An Open Letter to No One in Particular…
by Jonathan Slowik
April 10, 2008. It’s been 612 days since I last sat on this beach at night. I wrote a letter that night too, but to a different recipient. Much has transpired in the meantime—not all of it entirely surprising, but I certainly didn’t think that at this point in my life, I would still be trekking to the beach at night, alone.
The Ferris wheel has undergone a makeover since that spring night. Instead of flashing your garden variety carnival lights, it now screams a long, intricate, and positively psychedelic light show from the pier. Amusing, I have to admit. But I’ve always preferred the view to the north—brake lights snaking along the PCH, stretching to the twinkling lights of Malibu, where the Santa Monica Mountains meet a confused sky.
The Los Angeles stratosphere can never really decide what color it wants to be at night, but usually ends up settling on some shade of barely visible pink. In Santa Monica, where Ocean Avenue resorts meet the black nothingness of the Pacific, all bets are off. Pink, black, gray—it’s all of these things and none of them. With diminished competition from sodium vapor lamps, dozens of stars meekly peer from behind the fabric, unsure if they’re invited.
The beach, at night, always seems like a good place to get some questions answered. I think the solitude, the calming, rhythmic crashing of the waves, and the crisp ocean air facilitate the kind of free associations we don’t normally make. Sounds like just the elixir for a night like this, since our minds don’t seem to wander as much as they used to.
Tonight’s ocean, however, is not fielding questions. Rather than that rhythmic crashing I so often find, the scene I encounter is decidedly unfriendly—a constant barrage of waves crest far from the shore and then spit foam for as long as the rising sand will allow. Bathed in moonlight, the menacing water is quite haunting, like something from a spooky scene in a children’s movie. I begin to wonder if a younger me would be frightened or delighted, and realize I’m making some free associations after all.
After a time, an oldish man approaches and stands facing the water, gazing longingly at the waves. It appears to be a good time to call it a night. He seems like he has some questions for the ocean, and perhaps he will find it more receptive than me. I’m content to trudge back across the cold sand, blanket in hand, no conclusions made—except that, improbably, it’s a beautiful night, and we should do this again sometime.
photo originally published here
Angel’s Flight Radio: Salty Dogs and Rusty Nails…
by: Cashew Harding
Rarely does one think of a sailors life-style when one thinks of Los Angeles. It isn’t ingrained in the overall civic culture like, say San Francisco or Baltimore.
But under the ultra white-hot flash of the media empire that is LA, floats the busiest port in America. The Wilmington/San Pedro/Long Beach harbors bring in commercial fleets all day and night from Asia that are carried up the Harbor Freeway by trucks to the hub of downtown LA, and sent scattering across the country via wheels or wings.
…but those urban docks have a sterling silver cousin up on the Westside, Marina Del Rey, and I spent a few years living on my sailboat and mixing with the live-aboard community of salty dogs and rusty nails that call it home. While MDR is more known for condominiums and celebrity-owned yachts, there is a huge amount of dumpy boats and dilapidated vessels that thousands of unique characters spend their days drinking their government checks away.
I guess I could have been one myself, but I always felt too young and wet behind the ears….at least compared to Beau, the Irish pirate who literally had a peg leg. Or Dusty, the old school South Bay surfer with Tourettes whose PCP-inspired epithets echoed across the quiet docks in the middle of the night. There was Rob, the tough Jim Morrison-obsessed OG cholo who made his way from Pico-Union to skate the scene in Dogtown the next street over.
There are more, but Ill throw a couple character studies of the two coke dealers on my dock: Jason and Taylor.
Taylor came out of nowhere and moved in on the 32’ sailboat bowside to mine and was immediate trouble. He was straight up Venice Beach white trash and I didn’t like him. He was always nosy, where as I have a side of me that likes to be left alone in my place of residence. Living on a boat gives you the solitude to read and create and I did a lot of that, but Taylor came around almost every hour knocking on my hatch, asking ‘for a light’ or to sing a Nirvana song, or something.
One day after being gone for a week, Taylor all of a sudden came back with a huge bloody bandage on the back of his thigh. His story was believable at first: He said he got it while he was away in Hawaii by falling asleep on the beach after surfing. Apparently he scraped his thigh on coral leaving flesh exposed and as he slept, a mosquito or a critter of some kind crept in and laid some larvae under his skin. Seemed believable to me until a couple days later he took the bandage off and the injury was the size of a golf ball with a tear in the middle, red and frayed. A fuckin’ gunshot wound!
There was a round-the-clock cycle of his customers coming around and neither I, nor my neighbors cared for it. Broken-toothed stoners, underage Westside gangsters, and just bad junkies coming around. They stayed up all night, high on meth and made my early mornings miserable. They scared off a girlfriend of mine once by bringing an aggressive pitbull who didn’t like her on the docks at 3am, waking everybody up in the process. This was the last straw for me. But for the dock residents, tt wasn’t until an inboard engine was stolen off a handicapped live-aboards boat while he was in the hospital that we all banded together.
Ryan, my starboard neighbor, was an underwater repairman for Paramount Studios whose own terrier was being bullied by that same pitbull. One day while Taylor was away, he drilled eight holes into the hull of his boat and within hours it sunk and was being dragged out by the coast guard. There was a warrant out for Taylor, so when he came home not only did he find his home being towed away, but several LAPD officers waiting to take him out.
Jason was a different story.
Tall, overweight, Republican, and a total sweetheart. He moved in on our strip after the whole Taylor debacle and was waaaay more low-profile. He enamored everyone with his generous behavior and was immediately well-taken by the dock.
For instance, I had come back from my wedding in Costa Rica and my wife and I decided to have the LA reception on my boat, though I no longer lived there. He felt so bad about being out of the loop in my personal affairs, he rented a high-powered watercraft cleaner to shine up my boat for the party and assisted in everything, from handing out hors’d oeuvres to helping the elderly guests up the dock ramp. Charmed our families, the whole bit. Then, when it was time for the kids to play in the evening, he busted out with his primo Columbian cocaine and set it up on my table. And I don’t mean like a taste for everyone. I mean, like Scarface. A huge pile and railed up lines the size of Brazilian caterpillars!
Several months later, we got a horrible phone call from Rob, the Doors vato, who told me Jason was found dead in his boat. An overdose. The boy was just too big to be messin’ with that much toot. Huge loss. Big heart.
As far as waterfront property in LA, people think Santa Monica, Malibu, Pac Pal, whatever. But the boat lifestyle in Marina Del Rey is easily the most colorful and vibrant. Regardless of the portrayals I just carried out, it can be the quietest corner of the city. A well-kept secret of low-rent and spectacular So-Cal living. My sailboat, the SS Nipple, still remains my Westside getaway. Where I can be alone and daydream, or I can bring my family and let it all out on a sunny afternoon.