Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  10. THE DOMINATRIX

  A friend tells me that a Los Angeles dominatrix named Ms. Edie Elson will have interesting things to say about Silicon Beach. I contact Ms. Elson and tell her I would like to talk to her about how all the new tech companies have affected her business.

  Ms. Elson invites me to come over the next morning. She gives me the code to her building and tells me to be at her door at exactly 10:20 a.m. Just before I arrive in front of the large steel door, Ms. Elson texts and instructs me to “take two steps inside after you open the door and do not turn around.”

  I consider knocking but instead push the heavy door open, as I was told, and take two steps into the dark.

  “Turn to your right. I want to look at you,” a voice behind me says. The voice is calm, with an aristocratic edge.

  I turn, but I can’t see anything. I feel her hands on my shoulder, tracing down my body, over my ribs, then onto my upper thighs, then working their way inside my shirt, her sharp nails circling my nipples. It feels as if she’s memorizing me with her fingers. I’ve written about my sexual proclivities and experience with BDSM. One of my books is called My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. Yet I feel certain I’m a complete stranger to her. All she knows is that I’m a journalist here to interview her about Silicon Beach.

  I follow her into the sitting room. She sprawls across a large maroon leather chair. She’s wearing a short silk robe, sheer tan stockings with a seam up the back, short cream-colored heels.

  She points to the footstool in front of her, and I take a seat at her feet.

  “Could you imagine what it would be like to live here as my slave?” she asks.

  I could. She looks like Rita Hayworth and speaks as if she were clasping an unlit cigarette in a long holder. She explains that I would pay all the rent and make breakfast for her in the mornings. “Just for a month or two,” she says. “A break from your everyday life.”

  She shows me the slave’s quarters. Essentially a janitor’s closet large enough for a small bed. She’s had bars installed on the outside of the window. I wonder if this is how the poorer residents feel around Venice Beach, like they’re paying full rent but living in a closet and doing all the work while other people make all the money. Of course, it’s different when it’s between consenting adults. I imagine life in the janitor’s closet. Locked inside, lying on the small bed, riven with desire.

  The walls of the janitor’s closet aren’t quite high enough to reach the ceiling. “I’d like to put barbed wire along the top so you can’t climb out. Are you handy?” Ms. Elson asks.

  “Not really,” I reply.

  She moves close and whispers in my ear, “I know what you need.”

  She assures me she’d give me enough time to write if I moved into the slave’s quarters. She knows I would still need to do my work; how else could I pay the rent? She leads me around the rest of the space. Shows me the bathroom, the second room, with a collection of toys: metal chastity devices, leather hoods, bondage bags. I smile enigmatically. I know I’m not going to move in with her, though I find it tempting. I’ve tried to live in a fantasy before, even succeeded for a time. But it’s not sustainable. Then again, what is?

  I’m amazed that even at forty-three, life is still completely unpredictable. Strange and magical things can still happen. It’s never too late to figure out who you are, then change your mind.

  BDSM is a fantasy involving power, but it mirrors real life, with leaders and followers, creators and fans, parents and children. One group, dominants, or tops, exerts control over another, submissives or bottoms or slaves. And sometimes the dominant person wants to give up control and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the fantasy involves fighting back and losing. When you’re in bondage, tightly bound, layered in rope, perhaps hooded and gagged, you’re not responsible for anything. It’s inherently unequal yet often very loving. The world of BDSM is almost obsessively safe. Everything is negotiated in advance. People are checked in on. It’s the exact opposite of the real world, where the powerful and the powerless smash against each other like opposing storm fronts.

  11. THE MARINE

  Paige Craig, a former marine turned venture capitalist, wants to go for a hike in Runyon Canyon. It’s ten a.m. I don’t mind hiking, but I’m not one of those people who would put Loves hiking in my dating profile.

  “He’s just like the dominatrix,” my editor tells me. “He’s forcing you to do something you don’t want to do.” Editors always want to make a link between everything. But real life is harder to pin down. Maybe the clearer link is to Danny Zappin. Craig moved into Danny’s old house near Abbot Kinney Boulevard and still gets his mail.

  Craig, who runs a fund investing in nascent Los Angeles technology companies, coined the term “Silicon Beach.” He thought it would help bring founders to the area. He wasn’t exactly born into the investor class. He spent his early childhood in Seattle, where his family lived above a Chinese egg market. Then they lived in Pittsburgh. And then Idaho, where his dad worked in a lead factory. Then they made their way to Los Angeles. For a long time, he says, his bed was the backseat of the family car. “In high school I did football, I wrestled a little bit, I was on the science and math league teams. I was driven. I had this intensity. I ended up getting recruited by West Point,” he says. “I loved it at first. And then realized I’m a bad fit for traditional military. I’m not very good at listening to what other people tell me to do.”

  Craig dropped out of West Point after his third year and began cruising around the country, living out of his car. In New York City he saw a Marine Corps recruiting ad. “I drove down to the local office. And of course the Marine Corps accepts everyone, so I was in.”

  My brother was rejected by the Marines, so I’m pretty sure Paige’s statement isn’t accurate. But maybe it seems that way to him. My brother is a police officer in Chicago now, the murder capital of America. He patrols the area on the South Side known as Chi-Raq, a beat cop with blond hair and a Chicago flag stitched on his sleeve in the most segregated city in the country.

  Craig stops walking and unscrews his water bottle. I unscrew the water bottle he gave me. I’ve been following just behind, holding my phone near his face to record him as he talks. It’s sunny, and I wish I’d worn a hat. We’ve been walking for a while, but there are still trees, and it feels like we’re a long way from the top. We look at each other for a moment. “Are you getting what you need?” Craig asks.

  “I hope so,” I say, digging my inhaler out of my backpack.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “I’m in great shape,” I tell him, and we continue.

  After five years in the Marine Corps, Paige left the service and went to work as a military contractor in Northern Virginia. “And then, when the war in Iraq started, I was like, I want to go there. This is the culmination of all my training. I want to be in the middle of it.”

  Paige flew into Jordan, found a taxi driver to take him into Baghdad for $200, and set up shop with ten grand that he carried in camera bags. This was post-invasion, roughly October of 2003. “My pitch was ‘I will do anything.’ Imagine, like, a TaskRabbit for Iraq. When you need shit done, we get it done. I got paid to move trash out of al-Anbar. We got paid to deal with scrapped weaponry up and down the highway to Basra, which is all the tanks and all the shit we destroyed and blew up—getting rid of all that shit.”

  In other words, somehow he went from doing odd jobs to doing bigger odd jobs, like taking care of destroyed tanks on the highways. Paige is reluctant to get into the specifics. He says, “The kind of work we did, I can’t get into.”

  The things Paige can’t get into are psychological operation missions, or psyops. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Paige’s company, the Lincoln Group, used its network of connections to plant slanted news stories written by the Defense Department in foreign publications, often by paying the editors of those publications. Also in 2005, the New York Times reported that th
e Lincoln Group had become the main civilian contractor for an aggressive propaganda campaign in Anbar Province, the Sunni stronghold where al-Qaeda in Iraq took root. (Nine years later, al-Qaeda in Iraq would become what we know as ISIS.) The Times article pointed out that much of Paige’s company’s marketing materials at the time contained untruths, like listing partners who hadn’t actually done work with the company or claiming affiliations with other, larger companies, like Omnicom, that it hadn’t actually worked with.

  In less than two years, the Lincoln Group had grown into a propaganda juggernaut, with more than $100 million in military contracts. The war in Iraq made Paige rich.

  “I realized in my fifth year that if I kept going, I was either going to be that dude who is dead in some war zone, or I was going to end up a very lonely rich dude who does not enjoy life. I sold the business.”

  From Iraq, Paige went off to Egypt and Puerto Rico, Australia, D.C., L.A., Boston, and Boulder. He thought of doing micro-finance in countries like Sudan. Then he ended up in San Francisco and went to TechCrunch50, a conference started by a popular blog where fledgling start-ups compete for a $50,000 prize. “I was like, Holy shit, this is how the Googles of the world get created?” he says.

  We reach the top of the mountain. The view is outrageous, and I’m exhausted. Two helicopters are circling nearby. A woman has hurt herself down the trail. One helicopter approaches, hovering just above her. A man slides down a rope, lands on the ground, and unhitches. Craig wants to watch the scene unfold, but I feel like I’m dying under the California sun and ask if we can head down the mountain.

  As we approach the base of the canyon, I can see a public park full of families with their children and pets, blankets spread between the trail and the parking lots. “What you have to be willing to give up to be successful in a start-up is extreme. You wake up and you’re putting everything—your time, your relationships, every dollar, every asset you ever earned—it’s all going to this one thing, and you know every day that it’s fragile and can be destroyed at any moment. A bad contract, poor execution, a bad story—so many things could kill your business. And you’re asking yourself, Why the fuck am I doing this? What’s the meaning of all this?”

  Craig talked a lot about the importance of stories for a start-up, and the ability to communicate your story, first to investors and then to customers. Joan Didion didn’t live far from here when she wrote her elegy to the late sixties in Los Angeles, The White Album. It begins, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But she was talking about a time when she had stopped believing those stories. The acid wasn’t doing what it was supposed to. The speed freaks were taking over. The movement was turning murderous.

  They called it the Age of Aquarius. Manson called it Helter Skelter. Silicon Beach is a catchphrase meant to convey a story. Something more than surfers and money and drugs. But silicon is just sand.

  12. THE PRINCE

  Tao Ruspoli is an actual Italian prince. He lives in a small house near Abbot Kinney Boulevard, in the heart of Venice, equidistant from the canals, the ocean, and Santa Monica. The house is only eight hundred square feet, with one bedroom, but there’s extra land where he’s parked four vintage trailers. He’s also built an outdoor bathroom and an outdoor office surrounded by glass, like an oversize phone booth.

  Ruspoli had met Mona fifteen years before. He was living in a house in Coldwater Canyon that he was supposed to inherit from his father. “My dad sold our family castle to get us this little house. Then my mom married an art forger who ended up going to prison in Spain, and I ended up with all these lawsuits. My friend David Greenberg said, ‘You’ve got to call my friend Mona.’ He didn’t dress as a woman then, but he had these nine-inch-long fingernails.” Mona knew about real estate and advised Ruspoli on his lawsuits in Coldwater. “He really knew what he was talking about,” Ruspoli says, “but in the end we lost the house.”

  After that he moved into a school bus he’d bought on eBay. In 2001, he took the bus to Burning Man. Mona moved in with him there, out in the desert. “We lived out there on the bus for, like, eight months, shooting video. When we came back, Mona let me park in the Gas Company lot.”

  I clarify that we’re talking about the building where Google is now, a mile away from Paige Craig’s place. “Yes,” he says. “The Google building.” This was years before Google started renting the offices, asking potential hires if they “prefer the sand and surf over a mountain view? Want three hundred days of sun a year?” And promising “a climbing wall, an outdoor movie theater, a rooftop deck with views of Venice Beach, and a Michael Mina–trained chef.”

  Ruspoli decided to start a filmmaking collective, which he ran out of the bus. “It was funny because I was obviously living there. I would joke that it had all the luxuries and none of the essentials. It had editing systems and nice couches but no bathroom, no shower, no kitchen. I used the bathrooms and shower in the Gas Company Building.”

  While living in the bus and running the filmmaking collective, Ruspoli made a number of well-regarded documentaries on topics as varied as flamenco and his family’s drug addictions.

  In 2002, he met a girl who had come to L.A. to pursue an acting career, and they fell in love. She was eighteen; Ruspoli was twenty-six. She moved into the bus with him, which is where they were married. The actress’s name is Olivia Wilde. They lived in the parking lot, but the editing equipment was now in an office building, so there was more room in the bus. “We were married for eight years. We drove the bus across the country to New York, where Olivia was doing a TV show. By the time I got back to Venice, six months later, everything had changed. It was like Beverly Hills. And I was part of that too, in a way. I was living this kind of fancy life with Olivia and everything. But we still wanted to be in Venice.”

  In 2008, Ruspoli’s first narrative feature, Fix, starring Olivia Wilde, premiered in competition at Slamdance, the film festival set up in shaggy opposition to Sundance. Slamdance is an outsider festival, and yet it has become a very prestigious place to premiere. It’s for the insiders among the outsiders, which would be an interesting way to describe Ruspoli, who has always been at the center of something on the periphery.

  He shows me a coffee table book full of his photographs. He is an excellent photographer. Pictures of the bus on Abbot Kinney and at Burning Man. The boardwalk in 2005. The desert images emit a sense of stark freedom with wide landscapes, but on closer inspection they seem to suggest a giant, colorful parade.

  Olivia Wilde and Tao separated in 2011. It might seem like she left the beach for Hollywood, but Tao thinks eight years is a successful marriage. I was engaged in my early twenties to a woman I was with for two and a half years, and I’ve often wished we had gone through with the marriage, even with the inevitable divorce. Just because something doesn’t last forever doesn’t make it a failure.

  13. I’M STILL HERE

  On October 9, 2015, Francisco Cardenaz Guzman, the man accused of shooting Shakespeare, was finally found and arrested by the LAPD fugitive task force. He’s being held on $3 million bail. The biggest question hanging over the case for me is how it came to be that Sinnathamby, a rich property owner, was in a vehicle driven by Guzman, a known gang member. Alan Jackson, Sinnathamby’s lawyer, says Sinnathamby and Guzman met at a bar earlier that night and didn’t previously know each other.

  According to Jackson, Sinnathamby was at the bar with his ex-girlfriend and another friend. The area was very busy that night, and Sinnathamby was unable to hail a cab. Guzman offered Sinnathamby and the women a lift. “It’s not unusual to accept a ride from a stranger in Venice,” Jackson says. “That’s the culture of the beach.”

  Is it, though? A gang member and a real estate baron seem like an unusual combination. All I know for certain is what’s in the video: a man who appears to be Guzman shooting Shakespeare three times, the homeless grabbing and beating Sinnathamby after Guzman runs away.

  Today everything seems peaceful by the Cadillac Hotel
. It’s early in the morning, and I’m up, wandering the beach. I like it most here at dawn, when there’s still a soft purple bruise on the edge of the horizon. I’m struck with a strong urge to stay, though I live on the other side of the country, in New York. At the same time, I’ve lived lots of places. I’m open to change. I’m the most inconsistent person I know.

  Two weeks after Guzman’s arrest, a man on a bicycle identified by the police as fifty-five-year-old Edward Martinez spit on the picture of Shakespeare at the makeshift boardwalk memorial. Martinez turned to the homeless men nearby and said, according to witnesses, “You guys are next.” Derick Noralez, one of Sris Sinnathamby’s alleged attackers the night of the killing, clotheslined Martinez. Several of the other homeless joined in, and Martinez ended up being hospitalized for head injuries. They were convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, the weapon being the footrest of the wheelchair of one of the homeless residents.

  In the surveillance video on the night of Shakespeare’s murder, a man can be seen beating Sinnathamby with the footrest of a wheelchair.

  Most of the witnesses who remember Sinnathamby telling Guzman to “kill that nigger” have now spent time in jail themselves. (Guzman’s lawyer, Garrett Zelen, won’t concede that the figure in the video is his client. Guzman has pleaded not guilty to the charges.) At least one of the witnesses has speculated that the confrontation with Martinez could have been a setup to discredit them, according to the Argonaut, a free Venice newspaper. In court briefings, the prosecutors seem to agree, intimating that Martinez was acting on behalf of the Venice 13, Guzman’s gang.

  Ultimately, the case against Sinnathamby is dismissed for lack of evidence. “There’s going to be some work required to get his good name back,” Jackson says. “But he’s looking forward to being an integral part of the Venice community again.” Jackson says he’s planning to file a motion to have Sinnathamby declared innocent.