The Little House Around The Corner

We ended up in a little house on Cabrillo Ave in Venice. 800 square feet. It was the first house that I developed my stupid home repair tricks on. And all the people came. David and Jim and Angela and Loraine and Roberta and Bobbie and Lucy and Judy and Steve and Kathy and Mike and Elena and Judy and John from next door and Blanca. People would just come by and we would cook and hang out and talk and write. The twins came and then another one. Parties came and went, we read purposely bad poetry to one another, I lectured on Robert Frost in this back yard. And had birthday parties and kid parties and we sang Christmas Carols around the block and scared the crack dealers off their corners and banged pots on New Years Eve.
Kyle passed out drunk in our front yard. Rex and Marilyn got fixed up there and got married in our front yard.
We watched John and his boyfriend die next door. And the crazy man yelled at the twins and their whistles in our front yard. Sco helped me put the keys back on the keyboard that the twins had removed and he read Green Eggs and Ham backwards to them on our floor. And it was a really great time. I may still have the shirt.

Riding Your Bike On The Beach

I rode my bike a lot in Venice over the years. We eventually got a little house on Cabrillo and I started working in the Marina and I would just ride the bike back and forth. I upgraded to a European Clone with a 38" frame, which I've had ever since. Then, after moving to Westchester, some brainiac (I think it was me) decided that we needed to do the Cycling Merit Badge for the Boy Scouts. My son was in the troop then. We ended up with about 25 kids that summer. Each scout needs a total of 150 miles to get the badge. Almost all the trips were on the bike path that runs from the north end of Santa Monica to Redondo beach (there was only one hill - on the way over to the beach from my house) And everyone's schedule was busy and so I would do make-up rides and re-rides and then for the end trip we would do a 50-mile trip from my house to Newport Dunes. That first summer I think I booked about 1500 miles on my bike with the numerous groups of kids and their fathers.

We had all the rest stops down. The hamburger joint in Venice, the ice cream shop in Redondo, and all the drinking fountains on the way to refill water.And where to watch for the sand that could make you take a spill. When the traffic was bad -always 1:00 pm on Sunday in Venice- you might as well walk.

The Dads that went were a trip. One rode twenty miles a day out there and he road along with us for about an hour, mostly for the conversation, and then he got bored and off he went. The only ones that could keep up with him was his own son and mine. One guy told me all about his experiences as a social worker in tthe South Pacific. One, a hot shot lawyer with a big corporation, spend an entire trip close behind a curvy roller-blade girl we didn't know. I kept telling him he was going to get in trouble. And then there was the girl on the swing in the red sun dress. Several of the boys wiped out and two of the Dads. I had my first aid kit ready so it wasn't too bad. One of the kids wanted to go home, but couldn't get a hold of his parents, so he ended up finishing anyway.

One Dad and his son only rode with each other and were usually a half an hour to an hour behind the rest of us. I had to take their word for it that they finished each trip, I'd have been there forever waiting for them to show up.

Venice at 5:00AM

I was divorced and living alone (well with the hamster that was left behind, but he stayed up all night and ran in his wheel and went to bed when I was getting up) but was on a schedule of waking up at 5:00 AM because I was used to helping with our daughter and getting her and us ready to go off for the day, but now there was nothing to do for 2 hours. So I started teaching myself to surf.

It was fun for a little while (I have given away my car to her who left) but it seemed it was more of an adventure to get over to the water than to actually get into the water and there were dead days when there was no surf. And I didn't really connect - the guys out there were all ten years younger. Then I took to riding over and running. Had a running partner for a while, then she married and ran off to Utah. (I didn't find out she had gotten married until six months later when I got into a casual conversation with another rider on the 436 bus downtown. -That was how I met her. I had just figured she liked her privacy- still wonder if the kiss goodbye after the morning run was followed that day by her wedding.)

I got real healthy doing all of this. Had actually quit smoking shortly before divorcing. Then decided I would ride my bike some 50 miles to South Coast Plaza for a long weekend and start to write a play I had in my head. Was stuck and went down to the lobby and bought a pack to unstick me and it was soon all over and I was back to a pack a day.

The early morning in Venice is still the best time of the day. The criminals are all sleeping it off. There's absolutely no tourists. And Sidewalk Cafe used to open fairly early.

More Tales of Venice

It started with this guy. We had an upstairs two room apartment in the back (a 1/2 block up from the Venice Boardwalk) and we first became aware of how much we could hear from the apartment below because this guy was having an afternoon thing with the girl that lived below us. He's been a fixture on the Boardwalk for a 1000 years. Very loud lover as well. Reminded me of an opera singer in a boarding house near the IU campus who came with arias. This guy moved on I think. The girl didn't Late one night there was a sream and then nothing else, so we thought maybe it was her just having a good time. (Lesson: don't cry wolf, I guess) Anyway the next morning it turned out that she had been raped at gunpoint and the guy (not the one above) stole her wallet and her keys and ran out. The building guy was slow on getting the locks changed and guess what- the bad guy came back. The girl had gotten a big dog in the meantime and at midnight there's a scream and the dog barking like mad, so I slip on my jeans and run down stairs to make sure she's all right. I'm in the middle of the stairs

and at the bottom, running out is this guy with a gun.

I put up my hands and he runs out the front door. And a second later another neighbor from upstairs comes down with his gun. I was blessed that one was fast and one was slow or I would have been in the middle. The girl's dog had scared off the guy. The locked were changed the next morning.

Weird Places I've Lived

I didn't actually live here, but this was a trailer in the neighborhood where a couple did live. It caught fire recently and the couple had to be hospitalized for their burns. An ex-wife and I and child moved into an a small upstairs duplex apartment behind a small house in the middle of Oakwood because we were tired of trying to survive over by the beach with the armed robberies in our apartment building and the weirdo that set fire to an entire block of dumpsters in the alley behind the apartment building.

http://www.streetgangs.com/topics/1994/012794venice.html

Here's some background on our wonderful neighborhood. I looked for a picture of the real neighborhood but didn't really see anything that looked like it should. I had about six years there I guess. The first year was fights and then she left and took everything (cause I let her) I roamed the neighborhood and found old furniture and stripped it down and refinished it. I bought stuff from Thrift stores. I lived out of an ice chest for a long long time. The guy that owned the property had jumped a Polish Freighter in NYC and was working his way up in the American world. He and his wife lived in the front house with two dobermans. We were the only white people in a six block area. I can remember coming home late one night and watching a pack of wild gang boys chasing a girl across a park nearby. I stayed to make sure she got away. I'm not sure what I could've done if they had caught her. The hanger-arounders wanted to know if I could help them get jobs, mostly cause I wore a tie to work every morning. I had no car- walked over to Venice Blvd and took the bus to downtown  to work every morning.  There was a almost a murder monthly there.

Imagine the trailer with a couple of palm trees behind it and that's Oakwood. 

Had a beanbag chair. Finally had enough money to buy a car or a computer. I bought the computer.

Hosted a large group of intellectuals there for a presentation on Proust.

Friends came and went from the place. The neighborhood scared some women, didn't scare others.

Came home in a friend's car one lunch time and found gardeners at work on the yard. I chatted with them, got what I came for out of my apartment and left. Returned that evening to find that they were robbing all of us. A butcher knife was laying on my kitchen counter. One of them must have been in the apartment when I came and went. I didn't have much to steal and I guess I helped to scare them off.

Imagine two palm trees behind the trailer and that's Oakwood.

Where I'd Rather Be

1973 New Orleans Jazz Festival - Roosevelt Sikes and company

Buster Holmes and a plate of beans and rice for 55 cents.

I Was A Deadbeat Dad (How My Belief In America Has Been Restored)

http://divorce.lovetoknow.com/National_Deadbeat_Dad_List

Once upon a time there was a divorce and a child of the divorce. At one point, after the divorce was final, and the mother of the child of the divorce met someone else and was going to remarry, she told the father of the child of the divorce that her new husband was going to adopt the child and that the father should not come to see the child or send presents any longer or anything. So the father stopped. Twenty years later, when the laws all changed, the father was notified that he owned twenty years of back child support. He was willing to pay but wanted to see the child that he had never been able to see. He was told the law didn't care and it was two separate things. He asked that the law verify that the child was truly not adopted and he was told that the law didn't care and it was up to him to prove any different scenario. The father's lawyer suggested they file for a hearing to contest the rule of enforcement, so on the day of the court hearing, the father went downtown and stood in a big long line like this with probably thirty other deadbeat dads (which were mostly Hispanic) and waited with his lawyer for his fifteen minutes. The Judge didn't give a goddamn about any of the men and one after another told them that they had to pay. The same happened with our father of the divorced child. The lawyer didn't understand why his filing didn't work. But the father quickly understood that this did not have to do with him or any of the thousands of other fathers. This had to do with money and it was a machine set up by the DA's office in Los Angeles and across the country to collect the money no matter the circumstances or the guilt or innocence of any of the parties. So then the DA came after any money they could grab. Salaries, assets, cars, houses etc. It didn't matter if you needed a car to go to work so the DA could take your salary. It didn't matter that you might have other children to feed that were living under your roof. The father of the divorced child was a smart man and was able to protect his family, but the long line of not so smart poor men in the line (who didn't have lawyers) probably were ruined to the point that they dropped out even more, changed their name and identity and became illegal immigrants in Mexico where they could starve to dead without legal harassment.

You also get your name on the lists and the websites like the one I included above. 

I paid my debt to society (and to the ex in Texas who probably bought herself a house with the money) and my current wife has forgiven me for my transgression and I assume my name is not on any more lists. I was also given other bad legal advice from lawyers who will take your money under the pretext of "helping you." And I still haven't gotten to see my child, who is grown now and married. 

The one bit of justice I did get throughout the entire process was when I paid the bulk of the money and the DA's office came back one more time and tried to bill me for the accrued interest for the money that I hadn't known that I owed, I was able to quote the law back to them and show them that they could not do it and the lady actually corrected their mistake and removed the amount owed.

Also, the ex and her family knew of my whereabouts the entire time over the last twenty years and could have written or called or filed at any time for the money. I am also a child of divorce and was supportive of my mother when she had to garnish my own deadbeat dad's wages to get her child support. But this had nothing to do with the law or justice.