Crossing the wide swathe of sand, we noticed it was a little scratchy under our bare feet, and once we reached the shoreline, we were shocked by the coldness of the water, although the weather was Indian Summer mild. But if we were thinking that back in San Juan the beach sand was like baby powder and the water was always warm, we didn’t voice it. Not out loud.
Sitting on towels and feigning cool disinterest, we watched as groups of high school girls ran past us, legs muscling in their blue shorts, feet sinking deep into the sand. They all looked beautiful - still brown in October, the white gleam of their smiles matching their white gym blouses, their long straight hair whipping out behind them like kite strings. From sandy beiges to cool champagnes, golden wheats to palest pearls, I couldn’t help but notice how many blonds there were, running west from where Santa Monica High School sat squatting like a giant on the hill, down Pico Boulevard to the beach, up to the pier and back. So very many blonds on such a big beach.
Back in San Juan, my friends and I had spent our weekends cruising. We’d check out the tourist boys at the beach, their pink noses coated with zinc oxide, their pale blue Oxford button-downs opened over polished chests and new baggies. Running in from the beach, we’d check out fresh white towels from the local guys working as hotel pool boys, caramel-skinned surfers we knew from around, with their sun-bleached hair and puka shells and muy macho surf knobs on their knees and ankles. We used hotels -- La Concha, the Condado-- as if they were our private country clubs, racing back and forth between la playa and the pool bars, perching on stools, singing out, “Coka, por favor.”
We thought we were pretty glamorous with our mini sundresses slipped over bikinis, swinging our bare brown legs from bar stools, feet shoeless except for “sandals” made from a piece of string looped around an ankle and toe, a felt daisy holding it together. “There is someone walking behind you. Turn around, look at me” and other Top 40 stateside hits blasting over the loudspeaker. The smell of Coppertone in the air. Names like Emilio and Rogelio and Edwardo softly slipping off our tongues.
That first day on the beach in Santa Monica - a beach, I noticed with a stab of disappointment, unadorned by hotel umbrellas or beach-side bars where we could grab a Coka and papas fritas - I could see things would be quite different. Here I would be just one of a thousand sunny blonds, and there wasn’t a surf shack or a coconut palm in sight.
In Puerto Rico at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral School, all 200 of us, from kindergartners to 12th-graders, fit under one prettily tiled roof off the Avenida Ponce de Leon. I’d even been a cheerleader for the fledgling football team and a writer on the tiny mimeographed school paper.
In Santa Monica, almost 3,000 kids swarmed over the behemoth campus at Samohi, and I spent the first month of lunches hiding in a restroom stall rather than pass through the crowded quad to eat, ignored and invisible in the cafeteria. I waited for a teacher to ask me if I liked to write. I didn’t know that in a student body of 3,000, you can’t wait to be asked.
For awhile, I hung out after school with Rosa, who lived in my building. She taught me how to heat tortillas on the gas burner, and sometimes I’d sit alongside her in the front seat of her boyfriend’s low rider, Latin music blaring out the windows as we went cruising down Lincoln to shop for discos Latinos, Rosa translating snippets of what Miguel was saying. I couldn’t believe my year in Puerto Rico had left me so utterly mono-lingual.
I was pretty miserable until, by sheer coincidence, my friend Laura moved from Canada too. Suddenly life was like an AM station - all fun, all the time. Together we made up code names for the boys we liked and cruel nicknames for the girls we simultaneously envied and hated. In the era of newly relaxed dress codes, we sewed patches on our jeans and went braless under homemade string tops. We also wrote lots of terrible poetry in hardback ledgers that we carried everywhere in case the muse arrived.
We ditched school a few times, including the day the Sylmar earthquake hit, early one February morning of our senior year. My dad had dropped us at the Pico gate and we had walked in, noted the cracks on the history building and walked right out the back way. We hit the beach where, using a kazoo, we smoked a joint my brother had sold us for the hefty price of $5. Later we discovered that the marijuana had been nothing more than oregano. We’d been too busy laughing to know if we were high or not.
During the summer, Laura and I would walk from 14th and Wilshire to the beach almost every day, checking out our reflections in the storefront windows, grooving on the sound of our huaraches flapping against the sidewalk. I loved the way the ground glass in the cement sparkled like a zillion tiny diamonds.
On the way home we’d stop at the A&W for a root beer float and maybe a Mama burger, and we’d talk about whatever guys had or hadn’t tried to pick us up at the beach that day. Sometimes we’d stop at the old 3rd Street mall to shop and hang out. One day, these older, surfer-type guys in Hawaiian shirts told us they were the Beach Boys. “Right,” we thought cynically. We dismissed them as quickly as we did any guy whose hair was too short or who was stupid enough to try the lame pick up line: “What’s there to do around here?” Around here? We’d look at them as if they were overgrown insects. What could there possibly be to do on the mall? The place was a dead zone. “What this town needs are some sidewalk cafes,” we’d moan, disgusted with our sleepy beach town’s lack of action. “That would make it really cool.”
Cool? What did we know from cool? It was 1971. Our hair was long and sun-drenched, and we slathered on iodine and baby oil because you could never be too tanned. Underneath our graduation gowns we wore hot pants and knee-high boots and didn’t even know, had absolutely no clue, that all those songs about California Girls were about us.
NOTE: The 3rd Street Mall is now the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. It has plenty of sidewalk cafes.
The LA Times ran the illustration by Hiroko Tsuji
when they published ‘Beach Music’ in their Sunday Magazine.
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If you enjoyed this you might want to read #9 Of Brasso and Brownies about life before we moved to Puerto Rico.
I used to live at the Kensington Motel during the summer from the Fairfax District where I lived. I was wondering if you spent alot of time there and remember anyone who lived there. Like the old man and his little dog, the owners, and especially Bay and Patrick who lived in the center bungalow for many years. If you have any memories to share please e-mail me. The motel is gone, and so is a piece of Santa Monica history that I would like to remember.
ReplyDeleteJason
jrush007@zapmail.net
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ReplyDeleteGrettings from New Jersey! I stayed at the Kensington Motel, Santa Monic in the late summer of 1982 during a auto trip from NJ when I was 23 years old. At that time, I think the exterior of the Kensington was an aging white stucco?.. I could be wrong. I stopped there because it was fairly inexpensive. I had an efficiency on the North side of the building and stayed there for a good 3-4 weeks while I tried to find some work. I liked the Santa Monica area so much that I actually tried to settle there. I finally found work as a bartender at Gulliver's(now Jerry's Deli) in Marina del Rey on Mindinao Way and Route 90. One night when driving back to the Kensington from a Jack-In-The-Box, I was pulled-over and arrested for drunk driving by the Santa Monica police. When I was in jail, I didn't know of anyone to call to bail me out since I was out there by myself. So I called the Kensington and got a hold of the maintenance guy who I kind of knew, and he drove down and bailed me out!! Of course I had to pay him back the $100. What Luck. Also on the same side of Ocean Ave further south from the Kensington, I remember a very small like an 8-stool breakfast stand and a bar called the Mucky Duck or something like that. we're talking early 80's. Also remember the chipwich carts. I used to jog from the Kensington north on Ocean ave and up San Vincente and back.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Gulliver's Restaurant, I answered an ad in the paper for a bartender..."no expereince nessesary." I went down there to interview and there were like 120 other people applying for the same position!! I got the job because I knew the manager who I went to high school with here in Jersey. Another lucky break. Warmest Regards, Wayne G.
So great to hear from you- YES! The Mucky Duck, I used to work with a woman whose husband was a chef there. But it's not the little place with the stools; I see you've discovered that's Cora's - and I'm pretty sure it was Cora's back then too. Sounds like you had an adventurous time out here; hope life back east has treated you well.
DeleteToday's rainy day brought-on some reminicing about my trip to California in 82. After some research online, it seems the Mucky Duck is now an Italian Restaurant called Capo's. And right next door at 1802 Ocean Ave is that small 8 or 10 stool breakfast place I was thinking of which is called Cora's Coffee Shoppe. I can't remember if it was called Cora's back in 82 but I remember it was tiny. I'll never forget the young hot blonde waitress that worked there back then. Wayne G.
ReplyDeleteHi again Anonymous Wayne! - if you drop back by and read this, yes it's always been Cora's:) I really appreciate your response especially as I've stopped checking to see if there are comments, so many of them are just spam. I better recheck my settings! Anyway, I do appreciate so much you're dropping by with a genuine response to what I've written as opposed to being a spam bot!
DeleteGlad to be back! Wayne G here. This blog has lived in my browser's favs since my initial post and occasionally I'd check back to find a longer list of bot posts. But this time, I found a pleasant surprise with some new legit activity- sans the bots. Sim, I'm happy you cleaned-up your page and thanks for the responses. I remember swimming often in The Kensington pool because the water was cool and crystal clear... a gem in the center of a white stucco-peeled motel. The original muscle beach with gymnastics equipment was just one short block to the water and a few blocks up towards the pier. Other places I remember: The Pelican's Nest, TL's Clubhouse, the original World;s Gym (where I met founder Joe Gold), and seemingly tons of health food stores stocked with fresh produce and equipped with these huge centrifugal juicers. Something not familiar on the east coast.
DeleteMet a lot of people. One of them just so happened to be a prosecutor. Didn't know he was one until I bumped into him on the
second floor of the Santa Monica courthouse. Remember that DUI offense? Well, luck would strike yet AGAIN. Within an hour of facing the judge, he pulled some strings and had my charge reduced to reckless with ONLY a $300 fine. I think that's when CA just initiated stringent drunk driving laws when other states haven't yet done so. I snapped some great photos of Santa Monica and crazy Venice, but luck would take one back when I got the roll of film confiscated in customs while crossing back from Tijuana. I snapped a photo as two officers searched my NJ-plated 72 Catalina during "Secondary Inspection". Young and cocky, I stormed into the office and begged the customs chief to 'please have the film developed, destroy the offending frame, and mail the rest to me'. And wrote down my NJ address. He probably tossed the whole roll the second I walked out. A mistake I always regretted; photos are priceless. I had the best shots of my travels on that roll. Thank goodness for blogs like this... releasing memories into words.
Wayne G.
Good to hear from you again! Those were great days, Santa Monica has changed so much over the years. That sunny, perpetual summer of a town has vanished leaving a touristy corpocracy in its wake. I barely recognize it myself anymore. God, I sound old and disgruntled! Change! Bah humbug.
DeleteSorry about that roll of film - at least you'll always have the memories.
So many freaking anonymous robots; I've had to reconfigure my comments requirements to cut down the spam.
ReplyDeleteCrazy all those spamming comments, which distracted me from what I wanted to say after reading your memoir piece. So let me just say, wow. I love it. I can feel it all. You had me with "ENDLESS SUMMER WAS JUST A SHORT WALK DOWN A HOT SIDEWALK" and do you think huaraches are the same as Toms today?
ReplyDeleteThanks for brightening my day in so many ways, and I will never be a blonde.
Thanks for clueing me in on just how annoying that spam was; I've just done some major housekeeping which I should have done ages ago, and deleted forty something spam comments! Thanks so much for the compliments too; now I'm the one blushing. I'm going to try to post something on Fridays, every week or so. The management offers no guaranty of quality. :)
DeleteLoved reading your memoir!!!!! We are from two completely different generations but I can relate so much since I studied at the Episcopal Cathedral School since kindergarten up to my Senior year. It is a vivid picture the one you describe of Puerto Rico. I currently work at a hotel at the San Juan area not far from the fully renovated La Concha. Glad I passed by and read it.
ReplyDeleteThanks Dariana! Oh wow, so happy you stopped by. It was just a year but honestly a year that had a huge impact on my life. I don't go into it here but I was there in 1968 just before the World Surfing Championship was held in PR; I wrote a piece called Surfing Lessons inspired by that time too. http://bit.ly/1ErrAXx
DeleteI also knew Machuca, a legend in the surf community back then, he's on my list of people I want to write about as well.