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Almost Home
Welcome to my half-life daydream. ENTER SUBJECT: Kelsey Schimmelman. Tall and lanky, she is a slouching fifteen-year-old with a bad attitude and a self-administered haircut.
This is me. I am Kelsey Schimmelman. It seems inappropriate to say that I "live" in Livermore. My parents bought a house there, and that's about the extent of my feelings for the place. Livermore, California is, unfortunately, named after Robert Livermore, patron saint of cowboy culture and run-down movie theaters. The biggest event of the year is the godforsaken Rodeo, which the town has dubbed "the fastest on Earth," just to compensate for the general dragging deliberation with which everything else seems to happen.
I suppose true Livermorons enjoy the entire ring-tossing, bull-riding ordeal, but for those who don't (namely: my friends and me), there's only one option: get out of Livermore before your consciousness flies happily out of your skull. And so we did, once, Nikki, Lance, Chelsea and I decided to go to Berkeley. Gilman Street, if you want specifics. If Livermore is a stale, unsalted cracker, Berkeley is the Thanksgiving turkey next door. We could have absolutely lived there, and I mean "lived" in the truest, most spectacular sense of the word, until there was no more teenaged rebellion between the cells in our blood.
The particular event we were skipping away to was the Punk Prom. Call it voyeuristic jealousy, call it whatever you want. We wanted in, and we were going to get in. So we dressed up ourselves and Lance's Lincoln Continental and we drove away. We must have gotten lost somewhere. Nikki covered her eyes and screamed at Lance to keep his eyes on the road, babbling about bad experiences and car accidents and other nonsense that hung incoherently in the air, making it too thick, too warm. Chelsea laughed uproariously, coughed her lungs out, and rolled the windows up and down. "We missed our exit," said Lance. "Keep your eyes on the road!" Nikki shouted in anguish, digging her hands into her hair and paling noticeably. “Where's that CD you were talking about earlier?" Chelsea asked benignly, digging through the general debris and finally emerging triumphant, clutching the disc. I sighed and sat back, concentrating on the contrast between the fabric of Chelsea's dress and the fabric of mine. Non-believers, let me spell something out for you. There was nothing for us in Livermore. Nothing. Shows rolled around, they passed through. They withered and died and we studied their DNA. The Eagle's Hall, your typical alt-rock all-ages circus freak show: Home of the washed-out culture junkie, hundred dollar punk fashion poseur.
So going to Berkeley, or, actually, going anywhere at all, spelled good times for all of us. Someone started talking about running away. 200 dollars here, 57 there, 30 in the pocket of my jacket (eight hundred thousand in the corner of my mind). Chelsea stopped coughing abruptly, suddenly concerned with this new pathos. "Back there, you know, I sort of feel like I'm just part of someone's disease." She made a violent, jerky gesture with her hand to indicate Livermore. Bad, old, wrecked, destroyed. Over. Lance looked into our eyes in the rear-view mirror, and his own dark pair widened when he saw that we are serious. We wanted to leave. It was finally over, the one-sided love affair between us and the town where our parents had bought houses. "Alright!" Lance cried victoriously, sounding excited, sounding prepared. He licked his lips determinedly. Nikki smiled, Chelsea coughed. I looked out the window, where the scenery was growing darker all the time. We told Livermore stories to wash thoughts of the place permanently out of our psyches. "Remember when Tim got his first car, and George just pried all the hubcaps right off of it? He kept them on the wall in his room for 2 months before Tim even noticed anything." Chelsea said. She smiled at the memory. Lance's face was growing dark, his eyes narrower, troubled. "Do you remember that guy, that horrible, macho guy from ceramics?" he asked quietly. He didn't seem to be expecting an answer; we waited. "Remember how Devin made that ceramic peace sign. Remember," he demanded of us. We remembered. "And that kid, that horrible kid." Lance continued "Justin?" Chelsea offered. "Maybe," Lance nodded. "But remember how he took Devin's peace sign, and smashed it on the wall, and he said-" "Peace is gay," we all finished for him. We sat for what seemed like an impossibly long time in angry, turbulent silence, shedding any guilt we'd had for leaving. But suddenly, Chelsea broke the silence. "Remember when Nico came to town, that one time, from Oakland," she began. I remembered, and a smile started to creep onto my face. "Nico came, and The Sore Thumbs were playing at the Eagle's Hall." "Yeah, The Sore Thumbs! Why didn't we go to that show? I don't remember," Nikki murmured from where her head rested against the window. "Because," Chelsea said. "We found that power outlet at Carnegie Park, remember? George had his stereo, and Travis brought his acoustic guitar, and we just listened to him play all night," she finished happily. "What was he playing," Nikki asked sleepily, the way a little child inquires of its mother about the ending of a story. I gave her a "happily-ever-after." "Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground," I assured her, "and some old Pixies." I was positively shocked to find myself crying at this simple memory. I watched the exit approach, the difference between Berkeley and Livermore, between what we'd thought of as the good and the bad. "Livermore's not great, but..it's...it's.." I wanted to say it, but I was afraid. Saying it would set it in stone. I didn't have to say it. "Almost home," Lance whispered, sadly. He swerved into the exit lane, and we were back in the town where our parents had bought houses. We were home. Article provided by 
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