L.A. STORIES : Just When He Thought He’d Seen Everything

Everybody in the world strolls on the Venice Boardwalk. I now have conclusive evidence. I’ve seen the last person I ever expected to see down there. . . .

Of course, you always see the last people you expect to see anywhere on the Venice Boardwalk. That’s half the charm. You don’t find a lady masseuse draped in gossamer white, twirling in Hoodoo communion with the morning sun--calling herself “the Butterfly of Venice”--at the Corbin Bowl in Tarzana. Passersby do not exhort Perry, the “Prime Minister of Limbo” and broken-bottle walker to, as he puts it, “drive my ass through the glass” on Rodeo Drive.

But the gentleman I encountered there some weeks ago is not the sort you expect to find amid the roller hockey players, Tarot readers, Peruvian Indian bands, and those guys who finger-paint Hawaiian sunsets on cheap china. Think about it--who is the last person you’d expect to cross paths with at the Venice seashore? Your mother? Yasser Arafat? Luciano Pavarotti?

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Humans are, after all, irresistibly drawn to land’s end. There’s the obvious beauty of it, and then there’s that mysterious, edge-of-the-world, apocalyptic lure. Ken Kesey said something about feeling more secure at the continent’s brink--that if you stray too far inland you might wind up a lawyer in Cleveland, or something.

Maybe he’s right. The fellow I saw there had wandered very far inland, in fact, and did wind up like a lawyer in Cleveland--a real big lawyer in a real big Cleveland.

Please understand that I’ve been experiencing surprises on Venice walks for a long time--since the Beatles were still together and men had not yet golfed on the moon. (For younger readers, that’s your hazy pre-birth era that included Christ and World War II.) In other words, I’m fairly jaded.

My very first jaunt there was marked by an unusual encounter. I had wandered off the Boardwalk, far under the endless knock-kneed stilts propping up the wreckage of Pacific Ocean Park. At one point, desperate for a restroom, I paused to lift my leg, as it were, on one of the pilings. There was no one around--I thought.

“Hey man!” came a voice from above, “you holdin’ anything?”

Some years later, I determined that this was a hippie phrase meaning “do you have drugs?” At the time, I was an unworldly 15. I had no idea why the longhaired gnome--who was living, along with a fair number of friends, in platforms under the POP remains--asked this question. Obviously, I was holding something. I answered “Yeah!” and moved quickly away.

Other encounters over the years have been more poetic. Chief among them are my brushes with Marty. He’s a recurrent theme--more like a recurrent grace note--in my life, and I suspect, in the lives of many. Whenever I amble down the jammed Boardwalk, I’ve always got an eye out for Marty.

I met him at Venice High School in the late ‘60s, when we were both kids. Put it this way: Marty was never cursed with enough so-called normality and perception to attend regular school. Perhaps that’s why he liked to stop his beloved, shiny bike on the Venice High lawn at lunchtime, squeeze his Harpo Marx-like horn wildly and laugh like hell. Maybe he was trying to cheer all of us troubled “normal” teenagers up. Anyway, the kids would wave and yell “Hi, Marty!” and then he’d ride away.

Well, Marty still rides his shiny bike around, I’m happy to report, every 20 to 30 walks--as recently as a month or so ago. We are both the owners of serious, middle-aged faces now. Until, that is, I yell, “Hi, Marty!” At which point his eyes crinkle up like they always did, and he smiles like he’s 16.

I expect to stumble into Marty many more times in Venice during the coming years--just as I expect to see “Barry the Lion,” the barrelhouse-style pianist, and “the World’s Greatest Wino” (yelling “help me get drunk!”) and the old, retired Chinese art professor who will invent a Chinese name for you, then write it on paper with a brush-pen. I expect to see those guys with gas masks who spray-paint spectacular, imaginary planet-scapes, and the pro-hemp people, the anti-meat people, the chain-saw juggler, and that fabulous one-man-band sax player (he thumps the bass with his feet). I expect to see the Latest Hippie, as I call him--the bony, bearded troll who perches atop a mobile mountain of rags, strumming a banjo, warbling hillbilly songs. I wish I could still expect to see the late Ted Hawkins there, he of the soulful, sandpapery voice and ancient milk-crate stage, who serenaded Boardwalk shufflers for years and years.

I know I can depend on the Venice Boardwalk to attract these disparate presences--and such exquisite incongruities as this, witnessed one recent Sunday: members of the Dalai Lama’s Tantric choir--the famed Guyto Monks of Tibet, draped in their customary crimson robes--delightedly asking directions from startled strangers, while an elderly gentleman in a nearby wheelchair blasted out “In the Mood” on a clarinet and, a few feet away, a sullen guy in a suit scowled from behind a table bearing the sign, “Anti-Circumcision.”

Sure as Michael Jackson’s spit curls, I can bank on seeing these things--just as I can count on spotting the occasional incognito celebrity; like Tom Hulce or Jane Fonda on a bike, Brian Dennehy in sweats, Joni Mitchell joining a makeshift percussion ensemble (she played a Coke can). But I never, never expected to see a celebrity in whose metaphorical hands my very fate rested. A man who could have driven the Prime Minister of Limbo’s ass through the glass any time he chose. And yours too.

It happened just north of the main stretch of the Boardwalk--right near where that guy once asked if I was “holdin’ anything.” It was early and foggy; only a few cyclists and joggers were out. What appeared to be a family on a leisurely morning constitutional approached; no one gave the group a second glance. Except me. There were about five members in this party, all dressed like something out of Eddie Bauer: khaki, flannel, and baseball-type caps. There were two middle-aged guys, a younger woman, and two elderly gents.

I recognized the gent in the center just as they were about to pass. Whoops, I thought--this is an event! Never mind how I might have felt about this fellow’s philosophy--the moment called for some kind of gesture. It was the Hyakutake comet of chance-Venice-meetings, a dazzling convergence not likely to happen again in one’s lifetime. Almost involuntarily, I snapped to a quasi-military attention, saluted, and said:

“Mr. President.”

The target of my greeting ignored me, but the young woman at his side smiled appreciatively. In retrospect, of course, I guess I’m lucky I wasn’t lassoed by the Secret Service.

In any case, Ronald Reagan, looking robust and imposing, continued on his stroll.

Just another face on the Venice Boardwalk.