I also got a text message from Buzz Lightyear, so I'm quite certain that Patrick had a good time.
As for me, the only place I could think of in or near LA that had any resonance was San Pedro, home of the Minutemen 20 odd years ago. By happenstance, the airport where John was flying out--the 1960's looking Long Beach Airport, was not far from San Pedro. All I knew about San Pedro was what d boon and Mike Watt had reported in their songs--a working class place, but with a radical bent to it. The docks nearby, 70's and 80's rock culture saturating it, though with the separation born from being so near to an ocean, I suppose. Blue collar, yes, and probably even then a heavy latino influence, though it is especially true now--every other store is lettered in spanish and a large number of the restaurants are mexican.
I found a coffee shop downtown, even before I got there--triangulating mike watt's webpage and the San Pedro arts association. Sacred Grounds, a thrift store outfitted coffee shop with an huge flat screen television playing MSNBC the entire time I was there, though the volume was often off. It appeared to be something of a living room for many older and displaced looking folks, though the mixture was very suprising: several older and younger African american men, one Caribbean fellow, some survivors from the streets and an amalgam of computer screen lookers on, which I was for some time myself. The barista, woman probably in her late 20's, curious in that direct way that many Southern Californians I've met have been--as if to say I don't really care, but you can tell me, even though I was the one who asked--asked about the iPad, and soon after another woman, a middle aged teacher using a Mac laptop, also asked about it. An girl-catching idea for those of you interested in that sort of thing, apparently...
San Pedro has a low-rent feeling to it, a bit dissheveled, not as though crime were abundant, though it may well be. Many of the downtown stores were closed, though it was difficult to tell whether that was because it was Monday, too early to open, or whether the businesses had been deserted. There was also an larger number of independent thrift stores that I've seen elsewhere, testamony, perhaps to the density of junk collected by these folks. After an hour or so at the coffee shop, I drove around a bit, not really looking for anything in particular--finding a push cart ice cream man, a couple of crazy adolescents driving a go cart around the street at high speed, one of them losing their hat mid-intersection and hardly seeming to notice, at a vestige of the punk years, a skateboard shop with a dozen or so young skateboarders on the street.
I found the beach, not an inordinately beautiful beach, but with a bay surrounded in the distance by the huge machinery of the commercial docks. Large greyish pelicans hovered in the wind, surrounded by an understory of squawking gulls, and dove periodically into the water with great splashes, sometimes seeming to catch a fish. A long stone pier paralleled by a square brick breakwater stretched far into the bay, where rows of container ships packed high with rectangular containers were waiting to be tugged into port. In the farther distance the shipyards with their weathered orange and light blue cranes waiting to lean over the ships. The crowd at the beach on the pier were mostly latino and spanish speaking, casting out multiple lines, sitting back and enjoying the light sunshine, not seeming to catch nearly as much as the pelicans, but unbothered by that.
After a walk around the beach, I went off to the YMCA near San Pedro for a little exercise--a nice YMCA--pool, exercise machines, helpful staff. It made for a good hour's workout before heading back downtown for Porky's barbecue sandwich and a trip back out to Point Fermin to watch the sun disappear behind the marine inversion clouds (the Pacific equivalent to sunset) in a strong onshore breeze. There was a group of park-yoga practioners, as well as many others strolling on the bluff looking west and north out into the Pacific. A brief return to the coffee shop and the cabaret, a little cappucino, a little froth, many tattoo's and tattoo shops! Then off through the highways, those vast gullies now headlight and halogen lit to pick up Peter at the Onterio Airport to hear his stories of the end of his baseball season, the Sounders, and his perambulations with his friends in Seattle.
