A Visit to Huntington Beach

Huntington Beach is a lot like Santa Monica beach, if you upped the sandiness quotient a little more. Visitors to Huntington Beach are advised to do some stretching beforehand; it’s a damn big beach to walk across. I needed to stop at leas four or five times to catch my breath, and once I had to lie down and take a quick nap. Got to save my energy and all that stuff, you know.

I had brought along one of my bath towels in hopes of passing it off as a beach towel. I don’t think anyone noticed. More importantly, I don’t think anyone cared. I had also greased myself up with liberal handfuls of SPF 50. And I don’t mean “liberal” in the Zell Miller sense. We’re talking full-blown, national health care, no war in Iraq, impeach Bush, tax the rich 100% Ted Kennedy-and-Barbara Boxer love child liberalism. My skin didn’t just absorb UV; it reflected it, turning me into a walking mirror. I caught one beachgoer admiring his reflection in my chest hair.

Question: what does a Nixon intern do at the beach? Answer: read about Richard Nixon. I spent the first hour munching on the last couple chapters of Keith Olson’s “Watergate” (mini-review forthcoming). Then, with Olson out of the way, I dove into Andrew Greeley’s “The American Catholic.” Do I know how to have fun or what? Again, this is why I don’t get invited to many parties.

Yet I could hear the ocean calling my name. “Will, Will,” I thought I heard it whisper, “you stupid pasty nerd, put down that multi-volume sociological study of American Catholicism and jump in the water.” How can I resist a siren song like that? Not me. I think I was born with water on my brain. Wait, that doesn’t sound quite right.

So I stripped my shirt off, causing everyone within a five beach-blanket radius to recoil in horror at the sight of my spindly arms and potbelly. I dashed the last half-mile or so to the water, took a deep breath, and plunged in. And died instantly of hypothermia. My core temperature dropped from a healthy 98.6 degrees to a frigid -500 within seconds. When I came up for air, I had to elbow aside a couple small iceberg floating nearby. I took a look down at my hands and saw they had turned a delightful shade of lilac rarely found outside a Crayola box.

Yet I persevered, not out of pride, but rather because my limbs had frozen into Will-flavored popsicles. You know what? After a few minutes, it wasn’t so bad. Oh, sure, my blood did coagulate into a Slurpee-like consistency. And my entire body went numb, as if I had been jabbed by a Novocain syringe the size of a baseball bat. But I still got used to it. Heck, if I could get used to living in a college dorm room, I could adjust to anything.

Most people, when they visit the shore, either 1) stay close to the beach and stand around in the shallows or 2) grab a boogie board, surfboard, or raft and take it way way out there. I’m too hyper for the first and too cowardly for the second. When I go to the beach I simply repeat the same process over and over again. I run head-on into the waves, flailing my arms and squealing like a ten year old at a Jonas Brothers concert. The wave then smacks me upside the head and turns me upside-down. After I finish wringing the saltwater and starfish out of my nose, I get up and do it all over again. It’s fun!
Eventually, though, I had to get out of the water. After taking a few minutes to chisel the ice off my joints I rejoined my fellow interns. We took a little stroll up the beach, decided we were hungry, and strolled back to the car. After forking over the $500 necessary to find a beachside parking spot, we took off for Huntington proper. Main Street was closed off; the town of Huntington was celebrating its 50th straight day without a shark attack.

Finding a parking spot in Huntington was an ordeal that makes one question the very concept of the automobile. We drove around the city at least five times, as if we were the entrants in the world’s slowest NASCAR competition. The countless bicyclists zigzagging across the road didn’t help matters. Apparently, millions of cyclists make their home in Huntington, and every single one possesses an intense death wish. How else to explain their near-suicidal navigation?

Huntington in full festival mode is truly a sight to behold. Little kiosks stood along every street, on every corner, down every alleyway. Some kiosks sat on top of other kiosks. I’m pretty sure I saw a kiosk down in one of the storm drains. Each one had a cheerful person handing out flyers for free Slurpees or free tattoos or free tattoos of Slurpees. I took a couple of each. You never know when you’ll need a nice big tattoo of a grape Slurpee covering your upper back.

We ate dinner at a restaurant called BJ’s, and I confess I giggled a little at the name. OK, I giggled quite a lot. I sat down to dinner in a state of near-hysterics, actually. Dinner was fine. What really mattered, though, was the dessert. BJ’s specializes in something called a “pizookie.” This sounds somewhat like an unspeakably obscene sex act performed by a Thai prostitute for forty bhat. In reality, though, the name simply combines the words “pizza” and “cookie.” As a college student, I highly favor both foods. I would live on pizza and Oreos, if it didn’t mean dying at age thirty with a heart the size of Manny Ramirez’s head.

Hungry after a hard day of reading about Nixon, we ordered giant-size pizookie, a massive cookie cake piled high with two cows worth of ice cream. It arrived at our table at approximately 6:50 PM. By 6:53 PM it had all but vanished. I was the last one to give up; for five minutes I kept scraping the bottom of the pan with a spoon, searching desperately, hungrily, maniacally, for one last fragment of chocolate chunk cookie. Never have I felt such sympathy with the cookie monster.

Everything that came after the pizookie was an anti-climax. We watched the sun set over Los Angeles; it really looks beautiful refracted through the L.A. smog. As it dipped down over the horizon, it swelled until it looked like a massive tangerine about to squash Venice Beach. Eventually it vanished and left us standing in the dark. The only sound was the waves lapping at the bottom of the pier. That, and me, grumbling that someone had taken my share of the pizookie. Truly an enchanted ending to a magical day.