Let California Ring
Have I told you about my friend Dia?
We met twelve years ago at Innertown Pub, which—if you’ve never been—was (maybe still is?) your typical hipster dive with the cheap drinks, the line at the pool table, and the potential for hook-ups but not nearly as pretentious as Rainbo around the corner. Not that I knew that at the time; this was my first night in Chicago. My first fake ID. I was TERRIFIED. I was IN A BAR. What did you, like, DO in one of those? I was supposed to, like, ORDER SOMETHING. That was probably NOT a Zima. Essentially, I was about as big of a dork as one could possibly be, and why I wasn’t kicked out of there I’ve no idea.
What made Innertown so great (aside from the fact that you could drink there underage) was the jukebox, which was STELLAR. Old R&B and metal and classic rock and retro pop and tons of indie. Every time a song came on at least ten people would throw their arms in the air and yell, NO WAY! as though they didn’t know it was possible for someone other than themselves to dig that song. On the night I met Dia, the song was Chaka Khan’s Tell Me Something Good, and she was dancing. FYI: Innertown is not a place for dancing. It’s for drinking and smoking and pool and watching the door for someone cute and/or dangerous and more drinking and shots and sometimes fights and sometimes puking in the bathroom and sometimes drunken-spectacle dancing, but that’s not what Dia was doing. She was just dancing. She does that—hears a song and starts dancing. In the car, the kitchen, fancy restaurants, conference rooms, classrooms, backyards, doesn’t matter where. She doesn’t do it to see if other people are watching her like most people (“Is he watching me shake my ass? Does he think he can GET a piece of this ass?”), she does it ‘cause she likes it, and also it’s how she burns off steam. As I learned over the years that followed—as we became friends, roommates, better friends, colleagues, and even better friends—she’d start dancing ‘cause it was better than yelling, or crying, or pacing, or freaking out or any number of things we do to deal with stress (and Dia works in non-profit arts education, which means stress-without-end).
A few years ago, she moved away to San Fransisco. Sometimes I hate San Fransisco. Because it gets her when I don’t. When I need my best girlfriend to take me out dancing so I won’t scream. Or maybe martinis. Or to help me find the right pants, or cry with, or talk catty with about other people (specifically other women and their outfits), or watch some stupid Sandra Bullock movie with (and she’ll never tell anyone I actually like such trash (even though I DO, I DO!). I’ll deal with her so far away, though, because we still talk every week, and I can fly to California for dancing and sushi and coffee and shopping and house parties, and because I know how happy she is there in the sunshine, so close to the ocean, and mostly because her girlfriend Jessica is there and they’re insanely in love. Not just in love but in GOOD love. Healthy love. Love that’s going to last. Love that stays wild and new even after years of making it through serious and heavy. Love without the sap—with all the fantasies of what we all want our relationships to be—and seeing your best friend feel that way is about the greatest thing in the Universe.
That’s what Dia said to me at my wedding, seeing Christopher and I like that. And that’s what I plan on saying to her at her wedding.
Writing this for Dia and Jessica counts up there among "Most Important Things I've Ever Done."
Maybe somewhere in the great soup of it all we can make some sort of difference.
Dia and Jess at my wedding, August 2006