When I think back on my past, a lot of things are fuzzy. Events blur, time melts, a byproduct of living I figure. Within the last couple of weeks, I’ve really started reflecting on the hustle of my life. Decisions I’ve made have kept me moving from one thing to the next rather than staying on any solid path (i.e., a decades-long career at one outlet or another). One thread has connected it all: words. Working with them, playing with them, writing them. (If I dive even deeper, I might say writing is the thing I wanted to build my career around—and have on occasion—yet I never trusted writing as a way to make an income.)

The year before I moved to New York City, 1983, I lived in Huntington Beach above a bank on the main street in a space that had been converted into an apartment from what had been some sort of social services agency. I had two great roommates who I knew just enough to live with but not so much that we needed to be in each other’s business. The space was very cool, almost echoey in its largeness, all wood floors and spacious rooms. I was a student at CalState Long Beach on my way to a journalism degree. I had the hustle in me to write stories on the local music scene and would take my notebook and pen across the street to sit at the counter of an actual diner where coffee came in heavy tawny-colored cups on saucers. I could feel the future in my blood, the tingle of what was possible. I’d been to New York City and knew that was where I would move so that my writing and music life could crash together and make a big noise. Throw me into my future.

In the apartment, there was a little room where I used to bang out things on my electric typewriter. Interviews, assignments, that kind of thing. I remember dragging the phone (black rotary) from the hallway table into my writing space, stretching the curled cord almost straight so it would reach so I could close the door for an interview I’d set up with Lee Ving, guitarist for the punk band Fear. I was so insanely nervous and had one of those ancient suction cup devices that hugged onto the phone’s receiver and recorded the conversation. Criminy the technology before-times were challenging. I got the story though, which I think I wrote up for a local music paper, although I have no memory of the final product, nor do I actually have the final product. But I do remember the sense of understanding that if this was the life I wanted to live—one that mixed creating words around creative people—I’d need to get used to being nauseously optimistic, 80% terrified, and helium-headed thrilled with a strong dose of uncertainty at all times. And that seemed perfectly excellent with me.

The guy in the photo above became a short-lived roommate, moving into the room where I’d had my typewriter set up. I had a very intense crush on him. He was in a band (naturally) and his girlfriend often stayed over, thwarting my dreams of us stumbling over (into) each other in the long hallway some dark night. Naturally having a person I lusted after just a few doors down made sense in the scope of the tragic storyline I’d written for myself. He and I were pals though, which obviously made the whole thing even more painful. After he moved in, he claimed to have had all these wild out-of-body experiences in my old writing room, which we found out (made up?) had been the intake room for children displaced from their parents when the place was a social services agency. He’d talk about floating outside of his body and hovering around the ceiling, connected by a silver cord, while he looked down on himself and his girlfriend asleep. Astral projection, I was totally into that kind of thing. Or rather, I really really wanted to be into that type of thing, except I was definitely too worried that somehow the cord would snap and I’d be left floating away for good. Or something like that. Again, I had ideas, I didn’t know how, or even if, they would pan out.

That apartment was the place that set me sailing off into the life I’ve led. My real sense of hustle began there. Right before I moved to New York City in the summer of 1984, we had an epic party on the roof deck. I slept with the boy I had the crush on (he’d broken up with the girlfriend) but of course, I was leaving in two weeks so no future in that, which was probably the point. My hustle equal parts drama, timing, and pins&needles possibilities.

Next week: NYC arrival. More roof decks.