It’s been a while since I’ve lost my mind in Venice Beach, but even longer since I had ridden along the entirety of the bike-path. Six years, to be exact. Back in those days, I was crashing at my brother’s boardwalk pad — a glaringly pink building in the dirty heart of it all. We were writing a screenplay about getting lost in Italy that never came to fruition – like so many other hopes and dreams before and since. The U.S. had just invaded Iraq and the Shit Show was getting underway, that much was certain. Fast-forward to the last days of the new millennium’s first decade, and I am riding along the main nerve of Venice, where weird electricity is transported from one end of the West Side to the other. My red Dynasty 10-speed cruiser has been adorned with a comfy new seat that doesn’t entirely use my balls as a punching-bag, and I am therefore able to endure such a journey.

Deep inhale. Taking in the strange and sexy sights. Winding along the snaking path. Ride the snake. I am wearing sunglasses, still recovering from a night at a downtown pirate-bar where I listened to Jake La Botz wail the blues and drank Bacardi & Cokes like they were going out of style. Now I am trying to sweat it out, breathe in the Pacific, and soak up some vitamin D in the form of sunshine. L.A. is never shy about handing out the vitamin D. I follow my brother (whose bike necessitates a Tetanus-shot just for looking at it) and am careful to dodge overachieving roller-bladers… Tour de France snobs with their silly pants and shaved legs… wandering, naked Mexican children… and new couples hogging the route as they stare dreamily into each other’s eyes… Tricky territory, Venice. A single wrong move, and you could end up bleeding into the sand, unable to remember the last five seconds of your life.

We had jumped on the path as far south as Marina Del Rey and now shoot under the Santa Monica Pier all the way up to the south edge of Malibu. It is here, at the end of a parking lot adjacent to PCH, that the real-estate begins to take on an overtly elitist tone that prevents lowly Mar Vistians such as ourselves from going any further. No sir. For the next “27 miles of scenic beauty” (Malibu slogan) the beach is private — sliced and diced by million-dollar knives for the rich and famous. If we carried on any further, we would surely be eviscerated by these very knives.

It’s on a bathroom-break for my brother on the way back that I call Bonnie. She had made a large batch of pot-brownies recently that sounded too good to pass up, comprised of a species known as “Velvet Elvis”.

“Hound Dog Elvis, or Suspicious Minds Elvis?” I ask Bonnie over the phone.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Well, Hound Dog Elvis is young, lean and potent as hell… Suspicious Minds Elvis would be fatter and slower, and much more mellow. So which is it?”

“Suspicious Minds Elvis. How’s that sound?”

“Terrific. Meet you at the Drum Circle in 45 minutes.”

In most other cities, the Venice Beach Drum Circle would be sedated and quarantined for further study, but in Los Angeles, it has been an eclectic musical tradition since the Beat Generation of the 50’s. The premise hasn’t changed that much since then. Aging hippies, tattooed hipsters, Mexican gangsters, Rastafarian voodoo men and sexual gypsies alike congregate on the wide stretch of sand as if it were their own church. And if you are on HALF the cocktail of drugs and alcohol that some of this melting-pot tribe is on, it is still a transcendental experience — if not entirely religious. A total Shit Show set to the beat of a hundred drums, all pounding with random fury as the sun sinks into the cold Pacific and the mystery of night takes over… Yeah. This is our backyard.

Sun-burnt riff-raff lay face-down in the sand. Some of them have to be poked with a stick to make sure they still have a pulse. Their intoxication has peaked, and they are simply re-charging their batteries. Eventually, they randomly spring to life like zombies and continue to drink and stumble and smoke and scream and fall down all over again. A Mexican gangster, with the mandatory shaved head / mustache / plain white t-shirt and baggy denim shorts, asks one of these seemingly lifeless burn-outs if he is “Okay?” He gently nudges the man and repeats his question. The man stirs and lifts a red face with a sandy beard, one bloodshot eye cracks OPEN. He mumbles something exposing missing teeth and passes out again. The Mexican gangster shrugs, raises a conch and blows into it — making the shell bellow like a primal call on some strange island.

My brother is busy pounding his own animal skin with determined hands. This is a place he has come to for several years now, and he has since become a part of its mutant DNA. While waiting for Bonnie to arrive, I scribble some bad poetry into a small notebook – recalling thoughts and feelings no one will ever care about — when I find myself cast in someone’s shadow. When I look up it is not Bonnie or Elvis, but a young, blonde train-wreck of a runaway. She must be early 20’s, although age is hard to determine due to the explosive acne covering her face. She smiles, waves and mumbles hello. I take a deep breath and force a smile, knowing that she is too far gone to realize I want nothing to do with her.

“Watcha doing?” she asks me, greasy blonde locks dusted with sand covering her bloody eyes.

“Plotting world domination. You?”

Her spastic laugh would sound perfectly natural in a mental ward-hallway. She kneels – more like, collapses – next to me and has the audacity to lay her head across my lap. From this perspective, I can fully appreciate her violent acne, her yellow teeth, and whatever that green crust is painted around her eyes. If she bites me, I think to myself, I am sure to become just like her.

She shakes her head from side to side in my lap, “No you’re not! I don’t believe you!”

“Sure I am. I’m drafting up the plan as we speak in this little notebook.”

“How are you gonna take over the world? Huh?”

“Why should I tell you? You’ll find out soon enough,” I inform her with a grim tone. “Now I’d love to sit and chat all day, but I am expecting The King to show up any minute now and we have some important business to take care of.”

“The King? You mean, Michael Jackson?” she slurs.

“Not the King of Pop. The King. Elvis.”

“Ohhhh…” she thinks she understands, “Isn’t he, like, dead or something?”

“Yeah. Or something. It was nice meeting you.”

I swing my legs away, letting her head drop rudely to the sand. She abruptly stands up and teeters from the effort, swaying, unable to focus.

“Fine! Whatever. I was just trying to be nice.”

She stumbles back to a circle of tweeker runaways, a motley crew of youth that veered off the tracks in a permanent way. A cardboard sign declares, “AT LEAST WE’RE NOT YOUR KIDS”.

The Circle’s frenzy increases in pitch and rhythm. Everyone is facing me now, basked in a golden glow. I turn around and witness the sun shimmer as it melts into the horizon. A group of overweight women dressed as gypsies open their arms and scream at this vision. They belong to a roving band of hippies that seem to worship the sun. Every Sunday you can come here and watch them freak out as the sun’s last rays fade into the evening. They throw their heads back like they were having orgasms and laugh and dance around like Greek witches. I have privately dubbed them “The Sunset Junkies”.

“Shit, I missed it,” Bonnie tells me, having finally arrived.

“Yeah you did. But rumor has it, it’s going to happen again tomorrow.”

She smiles and grabs a seat next to me. I don’t know Bonnie too well, aside from the fact she is a cool chick who likes to smoke copious amounts of weed. She pulls two brownies out of her bag and hands me one.

“This is my first brownie, you know?”

“Wow, really? I’m popping your cherry!”

I eat the brownie, which is quite good — if not a little dry — since she saved me this piece from last week. We sit in the sand and admire the scenery – God dips his brush into more cobalt blue and dabs the canvas, drowning out the burnt orange. Before we know it, it’s night. We meet up with my brother and a couple of his drumming acquaintances and head to Sidewalk Café for some food and drink. It’s not until we’re seated that I feel the brownie kicking in. Pleasant vibes. Upon my insistence, Bonnie and I share the Chicken Nachos which she has never had. They are, as always, amazing. I wash them down with a cold Tecate and the simple beer seems to trigger the rest of the brownie… It means business and I go from sober to Fucking Stoned from one moment to the next. Pretty soon I’m engaging the table about the manipulation of Daylight Savings.

“Why? Why does it have to be so dark so early now? It’s just wrong!”

Someone says something about farmers, and I retort, “Great! Let their farms be in their own time-zones! Why should growing fruits and vegetables affect the rest of us? Leave us alone!”

“You know, Arizona doesn’t have any time changes,” Bonnie informs me.

“Ever?”

She shakes her head and sips her Red Stripe.

“Do you know what this means?!” I feel a revelation coming on, “Arizona has the only real time in the world!” Everyone laughs but I insist, “I bet you Arizona is actually in a different year than us. Think about it. All those hours over all those years adding up, shifting them completely. We think we’re in 2009, but it’s probably something else!”

After a brain-scrambling ten minutes trying to figure out the bill, we exit the patio – passing The Sunset Junkies who take up two long tables and are clapping their hands in a psychedelic sing-along. Outside, I hug Bonnie goodbye and thank her for the treat. She walks back to her car while my brother and I walk back to our bikes. As my brother attempts to affix his drum to his bike, and as I attach lights to mine, I am approached by a phantom of the night: a man in a tattered leather jacket with the head of a HAWK — the stoic beak, those menacing eyes. Surely this can’t be happening. Bonnie must have mixed the brownie with LSD or I am totally losing my mind…

“Heyyyy! You’re right on time!” the Hawk Man declares. He removes his head, revealing an old, bearded face with missing teeth framed by a head of grey, shaggy hair. He is ten feet away and I can already smell him: the Venice musk of urine, cigarettes, booze and insanity. He gets close and extends a gloved hand to shake. The last thing I want to do is touch this mythological creature, but I do so quickly (and discreetly wipe my hand on my jacket).

“I might be on time, but the rest of the world isn’t,” I respond.

Hawk Man grins and nods his head, “You get it! Alright! And you know that being right here, right now, is all that matters, man! All that matters! You can take your politics and taxes and news shows and wars and traffic jams and gods and shit and none of it matters, man! None of it!”

I nod my head politely, not wanting to have to deal with a crazy man who wears a hawk head in my current mental state. I desperately want to jump on my bike and ride through the peaceful Mar Vista night, but my brother is fumbling with his drum in the background, failing again and again at fixing it to his bike like some character in a silent-film.

Hawk Man steps closer, and in a conspiratorial tone tells me, “They need us, man. The rich and the poor alike. We’ve got to be here and be now and get the message out there, man. Out there!”

“I couldn’t agree more,” is all I can come up with. Maybe the more I agree with him, the faster he’ll go away? Hawk Man is speaking to me with an intimate intensity that makes me question whether or not the universe has sent him as a personal prophet, and if he is actually speaking some sort of wild truth that I should heed… Either that, or Mr. Presley could be working overtime and the joke’s on me.

Finally, my brother is good to go and I wave goodbye to my prophet. He insists on one more handshake and offers me some final, parting wisdom, “Don’t give up on them, and they won’t give up on you. Spread the message, man. This is our time!”

The boardwalk is mostly deserted at this dark hour, smooth-sailing.

“I couldn’t get away from that guy fast enough!” I express my relief.

“Hawk Man?” my brother replies, “He oversees the Drum Circle. He’s the shaman. Crazy, but harmless.”

That definition could apply to most of us: crazy but harmless. We are all sharing this epic hallucination called life. We are, in affect, all Sunset Junkies. We eventually cruise passed a condo with its front door wide open. Inside the slick, wood-floor pad: two surfer-girls who look like models dance with each other, rubbing their bodies in unison – one of them wearing only her tank-top and panties. Sensual hip-hop is blaring on the sound-system, helmed by some dude who is apparently playing host.

“Someone’s living the dream,” my brother says, chagrined.

The rest of the ride back – down Washington Blvd, through the Marina (where nocturnal sharks prowl the still, black waters around the boats) and finally into Mar Vista – is a death-defying adventure comprised of stamina and coordination. Cars and buses seem to veer around us within inches, and I nearly find myself under their tires on more than one occasion. By the time we get home, I feel like Odysseus. We are greeted by the dog — a German Short-Haired Pointer named Hans — and he stands up on his hind legs and walks around like a person to greet us. I hug him like I would a human, his giant nose sniffing my face like a wet Dust Buster.

I look deep into his brown, murky eyes and ask, “Hans, you don’t care about Daylight Savings, do you?”

Of course, Hans’ response – and the only sane one I have encountered this Sunday — is to simply wag his stubby tail as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.