Duct Tape
On a Monday night in September of 2002, I was driving behind Munson on Culver Blvd going toward the ocean, looking for a place to stop for beer and food. He had flown in to LAX in the late afternoon and I had driven to the airport rental car agency to meet him. Munson worked at the regional headquarters for the U.S. Post Office in San Francisco but had begun a 10 week assignment as the interim Director of Human Resources in Inglewood, California. We had no specific place in mind. We had simply taken Manchester Blvd and headed to the beach.
Going west on Manchester, once you cross Pacific Coast Highway you enter Playa Del Rey. The town has only 12,000 residents and is surrounded by LAX, the Ballona Creek Ecological Reserve, and the Pacific Ocean. Ballona Creek was the original mouth of the Los Angeles River until it was shifted to San Pedro. Playa Del Rey has virtually undergone no change whatsoever since the 1970s. The expansion of LAX and eminent domain took a huge bite out of the town in the late sixties. The threat of more neighborhoods being demolished has discouraged development of any kind. The residents tend to be throwbacks from an earlier era, waiting to be pushed into the sea by an earthquake, the Airport Commission, or the California Department of Fish and Game.
About a quarter mile from Dockweiler State Beach, I followed Munson's rental car into the parking lot of The Prince O' Whales. I don't remember if it was too much yuppie or the music, but the vibe was off. We continued further west toward the beach and pulled into the parking lot for Mo's Place at 203 Culver Blvd. This was more like it. Patrons ran the gamut in age and demeanor. We met Mo the owner and learned that we were there on a special night. Normally, I take a pass on Monday night football get-togethers but this sounded different. On Monday nights during halftime, Mo makes an elaborate entrance and brief performance as someone, or something, and hands out unusual prizes to customers.
The game started but wasn't given that much attention as the bulk of the crowd were locals who just came to party. Everybody knew each other except for Munson and me. We were definite outsiders but people were friendly and approachable. It was on this first visit to Mo's that we met Dave. Dave was originally from Buffalo, New York but had been living in his van in Mo's parking lot for the last 9 months. He did odd jobs around town and made use of the facilities at Mo's. He served as Mo's unofficial greeter to new customers. We hit it off with Dave right away. He had an arm load of stories and was a lot of fun.
Some people were actually watching the football but most of the crowd found out we had reached halftime only when the lights went out. A side entrance to the bar was lit by spotlight and the music came on. Out stepped Mo with two back up singers – it was Diana Ross and the Supremes. Mo was done up in full body makeup, a wig with the right do, a bright green sequined dress slit to the hip and 4-inch heels. The back up singers wore shiny satin dresses and the trio lip synced Stop! In the Name of Love. Mo does something different every Monday night during football season going way back. The list includes Chia Pet, B.B. King, Godzilla, Roy Orbison, Jabba the Hutt, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Yoda and a TSA Agent. The make up and costumes are sometimes amazing. Mo's Peter Falk bit was so on target everybody made him repeat it the next year.
The song was done and now the prizes were quickly raffled off. I won a remote controlled helicopter and would have flown it inside the place but batteries were no where to be found. I took it home and ended up giving it to somebody but can't remember who or why. Who cares anyway, Munson and I had something to do on Monday nights for a few weeks until he was pulled back to San Francisco. Mo's quieted down after midnight and Dave took us across the street to The Harbor Room for a little Sambuca. The Harbor Room has the least square footage of any bar in the County of Los Angeles. One of the owners was an assistant coach for the Lakers at the time. Munson and I liked this place as well.
It was the second or third Monday before we noticed Dave's shoes. They were almost completely covered in duct tape. He had extended the tennis shoes' expiration date several times over. It was also about this time that he shared with us his living arrangement with Mo and his seat-of-the-pants lifestyle. The nine months in Mo's parking lot was about as settled as he'd been in quite a while. He left the parking lot for two weeks in June to attend his high school's 25-year reunion in Buffalo. He explained, "I was short on cash, so I took the dog". The dog was a Greyhound bus and is an example of how Dave made casual conversation entertaining. The other thing that made spending time with Dave enjoyable was a treasure trove of coming-of-age stories from his youth in Buffalo.
I spent a week one winter in Buffalo consulting for a company that manufactured baby cribs. Their operation took up one small corner of a massive empty building. The building was one of many huge structures in a run-down, long-dormant, industrial section of Buffalo. I hadn't been in the building 5 minutes before I asked the owner, "What did they used to do here, make airplanes?" Turns out I was right, nothing else I could think of could have needed this amount of space. The building was part of the Curtis-Wright empire that during WW II built 29,000 planes and employed 180,000 workers. The owner said, "Yep, winter, airplanes and the mob. That was the old Buffalo in a nutshell". In perhaps an effort to show me another side to their city, his wife took me to a Monet exhibit. She was active in some way with the museum and after we did 20 questions and revealed I was a former art major, she sent me home with an umbrella made from a Monet print which I haven't been able to give away.
Dave had a mob story. Growing up, it was just him and his mom. They were always barely scraping by when he was a kid and he took any work he could find to help out. He got a paper route when he was in high school and this was literally the last resort for making money. You had to be pretty desperate to deliver papers through a Buffalo winter. He worked hard and just gutted his way through the weather. He eventually found out that the fellow that hired him and was the boss over all of the routes was connected. The boss knew Dave's home situation, took a liking to him, and helped him by throwing him errands and other work at times. Dave had a problem with one of the customers on his route. Many times when he had tried to collect for the two weeks owed, the guy would say, "I'll catch you next time". Despite anything Dave would say two weeks later, the guy would never come across with the money. Dave had to make up the difference out of his own pocket when it was time to turn in the collections to the boss. One day, Dave didn't have the 50 cents, or whatever it was, to cover for the deadbeat customer. Dave asked his boss to take it out of his pay. The boss took his time but eventually drew out of Dave what had been going on. A few days later Dave was on his bike delivering papers on his route and pulled up to the deadbeat's house. It had been burned to the ground.
For seven or eight weeks, Munson and I had met Dave at Mo's for the halftime extravaganza, and then made our way over to the Harbor Room. Munson's assignment was drawing to a close but we would have at least a couple more Monday nights to raise hell. I walked into Mo's and waited at a table for Munson to show. I didn't see Dave anywhere. Munson finally showed and we had a few beers. Mo came over to say hello to us but had bad news to share. He told us that two days ago he had gone out to the parking lot as he did every morning when he opened the place. He would always let Dave know when it was okay for him to come in and wash up. He couldn't raise Dave and called the paramedics who pronounced Dave dead once they got there.
The halftime show went on as usual but I don't remember what or who Mo was that night. Later, Munson and I went over to the Harbor room. Everybody was sad about Dave and had nice words to say about him. I don't remember if his van was still in the parking lot.