treasure maps

We start the walk back up 20th Pl. “I’m looking for a dresser, for my van,” Roger says.  “Hopefully closer to Rose.” We don’t touch anything on this street. Most of the dumpster lids here hang open, raided of anything of potential value. Some of the worst crack addicts hang out on this block, he says. But he still walks by, just to check.

We wind up Pacific, down 19th, up Speedway. He doesn’t even touch anything til we get to 18th Pl—presumably out of the crack addicts’ territory.  He opens the blue recycling containers looking for reading material.  Usually, a glance is enough—he lifts the blue plastic lid with one hand, leans forward, and gently lowers the lid again.  Occasionally, he reaches in, rearranging the cardboard or plastic bottles on top to see if there’s a magazine below, or removing a few glossy pages only to find a catalogue, not a New Yorker.

He leaves the trash containers beside the recycling untouched, but does lift the big metal dumpsters’ plastic lids—raising them with one hand, just as he does with the blue containers, peering in, very, very occasionally reaching his other hand inside to inspect something.  “I don’t like to dig around in there too much,” he says.

I lift lids, too.  I grab the handle between my thumb and forefinger, raising it up, peering in.  If it looks like there’s something of interest, I’ll reach inside, unlearning a gamut of childhood lessons to reach my hands into strangers’ trash.  I don’t want him to feel squeamish because I’m here—this is his livelihood, after all.  Yesterday, he took a trip up to Santa Monica to collect palm tree bark, to make treasure maps for tourists.  Early this morning, he collected shells on the beach—to make jewelry, or maybe to bury as treasure. And now, the recycling.

We keep winding our way back towards the lot at Rose. East on the even blocks, north on Pacific, west on the odd blocks, north on Speedway.  Roger says he usually makes $15 or so off what he find here, but as we exit the numbered blocks, turning up Windward Ct, he still hasn’t deemed anything worth keeping. On Zephyr, we find a pile of Sports Illustrateds, months of issues some girlfriend or mother got sick of seeing piled on the floor. Roger collects them together at the top of the bin, but decides to leave them there. He’s not a sports fan.

Our first keeper comes in a dumpster on Horizon. “Hmm,” Roger says, smiling.  He climbs up the dumpster to extract the prize, resting his waist on the edge while his torso dangles down inside.  Once retrieved, he examines it—a wind chime, with metal tubes suspended from a wooden blue bird.  He places it in the plastic bag with the shells he collected this morning and we keep walking. East, north, west, north.

At the corner of Breeze and Speedway, we see a kid—maybe 17 years old and sporting a small ‘fro—edging a dumpster away from the wall.  He leans behind it and extracts four skateboards—all without wheels—then pushes the dumpster back flush with the wall.  Roger says hello as we walk by—a polite, cursory greeting: hey, how are you, great, good to see you.  He doesn’t know the kid’s name, but, like most people who live down here, he’s seen him around. The kid helps Vegan Man get his cart down to the boardwalk and set up in the mornings—Vegan Man has a bad back.  I ask Roger where the kid stays. Roger doesn’t know, but the answer to the question is clear from what we’ve just seen.  During the day, sometimes, Roger lets people without their own places leave stuff on top of his van.  Or sometimes he let’s them just come sit in his van.

We keep walking, winding towards the lot.  And we find everything. I actually find a dresser. But it’s wrecked—one of the legs shattered, two drawers missing. We find a woman’s suit jacket. And shoes. And a duffle full of clothes. A couple weeks ago Roger found the vest Tommy was wearing at the lottery this morning.

We find books, a few of which Roger keeps. We find a beautiful, hand-carved wooden door leaning up against the dumpster’s side. A computer keyboard. The box for a drill. Roger digs around in that container more than usual.  “New drill means there’s an old drill somewhere,” he says.  He might make sure to come back and check this same one next week. But for now, we keep walking.

“Cats,” says Roger, as we start up Park.  Eight or ten empty tins sit at the bottom of the container—I don’t think I’d have noticed, or known what they were, but Roger identifies them right away.  “At first you don’t notice the smell,” he says.  “But once you see it, you start to pick up the smell too.”  And he’s right—now I smell the cat food.

As we round the next corner, we find all the bins empty, lids hanging open—the garbage truck has beaten us to the punch.  We catch up to it a few blocks later. The garbage men wear surgical masks and gloves. They pick up the bins by the handles and throw them into the compactor without so much as a glance at what’s inside, insulating themselves as much as possible from what’s around them, even the knowledge of what exactly it is.

What we’re doing, by contrast—actually looking through people’s trash—is incredibly intimate.  When I say this to Roger, he agrees. “Yeah, I get to see how they’re doing. If it’s been a good month, I can tell. Or maybe the next month I see it’s getting a little tighter with money.”  

But it’s more than that—people’s whole lives are in here. What they eat, what they wear, what they bought this week, if they’re getting laid, when it’s that time of the month, and, perhaps most personal of all, what they do and do not value—it’s all right here in the blue and black plastic bins they set out once a week.

It’s no wonder Roger skips the cans if a tenet’s outside getting the paper or leaving for work.  Even though he’s not doing anything wrong—he’s putting things to use that would otherwise go to a landfill—there’s still an invasion of privacy involved.

By the time we squeeze around the side of the hulking, beeping truck, we’re almost back to Rose, and Roger’s enthusiasm has waned.  He peers inside, still, but stops digging around much.  One dumpster at the corner of Speedway he skips altogether. “That’s usually a nasty one.” He laughs.  “I don’t know, maybe it’s because it’s near the beach and people like to walk their dogs down here, but it’s always full of dog shit.”

We don’t find anything else, entering the lot with the bag of shells, the wind chime, and four books. In the shade between Roger’s van and Tommy ’s, parked, as always, side-by-side at the south end of the lot, a few guys sit around, passing a joint.  Roger hands out the books, in case anyone’s interested. Vince flips through the one about John Lennon, setting the others on the ground. Tommy and Guy begin drumming. Next door, outside his van, Prospector plays chess against a guy with no shoes, carrying a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. Someone must have delivered bread this morning—bagels are scattered all over the nearby grass, where the seagulls pick at them.

Roger steps inside his van and shuts the door. Privacy, here, is hard to come by. This van is the only place that’s his—it’s where he sleeps and eats and shits and stores his stuff and watches TV. Even there, people are constantly knocking on the side, asking if he wants to smoke a joint, or if they can store something, or have a sit, or follow him in the alleys looking through garbage. And yet, he doesn’t shy away, doesn’t pretend to be asleep or refuse to answer the sliding door.

He emerges again a few minutes later, dressed just as he was before, in a Lakers shirt and the same jeans and zip-up sweatshirt he always wears.  He has no gloves, no mask. The goatee and slightly graying hair and those soft blue eyes are all in plain view.

junkyard dogs

In the lot at Rose, two of the RVs serve as trash heaps. There is a third, somewhere, which didn't make it into the lot today. Their roofs are stacked with upturned tables, paintings, clothing, chairs, buckets, pieces of wood, anything. Their insides are just as full, with broken CDs, an orange colander and single black combat boot spilling out of the back, out of the passenger's seat, into what little space the drive has left. 

They belong to the same guy. Sitting outside Prospector's van, as Rodney beats Vince in chess, we see him atop one of the vehicles, trying to erect some flag as he stands knee deep in his sea of possessions. 


"Junkyard dog," I say. That's what Roger calls him. 


"I'm a junkyard dog," Rodney says. "He's a pirate without a shit." 


He's a speed freak, Prospector explains. Sees value in everything. 


Rodney's apparently taken the opposite approach, though he does his fair share of speed. He wears only a pair of shorts, his nose the peely red of perpetual sunburn. I've never seen him wear shoes, and the only thing I've ever seen him carry is a plastic bag full of bread. he eats what people hand him--at the moment, a bag of vanilla wafers, their box discarded sometime before he got them.

He's also the best chess player around.

Rodney moves a piece forward--a live, 22-caliber round Prospector found on the beach, which now fills in for one of the white pawns.

"I keep thinking the sun might set it off, take us all out," he said when we first started using it. But in its first week as a chess piece, it's only managed to take out a few other pawns, or maybe the occasional night. Prospector's also carved a new rook for white--a very passable tower, the color of balsa wood.

It's a scene at once timeless and rooted in this moment, this place. Like I saw all over Asia and Africa, grown men take refuge from the sun in the shade of the largest object around, passing the too-hot hours with games and marijuana and talk of women.

But the shade, here, is cast not by a house or a tree, but rather by Prospector's van; Kai and I sit on our skateboards, the folding chairs reserved for the two players; and the plastic chess board is fastened to the folding table with black electrical tape--an attempt to stop the sea breeze, which occasionally knocks the bullet-pawn onto its side, from wreaking any greater havoc on the game.

Kai, known here as German, fiddles with an mp3 players he found. It's good, he keeps saying. It's good, it plays perfectly, but the screen's messed up in the middle. He found it in the alleys off Speedway.

"God, whose move is it?" Prospector says. "Come on, play! I'd lose on purpose just to give someone else a chance to play."

Roger walks by, returning to his own van afer a visit with the Colonel. As he passes, the pirate yelps, hopping on one foot and wrapping his knee around a lone Corinthian column t the corner of the van's roof. He looks down towards Roger, his long, thinning hair splayed out to the sides, eyes open wide, unblinking, frightened. 

"You OK, Jimbo?" Roger asks.

"Damn bumblebee. Back bumblebee landed on my elbow. Trying to push me off the edge." 


"He's awful small, I think. I doubt he can push you off." He laughs, trying to calm Jimbo down. 


"I thought he wanted to sting me."


"Sting you? Well that I could believe." He continues on towards his van, leaving Jimbo wrapped around the column like the wood vine carved onto its surface, holding on as if to a life raft.

treasure hunting

On his hat, his green baseball cap, is a pin: it reads, “Prospector,” spelled out in gold. He found some gold wire on the beach and asked a friend to make him a pin with his name on it—let him keep whatever gold was left over. He introduced himself to me as Dan, but this is his name: Prospector

At 7:45am, just before we set out from the lot, someone stops by to show Prospector a painting.  “Number 13 of 100,” he says, pointing to the label on the back of the frame. “Someone threw it out, man. It’s a lithograph. I found it in the alleys. It’s numbered set, man, should be worth something. Only from 1980 but still."

When we reach Brooks, Prospector locks his bike to a palm and turns on his machine—a long metal wand, with a doughnut-shaped sensor at one end and a screen at the other. He waves it back and forth in front of him in time with is stride, always keeping it just an inch or two above the ground, which is harder than it sounds, given the uneven surface of the sand.

Prospector talks constantly, as though calling play-by-play on his own treasure hunt.  “Hanging a right turn now...OK.”  I’m not sure how much this running commentary has to do with my tagging along. He keeps up a similar stream when he’s playing chess, analyzing potential moves out loud.  On the mirror in his van, he’s written, “Shut up Dan” in green marker.

While I stay mostly silent, the metal detector keeps up the other end of the conversation, responding with a surprisingly emotive array of beeps—the different frequencies connoting different kind of metal, the volume their proximity.  The screen, too, maps out what the machine senses under the sand, so, usually, Prospector knows what he might find before he even looks.  “Oooh, quarter,” he’ll say.  Then he leans down, hacking away at the sand with his homemade scoop—a handle fastened to the open top of a can, across which he’s fixed a wire filter. Once he’s scooped, the sand falls though back to the ground, while any metal stays inside.  And if he comes up empty, he runs the machine over the spot again, trying to find the highest pitch, so he knows where to scoop next.

Some of these hunts go on for four, five, six scoops.  It is backbreaking work, like sowing a field, always leaning forward, hacking away, then standing up to pocket maybe a few cents before moving onto the next.  But his body is used to it—soles of the feet calloused over, skin seared to a deep brown, and his right arm, despite the scars of an old motorcycle accident, veined and lean from years of swinging the machine.  Not many 56-year-olds could do this for hours every day.

When I ask Prospector what’s he looking for, he sticks out his hands.  His fingers are decked with rings—gold, silver, turquoise-studded, svelte and gaudy: he’s found them all with his metal detector, on this beach.  “A ring?” he says at one point, reaching for something in the sand that the machine hasn’t even beeped at, sounding excited. “Ahh, trash.”  It’s only the discarded top to a 40 oz.
 
That is, today, mostly what we find.  Bottle caps and pull tabs. He tosses them off to the side, back into the sand, where they might fool him again next week.  He’s as much a janitor as a gold-panner—when we find bottles, he stands them up in the sand, so no one steps on them; and when he finds a woman’s wallet, emptied of all bills, he holds onto it. He pockets the change as a tip, but he’ll send the rest back to the address on her ID.  And he leaves his card at all the lifeguard towers. When someone loses something of value—a watch, or a cell phone, or keys—he’ll come help them find it, hoping only for a tip in return.

Even though the trucks have already dragged the area smooth, you get a remarkably clear picture of what went the night before—the bolts and screws, the 40’s and the cigarette butts, the empty dime bags: the drum circle in all its glory.  Right at the crack of dawn, before the trucks come by, “sand worms,” as he calls them, will comb the area looking for the dime bags, in hopes of finding a little bit left over inside. And near the trashcans, we find body-length imprints.  People sleep there, near these obstacles, so the trucks won’t run them over in the morning, he says.

We continue back and forth over the area, our path a mixture of method and intuitiveness.  Prospector stays near the edge of the line the truck has dragged, where the most stuff gets pushed to. But, suddenly, he’ll declare, “I’m turning here,” and change direction.  “Sometimes you just see a butt print that looks promising,” he says.  “And you go with that.”

For two and a half hours we continue like this, zigzagging back and forth just like the seagull footprints, Prospector and his machine making conversation with each other. We find about $5 in change—mostly in bunches, where someone sat down, or decided to bury a friend in the sand—plus a couple sets of keys.  “Drop money, not keys, you idiots,” he says.  When we finish, he hangs the keys from a nearby tree branch, using the Jaegermeister lanyard attached to one set, hoping their owners might see them there.

As he turns back towards his bike, someone calls out to him.  “You don’t want that?” The guy’s already fingering the lanyard we just hung there.

“No,” Prospector says. “I was hoping maybe the owner would see it there. I don’t know.”

“Well, if you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”

the lottery

“It’s all commercial fucking vendors.”

That’s the first thing I hear as I approach the crowd outside the police station waiting for the lottery. At 8:10 am the place is packed—the majority crowded around the station itself, where they do the drawing for the I-Zone, the commercial vending area at the south end of the boardwalk. A smaller group has formed around another table 50 yards towards the skate park, where they draw for spots in the P-Zone—donations only, and traditionally, or supposedly, or theoretically, the area for artists. But these days, this territory too is under siege from the commercial fucking vendors.

I find Roger halfway between the two crowds, holding a Starbucks cup and mingling. He was about the first one to put his ID card in the P-Zone lottery, and we watch as others do the same. They walk through a makeshift gate up to a table surrounded by caution tape and drop their cards into the tumbler. Two men sit at the table, overseeing.

Tommy shows up on the stroke of the 8:30 cutoff, parking his van out front of Danny’s, right where Roger said he would. Bobby shows a couple minutes later. Dana’s son—a juggler—slinks over as well, looking mostly asleep. “You seen my mom?” He’s 20, Roger says, and never gets up this early. She must have coerced him down here this morning, hoping to double her chances after she didn’t get a spot last week.

Bobby peers over the caution tape. “Who’s lucky?” He looks around. “Chief blew his luck last week.”

“Better get your card in,” Tommy says. “They’re about to start.”

Bobby gives up his search, stepping inside the gate to drop the card in himself. Another man stands on one of the steel gate’s bottom rails. He tosses his card towards the open tumbler, just missing. Inside, another man picks it up. The tosser waves at him, signaling to give the card back, but the second man drops it into the tumbler.

“Awww, man. You jinxed me.”

A guy in a sombrero stumbles around inside the enclosed area. Roger refers to him as “Hatman,” although pinned to his hat is a Styrofoam sign that reads, “Dollhouse Dude.”

“You want to put it in down and to the left,” Bobby says. “Usually, it’s a right hander who’s reaching in to grab them, and it more natural for them to reach back to the left.”

“Excuse me,” Tom says. “I’ve gotta go put my card in.”

“Tommy, you bastard,” Bobby says. “You tell me they’re about to close it and you’re just standing out here biding your time.” He turns towards me. “You want to be either the first one or the last one. The ones on the top and the bottom get spun around. The other ones just get stuck in the middle. Watch, Roger’s gonna be the first one picked.”

They all stand around, exchanging stories and trade secrets like this—how to phrase a donation request so people won’t take all your stuff for free but an undercover cop won’t ticket you. The group refers casually to undercover cops—just part of their reality. Richard got ticketed a couple weeks ago for selling stuff he didn’t make himself. Since then, he’s changed to selling religious paraphernalia—prayer beads and crosses and the like—despite lacking any religious predilection of his own.

Dana’s telling a story. She looks like she’s been around this block more than a few times, her face weathered—lined, hardened, tough, and yet somehow resigned—with a wiry body and long, wispy blond hair to complete the package: this is a women who’s been there, done that, and can seriously tell you your future.

“So as I’m putting my box down, I came on this girl putting a bucket down in my spot. And I say to her, ‘You can’t save a spot for tomorrow morning at 9 at night,’ even though I’m right there doing the same thing. And she asks me what I’m doing and I change the subject and I say, ‘What do you sell,’ and of course she’s selling some cheap bracelets and shit she bought downtown for 50 cents and wants to sell here for two bucks. And I say, ‘You know it’s donations only here, you can’t set a price.’ And she says, ‘I can take donations.’ And I say, ‘No naming prices—donations only.’ And she says she can take donations. And I say, ‘Oh yeah? You can let everything on your table go for one dollar?’ And she just sort of looks at me and I say, ‘You set up here, everything you got, one dollar.’” She hold up her index finger to help make the point. “And she says, ‘Maybe I’ll go set up somewhere else.’”

The group loves this, everyone laughing from the belly. No sign of nerves on display, at least not yet.

At 8:40 the drawing begins. One of the men closes the tumbler and gives it a couple turns with the handle on the side. Everyone presses up towards the caution tape.

“Why is there crime tape?” says Bobby.

“A crime is about to be committed.” They all laugh again, repeating the phrase. A crime is about to be committed.

The emcee opens the lid again and pulls out a small handful of cards. He spreads them out on the table.

“The first five…” his partner announces into the megaphone.

No one in our group is called. They all step back from the ring again while the first lucky five go select the spots they want. It’s a dance that continues all through the drawing, with the crowd approaching and retreating in time with each round, paying intermittent attention. Sometimes, Roger tiptoes right up to the tape, peering over, so he can see if his card comes up before they even announce the names. Others, he goes off to talk to some acquaintance, not bothering to watch at all. Collectively, the little group looks vaguely amoeba-like—it changes shape as size, losing one person here, gaining another, shifting up towards the caution tape and then back.

Deana joins the group about halfway through the drawing, an overlarge plaid shirt hiding her hands—it looks like her husband’s, perhaps pilfered from him to help fight the morning’s chill. “Roger,” she says, “you have to turn your phone on.” She smiles slightly, a look at once very warm and slightly shy, a bit hurt, even. Last week she gave him a phone, and offered to share her minutes with him.

She also lets Roger and Tommy shower at her house—Wednesday is their shower day. And she has them over for dinner. Dana does the same, sometimes. Tommy says he just about fell asleep in Dana’s shower last week.

At this point, with more than half the hundred P-Zone spots already gone, no one from the group has been called. Finally, Roger gets picked, then Bobby. In the ring, Hatman’s card has been picked…except it’s his Driver’s License, not the card you need to purchase to enter the lottery. When he’s reclaimed it from the emcee, he holds it up for the crowd. “Look. I can drive. See?” Then he lies down inside the ring.

“He’s a riot,” Bobby says. “Although he’s sat down in front of my stand before. That pretty much ends business for that day. I don’t know if he’s actually drunk—he seems to turn it on and off pretty easy.”

When three-quarters of the spots have gone, Roger offers to let Tommy do one day in his spot if he doesn’t get called. It’s been a rough week for Tommy’s business—he left his bag full of henna oils outside his van, and someone ran off with them. The oils are his primary business expense—he mixes them every day or two, so as to get the optimal stain. Lots of others supposed henna artists don’t even use real henna, he says.

They use black hair dye, which looks great at first, but fades after only a few days, not to mention it’s toxic qualities. At his stand, he has a sign that reads, “Henna isn’t black.”

In the meantime, he’s borrowed some oils from Gil—another henna artist, who convinced Tommy to start doing henna in the first place, taught him how to mix the oils and everything.

As the lottery winds down, Tommy seems to abandon hope of getting picked. He limps around (old back injury), schmoozing, moving from one group to another to another. He dips in and out of a pretty good faux British accent, which he usually employs when he’s kidding. He’s looking out for spots, trying to see if anyone ended up with two, or got one but might not be able to use it this weekend. Or something. If it comes down to it, he’ll just get there early and set up in a spot where someone didn’t show. And if they do get booted, he’ll try to move to another spot.

“I have a lot of people I look out for here. And they look out for me. Like Roger. Roger’s a close friend, for sure.” He’s speaking regular American English. “Once I get called,” he says, “I’m sure as hell looking to see if I can help those guys out. And they’ll help me out.”

In five years here, there’s only been a handful of weekends whenTommy  hasn’t found somewhere to set up. He can’t afford not to—he’s not some vendor up from San Diego for the weekend: this is his livelihood. And his home.

A crowd is gathering. The drawing is about over, but another kind of show is getting started. A lot of the people gathered here are performers, after all. And, well, they’re performing.

The main attraction is a young couple fighting. She’s going at him with full force, swinging and kicking. He deflects her blows calmly, batting her gloved hands with his palms. He’s training her, it looks like—kickboxing practice. But also a show. And these two apparently go at it for real, as well, just like this, right on the boardwalk, but no gloves. Or, at least, it’s a realer show.

“I should go,” Bobby keeps saying. He has to get to a flea market in Redondo where he picks up metal for his wind chimes. But still he stays. They all stay.

They all complain about the lottery, this game of chance that determines their livelihoods for the week. They complain about the commercial fucking vendors. But the lottery itself, it’s almost like a community meeting—everyone who lives and works here gathered together, trading tips, telling stories, not trying to sell anything. It’s a gathering of their whole community in what is, really, a mostly social setting.

I ask Tommy if he likes these Tuesday mornings. “You know,” he says, “I guess I do.”

the friday night shift

The lot is empty. That’s the first thing I notice—the lot at the end of Rose where they always park is empty. I suddenly get what permit parking would do to this place. At night, everyone parks up in “the avenues,” as Roger refers to the rest of Venice.

And the place is abandoned. Abraham still has some stuff set up—a couple paintings, plus the sidewalk where he’s marked his territory, treating it like one of his potato sack canvasses. But the rows of bodies I’d expected, curled up with blankets in preparation for the next morning—they’re just not there. Not the night life Tommy had referred to.

I walk south, towards where Roger usually sets up. He’s not the only one out there, but I spot him from 100 yards away, his pants flaring off distinctively from his skinny legs, even in silhouette. Only once have I seen him in any other pants.

“I thought that might be you,” he says. “I thought, Eon is tall.” He laughs, a sort of adult male giggle that sounds at once forced and slightly out of control. And he calls me Eon, pronouncing it like the measure of geological time. He’s on his feet—awake, alert, speaking loudly despite the man in the sleeping bag not ten feet away.

“This is Bob,” Roger says.

“I’m Ian.”

Bob tries to stand, the sleep sack tangling in his feet.

“Don’t get up.”

He’s halfway prone when we shake. Then he curls back onto his side on the asphalt.

“Bob’s been sleeping here since he left his girlfriend. What? A couple weeks now?”

“Three weeks,” Bob says, eyes still closed. It’s 4am.

It’s 4am. But the street lamps are on. And Roger’s still talking loudly. Far from uncomfortable with my tagging along, he seems to enjoy having someone to talk to. “Do you know much about religion?” he asks. He’s reading a novel about Islam. I’ve also seen him reading Shakespeare. And Tom Clancy. He reads more than anyone else I know in LA.

I say I know a little bit about a lot of religions. Roger says the same. He was baptized at age 13, but he describes it as the result of a trick, almost. Some group came around offering fun and games, and he ended up with a baptism and a couple months of fleeting piousness.

On the edge of the sand, next to the boardwalk, there’s a squarish cardboard box on top of another, flatter one. I remove the top one and sit on the other. We’re still talking about religion—haven’t gotten to any of the questions I want to ask, like how this whole spot-saving thing works.

The boxes, it turns out, are how spots are saved. Along the sand at the edge of the cement, a string of cardboard boxes stretches all the way up to Rose—same thing the other direction. To me, they’re indistinguishable—cardboard boxes, one just like the next. But Roger names off who each one belongs to—Bobby (not Bob who’s sleeping next to us, but Bobby), Dana, Tommy, Flower, Novak, others. He’s saving all their spots, a whole block. I am sitting on Roger’s own box—a realization that makes me want to plunge my head into the sand beside me. I stand up as soon as I can. I have no idea what people value here.

Next to us is a spot belonging to the “Jamaican Connection.” He and Roger have been clashing for months. The Jamaican Connection would leave his box on the block Roger saved, and Roger, when he showed up that night, would move it. “Not just move it—get it off the boardwalk entirely.” Then, the next morning, when he asked Roger what happened to it, Roger would feign ignorance—he throws his head skyward, shrugging his shoulders, hips forward, arms back, in an ostentatious show of ‘I have no idea.’

But today, the Jamaican Connection put his box down right in front of Roger, announcing himself, so tonight Roger doesn’t feel like he can reclaim the spot.

Reclaiming spots is just the reality of what goes on. If he weren’t here, Roger says, the “Chinese Connection” would come do the same to him. He assumes the same ‘I have no idea’ pose to show what the Chinese Connection would say to him.

I don’t quite understand how such alliances are formed—why Roger saves spots for Bobby and Donna but throws the Jamaican’s box away. It seems to have something to do with those who live down here v. those who come in for the weekends—except Bobby comes in for the weekends from Pasadena.

Definitely something to do with artists who sell handmade goods v. corporate goods. Or something to do with seniority—how long people have been coming here—except Roger himself has been here less than a year. Or those who make their livelihoods on the boardwalk v. those who are just supplementing incomes. Or something. Like the boxes themselves, it’s a system that I, the outsider, don’t yet understand.

His opposition to the Chinese Connection—Roger admits he actually doesn’t know if he’s Chinese or what—is easier to get my head around—he saves too many spots. He lives just a couple blocks up, and if Roger weren’t here, he’d come down with his whole family and take up three, four, five spots.

Many Mexican families do the same, he says. At the lottery that Tuesday, 570 had entered the drawing for 200 spots. Many of the Mexican families, though, entered in all of their relatives—again, three, four, five people. This froze out many others—the locals who live here and had only themselves to enter. And this week, one local had had enough. “Don’t you see what’s going on here?” he yelled. The others had remained mostly silent.

Round 5, when light starts to creep over the horizon, more people begin to show up. Vladic, a “spiritualist,” appears and starts setting up his stand the next block over. Roger calls him Bobby, too—but not the real Bobby. He became Bobby when someone who forgot his name and called him Bobby by accident. He didn’t like that one bit—and so of course became Bobby from there on out.

Bobby—not the real Bobby—opens up a turquoise umbrella. He ties it down and drags boxes back and forth, stepping back onto the empty boardwalk periodically to survey his work.

“Bobby likes to move stuff around just so,” says Roger.

Runners go by with increasing frequency. Bobby departs again, his stand half ready for the day. The first van pulls into the lot at Rose. Bob stays quiet in his sack. Seagulls trickle south past us.

“They go up north to nest,” Roger says. “Up to Malibu.” At dusk, he says, they flock north in large groups. Now they return in pairs and trios.

I’ve hung out with Roger a dozen times now, but I’ve learned more about him this night than all our prior meetings combined. As the light continues to spread, he says something I hadn’t expected, after hearingTommy  rail against the lottery: he admits he’ll be happy when the full lottery starts. This is the last weekend he’ll have to be here at 4am. Next week, with the start of summer, even the donation only P-Zone spots like the ones he’s saving will be part of the weekly lottery. And Roger will get to sleep a little.

“Roger is not making a buck,” he says. “I do it donations—whatever you can give, same as selling in the P-Zone.” Bobby—the real Bobby—and another of the weekend vendors throw him $10 for saving their spots, maybe $5 extra if it’s a good weekend. The vegan guy gives him an organic cookie with “everything” in it.

“Pot cookies?”

He laughs his laugh again. “No, no, unfortunately, not that I know of.”

Tommy lets Roger help with his business, so he doesn’t give anything in addition, and others throw him what they can, depending on how the weekend goes. All two sleepless nights a week guarantees him is $20 and a couple vegan cookies.

“Why do you do it, then?”

He never quite answers the question. Donna, the fortuneteller, she’s the one who suggested it. As far as I can tell, it seems like it’s part of the process of working his way into this community, of a new guy gaining acceptance from people who’ve worked on this boardwalk for years and in some cases decades.

“I just need to make enough to park my van in the lot every day.” The lot costs $5. “Everything else is gravy.”

“What about food?”

He eats all his meals for free. Lots of local churches bring food around, plus some other “private citizens.” One church puts on a skit before they let anyone eat. “Always with a—a certain theme,” he says. “The last one there was this one guy dressed up as an angel, with wings and everything, and another one dressed up with horns and a tail and the whole bit. You can guess what that was supposed to represent.” He laughs.

“So anything else you make is just coffee and Henry’s and whatnot.”

“Exactly.”

Bob stays unmoving on the sidewalk, not ten feet away. I can’t quite bring myself to accept that he’s asleep—he chimes in occasionally, though only when Roger solicits a comment. Otherwise, he at least does a good impression of someone sleeping on cement, under streetlights, right beside two guys having a conversation, as joggers and seagulls pass by.

“You don’t sleep out here?”

“No. I don’t feel safe.”

“So when do you sleep on weekends?”

“I don’t really.”

He talks about Lee again—the guy who found someone asleep in his spot and, without asking him to move or saying anything at all, hit him over the head with a piece of hard plastic. Split the guy’s head open, lucky not to break his skull. He’s going to court now, though I’m not sure if he’s still “at the pagoda” in the meantime.

When Roger first told me that story, he said Lee had “mental issues.” He would yell at people sometimes, but he’d never gotten violent before. “Surprised it hadn’t happened sooner, to be honest,” he said.

And there are plenty of others. A lot of crazy people down on the boardwalk. Most have someone who takes care of them, Roger says. He tells me about this guy who also hangs out by the pagoda, a vet. Every week or so, his ex-wife comes by with his son, and he plays with his kid while she watches his stand. Plenty others don’t make any money off their stands. They sell art, except they never sell anything. Maybe one piece in the 9 months Roger’s been here. People take care of ‘em’s how they get by.

We look up at the moon. The sky’s getting brighter, light enough to see even without the street lamps now, but still the half moon glows.

“It’s a little overcast,” Roger says. “It’ll burn off before noon.”

“How can you tell it’s overcast? I can’t see the clouds.”

As we’re looking up, two guys approach—a tall, curly-haired blond guy, and a shorter, stouter companion. They enter our conversation as though they’d been out there with us for hours. Or, that’s what it seemed like, anyhow. Before I realize what’s happened, the taller man has moved on, and the man I’d thought was his friend is whispering some confidential information. He’s being followed by a submarine. Sometimes he catches sight of it, though, of the red light on its periscope.

It’s as if we’d conjured him with our conversation. His soliloquy moves seamlessly from blue balls to titties to dogs bending over right in front of him back to blue balls. Always back to blue balls—they are his touchstone, the Molly to his Bloom.

Roger and I dance around him, trying to engineer an escape. We turn away, step onto the sand, look out towards the water. At first, I occasionally respond to him, but when it becomes clear that he intends to stay as long as possible, I quickly curtail anything more than mmm hmm. I walk halfway down the block, then back, not wanting to strand Roger, who walks in little circles, trying not to get too close, not to look too engaged. At one point, the guy puts his hand up for a high five, which, after a hesitation, I give.

When he finally leaves, finally, walking back the way he’d come, the sun is peering out over the water. “You try not to get trapped in those conversations,” Roger says. We both laugh. You need to be able to laugh like this if you’re going to stand out here at 4am, in this place where, as Roger puts it, “two worlds wash up together. The shells wash up on the beach. And the rest of humanity washes up here too.”

Vans pull into the lot. One guy, Roger said, only leaves for about half an hour sometimes, then comes right back in when it opens at 4:30. But now, almost 6, it’s starting to fill up. Roger’s parked up near Gold’s. The seagulls keep passing by on their way south, the joggers in both directions.

“If you hang around a little, you’ll get to see my lady,” Roger says. “She’s this Asian lady I’ve been watching for a couple months. She walks by every day, like clockwork.”

“You ever talk to her?”

He laughs again. “No. Tommy makes fun of me. I don’t even know her name.”

“When’s she come by?”

“Always between 7 and 9.”

Such movements mark the time here. The seagulls’ daily migration, the joggers and the walkers, the vans coming and going from the lot, the vendors setting up and breaking down their stands, and of course the tourists and beachgoers they make their living off.

Roger, on these hectic weekend days, is the only constant, spending all day in this spot as everything moves around him. When I leave him, just after 6, he’s still there, just where he’ll be all the rest of the day and the next night and the next day.

He says he’s trying to make enough to get back up towards the Bay Area where his parents live.

Or, at least in theory he’s trying. But he’s made something of a life for himself here—he’s part of a community, with friends and coworkers and a role in the marketplace. He already has a van. If he actually wants to go up north, I’m sure he will. But for the moment, I think he’s still moving in here, not moving out.