Whenever a person sets out to pursue something that they love, they set their foot upon a path. When a person sets their foot upon a path, they begin a voyage. And when a person begins a voyage, they do so in blindness and ignorance – the destination is always obscured in the future.
By the time I reached the ripe old age of seventeen, my general adoration of the arts had gelled into a reasonably realistic (for a seventeen-year-old) resolve to makes something beautiful with my hands. Other than as a consumer, I had pretty much lost interest in the performing and literary arts. Something was due to happen, and it did.
One day a friend of mine and I were set upon the endeavor of selling some (ahem) herbs we had acquired through channels best unmentioned. He mentioned that he knew of some guys who ran a rock and mineral shop nearby who might be interested. I actually already knew of this place secondhand, because a friend of mine had been working there part time, and had told me about it.
The place was on Speedway, near Windward. It consisted of one building attached to a larger one: It had a large concrete-floored shop downstairs, the upstairs was carved into two small apartments.
We went to the downstairs door, and my friend hailed someone inside, and a guy came out. And he was a strange looking fellow. He was about forty and had long, wild, disheveled hair. He was about five-six and built like a little bantam rooster, with scrawny arms and legs and a huge chest with a protruding breastbone. I later learned that he had developed this peculiarity by spending his twenties in the Andes prospecting for mineral specimens at vast altitudes – the expansion in lung capacity actually shaped his body, as it does the native peoples of that region.
He was interested in what we had, and the business was transacted. My curiosity was aroused, and I asked him about what they were doing there. He changed, like a werewolf, right in front of me. From a reasonably polite and laid back hipster he morphed into a slavering fanatic. For half an hour he expounded on the dozens of projects they had in the offing, their history, the properties and values of various gemstones, the nature and state of the gem market, how much he hated the people who ran it, and a million other things.
And then he showed us around. The place smelled of machine oil and rock dust, and machines were screaming and grinding, and guys were running around with crates of brightly colored stone. He explained some of the things I saw, others went unexplained, but I was hooked. On the way out, I asked for a job, he said yes, and that was it.
Within a few months, I was living on site. There were about ten of us living there, sleeping in the two apartments and in tents on the roof. It was a sensory explosion for me. My eyes were flooded with the rainbow of visual splendor that comes out of the guts of the earth. My hands felt the vibration of rock being ground or sawn, and how jade felt different form quartz, and how they sounded different under the grindstone.
It was the beginning of my new life – and the end of my old one. One night, after partying late, we decided to name the outfit “the Venice Lapidary Guild”". We swore a communal oath. It was very sixties.
But in the long run, it didn’t work out that way.Within a year, we had left Venice for Hollywood, and within 20 months had landed in Topanga canyon, where I lived until 1980. I moved back to Venice briefly then, but things had changed, and it didn’t work, and I was back in Topanga in a couple of years. It was not until 2005 that I finally really came home to Venice – this Venice so unlike the one I grew up in. Came home as an old man, too. Like a lot of old men, I’ve gotten a lot better at seeing ghosts than I used to be. I see them all the time now, and that’s why I wrote this little tale about some of them. I hope you enjoyed it.
John O’Brien
