The Boardwalk

Hollywood Beach has a boardwalk 1.83 miles long, almost the same length as Roosevelt Island in the East River of the New York archipelago where I lived for the last thirty three years. As a former New Yorker I like lots of people on the street and even now as the sun sets the boardwalk is busy, bicycles and tricycles, runners and swimmers, acrobats and old people like me but with walkers.

Forgot how the ocean can float your boat. I am wearing a baseball cap all the time even now as I await the next three inch swell, never liked any kind of hat. Helke says I will need it as she handed it to me as I left New York and I do or I think I do. It's a cover-up narcissistic thing I do even in the surf.

It is a bathtub, warm and liquidy, my hands are under my head as I watch the sun set thru my toes and the palm trees back on shore. In the airspace of my half open right eye a turbo-prop beats its way quickly down toward the sun and Ft. Lauderdale airport followed later by a heavy and then another intermittently grinding their way so slowly, landing gear coming down, gray silhouettes against the Eastern mist. I wonder why gray, why not glinting yellow and orange from that setting sun.

South of the boardwalk tall condos rise. I have looked at some of them, one a foreclosure that the bank has priced below market was full of bargain hunters one of whom will outbid the rest and find themselves underwater next year. Well that is my opinion. The banks are keeping a lot off the market to manage the price but their inventories are still growing and sooner or later they will have to dump. Again my opinion. I have been wrong before.

The boardwalk is low rise, lower class million dollar properties. Low class if you think Trump is high class. Personally I would not want to live within a mile of any building with the Trump name on it, to high class for me. They say they are building a Margaritaville in the middle of the boardwalk. I like that though I am not a drinker.

When we had our photo lab in New York, I had a partner, we did a large Ciba color print of the front facade of Grand Central with a very large banner draped across it saying Trump. He was renovating Grand Central and this must have been part of the deal. The classic Trump touch.

I had to hang the print over Trumps desk in his fourth floor offices across the street from the still unfinished Trump Tower on Fifth  Ave. The young Donald supervised and complimented and shook my hand after but that is when my opinion of him started to drop from hero to the unfathomable depths. There would be no Trump Tower on the boardwalk of Hollywood Beach. At least I hoped not since I was serious about buying a place here. After all somewhere on Hollywood Beach the body of Candy Mossier's multi-millionaire husband had lain bleeding from his coke bottle wound back in the day when I was so naive, 1964 maybe, two years before I would first arrive. Now that scene adds class to the boardwalk of Hollywood Beach, a little history.

Naive? I knew so much more then, twenty, totally clueless now, sixty-seven.