Everything is expensive in Santa Monica. Everything. A sandwich costs eighteen bucks, a gallon of gas runs a dollar higher than everywhere else at the least. Parking costs two hundred dollars an hour since you’re bound to get a ticket, and they charge your credit card five dollars after you flush a toilet. This is mostly done to keep the riffraff like me from spilling over out of greater Los Angeles, so unless you need some fancy duds and a citation from Santa Monica P.D., keep moving.
I head to north on PCH to get out of the city limits and avoid the tolls. PCH is not a place for civilized folk; a maddening chaos of traffic all heading in one direction toward Malibu, an entire city inhabited almost exclusively by rehab patients and talk show hosts. At the end of Topanga Canyon I find a vacant parcel for my cheap and cheerful motor car to sit while I go to score some mushy, blown out Pacific current. Surfing waves, man. No hip scene in the fall, bub, just aging hippie-types, dirt bags, transients and RV-dwellers.
The usual crew is out. These aren’t surfers; just real-estate agents, pharmacists, architects. They paddle in and catch waves with such ease. You would be forgiven for mistaking them with the real thing. There are no surfers in L.A. They all left for Indonesia after the word got out.
I catch a sweet right hander, taking me away from that crazed mob of pharmacists, just as the sunlight begins to fade. The city lights itself; street lights, halogen headlights, high-rise condos and that psychedelic Ferris Wheel way off in the distance. Despite being in L.A., with endless roads, buildings, cars, traffic, and millions of people pressed in around me, I was way alone.
The temperature drops in the water drops and I catch a wave in, bailing off quickly enough to avoid face-planting into those bastard cobblestones. I trudge across the sand and haul my unwieldy board up the stairs to my parking spot, past a seedy tramp on the sidewalk. He rolls a cigarette and watches as I stuff my car with my waterlogged, sandy gear. As I depart he leans over the hood of my car and mumbles, “Nobody cares about us or anything, man.”
I nod. They really don’t, man.
I don my wetsuit ducking past the freaks and weirdos milling around looking for suckers like me. Covert-ops, baby. Make them work a little to get me. I descend the stairs. Safe entry assured, I paddle out through the turbulence, feeling the cold winds blowing in off the pacific. Topanga, though ride-able most of the time, breaks in about an inch of water over a floor of fist-sized cobblestones. The pollution isn’t bad, compared to say, Three Mile Island.
I catch a sweet right hander, taking me away from that crazed mob of pharmacists, just as the sunlight begins to fade. The city lights itself; street lights, halogen headlights, high-rise condos and that psychedelic Ferris Wheel way off in the distance. Despite being in L.A., with endless roads, buildings, cars, traffic, and millions of people pressed in around me, I was way alone.
I nod. They really don’t, man.