On the other hand it's always sort of nice and warm here. And even when it's not, it still sort of is.
I don't make it to the beach often enough, but I'm always reassured that it's out there waiting for me, keeping the same cycles of ebb and flow. I've never actually seen anyone walk flat out into the ocean with all their clothes on except in movies, but that's the feeling it gives me knowing it's out there waiting. My friends are better about getting out to it even if it is just to walk the boardwalk or read on the sand. I'm reassured by them doing that too. And of course I do know some people who surf. But they get a little hippy about it all and it's generally best not to talk to them too much about the ocean, especially at parties where it comes off as an invitation either for a long abstract stoned conversation about the oneness of things or for them to hook up with you in the back of their Outback—none of them actually ever drive woodies anymore, but you have to assume they imagine their cars to be the modern equivalent and do you have to appreciate that they've chosen their vehicles with a certain amount of functionality in mind, tho still there's this weird smugness vibe that I can't stand.
What what I really wanted to say was that the ocean is sort of eternally present for us here and not in some daunting jagged cliffs and storm clouds way. I think it's because we're on the same level with it and it just sort of laps up at us. I work in a pizza shop. I'm not sure why that fits with what I was just saying about the ocean. But somehow it does right? I sort of own the place, but only in this loose sense where we all sort of own the place which really just means that none of us make any money. We're like the least fancy place ever, but the surfers love us. Maybe that's why I feel like I'm always with the beach even when I'm not at it: there are always these barefoot beach people in and out tracking sand around—like the ocean coming up to great us. The place, like I said, is super simple in part because we always have to hose out the sand. It's all just white one by one tile, a counter and some seats. I honestly think it's the simplicity and the hours—which incidentally we had to fight the city tooth and fucking nail to stay open an hour later than's generally allowed—that have turned it into sort of a hub.
I'm a transferrer of pizza. And they're transferrers of sand. And money I guess.
___________________
What I was staying before was sort of like, the town has this really simple circuit of communication and we're at the center of it. On one hand the town is made up of beach people. It really is the only thing we have. It brings tourists some, but we're a bit too slummy for that. Mostly it's surfers that pour through, or those perpetual beach dwellers that just find their way to ocean and sand. It's hard to explain them. But the other side of the circuit is this thin skeleton of town infrastructure. The town is old and it's got this bizarre permanent population of old people from a series of care homes around the area. I can't explain how it happens tho. Somehow people come here right before they retire and settle into the community, buying up the little bungalow homes. And it seems, once they're entrenched, right then, they get too old and shipped off to the folk's homes. But by then they have some serious stake in the community. They run all these shops that one can't imagine how they stay in business. Trophy shops and model shops, repair for things that nobody gets repaired anymore. And they're all dusty and stuffy. But the whole business community of the town is these types of stores owned by these semi-retired old people and their peripherally.
Which leaves us. We're the only point that connects the town to its most lucrative clientele. I mean, we're the only ones that can actually open up lines of communication. Which was how, eventually, we got the extra open hour.
[Eventually this story should be about a central couple, a band and some maybe its a 'surfer pastoral.' They story should blaze like the sun in an overexposed 70s photograph, color washed out in a brilliant haze. Plot-wise I see it working on this level of drifting, i.e. like everything I write no plot. Maybe somebody dies? Nah. Maybe its just the story of a bon fire party? Man, I hate plots.]
_________________
Beach towns are weird because the beach enforces a casual atmosphere. The secret to our success is in that. Our whole place is hospital white with terrible fluorescent bulbs. Our tables and chairs are the cheapest restaurant supply variety. Anywhere else the whole thing'd be hideous. But here it gets the charm of surf bums and their sand, like barnacles. Like I said, we literally have to hose the place out. Plus, I've always thought that the neon signs were really our calling card and those wouldn't work quite right without the utter whitewash.
Anyway, the kids are sort of the point of it all. Sometimes I feel like a substitute mom to them. Tho older sister is more fair to myself and to them. Along with the rotating band and the bums who scrape enough together for a slice, there is a central crew that I get to be the provider for. Not all of them surf, but it's hard to tell that kind of thing. They all basically live on the beach. Their sweet kids. They care about the place, the whole town, the ocean, in a really thoughtful way. They're quiet and deep as far as surfer kids go. They manage to avoid both the stoner hippy and the bro side of it all. I can't say how.
They like their pizza cheap. Which, despite my quite literal investment in the stuff, makes me unreasonably happy. They come in for cheese, always extra large, because there is a minimum of mass that they require. What's fun is the days when they're feeling a little more free with their wallets. They only allow themselves one topping—tho I've seen them try to get to two once, which resulted in sort of an infinite calculus that proved too much for them and shot them right back to cheese. They're artful and democratic trying to establish the best possible one topping. It's never pepperoni too, which I like—I mean both: I like pepperoni and I like that they never get it. Mushroom is a standard that I think makes them feel healthy. Sausage for fogged in days when they're really had to work. Pineapple seems to be for days that have gone really right somehow. Tho, if they have a system, they aren't aware of it. Every time it's this intense debate and weighing of various emotional and intellectual states. They really love it all.
I like to fuck with them. I've tended to choose secondary toppings for them and even tertiary. We're not a fancy place, as I've said. But there is a sweet spot at three toppings that is almost always a perfect union of flavors. Think pomodoro or margarita. Of course they could never get there. That's the problem with democratic processes. They can't ever really get into the higher math. But I'll pretty much give them whatever I want. And tell them to fuck off. Their spend-thrift keeps them from complaining. And I part-own the damned place so I don't really have to care.
They're too old to only eat pizza. Or even primarily. But of course no one can tell them anything. I can't imagine them working whatever jobs they have. I know one of the guys does things with computers. Two of the girls are the mid-day staff at a coffee shop that is actually an old-person diner. But their lives are beach-centric so it doesn't come up much what they do. Whatever it is is just the thin edge of sustenance that keeps them on boards, sand and in pizza. Which makes it all sound a bit ridiculous. But there is a zen to it all. I'll get to that.
There isn't a thing that happened, that is sort of the point of me saying anything I guess. It was through them that I got that point, that things don't really happen. There aren't events. Which I guess is also to say that the thing that happened was that I learned that nothing ever really happens. But I got to know these kids more—and still I don't know what the fuck they do for work.
Pretty much from here on out it's beach parties and surfing. Which I suppose isn't all that bad a thing.
_____________________
So I'm the den mother, provider of pie, the matron saint of burnout surfers. Thankfully not fuckable thanks to some cognitive distortion that only allows the dudes to see me in a motherly way and the birds as a big sister.
All that sorted, I started, recently, dropping by their beach fires. The night beach is a different world. We're one of the few strands of Pacific, it seems, where it's still marginally legal to make use of the beach at night. Moon or no, you have the waves in the distance rolling at you in the ambient night lights.
I suppose I can name the main players for you so they aren't just this etherial bunch of long haired stoner types meandering through my words.
[It turns out I don't like writing characters.]
The two of them were going out, attending parties in each other's arms, making their way through the strip shopping streets at night. Luckily he was smart enough not to wine and dine her in our pie shop. Word was they'd had their first official thing at the one real nice Italian place in town. No pizza there. This was long before the world sort of got conscious or self-conscious about food. The Italians were the Italians. It was all old grandma's and their sauces. Your other ethnic options at the time were Chinese—always a bit divey—and French for the high class—and it was always only high class. Our emergence form this triumvirate has been abrupt. In my own personal sense of it, it was only then that Americans really discovered the rest of the world. When we learned to eat like other people. Of course we haven't actually learned that yet. We're still just tourists. But I suppose, at least tourists know there is something else out there? Even if they treat it like shit. Play it like a vacation.
Regardless. The love birds hit the the Italian joint, cause that's pretty much what young couples do. Dressed to the nines they looked like play acting children. It's adorable to catch a surfer with his hair combed in a button down that's a print you can't imagine him owning, too big, improperly tucked. What a doll. The girl was no better. Her options are either staid summer dress or slutty going out clothes, too tight, too short. This one was a peach tho and could make classy even the worst. In a little summery thing, she'd have been a touch too cute—cutesy?—if her hair hadn't kept the tangle of beach and sun bleached matte. Thing was, she was a real surfer, not some hang along babe. Held her own. But they weren't competitors, nobody surfed for sport, but more something like life. Surfed like religion. And that's why neither of them couldn't not do it. They would be incomprehensible entities to each other if they were the type to lay on the beach and read magazines instead of hit the waves. The toss and tumult. Maybe she didn't get pizza like he did. But that's my own thing.
___________
So I suppose I'm telling about them because it seemed like something special to me at the time. Like, as if, before seeing them together I hadn't really understood what it would be to be in love in some real way. It sounds silly sure. I mean the word love has been beaten up and mangled, emptied out, to such an extent that it makes me wish there were another word for it. There isn't tho. Except to say that they were cool. From that first dinner on they were this profoundly linked unit. Not that they became Tim & Jessica in some inextricable new proper noun implying their eternal codependence. Nah. They were this extremely modular and almost frightening effective grouping. I have the image of a bola flying through the air and tripping up an escaping villain. Or something molecular. Which is all to say that typical ways of saying that a couple are one thing and not one thing aren't good enough to express what they were like. But obviously not just them: anyone. We need to metaphors to express and talk about the way two people can choose to enter each other's specific orbit and remain amazingly malleable in relation to each other and the rest of the world.
So they were a good couple right? He had a bit of the zen on him, as I've already alluded with the whole "getting pizza" thing. It can't help but sound spacey and 'we're all made to stars' star-eyed, but pizza—for some of us at least—has come to stand in as some eternal awesome. Maybe it is the sublime in a really technical sense. It is something like goodness itself. It has a profound simplicity. Truth is I can't explain it and that's the point of it. It wouldn't be sublime it I could grasp and name the individual elements and their combination. I see its goodness and I balk. And that's how I know. Which keeps sounding silly. But I'm in the right business I guess?
Like I said from the start I don't get to the beach enough, but it is there for me. It pervades my consciousness because it defines my world. But I don't have it like I have pizza. Tim and Jessica had the ocean in that way I mean. So many I'm telling you right now about I started to get it a bit too. And also I guess about the thing they had that was new or special for the world. New because it's a new context. And these things don't exist abstractly, only ever embedded in material context. In the midst of the mess and the muck. The seaweed reek of the shoreline.
