David Diaz

I don't think he cared anymore about what dogs thought of him than he cared what people thought of him.

When Carl walked down the streets of Encinitas at night he set the dogs to barking. If he reads this I hope he'll understand and forgive me, but there was just something odd about him, something eccentric, and the dogs knew it. Maybe they could smell it. Maybe they could hear it in the rhythm of his gait. They might let fifty people pass by in the dark, including fall-down drunks, gurus with shaved heads and third eyes painted on their brows, teenage hitch whores, and hyped-up marines gone AWOL. But when Carl walked by, their hackles rose, their upper lips curled back, they thrust their snouts toward him, and told him in no uncertain terms that he had overstepped the boundaries of acceptable human behavior and if he so much as set foot in their yards they would tear him to shreds. Carl just snarled back. I don't think he cared anymore about what dogs thought of him than he cared what people thought of him.

He would canvass the neighborhood on his Schwinn, with the book tucked under his arm, dressed in army boots and denim, long hair and beard flowing, like Isaiah on a bicycle.

David Diaz

You don't see too many of Carl's kind around town these days. Not that you ever did — it just seems as though you see fewer of them now. If I had to characterize Carl, I would say he was something like a Bolshevik beach bum. He was Jewish, raised in Hawaii, from a family of doctors, intelligent (though he never finished high school), stubborn, good humored but quick tempered, inventive, and gentle with cats. With his heavy beard and nervous eyes, he had a guilty-until-proven-innocent look, and the local sheriffs were constantly stopping him on the street for a quick shakedown. He grew up surfing in the islands, and at seventeen sailed from Oahu to California — two experiences which no young man should be exposed to if he is expected to grow up with normal notions of how to conduct his life. He never returned to Hawaii, perhaps to escape his family's plans for his future success, and instead set up residence as near as he could get to California's best point break south of Malibu — Swami’s, in Encinitas.

He lived in a gloomy succession of beach shacks, converted garages, and empty workshops. He refused to own a car, which was probably a good thing since he couldn't have afforded one. He made his way around on a Schwinn ten-speed, which he kept in immaculate repair. He was skilled with his hands, and what little income he had came from them. He made the rounds of North County's surf-industry sweatshops, careful never to stay at one job long enough to get promoted. Sometimes he patched dings on surfboards for a living. Occasionally he would shape a board for somebody, making sure he never charged enough to make it worth his while. The closest he ever came to having a career was when he worked for several months at a bakery injecting jelly into the jelly donuts. The job only paid minimum wage — an exorbitant sum, to Carl — but it also had great benefits: he could eat all the day-olds he wanted, and he got to keep the plastic five-gallon jelly buckets. “They just throw them away!" he told me, both disgusted at the needless waste and thrilled by his unbelievably good fortune. He made bed frames out of them, wash basins, storage chests, kitty litter boxes, stools, tables, and chairs. He developed an entire culture around them. He was an absolute genius with jelly buckets, and it's unlikely the world will ever see his equal.

Though Carl never made a lot of money and was chronically unemployed, he always seemed to have more cash in his pockets than some people who made five or ten times as much as he did. He kept his needs simple, and for him living frugally was a daily exercise in creativity. It was rarely a hardship, perhaps it was even a joy, except for one thing: from time to time he got uncontrollable cravings for lox, bagels, and cream cheese, and since he couldn't afford these extravagances left over from his Jewish childhood, he was forced to steal them. He would slink into the Mayfair Market on D Street and fill his baggy pants with as much lox and cream cheese as they would hold; then he would pass through the checkout counter, paying for a bag of bagels, hoping this would make him look less suspicious than walking out with nothing. Once he invited me to share in his feast, and even though I was disappointed by the lox, it was a joy watching him gorge himself with glee.

Carl surfed every morning, and nearly every night. He owned an old yellow board which had been patched so many times very little of the original board still existed — only the shape survived. He couldn't afford a wet suit, and didn't care for them anyway; he either surfed bare-skinned, or, in the dead of winter, wore his white baker's pants and shirt. Riding the big outside waves at Swami's, with his wild black hair and his immaculately white shirt, he looked like a Protestant missionary driven mad by the tropics, and other surfers made a point of getting out of his way.

Carl loved the ocean. He watched it, studied it, and understood it a lot better than he understood most people. He got up at dawn nearly every day to sit on the cliffs and stare out to sea, trying to decipher its mood for the day. He would later make several trips back to the cliffs throughout the day to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, that he was up on the absolute latest. When you saw him around town and said, “Good morning," he would respond with, “North swell. First of the season." Or, “Whales heading south again." Or, “It’s blowing offshore!" He assumed that everybody wanted and needed the ocean’s news as badly as he did.

Men like Carl usually have trouble with women, and as you might expect, there was a tragic love somewhere in his past. I don't know what it was, and he never talked about it. But whatever it was, it broke his heart and left him deeply suspicious of women. When there were no women present, he spoke of them bitterly, as though they were all trash…whores, not to be trusted. But as soon as a woman entered the room he became sullen, shy, painfully vulnerable. He watched with disgust while his surf buddies went through a parade of ever-so-willing beach girls. He didn’t blame the men, only the women. He couldn’t forgive them for having ordinary lusts, like men, like animals, and his respect for women degenerated until he was barely on talking terms with them.

So Carl didn't win too many female hearts. He was nice-looking enough, even handsome; but his dark intensity, his squalid living conditions, and mostly his indifference to money, scared them away. But there was a certain kind of woman who found him absolutely irresistible: the very, very fat ones. I don't understand the source of that attraction, but if I had to guess, I would say it was his overwhelming need. He had hurt all over him — the bittersweet mystery of romantic tragedy — and they must have thought that a man with a broken heart is at least capable of love. His affections were like a garage sale in which they could buy damaged or unwanted goods at a fraction of their real cost, then make of them whatever they wished. They all seemed to want to wrap their big fleshy arms around his neck and smother him in their bosoms. They wanted to see if they could make the hurt go away.

And Carl liked them, too. I think he believed fat women were more virtuous, that they hadn’t yet been corrupted by the opportunities available to thinner women. They were all virgins at heart, and he was the only one who knew it. And he also seemed to think that one big woman could make up for a lot of little ones he might not get. He was like a coyote gorging himself on one meal, knowing it might be a long time before he had another one. Looking at the whole package, fat women seemed like a better deal to him: more substance and less promise.

Mostly, though, Carl lived his life alone, without women. Sooner or later they all expected some demonstration of responsibility. If he didn't have any money, he was at least supposed to act as if he were trying to get money. And he just wouldn't do it. Living on a budget, as he was, women were a luxury he could do without. Like cars and new clothes. It was a lonely life, but I think he had discovered something which, if other men have also discovered, they don't talk about much for fear people will think they are strange or somehow inadequate: that through a life of celibacy (or at least near-celibacy) a man can attain freedom, and even peace. It isn’t for everybody, and judging by what you read in the newspapers, even priests have a hard time pulling it off. Maybe it requires something beyond the individual’s control — quiet hormones, for example. But it seemed to work for Carl. If money didn't mean anything to him, and the only other reason for getting money was to attract women, then he would live without women. It was a courageous decision, full of peril, and so far beyond the comprehension of most people that a lot of them thought he was crazy. Particularly women.

People who had known Carl a lot longer than I said he once went through a terrible battle with alcohol and drugs, and even though he had come out of it the winner, it had left its mark on him. Excitable, high-strung, tortured by drastic mood changes, frustrated by loneliness, victimized by his eccentricity, Carl always had that look of an alcoholic about to collapse into a long, destructive binge. But he never did, at least not as long as I knew him. And this, too, had to require a lot of courage. He was living on the outer edges — way out there where the dogs bark at you, and women look at you as though you're something dead that washed up on the beach. But he had made a deliberate decision to live that way and he was determined to accept the consequences... in his right mind.

Like many reformed alcoholics and drug users, Carl needed a cause to believe in, something to wring a little hope from, something to keep him from sliding off into despair and self-destruction. So with an almost mischievous good humor, he took up promoting the Book of Urantia — a kind of modern-day Book of Mormon which claims that Earth was settled by beings from outer space as a divine biological experiment, and that the biblical prophets were the original aliens checking back to see how things were developing down here on hothouse Earth. Carl shoved me a big blue copy of the book once, and told me to read it. I tried, but I never cared much for science fiction.

At least it didn't seem to hurt his feelings much when I gave the book back to him, unread. He must have realized it was a religion that never could draw a very broad following. Its appeal for him was in its very improbability, its outrageousness, and sometimes when he talked about it he would momentarily drop his posture of missionary zeal and I would detect a glint in his eye, as though he was telling a long, dull joke and wanted to see how far he could string me along before delivering the punch line. I think he was amused to see how people would react to the Book of Urantia. I know he had fun with it. He would canvass the neighborhood on his Schwinn, with the book tucked under his arm, dressed in army boots and denim, long hair and beard flowing, like Isaiah on a bicycle, spreading the word door-to-door; or else working the coffee shops, he'd sit at the steamy counters arguing spaceships and Hebraic law with wigged-out flea market proprietors, driving the waitresses crazy, self-righteous, pumped-up. wild-eyed, a would-be martyr ready to die for his divine joke.

I miss Carl. I wish I knew what happened to him. One day he just disappeared. Or maybe to him I just disappeared. At any rate, our paths don't cross anymore, and I'm sorry about that. But I'm even sorrier that North County is losing its reputation as a haven for eccentrics. It was a fine tradition, dating back to Paramahansa Yogananda and his Indian ashram on the cliffs in Encinitas; the Rosicrucians, east of Oceanside; the vegetarian ascetics who founded Leucadia; and the dozens of self-styled health faddists preaching sunshine, mineral water, and clean ocean air. Next to flowers, crackpots were our most important product. They were what made people back East wonder what in the hell could be going on out there in California, and before long they were all moving out here to find out: delicatessen owners from the Bronx who cut off their pants at the knees and took up collecting driftwood for a living; teenagers from Texas living out of the backs of fifty-dollar cars; fed-up housewives from the Midwest looking for jobs as cocktail waitresses, and room to breathe.

I guess it ended with the real estate boom in the Seventies. People like Carl got squeezed out. The bamboo shack he was living in became a “charming, pride-of-ownership beach cottage." Before long everybody will be a Mercedes-Benz clone in flip-flops and flowered shirts. Nobody will be able to afford to live here except drug dealers and real estate agents — and apparently they can thrive forever, symbiotically, by doing business just with each other. We'll probably always have your average piss-in-the-street winos, the glaze-eyed casualties who stumble up and down the West Coast sleeping in the bushes and collecting aluminum cans until they have the price of another bottle. They'll always be here because if you're going to be a wino, you’re better off in Encinitas than Detroit.

But the ones I'm sorry to see go are the slightly off-center eccentrics like Carl, who wander into town looking for a place to live their lives in their own way, never harming another soul, who don't believe poverty is a crime, who help us laugh at our delusions, giving us faith in the diversity of mankind, and making us feel free through their freedom.