I’ve been skiing with my family at Snowmass the past two weeks. Normally, I would have written every day or so, describing the spectacular scenery, exhilarating skiing, and wonderful events and happenings which surround my time in the mountains. Somehow, that didn’t happen this year. I don’t know if it’s my ongoing, daily recuperation efforts, or something else, but my creative writing drive has withered recently. So, to keep my blog alive, I’ll turn to some Golden Oldies.
In the mid-late 70’s, Cheryl and I lived near the beach in Venice, CA. We encountered a number of strange characters and experiences, which years later I was able to capture in Nine Stories that I always meant to expand on. These stories exist elsewhere on www.bikrutz.org, but I thought I’d put them up in the Triblog, to allow comments, or at least give me an opportunity to read them again and correct all the typos.
Here’s the introduction to those stories: Venice, California, is technically part of the City of Los Angeles. But, in reality (or is it fantasy?), it exists as an altered state of mind, altered by the sun, the surf, the extraordinary diversity of its people. Walk down the street, and you’ll see anyone and everyone: movie stars, muscle beach rats, nodded out junkies, tourists, Jewish grandmothers, and maybe even yourself in an alternate universe. I lived there from 1975 through 1978. If this stuff didn’t really happen, it should have (or could have).
……….
The first Story is “The Man Who Lived Under the House.” Here’s the first part:
“I think I’d like to move out here to the beach,” I ventured. I was staring out the window of Cheryl’s second-floor efficiency apartment, straining to see the ocean beyond the houses crammed along the boardwalk.
“Why? It’s so far away from the hospital.” (Of course, she worked at the same hospital.) I’d have to be careful answering. I couldn’t come right out and tell her I wanted to move in together, not yet. She still seemed like she might be scared away by signs of clinging permanence.
“You’re on the edge here. Los Angeles is so big and over-built. Where I am, its sixty miles in any direction until you get away from concrete and people. But here – I can walk down to the water, and there’s nothing out there for thousands of miles. Gives me a feeling of freedom, of space, of being alone in the big city.” I’d always liked space and aloneness, I figured. So why did I want to move in with someone else for the rest of my life?
“But what about Rick? You can’t just abandon him, can you?” I shared a house in Alhambra with another intern. We were the sole survivors of our medical school house of five; the other three had dispersed across the country seeking the grail of perfect knowledge in post-graduate training.
“Maybe I can talk him into coming out here – he’s always liked the beach.” I didn’t tell her he would be leaving after this first year to take a residency somewhere else. My plan was to bait and switch – get a house for Rick and I, then, when he left, entice Cheryl to move in.
A few days later, she came up to me at the hospital. “There’s a house for rent over on Wavecrest.”
Aha! She’s not scared off after all; she’s actually interested in having me close by! “What’s it like?”
“It’s really neat. It’s two houses in from the street” – meaning Pacific; all the houses between Pacific and the beach were on walkways perpendicular to the ocean, with alleys behind – “and it’s got this sunroom in front, all glass and light.”
Wow, this was really serious. She’d been over to see it and size it up, I thought. I let her continue, which was what I did best.
“It’s got three bedrooms, a refrigerator and stove. And it’s $450 a month” This was three times what she was paying now, more even then Rick and I paid in Alhambra for a suburban tract house.
“You wanna go look at it sometime?”
(To Be Cont’d)