The Glendera

Let me tell you a story.

I was 16, unemployed, and living in San Diego, California when I got the key to my first apartment.

Built in 1958, the Glendera sat in the shade of a large carrotwood tree on Del Rey Street, nestled against a concrete retaining wall on the west side of the San Diego Freeway, the California Southern Railroad, and Morena Boulevard. With its chipped and peeling blue paint, oxidized by years of salt-brined air coming off the Pacific Ocean, she sat as a corroding memorial of a simpler time 50 years earlier.

“At least it’s by the water,” I lied to myself, as I looked off the balcony at the back of a building, which had a view of a building, which had a view of Mission Bay.

During my days at the Glendera, I loaded up my Sony Walkman with recordings of motivational talks and walked the 2.7 miles to the Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach. There, I filled out job applications at every restaurant, hotel, and coffee shop along the boardwalk. Weaving through the 20 blocks of residential neighborhoods, away from busy Grand Avenue, I daydreamed about realities other than my own.

The man pushing a lawnmower under a large-brim sun hat.

The shirtless, sunbaked angler casting for surfperch and kelp bass off the pier.

The imperious woman, clutching her young daughter, yelling for him to “watch where the hell he swings that thing!”

At night, I fired up a Pantone beige PC that sounded like a turbine engine, and wrote stories and macroed screenplays on Windows 95-era Microsoft Word. Later, I collapsed on a futon, where I drifted off to the rush of the freeway and the rumble of the adjacent railroad tracks. With the whoosh of every passing car, I imagined the vivid, complex worlds they represented, and the epic story arcs of the people in them. Stories in which I, hidden from view, was merely an unknown extra. There, in the Glendera, stories became an escape; a vehicle that took me away to a present more forgiving, more alluring, than my own.

Later that year, I got lucky and had a piece or two published by a couple of community newspapers that didn’t think to ask my age. And just like that, in a real Cameron Crowe-Almost Famous twist of events, I was a published writer.

I remember the Glendera because it was where I realized just how important stories were to me. Then, stories were an escape from life; an act of self-defense. Now, they are a way of life.

Looking back, I wish someone could have told that scared, 16-year-old kid that his magnetic pull to storytelling would help him carve out a path in the world. That he would make a life for himself telling stories he believes in.

As a journalist.

As a PR pro.

As a communications executive.

Last year, 17 years and 65 pounds later, I went back to the Glendera for old time’s sake, while visiting San Diego with my girlfriend. It had a new coat of paint. The carrotwood tree had been cut down.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“So, here’s a story for you,” I began.