SPRING

SPRING: I was living in an apartment in Crystal Cove, California, a coastal town that looks like a gated community, but they just built a gate and let any old scumbags live here.  I walked to work every day which was a paper route at the time.  I was delivering papers for a guy who hired both me and my friend Shaggy the same day we applied.  I was there every morning, sorting, bagging, walking, slinging, etc. The job was ok but our boss stole Shaggy’s bike chain.

I was in an amateur detective group at the time.  Nothing much professionally speaking, three of us with fucked up equpiment.  But we had fun goofing off and occasionally solving a mystery.


A guy gave my friend Fred and me a copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study In Scarlet.  We read it all the time.  It wasn't heavy because it was in paperback.  Sherlock Holmes was legendary of course, but the scene was surging in recent times as well.  Leroy Brown out of Idaville, the Hardy brothers out of Bayport, Nancy Drew in River Heights.  It was a growing network of DIY sleuthing.  I think the Hardy kids and Drew even did a tour together once or twice.


Fred, Shaggy, and I wanted to go to Los Angeles to meet some like-minded investigators.  We had this idea in mind - we couldn't wait for mysteries to come to us, we had to venture out into the unknown.


So we drove to L.A. and met some people at the Flower Lounge.  This girl Velma was walking around in circles, making this fucked up noise, screaming at the crowd.  Turns out she just lost her glasses.  We hung out for a bit, and Velma was really cool to us.  This girl Daphne was there as well.  Very smart and kind.  I respected and liked them.  We realized early on in our conversations that the girls were from Crystal Cove too.


We considered hanging out more and then all driving back together, since Fred had a van and the girls took a bus.  We all wanted to spend more time together, but I had to work early the next morning.  As I scurried down the hill to my job the following day, I started getting depressed.  People like Fred and Velma were out there winging it and trying to do something with their lives.  We all lived like dogs (probably me more so), but they lived life with more guts than I was by a long shot.