Dawn Patrol (7 page)

It was all good for about a year; then the boom went bust. In a single day, lots that had been worth hundreds were finding no buyers at twenty-five dollars, the San Diego College of Letters shut its doors, and the American Driving Park slowly yielded to the salt air, the hot sun, and sad abandonment.

Wyatt Earp left for Los Angeles.

A few committed hangers-on kept their lots and built cottages, a few of which still cling to life among the hotels and condo complexes that line Ocean Boulevard like fortresses. But for the most part, Pacific Beach slid into decline.

Well, as the trite saying goes, When God hands you lemons …

Plant lemon trees.

Left with little but dirt and sun, the developers of Pacific Beach used
them both to plant lemon trees, and around the turn of the century, the community proclaimed itself “the Lemon Capital of the World.” It worked for a while. The flats now occupied by rows of houses were then rows of citrus trees until cheap steamship rates and relaxed import laws made Sicily the Lemon Capital of the World instead; the lemon trees of Pacific Beach were no longer worth the water it took to irrigate them, and the community was back to a search for an identity.

Earl Taylor gave it one. Earl came out from Kansas in 1923 and started buying up land. He built the old Dunaway Drugstore, now the on the corner of Cass and Garnet, a block east of Boone’s current office, and then put up a number of other businesses.

Then he met Earnest Pickering, and the two of them conspired to build Pickering’s Pleasure Pier.

Yeah, Pleasure Pier.

Right at the end of present-day Garnet Avenue, the pier jutted out into the ocean, and this wasn’t a pier for docking ships; this was a pier for, well, pleasure. It had a midway with all kinds of carnival games and cheap food treats, and a dance hall, replete with a cork-lined dance floor.

It opened for business on the Fourth of July, 1927, to flags, fanfare, and fireworks and was a massive success. And why not. It was a beautifully simple, hedonistic idea—combine the beauty of the ocean and the beach with women in “bathing costumes,” junk food, and then the nocturnal Roaring Twenties pleasures of illegal booze, jazz, and dancing, with sex to follow at the beachside hotels that sprang up around the pier.

All good, except that Earl and Earnest forgot to creosote the pilings that supported the pier, and “water-born parasites” started eating the thing. (The uncharitable would have it that water-born parasites—that is, surf bums—still infest Pacific Beach.) Pickering’s Pleasure Pier started crumbling into the ocean and, a year after opening, had to be closed for safety purposes. The party was over.

Truly, because with exquisite Pacific Beach timing, the town had reinvigorated itself just in time for the Great Depression.

The tents went up again, but the Depression wasn’t as severe in San Diego as it was in a lot of the country, because the navy base in the harbor cushioned the unemployment. And a lot of people loved Pacific Beach in those years for precisely what it didn’t have: a lot of people, houses, traffic. They loved it precisely because it was a sleepy, friendly little town
with one of the best stretches of beach in these United States, and the beach was free and accessible to everyone, and there were no hotels or condo complexes, no private drives.

What changed Pacific Beach forever was a nose.

Dorothy Fleet’s sensitive nose, to be exact.

In 1935, her husband, Reuben, owned a company called Consolidated Aircraft, which had a contract with the U.S. government to design and build seaplanes. The problem was that Consolidated was located in Buffalo, and it was hard to land seaplanes on water that was usually ice. So Reuben decided to move the company to warm and sunny California, and he gave his wife, Dorothy, a choice between San Diego and Long Beach. Dorothy didn’t like Long Beach because of the “smelly oil wells” nearby, so she picked San Diego, and Fleet built his factory on a site near the airport, where he and his eight hundred workers came out with the great PBY Catalina.

Airplanes had a lot to do with creating modern Pacific Beach, because Japanese bombers hitting Pearl Harbor launched the Consolidated factory into high gear. Suddenly faced with the job of producing thousands of PBYs plus the new B-24 bomber, Fleet imported thousands of workers—15,000 by early 1942, 45,000 by the war’s end. Working 24/7 they pumped out 33,000 aircraft during the war.

They had to live somewhere, and the nearby empty flats of Pacific Beach made the perfect location to put up quick, cheap housing.

And it wasn’t just Consolidated Aircraft, for San Diego became the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet, and between the navy bases around San Diego Harbor and the marine training bases at Elliott and Pendleton, up by Oceanside, the whole area became a military town. The city’s population jumped from 200,000 in 1941 to 500,000 by 1943. The government built a number of housing projects in Pacific Beach—Bayview Terrace, Los Altos, Cyanne—and a lot of the men and women who came to live in them temporarily never went home. A lot of the sailors and marines who were stationed in San Diego on their way to and from the Pacific front decided to come back and build lives there.

Much of PB, especially inland from the beach, still has that blue-and-khaki-collar mentality—unlike its tonier neighbor to the north, La Jolla—and a fiercely egalitarian ethic that is a holdover from the close-living, pooled ration card, and backyard party days of the war. Notoriously
casual, PB residents aren’t at all bothered by the fact that two of their major streets are actually misspelled: Felspar should be Feldspar and Hornblend should be Hornblende, but nobody cares, if they even know. (So much for the San Diego College of Letters.) Nobody seems to know why the major east-west streets were named after precious stones in the first place, except that it seemed to be some kind of lame effort to suggest that PB was the gem of the West Coast. And you know a PB locie by the way he or she pronounces Garnet Avenue. If they say it correctly—“Garnet”—you know right away they’re from out of town, because the locals all mispronounce it, saying “Garnette.”

Anyway, if you drive west on Garnet, however the hell you say it, you’re going to run into Pickering’s old Pleasure Pier, renamed Crystal Pier, another PB landmark revived by the PBY and B-24. The midway is gone, and so is the dance hall, replaced by the white cottages with blue shutters that line the north and south edges of the pier, then give way to empty space for fishermen who have been known to hook the occasional surfer trying to shoot the pilings.

But the concept of pleasure remains.

PB is the only beach in California where you can still drink on the sand. Between noon and eight p.m., you can slam booze on the beach, and for that reason PB had become Party Town, USA, Beach Division. The party is always on, at the beach, along the boardwalk, in the bars and clubs that line Garnet between Mission and Ingraham.

You’ve got Moondoggies, the PB Bar & Grill, the Tavern, the Typhoon Saloon, and of course, The Sundowner. On weekend nights—or
any
nights in the summer, spring, or fall—Garnet is rocking with a young crowd, many of them locals, a lot of them tourists who’ve heard about the party all the way from Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, Japan, and Australia. You’ve got a drunk and horny United Nations General Assembly down there, and the bartenders on Garnet have probably done more for world peace than any ambassador ever double-parked outside Tiffany’s.

Yeah, except that something different has been creeping up the past few years as gangs from other parts of the city have been drawn to the PB nightlife, and fights have broken out in the clubs and on the street.

It’s a shame, Boone thinks as he drives past the strip of nightclubs and bars, that the laid-back surfer atmosphere is giving way to alcohol- and gang-fueled rage, scuffles in bars that turn into fights in the streets outside.
It’s weird—where you used to see signs that read
NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE
and might just as well have added
AND NO ENFORCEMENT
, now you see signs in the club doorways banning gang colors, hats, hooded sweatshirts, and any gang-related gear.

PB is getting a seedy, almost dangerous reputation, and the family tourist trade is starting to move to Mission Beach or up to Del Mar, leaving PB to the young and single, to the booze hounds and the gang bangers, and it’s all too bad.

Boone has never much liked change anyway, certainly not this change. But PB has changed, even from the time Boone was growing up in it. He saw it explode in the Reagan eighties. A hundred years after its first real estate boom, Pacific Beach hit another one. But this time it wasn’t lots of land for little one-story cottages; this time it was condo complexes and big hotels that bulldozed the little cottages into memories and robbed the few survivors of their sunlight and ocean views. And with the condos, the chain stores moved in, so a lot of Pacific Beach looks like a lot of everywhere else, and the small businesses that gave the place its charm—like The Sundowner and Koana’s Coffee—are now exceptions.

And prices continued to rise, to the point where the average working person, the man or woman who built the town, can’t even think about buying a place anywhere near the beach and will soon be priced out of the market entirely—threatening to turn the beachfront area into that weird dichotomy of a rich person’s ghetto, where the rich lock themselves inside at night when the streets are taken over by drunk tourists and predatory gangs.

Now Boone drives east on Garnet, past all the clubs and bars and into the area of coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, tattoo parlors, palm-reading joints, used-clothing stores, and fast-food restaurants, then into the mostly residential neighborhood of the flats. He crosses the 5, where Garnet becomes Balboa Avenue, and pulls into the parking lot of Triple A Taxi.

Just around the corner from the old Consolidated Aircraft factory, where Reuben Fleet won the war and Pacific Beach got lost.

The taxi office is a small, formerly white clapboard building in need of a paint job. A metal security screen is open, revealing the company logo stenciled in fading red on the front window. Off to the left is a garage, where a taxi is up on a rack. Another half a dozen cabs are parked haphazardly around the parking lot.

“Wait in the van, okay?” Boone says as he turns off the engine.

“And flirt with hepatitis C for what reason?” Petra asks.

“Just stay in the van,” Boone says, “and try to look aggro.”

“ ‘Aggro’?”

“Aggravated,” Boone translates. “Angry, annoyed, pissed off.”

“That shouldn’t be difficult,” she says.

“I didn’t think so.” He takes his watch off and hands it to her. “Take this. Keep it in your lap.”

“You want me to
time
you?”

“Just do it. Please?”

She smiles. “Cheerful said you’d have a sundial.”

“Yeah, he’s a hoot.”

Boone walks across the parking lot into the dispatch office. A young Ethiopian guy has the chair tipped back and his feet on the desk. Almost all the cab companies in San Diego are run by East African immigrants. Triple A Taxi is a strictly Ethiopian operation, Boone knows, while United Taxi is Eritrean. Sometimes they get into border skirmishes in the taxi line at the airport, but usually they get along okay.

“Can I help you?” the dispatcher asks as Boone walks in. He’s a kid, barely out of his teens. Skinny, dressed in a ratty brown sweater over new 501 jeans that look freshly pressed. He doesn’t take his Air Jordans off the
desk. Boone isn’t dressed so you’d have to take your feet off the desk for him.

“Dude,” Boone drawls, so it sounds more like “Duuuuuuude.” “I’m in trouble.”

“Breakdown?”

“Break
up
,” Boone replies. “See the chick in the van?”

The dispatcher swings his feet off the desk, brings the chair down on its wheels, adjusts his thick glasses on his nose, and looks out the window into the parking lot. He sees Petra sitting in the van’s passenger seat.

“She’s pissed off,” the dispatcher says.

“Way.”

“How come?”

Boone holds his left wrist out, showing white skin in the exact shape of a watch and band.

“Your watch is missing,” the dispatcher says.

Boone nods in Petra’s direction. “She gave it to me for my birthday.”

“What happened to it?”

Boone sighs. “You keep a secret?”

“Yes.”

I hope not, Boone thinks, then says, “My boys and me partied last night? Some girls dropped in and I got a little friendly with one, maybe a little too friendly, you know what I’m saying, and I wake up and she’s gone. Dude, with the watch.”

“You’re fucked.”

“Totally,” Boone says. “So I told my girlfriend that it was my roommate Dave who was with the stripper but that he was in
my
room because Johnny was in
his
and I passed out by the pool, you know, but I’d left the watch in my room and the dancer, this Tammy chick, just, like, took it, you know, because she thought it was Dave’s and she’s pissed he called her a cab. So I was wondering maybe you could tell me where she went?”

“I’m not supposed to do that,” the dispatcher says. “Unless you’re the police.”

“Bro,” Boone says, pointing out the window, “I ain’t nailing
that
again until I get that watch back. I mean, check her out.”

The dispatcher does. “She’s hot.”

“She’s
filthy
.”

“You shouldn’t have gone with that other girl,” the dispatcher says, looking indignantly outraged for the pretty girl in the van.

“I was hammered,” Boone says. “But you are right, brother. So you think you can toss a drowning man a rope here? See if you sent a cab to 533 Del Vista Mar, chick named Tammy? Where you took her? I’ll do a solid for you sometime.”

“Like what?”

Nice to see that the Ethiopians have adapted to the American way of life, Boone thinks. MTV, fast food, capitalism. Cash on the barrelhead. He takes his wallet out of his pants and holds out a twenty. “It’s all I have, bro.”

Which is pretty much the truth.

The dispatcher takes the twenty, goes into his log, and comes back with “You say her name was Tammy?”