(This was originally written in January 2020).
Ventura, CA. Two Trees, the Pier where they filmed “Little Miss Sunshine” (my favorite anecdote to describe where I’m from), missions, surfing, and an art scene monopolized by watercolor painters aged 50 plus. That’s what it was to me when I left 9 years ago. A place I couldn’t wait to leave.
I just finished planning a 6 day trip to Ventura and Santa Barbara, set for April (edit: 2020), when my wife and I will attend a friend’s wedding. My wife has never seen my hometown so I knew it would be a perfect opportunity to show her where I spent the first 20 years of my life. I even planned out a morning where we’ll take “The Tour of Brandy,” a driving tour of all my childhood haunts: my old house, schools, and my favorite donut shop. We are also staying conveniently across the street from my favorite Mexican food stand.
(Edit: Due to COVID-19 we had to cancel this trip. My wife still has not had the pleasure of visiting my hometown).
The last time I visited Southern California was in 2016, when for 5 days I slept on a twin-sized blow-up mattress at my dad’s apartment in Fillmore, 30 minutes east of Ventura. I was daily vlogging at the time, and was toiling with the idea of going into personal stories of what Ventura means to me, but I couldn’t. It didn’t feel right, and it would mean talking about people that I didn’t get permission to talk about. It felt too close to home, too scattered; what would I tell anyway?
Over a year ago I had—and though I’m tempted to soften the terminology, I’m not going to—a mental breakdown about my childhood and teen years. For so long I thought that my childhood was ideal, normal, and healthy. Without going to details, and because at least one of my parents will probably read this, I’ll just say that there was more adversity than normal, but I perceived it as normal, and that meant that I minimized a lot of stuff. When I revisit these memories I’m now seeing them with less distortion, a fresh perspective.
I was searching up hotels and restaurants on Trip Advisor, and would suddenly get lost in a memory connected to different parts of town. I’d start worrying about running into people I used to know, and no longer care to know, making sure to play some key clips from their movie in my head. Common themes of desperation and embarrassment. A loser working at a French restaurant, and having desperate crushes on girls no different than strangers from my community college classes. A closeted 13 year old getting ditched at the mall by her best-friend-turned-enemy. A still-closeted 15 year old grappling with unrecognizable feelings for another friend who was slowly and steadily put bricks up between us.
There are good memories, too: I stumbled upon a pizzeria on TripAdvisor where a group of 10 of us would pile in, cram tables together and share 2-3 pizzas. The foothills where we’d sit on laps in cars and take the long way downtown. Having picnics at Arroyo Verde Park and sliding down the grassy hills on ice blocks. Trendy photo booth pictures and emo music. Local bands in coffee shops, rec centers and small venues (a music scene I’ve not seen a comparison for in Canada). My first girl kiss on the beach at night. We all wanted out. We all had big dreams for college, careers, traveling, and big cities.
I outgrew the city when I was young. At first it was because I thought I’d be a horse trainer living on a ranch somewhere. Then I let the artist/writer/songwriter identity wax and wane and there was no room for that creative genius in this small town that wouldn’t lend me the ear. 100,000+ bodies that loved a quiet life by the ocean. 100,000+ bodies I didn’t relate to. Once I was out of the closet and visibly queer, I was noticed. One time at the promenade, behind the Crowne Plaza by the beach, a young teenaged girl asked me if I was a boy or girl while her friends snickered. People stared at my girlfriend and I when we held hands at the mall. I felt alone; who else was gay? I didn’t have a community and I stuck out like a sore thumb.
There is something I’ve come to realize, though. It’s not the town I have beef with. Ventura is simply a placeholder, a photo album, of my most developmental stages. It’s a box—Pandora’s box, maybe—of so many experiences that shaped me for better and for worse. And sometimes I can’t make heads or tails of it all. I remember visiting Ventura for the first time after I moved to Vancouver in 2011 and noticing how beautiful it was, almost for the first time. A truly beautiful town with stunning views and an easy-going nature. It wasn’t the bleak, dumpy town as I had remembered it. But when I see it broken down into places, people, and things, I feel, vividly, the joy, turmoil, confusion, and cemented history of my hometown. I hear the soundtrack of my teenage years. It’s a part of me, whether I like it or not, whether I’m going to embrace it or not. If I’m going to visit my childhood memories it means I’m visiting Ventura, California.
And I want to show my wife those memories. Well, as best I can. She’s not in my head, so when she sees my old house, she’s not going to have a flipbook in her head of all the snapshots I have of that place. The Halloween decorations, the basketball hoop I’d drag onto the driveway, all the times I cut the lawn while listening to my Sony discman. But hopefully she’ll have an image to form, to better understand where I was when I tell her those old stories. I wish we could go back — like that scene in “Annie Hall”— into my childhood, and be flies on the wall and I could tell her all the stories while we’re in them.
But she’ll probably see it the same as a tourist: a quiet beach town (I’m taking that from a Franklin for Short song, by the way. A local band from Ventura who wrote a song about Ventura) with a quaint downtown, and a beautiful sunset by the pier. All I can hope is that she likes it a little more than I did then.