at the gas station along the way to buy some condoms.
In the movies, this scene is always full of anxiety. The main character isn’t sure which size or brand to get. He’s worried that someone from his mother’s church group might see him. Hopefully he has enough money. None of those were my issue. My problem was the stoner clerk behind the register.
“Fuck yeah, man. You getting some?” he said as I dropped the box of condoms on the counter. “I like it. Hey man, didn’t we go to high school together?”
Fucking Santa Barbara. Everyone knows each other. The city is eighty square miles and has more than 80,000 residents, but late on a Saturday night when you’re trying to get your fuck on, you’d think this place was Casterly Rock and I was Jaime Lannister.
“Cool, man, probably. Nice to see you. How much do I owe you?”
He peered out the window to get a look at Anna in the front seat of my car. “Oh shit! Are you fucking her tonight?”
“HOW MUCH ARE THE FUCKING CONDOMS?!”
I’d had enough of this shit. It was time to take control of the situation. I hastily opened my wallet, threw down a ten-dollar bill, and bolted out of there. Correct change was the least of my concerns at that point.
Along the PCH, there are a bunch of places to park by the beach, and at night they are virtually empty except for a stray camper or two that belong to surf bums and road-tripping retirees. I drove for a couple of miles until I found a spot that felt isolated enough and pulled in. I parked the car and fumbled with the radio. Anna grabbed my hand to stop me on the first station without static. It could have been Mexican ranchera music full of accordions and she would not have cared. This was the first moment I really paused to take a good look at Anna. She was still blond and five-foot-seven like I remembered, but she was also impressively fit and weirdly confident. There was no trace of the petty high school insecurities. She knew what she wanted.
She was not trying to get to know me or rekindle an old flame. She had been an ice princess toward me in high school. There was no flame to speak of. What she saw in me was not a future life partner but something much more elemental than that: She saw a fucking man.
That house party we’d just come from was full of boys. It wasn’t their fault. They’d all graduated, most of them had stuck around Santa Barbara, some had maybe started college or were taking classes somewhere, others had bullshit jobs doing this or that, but none of them had actually done anything yet. I’ve gotten to know a bunch of beautiful women over the years that reminded me of Anna in various ways—I eventually married one—and the stories they all tell from this period in their lives are riddled with frustration from having to deal with idiot guys—with go-nowhere boys.
When Anna decided she wanted to hook up and she looked at me among all those other guys, what she saw was a dick dispenser attached to a returning war hero and a hardcore motherfucker in his prime. In reality, of course, nothing could have been further from the truth—I spent more of my first deployment cleaning shit out of toilets than I did pulling the trigger of my gun—but when the hottest girl you’ve laid eyes on in the last eighteen months is convinced you’re Jason Bourne, you don’t pretend to be Jason Alexander.
That night and into the early morning, we used every single condom in the box. Before I took her home, somewhere around 6 A.M., as the sun began to rise over the mountains behind us, I looked at this girl and thought about how different my life had become. The skinny emo geek everyone remembered from barely more than a year earlier was nowhere to be found. In his place sat a motivated, chisel-jawed Army Ranger with a boatload of confidence in his gut, an unfamiliar degree of comfort in his own skin, and twenty more pounds of muscle on his frame. Everything I could have ever envisioned about being in the military was coming true, and I still had nine more days of block leave to go through.
* * *
—
The next night, I went to another house party and hung out with the