The Boy Kings

itineraries. Miraculously they did, and two weeks later I was on a flight to Rio de Janeiro, away from the academic dramas of the English department and into another, more vivacious society.
    • • •
    “You two are so California,” our trip leader said one night in an outdoor bar in Brazil about me and a boy from Malibu wearing fluorescent sunglasses. He was a true California surfer kid, with a permanent tan and ocean-colored green eyes, and, in conversation, we discovered that we both dreamed idly of revolutions we wanted to play a part in someday. While the students from the East Coast gossiped about who had hooked up the night before, we talked about South American revolutionary movements that no one else on the trip had even heard of. Thisprompted them to perk up and listen. In the status hierarchy of the trip, we were California, and California was cool, and therefore revolutions were cool. “American culture starts in southern California and moves east,” I always told people on the East Coast who wanted to know why I knew about something they didn’t. This was before culture moved at lightning speed through the Internet, spreading from one coast to the other in minutes. I’m not sure now how anyone lays claim to cool anymore.
    I wasn’t actually from California, but people often made that mistake. I dressed with a casual beachiness and spoke with a slight Valley girl lilt that I never tried to lose. It was a hallmark that said (I hoped) that I didn’t take myself too seriously. It took too much time to explain to people that before the real estate boom of the 2000s and its influx of midwesterners looking for a warm-weather McMansion, my home state of Arizona was like a bedroom community of San Diego, like southern California without the beach.
    Being so close, and yet still a half-day’s drive away from us, California was exciting, exotic, a dream of American perfection that we could actually touch. When school was out, my best friend Dana and I would drive the long desert highway to San Diego, entertaining ourselves by searching for the Hotel California, which legend said existed somewhere on the highway. “Is that it?” one of us would ask, upon seeing a white building silhouetted against the sky. “I don’t know,” the other would say, and we would drive on, searching. I think that we almost prayed that we would never find it, so that we could keep searching, forever.
    When I returned to Hopkins I began the semester-long transition from my life as a graduate student to whatever would come next, which I didn’t know yet. All I knew was that I had to leave the decaying east and find my way back west, to the place I belonged and where I had to believe, if only to ward off depression at my failed grad school career, that dreams still came true.
    To this day, when I say “California,” I usually mean the beach cities of the south, replete with surfers and sunshine, not the quasi-cosmopolitan north. Northern California is somewhere else, a California that was familiar to me in 2005 only from the Joan Didion essays that I devoured in my late teens, in search of life advice. “Q: In what way does the Holy Land resemble the Sacramento Valley? A: In the type and diversity of its agricultural products.” Didion repeats, like her own accidental childhood mantra, and this always stuck in my head, a perfectly meaningless set of lines to someone who had never been to Sacramento, but suggestive of abundant riches tucked away somewhere north of Santa Barbara. It is perhaps because of this quote, and that I was broke, that I decided to move to northern California.
    I ended up in Berkeley, which, with its large student population, was all I could afford. It was close enough to Silicon Valley, where I knew the money was, and was a much cheaper place to live than Palo Alto, where a one-bedroom apartment couldn’t be had for less than $2000 a month. Through Craigslist, the 2005 unemployed person’s best friend, I found an apartment near the university and a temporary job as a copywriter at a design firm in San Francisco. My job was to write copy for a line of skin-care products that were being manufactured as a housebrand for Target. My initial enthusiasm quickly submerged by tedium, I wrote descriptions of cucumber-scented lotions and cleansers that I had never actually used. There were only so many ways to describe a face wash—invigorating, refreshing, cooling—and by the end of the month I felt