Illustration by Jay Allen Sanford

It was the late ‘70s and we were living in OB; everything was weird.

This is a story about the summer of ‘79, but it starts a year earlier, circa mid-’78. That’s when I first drove into San Diego. Within minutes of my arrival, I was almost murdered — and yet it was at almost that exact same moment that I knew I wanted to move here permanently. The three of us were heading west because the driver, Jack, was moving for a stint in the Navy, and invited me and my best friend Tommy along for the ride. We had enjoyed a fun trip driving out from our rural, coastal New England hometown, and were just driving into the built-up part of San Diego along the 8, late in the afternoon. I looked over to the left and saw the most magnificent drive-in movie theater screen I’d ever seen. In Connecticut, the harsh winters frowned on the kind of neon wonderlands offered by California’s outdoor theaters. Still, I was already a devoted drive-in theater fan, and so I was beyond thrilled to see the magnificent screen tower.

Illustration by Spain, JAS, SS Crompton

“Oh, that’s one of the lame ones,” Jack shrugged. “Just up the road is the Campus, where they have a giant neon Indian girl spinning a baton!” By that point, I was nearly speechless; my wonderment was such that words failed me. “Yeah,” continued Jack, “I think there’s around 15 drive-ins in San Diego.” Fifteen drive-ins?! Jack had been living in Connecticut for years, a land where the bland and featureless drive-ins were all at least 45 miles apart and closed much of the year. How was it that he had he never told me about this magical drive-in wonderland in the west?

And then the car right next to us, which had been speeding along at around 65 mph, suddenly spun out and ran completely off the road, disappearing in a cloud of gravel and dust. Jack was startled, but kept his hands on the wheel. What the hell happened? We looked back, and it seemed like other cars were slowing down or stopping. Suddenly, there was almost no traffic behind us. When we got to a friend’s house in OB and mentioned the strange incident, we learned that the news had reported the 8 had to be shut down because a sniper had fired at cars from an overpass. A bullet had apparently hit the car right next to us. Sorry to say, I don’t recall any more, I don’t think I ever got more than a second hand report — I don’t even know if anyone was hurt or killed.

Snipers along the highway notwithstanding, once I had dipped my toes into the water at Ocean Beach and tasted my first taco at Roberto’s up the road, I knew where I’d soon be moving. By the summer of 1979, I was a newly transplanted New England teenager living away from home for the first time — in OB. I got a pad a block from the beach on Abbott Street with my best buddy from out east, Tommy Gray. For two nerdy kids fresh outta rural New England, moving to Ocean Beach was like going from an Archie comic to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

When we landed on Abbott, neither of us had a job. Still, we somehow conned the morbidly obese and decidedly un-beachy landlord into letting us move into the one-room efficiency apartment. It was the smallest part of an oft-divided house with several units, and it cost us 175 bucks a month, which seemed so expensive back then. I had arrived with approximately one month’s rent saved, and little more than the contents of two backpacks (mostly stereo equipment, clothes, and a few record albums). We made furniture out of the plentiful (and fanciful!) debris in the alleys of OB, including cardboard boxes that we covered in fabric scavenged from those same alleys. For the deodorant we couldn’t afford, we used old suntan oil bottle remnants that we picked from the beach trash bins. (It works surprisingly well, and you always smell beach-y!) We stocked up on paper plates and plastic utensils from the aforementioned Roberto’s.

Tommy eventually found employment at 10,000 Auto Parts (later Unlimited Auto Parts) on University in North Park, but I had trouble getting hired, mostly because I refused to cut my hair. I applied for jobs up and down Newport and around the neighborhood: dishwasher, sandwich maker, janitor, box office clerk at the Strand. I figure I filled out at least two dozen applications and did a half dozen interviews. I was offered a few gigs, including a job at the Sunshine Company and one at a supermarket. All required cutting my hair. I kept saying, “Thanks, but no thanks,” even as we were approaching starvation. Before long, I was literally living off the grunion that I was scooping off the beach and frying up before scarfing with condiments snatched from local fast food joints. The fish actually tasted pretty good at first; we’d cook them whole and eat the heads and everything. When you’re that hungry, you’ll be surprised what you’ll eat. But when that’s all you eat, for days at a time, mealtime can become a grim affair.

Illustration by Jay Allen Sanford

Other than a few one-off gigs drawing flyers for the nearby Strand Theater (which mainly paid in free movie tix), my only income came from donating plasma, which paid ten bucks a pop. I’d sit there in an easy chair for a while, read a comic book, eat a cookie, and then try to scrub off the glow juice they rubbed on your arm to keep you from donating again for at least 48 hours. Really bad for you, they’d say — you could pass out or die. So they’d hold the blacklight over your arm and check before drawing more liquid gold from your body. But there were two plasma donation sites within a short bus ride, and I had two arms and plenty of long-sleeved shirts, so I’d rub off the marker and try to hit both blood banks in one round trip. Twenty bucks for a day’s “work.” Pretty soon, I was so skinny, hairy, shaky, and full of holes that prospective employers probably thought I was either a junkie or a diabetic Hassid.

Even though we were nearly starving, I have terrifically fond memories of that summer. Playing Supertramp’s Breakfast in America out the window while we sat outside on the porch steps, and having so many people walking by, almost all strangers, and stopping to either tell us how much they liked that album, or to ask who that was we were listening to! I needed only a couple dozen steps to have my feet in the warm beach sand, all the firepit people were generous about passing around their doobies, and we could eat whole meals at Roberto’s for less than the bus fare downtown. So of course, it couldn’t last. We got to spend only one glorious, oh-so-’70s summer in Ocean Beach before a lack of funds forced us out. A lack of funds, and the Squirting Ghost of OB.

One of the most notable, though unattractive, features of our one-room apartment was a large red stain running down the wall near the front window. The landlord said he’d tried to paint over it many times, but, he admitted, “the stain keeps coming back.” We’d been there several weeks before we caught him drunk one night, and he confessed that the red stain had originated when a previous tenant got shot in there. He also said, “Let me know if anything weird happens.” It was the late ‘70s and we were living in OB; everything was weird. But “weird” is insufficient to describe what did happen, which was that Tommy woke up one day splattered in blood! It wasn’t his blood, either. At least, not so far as he could ascertain. There were just weird splashes of red all over the sheet and his nightshirt.

His account: “I heard hissing, then a squirting sound, and went I back to sleep. When I woke up, this stuff was everywhere!” I guess I can’t say for sure what the stuff was, but blood is what it looked like, and blood is what we assumed it to be. We asked the landlord if any pipes ran behind the wall with the stain — maybe a rusty pipe? Nope, he said, no plumbing in front of the house at all. Why do we ask? Well, because something is hissing and squirting on Tommy while he sleeps. That’s when the landlord told us about the Squirting Ghost of OB. It seemed that every tenant since the murder had experienced the same nocturnal emissions. And always the same routine: the hiss, the squirting, the sticky red mess. I can’t remember what he told us about the killing, and I never saw or heard or felt or experienced anything myself other than the annoyance of replacing several sets of sheets with increasingly scratchy thrift store selections. But still. This was a thing that was happening.

Illustration by Jay Allen Sanford

I eventually picked up a book on exorcism from the downtown library (when I was supposed to be at the nearby unemployment office, seeking work), brought it to OB, and read aloud an incantation said to deter mischievous spirits with a tendency toward poltergeistal activity. I was kind of joking around with Tommy, and I certainly didn’t expect anything to happen. But that is exactly what happened. Nothing. Never another hiss or squirt or stain. Poor Tommy was so relieved — and he seemed to enjoy telling that story right up until he passed away a few years ago. Though it took several years before he was able to do so without visibly trembling at the recollection.

We were still practically starving when a brief respite arrived in the form of my ex-girlfriend Lisa Bardwell and her crocheted pocketbook full of spending cash. By the time I left for California, we had pretty much stopped dating, but I still invited her to come out and visit me in Ocean Beach. By that time, she was already dating the singer-guitarist for a band I was briefly in: Eric, a good friend and concert buddy, even after I proved too crappy a bassist for his band. Lisa liked to date. Even though it was the ‘70s, finding out just how many of my hometown neighbors she’d been visiting and, as it turns out, pitting against each other proved to be quite an eyebrow raiser. And the reason I found out was that, Eric or no Eric, she accepted my invitation.

The bliss of it: summer of ‘79, Elvis Costello blaring from the windows along Newport as we walked to Sunset Cliffs to find the various beer-drinking, pot-smoking, lovemaking cubbyholes that others had clearly been using for the same illicit adventures. Sex under the fourth of July fireworks (happy birthday, America!), buying records together at Arcade next to Lucy’s (still got the Sgt. Pepper’s picture disc she bought me, which made me panic at the time, thinking of all the meals I could’ve eaten with that cash!), catching a Firesign Theater movie at the Strand. It was an epic summer — mainly because we weren’t in a relationship. That let her be honest with me in a way that I never thought she could. Once she realized that there was nothing she could say or do that would get me worked up, she wanted to tell me everything.

When we landed on Abbott, neither of us had a job. Still, we somehow conned the morbidly obese and decidedly un-beachy landlord into letting us move into the one-room efficiency apartment.

Photograph by Jay Allen Sanford

As a result, we almost got married. We were in Tijuana, her first time there, just having an amazing time, when one of the street pitchmen told us that we should let him take us to the wedding chapel. They had witnesses and all the U.S. paperwork, a photographer, everything needed for a quickie lifetime commitment. It still startles me to recall how close we came to doing it. She really, really wanted to. Eric’s name never even came up. I genuinely considered it. Being around this new, “honest” Lisa was a lot of fun. But not quite that much fun.

When summer ended and she flew back to Connecticut, I figured she was destined to become a faded photograph, and for the most part, I was right. As I passed by the apartment complex just down Abbott Street, a lovely young ballerina invited me upstairs to smoke a joint. It didn’t take long before I realized just what a good decision I’d made, to not arrive in Ocean Beach with somebody like Lisa at my side instead of Tommy.

Still, I think both Tommy and I were ready to get away from OB by the end. I continued to go unemployed, and Tommy could no longer support the two of us on his Auto Parts salary. He got an apartment in North Park, while I ended up in The Palms, a downtown flophouse hotel at 12th and Island. Over my next 20 years in San Diego, I made it a point to visit OB at least once in a while. Catch Spirit at Winstons, grab a bite at the Sunshine, see if they still have dogeared old copies of Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics racked next to the Freak Brothers at The Black. (It never fails to be a thrill to see your stuff out in the marketplace.)

We were still practically starving when a brief respite arrived in the form of my ex-girlfriend Lisa and her crocheted pocketbook full of spending cash.

Unfortunately, we were so poor in 1979 that I have almost no photos from those days, other than a photobooth shot of me and Lisa from downtown’s Funland on Broadway. She’s wearing a pair of overalls she bought in an OB thrift store that she was still wearing (out) a little over 20 years later, when she finally returned to OB (another story for another day). I was horrified that she had spent money on hillbilly clothes when I didn’t know how I was gonna get my first meal after she boarded the plane back to Connecticut! There were also two photos that the Mexican street vendor took in front of the wedding chapel, I think she paid ten bucks for both (a week’s worth of life-saving Roberto’s!), but she kept the one with both of us.

I do have two photos that show where our place on Abbott Street was circa the mid-’70s: one taken from an old city street survey video, and the other taken by me a few years ago when I returned to San Diego as a guest of Comic Fest. Right after I snapped it, a young college-age woman came out and eyed me and my camera suspiciously. I could tell from the way she was dressed and the way her hair was coiffed that she had far more money than either Tommy or I could have ever dreamed of in 1979.

“I used to rent the same room,” I feebly tried to explain, hoping to not be mistaken for a stalker, “back in the ‘70s.”

“The ‘70s, huh?” she said, looking me up and down, her gaze lingering on the lengthy mop of hair that I still haven’t subjected to an actual cutting for over 30 years. “You look like you’re still living in the ‘70s,” she said with a slight huff, deliberately turning her back to me and walking away toward Newport.

I never got to ask her if she’d ever heard of — or dealt with — the Squirting Ghost. And I couldn’t picture her ever playing a Supertramp album out that window. It really is true, you can’t go home again. And if you do, they’ll just make fun of you.