OCEANIC---story by Patrick Breheny
The characters in this story are diverse, but the writer has not ascribed ethnicity, leaving that
to the reader to decide. It is a tale about certain types, who are not so good, but not so bad.
Facing the ocean in mid-afternoon he had to shade his eyes with his hand. It was easier to not look out, but focus on the pier itself. There were the fishermen---mostly men, a few women---and the fish and chips restaurant, the burger counter, the take away pizza slices shop, and of course the ferris wheel, turning despite few riders. Not a lot of people out on a weekday. Most were the elderly fishing line droppers and teen or twenty somethings after classes, A few beach bums were begging spare change.
They were on the Santa Movica pier, where below them the breakers smashed hard
into the wooden pilings holding it up, swirled froth circles of mayhem around the posts, its relentless indifferent surge letting you know your current situation was none of its concern. Their immediate one was that their apartment rent in the downscale McArthur Park area of L.A. just west of downtown was raised beyond any possibility of paying. Kyle and Babe took the bus to Santa Monica to breathe and think, then go look for an apartment in Venice.
The ocean was literary, it spoke in cryptic metaphors In Rockaway Beach, Queens, from the boardwalk it was a buzz always in your ears, a monotonous constant background drone that portended a possible invasion of insanity.
In Pattaya, Thailand, the waves came in splashing loudly on slabs of rock that bordered right at the street, angry slaps disapproving the unclass and decadence of the place.
In Phuket in 2005, the tsunami took the whole depraved section of Patong away. You’d think there might have been a monument built to the force that sent the waves, but Patong was rebuilt exactly as before, with bars and vendors and guest houses, and already looks decades old and trashed. Some of the streets with new TSUNAMI ESCPAPE ROUTE signs are dead ended by buildings put up after the signs.
They were looking for a place that might be cheap enough. In Venice he found the only structure he’d seen on the entire West Coast that resembled a New York apartment building. The ocean was less than a block away. When they knocked on the manager’s door, they were met by a man who said he was Calvin, and Kyle said, “We want an apartment.”
Calvin, instead of immediately showing a rental, struck up conversation with, “Welcome to Venice, where the debris meets the sea. There’s a theory people keep getting close to the ocean because they want to go back into it.”
“We might go for a swim. I think this is the only building west of the Mississippi that looks like its in the South Bronx.
Calvin said, “Shit!. You from the South Bronx?”
“West, but I hung around the south a little.”
Calvin proudly pointed a finger at his own chest. “Brooks Avenue. Hey, I like that idea, South Bronx. This is now The South Bronx Suites.”.
He’d always stayed close to the ocean. As a kid in Rockaway, he spent hours a day in it in summers. He caught waves as they were breaking and rode them in. He’d never heard of surfing or surfboards. There were ropes into the sea that separated the beach sections by numbers, and each section had a lifeguard station, and three orange barrels along the ropes where swimmers could stop and rest. The lifeguards didn’t let anyone past the third barrel. Right about the third, there was a ‘sand bar’, where you could stand again. Years later, when he was grown, that sand bar grounded a ship full of Chinese immigrants who waded ashore at 116th Street where all the Irish bars were. The ocean speaking something.
At the South Bronx Suites there was no pier close by, so at night no pilings to bash, and right here the Pacific lacked that encroaching schizo buzz of the Atlantic in Rockaway. But the ocean was restless. The waves came in, and went out with boring regularity. The sound would settle between rolllers that were spent, be quiet for a moment, then pick up with the next incursion. There was discontent, rebellion at the tedium of meeting the sand and just retreating
Living beside it, he had to put aside his theories of oceanic communication, dismiss that as coincidence, but couldn’t completely ignore what was always there. On nights when distractions surpassed focus on the wide Pacific, he had his moments of peace and it was during one of those interludes, lying content and half drunk beside Babe, that the while building started to shake and true to a brick tenement in an earthquake, the mortar between the bricks broke, the bricks started separating, and parts of the structure’s walls commenced to fall.
It wasn’t a giant earthquake. Everybody got out, but the damage was sufficient that the city---Venice is in the City of Los Angeles---condemned the building.
They all got relocation subsidies, but in reality stayed. The had keys to the doors, added padlocks. They had the old leases, which by their legal logic, gave them the claim to continue living there, as opposed to anybody who just thought they could.
They had priority, but not to the courtyard. That had no gate, and Calvin began charging ‘guests’ for sleeping there. Some of the tenants complained he was taking advantage of the impoverished, but Calvin was quick to point out that they knew they had to pay, and they came up with it, so how was he being unfair?
That worked for Calvin until “The Locals” from the Ghost Town section showed up. Calvin wouldn’t answer his door. Robo, their leader, was called such because he was as dispassionate and efficient as a robot.. Even cops can get emotional. Not Robo. He was efficient and he was there in person because this was a worthwhile mission. He gathered all who answered their doors in the courtyard and gave the disposition. He wanted to see their tenant’s leases, and they’d be paying the same amount to the Locals The courtyard overnight guests would also pay to the Local, not Calvin.. He had all those present show their leases, and would be back to see the others. Anybody who didn’t cooperate would be forcefully evicted. He expressed his magnanimity toward them with, “I could rent these places to anybody, you know.”
Kyle and Babe had actually looked for a relocation with ‘the relocation’ but their credit…They still had Kyle’s Army disability that had been paying the rent before, so even paying rent to the Locals, they had their relocation nest egg. But the Locals weren’t playing with pussies. Calvin wasn’t going to pay them rent .and he had friends in the building weren’t either. Never mind the ocean, Kyle woke up some nights during attempted evictions not sure if he was in Venice, the real South Bronx or Vietnam again.
All he wanted to do was keep living with Babe, watch her paint like Van Gogh except she was painting whar she saw---she’d say “Maybe he was too”--- and write his unrecognized and unpublished poetry. They’d smoke a joint if it came their way, but beer was their first love, and cheaper. A bottle of wino port would do too.
You’d expect Calvin to go out with special effects sounding like a fireworks display, but he just died in his sleep one night at age 52. Sudden Cardiac Arrest, the building ‘doctor’ ruled it, and oh, the conspiracy theories about that. Poisoned by the Locals. Or, his girlfriend Beverly suggested, by his ‘friends’ paid to do it. The ‘tenants’ were ready----are you ready?--- to go the po-lice, but the thought of investigation about what was really happening in an abandoned building and with the courtyard squatters, motivated the Locals---are you ready?---to give the residents one month’s free rent if no municipal shit got stirred up, which would just kill the party for everybody. And they swore they had nothing to do with Calvin’s demise.
They allowed Reynold to arrange a midnight wake in the courtyard, just as Calvin had expressed in a written will Beverly produced. Eulogies and bongos, incense and marijuana, or any smoke, but be cool, nobody’s living here, just having a funeral ritual, the body in a shroud of blankets in front of a bonfire, (electricity a memory---the apartments were all lantern and candle lit like in olden times)
Calvin had more friends dead than ever he had when he was alive. They praised his management skills, his concern for the residents, his generosity to the courtyard guests. Kyle was pretty fucked up when he took his turn.
“OK. Everything everybody’s said about him is true, but don’t forget he could be an asshole too.”
At first there were catcalls, and boos to the rhythm of bongos, but Reynold stepped up beside him and said, “The man has a point. Let’s not all be hypocrites.”
Then began the de-eulogy. “He was charging the homeless money to sleep here.”
Defenders said, “He was accommodating people no one else would.”
“What if they didn’t have it?”
“Never happened. They had to come up with it, so they did.”
The Locals, not wanting to be scapegoated for his untimely passing, and only doing themselves what Calvin had, were his staunchest defenders.
After the party, there was some thought of tossing him to the fish, Beverly objected, on the basis that he’d wash up, and because it was Calvin’s stated wish to be cremated so he “wouldn’t end up in L.A.s version of Hart Island in New York” where the city buried the unclaimed from hospitals and city street in deep piles.
Somebody said, “It has to be done before dawn,” like they had religious laws, but the reason wasn’t from any scripture, just the necessity of not incinerating a human body to ash and bone in broad daylight, and not in the courtyard at any hour.
They toted him down to the beach, reset the bonfire, and did it there.
He had specified he wanted his cremains in an urn that could hold water at the top, placed in the courtyard entrance, so people could---"kind of bless themselves as they come in.”
He was a bestowed a slab of concrete off the beach that came from an unknown source long ago, and it had a groove at the top where Reynold poured some water. He had to keep replenishing it not because any fingers ever dipped in, but because the street dogs lapped it up. So Calvin was doing some good, if ever there’d be a memorial.
The whole earth shook again, long and hard this time, and the “South Bronx” completely collapsed. The residents pulled who they could of their own out, and ran east before the tsunami came in.
It reached as far as the gentrified bungalows along the canals, and those were condemned. So guess where the South Bronx relocated to? And on Kyle’s suggestion, called it Scarsdale?. They deeply appreciate the tranquility of the canal cottages--- which aren’t on Locals turf so they’re not paying anybody yet---and love the ducks that survived, floating aesthetically in the water, that are sometimes also a source of food Seeing the good fortune brought by Calvin, they retrieved his undamaged relic. His concrete slab now prominently faces the canals. Reynold keeps the water full and the residents have initiated a ritual of splashing their fingers into the font above him for good luck.
Calvin may be gone, but for a few he is not forgotten.