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Lifeguard Queen

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This is an AI generated image that looks remarkably like the Lifeguard Queen of my youth.

Story 42 of 52

By M. Snarky

Late summer, 1974, North Hollywood, Calif. The walk from our apartment at 5342 Cahuenga Blvd to the North Hollywood Pool was about a mile, and for 25¢ you could swim all day. With only our towels in hand and one quarter each in our pockets (Grandma Opal Hess would say, “two-bits”), we walked directly west down the dry and dusty Union Pacific Railroad tracks that paralleled Chandler Blvd to North Hollywood Park, and then turn left at Tujunga Ave where the pool was located on the west side of the street just beyond the public parking lot. When the temperature rose above 100-degrees, it was like walking through the sweltering heat of a desert, but it was always worthwhile because I knew she would be there.

I had just turned 13, my younger brother Scott was 11-1/2, and our younger cousin Chris was 10-1/2. The three of us were accidentally representing the poor white boys of North Hollywood with our holey T-shirts, cut-off jeans, knee-high tube socks with holes in the heels and the toes and our worn out Keds and Converse sneakers. We had no food, no water, no sunscreen, and usually no extra money – not even a nickel for some bubble gum. Our parents were so broke that we would often have to resort to scouring the neighborhood for returnable soda bottles to collect enough money for the pool entry fee.

Whenever we did have any extra change, we would stop by the Winchell’s Donut House near the corner of Lankershim Blvd and Chandler because it was on the way to the pool, and we would have been foolish not to pick up a few 5¢ donuts.

At the front counter of the pool house, you handed over your hard-earned quarter to the attendant for a ticket, then you took the ticket over to the men’s side of the pool house where there was another counter. There was a hand painted sign above that counter that said, “No Cut-Off Jeans!” and, “No Swimming in Underwear!” and “No Urinating in the Pool!” There was another hand painted sign above the door that exited to the pool deck that said, “Rinse Off Before Entering Pool.” Being the ignorant youth that I was, I would have argued that the no cut-off jean policy was dumb and that the no swimming in underwear and no urinating in the pool rules were obvious, but why do I need to rinse off? But rules are rules, and in a public space they must be posted…and obeyed, that is, if you want to avoid getting kicked out.

There was this persistent rumor going around that there was a chemical in the pool water that turned bright red if you peed in it, which signals to everyone in the water around you AND the lifeguard staff that, a) you are a rule breaking savage, and b) you will be promptly removed from the pool, Pissboy will be tattooed onto your forehead, and you will be escorted off of the premises by two burly lifeguards, and banned for life from entering any of the Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation managed public pools. I will tell you unequivocally (although not without some level of embarrassment) that this was indeed just a persistent rumor that I believe was likely propagated by the lifeguard union.

Anyway, you gave the male attendant your ticket and they would hand you a mesh bag with what I can only describe as a large diaper pin that had a number stamped on the end of it which matched the stamped metal number tag attached to the bag. The first time we went to the pool I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the mesh bag or with the pin. After observing what the other men and boys did with them, I quickly figured out what to do, so I put my beat-up shoes, tube socks, T-shirt, and cut-off jeans in the bag, attached the pin to my swim shorts, and handed the bag over to the young man behind the counter who promptly hung the bag on a rack in numerical order.

Scott, Chris, and I, after rinsing off in the remarkably cold water (why was there never a hot water valve?), walked out onto the pool deck like we owned the place. Around the entire pool deck, about every ten feet or so, painted in fire engine red, was “NO RUNNING!” in huge, stenciled letters. More rules. So, with our towels draped around our necks, we briskly walked over to our favorite spot on the deck near the far southeast corner of the deep end where I could observe the high lifeguard chair from afar, which was the throne upon which my Lifeguard Queen sat.

She was a tan, brunette beauty with hazel eyes, wearing Ray Ban Aviator sunglasses, a white sun visor, and the iconic red one-piece Los Angeles County Lifeguard issued bathing suit. Being an official lifeguard, she also had the shiny metal whistle on a lanyard around her neck and a large megaphone by her side. She was a magnificent, powerful sight to behold, and I was crushing hard.

Mind you, I was not creeping on her or staring or ogling – I would simply glance over at her every now and then, hoping that one day she would notice me and smile and maybe wave at me. I had no idea what I was going to do if she ever did acknowledge me like that, but I probably would have suffered a heart attack.

I was comfortable in the water and thought that I knew how to swim, but I truly didn’t know how to swim well. You could say that I only knew how not to drown, just like most other recreational swimmers, I suppose. It wasn’t until I took professional swimming lessons decades later at Los Angeles Valley College for Ironman training with my wife Kim, that I realized how bad I was at swimming. How bad? It went something like this: On the first day of training, coach Stuart directed us (about three-dozen people) to self-seed ourselves along the pool coping thusly, “Advanced swimmers in the right-hand lanes, intermediate swimmers in the middle lanes, and beginning swimmers in the left-hand lanes.” I considered myself an intermediate swimmer and lined up in the middle lane.

Then coach Stuart said, “Okay swimmers, we’re going to split lanes for this drill in a clockwise direction, so we don’t swim into each other. Tom, Frank, Lisa, and Caroline will demonstrate this for you.” The four of them jumped into the middle lane and with a “Yip!” command from the coach, they started swimming in single file along the left-side next to the pool lane divider and when they got to the far end of the lane they turned around and came back along the right-side pool lane divider, passing each other without crashing as they swam in opposite directions.

Coach Stuart continued, “Does everyone understand this?” and we all nodded our heads in acknowledgement. “Now I want everyone to swim a few laps to warm up – Yip!” And with that, we jumped into the water and began swimming as directed. When I got back to the coaches side of the pool after a couple of laps, coach Stuart signaled me to the coping and asked me my name. “Okay, Kent, move down a lane to the left.” I moved down as directed. After a couple more laps, coach Stuart signaled me again and said, “Brad, move down another lane to the left.” I complied. By the time the warmup was over, my name was Norman, and I was standing in the wading pool.

But back in 1974 at North Hollywood Pool, I felt like I was channeling Olympic Gold Medalist Mark Spitz, and I was positive that I caught the queen’s eye once or twice as I swam by her elevated throne.

On the opposite side of the pool from the lifeguard chair were the two glorious springboards – one set at 1-meter, and the other set at 2-meters. These were our favorite activity to do at the pool. We got pretty good at doing jackknifes and swan dives (or so we thought), but big fat cannonball and cherry bomb splashes were our favorites. We mostly just goofed around doing boyish things like belly flops, lazy forward flips, mostly out-of-control back flips, and “Change-your-minds” where you acted like you were going to dive straight into the water but tucked into a cannonball at the last second.

On the last August day of the summer pool season – which was coincidentally also an extremely hot day – a Speedo wearing whale of a man swam right into the diving lane impact zone as I launched myself off of the springboard. I was in midair when I heard the whistle blow, but I didn’t see him until it was too late because I was looking across the pool to the Lifeguard Queen of all my dreams who was blowing said whistle. I collided with him upon entry of my almost perfect starfish belly flop, the impact of which knocked the wind out of me. I involuntarily inhaled a lungful of water which burned my lungs like fire. I began gasping uncontrollably for air under the surface of the water as I started sinking. The last thing I remembered was hearing a muffled splash next to me as I was looking up at the blazing, shimmering sun through the rippled surface of the water.

When I came back to my senses, there she was, smelling like Coppertone coconut tanning oil, leaning over me with the bleach scented chlorinated pool water dripping off of her face and hair and red swimsuit, giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the warm concrete pool deck. Her lips tasted like cherry flavored ChapStick. She was even more beautiful close up. Was I in heaven? I looked into her stunning hazel eyes and smiled. She pulled back and asked, “Kent, are you okay?” She knew my name! THE LIFEGUARD QUEEN KNEW MY NAME! Wait! How did she know my name? What happened? Never mind – let it happen! I started to say, “I love you, Lifeguard Queen!” but before I could say anything, I was rudely awakened by a big splash of pool water. Alas, it was all just a very vivid dream, probably intensified by the heat, hunger, and dehydration. But it seemed so real.

On the way out through the pool house that day she was working the front counter. We made eye contact, and I bashfully looked away. She said, “Cool Tee-shirt!” I was wearing a classic white Coca-Cola Tee-shirt with the red arm and neck ringer bands. I blushed. Then she said, “Have a nice day – see you next summer.” My heart skipped a beat. In an awkward, broken voice, I barely got, “See you next summer,” out of my mouth. At that age, “next summer” always seemed such a long way off and it would never come soon enough.

Summer, 1975, North Hollywood, Calif. This year we had secondhand BMX bicycles that we pieced together to get to the pool faster! On opening day, we raced each other down the railroad tracks from the apartment to the pool. All along the way we kept trying to one-up each other to see who could bunny-hop the highest or ride a wheelie the longest – this turned into a serious competition! Breathless, we locked our bikes to the rack at the pool and rushed to the front counter to get our tickets. The three of us; Scott, Chris, and myself, breathing heavily and dripping with sweat, didn’t even register with the attendant who just smiled at us as he took our quarters and handed us our tickets.

The singular thing that was occupying my mind was the Lifeguard Queen.

This time, the cold shower before entering the pool area was appreciated after riding our bikes so hard in the summer heat. We speed-walked toward our regular corner when we heard “Slow down!” coming over the staticky public address system, clearly directed at the three of us. We complied and slowed down – barely. As we briskly walked behind the queens throne I glanced up to get a brief look of her highness without being too obvious, but this time, the occupant of the throne was not the queen, instead, there was an imposter in her place: the throne was being occupied by one of the male lifeguards. Noooo! Where in the world was my Lifeguard Queen? Wahhhh! Sadly, I never saw her again. The pool days were never the same afterward. I felt an emptiness in her absence and became less enthusiastic about going to the pool.

Although I didn’t learn what her real name was, I imagined that it was something regal like Elizabeth, Genevieve, Catherine, or Margaret.

The summertime always reminds me of those carefree days at that pool with my brother and cousin, but mostly, I wonder about the Lifeguard Queen.

Old crushes die hard.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

Old Zoo Nights

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Story 38 of 52

By M. Snarky

One hot July night in 1976, we pulled up to the locked Griffith Park gate on Crystal Springs Drive near the Wilson & Harding golf course. It was after 10:00 PM. We were in Mark Flaata’s mom’s massive, dark green, fake wood paneled 1972 Chrysler Town & Country station wagon, the same car I wrote about here. Mark turned off the radio and we were given instructions to “Be quiet.” Actually, his instructions were to “Shut the hell up!” Just to the left side of the gate was an equestrian trail that was barely wide enough to allow the humongous station wagon to squeeze through. Mark turned off the lights and drove along the dirt equestrian trail slowly until we got past the ranger station, and then turned back onto Crystal Springs Drive, flicked the lights back on, and drove to the first parking lot near the merry-go-round. There were maybe a half-dozen other cars parked there too.

Although, from a purely technical legal standpoint, we were definitely trespassing into the park after hours, however, the cars that were already inside the park after hours could drive out of the south entrance at Crystal Springs Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard without being harassed by the park rangers. But, if the rangers caught you hiking or walking around inside the park after hours, they would warn you that you could be cited and strongly encourage you to leave RIGHT NOW, or they would radio in for law enforcement which meant the LAPD. I know this from personal experience. Back then the park rangers were not sworn peace officers and were unarmed, so they were basically LAPD-light.

For us, we just didn’t care whether or not we were technically trespassing with our single-minded purpose of going to the Old Zoo to get high and have some fun. Back in those days, the exuberance of our wasted youth was boundless, and we weren’t going to let any legal technicalities prevent us from achieving our mission.

The passengers were Mark Flaata and his girlfriend Eve Anton, Tom Armstrong, Van Cognata, and yours truly. We brought a couple joints of good weed – well, good weed for the era anyway – and two six packs of Bud tall boys in a brown paper bag that we had to pigeon for over at Circus Liquor at the corner of Burbank Boulevard and Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood (NoHo), famous for its landmark giant clown neon sign and popularized in movies like Blue Thunder and Clueless. I should explain that to pigeon for beer meant hanging around the parking lot of a liquor store where the store clerk couldn’t see you and asking guys that looked like they were old enough to buy beer to buy some Bud tall boys for us, which was about $2.50 back then. It was also a 50/50 proposition at best. I personally hated doing it, but even so, I did it anyway mostly because I liked drinking beer, but also to not get hazed by the guys if I didn’t do it.

We hopped out of the station wagon and slinked across the road over to the Lower Old Zoo Trail, hiked up the trail about three-quarters of a mile to the dilapidated chain link fence on the boundary of the Old Zoo property which was, um, open? Someone had used some wire cutters to cut a gap in the fence just wide enough for a teenager to squeeze through. I was like going through a portal because as soon as you descended down the hill on the other side of the fence, you began to see some of the old overgrown structures looming in the darkness and it felt like you were transported into some dystopian Planet of the Apes future. It was the coolest thing that I had ever seen.

The local story of the Old Zoo (est. 1912) was that when the new L.A. zoo was finished being built in 1966, they simply transferred the animals over from the old to the new and then abandoned it as it was, tucked away in a canyon near Bee Rock. It was already 65-years old when I first saw it.

We walked over to a partially burned concession stand, put the six packs on what remained of the old counter, and we all cracked one open and started chugging them down while Tom fired up a joint and passed it around. It seemed as if we were the only people left on the planet.

Before this first visit to The Old Zoo, a.k.a., The Bear Caves, it was already a local legend in NoHo. There were dark, disturbing stories of people disappearing, rape, murders, dismembered bodies in trash bags, ghost sightings, and people dropping too much acid and going stark raving mad. There were also lighter stories of young people going there just to meet up and party and have a good time wandering around the abandoned administration buildings, concession stands, animal barns, aviary, monkey cages, and bear caves. Obviously, we were in the latter group, but that did not prevent talk of the scary stories which started freaking Eve out a little bit, so much so that every little noise in the periphery made her jump which, naturally, made all of us guys laugh.

We eventually found our way over to the back access road for the bear cave entrances. At the entrances, there were a series of levers and pulleys and cables and sliding metal doors that were used to manage the animals, and surprisingly some of them still worked.

We descended down a couple of steep flights of concrete steps into what could only be described as a black hole. The first flight was to the dark main bear den on the left that reeked like piss. The second flight of steps went to the open viewing area out in front. For the moment, you could say that we were the ones that were on display, Adolescens Americanus, if you will. We drank the remaining beers that, by then, were barely below ambient temperature, and smoked the remaining joint.

We talked about all sorts of things, you know, the sorts of things that factually naïve yet miraculously all-knowing teenagers talk about, like how out-of-touch our parents were, books, movies, music, love, God, Jesus, the meaning of life, what we’ll do after graduation, who’ll go to college and who’ll go to trade school and who will get married first, how many children we wanted to have, where we wanted to live and work, and so on and so forth, all compressed into a lively ninety-minute or so ebb and flow conversation with completely inappropriate jokes being cracked all along the way because no topic was off-limits – not even God.

Suddenly, Tom shushed us with his index finger over his pursed lips and said in a low voice, “I hear something!” We collectively listened and heard a vehicle driving on the access road behind us. We immediately understood that it must be the park ranger and we went into Ranger Danger dead-silent mode. They stopped at the back entrance of the bear cave. We could hear some chatter coming over the ranger’s radio. They got out of their truck, flicked their bright flashlights on and pointed them down the steep steps with a sweeping motion and said, “The park is closed; come out of there NOW!” We were quiet as a mausoleum; you could have heard a pin drop. “We know you’re in there!” More hold-your-breath silence. After about a minute more, the flashlights turned off and the rangers got back in their truck, more radio chatter could be heard, and they slowly drove off. Time to go!

We slowly crept up the steps to the road and could see the taillights of the ranger pickup in the distance to our right. We went left and found our way back to the parking lot as fast as we possibly could. We were high and slightly tipsy and very paranoid about getting busted, so Mark wasted no time in getting us out of the park. It was around midnight. Van said, “Let’s drive down Hollywood Boulevard!” We turned west at  Los Feliz and drove past the magnificent homes to where Los Feliz turns south and becomes Western Avenue. We turned right onto Hollywood Boulevard and headed west again. This was a very different neighborhood. We saw bums sleeping in the doorways of the shops, hookers and John’s, drug dealers, drug addicts, and tourists, and rundown buildings in various stages of urban decay. Mark turned right at Highland Avenue, and we quietly drove back to the Valley through Cahuenga pass.

Over the following years, I would take my friends to party at the Old Zoo many more times with whatever party materials we could get our hands on. It was mostly weed and beer, sometimes tequila and limes, and occasionally some LSD to go tripping around the Old Zoo and watch the sun rise over Griffith Park. During that time period, the word got out about it, and it soon became crowded (like everything else in L.A.) and fires, trash, crime, gang activity, and graffiti took their collective toll, destroying all of the remaining buildings, leaving only the bear caves and various chain link and metal barred cages intact but all covered with the various rival L.A. street gang tags, and some stupid token suburban white boy tags like, “Greg Was Here,” or, “I Love Laurie.”

Now renamed Old Zoo Picnic Area, the city cleared out the overgrown trees and shrubs, cleaned up the trash, back-filled the bear cave pit area in front, and welded the metal doors either open or closed, providing limited access to our old familiar haunt, you know, all in the name of public safety.

Nowadays, the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride takes over the Old Zoo area in the fall, hinting at the haunted notoriety of the past.

More Information:

Hadley Meares from PBS SoCal wrote a good article about it here.

Wikipedia link to Griffith Park Zoo is here.

Los Angeles Haunted Hayride is here.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

A Massive 20-Foot Day at Drainpipes

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Story 37 of 52

By M. Snarky

January 1983 was a historic month for monster waves in Southern California. My close, very talented friend Bobby Doran (IG: @bobbydoranart) and I were in the thick of it with our newish state-of-the-art yellow topped, slick black bottomed, Morey Boogie Mach 7-7 bodyboards. The pejorative term the surfers used for these was “sponge,” but what the surfers didn’t appreciate was that we could get deeper inside a barrel and get more quality time in the green room that they ever could imagine on their fiberglass surfboards, granted that the bodyboards were not as fast. The animosity between bodyboarders and surfers is legendary, but that is a story for another time.

Our usual breaks were at Leo Carrillo (Primo’s), Point Zero (“Zeroes”), Staircase, and Drainpipes. Drainpipes is located at Free Zuma on Westward Beach Road in Malibu, just northwest of Point Dume’, and it was one of our favorite, most frequented breaks. Also, the parking was free (hence the name, “Free Zuma”), which was great for young broke dudes like us. Drainpipes was a fast, hollow shorebreak that broke both left and right due to the contours created by the huge boulders that were scattered around the sandy bottom. It was also notorious for riptides, but we knew the break and the beach well enough to avoid them. We were living the classic SoCal weekend warrior beach bum life.

When we heard that Drainpipes was pumping at 20-feet, we knew we had to go. Neither of us had been on such a big, heavy wave, and this was our chance to get a North Shore experience in SoCal, albeit without the warm water, reef sharks, sharp coral, and cute island surfer girls. The biggest waves we had surfed previously were double overhead, or about 12-feet.

Being that it was still winter, the water was super cold (mid 50-degrees) so we brought our thickest O’Neill full wetsuits to fight off the chill. We knew it was going to be a short session by default due to the cold water and drizzly, thick overcast weather, but a short session is better than no session.

At Drainpipes, you don’t usually see the waves breaking from Westward Beach Road as you’re driving in from PCH due to the downward slope of the sandy beach, but on that Saturday morning, we saw these glassy walls of water lining up and peeling off. We looked at each other with our jaws agape without saying a word. We pulled up to the beach and there were only a couple of dozen or so people hanging around, mostly watching the three or four surfers that were already in the lineup at the outside break. We got out of my beater, primer gray ’69 Chevelle Super Sport and took cover under one of the lifeguard towers to watch. The waves were absolutely massive, and the ground shook with the pounding of the breakers. The surfers were pretty good as we watched them carve it up. We assumed that they were either loco Malibu locals or maybe some pros.

We were also counting the wave sets and their timing to get an idea of when and where we could paddle out. After about 15-minutes we knew what to do and went back to the car to get suited up. The gawking onlookers couldn’t believe that we were going out into such big waves with our sponges and Viper and Duck Feet fins. We were the only guys on bodyboards. It was a battle to get out, even on the smaller sets. The whitewater itself was 15-feet high. After what seemed like an eternity (but in reality, was maybe all of 10-minutes) we were outside the break and could rest for a few minutes. The thing about gigantic waves like these is that the incoming swell itself moves you up and down so much that it sometimes feels like you’re on a roller coaster.

After a few minutes of rest, we paddled into the lineup. Bobby was to my right, and he found himself in a perfect spot to drop into a right breaking wave and I watched him slide down the face, carve hard right, and disappear behind a thick wall of water. I watched the back of the wave for the telltale signs of closing out, but it kept on peeling, and by the time Bobby flew up and over the back of the wave ten feet above the water, he was about a hundred feet away from me. The smile on his face, and the fist pump, and the loud, extended WOO-HOO were all I needed for some additional motivation.

My first wave was a left, and the exhilaration of sliding down so fast on such a steep face for so long will never be forgotten! I pulled a hard left bottom turn, trimmed up my bodyboard about mid face and carved sharp top and bottom turns a few times inside this incredibly massive, almost perfectly round, hollow wave. On a bodyboard, you are much lower and closer to the water than you are on a surfboard which provides a very different wave experience, and to me, it’s a deeper connection. I could hear the wave closing out behind me and felt the rush of air, so I accelerated across the face and digging hard with my left rail and shoulder, went vertical and punched through the lip for a nice airborne landing on the back of the wave where I slid down for a little bit – it was like getting a little bonus wave at the end!

Bobby and I caught several more individual waves and also a couple of “Party Waves” where we both dropped into the same wave and exchanged top and bottom turns as we crisscrossed each other – our wake looking like a DNA double-helix.

Then Bobby started to show off a little bit, so, naturally, I had to show off a little bit too…but then I got cocky, as young twenty-somethings do with their boundless hubris. I decided to go for a late drop-in and paid the price for it: I got pitched out over the falls, dropped headfirst at least 20-feet in midair, got pounded to the bottom, which knocked some of the air out of me, and then got sucked up the back of the wave and ended up inside the most extreme rinse cycle that I ever experienced – I was basically a spinning human-sized starfish. I could not sense which way was up. My leash wrapped around my neck, and for a brief moment, I thought I was going to drown – this was not your typical hold-down! But then I pulled myself together, detangled my leash and reeled in my bodyboard with it, grabbed the rails of the board with all of my strength, and popped up above the churning foam gasping (choking, really) for air.

But now I was caught on the inside of the break, which is the worst place you can find yourself in big surf. At this point, you only have two choices: Paddle back out, or ride the churning foam in. Make that three choices; the third of which is to die! I decided that I had to get at least one more wave, so I did the paddle-battle to get back out into the lineup. In the meantime, I spotted Bobby tearing it up, which made me both happy and slightly jealous.

When I got back into the lineup, I was cold and exhausted and had to take a break to catch my breath. By the time I caught my last wave of the day, my feet were numb, I was shivering, and my teeth were chattering. That’s when I found myself in the perfect take-off zone and dropped into the most glorious wave of my life. It was a perfect, glassy, seemingly endless left. I tore it up until it started closing out behind me. I turned hard right and let the fast, foamy whitewater push me back to the sandy beach where I was stranded momentarily like a beached whale. I jumped up with still numb feet, which was not a pleasant experience with the pins and needles sensation shooting through them, and struggled to walk up the steep sandy shore with the heavy pull of the retreating water from the massive waves trying to yank me back in. I fell forward a few times in my battle to break free. It was as if the ocean didn’t want me to leave.

I tossed my board down on the sand and plopped my totally spent ass on it, and as the saltwater, sand, seaweed, and maybe a very small sand crab or two drained out from my nose and ears, I watched Bobby take his last wave of the day and shred. He was so good; I truly think he could have gone pro.

As we were walking back to the car looking like a couple of wet stray cats, one of the onlooking surfers asked, “You guys were pretty good out there; are you pros?” Bobby and I looked at each other and smiled. I replied, “No, man, we’re just a couple of rank amateurs; can’t you tell by the holes in our wetsuits?” as I pointed to a hole in the knee of my wetsuit. We all laughed. Someone passed a joint to us. We inhaled deeply.

My old car did not have a working heater, so Bobby and I, exhausted, shivering, and half frozen, drove back to the Doranch in the Valley (another story for another day), listening to KROQ as we drove along Kanan Road toward the 101. We amused each other with the retelling of our epic wave session and what the experience was like on such a terrifying yet magnificent wave. We planned a surfing safari for the summer where we would hit all of the famous SoCal breaks all the way from Malibu to the Mexican border, and maybe plan a trip to the North Shore of Oahu. It was a good day to be out in the water.

I miss those days.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

Ride or Die / Wheels of Life

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Story 35 of 52

By M. Snarky

We wake at dawn,
often begrudgingly,
and load up the bikes,
and the necessary gear,
and drive the road,
barely awake,
to the edge of land,
to the edge of the sea,
where the two collide,
is where we congregate,
to set out,
on our weekly ritual.

We ride, we ride.

With skinny tires,
and spoke and wheel,
and chain and gears,
we hop on our saddles,
and grab our handlebars,
and we ride the weathered,
asphalt ribbon,
that strings along the,
Pacific Ocean,
and crisscrosses,
the coastal mountains,
that are dotted with,
century old oak trees,
that are covered with lichen,
and black walnut trees,
with resident squirrels,
and holes in the ground,
with other resident squirrels,
that often scurry,
frantically,
without apparent reason,
out across the road,
directly in front of us,
making us flinch,
and miraculously,
with nowhere to hide,
they somehow avoid getting run over,
at the very last second.

We ride, we ride.

With hawks, crows, and condors,
soaring overhead,
and sometimes,
a turkey buzzard or three,
on the road ahead,
dining a creature,
that was formerly living,
this is what they do,
we also spy mule deer,
and an occasional coyote,
out in the periphery,
of the living canvas,
and we see,
the tumbleweeds,
waiting for the wind,
to set them free,
and we see the purple sage,
and the green wild fennel,
an invasive species,
that is hard to eradicate,
and the orange poppies,
and the purple lupine,
and the yellow coreopsis,
the rainbow of colors,
and the richness of textures,
is pleasant to the eyes,
as we roll by,
side by side,
and keenly observe.

We ride, we ride.

Looking out across,
the shimmering azure sea,
changing hues by the moment,
we see the dark kelp beds,
just beneath the surface,
that protect the little fishes,
from the big fishes,
who want to eat them,
and we see sailboats,
and fishing boats,
and we see whales,
and dolphins,
and sea lions,
surfing and playing,
in the briny blue,
and they smile at us,
and we smile back,
acknowledging each other,
in the fleeting moment,
as we glide down the road.

We ride, we ride.

We ride in the fresh salt air,
and in the warm sunshine,
and in the biting cold,
and in the pouring rain,
and in the gusty wind,
that nobody really likes,
and we fix flat tires,
regardless of weather conditions,
because we must,
and we talk and laugh,
about all sorts of things,
sometimes serious,
sometimes humorous,
but always engaging,
and sometimes we cuss,
to emphasize a point,
and sometimes we deride,
the ones that are deserving,
of our scorn.

We ride, we ride.

We ride along,
through the open space,
between heaven and earth,
past the verdant fields,
and up and over the hills,
and across the valleys,
and through the mountain passes,
and down the canyons,
sometimes too fast,
and through the tunnels,
and over and under the bridges,
and sometimes through water,
that’s a little too deep,
that gets your shoes and feet wet,
making them cold and squishy,
and year after year,
we meet and we ride,
for endless miles,
with the people that we love.

We ride, we ride.

This is how we meditate,
and naturally medicate,
and how we heal,
and how we make sense of,
our complicated lives,
until the fateful day comes,
when circumstances conspire,
to weaken and wither our bodies,
and we can ride no more,
then we’ll dream,
the wonderful dream,
the golden dream,
the infinite dream,
of the adventures past,
and the stories told,
and the laughter,
and the comradery,
where time stands perfectly still.

And we ride, we ride,
endlessly.

A Fish Story

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Story 30 of 52

By M. Snarky

In the summer of 1971, my dad took my younger brother Scott and I fishing on the shore of the Sacramento river…at night. I was 10 and Scott was 8. This, we were soon to find out, was going to be an unexpected adventure.

My dad loaded up our fishing gear and folding camp chairs and a metal Coleman cooler full of 12-ounce cans of Budweiser and Shasta cola then drove us to the “secret fishing spot” in his stock, white top with Glenwood Green body, 1964 Chevy C10 long-bed pickup. At first, we were driving along a 2-lane highway and then turned onto a narrow 2-lane county road that generally paralleled the curves of the great river to the farmland far beyond the city lights of Sacramento. Then he turned onto a rutty single lane dirt road and drove for a half-mile or so to a small, flat clearing amongst the oak trees that dotted the muddy banks of the ancient river.

There was a large bonfire, and there were about a half-dozen other men with pickups and a few more boys who happened to be running around the bonfire. So much for the secret fishing spot! My dad barely had the truck parked when Scott and I gleefully hopped out of the pickup and into the arms of the warm, firelit summer night.

We quickly introduced ourselves to the other boys and immediately engaged in the ongoing activities which basically consisted of running around the bonfire while throwing more wood into it…or anything else that we thought would burn.

Meanwhile, my dad met up with his buddies, and in the illumination of a Coleman lantern, they began to get themselves set up to fish for the largest fish in the Sacramento river – green sturgeon! They had thick fishing rods with large Penn reels and heavy line that they rigged up with big lead weights and huge fishing hooks. For bait, they impaled chicken leg or chicken thigh meat onto the fishhook and wrapped it up tight with panty hose. Yes, these men traveled around with panty hose in their tackle boxes. I’m sure their wives understood.

After rigging everything up, they cast out the lines with a back-and-forth swinging motion of the fishing rod to build up enough momentum to get the bait as close to the deep middle part of the river as they could, and after a big splash, the waiting game between man and fish began. Or was it a drinking game that began between man and man? They also smoked cigars and joked around quite a bit. Apparently, there was a lot of downtime fishing for sturgeon.

As my dad explained it to us, a sturgeon doesn’t strike like other freshwater fish. A bluegill, trout, or largemouth bass, for example, will take the bait and quickly swim off with it and this is easily detectable by the action on the fishing rod at which time you set the hook with a pulling action. A sturgeon, however, is pretty much a gigantic prehistoric suckerfish, and they will instead gently pull on the bait as they try to suck the chicken meat off of the hook. The only way to detect it is by “feeling” the fishing rod for successive tugs, and when you think you have one on the line, yank the rod back hard to set the hook. Hooking a sturgeon is one thing, but landing a sturgeon was described as, “reeling in a pickup truck.” We witnessed one of the men working for what seemed like an hour before he landed a massive sturgeon on the riverbank.

In the meantime, Scott, and I, on our Shasta cola caffeine and sugar high, were fishing our brains out for catfish with our light tackle setup using nightcrawler worms for bait. We caught tons of them and threw all of them back into the river after convincing ourselves that a bigger one was out there lurking, worthy of us to keep on fishing for “the big one.”

It was getting late, and Scott and I decided to take a break and go sit down on a log that was against a tree near the bank of the river. We sat down with a collective sigh. One moment later, the “log” violently convulsed, sending the two of us running off in full, screaming-boy panic mode. After a few seconds of sheer terror passed, we stopped to collect ourselves. We looked back and reasoned that since a log is not a living thing it is impossible for one to move like that, so it had to be something else. We slowly walked back to investigate. As we got closer, we could see more detail. Funny thing: in the dark, a sturgeon looks a lot like a log. Now that we positively identified what we were actually looking at, which was, in fact, not a log, we moved in for a closer look. It was a fascinating creature that looked as if it came from another time…or another planet! It convulsed again, and we jumped back in unison, this time laughing a little bit at ourselves. We found out it was a sturgeon that was caught earlier in the night.

That last thing I remembered about that night was that I crawled into the cab of the truck and fell asleep. But my dad, who got skunked fishing, brought home a dozen or so thick sturgeon steaks that were given to him by one of his fishing buddies.

At home, my dad previously converted an old Kenmore refrigerator into a cold smoker that sat outside on the patio. He cold smoked all of those lovely sturgeon steaks into absolute smoked fish nirvana! I think he thought that he was going to have smoked fish for weeks to enjoy with his ice-cold Bud, but it was not meant to be…because us kids found his stash in the garage refrigerator, and we wiped it out in a matter of days!

Sorry dad, love you!

©2025. All rights reserved.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

Dissection of a Missive With a Retort

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Story 17 of 52

By M. Snarky

I don’t like passive-aggressive people at all because of their indirect and often murky communication methods that are often rife with thinly veiled threats. They also think that they are cleverer than they actually are. With this in mind, I found the preceding note on my windshield this week while parked on a public street in front of a public building (power distribution substation) without any posted parking restrictions, of which I will intensely dissect.

First of all, writing in all caps is the equivalent to YELLING AT THE READER. This is a trigger from the start. It is also an extremely juvenile way to communicate with people. Calm down a pop a Prozac which I bet you have in abundance.

Sentence 1: DEAR ________ EMPLOYEES, HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

For one thing, I am not an employee of the redacted company name, so there’s that little nugget. Also, writing “Happy Holidays” is code for not wanting to offend any non-Christian people. The last time I checked my Gregorian calendar, December 25 still says “Christmas Day,” not, “Happy Holiday Day” which would be ridiculously redundant and meaningless. And idiotic.

Sentence 2: THIS IS A FRIENDLY REMINDER THAT YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO PARK IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD STREETS.

Actually, this is a not so friendly reminder because you are still yelling at me, and according to the parking signage on the street, I do not need a permit. Also, I think you meant to write, “…TO PARK ON OUR NEIGHBORHOOD STREETS.” Parking in your neighborhood street would mean that my car is encased in asphalt. Preposition choice matters! Writing “…our neighborhood streets” is a possessive statement, as if you own the street, which you don’t because it belongs to the public. In other words, the public paid for it, so the public may use it. Facts.

Sentence 3: WE ARE GOOD NEIGHBORS, HOWEVER, WE HAVE WORKERS AND OUR OWN NEIGHBORS THAT PARK IN OUR COMMUNITY.

At this point, I’m not sold on the good neighbors declaration. It also appears that they are implying that I am a bad neighbor. Additionally, and I’m not claiming to be an English expert here, but I’m pretty sure there should be a semicolon after NEIGHBORS not a comma, at least according to my word processor. Oh, and I too have workers and my own neighbors parking in my community – so what? It’s a public street. I have no beef against anyone parking on it.

Sentence 4: WE HAVE TAKEN PHOTOS OF YOUR CAR AND LICENSE PLATE, AND WE KINDLY ASK YOU TO NOT PARK HERE OR WE WILL REPORT YOU TO __________________ AND THE MANHATTAN BEACH POLICE DEPARTMENT.

So, you’re going to call 9-1-1 and SWAT me for legally parking my car? Wow! This is not a thinly veiled threat; it is an actual threat. “We” also implies that there is more than one person involved in the photo shoot, but I’m thinking this is a solo effort. This is also creepy and probably illegal. Is this person a run-of-the-mill nosey neighborhood busybody or a wannabe lawyer? Also, I don’t know the redacted person’s name you are threatening to report me to but reporting me to anybody feels so high-schoolish. I’m still not sure whether this is a Karen or a Brad who wrote this note, but I’m pretty sure you have better things to do with your apparently ample spare time than walking around the neighborhood and putting your little missives on the windshields of random cars. Or is it the only the cars that are more than 3-years old? Oh, and the police department cannot do anything to a car that is parked legally with current registration tags nor to the person with a driver’s license in good standing that parked it, whether you like it or not. Get over yourself.

Sentence 5: KIND REGARDS, YOUR MANHATTAN BEACH NEIGHBORS.

This is how you sign off with an unkindly threatening note? No name, phone number, or email address to respond to? What a chickenshit. Now I will look at everyone in this neighborhood with suspicion. I do love the tony neighborhood of Manhattan Beach, but I’m better off not being your actual neighbor because I don’t believe we would get along very well. And are you really speaking for all of the Manhattan Beach Neighbors? How many neighbors are we talking about anyway? A thousand? Ten? One? You?

The Retort

DEAR KAREN OR BRAD,

I RECEIVED YOUR NASTYGRAM…

Wait, let me start over without the yelling. I’ll use my internal NPR host voice…

Dear Karen or Brad,

I received your note on my car windshield yesterday. At first, I thought it was a parking ticket. I was relieved to find out that it wasn’t because at the time my car was certainly lawfully parked and intentionally parked in front of a public building because I am mindful not to park in front any of the multi-million-dollar houses, one of which you apparently live in. Good for you!

After reading the overtly hostile note, I immediately looked around and noticed that there were many, many other available parking spots up and down the block of the public street in question, so it’s not as if I was taking the last parking spot on the block that you may have needed to park your Tesla, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Ferrari, or Lamborghini that I often see excessively speeding up and down your neighborhood streets and running the stop signs. Same goes for the spoiled rich kids on their $5,000 e-bikes.

Threatening to report a person to anybody – especially the police – who has not committed any crime whatsoever is beyond ludicrous; it smacks of elitist localism of which it appears that you are gleefully engaged in. I’m pretty sure there is a lawyer somewhere amongst your ilk that would inform you that you cannot prevent anyone from parking on a public street, posted parking restrictions notwithstanding. They would also likely advise you that threatening to call the police on a law-abiding citizen that has not committed a crime a serious waste of public resources and that you may be cited and fined.

Anyway, Karen, or Brad, I will continue to park my classic 1972 Winnebago Indian RV anywhere I want to on your street. One day, if I get lucky, maybe you’ll find it parked directly in front of your house and block your view of the ocean. Lawfully parked, of course, but for no more than 72-hours at a time.

Maybe I’ll drain my black water tank while I’m there, you know, like what cousin Eddie did in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Instagram: @m.snarky

©2024. All rights reserved.

Walking The Strand

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The Strand, Hermosa Beach, CA

Story 16 of 52

By M. Snarky

As a general rule, I walk at lunch, unless, of course, the weather sucks. Movement is good and it gives me a chance to reset and clear my head.

I’m currently working in Manhattan Beach, CA, and there’s a path a half mile away in Hermosa Beach that goes right between the multi-story, multi-million-dollar homes and the beach that the locals call “The Strand.” It’s nice. It’s a beautiful place. Sometimes it is so clear that I can see the west end of Santa Catalina island. It’s great for people watching. I see the beautiful people on a regular basis. I also see the locals and tourists, has-beens and wannabes, beauty, beasts, homeboys with their pit bulls, and burnouts. I’m sure I’ve seen a couple of drug deals go down. It’s an interesting dichotomy of the people that live in Southern California.

Some of them are day drinking a bottle or a can of something from a brown paper bag as they sit along the low wall between the sand and the path or as they cruise along the path on a beater bicycle. Some of them are smoking weed with the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air. Hotel California reference aside, I often wonder what the people living in those beachside houses do for a living. They certainly are not flipping burgers. These are the often-derided Coastal Elites: Educated, wealthy, influential, and meddling.

There’s also a regular mix of walkers, runners, cyclists, skateboarders, and roller-bladers on The Strand. Occasionally, I see a wipeout when someone hits the loose sand that is often on the concrete path. Most of them get right back up, dust themselves off, and go on about their activity. Others act as if they are waiting for an ambulance and Larry H. Parker to show up.

I’ve recently come to the realization that not every stroller has a small child sitting in it enjoying the fresh air and sunshine or taking a nap as you would expect. Indeed, many of the strollers I see actually have a small dog (or two) and sometimes even an occasional cat. Cats and strollers seem like a recipe for, well, a catastrophe. I can barely get my cat Cheeto into his cat carrier to get him to the veterinarian and the thought of getting him into a stroller “voluntarily” for a lovely walk down The Strand would turn into a bloody mess. My blood, not Cheeto’s. It might actually work out if Cheeto is inside the cat carrier first and the cat carrier is loaded and strapped onto the stroller, but I’m not willing to get shredded to find out. You can read more about Cheeto in an earlier post here.

Now, as I walk down The Strand, I play a game inside of my head called People and Strollers: Pet or Child? I haven’t really been keeping score, but I am often surprised, especially when it is a young woman or a young couple pushing a stroller with animals inside instead of the expected little human being.

Ironically, the animals are often much cuter than the children.

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©2024. All rights reserved.

Laundromats – Part 2

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Story 14 of 52, continued.

By M. Snarky

To the contrary of Laundromats – Part 1, my extremely frugal paternal grandmother Mary Alice never stepped foot inside a laundromat. She had an old electric semi-automatic open top 1940’s era Maytag washing machine with a wringer that sat out on the back patio. Nothing fancy. I saw her doing a load of laundry once in that odd machine. Odd, in that it was cylindrical and didn’t connect to any plumbing and had to be filled with a combination of garden hose water and boiling water from a tea kettle. It also had an external drain hose that was connected to a wye cleanout plumbing fitting on the back wall of the patio. There was a foot switch, a lever, and a knob to control it. It had a clutch. It also required the user to have one or two rinse tubs full of water available.

The semi-automatic washing machine process went something like this:

  1. Place dirty laundry in the tub and fill with water of the desired temperature.
  2. Add laundry soap.
  3. Turn the machine foot switch on, engage the wash tub agitator, and set an egg timer for 15-minutes.
  4. Disengage the wash tub agitator.
  5. Engage the pump.
  6. When the wash tub is fully drained, disengage the pump.
  7. Engage the wringer.
  8. Wring out the clothes and place them into rinse tub 1. Agitate by hand.
  9. Wring out the clothes from rinse tub 1 and place them into rinse tub 2. Agitate by hand.
  10. Wring out the clothes from rinse tub 2 and place clothes in laundry basket for clothesline drying, or place directly into dryer.
  11. Disengage the wringer.
  12. Engage the pump to drain the tub of the water collected from all of the wringing.
  13. When the wash tub is fully drained, disengage the pump.
  14. Turn the foot switch off.
  15. Drain the rinse tubs.

Obviously, this was really only a semi-semi-automatic process, and a very hazardous and ridiculously tedious one, but she didn’t mind doing it. Thank god for the modern automatic washing machine. I hope the person that invented them won a Nobel Peace Prize!

Mary Alice didn’t have nor apparently need a gas or electric dryer. Instead, she had one of those rotating umbrella clotheslines that looked like a TV antenna that she used for drying her laundry naturally with only sunlight and a light breeze. She also knew not to dry laundry on the clothesline if the gusty Santa Ana winds were blowing, shrewdly circumventing the possibility of having to fetch her undergarments from the neighbors sycamore tree.

Fast forward to when I was about 19 and lived in a 2-story 20-unit apartment building with my younger brother and my mom at 6037 Hazelhurst Place in NoHo. The apartment building had a small room on the ground floor near the pool equipment that had one heavy-duty top-loading coin-op washer and one heavy-duty front-loading coin-op dryer that were situated to the left side of the room and a small, convenient counter to the right side for folding your clothes. Above the folding counter was a soapbox vending machine. It was ostensibly a micro laundromat. Sorry, no fluff ‘n’ fold services available.

However, there were rules for using the laundry room to prevent any conflicts. On the back of the laundry room door, the apartment manager had posted a framed 8 ½ x 11-inch mimeographed schedule with gridlines for which apartment had access on which days of the week and which 2-hour time slots. There was another larger, 2-foot by 3-foot professionally hand painted sign from Erroll Sign Company in NoHo (I actually worked for the owner, Erroll Biggs, over one summer) that was screwed to the back of the door that had the following:

LAUNDRY ROOM RULES       

HOURS – 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM ONLY!                                                    

NO SMOKING!

CLEAN OUT THE LINT SCREEN IN THE DRYER WHEN YOU ARE DONE!

DO NOT LEAVE ANY TRASH BEHIND!

They went a little overboard with all capitalized letters and the exclamation points which gave me the impression that they were a little bit angry and very shouty. Reading between the lines, the sign inferred that people used the laundry room between 10:00 PM and 8:00 AM, regularly smoked in it, didn’t clean the dryer screen, and left trash lying around which probably consisted mostly of empty soapboxes, empty beer bottles, and flattened cigarette butts extinguished on the floor with a shoe. 

One Sunday night when our apartment number had the scheduled laundry time of 8:00 – 10:00 PM, I went downstairs to do my load of laundry at 8:00 sharp, but someone had apparently lost track of time and there was a load of laundry in both the washer and the dryer. Looking at the schedule, it was apartment #10 that had the 6:00 – 8:00 time slot. Not wanting to wait (nor should I have had to wait because of the established rules), I moved the clothes that were in the dryer to the folding table and moved the wet laundry from the washing machine and placed them in the dryer. I figured if the person came back while my clothes were still in the washer, they would just start the dryer and when I came down later the dryer would be available to me.

In the meantime, I went back upstairs and smoked a little weed and was feeling alright when I realized it was time to pop my clothes into the dryer at around 8:30 PM. I went back downstairs, and nothing had changed; the wet clothes were still in the dryer and the dry clothes were still in a pile on the folding table. No biggie – I decided to move #10’s wet clothes from inside the dryer and put them on top of it and put my clothes in the dryer and carry on with my business. But while I was loading the dryer, I noticed a rather large, middle-aged woman in a muumuu with these big curlers in her hair looming in the laundry room doorway, standing there in silence, and puffing on a cigarette. She was straight out of a Gary Larson cartoon.

I turned to say hello when she started in on me in a very nasty, throaty, gravelly tone of voice – the kind of voice brought on only from years of smoking. “What do you think you’re doing touching my clothes, you pervert!” Pervert? I don’t believe I deserved that. I defended myself by saying, “Actually, ma’am, this is my time slot (I gestured toward the posted schedule on the back of the door), and you left your laundry unattended, so I just moved it out of the way to make room so I could do my laundry.” I was talking in a low-key matter-of-fact tone of voice. Then she said, sarcastically, “Actually, it is against standard laundry room etiquette to touch anyone else’s clothes!” Standard laundry room etiquette? I didn’t know this was a thing – they certainly didn’t teach this is school.

Sensing the mounting agitation and wanting to avoid conflict, I said, “No problem. I’ll take my clothes out of the dryer and let you finish drying your clothes first and then I’ll come back later.” I grabbed my little white plastic laundry basket and filled it with my wet clothes from the dryer. Then she said, in a very demanding femdom-like voice, “Now you put my wet clothes back into the dryer!” I was shocked at her talking at me like I was her BDSM partner, and so I looked her straight in the eye and sarcastically replied, “I thought I wasn’t supposed to touch anyone else’s clothes, you know; standard laundry room etiquette!”

This snarky rebuff made her snap – she was apparently an angry woman who likes to get her way – she clenched the cigarette in her teeth and then she stepped into the laundry room and took a right-hand swing at me with all of the flabby power that she had in her big, puffy arms. I ducked and took a quick step backyard like a boxer in a prize fight. She missed hitting me by a mile. I said, “Are you crazy?” Then she said in a huffing voice, “You little bastard!” and took another step toward me as she was cocking her right arm back in preparation of taking another swing at me. I noticed that now there was just enough room behind her to squeeze between her body and the doorway. With newfound cat-like reflexes, I grabbed my laundry basket of wet clothes and faked a step to my right, which she jerkily followed while she was swinging at me which took her off balance making her fall softly against the dryer with all of her mass but catching herself from falling on the floor at the last moment. I took another quick step to the left and ran right by her, slightly bumping her, ah, equally puffy butt which prompted her to yell out loud, “DON’T YOU TOUCH ME YOU LITTLE FAGGOT!” So, within about a minute, I was labeled a perverted little bastard faggot. She was batshit crazy. Good job, Karen.

I had half a mind to call the cops on her for aggravated assault but thinking it through to the logical conclusion where the both of us are interviewed about what transpired while the cops are trying to keep a straight face and ultimately advising us to forgive each other and go back to our apartment prevented me from doing so. That, and I may have had a little bit of weed in my pocket.

This experience made me wonder about the frequency of laundromat violence, what was considered the ultimate unforgivable offense, and what the fatality rate was. It both slightly amused and somewhat disturbed me thinking about people snapping over such a trivial thing like touching someone else’s clothes. How about this, Karen: Follow the laundromat rules and don’t leave your damn clothes unattended!

Fortunately, laundromats have changed much from their utilitarian roots over the decades and have become much more civilized, but nowadays it costs like $5 to wash and dry a load of laundry. There are newer, fancier attended laundromats with attached sports bars where you can get a cheeseburger and a beer and watch a baseball game while you are doing your own laundry, or have someone else do your laundry for you, vis-à-vis, Fluff ‘n’ Fold service.

The fact of the matter is that I really don’t mind if someone else touches my clothes. As far as I’m concerned, standard laundry room etiquette can go to hell.

Instagram: @m.snarky

©2024. All rights reserved.