Life at the Edge of the Sea

Now that the election is over and everything and everyone I voted for lost, it’s time once more to turn our attention to matters of a less trying nature, namely racial hatred and cultural intolerance.

Today’s topic concerns efforts by a number of people in Malibu to rid the quasi-city of those contemptible individuals who hang around the beach all day, hoot at women, get drunk, fight and urinate in public.

Not the surfers, silly, the Mexicans.

As you know, Malibu has never been a friend of the dispossessed, with the possible exception of a bum named Joe, who lived in a clump of oleander bushes off Pacific Coast Highway.

He wandered into town one day, and those whose contributions to humanity are limited to what they can legally deduct suddenly found themselves with a homeless person of their own.

It was as though God, in a show of grace, had sent Malibu a golden bum to ease its collective conscience.

While nobody offered to take Joe home with them, they did feed him Fritos and grapes, and often stood upwind offering moral support.

When he died recently, a plaque was erected in his honor, and many a tear was shed over cocktails and pate de foie gras.

That same altruistic spirit seemed to prevail when a hiring center for Latino day workers was established at Zuma Beach six months ago.

Everyone turned out for the dedication, including Heaven’s own messenger of social atonement, Martin Sheen. Not since the Alamo have Mexicans in America been accorded such attention.

But then something went wrong.

Neighbors of the hiring center began to complain of the aforementioned public outrages as an infringement on privileges normally reserved for those with hair as blonde as driftwood and eyes as blue as the sea.

Very few seemed to have actually witnessed the outrages by the workers, but those few were good enough for the county.

With trigger fingers tensed on zoning ordinances 22.40.190 and 22.60.330, the Department of Regional Planning informed the Department of Beaches and Harbors that the hiring center was illegal and had to go.

Specifically, it was given 30 days to pack its Mexicans and get out.

That would put its departure on the Thanksgiving weekend, when we traditionally share our bounty with those less fortunate, as long as they eat it in a downtown mission and not on a Malibu beach.

When the order to vacate came down, there was stunned silence among those whose efforts had created the center in the first place, including the man in charge of the Malibu sheriff’s station, Capt. Don Mauro.

Mauro is that rare, intelligent breed of cop who understands the necessity of establishing social order through means other than cuffing and booking.

He wanted the hiring center to succeed for everyone’s benefit and was delighted to see it was working.

A growing number of Latinos were gathering there to wait for jobs under a strictly regulated system of hiring that was increasingly attracting those who wanted to hire them.

“We started the center with the belief that a greater good was being served,” Mauro said. “But now we’re in violation, and I’m hired to enforce the law. We tried and failed. The end.”

I’ve been hiring day laborers for years to do the kind of work around the yard us lighter-skinned Hispanics no longer feel a genetic tug to engage in.

When my wife says there are weeds to be pulled and wonders if there’s a Mexican available to pull them, I hustle on down to where the workers are.

It’s either them or me, and I won’t work for $5 an hour and lunch anymore.

Finding the right person for the job is always an intimidating experience. Fifty of them surround the car, and a few try to climb in the window.

The Malibu center offers a good, if not perfect, solution, and complaints based on scatology ought not to shut it down.

One woman I talked with insisted public urination wasn’t the major problem.

“They camp and cook in the mountains,” she said. “One of these days, they’ll burn us down!”

“How do you know they cook in the mountains?”

“My God, man,” she said indignantly, “I can smell the chili!”

Mauro said no one ever reported to him that day workers were cooking in the mountains. He suspects they didn’t report it, because if the problem were solved, there wouldn’t be anything to complain about.

But it doesn’t matter now, I guess. Adios to the hiring center and gracias to those who tried.

I just hope someday Malibu finds a Mexican who, like Joe, will live and die under an oleander bush without offending anyone’s sensitivities. One is all it takes to ease the conscience of a community.