The Pirate has his own stool in the Schooner’s Wharf in Cayucos with his name engraved on a brass plaque that reads “Patron of the Year.” But everybody knows he is beyond such a meager title and is actually at the very top of the pantheon of who’s who in Cayucos, and should have the engraving changed to “Citizen of the Century.” Or maybe even a statue outside the establishment like famous athletes have outside sports arenas, for the Pirate, born and raised in Cayucos and now 62, is a living local legend of ever-shifting images.

The pirate’s stool is dealt with in a sort of reverence, like a shrine, and is always situated at the corner of the bar just as you come in. When the Pirate arrives for his own personal happy hour, which precedes the real happy hour, and somebody happens to be seated on his stool, they’ll quickly jump up as if royalty has arrived. Even if this royalty seems rather short, round, bushy-bearded, elfish, sweat-stained ball cap squashed upon a reddened merry Santa Claus face and merry perennially bloodshot eyes, plaster-stained sweatshirt torn at the shoulders to reveal the arms of a man who has been working nonstop since he was a child.

Almost always, the Pirate will shoo you back upon his stool, especially if it is occupied by a female, for the Pirate holds great sway with the ladies, almost all of whom adore his grungy, work-splattered being.

I first observed the Pirate back in 1989 during the July 4th Parade, which in those days was not a corporate creation of Fresno and Bakersfield fossils waving from antique cars, but mostly a bunch of hooligans partying on floats, followed by cowboys and cowgirls on horses that shit in the street, and hula girls shaking their fringed bottoms.

Anyway, the Cayucos Tavern had a float which was essentially a flatbed hauled by a truck. The flatbed was made up as a card parlor, and the Pirate, a young man in those days reputed to be the most artistic stone mason in the county, was on that flatbed, drunk, up all night and wired to the gills.

He somehow fell off the tail of the flatbed and while doing so completed a back flip and came up standing, yet missing the half pint of Korbel’s brandy that fell out of his back pocket and rolled to the crowd. A young boy picked it up and handed it to the Pirate, who bowed, handed the boy some candy, snatched his bottle and uncapped it, took a reassuring swig, recapped it and sort of zig-zagged back toward the float, where Tag Morely and friends pulled him up.

At that time, the Pirate was a fixture in the Cayucos Tavern, and owner Bill Larkin, who hired the Pirate to design the facades of both his bars (Camozzi’s in Cambria), paid him by erasing long held bar tabs. Also, if the Pirate put in a long night of drinking and passed out on the seating area at the back of the bar, Larkin allowed him to sleep it off and offered him coffee in the morning before he set off to work as a plasterer. The Pirate never misses work no matter how hungover he is, and the Pirate, despite eating mostly meat and keeping long hours, is never sick.

The Pirate owns nothing but another of his long line of croaking pickups that warn you he’s coming from several blocks away. The Pirate owes nobody anything except his weekly bar tab, which is always paid off. Out on a ranch where the Pirate rents a small house and has tamed a feral cat, the Pirate grows veggies and often drops by friends in town to hand off squash, avocados, tomatoes, etc.

The Pirate was once a commercial fisherman and hunting guide and plays the guitar and had his own band, the Motowners. The Pirate has been smoking since childhood and his few remaining teeth show it. And, since he is a pirate, he swigs shots of rum with his Mexican beer and goes arrghhh!

I first got to know the Pirate up close and personal in 1992 when I was off work from my bartending job at Happy Jack’s Saloon in Morro Bay and boozing it up pretty forcibly on a night off in the Tavern, when I heard screams and scuffling back by the shuffle board.

The bar was packed, the music loud, but since I was in the area I drifted over and discovered two framers kicking the Pirate, who was on the ground, bloody of face, his left leg still weak from recently getting a cast off. So, wanting to be a friend of the Pirate, I ran at the scene and gave one fellow a running forearm football-style shiver to the jaw and proceeded afterward to park his friend beside him.

By this time, a few patrons came on the scene, and after that, as we pulled the raging Pirate to his feet, as he savagely cursed his attackers, who quickly fled, the sheriffs arrived. At the sight of the bedraggled Pirate, they sighed and shook their heads.

”You again,” one of them said.

“I’m gonna kill those chickenshit cowards!” raged the Pirate, his face a swollen pulpy mess.

“No, you’re not,” said one of the officers.

“What happened?” asked the other officer.

I stepped forward and explained what had transpired. The officer looked aggrieved.

“Do you want to take responsibility for him?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “I am barely responsible for myself.”

“Well,” said the officer. “We’re sick of throwing him in jail for drunk in public and other shenanigans. We don’t want the paper work. So why don’t you take him home.”

“I’d like to,” I said. “But I’ve had a few drinks.”

“You don’t seem drunk.”

“If you tested me you’d have to jail me.”

“Look, he only lives half a mile from here in town. We’ll let it go if you take him off our hands.”

So I agreed to take the Pirate home. They watched me lead him to my 1976 Olds Cutless Salon with much duct tape and pile the unwilling, still very riled up Pirate, who wanted to find one of his several guns and shoot the cowards, into the front seat. He had accused them of stealing his tools.
At that time I was living with Miranda, two blocks from the Pirate. And at that time, Miranda was working at the liquor store several blocks down, halfway between the Tavern and our residences. So I stopped at the liquor store, ran in to inform Miranda that I had no idea how late I’d be home—she was getting off at 11, in five minutes–because the county sheriffs had put me in charge of the Pirate, whom they characterized in that wide open era as the Tasmanian Devil.

Well, when I returned to my car, it was gone. I set off in a mad sprint toward the Tavern. Just as I arrived, at least 20 people were sprinting out of the bar while the Pirate chased them swinging wildly with a baseball bat, a Louisville slugger, he’d obviously found in my trunk. There was screaming and roaring as drunks scattered. I reached the Pirate and said, calmly, “Gimme the bat, please.”

The Pirate complied. I ordered him to my car. He grumbled about wanting to get his gun and shoot the culprits who beat him and those who stood by and allowed it to happen. Once we reached his upstairs one bedroom apartment, I locked us in and the Pirate broke out some beers and a bottle when the sheriffs showed up and asked about the bat. I showed it to them. They said, “If we see that bat and that Tasmanian devil on the street again tonight you’re both going to jail.”
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I promised it would not happen. We sat and talked about the stacks of detective novels the Pirate read, and his exploits, and drank, until he passed out in the wee hours, and from that point on we’ve been comrades for life. For he comes by several early afternoons a week, before hitting the Wharf, beeps, takes a while to get out of his work truck, finds a bag of dog biscuits, and, while Wilbur paces and drools, wings a couple biscuits up onto the deck and cackles as Wilbur instantly devours them.
I always thank him and vow to meet him at the Wharf and buy him a beer. Nobility must be honored.

I ran into Richard just off the seawall yesterday morning around nine as he was returning from his walk on the pier. Richard is tall, slender, a little stiff in movement, a trifle hunched, wears glasses, sports a 1950s style mop of hair, is in his early 70s, and is highly educated.

At one time he was into a jogging regimen (in fluorescent sneakers) that involved at least 5 miles in a gait slower than my walk. Richard became a real estate agent about 25 years ago; and why I don’t know, because he is not particularly ambitious or money-crazed, but reasonably calm and personable almost all the time, a picture of consistency in a nerd’s grown-up suit. Though he doesn’t wear suits, no, just a plain shirt and plain pants and no tie.

Richard has a small office on the main drag, and another in Santa Barbara where he says it’s much easier to sell a house. He shuttles back and forth, and I would say, the best quality about Richard besides his honesty and compassion, is his appreciation of irony and sarcasm and especially absurdity; though unlike myself, he is in too serious a business to be an “absurdist” like me.

“I hear there’s eleven real estate offices in Cayucos these days,” I said, after initial salutations. I’ve known Richard from back in the days when I was a bartender in Morro Bay and he slummed with his ex wife, a bit of an adolescent hooligan in grown-up skin. Richard, never a boozer, is long-suffering to say the least.

“Probably more,” Richard said. “Lots of real estate agents in Cayucos, and not much to sell. What there is, is too expensive.”

“Lots of empty castles and ghost streets.”

“Oh yes. I’d say at least eighty per cent of the beach front homes along Pacific Avenue are empty almost all the time.”

“Not even for the Fourth and holidays.”

He shook his head. “You walk on the beach, and maybe a handful of homes have people enjoying them. Mostly they’re rentals.”

“And whole blocks where people used to live, where kids and dogs played, empty. Ghost streets, I agreed.”

“Pretty much. These people from the Valley have a lot of money. They build these Carmel-like mansions, up to 3,500 square feet, though they can cheat by claiming storage space. They pay gardeners and caretakers to keep them up, and they’re never lived in. And then they go up for sale for astronomical prices nobody can afford.”

“How do you sell them?”

“Well, you know I work with Dale.”

“Yes.”

“He sells most of them. We work as a team. I do the writing.”

“The writing?”

“Yes, you have to write up a house like it’s a person, or a personality. Make it attractive. You sit down and give it a script, and try and make it enticing as possible—like a movie trailer, say…making it beautiful…even if it isn’t, even if it has flaws…”

“Like a romance novel.”

“Pretty much, yes, I’d say so.”

“And Dale won’t do that?”

“Dale can’t be bothered, and he’s not one to do it anyway. Dale talks. Dale sells.”

Dale is the biggest real estate maven in Cayucos and one of the biggest in the county. Dale is the opposite of Richard. Dale seems hyperkinetic and has the cell phone out. Richard is never in a hurry and seldom on his cell phone. Even when you pass by Dale’s office and he’s at his desk doing nothing, he appears antsy, as if he’s about to jump up and do something earth-shaking serious.

He is a world class bullshitter about nothing and everything, while Richard is a bullshitter on just about any subject, for he reads and listens calmly while Dale has the attention span of a parakeet but knows what to say and can be entertaining. Above all, Dale really, really knows his business. Unlike Richard, who is a touch frumpy, Dale is perennially youthful and charismatic.

And Dale is impossible to dislike even if what he does for a living contributes hugely to the radical gentrification of Cayucos. If it wasn’t him, it would be somebody else, and I have come across a few reptiles in town, one woman in particular who appraises you as not worth bothering with if you don’t look like you can bankroll at least a mini mansion.

She wears suits and high heels and drives a late model sports car, and is married to a grinning geek. Her cell phone is almost always affixed to her ear, her face wreathed in concentration, worry, and greed. She is a handsome woman, utterly unappetizing.

Real estate agents are everywhere in Cayucos, like locusts. And since, like Dale, they are outgoing and sunny and engaging and wear constant smiles when it matters, which is most of the time, they are accepted and saluted in the streets. My friend and former mechanic, George Borque, who was flushed from town over rent hikes and bought a home in shabby Los Osos, blames Dale solely for the ruination of Cayucos and his own demise and would torture him before executing him if he had his way.

“So what’s going to happen?” I asked Richard. “I mean, that place on Park sold, right? It’s a monster. Nobody but a big family can move in there. Six bedrooms? So who buys it? Another zillionaire for a tax write off? Weekly rentals to whole clans? Or some retired fossil who’s going to share it with his fossil wife?”

Richard shrugged. “Who knows. Most families can’t afford to move here. So you don’t see as many kids as you used to.”

“You see old fat rich people with little dogs and little to do.”

“There’s a lot of that, too.”

“Someday, that’s all it will be, until they die and their kids sell the places to people like their parents, or knock them down and build these gross castles nobody can live in—like living in a fucking mausoleum in a cemetery.

Richard laughed. “Well, maybe it won’t be that bad. Hopefully not. Anyway, I’ve got to get going.”

Richard left, a slow shamble from the area off the pier to his office a few doors down.

On my way back with Wilbur, I passed Dale’s office. He saw me, raised a hand in greeting, jumped off his chair, grabbed a couple biscuits and, to prevent Wilbur from plowing into his office and inciting his dogs, fed Wilbur the goodies. We exchanged pleasantries, and then I moved on…

…but later that afternoon I passed by his office on the afternoon walk, and this time he handed me the biscuits in fear Wilbur would take his hand. He then started laughing and told me he thought one of my pieces about the radical gentrification of Cayucos in the Cal Coast News was hilarious.

“What do you think about the radical gentrification of Cayucos?” I asked.

“Well, it’s sad,” he confessed. “But it seems unavoidable.”

“Lots of people blame people like you, and specifically you, because you’re big.”

“I know, but also you’ve got these people coming in who don’t live here, who Air B&B their places to get more than they can renting them out full time, so you’ve got people who don’t live here running around and not caring about the town.”

“So the full time rentals are shrinking, and the ones available are too expensive to rent.”

“That’s it.”

“Whole streets that used to have people in every house, are almost empty but for three or four, and sometimes one or two. Ghost streets.”

I didn’t want to press and torment Dale. His sunny disposition and readiness to bullshit and laugh eliminates most of the target. It’s a dirty job, being in the center of radically gentrifying one of the last affordable beach outposts in California. But I guess somebody’s got to do it. And get rich in the process.