Santa Monica, California

Sometimes in the winter, Los Angeles seemed quieter and less crowded. On those winter afternoons, I would find myself with nothing to do or any place to go. I would get into my car, turn the radio up, and drive to Santa Monica.

Santa Monica has a wide variety of things to do on a boring weekday evening. People come from all over the world just to see the famous Third Street Promenade, the Santa Monica Pier, and Pacific Coast Highway. My favorite among those was always the pier.

As I walked along the wooden planks, I observed short cubby women selling overpriced long stemmed roses to young couples. The boys who bought the roses were often thin, cute, and only interested in the kind of beauty that they could touch.

Dirty funny looking men who wore berets and had fake accents painted signs and tried to sell acrylic paintings. Sometimes the paintings were good, but most times they were only good enough to fool the tourists.

Mr. Bubble’s, a Vietnam vet, always stood behind his miraculous bubble-making machine. The bubbles would fly up and up glistening in the sunlight like strange precious jewels from an alien world. Every child within the bubble machine’s reach would jump and try to catch one of the gems.

Beyond Mr. Bubble’s, the musicians and street performers worked the pier. Little crowds of people would form around them to watch as old Chinese men spun plates on sticks, young college students pretended to be robots, and hippy women played guitars and pretended to be Joan Baez. I would often struggle through the crowds to leave a dollar bill in the hat of a performer I had seen before.

When the afternoon grew old and the sun began to set, I would leave the happy sounds of children laughing and begging for cotton candy. The roar of the roller coaster became dull beneath the sound of the ocean waves. Although I was native to it, Santa Monica Pier would become a foreign world as I took off my sandals and walked along the sand.

I enjoyed the feel of the cool rough sand squeezing between my toes. I would walk for two or three miles until I passed all of the beach goers. Fathers always flew kites with their sons, mothers always hovered nervously, and teenagers always played volleyball in the sand. I was intrigued by their interactions, but there was a magnificent show starting and the best seat in the house was beckoning me.

When civilization was behind me, I would sit in the sand and watch the day slip away. The sun blazed a brilliant orange and thin wispy clouds reflected soft pinks and purples. The vast ocean mirrored the sky’s magnificent display and distorted it. Every color in the word was there in the sky before me swirling and constantly changing. I could taste and smell the salty water; it awakened a primitive instinct in me.

The orange and purple would melt into something so beautiful that I often thought I would cry. Then, they would fade behind the mountains and darkness soon followed. I watched lights blink on one by one from the mountains lining the Malibu coast. I imagined rich important people coming home to houses that were made to look like medieval castles or houses that captured the greatest Victorian dream. The thought of all those people was romantic, but I knew that they were completely oblivious. No one saw Santa Monica the way I did.

After I returned to my car, I often had the feeling that I was just one of Mr. Bubble’s bubbles floating around reflecting the sun like a rare treasure.

Jessica C

Submitted: Tuesday 9th March 2004, 4:43 PM

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