The Tollway to Happiness

Some things are better left unsaid, and not liking San Diego is among them. Mere admittance to this makes you suspect: You’re an outcast that refuses to give in to the status quo.

I start disliking San Diego at about 500 miles distance---in San Jose, to be exact. That’s when the billboards start: Happiness is calling. San Diego. A little blonde girl is playing in the sand with her pail and shovel. The beach is honey toned and deserted, just like Disneyland and any other place that sells happiness. At least at Disneyland everyone has to pay the price and pretend to be a family unit, while this little girl is left alone on a beach. Mommy may be watching over her from afar, bleary-eyed after finishing off a pitcher of margaritas, but Daddy is off boinking the barmaid and older sis is beyond the rocks, scoring some weed off a surfer. 

There's a respite for several hundred miles. After all, there’s a lot of competition between here and there. Monterey. Pismo. Santa Barbara. Laguna. No use wasting our breath here. But south of San Clemente you’re on that road of no return and the billboard with the little girl on the beach appears again. We can’t see her face, least she remind you of something unpleasant, such as Marcia Brady. She must be Cindy, cute but mute. Sweet thing.

The Interstate passes the gray and gloomy San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant by the sea, idled for the moment because of undue corrosion of the cooling pipes, and then the road itself goes against the terrain---heaving and hoeing over the mesas and canyons like a geriatric rollercoaster. The mountains and the sea sink below a turned down horizon, replaced by Golden Arches and squares that spell out Hell instead of Shell at night.

The alternative is old US 101---often charmed by the surf and jammed by that fact, too. It may be worthwhile in the off season, but not today: Junior Saul has just committed suicide and a crowd is rushing across the boulevard into downtown Oceanside to be near it all.

“Who’s he?” asks my husband.

“A former pro football player,” I reply. A fact I know only because I’ve been listening to the radio closely to avoid an undulating coma.

It’s a diversion, this Day of the Locust event. People are calling in on their cell phones, sobbing out their brushes with fame that decided to extinguish itself. Legoland is passed by unnoticed. I spin the tuning knob and the melodrama is repeated over and over, like the pavement we travel over. Then Junior’s mother made an unseemly, out of control public announcement: "Oh God, why didn’t you take me instead?!"

I press the power button, and in the white noise I wish I was that little girl, alone on the beach and young enough to find happiness in grains of sand.