Old Man Finally Sees Van Neez (the One With the Beach)

Thick hands pressed against his cheeks, his blue-green eyes teary, Mike Zele is gushing. “This is the happiest day since I was born. The happiest,” says the 104-year-old man, a Romanian accent coloring his booming voice.

Wearing a 10-gallon hat, rainbow-striped suspenders and scrungy Nikes, Zele is so wound up, he says, “I could vet my pants.”

Finally, a 65-year mistake has been corrected: Zele is at Venice Beach.

The old man and the sea finally meet.

In 1927, at age 39, Zele moved to Southern California from Montana. Everyone there told him he should immediately go to Venice, “to the enchanting city by the sea.”

So when Zele arrived in downtown Los Angeles, he asked for the streetcar to “ Van Neez , Van Neez ,” he recalls.

He ended up in Van Nuys.

“It was an enchanting city, but there was no sea,” he says of the valley community where he owns a home and tends a 400-square-foot garden of hot peppers, tomatoes, carrots and garlic.

As time passed and Zele aged, he was unable to drive himself or to arrange other transportation to Venice.

But on this day, thanks to members of the American Centenarian Committee--a nonprofit advocacy group for the aged--Zele is finally surveying the boardwalk vista before him: Rollerbladers and jugglers, psychics and bodybuilders. Rappers hip-hopping in Afrocentric colors. A pair of cocker spaniels wearing Sun Blockers. Quasi-nude human mannequins vogue-posed in a store window.

And all that water crashing down on the shore. “I’ve never seen so much water!” he says, shouting. “Not since 1905.”

Zele was a teen-ager then and on the adventure of his life. He left his family, including two sisters, for Hamburg, where he sneaked onto a freighter hauling steel to Baltimore. He survived the eight-day journey on a diet of bread and water, he recalls.

He stayed in Baltimore for awhile, then traveled to New York and Wyoming before eventually settling in Billings, Mont. There, he farmed and, he says, occasionally smoked a peace pipe with Indians who had become his friends.

His fondest memory of that period was July 4, 1910, when his sometime drinking pal William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, “came over with three quarts of Canadian Club whiskey.”

Zele became a naturalized citizen and served in the U. S. Army during World War I. After the war, he returned to Montana, sold his land and came to California.

He bought a house in Van Nuys and 40 acres of land to farm in Balboa, then finally married at 60. Zele also worked various jobs, from picking strawberries for a preacher who paid him 10 cents a box to clearing land--at $15 a day--with a tractor he owned.

“I guess I could have driven myself to Venice many times, but I just never did,” says Zele, who has lived alone since his wife died in 1972 after 24 years of marriage. (Many friends help him now, as well as a woman who cooks and cleans for him.) “It’s just like I could have gotten married two or three or maybe even four more times, but I just never did.

“What the hell,” he says, pounding his cane into the pavement. “I’m in Venice now. That’s what matters.”

Indeed, Zele--who has slipped a VENICE BEACH-emblazoned T-shirt over his own long-sleeved shirt and cleaned his smudgy, thick-lensed eyeglasses--zeroes in on all that surrounds him on a people-packed boardwalk.

“Look at how many people, like cattle,” he says, slowing heading toward a crowd that has formed a circle around a quartet of four young rappers imitating Kris Kross.

Zele has never heard anything quite like it.

“It’s called rap music,” says one escort, Mark Compton.

“Rap music?” Zele asks, somewhat perplexed. “But I don’t see no wrapping paper. What are they wrapping?”

“No, rap music, not wrap, but rap, R-A-P, not W-R-A-P,” Compton explains.

A horde of skateboarders zooms past, and Zele’s memory is rekindled: “When I was a kid I used to make my own skates with a barrel hoop and cut it and put it in the shoe. I was 10, maybe 12 years old in Romania. Sometimes I went ice skating also.”

His stroll is momentarily interrupted by Jungle Joey Long, the boardwalk’s big-bellied balloon blower.

In a Las Vegas lounge lizard voice, he serenades Zele. “Consider yourself at home. Consider yourself one of the family,” Jungle Joey croons while twisting a long, skinny balloon into a spider and attaching it to Zele’s gray-felt cowboy hat. “What’s the secret to your long life, old man?”

Zele sits down in the wheelchair he uses when he tires.

“There are two things you need if you want to live long,” he says, as a small group draws near. “Courage and fear. Because you have to have courage to overcome fear.”

Zele elaborates: “The other day a fellow took $37 from me. It was 1:30 p.m. I had just eaten lunch at my home when this nice man with a good set of clothes on came to my door. He said he was from the bank. Well, he hit me in the left leg and I fell down. He picked my pocketbook and threw it on the floor.”

Zele laid there, unafraid, the robber standing above him.

“What’s to be afraid of?” he asks, adding that he’s lived through destruction, diseases, depressions. “That man was just bigger than I was, not more courageous.”

When the man left, Zele says, he called the police and then tended to his tomatoes: “Life must go on.”

And so it does for Zele, a free spirit who battles the infirmities of failing eyesight and hearing problems with a positive attitude. “I try to keep my mind active,” he says.

And his body alcohol-free. “I’ve been sober for 46 years,” he says proudly, adding that he never misses his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “I’m still no angel,” he says, laughing. “I’ve been a smoker for 50 years and I drink too much coffee.”

As Zele and his group leave the beach, he stops near a bicycle lane along the beach, amazed by the parade of joggers and bicyclists whizzing by.

“I like people--that’s another secret to a long life,” he says. “I have lived and worked and eaten with white, black, red and yellow people. There is no difference. . . . I never met anybody I don’t like. You see how everybody is happy here at Venice Beach?

” That’s how I am. Happy. If I die now, I die happy.”

Zele pauses: “You know, it was good I made a mistake and went to Van Nuys.

“This was worth the wait.”