In Santa Barbara

In Rome, we read from two different guide books. The blue guide book said we should go to the Spanish Steps after the Pantheon. The Pantheon it said was not built by Agrippa. The other guide book, with a lion's brass knocker pictured squarely in front, didn't tell us to go anywhere. It was merely a laundry list of things in Rome: here lie monk's bones, here lies an old church, this is where you'll find the Forum.

We found the Forum on a day that was blisteringly hot. The best spot was above the forum, where the silver hued leaves of an olive tree offered an umbrella of shade. We ate a loaf of French Bread and goat cheese while consulting the blue guide book. You can't write about a city like Rome without thinking of the past. The landscape is suffused with it, like the scent of honeysuckle come summer.

There was a time, years earlier, when I'd have not cared to travel to Rome. I was living out West then in a city by the water. Back then I lived in a house with strangers. A couple of us were involved, but the women were a thousand or so miles away. Most nights we'd come home from work and watch television. It was a reality dating show, the intricacies of which stretch far beyond the scope of this essay. The general gist of it was, four women competing for the attention of one man over the course of one evening. Or as I would call an evening like that: a short trip into hell. And what a more learned person might call--remaining narrative hegemony of the patriarchy.

I remember a particular episode of this show as my favorite. I don't remember if I watched it with my room mates or not. Two of them were physics students, one of whom worked at Lockheed Martin in a job where he was hated, and a few months back they'd scrawled equations all over the glass on the back door. The equations had remained there ever since, a testament to their intelligence and reluctance to clean up a damn mess. Anyhow, the contestant was a fire man, solidly built with close cropped blond hair. He was also, as I recall, deeply, almost incoherently stupid. Now, the particular joy of this date is that the traditional narrative is upended. By the end of the show, after repeatedly being asked to show him why they wanted to stay, the remaining two girls eliminate themselves from the date, and the firemen stands in a club with bubbles on the floor wondering where it had all gone wrong.

The wild nights we had back then mostly revolved around Charles Shaw. The famous two dollar wine that Trader Joe's stocked by the case. On the particularly lonely nights, I'd buy a bottle of Shaw, a Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon and get driven around the city by one of my less inebriated room mates. The harbor is dark at night, but for the white sail boats being rocked by the ocean as children in the arms of their mothers. In the far distance were the bright lights of oil tankers, grinding away at the ocean floor and looking like nothing so much as carnival ships. In college, a particularly built guy had tried to swim out to them on a whim. He wound up with a collapsed lung.

Why didn't we go out to bars where at least we could have pretended we weren't alone? Those drives along the back streets of Santa Barbara had the affect of making me briefly feel as though I wasn't alone, the ocean wavering, the whole world wavering under the influence of cheap wine. Those drives didn't really work. I went home and swam into my bed, a thin mattress on a hard floor. I remember a green carpet but memory is faulty. And once I'd entered my dreams I kept swimming towards a light that was far, far above me. I took stroke after stroke after stroke as I'd been taught since I was very young. Just keep moving toward the light. And then like that I'd wake up, sleeping the fitful sleep of the drunk, lying in a dark room, wondering where the light had gone.