Beach Stories

We lived in the same beach city. Which is like 2 square miles. Hermosa Beach. I’d see him at my local bars or riding on the strand.

I had one encounter that struck me as never existing before in humankind. I was doing laundry and for some reason I walked into the street to the laundry room and I had the basket on my head. My neighbor drove up in his sports car and he bought a puppy. It was hanging out the window. Then wee man rode up on his bike and we were all in the street feeling the super soft puppy. And I thought if someone had a picture of this they would never be able to guess wtf was going on. I’m like 6’4” with a basket on my head, a little person on a bicycle, and a drunk guy in a sports car with a puppy trying to escape.

EDIT: wow, this blew up. I wrote this on my phone, in bed, at like 2am. I got 5 hours of sleep. Someone will be napping later. This guy. Yes, Hermosa Beach is really like 1 square mile but I didn’t think a zillion HB people would be on and call me on it. I still live in the exact same place I did. The drunk guy in the car got sober, got divorced, moved away. Wee Man moved like 3+ times and now lives in a van. I got a sweet deal on my rent when I moved in and before they cleaned the place up. I’m a block from the sand. Unless the place burns down, or I die, I’ll probably be here in 15 years. But I use sunscreen and wear hats. I didn’t know the drunk was a drunk for a long time, so I was talking in retrospect. I just thought he was eccentric. But my very first encounter with my puppy-driving neighbor was he saw me outside and asked him to break into his 5 million dollar home because he locked his keys out. We took a ladder out to the alley I was talking about and I held it while he climbed up to the first patio, 1 story up. But the doors were locked and closed. Then we extended it to the 2nd story. For normal people climbing up over streets to 2nd stories, within 5 feet of beefy power lines, that’s scary. The ladder was flexing and I knew I couldn’t hold it if it slipped, it would just push me out of the way. He had a daughter, maybe 5, who was hanging out next to us blabbering to me while her dad risked his life above. I told the little girl to go around the corner of the house. I was seriously afraid he was going to fall and she would see her father die. It was so precarious. I was blocking the ladder with my feet cuz it was at such an angle. It wasn’t even my ladder. I’m not sure whose ladder it was. He climbed in, the sliding doors were unlocked, and he opened the door and he offered me beers. His wife came in(!) and she had been waiting in the car the whole time. I learned later that she had to take a shit and that’s why there was the big emergency. And I’m like, what? You got a random dude and random ladder to hoist you up next to power cables over a slanted, concrete driveway so you could break into your own house because your wife had to poop? He said he thought it was serious because she hardly ever poops. Again, I didn’t know he was a drunk at the time. Most of the times I saw Wee Man he had a posse with him, but he recognized me a few times and said hi or nodded or whatever. It’s not like we were buds. But lived like 40 feet apart. We lived within walking distance of The Green Store and North End and The Bottle Inn. Well, everything in HB is walking distance. But really close. I told the Wee Man story to my long-retired parents and they thought it was hilarious. I heard him on Loveline the one time in 10 years I listened to it. He was trying to pimp his restaurant, poor guy. He had a funny quote on loveline that I use often. They were talking about strip clubs. And Wee Man said he could never understand or enjoy strip clubs. He said when he was hungry, he didn’t want to smell a steak, he wanted to eat one.