****
When I awakened, my head was pounding and I was terribly thirsty. Surprisingly, I had undressed sometime before passing out. Rather than face my hangover, I used my standard cure. I took three Advil and washed them down with a large glass of cold water. Then I went back to bed for two more hours.
At ten-thirty I got up again feeling much better. I opened the curtain and saw a gray sky hanging over the San Diego coast. I thought it was always sunny in Southern California, but I guess overcast skies are common at this time of year. ‘June gloom’ I had heard someone call it. Just as well, I wasn’t feeling very sunny myself.
I thought about the bridge and the sign. Need help? Make the call. Suicide is never the answer.
I ate an overpriced breakfast in a restaurant near the hotel along with three, eight dollar mimosas. Then I walked down to Coronado Beach.
It was gray and actually chilly by the water. The beach was still full of people on vacation from places like Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Chicago who, maybe like me, had never heard of ‘June gloom’ and were trying to pretend that it didn’t exist and that they were in a tropical paradise. I had to admit, it was pretty even with the haze. Point Loma was a silhouette off to the right and some island sat off to the left. I’d have to ask someone what that was. The palm trees in San Diego were majestic, unlike the stunted little things I remember seeing on the east coast in Myrtle Beach.
I took off my shoes. The sand was cool and clean. I walked down the beach not going by the water yet. I was almost afraid to go up to that place where the surf came onto land. Afraid that I would see something there that I wouldn’t like.
But eventually I did walk down to the water. I’m not sure what I had been afraid of, but whatever it was, it wasn’t there. It was just water—cold, foamy water. It was surprisingly cold. I didn’t remember that from the last trip. The Atlantic is like a primordial bath, eighty-five degrees this time of year. The Pacific here had to be twenty degrees colder than that, but for some reason, maybe because it was colder, it seemed cleaner.
I didn’t see any gold.
I walked back to the hotel. My heart felt as heavy as the Pacific was cold.
I went to the hotel bar and ordered a bourbon. I only had one, not because I was trying to stay sober, but because I wanted to get drunk. At hotel prices I was going to run out of cash well before total inebriation. So I left the Del again. I was hungry and saw a self-proclaimed Irish pub with a large patio. I found a small empty table. I ordered the fish and chips and a Johnny Walker—it seemed appropriate just then.
A couple near me had a dog on the patio. I was surprised that this was allowed in a restaurant, even on the patio. People were eating, I mean. But no one paid any attention to it. Even when the dog took a piss on a chair leg and I watched the urine run into a drain, no one seemed to care—California.
The fish and chips were way too greasy, even for me who had been a regular at Steve’s Hotdogs in Cleveland for years. Another California stereotype demolished—everything wasn’t just about being healthy. To top it off, someone lit a cigarette on the other side of the dog people. The dog people gave him a dirty look and said something to one another, but apparently smoking was allowed as the waitress brought him an ashtray. I pulled out my own pack of Marlboro Lights and lit one up. Now the dog people had something to be really upset about. A minute later, they got up and left, taking their ill-mannered, pissing dog with them.
At some point I found my way inside. You couldn’t smoke in there, but it was darker and dingier and I felt more at home. I had come to San Diego to try to recapture something, but so far I felt just like I had at home. It was cloudy, chilly, dirty, and I was drunk. It was like I had never left Cleveland.
Eventually, I reached that rarified level of intoxication where I was able to clearly see those years after my mother died and I had gone to live with my father. Early on, we still had money and even though he drank too much and was occasionally violent, it wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t until Cleveland’s economy fell apart in 2000 or so and he lost the business and then the house that it got really bad. I was sixteen then. We had to move into a little shithole apartment on Lorain Avenue. I got a job at USA Gas and he—well, he drank. I am not going to go into the fights or the times I would come home and find him unconscious on the couch with his pants full of crap. Needless to say, it wasn’t a happy home. I told him that I hated him more than once.
I left the day I turned eighteen.
Two years later, he called me and told me that the doctor told him that he had cirrhosis. I don’t remember what I said, but I wasn’t very nice. I had only spoken to my dad twice since I had left.
A year later, shortly after I turned twenty-one, I saw him in a bar. He looked yellow and was a lot thinner than I remembered. He had a scotch in his hand—not Johnny Walker; he couldn’t afford it by then—this was the really cheap stuff, gutter scotch. We talked a little, not about his drinking or his disease, but about me and about mom. He asked what I was doing, if I was dating anyone. He told me a story about mom—apparently she had started doing some odd things before they had separated. One night, he said I had stayed over at friend’s house who was having a birthday sleepover, so him and mom had decided to have a romantic evening. He bought a bottle of wine and some cheese and bought mom roses. He had some rose petals too. He spread them on the bed and on the floor of their bedroom. Everything went great right up to the point they went into the bedroom. He told me that mom had seen the petals and it was like someone had flipped a switch in her head. The romantic evening was forgotten.
“Look at this mess,” he said doing a passable imitation of mom. “It is an absolute, disgraceful mess in here.”
At which point, dad said, the romantic evening was over as mom got it into her head to vacuum and clean the whole house from top to bottom.
“It was eleven at night,” he told me. “That was the first really odd thing I noticed. Then there were the headaches. I never once even considered though that she might be sick. I was too wrapped up in my own sickness. I thought she did that kind of stuff to get back at me for drinking. I’ve always wondered if I had done something differently, then maybe things would have turned out better.”
He stared into the mirror behind the bar, but I got the impression that he was looking at something else entirely. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have the experience, the empathy, the words—nothing. Today, I understand a little more clearly what he was feeling.
After a brief second where I thought that he was going to cry, he was back to being his gruff, surly self. He asked me to spot him some money for a few more drinks. I gave him a twenty. He said that maybe we would get together for Christmas. I said, sure, maybe.
He died on the twenty-third of December.
Need help? Make the call. A fall two hundred feet into cold darkness. I had heard somewhere that killer whales used to be common in San Diego Bay a hundred years ago. Wouldn’t that have been a sight? I wondered what was in the bay tonight? I thought that I would finish my drink and then find out.
“Hey sweetie, can I have one of those cigarettes?” said a gravelly voice.
I looked at the wreck of a woman on the stool next to me and realized that she was talking to me.
“What? Yeah sure,” I said, handing her one.
“You want to come smoke with me?” she asked. “Come on. Bring your drink.”
I followed her. Why not?
Outside, she introduced herself.
“My name’s Audrey,” she said. She looked like she might have been pretty once, but the sun and alcohol had aged her prematurely. I bet she was no older than thirty-five, but she looked fifty. Her smile was warm though and something in her tone was reassuring.
“Tom,” I said.
We talked and smoked and I bought us more drinks. At some point we staggered back to my ro
om.
“This is really nice,” she said. “I’ve lived around here all of my life but I’ve never stayed here.”
“It’s okay. I stayed here when I was a kid. I wanted to come back for some reason.”
Audrey spent the night in my room, but we didn’t sleep together—sex, I mean. We just talked. I know it sounds cliché, but that was all. For an evening, I allowed her to direct where my mind went. It’s probably not a way to live your life, but I didn’t think anymore that night about suicide hotline signs and marine monsters lurking in the bay.
The next day, I was much less hung over than I had a right to be. Not so with Audrey. She looked worse than she had the night before, but she took a shower and that helped a little. She kept saying that she had to go, but it was sunny today and I pleaded with her to walk down to the beach with me before she left. I had no desire to take over responsibility for myself again. I bought her some coffee and she finally relented.
Once she decided to walk with me, she wasn’t anxious anymore. We got down to where the waves were rolling in, wetting the sand. There, spread out like a nebula, were the glittering gold flecks that had dazzled me as a child.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “You know, when I was a kid I saw this beach and was convinced that all of those sparkles were gold. I was crushed when my mom told me they weren’t.”
“No—they probably are,” she said. “Gold dust gets washed in with the sand on a lot of California beaches. I went to Gold Bluffs Beach once up north and read this whole thing on how the prospectors would pan an ounce or two a day from a lot of the beaches. Yeah, that probably is gold. Not really worth anything, not enough and too hard to get.”
It was worth a great deal to me. I don’t know if what she told me was true. I’ve never looked it up. I’ve never wanted to. Right then I accepted her words as if they had been handed down from God Himself. I stared down at the sand, at the tiny, shining specks that had briefly meant everything to a child.
Tears welled up in my eyes. I tried to push them down and it made them push back harder until I just let go and cried uncontrollably—for the first time that I could remember.
“Hey, what wrong? Are you all right?” Audrey asked. She could have walked away, or been freaked out by my sudden fountain of tears. Instead, she held me, right there on the beach with the waves lapping our feet. That scarecrow of a woman who was a veritable stranger, except for what we had shared last night, had unwittingly brought this on with her words and now she helped me through it.
“It okay, Tom, you’re all right,” she was saying.
And I really was. I won’t claim to have had a life-changing epiphany. I struggled after that for a long time. I still do. But that was the moment when I was able to let go a lot of the past, including my guilt and my many regrets, and take back the one thing that I had been missing for a long time.
Coronado Beach really is covered in gold—and I felt hope again.
The End
****
About the author
Erik C. Martin is a native of Cleveland, Ohio who is currently living in San Diego, California. He has been a social worker, a Deadhead, a southern cop, a bookstore owner, and much more. He began writing seriously in 2010. June Gloom and Golden Sand is his second published short story. Erik enjoys writing fantasies, westerns, and other genres. He is currently working on his second fantasy novel, which should be completed by spring 2011. Contact the author at
[email protected] Visit the author’s blog at www.martin-inabind.blogspot.com.
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