Lost Film
My 21st birthday was a bit of a mixed bag. Ben and I - the loony Lebofsky brothers - were in the midst of our month long trip exploring the country. I was on the west coast for the first time, and we were working our way south from San Francisco. The day started by waking up at a KOA near Monterey.
Since they give away free meals on your birthday, we hit up the nearest Denny's for breakfast. Then we moseyed down highway 101 stopping every so often to check out random beaches. Sea lions and sand. So this is California.
At the first gas stop I felt compelled to take inventory of everything in my backpack. Book, CDs I bought in San Francisco, extra deodorant, four extra bars of soap, 300 q-tips, and several film canisters. I counted the rolls of film and, much to horror, discovered I somehow lost the first one.
We tore the car apart looking for that missing film to no avail. So a dark cloud instantly formed over my special day - the documentation during the first week of this life-changing journey, spanning from New York to Yellowstone National Park, was suddenly just.. gone. Memories of those adventures will disintegrate within a few years with no photographic clues to support them.
Mopey and exhausted, we arrived at our planned stopping point for the night: the KOA in Carpinteria. It was fully booked up. Fuck us! Ben and I hit the beach and soaked knee-deep in the cold water as the sun set. Back at the car we decided haul ass to Los Angeles.
There's only so much research you can do about lodging when there's no internet or cell phones. Nevertheless, thanks to guide books and pay phones, we eventually got a room at the Best Western hotel in Hollywood. En route we hit up another Denny's so I could score my second free meal of the day.
We checked in at 8pm, settled into our room, caught up on some journal writing, and then called it a night. Happy 21st birthday, Matt-o!
On hindsight it seems absolutely crazy that we didn't go out to celebrate, or commiserate, by getting cocktails somewhere. I mean.. I could finally drink legally and we're in L fucking A! But there were reasons. First, we were generally on a camping schedule, i.e. waking up early every morning. Second, we were doing this trip on the cheap. Third, we were supreme introverts and as such going to a bar in a strange city didn't seem all that fun at the time. And fourth, I'm from the NYC suburbs and had already been able to get drinks everywhere in Manhattan for years. We were under age but the bartenders never checked IDs - kind of an unwritten rule back then. And I had already decided that I hate loud, stinky, smokey bars. So.. no thanks. In short, there was zero mystique drawing me toward any watering holes.
So that was how I entered the age of adult beverages: road weary, bummed out, and sober. The next day we hiked over 20 miles around the city, trudging through Hollywood proper, then Beverly Hills, and finally the La Brea Tar Pits. No celebrity encounters. Upon limping into our hotel room Ben plopped down on the bed and commanded, "Matt, do laundry." I hauled our duffel bag of dirty duds to the washing machine on floor below. Upon pulling the giant clump of nasty clothes out of the bag a film canister fell onto the dryer. Holy shit! I didn't lose that roll after all! Fuck yeah!!