Joe was like the punch line to a joke I didn't know how to tell yet. I assumed he was just in it for the barely-legal sex, that I was as much a joke to him as he was to me. "Jeans get 'faded," he told me. "You do not."

Once Joe told me a long-ass story about a guy he'd had to beat up over some obscure beef involving "honor." I must have had a real what-the-fuck look on my face, because Joe started explaining to me how one could never hit a lady, no matter how much she deserved it.

"What is that?" I asked. "Some sort of redneck code of ethics?"

He stared at me hard for a second, inhaled like he was going to say something. I stared back. Then he gave me that scar-creased grin of his and laughed. "You're feisty," he said and pulled me closer to him. "I like my women feisty."

We talked once about being sober. He was lying on his back, fingers stroking my thighs, when suddenly he asked, "What you got, darlin', like a year?"

"Clean time?" He nodded, and I shrugged. "Around there. Little more."

He looked out the window. "I had some time once," he said.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." He was quiet for a minute before he rolled over to face me, tattoos sagging across his belly. "I did a stint in one of those programs they got. You know, instead of juvi."

I didn't ask, but I had a picture of what he meant. Those kidnap-your-kids-and-send-them-to-Utah gigs were still big then, but those were for rich kids. I pictured Joe, young and angry and without any tattoos, in some run-down state program. I pictured the gray walls and cement beds, the sour urinals, and said nothing.

"Didn't stick though," Joe said finally, before taking a sip of his Budweiser and rolling back over.

It went on that way, a little longer than I'd like to admit. Joe remained a joke to me, even when he pulled my hair and pinched me so hard it left marks. Even when he picked me up and threw me across the room; even when he held my underpants up over my head and refused to give them back, so that I had to walk home in that Misfits skirt with my ass damn near hanging out; even when he called drunk and yelled at me for not coming over.

I suppose it would have kept going on that way — me coming over, getting fucked in a fairly satisfying fashion (compared to that of all the willowy artsy boys I'd dated, at least), him sweating all over me. I'd like to say it was me who eventually ended things, but it wasn't. Joe exploded in a drunken rage one afternoon. I cowered and didn't at all live up to the feisty vision we both had of me. After that, he stopped calling. I'd also like to say that I let it end there, but I didn't. I called him more. It was before texting, so I left notes on his doorstep, wedged between the door and the battered frame.

He never responded.

Four years later, I was cruising down Telegraph Ave., running errands with my then-boyfriend, when I saw Joe. He was crouched down, smoking a cigarette, but there was something different about him — a clearness to those blue eyes, skin a little glowy.

He nodded at me. I gave my boyfriend's hand a squeeze before I walked over, alone.

"Hey, Joe."

"Hey, darlin'." And he said it like that, just like I remembered.

"How you been?" he asked.

"Good. You?"

"Been all right." He squinted in the sun. "Hey, I'm sorry about how that all went back then."

I shrugged, then added, "Me too."

"I was... I'm not drinkin' anymore."

"That's really good to hear."

"You still...?"

I nodded. "Yeah."

We were quiet for a moment. "Hey, you think I could buy you a cup a coffee?" he said.

I smiled and shook my head.

Joe nodded at my boyfriend. "That your fella now?"

"Yeah." I looked over at Paul and smiled. I knew what Joe was thinking — "art school fag" — even though Paul was neither.

But that's not what he said. Instead he just looked at me. Our eyes locked for a second, the way they used to, and some kind of wordless energy passed between us — as if to say, here we both still were, still waiting for the punch line, still waiting for the joke to be funny. Then Joe flashed a grin at me, that same scar-creased grin. "Take care of yourself, darlin'," he said with a wink before walking away.

But it doesn't stop there, because I stayed in Oakland, and when you stay in a place, you never really get away from things you've done or the person you've been. Most of a decade later, I was still sober, back to being single, still not sure what to do with myself, covered in tattoos and blending in with all the other hipsters, just like I was one of them. I'd ditched the Misfits skirt, but still felt like a misfit.

One afternoon, my friend Alicia called me. Some friends were shooting a music video in the bar below her apartment — what had once been a legit gangster bar, before the farmers-market crowd chased them out. "Bunch of dudes from that old car club downstairs," Alicia told me. "Didn't you date one of them?"

"Yeah, Joe," I laughed. "Is he there?"

"With a scar above his lip? Yeah, he's down there."

"No shit. Is he drinking?"

"Pssh, they're all shithoused." She let out a wry laugh. "They're all bikers now."

I watched the video when it came out, and sure enough, there was Joe, a little fatter, a little older. No black car, no pomade — no hair at all, actually — and riding a damn chopper. But there was something in the way he leaned back on that bike, the way a snicker seemed to be waiting beneath that creased lip — like there was a punch line to it all, and he knew it. Like he'd known it the whole damn time. Like even now, we weren't so different.

Like even now: the same-ass Joe and the same-ass me.