YEFIM & EDE

Today I talked to Yefim and Ede.

I am wandering around Plummer Park in West Hollywood. The place is lively and full of people. A young wavy-haired guy teaches a woman how to dance. She obviously didn’t move for a long time. Every movement she makes is unnatural and stiff. The guy doesn’t seem discouraged at all. He shows her the movements over and over again, and she imitates him. Further away two women talk while pushing swings with their toddlers in them. The children are so tiny that they look like soft puppets hanging on wires. The scene is really amusing. On the basketball field, a tall lonely man throws the ball and scores a basket.

I notice two men playing chess at a table. Ede is short and skinny. He looks about eighty years old and wears a green cap. His partner - Yefim – is taller, larger and wears a straw hat. They are very concentrated on the game and don’t seem to notice anyone around. I stand by their table for a while, trying to remember the basics of chess. Suddenly Yefim looks up at me. “Do you mind if I watch you play?” I ask. “No. Please sit,” he says and points out a spot next to him. I sit down.

It seems like they have been sitting here for hours. Their faces are burnt by the sun and their bodies are tight. They play on a leather chessboard. Four yellow straps hold it to the table. Each time one of them plays, he stops the chess clock. It counts the time separately for each move that each player makes. The surrounding noises don’t interfere with their intense concentration. They are both totally silent. All of a sudden Ede speaks. “Mate,” he says. The game is over. They remove the few remaining pieces from the base. I take advantage of the moment to jump in and ask a question. “Do you play here often?” I ask. “Every day. Two to three hours. Even Saturday and Sunday,” answers Yefim. Ede laughs. They bustle about putting the black and white pieces in position to start the game. It starts over again. I realize that my question time is short. So I better choose a good one.

I observe Yefim and Ede’s movements and try to follow their thinking. Both of them are quick and incredibly focused. Ede’s sharp eyes move to the left, to the right, up and down, as if following a scared mouse lost on the chess pad. His jaw trembles regularly from side to side. He seems to mumble and constantly evaluate the consequences of each move. On the contrary Yefim looks as quiet as a rock. His elbows are resting heavily on the wooden table. His stare is fixed but his feet and knees shake nervously. The game is over again. They remove the pieces in silence. “How long have you known each other?” I ask. Yefim answers first. “Sixteen years.” Ede adds: “I’ve been in this country for forty years. And I’ve know him since he’s arrived.” They speak like they play: quickly, with short sentences and always one after the other. “Where are you from?” I rush to ask one more question. “I’m from Odessa. And he’s from Hungary,” says Yefim. In a wink of an eye they place the pieces back on the chess pad, reset the clock, and start a new game.

Around them, life goes on. A tiny girl unwraps a bright yellow ice cream and squeals in excitement. Three middle-aged Russian ladies sitting close to us complain about their lazy relatives and seem happy to agree about everything. A girl in pink velvet pants walks her furry little dog and smiles to the child who wants to touch it.

Yefim and Ede don’t look around. They just play and play more. Their hands move so fast - taking a piece from here, moving it to there, then stopping the clock, and grabbing another piece again - that the action is impossible to follow. At a certain point they don’t bother counting the time anymore. More than an hour has passed. I feel the sun burning the left side of my body. Game over again. I give them a picture that I took of them as a present. Yefim is too preoccupied by the game he just lost to say anything. Ede gives me a warm and surprisingly firm handshake. His lively sharp eyes twinkle. “Tomorrow?” he asks and grabs a white piece to start the next game.

THE VENICE BEACH SKATEPARK

Today I talked to Scott.

I’m driving on Venice Boulevard. The white sky is blinding even with sunglasses. I walk to the beach to see skaters at the Venice Beach Skatepark. There, the atmosphere is extremely mellow. Almost no one is speaking. A soft smell of weed melts in the cool wind. I listen to the sound of the ocean in the distance, the chirping of the seagulls, and the skateboards striking against the concrete.

Scott stands besides me and we start to talk. His tanned face contrasts with his tiny blue eyes. I notice that he’s wearing skater pants, black sneakers and has colorful tattoos on his lower legs. “Do you skate here?” I ask. “I do. But I’m injured now,” he answers. He shows me his ribs and left shoulder. “I deserved it though. It was night, I had been drinking, and I’m fifty years old. I don’t belong to the skatepark anymore,” he says with a beaming smile that makes him look really young. “Concrete is very unforgiving. I’ve seen heads opened; it bleeds a lot.” While we speak, the dance continues on the skatepark. Each skater waits for the other to finish his round. Three kids – the youngest is about six and the oldest maybe ten – are skating smoothly, jumping and performing figures in the air. Their elegance is impressive.

This park opened only seven months ago but has already a life of its own. A man with a burnt face and a black cap walks around the place blowing the sand away with a machine. The skaters need the concrete to be as clean as possible in order to slide better. The task looks tremendous since the skatepark stands in the middle of the beach and the wind never stops blowing. Scott points to the man with the machine and speaks in an undertone: “This guy is Jesse Martinez from the original Venice Zephyr skateboard team. There was a movie about them called Z Boys. He cleans the sand for the kids but he’s the best skater here. He’s still the best one.” At this moment Jessie Martinez approaches. “I’m gonna quickly pass here,” he says softly and waves at his machine. I jump on a fence, put my legs in the air so he can clean the sand away. A group of cool skaters spontaneously strike a pose for me.

Scott was born and raised in Venice Beach. “When I was a kid, my dad – who’s a pilot- used to take me on his plane. We would fly from Santa Monica to Catalina Island and watch whales. It was incredibly beautiful,” he remembers. Scott is always at the beach when he doesn’t work. “Since 1979 I’ve been working on movies. I do all kind of jobs on the set. I used to be a location manager. I spent time in Yugoslavia and Italy to scout locations. My hotel was facing the Adriatic Sea but I never stayed there because people were so nice. They would invite me for dinner and ask me to stay at their home for the night,” he says. “I also worked in England for a while, on The Muppet Show. But I hardly remember anything because we used to party so much.” Scott laughs heartily. I notice a skater who wears a black t-shirt that says: “Skating is not a crime”. His movements are so smooth that he doesn’t produce a single sound. Total calmness emanates from him. The concrete shapes feel like water.

In ten days Scott will drive to Oregon to watch his daughter graduate from high school. “I’m very excited! Then I’ll drive her down here and she will spend time with her grandfather and with me,” he adds. I thank Scott for this peaceful moment and walk away to the sidewalk. A few feet from the beach, I pass by a black Jeep with tinted windows parked on the side. It looks packed with guys and loud music. A door opens and a head pops out. “Hey photographer girl, wanna smoke one?”

CRAIG

Today I talked to Craig.

It’s a beautiful sunny day in Santa Monica. I’m sitting by the beach, scribbling pieces of dialogue that I catch around me. People are walking, roller-skating, and bike riding. It really feels like summertime. Next to me a little girl entirely dressed in pink struggles to get rid of the sand in her shoes. Her mom looks at her amused. I smile at them when I notice a group of people gathered behind me. They are staring at a beautiful dragon that quietly wanders around and stares back at them. He is beige with olive-green legs and turquoise stripes on the back. Its owner walks a few feet behind him and answers people’s questions.

I walk towards the reptile. The group of people disperses. Only a tall man and me remain. The man takes a picture of the dragon and I ask the owner if I could touch it. “Yeah sure, you can hold it if you want. Just hold it like you would hold a baby”, he says. I pick up the animal but my hands are not steady. He pedals in the air, scratching my arms on the way. The owner takes it back on his shoulder and then waits until I take a picture.

I go back to my bag that I left on the wall. The tall man is getting ready to leave on a bike. We start to talk about the amazing animal we just saw. The man’s name is Craig. He looks sporty and energetic. “I just bought this old bike for $80. I love it!” he says. “I named it Simple Seven because it has seven gears”, he adds. “Instead of buying a new bike, you re-use.” I ask him what he does. He shows me a thin black bracelet on his wrist. “I do this. I recycle old tires and create stuff with it.” I tell him that I feel concerned with the environmental issue but sometimes overwhelmed. A plane roars over my words. According to Craig this fight is a tough one. Each time the city changes the rules for a more ecological way of life, the oil companies sue it and manage to delay the implementations. As we talk, I realize that Craig is not a bracelet designer but an inventor, an environmentalist and the president of two companies he created with his father. “My father passed away eight weeks ago. He was a good man”, says Craig. Then he pauses and holds his breath. “During WWII he saved so many lives and so many villages”.

Craig tells me a story he probably heard his father tell a thousand times. “One night, my father and his men arrived in a French village. People were terrified. They brought him to a barn. There, he saw two dead Nazis on the floor with their throats opened. More Nazis were going to come back and kill the whole village. My dad protected these people and many others.” Craig’s father was decorated with two of the highest French medals: The Croix de Guerre (Cross of War) and The Legion of Honor. His name was Thomas J. McGowan Jr. “He landed in France one hour before D-Day. In the battle of Bulge, he and his men were surrounded by tanks and infantry. But he kept his position. He was seriously injured and was one of the three who survived”, says Craig in a muffled voice. I’m picturing these harrowing scenes. Then Craig points at a man riding his bike with four dogs seated in baskets and he laughs.

I ask Craig to tell me more about his work with the “repurposed rubber material”. “Until two years ago, old tires were used to build the roads. They would be cut in pieces and mixed with tar. But the city lost the money to do it, so now everything goes to a huge junkyard. I’ve rescued four tons but there’s a lot more”, says Craig. “You can built shoes, belts, all kind of things. I’ve created a dog harness that holds the dog under the chest so it doesn’t hurt him. And it has reflection on it so you can see your dog in the night”, he explains passionately. A panting man dripping with sweat runs by us, followed by a young couple arguing. Craig is currently working on a suit that a paralyzed person could put on. He has never been married and doesn’t want to because he has so much work to do.

Recently Craig went to a congress for industrialists. He met a businessman who had just opened a factory in China. The man told him how easy it was to get rid of the toxic pollutants in the water because no one cared. Craig asked him if he was thinking about the environment. And the man answered: “Do you know how much money I make?” Craig is visibly still shocked by that encounter.“This is the moment I knew I was doing the right thing”, he utters.

All the objects Craig creates are built in the U.S. and he uses eco-friendly and renewable energy. If you want to find out more check out his websites Ecofunwear and Green World Studios.