Beachbummin

The weekend has drawn to a close and I find myself in thedowntown Los Angeles library fiddling at the keyboard, my stomach growling, with quite a dilemma on my mind. Two cups of day-old coffee are churning in my belly with sour belts of indigested air adding acidity to the Hawaiian Hazelnut. I need a place to stay. My stay at Toro La Roy's aka Johnny Hren has come to an end, my couchsurfing days with a section eight agoraphobe and former pornstar are over, his landlord put his velcro-sneakered foot downand booted my ass out the door. I went to my storage unit and put a suitcase in storage and with me I kept my guitar ( vintage 1970's epiphone) and a backpack stuffed full of clothes, to compound the direness of my situation I'm flat broke not even a couple of grimy copper coins to my name, but I know I'll get by, I've been In worse situations, I actually slept under a lifeguard station on Santa Monica Beach for 2 weeks in December 2006. That was part of my 3 month stint as a beachbum/vagrant in the Venice/Santa Monica areas. I had met this guy Matt Bernard, who came from a well-off family in Baltimore and he had shunned his life and was chronically depressed. He was supposed to be some big college sports star but he got into cocaine and never went off to school just spiralled into a world of drugs and excess. I met him on the Third Street promenade one night when I had been wandering around aimlessly looking for a way to spend my time and some of the tips I had earned on my last night before getting fired from the Kaiten Revolving Sushi restaurant which is now a Pinkberry, because OSHA gave it a B rating after a sanitary inspection and once you get a B on the promenade you go under. I had been bussing tables and making Wasabi sauce and dishing out tiny portions of ginger and bringing orders to the tables, (a lot more than just bussing, those stingy fucks) I had showed up late a couple times and I don't mean tardy I mean practically a no show, I came in an hour late twice, but I had been sleeping in the park in between the highrise apartments by the tennis courts by station number 26 and that's a half hour walk from the promenade. So I had that job for about two weeks and I don't think I showered once, or maybe I did once at the pier when I found out about it and I was in the food service industry and it was a swanky restaurant and it was the Third Street promenade. Anyway I was killing time, staring at the scurrying shoppers under the awnings and parapets lined with blinking Christmas lights, smoking a cheap hand-rolled cigarette wondering about what I was going to do for money and how morally vacant it was to steal food, when this tweaker named Angel I had met the night before when I was high on rock and whom I had given a bud of high-grade chronic for the amusement he had provided and the general hilarious paranoia that he eyed me with walked by. He recognized me immediately and began stomping up and down barefooted, ranting about the establishment, his mouth caked with spittle and his afroed hair dirty and knotted together was full of sand. A cruiser rolled up. Angel looked at me and with concern and said the "block is hot and I'm out" he hoisted his pants up by the beltloops and scampered down the street on his bare and blistered feet. Wondering what to do next I glanced over at the bus stop and remembered I had wanted to ask Angel where to get some cheap weed. Standing under the bustop outside the La Salsa was a kid in his late twenties wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and dirty baggy jeans. He had an over-stuffed backpack slung over his shoulder and I could tell by the way he looked that he was outside too. I approached him and offered him a cigarette and then popped the question, to which he replied he could have some in five minutes if I had the money.  I followed him down the block and we made a left down second street and headed towards Broadway.  Crossing Ocean Drive, I looked over at his unshaven face, he had square features and pronounced dimples in his smile and I knew he was smiling because he knew I was gonna blaze one with him.  He told me his name was Matt and that he had been in LA for seven months.  Doing what? I asked. Enjoying the weather and fucking up my liver was what he answered.  We reached the source of our common bond, a gap-toothed black man in his late forties wearing a blue track-suit sitting on a flattened cardboard box and leaning against the rough and rinded trunk of a palm tree. I  reached into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty.  Five minutes later we were smoking a massive joint and I had a partner in crime to navigate the depths of destitution with.  So back to the lifeguard station.  It was December, just before Christmas, the Santa Ana winds were blowing at what seemed like hurricane speeds, on the promenade potted plants and picnic tables were gusted over like straw hats, signs and canvasses were whipping in the furious wind flapping against each other in a symphony of fabric.  Walking along the beach was like walking in a sandstorm.  We didn't really wanna be out in the open that night so we decided to improvise with the emergency blankets the christians hand out, we had found a bunch of them and had stashed them under station number 13 right in front of Liv Tyler's house I later found out.  We draped the blankets over the cris-crossed planks and heaped hundreds of pounds of sand, (the wind was that strong) on the bottom to secure it, kind like stretching canvass over a frame, we did that to all four sides curtaining ourselves in with tattered gray fabric.  Now there are no life guards in December, but there is still a yellow pickup with flashing orange lights that cruises by on weekdays with nosy assholes in it and menacing headlights flaring in the pre-dawn darkness.  They seemed amused at first like they thought we were a band of gypsies or something peddling whalebone bongs and turquoise trinkets, in the daytime we left behind a heap of junk: canned food, porno mags, dirty clothes, random books all tented in and fluttering about as gusts of wind  pelted the rudimentary structure.  Sometime around three in the morning Wetto, a tweaker who had a mild meth-induced heart attack two days later under that same tent smoking the devil's drug out of his pookie stumbled into our little hideaway and tried to set up camp.  He'd seen it from a far.  Hotel California is coming to my mind right now: "Up ahead in the distance he saw a shimmering light, his head grew heavy and his sight grew dim he had to stop for the night"  We had pity on the skinny half-el salvadorian tweaker who eyes were bugging out of his skull like a frog wearing contacts, he was high as a kite and the wind was whipping his t-shirt almost right off his bony body, sand stinging his eyes, so we let him in the fort and just then the wind picked up even more, ripping down one side of our life-station tepee and sending a blanket whipping into the foaming Pacific.