This Place in Bakersfield is Still Horny
A Midcentury artifact and the keeper of secrets all awash in browns and stained glass
I got to have lunch on Sunday with a pair of old friends I hadn’t seen in years; close to seven is what we figured out.
They were in town visiting from up North, and we met at a little seaside hotel, the kind with the pool that looks out over into the Pacific, so if you took a dip, from eye level, it seems like one endless horizon of blue.
It wasn’t crowded at all. A handful of Sunday straggler couples with kids by the pool and a woman with a keyboard singing covers by both Eagles and The Weeknd, but nobody paid her much mind.
The conversation was fast, and there were gaps. I suspect I’m about the only one (or one of the only ones) now who hasn’t been in a sustained social situation like this for quite some time.
Everyone I know has at least dipped their toe back into what “real life” (air quotes) looks and feels like. I don’t know why I haven’t. I’ve been on little excursions with immediate family, but flying solo like this hasn’t really happened.
I’d like to say I’m making some kind of statement of solidarity with the folks who haven’t made it through these last 18 months or standing, locking arms and hunkering down—doing my best until there’s a vaccine for my seven-year-old, and both of those are partially true. But also, I don’t think I’ve been ...invited anywhere.
Which, I guess this all sounds a little sad. A lot of folks kind of do the self-aggrandizing, “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m just so awkward right now,” and they're not. For someone who actually is awkward and weird and gets a strange buzz around people but at the same time really wants to run and hide from it all—you’re not fooling anyone.
It’s hard for me to see people having a normal time or at least a time they perceive as normal. It makes me question a lot of things, starting with is everyone who's out here doing this in a performative way because that’s what we’ve trained ourselves to do? Is that cackle one that’s rehearsed? Has everything been planned down to the pause before the subject is changed? Choreographed to make it look like everything’s cool, the same?
Or are these people faking it too? Are they able to disconnect or at least compartmentalize to a degree that nothing really matters but for the fact that someone, somewhere, still can mask up and give them hot food on a clean(ish) plate? Are we really that far gone?
I made the mistake Sunday of looking at my phone just after parking and before the meet up, and I saw the COVID memorial at the National Mall in DC. Tiny white flags the size of the ones you wave at Fourth of July parades with names of those who’ve died on them. I looked at it for a minute, swiping through the series of angles showing how many are in each row, zooming in to read a couple, zooming out to get a better view—like an overhead. And it dawned on me, the little wheel spinning slowly in my brain, that the flags had to be so small because the death toll is so big.
Rows and rows and rows and rows, person after person. Everyone is somebody’s somebody. All those stories gone, all those empty spaces at the holiday table. All their work, vanished.
I’m going to give most the benefit of the doubt and say they tried hard in the American tradition. Maybe they spun their wheels or wasted their time, but we all do that.
Maybe their stories lingered, or they drank too much, or they could’ve helped out more around the house, or they were a shitty tipper. But maybe they could fix a car, or stayed after at the anniversary party to help fold up chairs, or gave a ride to a kids’ friend whose guardian didn’t show up at soccer practice and took them out to dinner before dropping them off.
The bad people in this country—and they are legion: the grifters, the charlatans, the sociopaths, the racists, the killer boyfriends, the Christian fascists—they’re the ones who grab headlines and take up most of my thoughts. How do WE stop THEM? How do WE DO BETTER when they're always doing their worst?
But that’s maybe not the right question. It’s focusing on all the rest of us in that sea of names, doing the best we can. Enjoying one another’s company in the most insane and extreme of circumstances that still at least has the facade of normal, for now. It’s about knowing we’re all on the clock and trying our best not to show it. Not during those rare moments when we’re together face to face, at least.
1812 Country Club Dr. Bakersfield, CA 93306
My grandparents used to live in this neighborhood, and when I was little, we’d go stay at their house. We’d go visit every Friday after school and if my Mom and Dad had something planned it’d be with a packed bag.
Their house was dark, especially their den, where they spent most of the time. It’s not that it didn’t get sun exposure or that they were vampires; they just liked dark things. Dark woods, dark books (library mysteries with skulls on the spine), dark movies, dark booze.
Venturing out into their backyard, overgrown with ivy with a large deck twenty steps up that looked out over a lush landscape that included avocado trees, azalea, oleander, more ivy, bottle brush, and a couple of large pine trees, you could duck out into the dense bushes and camp out for hours, digging up roly-poly bugs or spying on the neighbor kids through the knotholes in the fence.
Time seemed to stop there; they played card games or sat out on the astroturf back patio and sipped a cocktail while we ran about trying to engage their little dogs in a game of fetch, but they too seemed old and disinterested.
My grandfather kept a magnifying glass near his seat, always examining something up close. Stamps and coins mostly, but also little artifacts he’d collected in his travels or sent away for; a piece of parchment from a soldier’s jacket from the Napoleonic Wars, a tiny etching done by someone from Ancient Rome. He knew a lot about wherever this place was that he’d landed, and what came before, and especially the history he’d lived for almost a half-decade overseas in World War II. His place in that small house in that small town never bothered him even though he was constantly distant from it.
This house was one of the nicer ones in the neighborhood, and boy is it. A low-slung rancher tucked away from the street built or morphed over the years with very West Coast-Miyagi Asian flourishes amongst mature trees. The inside hasn’t been fucked with.
It’s a three-bedroom, two-bath but this home was created with plenty of free space to roam and party. A pool, a playhouse, fruit trees, a gated entrance, and an insane master bathroom built for the best/worst of horny humanity you can throw at it.
This is a place made for making suburban-type temporary mistakes. Key parties and the like. But that’s not going to happen anymore. It won’t ever be Playboy Grotto North again; because that time is gone. We’re (still) in a pandemic, and just this last week, we passed up the 1918 Spanish Flu in number of fatalities, a remarkable feat seeing we have science on our side this time. Guess having rapid-fire misinformation-spreading machines in the palm of our hands really WAS a disruptor after all.
And so here I sit, in my dark room, looking at old kitchens and bathrooms that haven’t been sledgehammered or subway tiled into blasé oblivion. Such a treat to see these survivors and think of the stories they could tell. They assure me of my place in this space in time, this imperceptible wrinkle I’ve created in the universe—before I become a little white surrender flag in a sea of other little flags.
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