The Pisces(8)

I didn’t protest any further. I needed the money and Annika had it. Tons of money. In the late ’90s she’d gotten into the yoga studio scene in Santa Monica, designed a line of mats made of bamboo. The mats were featured in Yoga Journal in a three-page profile about their biodegradable properties and rich texture for asana. Two days later she received a call. It was Hain Celestial. They wanted to buy the patent. Then Native Foods came calling. A bidding war ensued, and the patent was bought by Hain Celestial for $3.1 million, which she used to get into the tech and innovator conferences during the first dot-com bubble. That’s where she met Steve, a Jewish hippie investor deep in Silicon Valley 1.0. She got him into kombucha, taught him how to relax (sort of), and they got married in Sonoma. Then she moved him down to Venice Beach, used his money to build a giant glass-and-metal cube of a house right on Ocean Front Walk. Later they got Dominic: a purebred foxhound who became their child. Annika hadn’t practiced Ashtanga or Vinyasa yoga in years—only Hatha and restorative—and was fat now. Steve loved her ass and was always squeezing it. He tried to grow what remained of his hair long like Kenny G and casually ran an investment firm with offices in Century City. He wore linen shorts to work. They joined a hippie synagogue in Malibu and were happy.



Now they complained about the newest wave of gentrification though, what the real-estate agents called “Silicon Beach,” taking over Venice. A new kind of yuppie, shiny like the young ass-cheeks couple. The clothes they sold on Abbot Kinney and Main Street still had some boho vibes, but now they cost thousands of dollars. Rich hippies. That didn’t bother Annika as much as the chain stores that were moving in, upscale and soulless.

“They’re turning this place into a MILF mall,” she said. “Soon it will basically be Phoenix.”

But Venice would never look like Phoenix, because of all the bums. Phoenix would never allow a homeless community so bustling. Instead they shipped them all to L.A. If you were a homeless person and you weren’t living in Venice, then you were doing something wrong. Venice was the place to be. They lined the lawn between the beach and Ocean Front Walk: camps of them sprawled out in the sun. There was a lot of meth and heroin, young people nodding out, barefoot, army surplus–clad and dirt-encrusted. Others had been there longer, hardened, as though the dirt had completely melded with their skin, reeking of piss, fighting with one another, cranky junkies. They pitched tents and got into brawls, held hands and talked to themselves. At night they walked from the beach to Third Street and formed a tent city two blocks long, leaving the street lined with trash, shit, and sleeping bags in the morning. No one disturbed them.



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The first time I came to Venice I thought it was weird, all of these millionaires living among the bums. If you moved here in the past decade, you either had a million-dollar home or you slept on the sidewalk in front of one. That visit had been a disaster. Annika and I rarely ever saw each other, although I had promised for many years to take a trip to the beach. I couldn’t get Jamie’s and my schedules to align, couldn’t get him interested, and I was afraid to go alone—to be intimate with her—without him as a buffer. I didn’t want to be seen too closely or I might have to look at me too.



“Just come by yourself,” she would say. “I don’t care about him, it’s you I want to see.”

This was easy for her to say from the comfort of couplehood. Her independence, even though it had been real once upon a time, was now a performance. How could she judge me for waiting for Jamie when she had Steve following her ass around like a Sherpa? I felt judged, even if she wasn’t judging. So I delayed for years. Then, finally, when Jamie was shooting a special on Joshua Tree, we decided I would come out to Venice at the end of his trip and he would take the Airstream out and meet me there.

I was so nervous the afternoon I flew to see her that I got drunk on the plane. I couldn’t tell if she or Steve could smell it on me when I landed, although he looked at me funny. I was sitting in the backseat of their Prius and watching him gently rub her neck when the call came in. Jamie’s shoot had been extended and he was not going to be able to come. I spoke to him calmly and tried to contain my anger. I didn’t want Annika, or especially Steve, to see that I had any rage. If I could fool them then maybe I wouldn’t have to feel it myself. But that night I got so drunk on white wine that I puked all over Annika’s guest bed. Apparently, in a blackout, I talked to Steve about suicide. I wasn’t threatening to do it, just discussing its merits as a practical solution for the problems of life.

I spent the remainder of the trip on good behavior. I used the bums to triangulate, inquiring about them often, giving them money. I thought that in the light of the bums I wouldn’t look so bad. I made up a game, “billionaire or bum,” in which I would ask Steve to place a bet on which one he thought a straggly-looking bohemian was. Apparently he was offended. She continued to invite me out there, especially once they got Dominic, but I always told her “soon.” I didn’t invite her to see my world.



Now it was the bums, especially the kids who ran away out here, who kept Venice from becoming a total Google campus—at least so far. They graffitied the palm trees, made sure the drugs were still flowing. I felt drawn to them, particularly the younger ones, how they just let everything go. How they were able to do that. Palm trees in pristine locations depressed me. But with a little grit they were sexy against the setting sun.