Naomi Hirahara: Santa Cruz Noir

Every town has its noir-ville. It’s easy to find in Santa Cruz.

We live in what’s called “paradise,” where you can wake up in a pool of blood with the first pink rays of the sunrise peeking out over our mountain range. The dewy mist lifts from the bay. Don’t hate us because we’re beautiful — we were made that way, like Venus rising off the foam with a brick in her hand. We can’t help it if you fall for it every time.

We live in a place where the screaming never stops. No, not the publicly psychotic. Our crown jewel, the reason a million-plus pleasure-seekers visit every year, is the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, a roller coaster — screamin’, cotton-candy amusement park. Our most famous ride, the Giant Dipper, will plunge you seventy feet down its wooden tracks at fifty-five miles per hour. We hear your cries all the way down the riverfront. Hell yes, you had a good time!

My companion editor, Willow Pennell, is second-generation Santa Cruz. She reminded me that the 1980s Santa Cruz film Lost Boys is still screened on our Main Beach every summer.

“How does it hold up now?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter.” Willow is firm. “Every shot, from the Boardwalk to the leather jackets on predatory vampire boys — that was my teen experience. I, too, had a hippie name and sparkly Indian skirt like ‘Star.’ The combination of hippie and punk. The cliques, the Pogonip. And don’t forget: Lost Boys is the only cinema of the pre-1989-earthquake Pacific Garden Mall.”

Pacific Avenue, our “downtown,” was nearly flattened in a late-twentieth-century earthquake — the one time we really crumbled on the outside.

Since the 1960s, most people who’ve landed in Santa Cruz arrived because they fell in love, got high, found an under-the-table gig, walked through our cute little doors of consciousness, and couldn’t find the way out. We are historic bootleggers, and we don’t let anyone go too easily. It’s a pleasant place to bottom out.

Our origins are colonial and grisly, like all the Americas. Father Junipero Serra enslaved and buried the Ohlone Indians who lived here precontact. Mexico was kicked out next, by the Anglo settlers — but that’s always been a bit of a joke. Spanglish is our native tongue.

We’re haunted by an ancestral race war, but we intermarried the fuck out of each other. Our fertile land, the ag and range bounty, saved us from disaster again and again. In recent years, our equilibrium has been shot through a Silicon Valley cannon, the billionaire-boom over the hill.

We’ve been on the precipice of class war since the beginning. But perhaps all the good bud and coastal blue has made us soft. Everything stinks and yet... surf’s up.

What makes Santa Cruz different from other California seaside towns? We have serious bragging rights. The Hawaiian princes brought surfing to the mainland, when they first paddled out our San Lorenzo River mouth in 1885. Their aloha is one of the best things that ever happened to us.

The psychedelic experience may not have been invented here, but it was perfected. We prize our sensual roots. We were once the home of a Wrigley Chewing Gum factory, and the Doublemint smell still permeates the old factory site at the city limits. It’s one of those little reminders — we were first a working-class joint, before the university arrived in 1967 with its dream to become the American Oxford.

Monarch butterflies migrate here en masse every year, coating the coastal eucalyptus, a mass of orange and black beating wings. Our bay faces south, not west. That is not Hawaii you see on the horizon; it’s the Monterey Peninsula.

Yes, we were once dubbed the Serial Murder Capital of the World by the press, at our trippy-dippy apex in the 1970s. Willow reminds me: “Serial murderers seemed to like the pretty coeds around here. Despite the chipper holiday persona, our town always felt dangerous.”

Downtown and the university are well-known to visitors — our North Coast, Westside, and Eastside (divided by the San Lorenzo River) are just around the bend. To the south, Santa Cruz County turns far more rural — but never let it be said, bucolic.

The first person I dialed when I got the Santa Cruz Noir gig was my favorite editor, Ariel Gore. She spoke with darkest authority. She defined “noir” in a short list I kept in my pocket for a year:

Often... the narrator has her own agenda.

The darker twist.

Moral ambiguity.

More cynicism. More fatalism.

The femme fatale. Even if she’s mother nature herself.

Ariel stoked my film noir nostalgia. “Yes,” she wrote me, “it came out of the WWII-era realization that people were not, in fact, basically good, but rather easily overcome by their base impulses — or that they tried to be good, but were swamped by outside forces. They were drawn into bad things, and couldn’t figure how to get out. After all, people betrayed their own neighbors and lovers to the Nazis... that’s the worldview we inherited — which is actually quite timely now.”

This afternoon, one of my merry weekend visitors walked in the back door, complete with a happy sunburn and Foster’s Freeze Softee in hand. “If I lived in a place like this,” she said, “I’d wake up with a smile every day.”

Oh, we do, thank you for that. There’s no beauty like a merciless beauty — and like every crepuscular predator, she thrives at dawn and dusk. You’re just the innocent we’ve been waiting for, with your big paper cone of sugar-shark cotton, whipped out of pure nothing. We have just the ride for you, the longest tunnel ever. Santa Cruz is everything you ever dreamed, and everything you ever screamed, in one long drop you’ll never forget.

Susie Bright

Santa Cruz, CA

March 2018

North Coast

The Mexicans say that the devil sleeps under the mouth of the San Lorenzo River. On moonless nights, he rides a black horse up the bank and through the streets of the Flats. If he catches you then he’ll tie you over his saddle and, before the sun rises, take you with him, beneath the river. I’ve spent nights waiting for their devil in the street, but of course I’ve never seen him.

I often end up here, by a fire in the dunes. Hitting a good vein in these hands is tricky. There is just the faint tickle of coke behind the watery brown chiva.

“Let’s take your car up the coast, leave Santa Cruz for the night, like a little vacation,” I’d told her. My fingers find their way along the scalloped edge of my ear, tracing the bite she left — remembering Katie’s mouth. The waves crash onto the shore below, the whitewash hisses up the sand. We brought blankets, beer, mushrooms, food, a tarp. We built a fire. Tonight, the moon is almost full. Then, it was just a sliver and the stars were bright.

I met Katie downtown. Jerry Garcia had just died and she didn’t know what to do. The first times, she wouldn’t come alone, she’d bring a girlfriend. They would use my place to shower, smoke some weed, and then wash the dishes, vacuum, take out the trash. It felt like a very honest and pure exchange. “Katie, come by yourself next time ,” I told her. She started sleeping on the couch. I liked that, watching her dream, blissed out and far away. Eventually, she got into my bed. I took my time with her.