Ocean beach San Diego circa 1980.
In the first days of the new decade Kim and I packed up and drove the Barracuda to San Diego, which to our surprise made the trip without a hitch. I had a friend there from the dorm years, Doug, with an apartment on Pacific beach. He was moving out at the end of January and was glad to let us sleep in the living room until then. I started my new job, enjoyed the perpetual summer of the place and gorgeous bikini clad women on the boardwalk every day. Kim loved it even more.
And luck favored us. We had to be out of Doug’s place by the thirty-first. We did nothing till the evening of the thirtieth, when we bought a paper and looked at the rental ads. They were listed by price, cheapest first. What caught our attention was the first one, a one-bedroom house in Ocean Beach for 150 a month. The next add and all the rest started at 300 or a lot more. So we called and quickly visited an old lady. She took us to a small but fixable cottage a half block from the beach, a perfect spot. We showed huge enthusiasm and told her we’d fix it up, gladly. She told us she’d had many applicants but liked us best so it was a deal. We moved in the next day.
Pacific beach is a middle-class beach, with rows of nice apartment buildings facing its boardwalk. Ocean beach is the older bohemian beach, closer to town center, with run down cottages and hippies and all sorts of miscreants, but still clean enough to draw large numbers of beach goers every weekend. Our house was on a gateway street to this beach and the porch, which we quickly built at the front door, was a place to sit and enjoy a parade of people ten feet away on the sidewalk, talking to them, sharing a beer or offering the use of the bathroom to pretty girls, a perennial party machine.
It was slow at first, the rainy days of winter, and my eight to four, five days a week job. Kim worked on the house and porch and as Spring began the number of our acquaintances grew. Our front door was almost always open, too often. Our porch and living room became the hangout for all types of people, not all of them good. Boisterous nights ensued. It was like the “Rake’s Progress” by Hogarth, and by early summer and more and more visits by the police, it all came crashing to an end.
But to go back to the idyllic beginnings. My father's friend, Larry Kahn owned a small company called Modular Mechanics with about twelve employees, designing and building some of the first small robots to perform simple tasks on assembly lines, like grabbing some piece as it approached and turning it to a new orientation for its next alteration. He had one lucrative contract with the military in the manufacture of grenades and at least ten with other companies, designing and then building the prototypes that would replace human hands. My job was 'factotum' a little of everything, sometimes assembling parts, just like my old mecanno set, picking up parts throughout San Diego, sorting and organizing them and I was always treated with deferential kindness by Larry who was a rather hard taskmaster on the others as deadlines loomed and prone to bursts of anger when his creations failed their first tryouts. I was always greeted by him with a pat on the back and a "Good work" which was sometimes embarrassing when he had just finished reaming out the other ten people in our little assembly room. So my job was idyllic, it was easy and interesting work.
I was very happy at it as Kim was at home. My wages supported the both of us easily. Like in the idyllic days of our purest friendship the year before, (unforgettable to both of us) we shared whatever we had, equally. I paid the rent and utilities, the groceries, and whatever was left of the check split it evenly between us, with a smile. Kim worked a little each day on the house, smoked cigarettes and read pulp fiction. In a small apartment two doors down he met two cute sisters, twins, who shared everything with him, their beer, their food, (making him dinner), and finally their bodies, the three of them in their queen-sized bed.
I had a desk in my bedroom and began to make notes for a novel, some thirty pages of them. There are a lot of ideas and quotes but it never got past the first few pages. It was to be my own “Crime and Punishment” set in San Diego. I had just chanced to read that novel and was so taken by it that when I finished it I set it aside for two weeks, waited in anticipation, and then read the whole thing over again, doubly fascinated by it. It’s the only novel I reread so quickly and eagerly, so much was my rapture. But the bar was too high to emulate. If I had just described in detail the scenes and conversations in my living room a few months later, minute by minute, I would have had a colorful stream of characters and wild events, and a contemporary novel.
