Californias
Tags: Stanford, West, School, California, Essays

A crowd gathers in Cole’s dorm room, contained in the gap between his desk and a pile of university-issued mattresses. The mattresses eat up half the floor. “It’s my super-bed,” Cole tells me with an open-mouthed grin. It’s dark. The only light in the room filters out through the printed scarf he’s tacked over the ceiling fixture. Everyone is wearing black, and in the dimness, the boundaries separating t-shirts from t-shirts and jeans from jeans give way. The crowd is a single kinetic body. It bulges and contracts as heads turn and hands gesture. It pulses.

At the center of the organism is an iPad with several lines of coke on it. From my spot on the super-bed, I watch my friends dip their heads and skim their noses along the touchscreen. I tug Quinn’s sleeve. “We all see the symbolism here, right? Like we acknowledge it?” I ask. He sniffs. “It’s the flattest surface we have.”

I made these friends freshman year, when everyone sprawled out on the field behind the dorms to smoke in the sunshine. The plastic blades baked in the sun and burned our feet. Uneasy electronica flooded out from a Jambox. Bits of rubbery turf stuck to the backs of our legs. The field was a scene. The most dedicated stoners made it a point to sit and smoke there every day at 4:20, until a campus cop caught on and appeared every day at 4:20 to write them a citation. Two hundred dollars later, they broke with tradition and resigned themselves to smoking every day at 3 instead. “But I have a medical card!” one stoner wailed. “I know,” I sympathized. “It’s totally fucked.”

My friend, Eduardo, pulls his admirably straight nose from the retina display. “Coke makes me feel like a sexy model,” he announces. The iPad is tugged from his hands by someone else eager to wipe their nose with 128 GB. He grins and dances in my face. “I am ready. I am ready.” He grabs my hands and moves them from side to side. “A boom. A boom. A boom-boom-boom.” He releases them and pauses. “Did you want any?” I shake my head, no. A week earlier, I clicked on an anti-drug ad circulating Facebook called, “Every Line Counts.” The ad was a step by step “recipe” for making cocaine with ingredients like “destroying an acre of rainforest” and “violence aimed at innocent South American villagers.” “Naw, I’m good.” I tell him, but he’s already turned away.

I’m not turning down the coke to protect the Amazon. I’m turning it down, because coke is for rich party kids. And because in gangster movies, the main character always gets addicted to coke. And then he gets careless and the police arrest him, and everything he’s ever worked for comes crashing down around him. But mostly, I don’t do coke, because when I lost my iPhone, my dad just bought me another. “Consider it an early birthday present,” he said. And I did.

On the floor, just inches away from my Keds, is a large bong. It’s two feet tall, clear, and several hundred dollars. I can’t take my eyes off it, because I’m so afraid of knocking it over. I’m thinking about it right now, but in five minutes I’m going to forget it’s there. I’ll turn to talk with someone and shift my body to the right. My knees will slide over and my left foot will trail behind. The foot will knock over the bong. It will shatter on the floor, and everyone will hate me. I stand up from the super-bed and move somewhere else. Will and two girls enter the room. Their hair is dark and wet from the rain. They are absorbed by the mass. It still surprises me that it rains in California.

Before I moved here, my mental landscape of the state was largely produced by the California Dairy Farmers Association. They made milk commercials with talking cows. My favorite one starts with a herd of lady cows meandering about lush green foothills and gossiping about some newcomer. “Where’s she from again?” one asks. “I think someplace called “Wisconsin,” another answers. “Shhh! She’s coming.” A new cow, notably dumpier than the others, wanders into the scene. Her tail flicks back and forth; her eyes are wide. “Don’tchya know, there aren’t any snow drifts here!” she marvels, flattening her a’s. She grins at her companions. She’s just excited to be here. One of the California lady cows turns to her friends and says in a mock stage whisper, “Sounds like someone’s been tipped over, one too many times.” They roll their soft brown eyes and laugh cruelly. The Midwestern cow hangs her bovine head in shame, and lumbers away. The camera pans across soft valleys bathed in thick golden sunlight, and a smug voiceover declares: “Happy cows come from California.”

Someone sets the iPad down. They are out of coke. “Alright. Downstairs?” Will asks the organism, opening the door to the hall. One by one individuals break off and file through the door, until it’s no longer an organism. It’s just people in a room. We scatter down the stairs and into the party, arriving at the landing in clumps. We were here 45 minutes ago. The music is still bad and there are still no guests anyone wants to meet. Only now the Gatorade cooler filled with fruit punch and Everclear is nearly empty, and people are tipping it over — to the point where it looks like it might fall — to fill their cups. Before escaping upstairs to Cole’s room, we’d lingered by the speaker with bored faces. But now my friends are on coke. They’re having fun. They commandeer a beer pong table.

It’s easy to pick out our group from the rest of the party, because everyone else is wearing colors. Eduardo and Stephen sink consecutive shots into a zipper formation. They do a high to low five, black sleeves pin-wheeling. “We’re the coolest people here,” my friend Will observes, whispering into my ear. Cole and Meredith are dancing. Eduardo abandons the game and once again grabs my hand. His eyes are closed. His elbows jut out and his lips are pursed. He stomps his feet and swivels his hips. “I’m feeling myself, I’m feeling myself!” I want to have fun, so I start dancing too. But after a few minutes, my arms drop and my feet are still. I’m tired. Eduardo dances over to someone else. I lean against the wall. This party sucks.

I leave our beer pong table and wander. I walk up stairs and down halls looking for people I know. I find them. The girl from my high school is in line for the bathroom; two kids from my poetry class are at the stairwell. I pause by each of them and lean in, slapping a hand on their arm. “All my friends just did coke off an iPad,” I confide. They laugh, unsure of what to say. “What?” I want them to get upset, because I’m upset. I don’t want to have friends who do coke off iPads. I don’t want to be at a party as a senior and feel lonelier than I did as a freshman. I don’t want to be here. I release my grip on their arm and (without bothering to respond) walk away. I make my way back downstairs through the throng of bodies to a chair where I’ve left my sweater. My friends are still by the beer pong table. I wave the sweater and point to the door, signaling my departure. Chelsea and her new boyfriend are standing on the porch. He is nice and boring. I grab their forearms and lurch forward a final time. “My friends do coke off iPads,” I tell them. “I know,” he says gently. “You already told us that.”

I walk the five blocks home drenched in rain and my own melodrama. I’m always upset by the littlest things. Along this path are walls of hedges. During the week, I stop to admire the white stars and yellow climbing roses billowing out of the leaves. I’ll take pictures and send them to my parents, because back home everything is dead and frosted. But tonight it’s dark and raining, so all I can see is the shine of slick leaves. It makes the hedges look wild. I pass under branches sagging with persimmons and step over the oranges rotting on the street. It feels like every house has a lemon tree. Even after four years, I’m still amazed that a fruit tree can grow in a front yard.

Mariah Oxley ’16 just graduated from Stanford.

Photo by Steven Tyler PJs.