After a long year at Charlie Chaplin’s house, I was running out of tolerance. I was dating a guy and just before Christmas, on a reckless whim (both of our leases were up), we decided to move in together. We found a charming duplex bungalow in Venice near Abbot Kinney Blvd which was the hipster, artsy section of this little beach town. The beach was a hearty mile walk directly west and a vegan coffee shop was a fuzzy slipper walk around the corner.

The bungalow was built some time in the 50s. We didn’t have air conditioning, but the constant ocean breeze made it unnecessary. The kitchen had the original sink and stove which gave it a precious charm. The stove only had one rack, but since my old shit hole didn’t even have a stove, it was a giant step forward. My artist boyfriend painted the kitchen a hazy blue and put wispy clouds around the windows to serve as frames. The frames revealed the vibrant bulgonvia that canopied the side yard. Many mornings were spent drinking a cup of coffee and staring at our “art”.

The other roommates were three cats or “The Three Queens” as I referred to them because they resembled the characters in the movie Pricilla Queen of the Desert. Bernadette, the old drag queen, was the boyfriend’s black Manx, a bit of an asshole with sharp claws that he would slowly sink into your skin when you had petted him long enough.  Felicia was Kuan, the adorable, egotistical kitten I found under a bush the day after he was born. He was the younger, strikingly beautiful drag queen who earned applause in every outfit and as a result had a “look at me!” personality. Mitzi was my sister’s cat Seymour that she flew to me from Colorado. He was the middle aged drag queen who could pull off most outfits but whose routine was becoming dated. He never found his bearings and was constantly tortured by the bullishness of the Manx and the obnoxiousness Kuan.

Venice Beach itself was a constant carnival. Street vendors and street performers ranged from the outrageous to the ridiculous. I would love to understand what inspires someone to cover themselves in silver paint and stand motionless (unless a small fare is placed in a box) for hours in the California sun. But I also have no idea why any tourist would want their name written on a grain of rice. The beautiful attribute of Venice Beach was of course the ocean. There is nothing like walking the shoreline during a pink and orange sunset while your earphones pump out U2.  There is nothing like a morning run along the boardwalk in the misty fog. There is nothing like sitting on the beach with friends, drunk on Coronas, watching July fireworks decorate the coast.  But there are some less than desirable attributes of Venice: the constant stream of mentally unstable homeless characters with skin that looks like beef jerky, the sound of beach bum heroine addicts throwing up in the community bathrooms during those early morning runs, the neglected beach littered with cigarette butts and bits of indefinable trash, and tourists.

But I did love living there. There was a certain street cred to living in Dog Town where real skateboarding began. I got a silly buzz when I passed people like the white haired Donald Sutherland on my beach runs (who unlike most celebs, stared directly at me and smiled when I passed instead of shirking, which made him smokin’ hot). But mainly after surviving a year at Charlie’s, a real home felt pretty good. I didn’t have to share a shower with daddy long leg spiders. The real nostalgia however was after growing up in Kansas watching Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, I finally made it to the beach.