other people have.  You see families playing at the park, picnic lunch spread out on the grass.  Dads chasing their kids around the playground, or pushing them on a swing.  You see moms picking up a crying kid who fell, kissing their scraped knees better.  As you get older, you see the girls starting the school year in a new wardrobe, or not getting marked down for not having all the school supplies required for a class.  You know that they go home to the house they have lived in their whole lives, rooms stuffed with little mementos of their childhoods.  Pictures on the hallway walls, framed and lining the length of the wall.  I know my mom had some pictures of me, not many, but some.  Then nothing for a long time.  And in the last year, I found myself smiling in front of a camera on several occasions.

So what made me, over a month after that conversation with Bette about running, suddenly actually follow through with it?  I found myself one morning walking up to Sandra at the reception desk of The Edge, The Ramones blasting through the sound system, and telling her I couldn’t explain but needed to take a few days off.  When she asked how many I needed, I couldn’t give her an answer.  I think the only thing that kept me from getting fired right there and then was her seeing the look in my eyes.  I probably looked like I felt; that I was slowly going crazy and had to get out of there.  She told me to call her when I got back in town.  I got in my truck and pointed it north.  The last time I had run from LA I went south, and that didn’t turn out so good.  North just seemed like it couldn’t be worse, so that was where I started driving towards.  As much as you try avoiding the freeways in LA, I hopped onto the 101, heading up to merge onto 1.  Next thing I knew, I was sitting on the hood of my car, watching the sun set over Big Sur and the Andrew Molera State Park.  I turned off onto one of the winding roads, and eventually ended up at the beach.  I threw on a hoodie, grabbed some clothes from the cab and made a make-shift bed in the back.  I smoked half a pack of cigarettes, laid there looking up at the stars, enjoying the openness around me and the sound of the ocean crashing into the beach.  Just before drifting off to sleep, I remember thinking how much cooler it was north of LA, and how I was glad I took that bus to LA instead of some place like San Francisco where I would have hated winter…