Though the storm had passed, it brought heavy swells, and the waves crashing against First Jetty filled the already damp air with a taste of salt. I sat for almost an hour, on the smooth rock atop the jetty, which wasn't really a jetty at all, but rather a stone breakwater, stabbing into the ocean, stopping the eternal shifting of the sand by the current, creating the beach. Whatever, it was First Jetty, that's what everyone called it.
I watched the sun setting between Catalina and Point Dume, though the dark clouds and grey mist diffused the colors to a dull slate, but no matter. I tried to watch the sunset every day that year, and the late fall and early winter always promised the best gloaming. I would walk along the tideline from Chautauqua to Gladstones and back, the breaking waves tickling at my bare feet, wetting the cuffs of my jeans, erasing my footprints as I passed. And always I would stop at First Jetty to watch the waves hurling themselves against the unyielding rock. It was the last year of my youth, the year I lost my mother, and I met Beth. I realize now that I was hiding then, wanting only to drink and fuck and escape the sadness I'd always felt, but drinking only numbed it, and fucking was a poor substitute for love, though at the time I fell in love with every girl I slept with, if only for the moment.
If you'd asked me, I would have told you I had no desire for love. I wanted to be wild and loose and all the things I'd been too timid to experience in high school and my first years of college. I was a fool, and like all fools, I lied to myself. But whether I was looking for it or not, I found love in the mad, brilliant, mercurial form of Beth.
And of course I was lying to myself about my mother. Oh, I knew she was dying. We all did, but I think I saw it first, yet was the last to accept it. I'd felt a shadow clinging to her for a long time, an intangible presence different from the sadness we both shared, which was her legacy to me, perhaps a gift, more likely a curse. The point is I knew that she would be gone soon, but went on in my pointless debauchery, only going home to do laundry, because there was nowhere to do it at my apartment by the beach. I was a coward as well as a fool. I would sit with her, talking and joking, carefully avoiding the grey crepe paper quality to her skin, the dark smudges surrounding her eyes. I would stay as long as I could stand it before fleeing to my hovel and excesses, loud music, easy women, and cheap booze.
Yet still, every afternoon, I would walk along the beach from Chautauqua to Gladstone, and stop at First Jetty, which wasn't really a jetty at all, to watch the last of the day, and let the spray from the crashing waves hide the tears in my eyes from no one but myself.
