Thursday, July 5, 2018

Santa Cruz Noir--blogging the book. Day 12, "To Live and Die in Santa Cruz" by Calvin McMillin

(To learn more about my "blogging the book" challenge to myself, go HERE.)

Just as no anthology of Santa Cruz stories would be complete without a surfing story, it would lack a certain authenticity without reference to the "City on the Hill", our local campus of the University of California. Perched in the redwoods above the city proper, with a view of the Monterey Bay, it is a place of great natural beauty, which at times can be its own kind of distraction.

But it's also like any other college campus in being a portal to adulthood, and people don't just leave their problems at home when they go off to college. So this story features the death of a graduate student who has apparently leapt from one of the campus's many bridges, and a narrator who isn't so happy with this verdict.

As a sample from the story however, I'm taking a piece from down by the water, a famous landmark which many have tried to make into something beautiful again, but which, at the time of this writing remains very much as Calvin McMillin describes. Although McMillin refers to it as the Beach Street Villas in the story, the description owes a lot to a well-known apartment building here called La Bahia.

Chet's apartment wasn't difficult to find. Boasting Spanish Colonial Revival architecture and an iconic bell tower, the Beach Street Villa must have been breathtaking during its 1930s heyday. Eighty-five years later, the place was considerably less impressive. I suppose "crack house" might be a more apt description. Still, the appeal lay mainly in its location: to visit the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, all you had to do was walk across the street.

Audible sample of Calvin McMillin's "To Live and Die in Santa Cruz" is HERE.


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