Nine days later, I arrive in Venice. I move into a small two-bedroom with a roommate on Pacific and Breeze, one block from the beach, four blocks from the Cadillac Hotel. It’s ferociously hot, and like most places so close to the ocean, this one has no air-conditioning. I have a small carry-on bag with me, a pair of jeans, two T-shirts, a pair of shorts. No return ticket.
On the boardwalk near my apartment, some people and local community organizations have erected a memorial for Shakespeare at the base of one of the boardwalk’s pagodas—the usual candles and flowers, a pink bow, a poster signed by his friends, a framed picture of Shakespeare in a tan jacket, a stuffed panda bear. A group of homeless men and women lounge in the pagoda, one of only a handful of slivers of shade.
I’ve been sent here by a magazine to figure out why Google has moved into so many buildings in the area, why there are so many accelerators and shiny new coworking spaces. Snapchat chose Venice over Silicon Valley and is now valued at $20 billion, with more than eight hundred employees. What is happening here? That’s my assignment.
I’m not a tech reporter; I don’t have any particular expertise in real estate. I’m forty-three and I’ve lived a lot of lives. I’ve been homeless. I’ve worked for a start-up. I’ve sabotaged myself and my relationships and been fired many times. I’ve been ripped off and overpaid in equal measure. I’ve overdosed, worked in politics, fund-raised, hosted, waited, bused, Kickstarted. I was a dedicated climber until I wasn’t. I spent a season snowboarding, living on a mountain. I spent three months in a mental hospital when I was an adolescent and fourteen years later taught undergraduate creative writing at Stanford. I’ve said “I love you” more times than I’ve actually been in love.
Venice has lived a lot of lives too. One-hundred and thirty years ago, Venice was conjured into existence by Abbot Kinney, a wealthy tobacco magnate from New Jersey, who in the beginning of the twentieth century won the swampland south of Santa Monica in a coin toss with his business partners. Kinney was determined to build his own version of Venice, Italy, the floating city he fell in love with on one of his many trips abroad.
Kinney brought architects and engineers from Boston; he hired laborers to build miles of trenches and an amusement pier, a lecture hall, and a boardwalk. On June 30, 1905, ocean water began flowing through two enormous pipes at a rate of five hundred gallons a second, filling the canals. Venice of America opened on July 4, 1905. Kinney hired the best lecturers and performers of the time, including Sarah Bernhardt and symphony orchestras. By 1910, Venice had more than 3,000 residents and was drawing 50,000 to 150,000 tourists on weekends.
Kinney died suddenly in 1920. Without him, Venice foundered. Half the canal developments remained unfinished; the piers burned multiple times; the city couldn’t maintain its own infrastructure. In 1925, Venice voted to join Los Angeles.
The city paved over most of the canals in anticipation of the great automobile influx. Then, like a neglectful parent, Los Angeles turned its back on Venice. By the 1950s, the area had become known as the Slum by the Sea. In the late fifties, drawn by the cheap rents and the ocean breeze, the artists started arriving. Dennis Hopper opened a studio, along with Ed Ruscha. There was an explosion of poetry and art as the beat generation settled in. The beats were joined by the flower children. Venice was brimming with bohemian creativity. Janis Joplin showed up in 1960. Jim Morrison lived in the sidewalk villages, partying and writing poetry on various rooftops near the ocean. When Morrison met Ray Manzarek on Venice Beach, he told Manzarek, “I was taking notes at a fantastic rock-and-roll concert going on in my head.”
But the hippies and the artists weren’t the only outsiders flocking to Venice. It’s also where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu came to get huge, at Muscle Beach. And it’s where the Z-Boys took skateboarding mainstream in the abandoned Pacific Ocean Park. It’s where Suicidal Tendencies combined punk rock and heavy metal and where Jane’s Addiction created the bridge between metal and grunge bands like Nirvana.
Venice is like that kid who overcommits to everything. She comes to college, joins the cheerleading squad, dates the quarterback. By her senior year she has tattooed her face, gotten eighteen piercings, and occupied the administration building. A few years later she’s living in a commune, eating only raw food. Then maybe she finds religion or joins a cult or has a child. You could argue she’s never had anything but religion. She’s a believer, and when she believes in something, she believes in it all the way.
Which might be part of what I relate to about this place. I’ve always lived my life like I’m about to jump out the second-story window of a burning house.
3. THE LANDLORD
I spend a week mostly swimming in the ocean and eating pizza on the boardwalk, surrounded by souvenir shirts presenting dreadlocked skeletons smoking joints with a smile. I read Geoff Dyer novels purchased at Small World Books, observe the bodies at the famous outdoor weight-lifting gym just outside, watch surfers and skateboarders, try to empty myself out.
I try to avoid doing anything, until someone suggests that I contact one of the largest landowners in the area. “You can’t understand Venice,” they say, “without understanding Mona.”
Mona lives on Electric Avenue, near Venice Boulevard. Stepping into Mona’s house, I’m struck by one of the strangest sights I’ve ever seen. An array of seventeen televisions in the living room are all tuned to different channels, with the volume low but not all the way down—liberal commentators compete with conservatives competing with children’s programming. I take the seat across from Mona, with my back to the screens.
Mona has spindly legs and long feet, wears pink pants, a dark-pink ballerina top, plastic sunglasses, and a blond wig. He says, “I’m not a girl, but I’m not a man either. I’m both. I think they both suck.”
Mona says he’s been here since 1969, but everybody seems to think he’s been here longer. He started buying property in and around Venice in the sixties, back when his name was Roger. He owns more than forty properties, including office space on Windward Avenue, warehouses, and a fourteen-thousand-square-foot building he lived in for years.
When Google decided to open offices in Venice in 2010, it moved into a Frank Gehry building on Main. I pass it almost every day, with its famous sculpture of matte-black binoculars forty-five feet high pointing straight down into the sidewalk. For a company predicated on helping people find things, it’s a bizarre choice, leasing a building framed by binoculars that can’t see.
The binoculars building wasn’t big enough for Google. It also wanted to rent one of Mona’s properties, the old Gas Company Building, on the same block. Mona offered to rent the building to Google as long as he could keep his office there. Google balked. The search giant didn’t want Mona in its Los Angeles headquarters. Mona told Google he’d just rent to someone else. Google executives learned that he was actually talking to other potential tenants, and now they rent Mona’s building on Mona’s terms.
It’s the middle of the day. Mona drinks straight vodka without ice from a plastic cup. The house looks like a thrift store, but weirder. Racks of old clothing fill one room and spill into another. He talks fast, a stream of words that come so quickly, it can be hard to follow what he’s saying.
He says, “Distraction is a good thing. It must have something to do with longevity and function. Everybody should just promote distraction at every level. I can’t tell you, there has to be some risk. If you follow the course and logic of sensibility, I mean, right there you’re sunk. You know what I mean?”
I have no idea what he means. I ask Mona about being a landlord in Venice. He says, “I’m not a landlord.”
“You’re not?”
“I’m not a Negro either. I’m not a cross-dresser and I’m not a transsexual and I’m not genderqueer. I don’t want to be any of those things, and they’re all abusive. Remember the word ‘hippie’? It was a very pejorative word about unkempt people who didn’t seem to take life seriously and were probably for what
ever reason following some ideology that was pointless and would soon blow away.”
“So ‘landlord’ is pejorative?”
“‘Landlord’ is boring, and don’t say it again in my presence. I don’t like it, so don’t use it.”
But Mona is a landlord with many properties and renters. He’s also a developer with many employees. I wonder how anybody works for him. I find him incomprehensible. He’s supposed to be the bridge between the old Venice—dropouts and surfers and freaks—and the new Venice of technological innovation. When I think of Mona as a bridge, all I can think of is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, caught dramatically on film, its concrete and steel twisting, fluttering along its node in forty-mile-per-hour wind. And then I remember the lone scientist who knew that the wave oscillating the bridge had a stable point in the middle. And he knew he could walk safely out onto the bridge, which he did for a bit, returning before the structure collapsed into Puget Sound.
I can’t bear to talk with Mona for more than half an hour, though later, when I listen to the tape, I find him surprisingly coherent and insightful and something of a poet.
“There is no history of Venice,” Mona says. “Nor should there be. Everybody should shut up and stop talking about Venice. Everybody thinks they’re clarifying something, when all they’re doing is selling the hype.”
4. THE SALESMAN
The TrueCar office is located at the corner of Broadway and Second in Santa Monica, on the northern end of Silicon Beach. TrueCar, a data-driven car-buying and -selling mobile marketplace, has outposts in San Francisco and Austin, but it has chosen to make this its headquarters, with a view of the ocean and the Santa Monica Pier. Large desks. Soft, balsa-wood-encased lighting.
I’m met by Neeraj Gunsagar, executive vice president and chief revenue officer. Gunsagar is responsible for growing revenue and all profit-driving functions. He’s handsome and well dressed. We stroll past outdoor lounges and through a group of programmers, into his office, where we’re joined by a public-relations person named Alan Ohnsman.
TrueCar went public in May 2014. Gunsagar explains, “There were 17.2 million new vehicles sold this year in America. There were 38 million used vehicles sold. The market is well over a trillion dollars.”
Ohnsman sits slightly behind me on the right while Gunsagar explains that TrueCar is a CPA model. Cost per action. In other words, TrueCar gets paid by car dealers to introduce the dealers to buyers, but only if the dealers actually sell a car. He says we’re moving away from the old Internet—cost per click—into a more exciting, target-specific environment. “There’s no risk to dealers,” he says. “TrueCar isn’t focused on page views, it’s not an advertising model; in fact, there’s no advertising on the site.”
“So what exactly is your article about?” Ohnsman asks.
I think about Shakespeare’s murder on the boardwalk. The other morning I jumped into the ocean. The water had been warming all summer and it felt perfect, but the tides were angry. It was early, and as I waded out, I looked toward the surfers up the coast in Santa Monica, framed by the Palisades. I felt the undertow slip its fingers around my ankles, pulling me under a wave and farther from shore. One moment the sand was beneath me, soft and silty, and then it was gone.
“I don’t really know what it’s about,” I say. They nod thought-fully.
“I was raised in Silicon Valley,” Gunsagar says. “My father moved there in the sixties and was part of the initial, true Silicon Valley. I was born right next to Apple, in Saratoga. Silicon Valley has become a very efficient creator of technology enterprises, with all the venture capital right there and several generations of entrepreneurs. It’s a well-balanced system. Compared to Silicon Valley, the Los Angeles tech scene is the Wild West.”
We talk about Los Angeles. We talk about the heat. We talk about the changes in the neighborhood. The west side of Los Angeles is becoming a technology hub. Perhaps even the second largest in the United States. Perhaps the fifth largest in the world. “Why not?” Gunsagar asks. “L.A. has lots of great universities. Southern California has long been home to the aerospace industry. There’s talent here,” Gunsagar says. To him, Los Angeles is like a tree, the fruit hanging from its branches easily within reach. The question isn’t, Why is technology moving to Los Angeles? but, rather, Why be anywhere else?
“People want to live in a city,” Gunsagar says. “Los Angeles is a diverse city. If you go to a party in Los Angeles, you might meet an actress. But you might also meet someone who works in avionics, a manufacturer. San Francisco is a one-industry town. You don’t meet anyone outside of the tech bubble, and that makes it hard to realize what real people want. They’re making apps for themselves; in Los Angeles, companies are building technology people use. The Los Angeles metro area is as big as Mexico City.”
Of course, Los Angeles is perhaps the most famous one-industry town in the world. The manufacturing sector has been obliterated. People in entertainment don’t hang out with avionics engineers.
I mention the advent of self-driving cars. Gunsagar dismisses it with an easy smile, waving his hand as if he were sitting next to a smoker. “Most of these innovations are safety innovations. But cars aren’t going anywhere. We’re currently seeing the best car market we’ve ever seen. Ownership of a vehicle is the cornerstone of being an American.
“Do you own a car?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
Gunsagar cocks his head before returning to his point. He gestures at the flotilla of engineers at their desks, crowding the expansive floor beyond his office. “I have a great team,” he says. “A group of young guys who just kill themselves for this. To solve this one problem. Really smart people who love the challenge.”
“The challenge of helping people buy a car?”
“A one-point-two-trillion-dollar auto market this year. There are millions of permutations of auto vehicles. Connecting these permutations to a consumer is an amazing challenge.”
“So you’re just helping people buy cars?”
5. THE FRIEND
Andrea1 sits on the screened-in patio at a café on the northeastern edge of Santa Monica, where she lives. She’s tall and olive-skinned, with short copper hair. When she sees me coming, she closes a mathematics textbook. She is considering going back to school to study economics. We’re old friends, and it turns out that she had a relationship with Sris Sinnathamby, although they haven’t been in touch in years.
“He helped pay for my school,” Andrea says. “Sris has a lot of money. Like, he had multiple people to take care of his dog, even though he had a custody arrangement for the dog with his ex. He doted on his dog, but I didn’t like how he treated other people. He always wanted employees to make exceptions for him.” Andrea thinks Sinnathamby was classist. She says she stopped seeing him because his worldview made her uncomfortable.
The night Shakespeare was killed, after Guzman took off, the homeless who had been celebrating with Shakespeare attacked Sinnathamby. Derick Noralez, whom everyone called Bigz, threw Sinnathamby to the ground. A disabled man beat Sinnathamby over the head with the footrest of his wheelchair. They beat him so badly that he ended up in the hospital with a broken collarbone and eye socket. At the hospital they put twenty-four staples in his head.
Multiple witnesses told the police they heard Sinnathamby telling Guzman, “Kill that nigger.” But if you watch the surveillance tape, the witnesses’ account of Sinnathamby instructing Guzman to kill Shakespeare is hard to believe. The witnesses are fifteen feet away, at least, and Guzman is on one side of Sinnathamby, with Shakespeare on the other. He doesn’t appear to be yelling, so even if Sinnathamby said something, it seems unlikely the witnesses would have heard it.
The police finally arrived on the scene more than half an hour later. They arrested Sinnathamby on murder charges before taking him to the hospital. His bail was set at $1 million, which he posted. His passport was confiscated, and he had to wear an ankle bracelet. The men who beat Sinnathamby weren’t charged
.
The merchants along the boardwalk say Sinnathamby is part of the community, that he knows how to get along with the homeless like any boardwalk merchant has to. The homeless are a part of the place. When a neighborhood coalition suggested hiring private security for the area several years ago, Sinnathamby organized a meeting at his hotel and argued against the idea.
Andrea insists that Sinnathamby despised the homeless. “He took me out for dinner one night. We walked past a giant construction site that took up the entire block. He spread his arms and bragged, ‘All of this belongs to me.”’
“What about the homeless?” she asked.
“They have to go,” he replied.
Sinnathamby’s lawyer, Alan Jackson, declined my requests for an interview with Sinnathamby, but he says that his client doesn’t own anything fitting the description of an entire block. Andrea, for her part, told the story to multiple people at the time.
After meeting Andrea, I re-watch the video from the night of Shakespeare’s murder. There’s Sinnathamby talking with someone carrying a sleeping bag. Then Guzman strolls into the center of the screen, wearing basketball shorts with his hands clasped behind his back. Sinnathamby moves toward the right of the frame, where he’s speaking with someone off camera. Guzman follows, casually pulls a gun from his shorts pocket, and fires four shots toward the water.
Fifteen seconds later, Shakespeare and Sinnathamby re enter the frame. Shakespeare is agitated, pointing at Guzman, who is still holding the gun. Sinnathamby positions himself between the two men, doing everything he can to keep them apart. It looks like Sinnathamby is alternately trying to hold Shakespeare back and get Guzman to lower the gun. At one point, Sinnathamby approaches Guzman with his arms out, as if to give him a hug. But Shakespeare follows, and Sinnathamby turns to push Shakespeare back.
Suddenly, Guzman closes the distance between them. Then Shakespeare gets around Sinnathamby and leaps toward Guzman. Guzman sidesteps, firing multiple shots at Shakespeare at close range.
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