Zuma Beach, March 1, 8am

Sunday morning, 8am, Zuma Beach. Perhaps it was the time of day, perhaps the time of year...but I don't remember it ever looking more beautiful. Water flat and glassy past the break; coming down the canyon the ocean looked like a lake.


Zuma FOOD sign


Huntington Beach, Feb 2009

This Year's Theme

Every year has a theme, it seems. Last year's was obvious: the election, and with it, inner city blues. This year the theme is likely gonna be the beach.

The rains have finally let up, or at least took a break. Went down to Huntington Beach Saturday am to surf. This is a shot from two years ago, up at Zuma:

1986

1986-ish. Punk was dead, unless you were a rich kid in the OC, in which case I have no idea what it was you were pissed off about. I'd been doing some work with one of those bands. The drummer went to USC. His dad was really rich, he had a hot girlfriend, and a bigwheel truck. The singer was going to Pepperdine. His dad was filthy rich, he girlfriend was super hot, and his truck had even bigger wheels. Were they angry because their girlfriends were too hot, or because their parents were too rich, or maybe because the wheels on their trucks were too big? I coulda helped 'em out with some of that.

Me and my old punk pals were in limbo. We were all involved in the underground, but these were the days of dynasty and Miami Vice. Stuff was happening. MTV was new and it favored us. LA has no shortage of ostentatious displays of wealth. It's all right there and in your face; you can't help but want to grab a chunk of it for your own. If those tacky fuckers can make it, so can we – after all, they are just white trash with money. We were in our mid 20s, and there seemed to be a lot of promise and potential if you had a decent hustle and weren't afraid to tell lies. At the same time we were still a bunch of fucked up punk kids, we were still doing way too many drugs and not exactly living responsible lives, but hey, there was no Hep-C, Aids was still for gays and Haitians…there wasn't yet an awareness of the consequences of our lifestyles...life was still a party.

My days and nights consisted of hanging out at the beach, going to clubs – mostly Rajis, the Scream, White Trash a Gogo, but also the Music Machine, Club Lingerie, The Palomino, the Anti Club…getting drunk, getting loaded, getting laid, 7 days a week, endless summer.

Here's some old shots I just found, from '86, and a typical story from the same year.

Addison asked for a ride down to Long Beach to pick up his car. I'd been out at the Scream the night before and didn't get home until about 5am. The night had been a modest success and I was nauseous with a sour hangover.

He said it wouldn't take long.


Venice Beach

Addison had a beautiful late 50s Thunderbird convertible he'd inherited from his grandmother when she died. Just about everything he owned he'd either inherited from her or had won on a TV game show. Consequently we had a lot of kitchen appliances.

I'd noticed the Thunderbird had been missing for about two months, but never asked. I wondered, too, about the Japanese hair-metal bass guitar that had turned up in the living room right around the time the car disappeared. Nobody in the house played bass.


I think her name is Amy. She was from Yorba Linda, down where they have the Nixon Library. This was in Venice Beach? State? It looks so different now.

Addison explained it all while we drove down to Long Beach. See, his friends had arrived 2 months back from Florida, and everyone knows how much people from Miami like coke, so Addison reckoned he'd use his car as collateral on a coke deal, figuring his Miami friends would buy it from him and he'd turn a nice profit. For some reason the dealer tossed in a Japanese bass guitar.

What Addison didn't figure on was that all the coke in LA probably came from Miami in the first place, where it was cheaper, and his buddies brought their own supply hoping to sell some to him. Between them, they ended up with way more coke than anyone had intended or imagined, but they did it all anyhow and everyone had a great time despite nobody turning a profit, and when it was all done Addison had a cheap Japanese bass guitar and the dealer had his grandmother's vintage T-Bird.

It looked as though the T-Bird was history, but Addison managed to score some cash on a record deal for a hair-metal band he was managing, and now we were driving down to the LBC to get his grandma's car back.

We spent a few hours in Long Beach at his step-sister Julie's place. Julie's claim to fame (and to her it really was a claim to fame) was having once been Brett Michaels from Poison's dealer back before Poison made it big on MTV. She still sold drugs on occasion to Brett Michaels, and this, to her, made life worth living.


Addison's sister became our roommate later on. Amy was her friend she was trying to set me up with. This is Julie at either Venice or State.

Julie's supplier was also named Brett. He dealt in quantity, so he was the guy with Addison's car. Julie told us she'd been trying to page him all evening but he hadn't gotten back to her.

We waited around in her tiny bachelorette apartment. She played some Poison records. Some folks came buy looking to cop but she was out. We shared a six-pack. She kept paging Brett.

Addison was getting anxious. Julie suggested we drive down to Irvine and look for the car. She'd seen it down there and was pretty sure she could find it again.

Irvine is not an easy place to find stuff in. It's an entirely artificial, planned community built almost entirely in the mid-to-late 70s. I remember my ex bringing back a brochure about this new city. She wanted to get out of Hollywood and all the newness appealed to her.


At the time this story happened I was "dating" a girl named Liz, from Torrance. Venice Beach.

The guy who built Irvine claims to have modeled it after Atlantis, which seems an odd and probably bad idea since Atlantis is a lost city buried under water someplace. His design consists of a bunch of nearly identical sub-Irvines which all meld into a larger Irvine. Each sub-Irvine has a specific number of churches, a specific number of schools, and a specific number of stores, not to mention a specific number of houses of about 4 specific styles, all evenly spaced. It's very hard if not impossible to tell when you've gone from one sub-Irvine to the next. To make matters worse, the streets are all circular, and have the sort of names popular with prefab cities built in the 70s: Quail Drive, Quail Road, Quail Street, Quail Blvd, Quail Lane, Dove Drive, Dove Road, Dove Street, Dove Blvd, Dove Lane…The point of it all is anonymity through uniformity.

This makes it not an easy city to find anything in.

We drove in circles for hours, up and down identical streets, looking for the T-Bird ("I recognize that house – I think it's just around the corner"), stopping every half an hour or so to page Brett from a payphone. We were the only people on the streets, and had to hide in the shadows near each payphone whenever the cops drove by.

Around 4 in the morning we finally gave up. Julie remained convinced it was just around the corner, but Addison was getting depressed and agitated and my hangover was not something I could deal with much longer.


Some weird 80s dude checking us out in Venice. No doubt there were chicks in the car.

Addison needed something to calm him down. Julie paged a few more people. All she could find was a friend of hers with some pot. We headed back to Long Beach.

Julie's friend came out to the car. She was cute in a sort of hard, thin-lipped, white-trash way. Walmart sexy. She was about 23 years old, hostile, aggressive, and all about sex. She was missing all her teeth.

We didn't have any money. She said she'd give it to us if Addison would let her suck his cock. Addison was spectacularly inept with women and as a consequence hadn't been laid in nearly 2 years. Toothless or not, this was an extraordinary opportunity for him. I was stunned when he got angry and turned her down.

Addison and the toothless girl started screaming at each other. The toothless girl stormed back into her apartment complex. Julie ran after her. After about 10 minutes Julie came back with a bag of pot. She tossed it in Addison's lap. "You owe me," she said.

We dropped Julie back at her pad and drove back to Hollywood, pulling into the driveway just as the sun rose on Monday morning.


Not sure which beach. You won't find these dunes or the grass anymore. There's probably a parking lot there instead.