The first and last time I moved away from home

Oh to be 23 and dumber than a box of rocks again.

I was never in a big hurry to move out of my family home. I lived with my Grandma mostly from 18 until she passed away and I lived with my dad from 16 until I moved in at Grandma’s. Then Grandma and Dad and I all moved in together. When my Grandma passed my dad and I got another apartment and I lived with my Dad until I was 23.

My family treated me like an adult. I came and went as I wanted to. I had a job working overnights so the idea of giving me a curfew on my days off even before I was 18 was pretty silly and I didn’t have one. I was usually home by 12 or 1am any way. I paid a few small bills for our house, bought food and paid my own personal bills (car, insurance, cell phone) on my own for the most part.

I was doing radio at KRAB in Bakersfield one night and I had the DJ dream actually happen to me. I remember No Doubt was in town and I didn’t get to go to the show because, duh I had to be on the radio at midnight. Around 12:30 or 1am the hotline rang.

Pause: The hotline is a phone line in radio stations that have actual DJ’s in them. It is a big flashing light instead of a ringer with sound and only people who work for the radio station are supposed to have the number.

So I answer the hotline wondering what I had possibly done wrong and on the other end was a Program Director for our sister stations out in San Luis Obispo and he wanted to ask my boss if he could hire me away. Literally just called me up out of the clear blue sky and told me he was going to ask if he could have me.

The job offer and negotiations took a damn minute. San Luis Obispo was waaaay more expensive to live in than Bakersfield and I’d be adding rent to my cost of living, BUT, I’d be working during the day when actual people could hear me and I’d be the Music Director, which is all I ever wanted to be in radio, even if that’s not exactly how that went…

I found my apartment about a week before I was supposed to start there. It was a nightmare to find, the landlord was insane and basically called my Dad to see if it was okay for me to move into this place with my boyfriend at the time. She apparently didn’t like him at all. Whatever. This apartment over on Johnson Ave in SLO was mine for 750 a month. (In the current rental climate this place is probably 1600-1750 now, just a one bed room, one bath, walk in closet, built in book shelves and everything is impractically white from the carpet to the tiles.)

I had to get here before we were able to rent a truck, so I took loads of stuff over from Bakersfield in my trusty red Dodge Neon (yes the same one I helped my former roommate who’s name will always be left out of my stories move to SLO from LA with,) for a couple of weekends.

My furniture for the first two weeks of living in SLO was as follows: 1 butterfly chair, leopard print.

(For those of you who don’t remember buying furniture at Claire’s… not the actual chair)

My Dad’s old TV from Seattle, a couple of milk crates, my 3 CD changer, my ancient laptop, a lamp or two, I can’t remember if I took one each time I went, several suitcases, some bedding, my favorite stuffed animals (yes I said that, I have zero shame,) my Hello Kitty make up mirror and an inflatable mattress.

The mattress was a very kind loan from my then boyfriend’s mom. I could have fit our futon in my car, I’d done it before, you can cram those cheap ass 80 dollar World Market futons in anything, but I didn’t want to spend two hours in the car by myself trying to hold the damn futon pad in the car, so air mattress it was.

If you’ve never slept on an air mattress for an extended period of time, I’ll let you look at this.

This was very true of my borrowed air mattress. I inflated it the first night and realized the motor was incredibly loud. “This won’t be a problem at all though,” naive little me thought. “No no, this will be the only time I have to turn this thing on until I need to take it down when the bed arrives! This is fine!”

It was not fine.

After inflating my bed, I went out in search of a dollar store (really hard to find back in 2003 in SLO,) a drug store, some food, like anything. I had been in SLO as a driver exactly three times before moving here. Once to visit my friend who was going to college here, once on a radio station meeting where I ended up being the DD for everyone and finally the day I interviewed in person for my job. My apartment was right between downtown and Cal Poly and I had zero clue where anything was.

This was before smartphones. I didn’t have a key to the radio station yet to go and use the internet there to find out where shit was and I wouldn’t get internet installed at my house for at least a month after moving in…

If you’ve never been to SLO, the downtown is full of one way streets. Actually there are a lot of one way streets all over town but when you’ve just driven over from two hours away, moved all of your car upstairs without any help and don’t know where the fuck you are, it’s intimidating and frustrating.

After a lot of driving in circles and almost running over a pedestrian in one of those crosswalks that doesn’t have much of a light but has these stupid blinking lights on the ground, you know under your car, I finally pulled into a shopping center with a Scholaris in it. Scholaris was this weird grocery store that was insanely over priced, but I soon learned also took a week to cash a check if you wrote one there.

Hello my last week before pay day grocery store!

So at Scholaris I bought paper plates, styrafoam cups (the cheapest ones), lunch meat, cheese, bread, mustard, a 12 pack of Diet Dr Pepper, toilet paper, paper towels and a screw top bottle of Corbett Canyon wine because I didn’t even have a cork screw.

I found my way back to my apartment and went upstairs and sat in that butterfly chair watching whatever the hell was on Fox because that was the only channel I got and drank shitty wine out of a styrafoam cup and felt absolutely defeated. Clearly it was time for bed.

I had made the bed after inflating it, thinking having my pillows and blankets and animal friends on it when I got back from exploring would make it easy to sleep in this strange apartment. It was probably like 10 or so and I cleaned up my dishes (aka threw them in the grocery bags I just brought in) and changed my clothes and brushed my teeth without much thought and then turned to the bed and saw… it was completely flat. I hadn’t even slept in it yet, and it had deflated itself in about 5 hours.

I’m not going to lie, I burst into tears.

It was so late, I didn’t want to crank the motor up again to inflate it, but I also didn’t want to show up to my first day at work with a stiff back. In that moment I decided “Fuck my neighbors,” a some what prophetic move as my neighbors in that place turned out to all be pieces of absolute nosey, violent, noisy, inconsiderate et all etc people I’ve ever had to live around, and I turned on the inflation thingy.

About 5 minutes later, the bed looked normal. I assumed maybe I had put the plug in wrong earlier and climbed into my little inflatable cloud and went to sleep, with my alarm set for 7am to get my happy new job having ass to work as soon as the office opened.

At 5am I woke up. No not because I was paranoid about sleeping through my alarm. Not because of a loud noise. No it was because my face was in the carpet.

I hadn’t fallen off the bed. There was no bed to speak of. I had merely rolled away from the sheet of plastic that my bedding was so carefully arranged on. The bed was completely flat.

Fuck.

I got up, there was no point in pretending I could go back to sleep at this point. I took a shower. I agonized over what to wear, even though it was a radio station and you could at least back then, show up in like almost anything and no one cared. I had been wearing my PJ pants and band shirts for the last few years because you see absolutely no one when you work midnight to 6am. I found something to wear though and decided with the literal hours I had left to kill before I could even get into the radio station, I’d go find a Starbucks.

There is one in Downtown SLO and I had seen it the day before, I knew I could find it! And I did! Except no one really mentioned to me that the entire downtown was metered parking. I mean sure there are parking meters in Bakersfield. I had lived in LA part time before, I know what a parking meter is but I didn’t realize that was like the only place to park in SLO. I was convinced this town hated me.

At home, I still dutifully refilled that air mattress every night. Every morning I woke up in the carpet. Every morning I was surprised by this, like this air mattress would finally straighten up and act right because I was asking it to and even going so far as to telling it “I believe in you, you can stay inflated tonight!”

I started trying that on myself. “I believe in you self, you can figure this town out! You’ll find your way to that dollar store and buy a pan tonight!”

In the next few weeks I also learned that if you didn’t have a bank account (which I didn’t at the time, I had been cashing my checks every week in Bakersfield on pay day, no problem) you had to drive to Grover Beach to cash your check, check cashing places didn’t exist in SLO.

If you wanted Taco Bell, you had to go inside as there are no drive thru’s in SLO.

If you wanted to go shopping in Downtown SLO, get off work before 6pm unless it’s Thursday, then the shops stay open later.

The Starbucks and Jamba Juice on Foothill have a parking lot.

The laundry mat by the 7-11 by Cal Poly has more washers and dryers and is closer to your house but the laundry mat on Broad was next to a dive bar you could wait for your clothes at and oddly still had less “crazy,” people at it.

None of the bars are what you think they are based on the name.

People aren’t as snobby as you think they are, you may actually be the snob.

If you wanted to go to Target it was either 45 minutes north or south in another city.

You will feel dirt poor wandering around day to day in a town that rich people come to visit on vacation and you will for awhile feel like an outcast because everything seems to be geared to those tourists and college kids.

Eventually my furniture came. Eventually I found my way around. Eventually I found my friends and my place as did the air mattress when it found where it really belonged, in a dumpster.