Highway 500 revisted

Searching for Love and Adventure on Craigslist

By Fritz Brantley

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I was tired nearly every day I was in Oakland, because at the time, everything required intense planning. Absolutely everything—from the bus to the groceries to my first and last date in the city. I'm not a big planner, one could say. I had never expected that adult life would take elaborate games of phone tag to schedule dinner, nor 30 minutes in advance to catch a bus. So, with this in mind, also consider that I had moved to a city where I knew exactly three people, and consider that I needed something to do over the Fourth of July weekend. I went to Craigslist.

Internet dating long ago lost its stigma. If "Must Love Dogs" and "You've Got Mail" are to be believed, successful single white straight people do it. Soon, we'll see the children of internet dating, children who will say without a trace of shame, "Mummy and Daddy met on Nerve. It was kind of funny, because Daddy 'Collect Called' Mom, and. well, it's all history." Craigslist is not like that. If the Nerve and Match.com's of the world are the new future of courtship, then Craigslist posts are the new ads for "sensual massage" in the back of the Village Voice. If you want a lesson in forthrightness, consider the Craigslist M4M (males looking for males) forum—"Cute white preppy bottom/vers (33 yo, 145#, 5'10", HIV- and NO drugs) looking for cute white frat or prep or sk8r top for kissing, lots of body contact, cuddling, and more fucking." This is accompanied by a grainy photo of a torso and penis.

I went to Craiglist, I swear to God, not because I wanted an encounter like that (in the words of a close friend, "Sex is a handjob. Sex is the ultimate handjob."), but because I figured that in a place as strange and atomized as the Bay, I could find someone like me. I sort of did. The headline ("Let's Take An Adventure This Weekend!") was yes, in M4M, but the message itself was pretty PG. I can't quote it after this many months, but it went along the lines of this, sarcasm included:

"Hey! I'm broke, and so are you. Let's pool our limited resources and take a wild, fantastic trip out of the effing Bay! Maybe you've got a timeshare, maybe you know how to break into one? Let's pick berries, watch fireworks, and live as much as we can off the land in the 2000s. If we hit it off, we hit it off, but mostly, I'm just looking to get out for as little money as possible."

Despite the ad's modest ambitions, this still sounded like the beginning of both a pretty decent weekend, and an unfortunate missing person's report. Nonetheless, for the first and last time, I responded to a personals ad on Craigslist.

Next Stop, Wonderland

We planned a preliminary meeting on neutral territory: a Thai restaurant in downtown Berkeley. I assume that for both of us it was an attempt to determine if the other was a serial murderer. We were not—I was a schlubby editorial intern at a newspaper, living in a rat's nest in Berkeley; he was considerably more dashing, and working at a publishing house while living with his folks in San Leandro. We had the same sort of encyclopedic knowledge of junk culture that everyone has these days. We were big talkers, and there were few silences. This is good, as my radio is legendarily faulty, and could only pick up the local hip-hop station in Oakland. He told me that he once came up with a driving tour of Oakland that would take eight hours to complete. He was a good adventurer. I left with guarded optimism, but more importantly, a plan. We would drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, making stops at anything compelling along the way. We'd figure the rest out when we got there. To protect the innocent, we'll refer to him as Luke.

The first day started as we thought it would go. We bought a bunch of fruit, tortilla chips, and a few jugs of distilled water. After a traffic jam on the San Rafael Bridge, we hit Highway 1 at a good clip in the early afternoon. It was my first time in the Marin headlands.

"You know, I thought all of California was hot, sunny beaches. You know, like LA," I said.

"How could you think that? I mean, sorry, I've just lived here all my life. It's all rocks and rain and fog to me," he said.

"I don't even know what this part of California is, like. famous for. Down there, it's cars and sun and. gang violence? What's here?" I asked.

"Well, hippies. Wine country. A lot of this is new to me, too. I always knew it was here, I just never went."

Our first stop is at Stinson Beach—it's about 20 miles directly north of San Francisco, but from the East Bay, it took around an hour. Luke was a conceptual artist, and though he claimed he was going to do nothing with them, he was keeping an extensive diary and some digital pictures. I imagine somewhere in an Oakland gallery is a very large picture of me in an orange t-shirt, flipping off the camera. I am doing this a lot during the first day of the trip. After Stinson, we keep moving north, with a western trip to see a lighthouse.

It's alarmingly cold—60 degrees with high winds—and I'm standing on the observatory cliff, tantalizing steps from the Pacific Ocean. The ocean is raging, and I am standing, as I see it, on the edge of the world.

"Hey, turn around," he says.

"Fuck you, guy." My picture is taken.

That night, we stop at a very fancy restaurant in Inverness with a rave review from Gourmet circa 1976. We can't afford it, so we just use the bathroom. The first day ends in Bodega Bay. Our plans of busting into a resort have not been mentioned, and we instead make camp in the back of my Volvo station wagon. Our dreams of stealing away from luxury are dead, but that other, unspoken dream apparently wasn't. I folded down the seats, and we are lying prone in the trunk.

"Hey, could you put your back against mine? I feel like I'm floating in space."

To this date, I'm obsessed with this sentence. Was it the worst come-on ever? Was it a come-on? Wasn't I, at the time, floating in space—between homes, between dreams? For the first and last time, I didn't care. I went into the trip wanting some elusive concept of a boyfriend, but at that specific midnight, I couldn't give less of a shit.

I oblige his request anyway.

Days Of Whine And Roses

Luke and I wake up that day and go to the Bodega Bay Fire Department Pancake Breakfast. Or rather, we go to the Fire Department, but we feel too fey and shy to go to a Pancake Breakfast in a town of four 400. We spend the majority of the day in Mendocino, which is now how I remember all of California. If you take around 1,000 former dot-com millionaires, give them the aching urge to rough it in the woods and seven square miles, you would end up with Mendocino. Both of us have apparently forgotten last night's mystery sentence. Well, I hadn't. But at the time, I was more cranky than I was pensive. I realize why I left behind partial country life in Arkansas in the first place—country life sucks ass. I have, at this point, become a terrible traveling companion. Luke, however, is as voluble as ever:

"Hey, let's walk to the cliffs. They're beautiful."

"What the hell are we going to do there? Sit and watch the ocean?" I bark, ignoring the fact that that has been the main activity for the past day and a half.

"Well. yeah," he said.

We sit and catnap in the Mendocino sun. I develop another sunburn and get queasy off the organic mozzarella we bought at a co-op on the main drag.

It's July 3, and there's an elaborate fireworks show in the lagoon at Point Reyes. It's free, and we want to see fireworks. The lagoon is a strange collision of worlds. It's a naturally carved, breathtaking vista that someone chose to put a Carlos n' Charlie's in. After a few terrible bands, the fireworks start in earnest. We're sitting much too close—I periodically touch my sweatshirt to make sure some piece of sparkler hasn't burned it. The show ends with a bang of gold, red, white and blue. That night, we sleep in Bodega Bay again, and the morning after, we drive back to San Leandro, and the gray Marin winds turn into stifling suburban Oakland heat. On the way, in Sonoma County, my radio kicks back to life, and "Summertime" by Mungo Jerry loops along as I swing through the curving cliffs.

"I guess we didn't see too much wine, for being in wine country," he says. "Yeah, sorry. A bouncer took my fake." I wasn't lying.

Unstuck In Time

It hit me then that that summer, I had been playing a grown-up. I was at an uncomfortable age where I was too old to stay with my old friends at home, and much too young to go barhopping with my friends at work. I was too young to work at a real job, but I was too old to go back home and wait tables. When I went to Craigslist, I was too young to go out and play like a heartbreaker, making anonymous meetings with my wedding band turned down, but I was much too old to expect that anything I found there would lead to a teenage romance, with the proverbial stupid shit: letters, sodas, and longing, parting glances.

But I erred on the side of my youth anyway, and I think what I found was a lot more valuable. I'm not an adventurer, I'm not a planner. I'll always probably be a bit of a train wreck. But in the countryside, I found a new toughness that I never knew was there, that's far better than any traveling companion. My toughness and I lived for a week on tortilla chips, water, and apples. We slept in a station wagon, and took on fall weather in cargo shirts and a t-shirt. My toughness and I left Oakland that summer and drove back across the country, rented our first motel room together in El Paso, and ended up in my hometown sure-footed and true. My toughness and I are probably an obnoxious couple.

When I dropped Luke off in San Leandro, our goodbye was unforcedly polite. We did in fact hang out a few more times, though by that time, he had gotten together with his ex-porn star boyfriend, and I was understandably cut out. As I merged onto 580, I thought of the edge of the country, and the lighthouse I stood at the top of. I think to myself, "This is exactly what I wanted."

FRITZ BRANTLEY B'07 left his wallet in Studio City. He needs it back.

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