Sometimes you can just smell the cold, and it's not just a lack of a smell, it's a certain kind of smell that masks all the others. Maybe tiny particles in your nose freeze. It's like the way you can smell burning cookies. You smell them, and you know that they're cookies, but you know they're burning too. Santa Monica smells like beach and cigarettes, always, but sometimes it smells cold too. For about half of December.
But we're still all on the streets and it doesn't really matter who you're with, though big groups are safer, and trashy dressers, and youngsters, and punks. Hi, are you interested? Miss, would you care to donate? Free tickets to the show? Are you willing to sign a petition against? Just a minute of your time? If something about your hairstyle and your walk says "I will turn you down, no matter what you want," only half of them will still try. They all have dirty fingers and greasy hair, and don't get offended when you carefully avoid the equator of their personal bubble, stretching five feet wide and keeping you out of arm's reach. They push pens and clipboards in your face like it's a nervous tick and roll themselves into anonymous blanketed burritos at night like it's a coping mechanism. They cope with the smelly smelly cold.
I am the teen with outstretched legs in the comics aisle of the three story book store, and wearing headphones in the used CD store with a smoke shop in the back that sells water pipes that make up 90% of their revenue, and blindfolded on the roof of the hotel overlooking the ocean, and navigating the camera obscure that spies on all the beach-loungers.
A cold-shrouded Santa Monica smells like age fourteen, all high-strung and tormented and I was so enthralled with this young boy and life would be so good as soon as I got out of the drama-muck.
And I still won't give you my change.