Back at the beach, I found Reggie building a fire in a concrete ring behind Chavi’s fortune-telling stand. He was using a copy of the Los Angeles Times for tinder and a busted-up wooden chair for fuel. Nearby, on top of a Styrofoam cooler that undoubtedly contained cold Budweiser, there was a metal grill that could be laid across the fire ring and a stack of frozen T-bone steaks.
The fire was coming along nicely. It was hard to imagine now, looking at the fiftyish biker with scarred knuckles and tattooed forearms, but he had been a Boy Scout once, briefly, long ago. When his parents were still in the psuedo-sophisticated cocktails-and-dancing stage of their joint alcoholism, before the filthy fights and car wrecks and court appearances, his father had been a jolly troop leader who taught his oldest son the ancient art of building a fire.
“Hey, Rob,” Reggie said as I walked up.
“Where’d you get the steaks?” I asked him.
“Meat truck,” he said, nodding toward an alley that disappeared behind the boardwalk restaurants. “Stick around and I’ll grill you up the best T-bone you ever tasted.” In St. Louis, Reggie was famous for his barbequing skills.
“Deal,” I said, and walked over to say hello to Chavi.
Draped in a flowing, multicolored robe, with a red scarf covering her thick black hair, she was holding the hand of a young Mexican woman who sat opposite her beneath the canvas roof of her booth, tracing the lines on the girl’s palm with the tip of her index finger.
“For you,” she said softly, “the path to spiritual fulfillment and happiness is through helping others.”
The girl’s eyes got wide. “How did you know that?”
“What?” Chavi said, looking up.
“I’m studying to be a social worker at City College. All I’ve ever wanted to do since I was a little girl is help children. My priest even told me that I have a calling. But I was thinking of quitting because the classes are so hard.”
“Get a tutor to help you with math,” Chavi said.
“How did you…”
“They have free tutors at the math lab at City College. You must never give up on your dream, darling. There are hurt children waiting for you to help them, some not yet born. You are on a beautiful path. Don’t worry about anything. You will be fine.”
“Thank you so much,” the girl said, fumbling a ten-dollar bill out of her purse. Her eyes were full of tears.
“God bless you, and the little children through you,” Chavi said. “Come back and see me soon.”
“That was pretty good,” I said as the girl walked away with a look of wonder on her face.
“Hello, Robert,” Chavi said, slightly dazed.
“How did you know she is meant to help people?”
“Everyone is meant to help people,” Chavi said. “Sometimes I see pictures when I look at their hands. Sometimes it is just a feeling. In her hand, I saw an image of the Virgin reaching out to save an abandoned soul. She really does have a calling, I think.”
“How did you know she was having problems with math?”
Chavi spread her arms wide and tilted her head back, striking a pose. “I yam of the Roma peepole. I yam geepsee,” she said in her best mock-Romanian accent. “I see all!”
When I didn’t say anything, she lowered her arms and smiled.
“Most kids at community college have problems with algebra,” she said. “You don’t need ESP to know that.”
Chavi claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Bela Lugosi and a raccoon-eyed B-movie actress who appeared in some of his later films. With her bright clothes, gold hoop earrings, and dramatic manner, she fit perfectly on a boardwalk crowded with theatrical characters.
On one side of her, there was a tall, skinny white guy dressed in classic hippie style with an embroidered Indian cotton shirt and granny glasses whose handicraft was mandalas he burned in scrap wood using sunlight focused through a magnifying glass. On the other was a diminutive Jamaican with a mouthful of crooked teeth who entertained the passing crowd by jumping off a stepladder into piles of broken glass in his bare feet while telling jokes or firing insults at people who stopped to watch his show and then walked on without putting a dollar in his cigar box. Beyond him was a heavyset, middle-aged white man who wheeled a battered piano out from someplace each morning and spent the day playing melodic jazz in return for money that people stuffed into a pickle jar. Beyond him was a chalk-portrait guy, then a woman selling wiki gear, then an Okie with an acoustic guitar and a Woody Guthrie twang in his voice.
The artists, hucksters, and entertainers stretched for more than a mile, from Venice Boulevard halfway to Santa Monica, creating a counterculture atmosphere and energy that attracted tourists from around the L.A. basin and the planet Earth. On that sunny Saturday afternoon, the boardwalk crowd was as colorful as the professional performers. Leather-clad bikers ogled elegant Latinas in spike heels and capris while bangers in thick plaid shirts and work pants held shop doors open for elderly ladies in flowered dresses; sophisticated international travelers looked down their aquiline noses at Iowa couples in JCPenney clothing who weaved like drunkards to avoid the beggars lurching out from behind palm trees rattling Starbucks cups. There were dreadlocks and flowing blond tresses, heartbreakingly beautiful bodies and ruined faces. Roller blades, skateboards, and bicycles; tight shorts, baggy jeans, and sweatpants; bodybuilders, businessmen, and mermaids. All mixed together in a murmur of mostly good-humored humanity flowing in two directions beside the shining sea.
North of us, up the boardwalk toward Santa Monica, something was creating a stir. The sound of the crowd changed, the multilingual buzz gaining density. People walking north began to go faster; those coming south toward Chavi’s booth slowed down and looked back over their shoulders.
First in glimpses, then more clearly, I saw coming through the menagerie a figure that stood out even in that crazy seaside circus: a tall, rotund white man dressed only in a cotton dhoti, surrounded by a flock of young women in airy white robes who scattered red rose petals in his path. The man, who looked like he was in his fifties, and the girls, who were much younger, paused occasionally when someone stepped out from the line that had formed along the boardwalk and knelt to touch the man’s bare feet or hand him a flower or piece of fruit. He greeted these devotees with loving smiles and graceful bows, hands pressed flat together in front of his barrel chest, fingertips pointing upward like a steeple, then came on majestically toward us, placing the soles of his feet on the silky petals strewn before him.
“Who’s that?” Reggie said. He had come up beside me in front of Chavi’s booth, attracted by the excitement of the crowd.
“It’s Baba Raba,” I heard a grade school voice say.