A few hours later I was at a wine bar called Kalyra in Santa Barbara that looked like a tiki room. Manisha thought it looked like the Elephant Bar but didn’t want to insult the owner. We opted for a wine tasting and eating basketfuls of their breadsticks. While Trevor poured various wines we guessed where he was from.
Manisha looked at his fleece jacket and said, “I bet he’s from Oregon.”
I listened to his accent and settled on Northern California.
“So are you from Santa Barbara?” I asked.
“No, I’m from Northern California,” he responded.
I smiled widely at Manisha.
There was a private event at 5:45 p.m. and we were technically not supposed to be there anymore but we decided to push our luck and stay. The owner appeared suddenly and he looked like a character out of a novel and I told him so. He had an Australian accent and a layer of a speech impediment on top of that which made him more endearing. He told us how he came to own a winery with his brother and that he once wore a wig as a barrister in England. Manisha asked him all these law questions while I watched decorations being hung for the jewelry show we were crashing. The jewelry designer liked using feathers as materials for earrings and the owner, Martin, joked that it looked like bait for bass fishing.
The next morning I borrowed a maroon bike from a former roommate from Croatia and pedaled all over Santa Barbara for the first time. Manisha and I joked that God wanted us to go bike riding since the sun was out despite the rain from the prior evening. There was a lovely bike path we took and I followed Manisha, watching her extend her right hand to high five the foliage and stand on her bike to touch the branches of trees. I felt like I was in a movie and wished I had a video camera to document our journey. We took turns saying hello and good morning to the cyclists and joggers we encountered and made fun of those who didn’t. “Oh I guess he couldn’t hear us say hello through his thick helmet,” I said. We sang snippets of songs that had the word spring in them and all I could think of was “spring time, la la la la spring time” from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Manisha jumped off her bike as we stood at a pier, reading the signs about prohibited items and activities. “Do you think we are allowed on the pier if we walk our bikes?” she asked me.
I shrugged my shoulders and said, “ask him,” as I pointed to a man driving a state truck.
No one knew officially but said it should be fine. Manisha informed me that UCSB stands for you can steal bikes so we clutched them in our hands against the cold pier air, her tires clicking like crickets. As we walked, we chatted with the fisherman and learned that the best bait are mussels scraped off the side of the pier. One man wearing a sand-colored sweatshirt with the hood tied around his face said he caught a one armed crab but threw it back. I felt sorry for it but he said its arm would grow back with time. At the end of the pier where the wind was the strongest, there was a group of three men, each with long hair and a beer in hand. The one with visible tattoos and golden rings on every finger owned a series of tattoo parlors named Precious Slut.
I said, “I understand the precious part but why slut?”
“That’s my name. It’s on my birth certificate too.”
“Your legal name is Slut? Wow, your mother must have quite a sense of humor. What is your middle name?” I asked.
“Brian,” he responded.
As we walked down the pier, the man who caught the one armed crab said they caught a baby leopard shark but threw it back too.
Manisha was unconvinced. “I bet they made that up.”
“Why would they make that up? We aren’t even wearing any make up.”
“I don’t know, but you can’t believe fishermen. They always say, I caught a fish this big.”
I laughed at her logic and chuckled to myself for being there in the first place.
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