Venice, Part I

I love Venice.

I loved it before I ever came here because The Doors were born here and I am Jim Morrison.

At least such was my belief as a leather-clad Boise teen in the nineties. And if I stop to ponder it, still today. I’m kidding of course. I think.

I’ve loved Venice for more clear-eyed reasons in the intervening years. I’ve loved it for its light, that diffuse glow descending between sea-blown palms at dusk, waving through copper mist like a ghostly friend.

I love that there’s always life in the streets, a whirring in the air, rock ‘n roll whirring between mescaline murals, a hum like no other city’s.

What is the source of that hum? Does it ring from topknots ambling down Brooks to join stoned multitudes drumming on the sand? Is it twisted into the braids of addicted Boardwalk angels? Does it whine and jangle from their dented guitars? Did it glide west on orphaned Santa Anas, or ride a tide of Hollywood blood money past the 405 and into our dying sun? Does it sing from rose quartz medallions or busted amps or beer-soaked yowls or the snarls of choppers just rolled in from Pueblo or El Paso or Lubbock?

No, none of these, or all of them, the hum of the Mystery Tramp himself, hoarse and skinned and lost, the call of art and adventure and madness and longing and youth.

The first time I came to the Boardwalk, its electric, rolling immensity broke me. Its throngs were so vibrant and variegated they thrashed me like a great shore break, blinded my Idaho eyes, and drove senseless poems from my lips.

But why does a person fall for Venice? Why not Vancouver or Vail? Why not Salt Lake or Seattle?

Well, why does a man fall for Samantha instead of Stacey, or Pam instead of Penelope? It’s just that way, and there’s not much more to say.

Or perhaps there is more to say, much more. Few consider such questions, however, because they lead one down into the leas of the soul, a terrifying prospect, and so in this regard, as with wine or song, when one finds one’s native predilection satisfied, one doesn’t ask why. One only savors and rests.

Some say that because these streets harbor wraiths and crystals whose vapor, uncurling in the twilight, spells “death,” they are therefore nightmare streets and Venice is a carnival of evil. But I maintain that ours are the dream streets of a holy city.

Always around the next corner, the Cheshire Cat or Alice herself might stagger forth, crackling with magic. Like night birds lacing the darkness, a bona fide spirituality stalks these avenues. On these filthy sidewalks, under these desecrated stop signs, here between death tents and temples of lies, unassuming wanderers pursue real inquiry. They know this is a place for delving, for beauty, for trouble. Behind every colored door, they sense Harry Haller’s Magic Theater: For madmen only.

I always thought I would find myself here, that whatever I was meant to become I would become in Venice. A poet perhaps, or a shaman or a singer or a lover or a freak. And indeed, I have been all of those things and more, here under the sea-sprayed palms of Venice.

But I can’t suppress the suspicion that the town I’ve just tried to summon no longer exists. How many 2024 analogues of my twenty-year-old self even know who Jim Morrison was? The world rolls on and old raptures bleed into the sea like spilled whiskey in the rain.

Even more horrible is this: Perhaps that Venice never existed.

Could it be? Did a phantom merely brush my brain in some long-gone North End reverie, somewhere between the opening lick of “People Are Strange” and the keening of my awful teenage thirst?

It can’t be. It wasn’t just me. At the very least, Oliver Stone, Robbie Krieger, the ghosts of the Venice beats, and a few thousand Deadheads know.

Even so, if this was the shared vision of a family of seekers grasping at Eden through a kaleidescope of Phish, shrooms, sex in cars, raves, Iyengar, Whitman — were we on to anything? Whatever hymn we sang into this ground, did it resonate in the heart of any true god? Or was the meaning of this Basin buried long ago, interred with the bones of extinct Chumash medicine men?

Is Venice a place at all? Or is it rather songs, songs sung across decades by drifters, pickpockets, jugglers, surfers, breakdancers, gurus, killers, bikers, grandmothers; across centuries by rancheros, soldados, Tongva archers, infinite songs echoing up from the black well of time?

What is a place? Is it only streets and bars and phone lines and waves? Or is it the songs we breathe into them, as a baby is the fables her mother sews into her hair at midnight?

Could I even bear the truth of this if it appeared, or would it snap me like an uncooked spaghetti noodle? “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” said Eliot.

I don’t know. Perhaps none of it matters. Perhaps I’ve lost the thread. I love this place, even if it’s foolish to love it, even if my love is a fantasy. I suspect I’ll always love it, as a good man loves a kind, steady wife, even as she changes and no matter who she becomes.