Arteries of Memory: Speedway

Speedway, Venice, ca. 1982.


I LIVED there in a first floor apartment in "Four Floors West," a building with front door on the boardwalk and the back door on Speedway, the alley parallel to the boardwalk. I think of it often when the marine layer rolls in, the street lamps haloed and the cold which otherwise wouldn't be so cold really getting to you because it's so damp. The memory brings an admixture of emotion—nostalgia, anticipation, fear, which follows the contours of what my life was then. I was a déclassé bohemian, living just one rung above the streets, sleeping on a sofa in a friend's apartment, improvising life in the way only kids in their early 20s can. I wanted to be a poet, in the Bukowski or Beat mode. I could have gotten into a lot more trouble than I did, but I did get into some, the echoes of which are still with me today. But anyway, there was a musician who became a mentor whose street nickname was "Cooch" (don't ask) and he would always tell me, "What dies in the ocean washes up on the shore, what's dying on the land comes to the sea." This was pre-gentrification Venice. Like Fante's Bunker Hill: most of us were poor, a lot of us were scheming to survive. The thing about living on the beach in LA is that the Santa Anas have to be really strong to blow all the marine air out. It could be 100 degrees in Pasadena, and foggy-chilly at the beach. And with the fallen human tableau of Venice at that time, the whole atmosphere was elegiac... breakers crashing unseen beyond the scrim of gray.

-- Ruben Martinez

(photo: Speedway Westminster Venice by Michael Dorausch via flickr creative commons)