VeniceWire

“Some are in the streets now, some with friends”

2010-11-23T10:56:00.000-08:00

The beach lot at Rose Avenue in now all but free of RVs.

Hand-painted with slogans like “The Spirit of Venice” and “Jesus Was Homeless”, Abraham and Diane’s RV has for years been a symbol of the beach parking lot at the end of Rose Avenue where dozens of RVs parked every day.

But now it’s the only RV in the lot (far right in picture). And they’re not just gone from the lot: dozens, maybe hundreds of RVs are gone from Venice.

A little more than a month after signs went up banning large vehicles from the Rose lot, the ranks of Venice’s vehicle-dwellers have thinned dramatically.

Around Sunset Avenue and 4th Avenue, for so long an epicenter of RVs where dozens of vehicles parked each night, there’s hardly an oversized vehicle to be found. The only RVs in the area are behind the Public Storage and Gold’s Gym on 3rd Avenue, the skid row of RVs where many of Venice’s other vehicle-dwellers won’t go. Even there, numbers have dwindled to a dozen or so vehicles.

So, where have they gone?

Some have started spending their days in the beach parking lots in Santa Monica, just a stone’s throw north of the Rose lot, across the city line. The lots are more expensive—and don’t allow vehicles with handicapped placards in for free—but at least they’re still allowed in.

Others have lost their vehicles. Vehicle-dwellers complain of an LAPD crackdown—with vehicles ticketed and towed for minor infractions—and, once the vehicle is impounded, many of them lack the financial resources to get it out.

“Some are in the streets now, some with friends,” Abraham said.

Diane and Abraham on the boardwalk across from Venice Bistro.

“Some in jail,” Diane said. She told the story of a friend, D, whose van was impounded, with her three dogs inside; D was taken to jail. She’s out now, staying in a friend’s van, but the dogs are van and the dogs are gone.

Others have simply moved on from Venice. Antonio and Tina are gone—Tommy said Tina is back in Palmdale where they met; Antonio is in Highland park with the RV, trying to get the money to go back to join her there.

Tommy is trying to leave as well. He had a deal to sell his van lined up, and planned to move to an apartment in Hollywood or $200 a month, but the housing fell through right before the first of November. Now, he’s hoping his family in Rhode Island can find the money to fly back east, where he could stay in a cousin’s basement for a while.

All his friends who used to live here and work on the boardwalk are gone, he said.

“I’m getting air lifted out of here,” Tommy said. “I’m like the last one left.”

A few RVs still line 3rd Ave.

Even those still trying to work on the boardwalk, like Tommy and Abraham and Diane, face a new, longer commute. While Abraham and Diane have an RV small enough that it’s still allowed into the Rose lot, most RVs are too big, which means their owners have to cart all the supplies for their livelihoods to the beach—an arduous process that Tommy was forced to undertake for almost a year, after his van broke down last fall. Some vendors can’t do it themselves, and pay someone else to help them. Some now find it yet another reason to leave Venice.

(Post forthcoming on carting his stand to the beach.)

Abraham and Diane, though, are staying. Abraham said a year from now, he expects to be right where he has been for year, painting on sacks on across from Venice Bistro.

“I think there’ll be an even bigger community of RVs here in a year,” Abraham said. “Because of the economy. There’s two wars going on. That’s the reality.”

2010-10-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

Check out my story on RVs in Venice on the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/us/04rv.html?_r=1&hpw

“when you stay in the rose lot, you’re part of the tribe, whether you want to be or not.”

2010-08-30T22:49:00.000-07:00

Last week, a furor erupted in Venice after RV-dwellers were caught dumping sewage into the street at Pacific and Fleet. A resident who, for fear of reprisal, goes only by “Boston Dawna”, took down the RV’s plate number as it drove away, and called the police, who caught up with the vehicle at Sunset and 3rd. Officers arrested the owner of the vehicle, and also found more evidence of sewage dumping around Sunset and 3rd, the skid row of Venice’s RV community, where many of the Rose lot regulars won’t go. Hazmat teams were brought in, videos of the sewage made it to YouTube, and every news outlet from the LA Times to KTLA ran stories.

Selwyn, the illegal dumper, is a regular at the Rose lot, where he camps out at the north end with his wife, Lindsey, and their 15-year-old daughter. Even before the incident, he cut something of a notorious figure. As Antonio pointed out, his gray water tank leaked constantly, leaving a trail from his van down to the sand as the west side of the lot.


The gray water trickles slowly from the van to the beach.

I took these photos of Selwyn's RV several weeks before the sewage dumping incident, after Antonio pointed out that his gray water tank always leaked. You can actually see the pipe dripping.

After two days in jail, Lindsey, under whose name the vehicle is registered, was released, with no charges yet filed, though City Attorney Carmen Trutanich has said his office still plans to charge her. In the wake of the incident, as other Rose lot regulars have gone into damage-control mode, they’ve warned Selwyn to stay away. They’ve since been parking at the Santa Monica lot, a stone’s throw from the Venice lot, just north of the city line. But RVs can’t park on the street in Santa Monica. So at night, the Rose lot community suspects he has been coming back to Venice.

Selwyn is unrepentant, however. When Antonio called him, several days after the incident, he called Boston Dawna a “jackass”. And this week, he exchanged the following texts with Antonio:
Selwyn: Just to put to rest any misinformation, the city attorney rejected the case and also called it a bullshit charge.

Antonio: Bullshit? Clearly you have no idea will affect the big picture. This will be used as an example against all RV-dwellers for years.

S: Bullshit was the word the supervising city attorney used. Apparently prosecutors don’t take it very seriously. You’ve been reading too much inflammatory shit on the net. We’re good. Lindsay is much better now, love to the gang.

A: What you did was wrong, and you’re not taking responsibility. You made the homeowner look like a big champion to the public and media and she’s the jackaass?

S: what are you, ace? The rose lot moral authority? You going to come over here and kick the shit out of us with your dogs and sticks? You’re some variety of junky, yes? You and your buddies are selling and using drugs 60mph, yes? We don’t have any money. None. You want to lend us money to dump?

A: No, I have never sold drugs. I’ve been holding my sewage for two weeks now because I don’t have the money to dump. You can’t justify what you did. Be a man, admit.

From there, Selwyn began threatening to have Antonio prosecuted if he didn’t stay away, and calling the Rose lot community a “tribe”. Finally, Antonio replied, “You best stay away from Venice. We don’t want shit-dumping trash around here.”

“When you stay in the rose lot, you’re part of the tribe, whether you want to be or not,” said Ian, a 20-something, rainbow-haired local who lives in a house on San Juan.

On Thursday night, a week after the incident, Antonio sat in his RV watching TV with Tina and Tommy. Suddenly, Raven screeches to a halt outside on his bike, shouting, “He’s on Rose! He’s on Rose!” Immediately, ten people are outside.

“We have to do it now,” said Ian. “We have to show him he can’t come here anymore.”

The plan was this: the group would go confront him, demanding that he stay away from Venice. Ian would videotape, so as to have evidence that the RV community doesn’t like illegal dumping any more than the residents do.

Raven biked ahead, while the rest of the group walked up Rose Ave towards 6th, where Raven had seen the RV. “I have a bad feeling about this,” Antonio said. “Everyone is too excited.”

But as soon as Selwyn saw Raven, he bolting, driving south down 6th, and Raven couldn’t keep up. By the time the rest of the group arrived, he was gone. They walked around in circles for the next half-hour, looking for the vehicle on Sunset and on 3rd, but found nothing.

The situation has the Rose lot crew spooked, afraid that any infraction, however small, will be used to drive them out. Antonio said he doesn’t want to dump his gray water down the storm drain like he usually does. He’s even afraid someone might pull the valve and open his black water tank, just to sabotage the RV community. “All it would take would be for someone to pull the lever, and it’d be all over.”

"heaven rocks"

2010-08-27T06:33:00.000-07:00

At the Rose lot, locals set up a memorial for Patrick, a longtime resident who died of cancer yesterday inside an RV.

"she's probably dehydrated"

2010-08-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

Fire truck on the boardwalk. Everyone’s attending to a woman on a bench. She’s breathing from an oxygen mask. Someone says “I.V.” The woman is calm—in her 40’s maybe, a bit heavy set, with a warm face and dyed-red hair. She takes the mask off for a second to ask someone to hand her her purse. Beside her, several others are sitting on the bench, also very calm, paying only intermittent attention to the commotion right next to them.

“It’s Jan,” Tommy says. “She’s probably dehydrated.”

“What’s Jan do down here?”

“Not a lot. Just lives out here. Trolls for young guys, sometimes.”

For the tourists, this is a landmark moment—something exciting they will remember from their trips to California, along with the guy on rollerblades playing electric guitar, and the well-oiled man in the Speedo. They form a ring around the truck on the east side of the boardwalk, snapping pictures and pointing, keeping a safe distance.

For the regulars, the ones that live and work here, the trucks are hardly worth note There are fire trucks on the boardwalk every week, at least. They're just part of the basic health care system here--the ones who respond when someone's deydrated, or gets tired of sitting outside in the sun. The musicians don’t even stop playing for the sirens.

At the pagoda beside the trucks, a young man is playing a keyboard on his lap. His fingers whip about the keys, playing frantic snippets of melody. An upturned top hat sits on the sidewalk a few feet in front of him, a blond young woman on the step behind him.

“His girlfriend needs a shaker,” Tommy says. “His rhythm’s all over the place.”

Tommy grabs an empty juice bottle from off the bamboo mat in his stand and starts picking around the edge of the sand, looking for pebbles. He stuffs a handful of them inside the bottle, using the handle of his pocketknife to push through one that gets stuck at the mouth of the bottle. He caps it, and shakes it a couple times. The rocks make dull thudding sounds against the

The next break in the music, Tommy approaches the keyboardist.

“Here,” he says. “For your girlfriend. So she can play with you.” He shakes the bottle again, to make sure the guy gets the idea.

The firemen have Jan on a gurney now. A couple of them wheel her towards the ambulance, while the others chat with Jan’s friends, or pose for tourists’ pictures. Jan sits upright on the bed, looking comfortable, no oxygen mask now.

“Oooh, you look good, Jan,” Tommy says.

She smiles at him. She’s fine.

“Take good care of our girl,” Tommy says to the paramedics.

The firemen shut the doors, and the ambulance pulls away, no sirens, with the truck close behind. The tourists snapped their final pictures. The keyboardist picks up his top hat and flipa it onto his head before he and his girlfriend moved on.

The plastic bottle full of rocks remains on the steps of the pagoda.

“Oh well,” Tommy says. “Guess she didn’t wanna play.”

"i'm recycling right now, but what i really wanna do is direct"

2010-08-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

My story from the Beverly Press this week about people who recycle bottles and cans for a living in West Hollywood, and the city's plans to stop the practice. Different part of the city, same issues as Venice.

Since he lost his job working security in Las Vegas last year, Lansing Beard, a 53-year-old army veteran, has slept on a mattress on the side of the road near the corner of Genesee Avenue and Sunset Boulevard.

Starting at 6 a.m. every morning, Beard pulls his cart through the streets of West Hollywood, salvaging bottles and cans from trash and recycling bins. By noon, when the cart weighs 300 pounds, he redeems his bounty, then starts all over again in the afternoon. When the redemption center closes at 5 p.m., he might have $60 to show for 11 hours of work.

“I never thought I’d be doing this this long,” Beard said. “When I left Vegas, I thought I’d be here six months tops. That’s the thing about being homeless — time just slips away from you so easily, you don’t even notice it. One minute, you’ve been on the streets a month, the next minute, it’s been a year.”

Beard supported himself the same way from 1998 to 2004, when he was last homeless. Back then, he said maybe 20 people supported themselves recycling in West Hollywood. Now, at least 50 people make a living scavenging just in the area of the city that Beard works — between Crescent Heights Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.

But after years of resident complaints, the City of West Hollywood is drafting an ordinance that would make it easier to cite, arrest and prosecute people who go through city trash and recycling bins.

Lauren Meister, president of the West Hollywood West Residents Association, outlined the concerns many residents have voiced about scavenging.

“First of all, it’s a little scary, because sometimes people come at five-thirty in the morning,” Meister said. “There’s the possibility of identity theft. Then, it’s a mess. I’ve gotten complaints of people going through the regular trash, not just the recycling, and opening up the bags, so trash ends up all over the street. I’ve seen people going up driveways and behind people’s gates to get trash. What’s to stop them from breaking into somebody’s house? It’s a good ordinance for public safety and public health.”

Beard is sympathetic to residents’ concerns.

“I can see her perspective,” Beard said. “You’re back there, you’re making all this noise, leaving a mess. A lot of people do that. But for the person who’s doing it, it’s like, ‘Hey, I don’t have any money. I’m just doing this to survive.’”

Last Thursday morning, he tried to keep quiet, as he went through bins in the early morning.

“I like this cart because it’s one of the quieter ones, sometimes you hear them and they’re all rickety,” Beard said. “I try to be quiet, especially at this place. A couple times, one of the women who lives here has asked me to come back later. But if you come back later, everything is gone.”

Beard pulled his cart up a driveway, setting it beside the dumpster in the parking lot behind an apartment complex. One by one, he opened the lids of the recycling bins, reached in to retrieve any plastic bottles or cans, deposited them in his cart, and shut the lids again, careful to leave everything how he found it.

He propped opened the lid to the dumpster with a long stick, then used another stick with a hook on the end to retrieve a trash bag. He untied the bag, removed a few cans, and retied it when he was done.

“Some people just climb into the dumpsters, I don’t know how they do it,” he said. “A lot of them rip the bags open and leave a mess, too. I try to retie them, but sometimes I need the bags, so I have to empty them and take them.”

As he turned the cart back onto the road, a man on the far side of the street pointed to a small pile of cans at the bottom of a driveway for Beard to collect.

“A lot of stuff we do depends on compassion of people, people giving you stuff,” Beard said. “At the same time, yesterday I had a woman screaming at me, saying she was going to call the police, even though it wasn’t her property. I got angry for a second, but then I just walked away. She’s a resident, it’s her right.”

Currently, scavenging exists in a kind of legal gray area. Although it is illegal to go through city trash and recycling containers, it’s unclear what authority the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department has to enforce that law. Lt. Lujuanda Haselrig explained that unless there is a victim, deputies cannot cite people they see scavenging for misdemeanors. They simply warn them verbally and send them on their way.

City Councilmember Jeffrey Prang, who sponsored a motion in May to ban scavenging, would like to change that enforcement policy.

“This is a quality-of-life issue,” Prang said. “It’s important to prevent identity theft, as well as for public health and public safety. We asked the city attorney to see what authority we currently have to combat scavenging. The Sheriff’s Department has a couple of specific enforcement teams whose whole job is to address quality-of-life issues, so if we want to focus on jaywalking or pooper scoopers one week, they can do that. Before we tell them to focus on scavenging, we want to make sure we have all the legal authority we need to take appropriate action.”

Cities around California have taken similar measures to curb scavenging. The City of Redondo Beach, for example, has a full-time city employee who drives around looking for people going through recycling bins and issuing citations.

Twice, Beard has been issued citations for having a shopping cart on the street, both of which turned into warrants when he was unable to pay the fines, which in turn led to nights in jail. But in both cases, when he was released, he resumed scavenging for recyclables.

“When I first got on the streets, I made a vow to God that I would not drink alcohol until I was off the streets, and I’ve pretty much kept that,” he said. “If you drink, you’re trapped. I try not to spend more than five dollars a day, just for food.”

Beard acknowledges the prevalence of alcoholism and crystal meth addiction among people who scavenge. He was once robbed by a man named Shaw, who was an alcoholic. Shaw was later killed, and Beard keeps a knife on himself for protection.

Still, Beard doesn’t like the idea of going to a homeless shelter. He went once, but only stayed several days. He said he thinks he can make more recycling than getting general relief, and he prefers to support himself.

“I’ve always been an independent person,” he said. “I joined the service when I was eighteen. It’s not in my character to ask anyone for help. I’ve never been one to panhandle. I would much rather do this, but I don’t want to do it very much longer. I want to get myself a real job as soon as possible, but of course we’ve got the worst economy in years.”

Kerry Morrison, director of the Hollywood Business Improvement District, conducted a registry of all the homeless people in Hollywood several months ago. She said Beard’s attitude is common among people who support themselves recycling.

“I was struck that 30 percent of the people we surveyed said they recycled for a living,” Morrison said. “They were proud that they were doing that and not just panhandling.”

Still, Rodolfo Salinas, director of community outreach for People Assisting The Homeless (PATH), which contracts with the City of West Hollywood to provide services for the homeless, said it’s important that local governments not allow people to use recycling to feed alcohol and drug addictions.

“I hope to see some groups and elected officials truly assume some level of responsibility for homelessness, which is one of the worst things going on in L.A. County,” Salinas said. “The fact is that in this economic climate, people apply themselves to recycling with the same effort you do at work. But the city has a responsibility to police itself carefully, so people aren’t using recycling to advance their addictions. We see patterns where recycling centers are located within a quarter-mile of liquor stores, and people are recycling just enough to get themselves a pint of vodka.”

Beard doesn’t want to recycle for a living. For the time being, he doesn’t know what else to do, though. He said he’s trying to save up money, spending no more than $5 to $10 per day.

Besides food, Beard’s main expenses are movies — he goes up to a theatre in North Hollywood. He’s also written several screenplays.

“It’s Hollywood, everyone has a screenplay,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Well, I’m recycling right now, but what I really want to do is direct.’”

Realistically, though, his goal is to find another security job. Every few weeks, he takes the bus back to Las Vegas to look for work, but so far he hasn’t been able to find anything. His real dream, he said, is to buy a house for his ex-girlfriend, who kicked him out when he lost his job.

“In five years, I hope I’m going to be back in Vegas, working two jobs, hopefully paying off a mortgage,” Beard said. “Hopefully living with my girlfriend. I’m still in love with her, even though she was kind of my undoing. I should probably let her go, but I just can’t.”

"i don't need that kind of help"

2010-08-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

Last week, the Los Angeles City Council approved a plan to establish a "safe overnight parking program" for people living in RVs in Venice.

City Councilmember Bill Rosendahl secured more than $700,000 from city coffers to fund the "Streets to Homes" program, which will be modeled on similar efforts in Santa Barbara and Eugene, Oregon.

In the new "save overnight parking" program, outdoor cooking would not be allowed

Participants would be offered a safe, legal place to park overnight, along with various other amenities like restrooms, a place to dispose of garbage, and a drain for septic tanks. These amenities, however, will come with a set of conditions: no drugs or alcohol, no outdoor grilling, and mandatory case management, with the goal of moving RV-dwellers into permanent housing.

Rosendal's office hopes the program will begin by the end of the year, around when the new ordinance against over-sized vehicles would take effect and police will be more easily able to remove RVs that park on residential streets. Participation is voluntary, and open to any Council District 11 residents living in their vehicles.

"Participants will benefit from case management, social services, housing assistants," reads one slide in a PowerPoint presentation Arturo Piña, Rosendahl's deputy for Venice, sent out about the program. "Non-participants will be subject to law enforcement action."

However, many of Venice's RV-dwellers express no interest in participating in the program.

"I don't need that kind of help," Antonio said, while sitting in his RV in the Rose lot. "I really dig this lifestyle. I'd like to be doing it a little better than I'm doing it right now. But the reason why I'm living here is not to be a working stiff. The idea of having to go to case management and try to move into an apartment doesn't sound appealing at all. If I wanted to live in an apartment, I'd be trying to do that already. Right now, Tina and I's goal is to get a converted bus."

Antonio mentioned Peter, who lives with his wife in an RV in the Rose lot, as an example of someone who's doing very well living in an RV. He makes buttons, which he sells on the boardwalk, and makes enough money to hire someone to sell the for him, so he can stay in the van and keep making them.

Tommy wasn't inclined to participate in the program, either.

"I don't want to have to check in with somebody on how I'm doing," he said. "I'm busy, I work in the henna stand. It's like an outdoor shelter, and I think for a lot of people, it would be a good thing for them, but not for me. If it's an option for people, that's great, but not if it's forced. Then it's more like an internment camp, trying to round us all up in the same place."

One slide on the Council District 11 PowerPoint presentation reads, "Ultimate evaluation criteria will be reduction of vehicle on residential streets." It remains to be seen what will happen to the locals who continue to park their RVs on the streets.

everything you always wanted to know about RV septic systems*

2010-07-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

*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

2010-07-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

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'

2010-07-09T13:55:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-07-01T19:27:00.000-07:00

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'

2010-07-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

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.

treasure maps

2009-08-09T22:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-01T23:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-20T21:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-09T20:57:00.000-07:00

“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

2009-06-09T20:50:00.000-07:00

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.