Corona is the beer that beer snobs love to hate. Light and sweet, it's the staple food of frat boys and lightweights all over the US. Guinness took a swipe at Corona a few years back with an ad campaign that read, “Real beers don't need limes.” I think the Irish can't stand stand the thought of a beer that's not bitter.
I was introduced to Corona by my Mexican friends in Indianapolis. Their refrigerators only ever had three drinks-jamaica, Gatorade, and Corona. Between shots of tequila, they showed me the right way to put a lime in a bottle of beer: shove the lime wedge all the way into the bottle and put your thumb over the top. Turn the bottle upside down and wait until the lime floats up to the bottom of the bottle, then turn it upright and let the lime float back. Keep your thumb on the top until the fizz dies down, and enjoy. It's the only way to distribute the lime juice evenly in the beer.
Now Corona is my favorite drink. To hell with the beer snobs; I'll trade a keg of Guinness for a bottle of Corona any day. In San Diego, when I was thirsty for a beer, I'd walk down the street and drink Coronas at Pacific Shores.
Pacific Shores is a dive bar about a mile from my house. It's cozy, crowded and filled with cool people. A curved black bar filled with dollar beers and two-dollar shots runs along one long wall, and diner-style booths fill the other side. The walls are covered with cheesy blacklight murals of starfish and shipwrecks and mermaids coming out of giant clams. It's dimly lit by blue neon tubes over the booths and Christmas lights strung up over the bar, and a jukebox in the back plays a mix of punk, ska, and classic rock. Sometimes a favorite song comes on, and half the bar drunkenly sings along. One of my best-and haziest-memories is of standing in Pac Shores with a Corona in each hand in the middle of a pack of drunk hipsters shouting, “Black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac!” It's stupid and it's only funny if you were there, but it's how we build community on Newport.
Newport Avenue is the main drag in OB. It runs from Santa Monica Avenue right down to the beach, and it's not unusual to see surfers dressed only in wetsuits carry their boards from the shore right up to a local bar. Newport has a few kitschy souvenir shops for the tourists, but mostly it's a row of inexpensive bars and restaurants made for the surfers, hippies, bikers and punks who make their home here.
Rumor has it that most of the shops on Newport are owned by a family of antique dealers. That would explain all the antique malls. For every head shop or dive bar, there's an antique store right next to it. Sometimes you see an elderly couple shopping for Depression glass step around a pair of Diablos bikers downing beers in the morning. Every time a business closes on Newport, an antique shop opens in its place. It's sad, but it gives the neighborhood some interesting interior decoration. If you want to get high under a poster of Jimi Hendrix on an 80-year-old Persian rug beside a Tiffany lamp with a blacklight bulb, you can find everything you need on Newport, the main strip in Ocean Beach.
Ocean Beach-the little beach town in the middle of a big urban city. Locals call it OB, but they shorten every name. Los Angeles becomes LA, San Diego becomes SD, Tijuana becomes TJ, and Ocean Beach becomes OB. Sometimes you even hear a local call himself an “oh-beachian” with tongue firmly in cheek.
It's the decadent bohemian side of the city, the only liberal part of a very conservative town. They opened an organic foods collective here two years ago, and they even held a street protest when somebody opened a Starbucks on Newport Avenue. Fliers posted at the collective advertise everything from militant environmentalism to charity runs for AIDS. There are half a dozen surf shops, a Wednesday farmer's market, and countless stores selling “tobacco accessories.” A popular joke here is, there's so much weed in Ocean Beach, the Boy Scouts get merit badges in Hydroponics.
The waves here aren't as good as some other spots, but the surfers are always in the water. A third of the waterfront is designated “Dog Beach,” where locals can let their pooches run leash-free. The rest of the beach is packed with tourists on Summer days and lit with bonfires at night. Sometimes it's hard to find a place to sit, but on winter mornings you can take your board and your wetsuit down to the ocean and have the whole beach to yourself.
The end of the beach has a pier that goes nearly a mile out to sea. There's a cafe at the end of the pier, where it's fun to dine during big-wave days in the winter. The waves shake the pier violently and splash against the cafe windows. Newport Avenue starts a block away from the pier. It runs down to Sunset Cliff Boulevard. That road in turn goes along some steep cliffs that are indeed the best place to watch the sunset. There's good surfing there, too.
If I ramble on about OB, it's because it used to be my home. I lived there with two roommates in a one-story house on Long Branch Avenue. It was a cheaply built cinder-block building painted a horrible shade of pink, but it was five blocks from the beach, so it was valued at almost half a million dollars. A third of my take-home pay went to rent, but it was worth it to hear the rumble of the ocean from my back yard. I raised a vegetable garden in that yard, a holdover from my midwestern upbringing. When I planted it, my roommate called me a hick. When I harvested it, his girlfriend ate all my cherry tomatoes. I kept my surfboard in my bedroom, and so the carpet always had a mix of sand and surf wax in the fibers. My friends thought it was gross, but I liked keeping the smell of the ocean in my room.
The owner sold the house after I moved out. Someone else is living there now. They're probably pissed that they had to replace the carpet and plant new grass where the garden used to be. But I have fond memories of coming home to that house-coming back from the garden shop with packets of new seeds for planting, walking back from the beach with my surfboard under my arm and seaweed in my hair, stumbling back from Pac Shores waiting to pass out on the couch. That's OB, the decadent bohemian side of San Diego.
And San Diego? Well, if you don't know it already, San Diego is the finest city in the world.
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