Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

A Montana Redneck Crawls Through Venice Beach

By Bob Wire, 9-27-10

	Illegal Aliens, Your Name On a Grain of Rice, and the Magician from 'Couples Retreat.' This is what you do with your MFA. (photo by Bob Wire)

Ich bin ein Californian. Seriously. Although my ancestors carved out a gnarly little pioneer home in Western Montana five generations ago, I was born in the city of Orange, five miles from Disneyland. I don’t remember much about that day, but it has been decades since I spent any significant time in Southern California.

So when I flew down there last week for a couple of days of research for my novel, I was prepared to be slapped full across the face with the big suntanned hand of culture shock. And then cursed and insulted in Spanish. Like a lot of Missoulians, I do make the occasional trip to Seattle or Denver or some other city big enough to have a football team or local newscasts that don’t look like college Homecoming skits. But Los Angeles, man, that is the country’s biggest slab of crazy. I mean, Mel Gibson AND Gary Busey live there. Fortunately, my activities would be constrained to the Venice area, between Santa Monica and Marina del Rey. How clever of me to choose that as one of my locations over, say, Detroit. Nyuk nyuk.

Thankfully, Allegiant Airlines offers cheap flights to LAX, although they fly only twice a week. Allegiant specializes in delivering us poor cold-weather schmoes to sunny meccas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and L.A. Flights can be as cheap as $20.00 each way, if you remembered to book during the first Clinton term. Also, few amenities are available, none of them for free. You want a can of Coke? Two dollars. You want a seat cushion that’s a real flotation device, not a sack of shredded boarding passes? Ten bucks. There is no first class, and the bathroom consists of an empty milk jug passed up and down the aisle. But they sell liquor. Lots of liquor. I saw plenty of people hammering down triple vodkas on our 9:30 A.M. flight. Must be pitching a movie script.

Two full days in Venice is hardly enough to scratch the surface, but enough to make you want to wash your hands after you do. The storyline of my novel includes crime, sex, music and rock ‘n roll history. I found plenty of that in Venice, sometimes all in the same person sitting on the adjacent barstool. I was staying with my friend, Mike, in his downtown apartment. It took three different freeways to get me to Venice and back each day, but traffic really wasn’t much of an issue. With four million people living in the city, it’s basically rush hour all day long. I had my coffee, my K-EARTH 101 oldies on the radio, and beautiful fall sunshine to help pass the time. No cell phone convos, though, that’s illegal while you’re driving. So I had to text.

I’d done a ton of research on the internet before I left, so I was armed with a list of sites to investigate. At one spot, a dive on the beach called Hinano Café (it reminded me of a West Coast Mo Club), a middle-aged Hispanic gentleman with narrow rimmed glasses and a sleek gray brush cut gave me the lowdown on Venice Beach and its long-running freak show. “You don’t have to be open about your own lifestyle, or even tolerant, necessarily. You just have to be not afraid.” That turned out to be spot-on advice, as I waded through the crowds on the world-famous Boardwalk. I talked with dozens of locals, some for over an hour, about different facets of the Venice lifestyle. In Roosterfish, a gay bar on Abbot-Kinney Blvd, the small knot of happy hour regulars were talking about the woman who’d recently won an upset victory in the primary in Delaware. She’s crazy, said one guy. She is stupid and doesn’t have a clue, said another. Backed by Sarah Palin, said a third. They fell silent as they tried to conjure her name.

“Christine O’Donnell,” I piped up from my little table off to the side. I had my notebook open in front of me, and had been describing all the giant homoerotic paintings on the wall. They made me feel somehow inadequate and, uh, normally colored.

The bunch turned as one and looked at me. “What are you writing?” asked one guy. “Are you taking notes?”

Another one pointed at me from his barstool and said accusingly, “Are you writing for TV?” He snarled the last word like he was spitting out something disgusting. I assured them that I was just a fly on the wall, and wasn’t writing a teleplay for Two and a Half Men Plus Ten. I finished my Cosmo and left.

By and large the natives were friendly, and eager to share their knowledge of the area. A few of them said they should appear as characters in the book, and one guy even insisted on playing himself in the movie version. I told him I’d see what I could do.

I did allow myself about an hour on Friday to lie on the beach and just relax, without taking notes or photos, or poring over my Thomas Street Guide. I just walked through the surf for a bit, then stretched out on my souvenir blanket. The scenery was idyllic, the beach not that crowded. I heard the music and cacophony drifting across the sand from the Boardwalk, and watched bikini-clad girls stroll by while wet-suited surfers took turns catching some meager waves. And yes, Barb, I used sunscreen.

I rented a fat-tired beach bike for an hour, to take one last trip up and down the length of Venice Beach. I cruised up to the north end and took a photo of the amusement pier, with the Santa Monica mountains in the background, echoing the shape of the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster. The I turned around and went back to the rental shack. The guy checked me in and told me I still had fifteen minutes left.

“My ass tells me I’m done,” I said.

Then it was time to pack it up. I walked to the end of the quarter-mile long Venice Pier and stood for awhile among the dozens of fishermen, just taking it all in. I could see the panorama of Venice Beach spread before me, from Santa Monica up north, all the to Marina del Rey to the south. I’d covered every foot of the beach in two days, wandered for miles through the neighborhoods and canals, taken half a notebook full of notes and hundreds of photos.

I watched as jets roared skyward out of nearby LAX like fireballs out of a roman candle. I’d be on one of them soon enough, but I’d found everything I need, plus a whole lot more. It had been a whirlwind couple of days, but I felt from the moment I’d set foot in Venice that I belonged. My dusty California roots and my affinity for the Beat artists of the fifties are what drew me there in the first place, and I wasn’t disappointed in what I’d found. Funky, diverse, art-drenched, sprawling yet compact, Venice is like Los Angeles’ most colorful tattoo.

[Bob Wire’s column appears weekly at NewWest.net/BobWire. Sometimes more, if he’s really pissed.]

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