Mel Gibson Goes to Ventura

"Mr. Mel Gibson! Hey, Mr. Mel Gibson!"

I pretended not to hear him at first, while standing this morning at the counter of the Jack in the Box on East Thompson Avenue. But finally I turned around to look at the homeless guy with the West African accent calling out to me from a table nearby. I'd seen him there before, always combing over all his personal papers on the same table by the door.

I smiled and nodded at him, then turned to order my coffee and egg burrito. When I sat down to eat, he came over to my table and chatted me up while I sat, still a bit groggy on an early Sunday morning, wearing my dark sunglasses. He dumped the story of his life to me in thirty seconds. I pretended to follow him, but it was impossible. Something about a church in Thousand Oaks. Finally having had his say, he went back to his papers.

I'd driven down here from Bakersfield to Ventura two weeks ago, rugged through the mountains of the Dick Smith Wilderness, having reluctantly given up TCM at the Super 8.  But I'd already booked a night at the Viking Motel here, an independent place that had very good reviews online. By the time I decided I wanted to stay in Bakersfield longer, it was too late to cancel the reservation.

After checking in, I was glad I had come. For fifty-one bucks a night, I get a huge suite with a kitchenette, a comfortable king-sized bed, and a huge flat-screen television. If only it had TCM it would be perfect. All of this just ten minutes walk from the beach. It was very easy to turn my one-night stay into a two-week sabbatical from the road. It's the longest I've been in one place since June.

As I recently wrote to a friend, the incident in the Jack-in-the-Box wasn't the first time I'd been treated as a celebrity in Ventura, a charming and inexpensive little unpretentious town on the northern edge of the Greater L.A. area, where all the pawn shops have a collection of surf boards in the window.

On my first full day here I went walking along the waterfront downtown by the Crowne Plaza Hotel, the city's only tall building. I was dressed in black Kuhl jeans and a black t-shirt, which has become my default urban California attire, and over that my lime-green Patagonia Houdini (it turns out Patagonia is headquartered here).

Out by Surfer's Point, the waves were coming in rather strong and the surfers were out in force. At least two dozen of them bobbed in the water on the boards, waiting for their turn. I noticed that they were all clad in black body suits, since the water is cold this time of year. I felt right at home, the way I was dressed.

As I stood by the railing watching them, I became fascinated by their activity. I've never surfed in my life, but all at once I took on the challenge of trying to figure out the rules of surfing just by observing them. I watched them in turn, as they peeled off from the group, turning to paddle as a wave came over them, then standing on the board at the moment that the wave began to swell under them.

In my reverie of observation, my mind kicked into physicist mode, and took in what I was seeing with the joy of pure rationality. I began to meditate on the equations of fluid mechanics and buoyancy, and started to formulate an equation that would generate the perfect angle of the board in relation to the curve of the wave form underneath.

As the mathematical symbols danced in my head, I was interrupted  by a voice in a foreign accent. I turned to see a pair of Japanese tourists, a young couple. The man was talking to me and waving a camera at me. His rather attractive wife or girlfriend was standing next to him smiling.

Are you a model? he was asking me.  I looked at him confused, with my sunglasses on, he probably only saw my smile.

At first I assumed that because he was waving a camera, that he wanted me to take a picture of him with his girlfriend. But I could tell that was not what he was asking.

Instead it turned out that his girlfriend wanted to have her picture taken with me. He was asking if that was OK. Sure, I said, nonchalantly. She sidled up next to me and I put my arm around her, giving her a big squeeze. She seemed delighted as he snapped a picture of us, and then they both thanked me profusely and went on their way down to the walkway.

The ego boost of this incident was quite fun, and lingered in me for the rest of the afternoon like a sugar high.

But actually I was not surprised at all. As my aforementioned friend can testify, this kind of thing invariably tends to happen to me every time I come to Los Angeles. 

I seem to get treated like a rock star here, when I'm just going about my everyday business. People step out of the way for me on the sidewalk, like I'm somebody famous. Women approach me and flirt with me (and more).

I have no idea why this happens. You would think that in a metropolis full of famous people that a schmuck like me would just blend in as a nobody, but just the opposite seems to happen here.

I could contrast this with New York, where I feel a beautiful warm anonymity. I don't feel like a nobody there, but an ordinary person just like everyone else there, because New York is too much for anyone person to dominate. Everybody there is ordinary in one way or another, and it feels fantastic to experience that great leveling.

But in L.A., I'm somebody, I guess. Or at least I feel that way. It makes me wonder what it would be like to live here for any length of time. I probably won't get the chance to, by choice. But I somehow don't mind the amusing ego boosts that seem to flow towards me here.

Besides if I ever really want to feel like a worthless waste-of-space nobody, I can always go back to Washington, D.C.