By Will Carless

I wasn’t looking forward to the 4th of July in California. Not at all. I had it pictured as another inane block Party. Hundreds of drunk dudes in baseball caps, lines at all the bars. Drunkenness. Boredom. So as I woke on the morning of the 4th I had no plans. Our apartment had been re-named the ‘refugee camp’ as my room-mates buddies had come in their droves from all over the US to sleep on a couch or a corner of carpet.

The refugees were already drinking. Miller lite and Bud cans and bottles littered the floor and sandals, underwear and chaos permeated the hot morning and I thought ‘fuck it’ and popped a cold Corona. Stepping out into the sunshine I drank the icy brew and looked up at another perfect blue San Diego sky. Who cared what happened? This place was great.

My cell rang at around 11am, it was a cute girl I had picked up at a hookah bar. She was 19. Hot and cool and sweet. She wanted to know what I was doing. But I had no plans, no party, no crazy beach scene to entertain them with, and I stalled, told her I’d call her back and began to call the boys.

I knew my mates had to have something going on, and I wandered down to the sand to check the scene they had going on. I was still a hundred metres from the beach when I heard booming bass and loops spinning into the fair breeze and blowing all over PB. I smiled. The boys had mentioned a DJ.

How to describe the party? Well. Put it this way. It was the best party on Pacific Beach. Period. The set up was just perfect,: palm trees, flags, bath tubs full of beer, a generator, a DJ, speakers, chicks. I randomly knew the DJ and as I walked down to greet the lads he began to spin a tune made popular by the English DJ ‘Mr.Scruff’, his timing was perfect.

I called my girl back. She was down and agreed to meet me at the beach. “How will I find you?” she asked. I held my phone facing the speakers and then said into it “you hear that? Just come to the loudest music. You can’t exactly miss it”

I spent the next hour or so catching up with friends and meeting new ones. Everyone was imbued with a carnival spirit of youth and party, and smiles were hanging off every face I saw. With US/English relations at an all-time high I was welcomed into the crowd as an ally and a comrade. No-one suggested the heavy irony - the 4th of July essentially being all about liberation from the Brits. I mentioned this paradox a couple of times with a shrewd smile but all I got back was shrugs and grins- No-one cared. This was all about being young and happy and free.

PB was rocking. The sun was out, the beers were cold, the young bright things were bumping and grinding to the music or just chilling on one of the couches drinking a beer and taking in the scene. I went for a surf in the warm water for an hour or so until I looked in at the beach to see two of the hottest girls I’d ever seen cruising down to the party tent. It was my chick! I caught one in, stacked my board with the others and greeted the girls with a couple of cold beers.

Half an hour later I was in an inflatable dinghy with the two babes and one of my good mates. The chicks were in string bikinis, I had a beer in each fist. We were lying back in the boat out behind the surf, listening to the DJ’s tunes even right out to sea. That was when it hit me: “Life just doesn’t get better than this.”

And so things continued for the next few hours. The girls were sufficiently impressed by the beach party to hang around all day, and that evening we hit up a mad house party where we drank cold wine from the bottle and danced around the prone forms of passed out revellers. Then it was back home to the refugee camp, where I found two English mates camped out on my front doorstep. A few more beers were consumed in the early hours before I pulled my young princess into the bedroom, away from the chaos and craziness of ‘the 4th’. And so it ended. The perfect end to a perfect day. The boys had done me proud with their awesome party and I had had probably the best 24 hours or so of my life.