My mother’s brow was knitted in consternation. It was 1980, and I’d decided to attend Stanford, a school I’d only recently learned wasn’t in Connecticut. After multiple teenage readings of On the Road, I had long ago decided—like The Beverly Hillbillies’ Jed Clampett—that California was “the place you oughta be,” at least for a while. My mother had watched me spend the summer in a dizzying array of street scuffles in Brooklyn and Manhattan as, having moved on from dodging sexual predators at Studio 54 a few years earlier, I attended punk rock shows at CBGB and took up bodybuilding with mafiosi. She was glad to see me go, she said, but she also wanted to see me return.
“Nothing there’s going to be able to keep me,” I told her with all the foresight an 18-year-old could muster. I’d give the Golden State four years, at most.
As she wept at JFK, I made her a promise. In the future words of my onetime bodybuilding icon and the eventual governor of California, I told her, “I’ll be back.”
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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Now, as I cruise toward 62 years old after 44 years in the most golden of states, it dawns on me that I didn’t so much tell a lie as say something that didn’t come true. I raised three daughters to post–college age here, and my fourth just started preschool. This after graduating from Stanford with a degree in communications and a lack of professional will to return to the media center that New York was and (mostly) remains.
Yes, I stayed in Palo Alto, and sometimes East Palo Alto, using them both as home base for my travels around the world with my bands and for my jobs and other pursuits as a journalist, an actor, a media executive, and a mixed martial arts hobbyist fighter. California has imprinted itself on me, sometimes literally, in the 30-odd tattoos etched in muscle, skin, and blood that mark my time here. And yet, I find myself preparing to leave.
On a whim one rainy day in the fall of my sophomore year, I jumped on my moped and headed up El Camino Real to ride as far as it took for something, anything, to happen. Looking around Palo Alto, I had the feeling that California’s glory days had already happened and I’d missed it all.
Pulling into San Francisco hours later, festooned in head-to-toe leather, oblivious to the ridiculousness of being badass on a moped, I kept going until I saw another guy in leathers. And then another. I found a record store, the Castro’s Aquarius Records, where the rumors I’d heard were confirmed: punk was not dead.
Then neither was I. Classes and what little social life I maintained at Stanford (luaus were cool then for some reason) became my job. My education? Hardcore shows at the Elite Club, the California Hall, the Tool & Die, Mabuhay Gardens, On Broadway, the Sound of Music, and half a dozen other Bay Area venues. School is where you find it, and if it was in a mosh pit, then so be it.
Over time, my love for hardcore faded, but my feelings for California lasted. Mostly because wherever I looked, I found things that drew me in. Especially the Golden State’s darker corners—of which there were many.
In 1981, I launched an independent magazine called The Birth of Tragedy (the name lifted from Nietzsche), which helped me explore the darkness up close. Infamous personages like Charles Manson, Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, and serial killer John Wayne Gacy (a midwesterner whose art had become popular in Los Angeles’s underground) graced the pages. So did notorious artists like director Russ Meyer (and his muse Kitten Natividad), Dead Kennedys provocateur Jello Biafra, and the art terrorists of Survival Research Laboratories. Would it surprise you to hear that I found them all, to a person, to be rather convivial? Enculturated by a place where permissiveness made everything sound good, these folks, and others I encountered, might also claim that the state was responsible for the states they were in.
Which was all well and good until, inevitably, Manson and his “family” came after me. In 1987, I opened a shop called CFY/House of Faith, which sold records, tapes, T-shirts, posters, books, magazines, and guns. Tattoos by appointment only. All in Palo Alto. The Manson family, pleased at how things were developing with me and Charlie after I put some recordings of him on Fear Power God, one of the first significant spoken-word albums, asked if they could sell some of their records in the store. I agreed to take some on a 90-day consignment.
Using a timescale unfamiliar to me, representatives for Manson called 11 days after I received their records, asking for full payment. Trading on the family’s well-publicized history as a murder clan, they threatened me. Me, who was deep into a lifelong study of martial arts, who’d reached 265 pounds thanks to bodybuilding and steroids, and who had a federal firearms license.
“You got a pen?” I asked. I gave the caller all of my addresses and my entire schedule. “Come by anytime you think you’re ready, because you will soon see that I am perfectly willing to go wherever you’d like to take this.”
Quiet on the other end of the line.
Returning briefly to New York in 2001, I interviewed Chris Rock on the Harlem set of Down to Earth. I told my fellow Brooklyn native how much I missed New York.
“The teenager in you misses it,” Rock told me. “The adult man in front of me wouldn’t miss it.”
He was right. The adult man in front of him was now married and a father, a homeowner several times over even if inside I sometimes still felt like the street-fighting punk kid of yore.
I probably didn’t miss the subways, the street scuffles, or trying to get strollers up the stairs of the brownstone in Flatbush where I grew up. Moreover, the city that I missed was gone. And anyway, like a drug habit or a crush, California had snuck up on me. I belonged to it as much as it belonged to me.
California, a place full of moments that had to be experienced to be believed. At a back-to-school event at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, where my kids went, I was shit talking with one of the other dads, a fellow New Yorker. “What is it with these California moms?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all, like, trying to look like Michelle Pfeiffer,” I said, pointing to one who looked especially Pfeifferesque.
“You idiot,” he said, laughing. “That is Michelle Pfeiffer.”
Ah, the golden dream.
“You’re not planning to stay in California until you die, are you?”
I posed this question to my ex-wife in 2013. It was more than three decades after my predeparture conversation about California with my mother, and I found myself thinking of Peggy Lee’s famous question: Is that all there is?
“I guess not,” she said.
Me neither, I thought. Was I really going to go from Brooklyn to California to the great beyond?
When I looked at how much my post-divorce house, a 1,050-square-foot home in East Palo Alto, was worth, I realized that the world was practically at my fingertips. I could sell the place and move anywhere with my new wife and young daughter.
And so the search began. Malta. Germany. France. The United Kingdom. Before too long, we zeroed in on Spain, which has a similar latitude to California, the same mild winters, the same promise of the good life minus so many of California’s downsides, like the threat of major earthquakes, rampant fentanyl usage, regular gun violence, and high rates of homelessness.
What started as a whim became a decision: We could build a house three kilometers from the beach on a hillside. We could live on a dead-end street with only two neighbors in an 8,000-square-foot home with a pool and a hot tub for what it might cost to live in a spacious apartment in California. Decent healthcare and a good international school for the kid were signing bonuses. Our house will be finished this winter.
As I prepare to go, I’ve been doing something of a long goodbye tour. I texted my friend Jamie Stewart, a Californian in the band Xiu Xiu, to tell them I would be in L.A. and we should meet to say goodbye in person. “Yeah, that’s great. But we live in Berlin now,” they told me. “We sold the house, quit jobs.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. Wanted to stay ahead of disaster this time.”
Me too. So, so long, California. Cheers to you and here’s to staying ahead of disaster this time. I’m sure there will be adjustments, but the flight from Spain to New York is short and there’s plenty of room for visitors in our new place.
Truth be told, we’re all visitors from somewhere, hoping to find not so much a place to go back to but a place to be. My search is far from over, even if it’s far from California. To quote the governor again, “Hasta la vista, baby.” •
Eugene S Robinson pens Look What You Made Me Do, a Substack, and is the author of A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight into Murderer’s Row, forthcoming from Feral House.
