[Editor’s note: This essay first appeared in the “Chapters of Our Lives” issue of PREMIUM Magazine, which featured personal storytelling.]
The day I got out of the Navy, I walked down the gangplank with a seabag slung over my shoulder and two thoughts on my mind: USN, never again, and that goes double for San Diego.
I had my reasons: Inflexible discipline. Stifling conformity. Rules. I hated the way the Navy tried to squeeze every bit of individuality out of me. To the powers that be, I was just another piece of government property to be put in harm’s way.
To blow off steam, I’d hit the streets of San Diego, but there was nowhere for a broke, underage squid to go. It was 1987 and The Gaslamp Quarter hadn’t been invented yet. Downtown San Diego was a desolate stretch of dive bars, liquor stores, and tattoo parlors.
The beach was free, but I didn’t have a car. I’d take the trolley to the big outdoor mall, get a lemonade from Hot Dog on a Stick, fill it with gin, and try to meet girls. The thing about being a sailor in a sailor town is that people treat you like a transient: here today, gone tomorrow.
That left Tijuana, a place where sailors were routinely hustled, assaulted and robbed. My shipmate Dwayne went to TJ alone and was jumped in an alley, hit in the face with a beer bottle, and lost an eye. That was the end of Dwayne’s adventures in the fleet. He was discharged and sent home. None of us ever saw him again.
I couldn’t wait to be done with San Diego. When that day finally came, I went all the way across the country to a small state school in the middle of Virginia, 2,500 miles away. That was just the beginning of my wandering. I moved back to LA to be a screenwriter, and when that didn’t work out, I set my sights on Arizona for grad school, only to come back to LA to be closer to the punk rock music magazine I was writing for.
Even then I didn’t settle down. I moved all over LA — from the valley to the beach — into a series of rented rooms and crummy apartments.
But life has a way of making you revisit the assertions of your youth. Because eventually I moved back to San Diego to get married and now I’ve lived here for close to 20 years. Every night, I lay my head down just a few miles from the Navy station where I toiled as a deck seaman. I’d be hard pressed to get any closer to the place I swore I’d never come back to.
How did this happen?
My mother had a theory. She came out to visit a few summers before she was diagnosed with the chronic lung condition that would run its course during the pandemic.
My wife Nuvia and I took her out to dinner at a restaurant in Coronado. We watched boats go by on the bay as the sun sank into the sea. She told us it made her nostalgic for when she, too, lived in San Diego.
“Wait, what?” I asked. I had no idea my mother had lived in San Diego.
“This was back in 1967,” she explained. My father was stationed at North Island for swift boat training. They splurged and rented a beachfront apartment they could barely afford on their combined salaries as a naval officer and a nurse. They were newlyweds and wanted to be together before he was shipped off to Vietnam because there were no guarantees he’d be coming back.
I knew I was born while my father was serving in Vietnam. In fact, the word of my arrival reached him while he was out on patrol, which was welcome news to his fellow officers because it meant the bottle of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey in the officers’ mess that my mother had hidden inside a loaf of bread could be opened and shared.
My father’s shipmates sent the announcement of my birth over the short-wave radio: “Give every man his dew,” which was the slogan for Tullamore Dew at the time.
I’d carried this bit of family lore with me all my life. Because my parents were both New Yorkers and that’s where I was born, I assumed it’s also where I was conceived. But that, apparently, wasn’t the case.
“You were conceived right here in San Diego,” my mother said. “That’s why you keep coming back.”
Like a salmon swimming back to its home waters, I thought.
The Pacific salmon are strong swimmers. It’s not uncommon for them to swim from California to the Sea of Japan. Some make this journey several times in their lifetime. But they always come back to their spawning ground, an ancient impulse encoded in their DNA. You could say it’s their destiny.
After dinner, which I’m happy to report did not include salmon, we went in search of this magical place where I was hatched. A place not far from the border with Mexico called Imperial Beach.
There was just one problem: I have a terrible sense of direction. I frequently get lost, often very close to home. I can almost always be counted on to take the wrong exit, make the wrong turn. I rely on the GPS on my phone to get places I’ve been to dozens of times.
What does it mean exactly to get turned around? Why do I have such poor instincts for finding my way home?
Easy. I inherited them from my mother. We’re directionally challenged. And now we were chasing a memory from my mother’s youth, from before I was even born.
Although I’ve learned not to trust my mother when it comes to directions, on the way to Imperial Beach she swore she remembered her old address. She also recalled that her apartment building was adjacent to a bar that billed itself as the most southwesterly saloon in all of the United States.
“The IB Forum?” my wife asked.
My mother couldn’t remember. But my wife Nuvia has an interesting story about the place. After breaking up with some loser, she went to drown her sorrows at the IB Forum. A friend of hers was learning how to bartend and she got Nuvia ridiculously drunk. U2 came on the jukebox and this resulted, as it often does, in a crying jag. She staggered outside and shouted at the stars.
“When am I going to find the man for me?!”
Then she threw up in the parking lot.
Little did she know that her future husband was conceived a few steps away.
While Nuvia told this story, I struggled with the GPS on my phone. Something wasn’t right. As we crept down a sandy street, while following the directions and searching for the building where my mother lived for a while a long time ago, I realized the apartment numbers were way off. Like by a thousand. And the street name wasn’t right either.
“This looks familiar,” my mother insisted, which meant we were probably going to end up in Ensenada. When we passed IB Forum, my mother pointed to an apartment building across the street and shouted, “That’s it!”
I looked at my phone. I’d plugged in the wrong address and the wrong street, yet it guided us right to the spot.
Weird. Spooky even.
It was getting late, nearly dark. The last of the light was fading from the sky. To my eye, the apartments all looked the same. But my mother got out of the car and walked right up to the building as if half a century hadn’t passed. She pointed out how the laundry room was on one side of the courtyard and the entrance to the beach on the other. And there they were, right where she said they’d be.
The three of us went around the building to the beach. I was struck by how close to the ocean we were. The sound of the surf filled our ears. The maritime layer dampened our clothes and left a salty film on the rocks and railings.
“Here it is,” my mother said. “This is where we lived.”
“Wow,” I said.
“This is where you were conceived.”
“That’s enough,” I said, before she could go into the gory details.
Still, how strange it must have been for my parents to grow up in New York, amidst all that clank and clamor, to somehow end up on the other side of the country, not knowing what their future held, and being gently lulled to sleep each night by the sound of waves tumbling in the sand.
My mother explained that after she learned she was pregnant, she realized she couldn’t stay in California. She decided to go back to Brooklyn where she had family and friends.
Suddenly, it all clicked. Being summoned to San Diego by the Navy when I was still a teenager. My wanderings around the Western Pacific when I was a part of the war machine, and then after I got out all those journeys back and forth across the country, all those temporary addresses. It seemed like such a wayward way to build a life, a series of journeys without rhyme or reason.
But from the perspective of the Pacific salmon, it all made perfect sense. This is where I was spawned. This is where I returned to make a family.
In spite of not knowing where I was going, my instincts kicked in and guided me to the place I was headed all along: home.
______Jim Ruland is the LA Times bestselling author of “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records.” His new novel, “Mightier than the Sword,” will be published next year.