Over the just-finished weekend Tatyana and I stayed with Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling and his partner, Dan. They live in an elegant, Spanish-styled, single-story home (brick adobe exterior, stressed clay roof tiles) in a gated Goleta community. On Sunday Dan’s son Alex dropped by and we all went for brunch at the Bacara Resort & Spa, about a mile to the west. During that meal and for the rest of the day we were a fucking gang of five — a posse.

We ate like a posse. We travelled in the same car like a posse. We went to a local Best Buy so I could buy a computer charger, and we all strolled around like the Jets from West Side Story. We walked down to the beach like a posse. We watched Game of Thrones like a posse. At 7 pm we went back to the Bacara for dinner and chowed down like a posse — chuckling, joking, half-owning the room. When one of the Bacara staffers came up to say hello, Roger gestured in our direction and explained to the guy in a soft-spoken, put-on way, “This is my posse.”

I hadn’t hung with a posse since 11th grade. For years I’ve been putting down posses (my animus started with Leonardo DiCaprio‘s pussy posse in the late ’90s) for what seemed like a kind of arrogant, entitled swagger. My mantra had been “be a man and walk alone or with your girlfriend…only immature schmucks walk around in a wolf pack of five or six.” Now I feel differently. It’s nice to hang with a posse. It makes you feel safe and secure and relaxed. They’ve got your back and you’ve got theirs.

“When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day…when you’re a Jet, if the shit hits the fan you got brothers around, you’re a family man!”