Journey to the Heart of Party

San Diego! Who knew? I had wrapped up a day interviewing Republicans, listening to Meg Whitman and Damon Dunn, writing blogs and stories when I and several other journalists at the California Republican Party convention realized we hadn’t eaten dinner yet. How about it then? Would something still be open at 11 at night? None of us wanted to stay inside the hotel where we’d been cooped up all day.

A group was formed, and a plan hatched. Meg Whitman’s campaign was having drinks somewhere in the Gaslamp neighborhood a few blocks away. That’s where we headed, uncertain whether we’d end up back at the hotel anyway, begging for an after-hours meal.

Although I grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs, San Diego had long been a mystery to me, actually, a place not worth thinking about. I had visited when I was 5-years-old and then again last September, when I rented a car for a trip to Baja California. On that last visit, I noted the city’s busy skyline and crystalline, ocean sunshine – an extension of sorts of Orange County with its clean lines and blond, laid-back fog. I remembered the middle-aged couple that rented me the car, hanging around their lot in tank tops and flip flops, as if life was one big barbecue. I instinctively distrusted this lack of edge, this easygoing amble, although the couple seemed nice enough. I knew this world. I’d grown up with it in my Los Angeles suburb. And just as I had no desire to move back home, San Diego seemed familiar in a brain-numbing way.

So that's what I imagined I’d encounter as I left the hotel’s opulent lobby with about a dozen colleagues. The downtown streets were empty – the sidewalks and glass-and-steel towers glowing orange from the streetlights. Turning onto Market Street seemed to confirm our fears that San Diego was closed for business. Yet we pushed on, in hopes of at least finding some fast food to fill our stomachs.

The first signs that a whole unimagined world awaited us were two drunk girls in black minidresses struggling to stay standing on the sidewalk as their boyfriends or escorts for the night or whatever patiently waited. The girls taunted each other and the world in piercing screeches – “Look at how drunk you are! Hey, let me smell your cologne!” I felt an animal-like sense of danger. These women in their Friday night glory and their boyfriends were capable of anything. I recognized this sensation – I had felt it growing up in suburban Los Angeles, when young men and women of the same party-hardy ilk, although sober, had ceaselessly taunted me with various Asian racial epithets. I steeled myself for such an assault. Happily, our group passed the pair without incident. What would I have done this time around if it had happened? I was probably too tired to avenge old injustices that night.

As it turns out, those girls were but sentries for an entire sloppy world of vodka shots, booming SUV sound systems and backward baseball caps. I’d discovered the city’s soul, I thought, as we walked past bar after bar packed with co-eds gripping Silver Bullets and freaking each other on the dance floor. Hordes of buzzed young men in their out-on-the-town collared shirts formed a rowdy gauntlet on the sidewalks, pummeling us with stares as we passed. “Hey, she’s cute!” one said about someone in our group.

Strangely, the enormous drunken crowds that stretched on for blocks reminded me of carnaval in Brazil. Except in Brazil, I mostly felt like a visitor to the party, an observer, which made all the urine and malevolence picturesque back there. In San Diego, I knew these people, had once partied with them, been taunted by them, still circulated among them. I could imagine what their apartments and houses looked like and exactly how their cars or trucks were tricked out.

We eventually found our way to a restaurant still open for the night and probably too expensive and quiet for the party crowd. Settling into my seat, with the party outside, I felt like I had survived a trek through all my high school yearbooks. I had earned my shrimp pesto angel hair that night.

Photo: BrokenSphere