california dreaming

by Amy Bee

I’M NOT SURE WHEN when my escape plan first formed. In the spring of ’99, just after I turned twenty-three, I was living on the streets of Fort Collins, Colorado, with Jay, a singer-songwriter, thinking we’d eventually hitch our way to California where he allegedly had family. But he suddenly broke it off with me, listing my perceived flaws for the end of our several-month relationship in a matter-of-fact tone, like I’d failed an internship.

“You’re too snobby for life on the road,” he said. “I saw your face when you took a sip of that warm can of Sprite. You grimaced like you were drinking cat piss.”

His guitar was propped on his knee, and he lightly plucked the strings listening for any untrue notes while he prepared for his turn at the open mic. A weathered outback fedora perched solemnly on his head, contributing to an overall aura of a young man who’d been places, done things. He’d traveled all the way from Ohio, after all. Him and his hat and his guitar.

“You can’t be picky on the road, Amy. Who knows how many warm Sprites you’ll have to live off of.” Strum. Pluck. Strum. “You have to live on what you find, what people are willing to give you. Graciously accept what the road offers. I don’t think you have it in you.”

He stretched his long, rail-thin legs, thumped each dusty cowboy boot on the dirty bar carpet as if in agreement with his assessment, and stood up. Then he adjusted the collar on his thin brown leather jacket—the one he’d humbly worn for thousands of miles—before ambling up onto the stage where a lone stool and slanted mic waited for him to sing his beautiful Dylan and DiFranco-esque songs.

Robert Pollard from Guided By Voices was my high school science teacher, he liked to tell me and whoever else was whiling away the night at the open mic—like this fact alone gave some kind of credence to the brilliance of his own songwriting. I’d heard of Guided By Voices from Californian friends, and although I wasn’t a fan at the time, I was appropriately impressed. It was like he’d been born to be a traveling singer-songwriter. As far as I could tell, Jay’s life had been terribly messy and painful, and yet somehow, he’d managed to perfectly package it all into a beautiful persona. His dark skin and velvety-black eyes certainly helped sell the dream.

I watched him play through three gorgeous songs, two of them supposedly about me, but I should’ve known he was planning to move on without me. Just yesterday, when we’d been talking about how great California would be, his descriptions of Oakland began to take an ominous turn. You can’t walk by yourself around Oakland, and you better be careful what you say, he said and munched on a plate of french fries we’d begged the waiter to order for us on the sly. I don’t even know if my family will let you stay there, but if they do, you better stick by me the entire time.

Have you even been to Oakland? I asked and pulled my purple flannel over my freckled-white arms. I’d never been worried at the thought of moving through a city where mostly Black people lived, but Jay was making me doubt.

That’s not the point, he snapped. Just trust me. They don’t even fully like me. They’ll definitely have issues with you. So watch yourself if we go.

Jay had told me the first night we kissed that he wasn’t Black Black; he was descended from Egyptians, which made things different for him. When I said that I’d just gotten out of a relationship with an older man from Egypt, he frowned and pulled out his guitar, rolling into a long, Utah Phillips-style tale about how an avalanche had stopped him from leaving Fort Collins. I sat and listened, utterly enamored. I’ve always dated out of my league, usually musicians, but Jay struck me right then as the hottest. And in those faded, straight-from-Ohio Levi’s, the coolest.

Back at the open mic, the Oakland conversation now seemed like a lukewarm attempt at dissuading me from going to California with him. And his depictions of me made me feel anxious and perplexed. You could throw a lot of unsavory labels my way, but snobby wasn’t one that fit. It infuriated me. I’d grown up poor; I’d been in foster care for chrissakes. I’d been living without a real home since I was thirteen, and this guy was judging my resilience based on my reaction to a can of soda.

By the time he got off the stage, I was fuming. I remained silent while he packed up his guitar and spoke earnestly with a few admirers. I followed him out of the corner bar and into the frigid night. Up the street, frat boys poured out of a small sports bar, boisterously clapping each other on their backs and eyeing the frat girls hanging at the martini spot one building over. Down the street, the lesbian dive thumped. Nights in Fort Collins belonged to the college kids, and the binge drinking was just getting started.

We hurried in the opposite direction toward the seedy part of town, where a fleabag room with communal bathrooms could be procured for thirty bucks. Jay knew the kid working the desk, and he’d promised to let us stay the night for fifteen. Jay had busked all day, and I’d managed to get five bucks off an old guy who applauded my homelessness and dedication to fighting societal norms, saying he’d wished he’d taken more chances when he was younger. You must travel, he told me as he grasped my shoulder, whatever else happens, go see the world. It’s all that matters. I thanked him, flashed a crooked smile, and continued with my task at hand—digging for cigarette butts near the trash cans.

Once we were safely ensconced in a dingy room replete with forest green carpeting and dim lighting, Jay returned to his list of my flaws and why they were the reason to break things off.

“You’re too emotional,” he said plainly from the bed, like he was being forced to mete out judgment. The kitschy gold lamp on the nightstand buzzed on and off behind him. “You can’t control yourself. You lash out. And you probably need help.”

Well, of course, being told I was emotional flooded me with emotion, and I had to bite my lips and clench my hands behind my back. Duh, I needed help; so did he. We knew each other’s struggles, and I didn’t like my bipolarness being held against me this way. But I also knew what he was really saying: I had pushed him the other night, and now he would use it against me every chance he got. My eyes welled in pure frustration. It didn’t matter that I’d barely shoved him or that he’d consistently baited me into it; I’d been physical, and there was no topping that.

What’s worse, I was frightened I could be provoked so easily and that his verbal attacks that night had overwhelmed me so much that my hands had just shot out and shoved him. Yes, he was a skilled provocateur, but I ... well, was I now an abuser? Like my mom and stepdad, Doug? Was this how abusers felt? Unheard, misunderstood, overwhelmed? Like they had no other options?

I gritted my teeth as Jay went on and on and only halfheartedly tried to refute his litany of my wrongness, his reasons for why we needed to break things off, and why he needed to go to California without me. Honestly, it didn’t take much to start agreeing with him about all my wrongness. I just didn’t want to be left behind for it. I was willing to accept him and his bullshit; how about some reciprocation? I’d shoved him, but he was an asshole and said the worst shit. I could see he was more than his assholeness; couldn’t he do the same for me?

Instead, somehow, my weaknesses and illnesses were dealbreakers, and I couldn’t help feeling like he’d found a way to be the victim in all things between us. No matter what else transpired, I’d shoved him. I’d crossed a line, a line I just knew in my heart was arbitrary for him but concrete as hell for the rest of the world, me included. And since it also brought up such shame and guilt and fear in me, I couldn’t really fight off the assignation because ... what if? My mom beat me; maybe I was destined to beat other people, the people I loved. Jay’s use of my weakness was insincere, but the weakness was still exposed, and the crux of it was accurate: I was capable of physically hurting people, just like my mom.

I knew Jay was using these things about me to win an argument, to win all our arguments, and now, worse, to leave me. He would go to California without me; there was nothing I could do or say. And off he went, him and his hat and his guitar, to stay with who knew. I thought he’d spent what he’d made for us to stay here. But he left, and I was just another lost soul sitting in a seedy motel, almost twenty-three and no prospects. No shiny knight was coming for me. So I did what I always did when I felt shitty and low; I called my mom.

“Mom, he left me,” I said, and stared at myself in the grimy mirror by the bathroom. I didn’t look like anything special. Not like I’d just been dumped. My face was flushed red and slimy with snot and tears but essentially unaltered. Bad breakups should leave a mark, I thought, then grimaced at the unintended allusion to abuse. I didn’t want to look like I’d been fucked up, per se, but shouldn’t there be something in my eyes that showed what I’d just been through? Yet it was just the same old me looking back at me, judging me for calling my mother like a loser with no friends.

“That boy is a megalomaniac. I knew it the moment I saw him,” she said.

I mouthed the word to myself in the mirror. Meg-a-lo-man-i-ac. So many syllables.

“What is that?”

“He’s full of himself, filled with illusions of grandeur. Basically, a cult leader in training,” she said.

I watched as mirror-me’s jaw dropped, dumbfounded. “This is what you thought when you first met him? And you’re telling me now?” I was torn between feeling offended for Jay and attracted to such an easy way to encapsulate his behavior and treatment of me.

“Oh, like you would’ve listened to anything I had to say.”

“Mom, I listen to everything you say, probably too well.”

“If you say so.”

I twirled the phone cord between my pinky and thumb. Mirror-me looked on, barely hiding her contempt. What are you gonna do? I asked her. You can stay here tonight, but then what? You gonna beg for money all day? Without Jay’s songs? No one out there gives a fuck about you.

Mirror-me’s eyes said it all. You think your mom gives a fuck about you?

I suddenly felt very tired.

“Mom? Can I come stay with you? Just for a little bit?”

I could hear her puffing on a cigarette. Or maybe splitting a joint with Doug.

“How many more times are we gonna do this?” she asked.

I pulled the crumpled five-dollar bill from my jeans, thinking.

“This is the last time, I swear.”

I waved the fiver at mirror-me, who glowered back until I flinched. Megalomaniac, she mouthed, megalomaniac, megalomaniac.

California, I mouthed back.

My friend Hanna called me at my mom’s house in Lafayette two weeks later.

“You’ll never believe what Jay’s doing,” she said.

“I assume he’s left town by now.”

“Nope. He’s still here in Fort Collins... editing porn for some friend of his.”

“No way.”

“Yep. Kev says Jay’s spending like ten hours a day splicing gangbang footage together.”

“Oh my god. That sounds hideous. I thought he was all about getting out of town.”

“Kev says he’s like a totally different person. He’s not even playing open mics anymore. Did you even know he was that into porn?”

I thought about our brief time sharing an apartment before getting evicted because Jay and I refused to get a job to pay for rent. Jay had found my single porn video, and I’d hear him at all hours watching it in the living room. I’d sit in the bedroom on the blankets (no bed) and try to read, uncomfortable as hell, afraid to leave the room and interrupt.

“I guess there were clues,” I admitted.

Remembering the apartment fiasco tightened my chest, and I didn’t want to get into it. Not only had a lot of weird stuff gone down, but Hanna had paid the thousand-dollar deposit for us, and I’d probably never be able to repay her. Things were starting to feel a little strained between Hanna and me, which was why I was at my mom’s house and not hers.

“Okay, well. Anyway.” Our newfound awkwardness settled between us. “Still going?”

“Next week.”

“Come see me before you go?”

“Of course,” I said. I bit my lip. “It’s gonna be so weird without you.”

“We’ll talk all the time. You can’t get rid of me that easily, Amy. I’ll visit once you become a real Canadian, eh?”

I laughed and said bye, grateful Hanna was on my side in all things great and small. She’d been initially skeptical of my plan to hitch to California, find a job to raise money for a van, and then drive myself north to Canada, but warmed up to the idea once she found out I’d be staying with a friend in Santa Cruz, and our buddy Brian was going to drive me there. She was used to my manic cycles, but the last few months—with me destroying her attempts at helping me with a place of my own so that I could “follow synchronicity” and live on the streets with Jay—had strained our relationship to new levels. I’d been mooching off Hanna for years in one way or another; maybe she was accepting my latest venture because a part of her was happy to see me go.

I quickly pushed those thoughts aside. The important thing was that I was leaving; I was finally doing it, having an adventure, living by my rules rather than society’s. Everything would be understood and forgiven the day in the near future when Hanna opened up her mail to find a check for 1K from yours truly. I was embracing the universe, and in doing so, the universe would embrace me back.

There was no way I would let Jay be the only one living all synchronistically, I thought as I sat on my mom’s couch while she smoked joints and watched The Monkees marathon on TV. I’d read the Celestine Prophecy, just like him, and I’d learned shit, too. I didn’t need Jay to manifest the life I wanted. Where was he, anyway? On the road to Oakland? No! He was still in Fort Collins, whacking it nonstop to never-ending gangbang porn. What a fraud. What a sellout. At least I was fucking doing something. I was keeping our promise and going to California, trusting the universe, trusting myself.

I flipped through the Westword, eyes falling on a small ad for a folk festival happening the coming weekend in Estes Park.

“Hey, aren’t these your buddies?” I asked Mom, who glanced at the paper before going back to the TV Guide, black pen in hand. She liked to circle what she planned on watching for the week.

“Karen and her husband. They come up from Kansas to sell their tie-dyes. I wouldn’t call her my buddy, just a woman I met at the store.” She frowned at the guide. “Great. A Three Stooges marathon is happening at the same time as good TV night.” She tapped the paper. “Maybe I’ll record.”

I tossed the Westword on Mom’s mounting Sunday newspaper pile and then promptly snatched it back to read again. After months of deciphering the universe’s messages, often to find food or a place to sleep, I knew opportunity when I read it. Maybe this is what everything had been leading up to all along: I was supposed to go with these Kansas hippies and help them make tie-dyes. A true following of synchronicity, living off the beaten path, eschewing the norms society was constantly trying to foist upon me, upon all of us. I would give them my labor, and they would give me a skill and a place to stay. Finally, I’d be doing something different, something meaningful with my life. It was perfect.

Mom would be back to work in the store tomorrow. I told her my plan.

“Will you ask Karen if I can go back to Kansas with them?”

“I suppose I can,” she said, pipe in hand, TV Guide momentarily forgotten on her lap. She nodded her head faintly as if listening to music only she could hear. “What about California?”

“This is better. The universe put it right in front of me. I can’t ignore it.”

She nodded more but didn’t say anything.

“Plus, it’ll make a good story, something I can write about someday,” I added, thinking that mentioning writing would get her all the way on board. I couldn’t tell what she thought of any of it.

“Ah, that reminds me. I saw that boy Marc at the store. He gave me his newest short story. Have you read it? It’s sci-fi; great stuff.” She jumped up to rifle through her purse, looking for Marc’s story. “His tales are so intricate. So deep. Why aren’t you writing like this?” She thrust the papers at me. “Read it. You’ll love it.”

My breathing grew shallow, and my eyes burned. “Sorry I don’t write like Marc, Mom.”

She tsked, settling back into her seat, freshly filled pipe in hand. “Oh, come on. He’s a great writer, and you could be, too. That’s all.” She lit the bowl and took a hit. “I told him he had to submit somewhere. I bet Fantasy & Science Fiction would take it. Stephen King’s early stuff was published there, you know, and Marc ...”

She went on, but I stopped listening. I didn’t want to hear any more about the fantastic writer Marc and his amazing chances of publication. And I already knew that anything I wrote, anything I ever did at all, would never be good enough for her, anyway.

She could just go ahead and put all her enthusiasm on my friends, like always, nothing new there. Soon I wouldn’t be around for her backhanded compliments and poor comparisons. Soon I’d be grabbing life by the horns and making tie-dye, freer than Marc or my mom would ever be.

Karen expressed interest in my joining her commune tie-dye crew and invited us to come to the festival and talk about it more. If everything went cool, they were leaving for Kansas that night, and I could join them; there was room in the van for me.

Doug decided to come with us to Estes Park, and he and my mom got ready for the hour drive, making stony jokes with each other, their jovial mood rubbing abrasively against my darker one. Probably psyched to be getting rid of me, I thought, pacing aimlessly up and down the stairs. I didn’t have anything to pack, and I didn’t have anything to bring except myself.

The whole morning, I kept picturing what a commune in Kansas would be like. First off, everything was probably flat. So there’d be blue skies and golden fields in every direction. Gorgeous. And we’d be in ... what? A giant house made of firewood? Maybe like an old, abandoned horse ranch. And we’d be making tie-dyes in... what? Maybe an old metal washing vat. So I’d be sitting on a milking stool, scrunching fabric into a vat of colored water, then hanging it on an old hitching post-type clothesline with old wooden clothes pins? Maybe. If I focused, I could see myself there, suddenly a lot prettier, long hair whipping in my face, blue apron hugging my curves as I scrubbed and twisted and hung, sleeping in a hay loft with my similarly beautiful brothers and sisters, maybe eating ... what? Beans from a pot over a campfire?

Was that how I wanted to live? Kinda maybe? I shook my head and paced twice as hard. Mom called for us to leave, and I climbed into the back seat of the Subaru like it was a hearse. Mom and Doug were completely immune to my mood; they played classic rock and made jokes out of big words only they could understand. Considering how high they were, I didn’t even know if the words were real or just real to them. An errant memory came back to me of my then six-year-old brother coming up to me and saying that the difficulty of bad guys he was beating in his video game was a “harbinger of the bad guys to come,” and the boy pronounced it correctly, har-bin-jer, not har-bing-er, and my mom beamed and said, See he’s gonna be one of us, and I thought, you mean he’s gonna be one of you and how proud of him I felt, even as I recognized we were slipping away from each other, even then. They were the family unit; I was the misnomer, the mispronunciation.

Of course, Kansas would be better. Anywhere would be better, I decided, and my mood finally lifted. But when we got to the festival, I froze and couldn’t leave the car. The thought of getting into a van of strangers suddenly terrified me. I would be trapped in Kansas all alone.

They won’t be strangers once you go meet them, my mom said when I tried to tell her some of what I was feeling. She was right, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave. I was stuck right there, forever.

She gave up trying to coax me out and said, Well, since we’re here, lemme look around a little bit.

They were gone for about fifteen minutes while I sat in the backseat, paralyzed. Finally, they came back and once inside, asked me, So? Do you want to stay or go?

I said, Go.

“I’m still going to California, though,” I said through tears.

Neither of them said anything. They just nodded and cranked up the radio. I had expected a hard time from them, but none came. It almost felt like they respected my emotions or decisions, but I couldn’t be sure. Hadn’t they been super excited to see me leaving? Shouldn’t they be disappointed and angry with me, like usual? For not following through, as usual? I had no answers, and the inability to discern the truth of the matter, coupled with the aftereffects of my panic attack, had me woozy and suspicious of anyone and everything.

But I knew one thing for sure. In a parallel universe, a much braver Amy said yes to Kansas and yes to a life of adventure. But not here. Because the thing I knew for sure, deep in my gut, like a worm with a thousand tiny teeth, was that Jay had been right about me, after all.

About the author:

Amy Bee writes lots of stories about her life. Her work has been published in Ozy, Salon, New Ohio Review, HeartWood Lit, and other really cool places. She writes personal stories about living anxiously and performing anyway on Substack under This Might Go Terribly, and she is the co-creator of In a Nutshell Storytelling, Wildcard story swap, and Prompt: a podcast for people who love stories. Amy lives with and adores her author husband even though he’s a ska guy writing about … yup. Ska. They have a goofy dog who makes them laugh every day.