Growing Up in V E N I C E by Michael Cramer

My life back then was one long rush of surfing, skating, and drinking cheap malt liquor, bought for us by any number of street dwellers willing to trade a shard of their shaky morals for a Kool or a cold can. It was exhaling Marlboro’s by day and inhaling drugs by night. It was summer living year round, skipping school with the scent of salt air, hippy incense, and coconut oil never really washed far away. It was tar in the tides and on the soles of your feet. It was a cold forty at ten in the morning. It was a way of life all held together with Mr. Zog’s surf wax, beach cruisers, and drum circles. And it was living with sand and insanity in everything you owned. And when the sun went down… it was Venice nights… but that’s another story, for another day. Yet happily, in time, there were also many like me who made the mayhem into something good. We survived and we thrived, and now we have an indelibly tattooed spirit, a tie-dyed soul that found its heart from growing up in Venice.