Malibu’s eternal happy hour

WE’RE IN Malibu for a week, the sort of place butterflies go to retire -- a fairy tale of tonic-water seascapes and lots of remade Cinderellas, many of them on their second or third marriages.

Yes, we’re happily-everaftering in this Camelot by the sea. Yesterday, the kids and I built a sand castle, then sold it for a million seven. It was a spec sand castle, with high ceilings, seven bedrooms and motor courts, front and back. We worked on it for about two hours, then arranged a 30-day escrow with some TV exec. What an idiot. The kitchen isn’t even custom.

Anyway, things are great here in The Bu. It seems like a good place to become an alcoholic, if you ask me. There are no clocks, and happy hour starts at some vague period between noon and 4 p.m., take your pick. The natives are almost aggressively friendly, like strippers at a convention of lonely dentists. I think they think we have money.

“I found a great peacoat,” says the little girl.

“How much?”

“Um, $489,” she says.

Jeesh, at that price, why not buy two? Or you could get the pea pants to go with it. And a pea hat.

“I’ve had the same peacoat for 20 years,” her mother says.

“Can I have it?”

“Sure.”

“Can I get it tailored?” the little girl asks.

Our kids didn’t have many values to begin with. Now, after four days in Malibu, they have made a game of counting the Range Rovers they see (47!), and looking everywhere in hopes of spotting a celebrity.

Apparently, most of those have been locked up, but we did see one guy who looked a lot like Tom Hanks, if Tom Hanks didn’t have much of a chin. Then there was this mail carrier who looked remarkably like Cher, except she was about 5 feet tall and wore a small soul patch below her lower lip. It’s rustic here. People shave at their own convenience.

“Look, Pamela Anderson!” I screamed at the local market, where she and her kids have been spotted in the past, arguing over ice cream. Turned out it wasn’t her.

“Look, Citizen Kane!” I said at the Arco station one day, and nobody got it, not even my wife. I blame the alcohol. They blame me.

Did I mention that we’re house-sitting for perfect strangers, some friends of a friend? It’s sort of like being in an Alice Sebold novel, trying to figure out the family from the photos on the fridge or the books on the shelves. It’s impossible not to draw some conclusions. The parents seemed happier when the kids were young. Or maybe they were just smiley-insane, like us -- driven loopy by the insatiable demands of small children.

I have the toddler on my lap right now, practicing his “t” sounds with such abandon that he’s threatening to spit out his own teeth.

The other day, he stood up in my lap and accidentally pinched my thigh between his shoe and the chair, causing the kind of pain I haven’t experienced since I saw my wife in labor, a pain I’ll not soon forget.

“Yowwwwwww!” I yelped.

“You OK, Daddy?” he asked.

Sure, I’ll be fine after the skin graft takes. He’s 30 pounds of pain, this kid. Hey, doc, how about an epidural?

On evenings out, the kid will wander into a place as if on his fifth martini, my little Mel Gibson, throwing an arm around strangers and acting vaguely Australian. He has no indoor voice, just an outdoor voice. Even in a noisy saloon, he is always being shush-Shush-SHUSHED! for being too boisterous.

“You think his hearing’s OK?” I ask his mother at one point.

“Yeah,” she says. “He’s just drunk.”

Who isn’t these days? It’s early August and the beach is warm and the drinks keep coming. Time flies when you’re having sun.

I spend significant amounts of my day clearing sand from the little guy’s various openings and trying to keep him away from the cops. Like a lot of 3-year-olds, he is deliciously subversive. To him, everyone is an authority figure. Even me.

“Hey, wanna build another sand castle?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“What kind?” asks the little girl.

“English Tudor,” I say.

“No,” says the toddler.

“We could carve it into condos,” I say.

“I want a condo!” the toddler yells.

Fortunately, we own Malibu.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com, or at myspace.com/chris erskine.