I visited the city of
Huntington Beach on a road
trip, maybe two different road trips however my memory is not constructed to distinguish those kinds of things. We arrived in search of the well known
skatepark (and adjoining plenty skateable
high school). After locating the
park and skating till
dusk crept in, we started talking with some of the other people
lingering around.
There was a group of five guys who we learned had been on a perpetual road trip for the last three years at least. They had started somewhere in
Texas and had become essentially transient since then in their decrepit
volkswagen van, driving, bumming money, and enjoying the skateparks of
America. They gave us the
low down on the city, imparting that "
huntington beach was the best place ever to be homeless". Well, as we were at least a week into our trip, out of
food,
dirty,
tired, and slightly
cranky, this news went over well. They explained that the next day we should go to the library where there was a free food hookup. After
divulging that, they asked us if we wanted to go in on an apartment together, this was slightly random, they were a little beyond too
shady, so we declined and thanked them for the information.
It was now dark, time to find a place to
camp illegally. Having driven a
pickup truck with a futon in the back, it was just a matter of finding a semi-
secluded spot to park. A
church with a large
parking lot lined by a fence and trees on one side did the job nicely, we drifted off into that light uncomfortable exhausted on the road sleep.
We awoke sharply at
dawn, light cutting in through the windows of the bed
canopy, cold, hungry, and slightly rested. It was much to early to investigate the free food, we would have to
kill time till the afternoon. Driving around until we found a
park noticed in passing the previous day, we set down and ate something resembling
breakfast which involved warm limp
cheese and an insubstantial breadlike
product. Lounging in sun and shade on the close cropped
grass, despite the trip starting to wear on us, we enjoyed this time immensely.
After we picked up some food at the place we'd been tipped off we returned to the skatepark. We skated for a while and then dug into the junk food portion of the free food haul. Something of a treat since we had been subsisting off the cheapest possible food items, ramen, white bread, and a eight pound block of
mozarella stolen from a
pizza parlor in our home town. This was a nice
feast, afterwards we moved on to explore other parts of
Los Angeles.
A couple of hours later, stuck in
immobile traffic along one of the major
interstates. Stuck is probably the wrong word, we may as well not have been driving. I think we might have turned off the car for quite a while, making a couple of feet every fifteen minutes when it was good. I was in the drivers side, the sun was
smouldering, and we had no
air conditioning. We had been
depending on wind through
open windows to keep us
cool, we were fucked and starting to get
hungry. I
inventoried one of the bags, found a package of
small donuts which looked very appealing,
chocolate ones. I hastily
gobbled up half the box, and then stopped
abruptly. I looked closer at the
package. A
sickening feeling was rushing towards me. I noticed on the underside of all the donuts, a
menacing thick layer of mold. I cast the donuts back into the bag in
disgust. My stomach was a useless lump, I felt
feverish and light-headed. Traffic was now starting to move at last, there was no time to switch places so that I could shrivel up quietly in
shotgun. I spent the next half our in a state of
madness trying to cope between
hellish traffic and
delirium, a experience which I have yet to approach again. For a long time thereafter I was unable to even
consider eating any type of small chocolate doughnut without a
shudder running through me.