Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [20]
And it wasn’t just Consolidated Aircraft, for San Diego became the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet, and between the navy bases around San Diego Harbor and the marine training bases at Elliott and Pendleton, up by Oceanside, the whole area became a military town. The city’s population jumped from 200,000 in 1941 to 500,000 by 1943. The government built a number of housing projects in Pacific Beach—Bayview Terrace, Los Altos, Cyanne—and a lot of the men and women who came to live in them temporarily never went home. A lot of the sailors and marines who were stationed in San Diego on their way to and from the Pacific front decided to come back and build lives there.
Much of PB, especially inland from the beach, still has that blue-and-khaki-collar mentality—unlike its tonier neighbor to the north, La Jolla—and a fiercely egalitarian ethic that is a holdover from the close-living, pooled ration card, and backyard party days of the war. Notoriously casual, PB residents aren’t at all bothered by the fact that two of their major streets are actually misspelled: Felspar should be Feldspar and Hornblend should be Hornblende, but nobody cares, if they even know. (So much for the San Diego College of Letters.) Nobody seems to know why the major east-west streets were named after precious stones in the first place, except that it seemed to be some kind of lame effort to suggest that PB was the gem of the West Coast. And you know a PB locie by the way he or she pronounces Garnet Avenue. If they say it correctly—“Garnet”—you know right away they’re from out of town, because the locals all mispronounce it, saying “Garnette.”
Anyway, if you drive west on Garnet, however the hell you say it, you’re going to run into Pickering’s old Pleasure Pier, renamed Crystal Pier, another PB landmark revived by the PBY and B-24. The midway is gone, and so is the dance hall, replaced by the white cottages with blue shutters that line the north and south edges of the pier, then give way to empty space for fishermen who have been known to hook the occasional surfer trying to shoot the pilings.
But the concept of pleasure remains.
PB is the only beach in California where you can still drink on the sand. Between noon and eight p.m., you can slam booze on the beach, and for that reason PB had become Party Town, USA, Beach Division. The party is always on, at the beach, along the boardwalk, in the bars and clubs that line Garnet between Mission and Ingraham.
You’ve got Moondoggies, the PB Bar & Grill, the Tavern, the Typhoon Saloon, and of course, The Sundowner. On weekend nights—or any nights in the summer, spring, or fall—Garnet is rocking with a young crowd, many of them locals, a lot of them tourists who’ve heard about the party all the way from Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, Japan, and Australia. You’ve got a drunk and horny United Nations General Assembly down there, and the bartenders on Garnet have probably done more for world peace than any ambassador ever double-parked outside Tiffany’s.
Yeah, except that something different has been creeping up the past few years as gangs from other parts of the city have been drawn to the PB nightlife, and fights have broken out in the clubs and on the street.
It’s a shame, Boone thinks as he drives past the strip of nightclubs and bars, that the laid-back surfer atmosphere is giving way to alcohol- and gang-fueled rage, scuffles in bars that turn into fights in the streets outside. It’s weird—where you used to see signs that read NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE and might just as well have added AND NO ENFORCEMENT, now you see signs in the club doorways banning gang colors, hats, hooded sweatshirts, and any gang-related gear.
PB is getting a seedy, almost dangerous reputation, and the family tourist trade is starting to move to Mission Beach or up to Del Mar, leaving PB to the young and single, to the booze hounds and the gang bangers, and it’s all too bad.
Boone has never much liked change anyway, certainly not this change. But PB has