everything you always wanted to know about RV septic systems*

*plus a lot you probably didn't

Before Antonio can dump his septic tank, he has to go to the pawnshop.

Same thing with filling a prescription for his girlfriend, Tina; or getting something to eat; or filling the propane tank so he can take a hot shower. He can’t take a shower until he dumps his tank, anyway, because the RV’s ‘gray water’ tank is full, too, and the shower water will run off into the street.

Unfortunately, he and Tina are almost out of things to pawn. Already, they’ve pawned most of Tina’s jewelry, and even her car—a Lexus SUV they loaned for just $2,500 and weren’t able to get back.

Now, they only have a couple items left—a gold ring and a pair of diamond earrings Tina’s mother gave her. They’re not expecting much. A pawnshop rejected the ring last week—guy at the counter said it wasn’t real gold.

Antonio parks around the corner from a different pawnshop on Lincoln Blvd, where no one in the store can see the RV, and goes inside alone.

Tina stays in the van. She sits on the bed, right across from the door, holding her Chihuahua, Cody, in her lap. She’s quiet, occasionally looking out the front windshield.

“He’s not gonna get anything,” Tina says. “I hope he gets a hundred.”

A few minutes later, Antonio comes running back towards the van, jewelry in hand.

“See,” Tina says. “I told you he wasn’t gonna get anything.”

They offered him $100 for the ring and $250 for the earrings, he says. “You sure you want to sell the earrings? We could just sell the ring.” It’s the only time either of them acknowledges any sentimental values the items might hold.

“Yes, yes, Jesus, just sell it!”

The money changes everything inside the van. When Antonio returns with bills in hand, Tina calls Rite Aid to refill half her prescription. Antonio starts driving north towards Dockweiler State Beach, the only place within 30 miles where RVs can legally dump waste water. He talks almost nonstop, grinning now, looking back into the cabin of the van as he drives, explaining why so few RVs in the Rose lot dump legally. Cody jumps on his lap, sticking his head out the window.



You hardly need to live in an RV to be conscious of water’s value in Southern California, but RV-dwellers experience this fact on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Basic tasks like washing the dishes, taking a shower, and using the toilet require a staggering commitment of time and energy towards acquiring and disposing of water. Doing it all legally adds a serious, potentially prohibitive financial investment to the equation.

Like most RVs, Antonio’s vehicle has three tanks—the freshwater tank, which holds 80 gallons of water; the gray water tank, which traps runoffs from the sink and the shower; and the septic (or ‘black water’) tank, which holds waste from the toilet. The black water tank fills up every two weeks or so, the gray water tank every week. Both are supposed to be dumped only at official RV dumping sites.

The process of dumping the tanks is easy. At Dockweiler RV Park, Antonio drains the two waste tanks from a valve on the side of the van, through a black hose, into a hole in the pavement. Then he uses a white hose to pump fresh water from a faucet into a different valve on the side of the van. The whole process cost $10, and takes just 15 minutes.

There are other costs, however, some of them harder to calculate. Dockweiler RV park is almost 8 miles away from the Rose lot where so many RV-dwellers park. Many of the vehicles in the Rose lot simply can’t make it that far—Tommy and Shawn can’t even start their vehicles, and others, for fear of ending up like Tommy, won’t risk driving their vans farther than a quarter mile—from the lot to wherever they park at night.

In addition, the drive itself costs Antonio about $15 dollars in gas—as much money as he makes most days. So instead of making the drive every week, Antonio, like most others in the Rose lot, dumps his gray water down the storm drain.

“I don’t feel guilty about that at all,” he says. “There’s nothing harmful in there. Worst you’re gonna find is maybe a couple vegetables from the sink.”

It’s not always easy to tell when the gray water tank is full—the gauge on his 1977 Winnebago was defunct long before Antonio bought the van last year. The only way he knows for sure that the tank is full is when it starts leaking onto the street through an overflow valve. The leaking, of course, is also illegal, punishable with a $900 fine. Once, when Tina did a bunch of dishes and the tank overflowed, the cops threatened to call in the hazmat team and shut down the whole Rose lot.

But there’s no question when the black water tank needs dumping: waste backs up into the toilet, and the smell in the bathroom becomes unbearable.

For the last two days, Antonio has shit in plastic bags, which he discretely deposits in dumpsters, and pissed in plastic bottles, which he empties into the storm drain. Tina’s continued to piss in the toilet.

“I had to go to the bathroom this morning and I thought I was gonna puke,” she says.

Many RV-dwellers won’t use the bathrooms in their vehicles. Tommy always uses plastic bags and bottles. Others use the bathrooms next to the Rose lot, a spot many drug addicts use to shoot up. A few keep gym memberships just for access to running water.

The year before Antonio met Tina, when he was living in a van that didn’t have a bathroom, he used to go to McDonald’s to use the bathroom every morning, bringing the cup he already had with him. He called it the ‘Antonio Combo’: a shit and a refill.

Finally, there are those who use the RV bathrooms but don’t go to Dockweiler to dump. Antonio says that last night, he saw three vans pull up behind the dumpsters at the edge of the lot and “do the dirty deed.” While dumping gray water is tacitly accepted in the RV community, dumping black water is not. It’s done in secret, in the dark, anonymously. No one in the Rose lot will admit to it.

One of the main accusations opponents of RVs level is that these kinds of illegal dumping are hazardous to the environment and public health alike. Yet, as Antonio sees it, the problem could be very easily solved. The dumping station at the Dockweiler RV Park is just a line that connects to the sewer system. Wealthier people, who use RVs recreationally, often have similar lines installed at their homes.
“If you just put one of those lines in at every gas station, and you made it free, you wouldn’t get people dumping illegally,” Antonio says. “Or put one in at the Rose lot. Then everyone would use it.”

“Yeah, but they don’t want to encourage RVs to park there,” Tina says.



This is one of the many Catch-22s for the Rose lot community: it is illegal to dump except at official sites, but there are no dumping sites around.

On the way back from Dockweiler, Antonio stops to refill the propane tank. He buys $22 of propane for hot showers, enough for a couple months. $24 for Tina’s pain medication, for a list of maladies that includes a spinal fusion, a removed adrenal gland, and most recently a removed gall bladder. $15 for Chinese food. $20 for weed. In three hours since they pawned Tina’s jewelry, they’ve spent $106—nearly a third of what they made.

And there are more errands, more expenses. Antonio wants to go to the DMV. Last week, he got pulled over in Santa Monica. He doesn’t have a valid registration, because he hasn’t had a smog check, and before he can pass a smog check, he has to weld a new tail pipe onto the roof. The cop said the only reason he didn’t have the vehicle towed was he didn’t want to leave Antonio homeless.

“You can’t just go to the DMV today,” Tina says. “You know how long that’s gonna take to get the smog check and then go?”

“I just don’t wanna go through another weekend stressing out about my home being towed and me sitting on the curb wondering what I’m gonna do. The only thing preventing us from getting a valid registration and being completely legal is the smog certificate. Right now, if I run into a dick cop, he can just tow it away.”

But Tina’s right—he doesn’t have time to make it to the DMV. Instead, they sit in the van, shades drawn, at the corner of Lincoln and Vernon. Tina sits on the bed, eating Chinese food; Antonio leans over the dishes in the drying rack next to the sink, smoking from a water bong.

When they get back to the Rose lot, Tina wants to take a shower.

“Don’t use all the water,” Antonio says. “I have to have the freshwater tank nearly full for her, or she’ll run out.”

“I’m a girl,” she says. “It’s easy for you.”

“Just don’t take half an hour again. Fuck, it’s not a house.”

Antonio steps outside to say hi to Peter, whose RV is parked a couple spots over. Peter’s trying to give away a microwave he and his wife can’t use. Antonio says he can’t use it either.

“It’s such a hassle to do all this stuff,” Tina says. “Such a pain in the ass. That’s why I’m trying to convince him to move into an apartment. He doesn’t want to pay rent, but, I mean, everybody does it. Fuck, what’re you supposed to do? I wanna be able to take a shower whenever I want and not have to worry about running out of water. I can’t live like this forever.”

She’s not used to this—neither of them is. Antonio is happy enough living in the van. He talks about getting another RV, or even a converted bus. But Tina wants out. She wants the kind of life she used to have before her mother died, back when she could afford a Lexus, diamond earrings, Louis Vuitton bags.

But neither of them has a job. Tina’s applying for disability, but has no idea if or when she’ll be approved. Antonio recently lost his most consistent audio editing gig. For the moment, the question is not when they can get an apartment, but how they’ll arrange their next hot shower.

mystery bag

Tommy's biking up Sunset back to his van when he sees it: just north of 3rd, a blue gym bag is sitting on the sidewalk outside the Gold's parking lot, attended only by the water bottle beside it.

He slows down, coasting by it, taking a real good look. A guy in a white pickup is idling in the spot next to it. He stops at the corner of 4th, sits on the curb, and rolls himself a cigarette, watching.

Eventually, the pickup pulls out of the spot. Tommy finishes his cigarette. He stands up off the curb, stomps it out on the cement. He gets back on his bike, pedals over, and real casual, like it was his that he just forgot there, hoists it onto his shoulder.

Around the corner, back at his van, he undoes the single zipper down the middle of the bag. It's a beach bag, he can see that now, not a gym bag. A couple towels and a blue and white Coleman cooler. The cooler is huge for Tommy--he uses them to keep his henna oils cool down on the beach. His insulin too.

He pushes the button on the side and slides back the lid of the cooler. An ounce of weed inside.

This is really huge. Not because Tommy smokes. He does. But it's huge because it's something people want.

People in Tommy's community live incredibly symbiotic lives. They rely on each other for company, for shelter, for meals, for transportation, for a place in the shade to sit and rest, for entertainment, for help carting the henna stand to the beach, for work, and for little pleasures like coffee and cigarettes and a couple hits from a pipe.

Since Tommy's van stopped running--eight months ago--he's been in need of a lot more help than he can give back. Every Monday morning, he has to recruit at least four people to help him push his van across the street and back. Every time he wants to work, he has to find someone to help him wheel all the supplies for his henna stand six blocks down to the boardwalk. Every time he wants to sit and kill some time in the lot at Rose, he has to find someone who will let him sit in their van.

So he goes down to the lot at Rose. Fine, first he smokes a little himself. Bu tthen he goes down to the lot at Rose. He smokes out Mario, who's been helping him push for five months. He smokes out Happy, whose bus he often sits and watches movies in. He smokes out Tony, who helps him get all the supplies from his stand down to the beach.

Before, when his van worked, Tommy used to have his own hangers-on. He'd buy Roger coffees and let him sit in the shade of his van, throw him a couple bucks for helping cart his start to and from the van. Bust for the last eight months, he's had nothing to offer. He's been the hanger-on. And it's cost him.

Just the other day, he was sitting on the steps of Mario's van, not even all the way inside it. Mario stepped over Tommy, trying to get some air. He caught the edge of Tommy's foot, which threw him off balance, and he stumbled down the stairs, almost slamming his broken arm against the car in the next spot.

"Tom, you're in the fuckin' way," he said. So Tommy slinked off to smoke a cigarette at a bench on the edge of the sand, by the dumpsters.

So an ounce of weed is huge for Tommy.

I ask him why he thinks it was just sitting there. He shrugs. No idea.

To me, this is the most interesting part of the story--why someone would have left a bag with an ounce of weed in it sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. Was someone carrying it and saw a cop and feaked out and dropped it? Was it the worst handoff ever?

Tommy doesn't seem to care why. For him, it's a gift form god, fallen from the sky, offering him a kind of currency that, in his situation, is more valuable than a week's income would have been.

'i'm gonna leave here rich'

"I'm going to make a quarter-million dollars before Christmas."

That's Stan, the homeless guy who for the last week or so has laid his pallet out on the sidewalk behind Tommy's van. He was sitting in a folding chair in the middle of the day on Saturday, still in the same spot behind Tommy's van. He rolled a cigarette himself, his fingers thick, calloused, but also nimble.

"Woodworking," he said. "Been doing it forty years. Everyone who sees my stuff says it's the best."

Tommy once said that the only reason he had so many friends on the boardwalk was that, for a lot of people, he was the only person who would really listen to them. They all had stories they wanted to tell to someone.

Stan had stories. Said he wanted to work triple-time for the next year. Had a friend looking for a studio for him--slow, but reliable, this friend. He'd start a small business, hiring sober people off the street to work for him. Even give them insurance, he said, what with the new Obama tax breaks.

He had other stories, too. He was living in the Virgin Islands last year, making money off a trading schooner he bought for $500 forty years earlier. He wanted to get to Honolulu eventually.

"I came here rich, and I'm gonna leave rich," he said. The American dream.

He talked and puffed on the cigarette without ever taking it from his mouth--a small white nub poking out from behind his dark beard.

Stan said he had a friend looking for supplies and studio for him. He'd stopped drinking this weekend, in anticipation of starting work. But it fell through. Now, he'd wait til after his birthday next week--he was turning 62--to get back to work.

Still, he had no desire to get back on the booze. "My lady friend offered me the other night, and I just said 'no'. Didn't want it anymore."

That's about as close as he got to an explanation of how he ended up on a folding chair behind Tommy's van. Drinking. his teeth told a little more of the story, perhaps--most of them blackened, or gone altogether. Kept saying he "messed his life up," or he was "trying to get his life together." But he never said what happened. And I never asked.

Only question I asked was where his ladyfriend was.

"No, just a friend," he said. he put his arms up. "How'm I gonna have a lady out here."

He pointed towards Shawn's van, which he'd recovered from the impound but, like Tommy's, won't drive. In its shade was Stan's friend, hunched over in her chair, asleep beside a pile of stuff, on top of which lay a jewelry box.

It was hand-carved, he said--laquered wood, with a mirror and a pink, furry padding inside. By the look of it, it had been done with a knife--a diamond pattern carved into the outside, very intricate, a little uneven. Took him more than two months to make. Said he sold it two years ago to a family for $1,500,  but now it'd be worth more like $4,500.

"Family I sold it to was in Nevada, but they moved back out this way into another million-dollar house. Asked me to fix it up for 'em when I get the time. I can make three-quarters of a million dollars a year doin this."

That was the last time I saw Stan. The next day, he was gone--off to a wordworking studio, or to Honolulu, or somewhere.

immobile home

In the front seat, Shawn is dozing, his head leaned back, mouth slightly agape. His van got towed two weeks ago. It's ten past 8:00, then minutes past the start of street cleaning, when the parking attendant could have slapped a ticket down under the wiper blade, which, like most other parts of the van, doesn't work.

Tommy steps out of the back, rubbing the beanie on his bald head. As usual, even this early, his look has been carefully assembled--a white, long-sleeved waffle pattern shirt is mostly covered by a fitted black T-shirt with Asian characters; his jeans, a dark blue wash, fit like they were tailored specially for him; the DC shoes look fresh out of the box. Inside, the floor of his van is covered with paper bags, coffee cups, giant bubble markers, henna oils, and empty boxes of insulin syringes. But his dress is a rejection of this chaos.

He says there's a coffee for me, in a carrier on top of his mom's car--a scarlet Toyota rental parked a few spots ahead of him.

Tony parks his van across the street and walks over. Under his cargo shorts, he wears a pair of rainbow pajama pants. With him is someone I haven't met before--biologically male, but with long blond hair and lipstick smeared slightly beyond her lips. She says her name is Robin.

Shawn gets out of the van, rubbing his eyes. "Tommy, I'm sorry, can I take a piss real quick?" He doesn't want to ask, you can tell, and scampers quickly inside.

We stare at the van sitting next to the curb on Sunset Ave, between 3rd and 4th. For the last six months, this is what every Monday morning has entailed for Tommy--scaring up enough people to move his van across the street, or around the corner, or anywhere, and then back. It is an exercise in arch bureaucratic inanity; in community building; in politics, local and localer; and, ultimately, in the application of brute force.

Four months ago, he tried to drive the '85 Winnebago to a festival in New Mexico. In Arizona, it broke down, and hasn't started since. AAA towed it back to Venice, where it's sat ever since, in need of serious work, and, in lieu of that, at least three people to move it. It is a mobile home that's no longer mobile, instead serving as a reminder of the price he's paid for trying to take a week off from the boardwalk and enjoy himself.

The homeless guy who's been setting up his pallet on the sidewlk behind Tommy's van says he'll help. His name's Stan. We shake hands.

"You've helped me out by blocking me," he says. "I can help you push."

"Thanks man," Tommy says, but with a trepidation I've never seen from him. "I'm gonna call Antonio again. I talked to him earlier. I hope he didn't go back to sleep."

Still no answer. With Stan, we have more than enough people.

Tommy gets in the front seat to steer while the rest of us stand at the hood. We learn our weight onto the van, heaving and grunting, my nose so close to the metal I can smell the rust. At first, it doesn't budge. Slowly, though, it starts to move, picking up steam until we're just guiding it more than anything else.

We push it backwards into the intersection, reversing it from Sunset onto 4th, Stan yelling instructions and encouragement, "Come on, keep going, turn the wheel, just a little more, there we go!" Then we move around the other side to push it forward into the open spot.

When it's done, Shawn goes down the line, his dread locks swaying back and forth in front of his eyes, giving everyone high fives. The whole process took just five minutes.



It's not always this easy. Last week was a fiasco. We only had four people, and, again, Antonio was M.I.A. Tommy biked down to the boardwalk to see if he was there, and while he was gone, the parking attendant showed up and started ticketing the cars ahead of us. We tried to start pushing--just Tony, Shawn and I--but Tommy had the keys with him: we couldn't even get it into neutral. For whatever reason, though, the meter maid just left us alone. Tony said "good morning" to her, and she got in her car and drove off.

Maybe that should have been our cue to just leave the van where it was. But when Tommy returned with Antonio, we tired to push. The only available spot was directly across the street, which meant we had to turn the thing around 15 times to get it over there. Tony, Tommy, Shawn, and I pushed, using the curb for leverage when we could, our bodies perpendicular to the ground. We grunted and heaved, leaning our faces right up against the dirt and exhaust that accumulated on the back of the van, trying to get it moving, as Antonio struggled like hell to turn the wheel. As soon as we built up some momentum, and the work became easier, it was time to stop and turn again. With each pass, we blocked traffic--cars lined up four deep on each side, waiting to get by. And after each pass, we sat on the curb, panting and dripping sweat.

By 9:10, after 30 minutes of this, we were almost there--maybe two turns away. Again, we learned our weight against the van and started moving our feet, my flip-flops threatening to slide out from under me. The van inched into the street again, accompanied by a nasty noise--the sound of something metal dragging against the ground, then the sound of air. Forget it, Tommy yelled. Keep pushing.

When we reached the far side, we were a single push away--the van almost parallel to the curb, finally. But we were also stuck. The sound we'd heard was all the air rushing out of the rear driver's side tire, which, once completely flat, had gotten caught underneath the rim. Tommy cursed; he sat on the curb and held his head in his hands; he asked "why?" he called AAA.

"I can't wait til I don't have to fucking do this anymore, man."

While we sat on the curb, waiting, Tommy and Antonio had a fight. Antonio said he'd only been doing this for three months, and he was already fucking sick of it. "I wouldn't say this if I didn't think you were capable, but I know you could scare up $500 to get this thing fixed. This shoulda been your first priority six months ago. I don't wanna spend my Monday morning doing this every fucking week."
 Still, Antonio stayed to help push after AAA repaired the tire. Tommy is out of free tows for this year.



For the moment, though, Tommy is happy. For a week, he won't have to do this again. And for three more days, his mom will still be here, before she goes back to Rhode Island. It's down time now, sitting on the curb shooting the shit, waiting til 10 when street cleaning ends and we can move the van right back where it was.

Tony and Robin come back from his van, their hair wet from the shower. Robin has a guitar hanging from her shoulder. She's new to the area, and says she came here to make it big.

"My place to stay fell through," she says. "Luckily, I found some good people who are helping me out. I'm gonna remember that when I've got royalties comin' in. Give a little here, little there." She mimes passing out cash as if dealing cards to an imaginary circle of people around her.

One of the guys who owns the business across the street pulls his yellow Land Rover into the driveway. Tommy waves to him, and the guy sort of lifts his head ever so slightly.

"I saw that guy when I was out with my mom at dinner the other night," Tommy says. "He looked at me and did a kind of double-take, like he just couldn't believe that I had a mom, or ate dinner, or did the same things that he did. I think it was good he got to see me like that. They give me shit for being out here sometimes. It's good for him to see that I'm a person."

'the whole purpose of this group is to get rid of RVs'

The signs went up on Monday morning, pounded into the dirt with the authority of a tiger pissing on a tree your dog had fancied his own.

No Parking: Vehicles Over 6 Feet High ------>

"It's for visibility," the workman said. "At the intersections."

When the trucks left, the signs covered a couple of blocks around Sunset Ave and 4th Ave--the epicenter of Venice's RV community.

At least 50 percent of the area's mobile home dwellers park their vehicles within a four-block radius of Sunset and 4th--near the Gold's Gym, Public Storage, and parking lots, and away from residences. The signs put at least half that area of-limits--no vehicles over six feet tall allowed within 100 ft of a corner: no SUVs, no pickups, no vans, and especially no RVs. They were being squeezed out.

Visibility isn't really a problem in the neighborhood. The roads are flat, with four-way stops at just about every intersection. But the Venice Stakeholders Association put in a complaint to the Department of Transportation. Fifty complaints, actually. No study is required to determine if visibility is a problem. When residents complain, LADOT puts up signs.

For decades, Venice has been home to a large community of people living in vehicles. Many of them work on the boardwalk, selling what they can make with their own hands--artwork, henna tattoos, tarot card readings.

During the day, the lot at the end of Rose Ave serves as the community nexus, a place from which to move supplies to a vending spot on the boardwalk, or to relax by the beach. But at night, the lot closes, and the community migrates inland to sleep at Sunset at 4th.

The Stakeholders Association, however, wants the RVs out. They complained to police, who conduct raids in the middle of the night, banging on the sides of vans and yelling at occupants to come out. They applied to restrict overnight parking to Venice residents, got shot down, sued, shot down again. So, in the meantime, they're trying to move them off the intersections.

As Mo Blorfroshan, LADOT Western District transportation engineer, the man responsible for actually putting up the signs, put it, "The whole purpose of this group is to get rid of RVs."

And they show no sign of giving up. Just this week, in response to pressure from Rosendahl, the Los Angeles City Council passed amendments to the city's vehicle ordinance that will make it easier for police to remove vehicles more than 22 ft long or 7 ft tall.

What would happen to the community of RV-dwellers if and when they're banned from the streets they've called home for decades?

Tommy, my friend who parks his van on 4th Ave and works as a henna artist on the boardwalk, said, "You'll probably find a lot of RVs that somehow got Venice parking stickers. Just like you find a lot now that have handicapped stickers so they can get into the lot for free."*

Still, a very real possibility exists that this community will soon be sent into exodus, its members dispersing and taking with them a way of life that has been as essential a part of Venice history as the canals or the boardwalk itself.

So, as long as this community continues to exist, my goal is to document it in as great detail as i can manage. Where they sleep, what they eat, where they shit, what they do with their down time, how they make their money, how much they make and how they spend it, their pleasure and pains: what life is like living in a vehicle and working on the Venice Boardwalk.

*A note on attributions: Because many people who live in RVs and work on the boardwalk are understandably nervous about drawing attention to themselves, I have agreed not to use whole names, and in some cases have changed names altogether.