3. Little Fish, Bigger Fish — Chapter 1
Little Fish, Bigger Fish is a long sprawling story verging on novella territory. It was originally written in five chapters, some long and some short. I replicate that form here, so be forewarned. It also isn’t an easy story in the sense that there are stories within stories, it’s tenor shifts from classic realism to postmodernism with flights of fantasy. It’s also the most researched story I’ve written, and while it is fiction, certain places and events are quite real. One final note, by the time the story ends you, the reader will fully understand who the two main characters are. They will reappear in The Tenth Floor in important supporting roles!
I am serializing my collection Stories from The Last Basin currently available on Amazon. The stories are best read in the order of Table Contents:
Little Fish, Bigger Fish
by John Anthony, 2021
Journal Entry #1: This morning I awoke, as I had for several weeks, with a monocular vision of anger that I didn’t wish to see beyond. There was no dimensionality, there weren’t two ways to look at it or an infinite number of ways to look at it. I’d been seriously ripped off and no one that surrounded me acknowledged that simple fact and that’s what pissed me off, even more than the loss did. Each act of kindness, each expression of compassion, each attempt to elicit a smile from me inflamed me more, yet I sat passively not allowing myself to appear provoked. I guess I allowed others to continue their normal lives, while inside of me, my life had become intolerably abnormal. What made today different? I don’t have an answer, not yet at least, but today gives me hope I’ll find one. You see, it was stone-cold simple: once I was able to cry again, I was able to laugh again.
Chapter 1
The Santa Monica Pier was different back then, not as it is now with Ferris wheel, roller coaster, and summer crowds of tourists from far and near. It was just as sea-haggard then as now; anything that juts out a quarter of a mile over the bay and built of wood pilings and planks is under constant attack by the sea and its salt and its flotsam, flora, and fauna. It is abraded and etched by suspended clouds of sand and the waves that carry them. When in August wind-birthed swells from eastern Pacific hurricanes travel a thousand miles to eventually reach the shallow shores of the northern crescent of the bay, they arrive like battering rams aimed at the pier, ignoring the ramshackle broken-down breakwater built to still the nearshore waters and protect the pier and the little moorage surrounding it. The breakwater was not up to the task.
This would play out every year, some years worse than others. In the worst years, sailboats and motorboats would be washed onto the sandy shore by the surge tide where they would rest like little beached pentekonters for weeks while their owners haggled with the insurers and tried to figure out what to do with their forlorn pleasure craft. Overlooking the sad ruin of the tiny fleet were the buildings, signage, shacks, latrines, boat lifts, benches, fences, fenders, platforms, staircases, lampposts, power poles, planking, pilings, and other infrastructure that formed the pier’s profile and all would be encrusted with a freshly sprayed layer of briny water each droplet filled with planktonic-diatomic-algaetic life creating an archeological tell, a palimpsest of tiny macroscopic and tinier microscopic pelagic wanderers’ final journey. Mussels, growing in multitudinous abundance around the pilings, would be ripped from the safety of their ancestral anchorages, shattered, and then transformed from filter feeders to forageable feed, and the pilings themselves would be assaulted, and one would occasionally shatter, its broken pieces to be used by the relentless force of the waves to create further havoc. And then, as suddenly as the big south swells arrived, they would also depart, leaving the quotidian calm of the bay.
The pier always had an odor of organic decay and rot, which is for many the delightful smell of the seashore. This odor wasn’t the pier’s coating of seaborne life’s fault alone. Back then the Santa Monica Pier was also the home berth of bait fishing boats and sport-fishing party boats all of which unloaded their hauls and their patrons onto the pier’s thick wooden deck, always accompanied by the screams of gulls which had followed the boats in and now were anxious for their expected meals, scant as it was given the competition. The bait was carelessly hoisted from the holds and dumped into waiting tanks, while escaping anchovies were picked off by the seabirds or crushed underfoot by the party boat patrons hauling their rods, reels, and catch to the troughs where fresh water flowed to wash the fish blood, bits of guts and scales, and sometimes remnants of seasickness from themselves and the roughly deckhand-filleted flesh of the day’s catch. The troughs drained directly into the water surrounding the pier, as did the broken and crushed anchovies when the maintenance crew hosed off the planks in the early morning each day. The smell lingered, but all the blood, the little fish bits and pieces, mixed with crushed mussels, sand crabs, and other victims of the tides, were stirred into the water surrounding the pilings which created a rich broth for the little fish, bivalves, and arthropods that sustained themselves living in the pier’s shadow, the croakers, the opal eyes, an occasional glistening garibaldi, the juvenile calico bass, the rock crab, the spiny lobster, the mussels, and the clams.
As is the way of the sentient sea, if a bigger fish could be imagined, there was a bigger fish to be found looking to make a meal of these pier feeders and scrap eaters. The anglers that crowded the very end of the pier, they baited their hooks with live anchovy and used an underhand cast to send their weighted bait fifty yards into the opaque water, passionately fishing for these leveled-up predators. Recreation-minded families tried their luck further back and off the pier sides, closer to shore, particularly if they were cognizant of their lowly social status among the pier end’s elite or had been sourly experienced previously due to an unwitting unawareness there was such a thing as an elite pier fisher.
The tip of the pier could be quiet for an hour, a morning, or a day, but when the cry went up that a bonito had struck, it was lines out of the water or be prepared for an assault of angry, coarse, and bitter insults as the lucky fisherman (almost always a man) reeled and ran, trying to keep the fighting fish from breaking free while also avoiding tangling with laggards or those that didn’t know the etiquette requisite to an experienced angler with a successful bite. It was no place for novitiates or their children.
David Sanscroft knew all the rules. He learned them through trial and error, fishing first from the pier-sides with his father and brother, then off the ocean end with just his brother, although as he got older and entered high school, that happened less often, and then less than that. Beyond a place to fish, David’s impression of the pier was guarded. The place could be gloomy and anachronistic but also possessed sufficient attractions to make him look forward to a day trip there, although the attractiveness of the attractions varied as his young years accumulated. Starting with the ancient Looff Hippodrome Carousel surrounded by mechanical arcade games housed in a carnival-era building, the pier’s other ramshackle structures housed the elements of a mid-century boardwalk, its souvenir shops were filled with snow globes curiously featuring bikini-topped mermaids (whose one and only seductive pose looked far too contented to be seated in ice cold water where snow somehow fell), the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the almost-as-famous “Hollywood” sign, as well as endless aisles of plaster paint-it-yourself casts depicting an eclectic assortment of subjects. There was an aisle or two of binned seashells, none of which are found locally (sand dollars excepted), such as conches (including the nautilus), and cockles, and worm snails, and periwinkles, and junonias and jujubes and cowries. Upon the walls — trinkets that might catch a child’s eye: Plastic binoculars, mermaid dolls, cap guns, embroidery kits, magic tricks, bicycle license plates with common anglophile names, polished petrified wood samples from the desert of Arizona, plastic necklaces and tiaras, bathtub submarines that somehow ran under bath soap power, and most everything destined for the Sepulveda landfill in a few short weeks.
Then there were the food joints selling fried fish, oysters, clams, and popcorn shrimp, served with French fries along with cocktail and tartar sauce (and vinegar for the Canadian snowbirds), corn-battered and deep fried hot dogs, and roasted peanuts in the shell, chocolate dipped frozen bananas, cotton candy, salt water taffy, and double swirl Softees with cheerful rainbow sprinkles guaranteed to bring a smile after a round of Midway games staffed by apathetic ex-carnies who, stuck in one location year round, couldn’t augment their meager income with short-change routines or other hustles and therefore jealously guarded the payout of cheap plush sea life (colorful crabs, lobsters, seals, fish, sharks, and dolphins) sized small to ridiculously large, all prizes for beating the lopsided odds when playing Ping Pong Toss, Dizzy Darts, Derby Racer, Balloon Bust, Milk-Can Stack, and The Wild West Shooting Gallery. There was even a penny arcade that cost more than a penny, the games all mechanical with not a video screen to be seen. The best game was Skee-Ball, where, with a little practice at rolling the ball into the smallest concentric ring, a player could amass a fortune in prize tickets, enough tickets to claim the same merchandise lining the walls of the souvenir shops. You pay to play and you play to pay wherever you went on the pier. That it held an undeniably unique charm would not be recognized by many until that charm was forever gone.
* * * * *
David loved the ocean and especially loved to test his body against the big waves of August, those same sea monsters that assaulted the pier also pounded the beaches as far west as Malibu’s Point Dume. But David didn’t have to travel to the bay’s end to tangle with the behemoths, he lived in Santa Monica and if he could find his way to Idaho and Ocean Avenues, a roughly paved foot trail led down the face of the palisade that overlooked the bay. It emerged at the intersection of the California Incline and Highway 1, creating a complicated choreography of impatient and overheated drivers and overeager pedestrians, a volatile mixture so combustible that David and his friends viewed their first fresh car-kill there, bloodying the crosswalk and bringing the whole intersection to the brink of anarchy save for the desperate efforts of the police and emergency medical technicians.
“What the hell, man? That was gross,” David’s gangly friend Jim said as they made their way to the beach.
“Shake it off, Jimmy. See how old that guy was? Probably forgot to look both ways, right?”
“That’s cold.”
“Just saying. You beat back fate until it beats you. No escaping that. And we’ve got some waves to tame today. Look!” And Jim looked and saw the lineup, row upon row of swells stretching out hundreds of yards from the tide line, starting small, building, steepening, and finally crashing with a roar, a roar David had heard in the darkness of his bedroom, almost two miles inland, lying awake, listening to the seductive Siren song of the southern swell.
David and his friend crossed the wide sand plain of the beach until they reached the spot where the rest of their friends had staked out a claim just above the high tide line and to the right of Lifeguard Station 9. It was a ritualized spot, populated by generations of Lincoln Junior High School alumni before them and maintained by those same alumni as Santa Monica High School sophomores and juniors (seniors began working, drifting off to college, or losing the military draft lottery). There was always another incoming class to replace those that graduated, and there was an approved and loosely abided class segregation: Groups would form that spanned three grades, which would be their peak size, and then slowly dwindle during the high school years. From Spring Break until late September whenever school was out the same group of friends would be found in the same spot: They were hardcore beach rats.
The simplicity of their primary social rituals is likely to be shocking, given Madison Avenue’s idealized version amplified by the smooth harmonies of the Beach Boys (from the beachless Hawthorne, California). The simplicity is easily exemplified by what they brought with them for the day. The local boys wore board shorts under Levi 501s and a tee shirt, very often arrived barefoot or with very beat sneakers (Vans from the outlet store on Pico Boulevard or Converse or Keds from Penny’s on 3rd Street), and brought a towel, and if they could scratch up the money, a pair of Churchill Fins designed for body surfing. If they were lucky, they had a little change in their pocket, otherwise it was beg, borrow, or go hungry for lunch. The girls wore their bikinis, covered with cut-off jeans and a tee shirt, sandals, a towel, usually a bit of cash they could lend to the boys, a bottle of their favorite coconut oil or other tanning lotion (SPF zero), a few might bring totes with feminine supplies (and notably avoid swimming) and a hair brush and a deck of cards so the girls could play Spit, and one would always bring a transistor radio set to KHJ, or if David complained long and hard enough, KRLA, until he went into the water when it would be tuned back immediately. That was it. No beach blankets, volley balls, footballs, plastic coolers, paddles for paddle tennis, picnic lunches, beach chairs, sun umbrellas, guitars, bongos, surfboards, blow-up rafts, cameras to capture the memories, watches to tell the time (one of the girls would always volunteer to ask the lifeguard if necessary), or wallets to lose. This minimalist approach to the beach wasn’t out of necessity, it was an acknowledged point of pride, and there were days they suffered for it when the water was frigid and the afternoon onshore winds kicked up and they shivered while their lips turned blue, but their devotion was solely to the beach, body surfing, and each other, and on hot summer weekends when their beach grew crowded with inland families and all that they hauled across the sand, they felt sanctified by their purity and sacrifice.
*****
