A Weird Thing Keeps Happening To Me In Malibu

Jill Gutowitz
Jul 24, 2017 · 7 min read

Today, I needed something sandy. After a taxing week of scrubbing through Comic Con trailers, watching men spit internet bile about Anthony Scaramucci and bookmarking whatever Gal Gadot content I needed to save for later, I decided Sunday was my beach day.

Malibu is the gatekeeper to my most polarized emotions. I live 45 minutes away. On my darkest, dreariest, most lackluster and hopeless days, I will throw my shit in the car, drive to Malibu scream-crying, lie on the beach with my shit and cry in the sand, hoping no one notices what’s going on here. On my most hopeful days, the days where I can sift through the mental detritus being excreted from my fraught, broken, tortured soul and remember that life is sometimes cool and fun, I will also flee to Malibu to walk into the sea. Malibu is my happy place. It holds all my most fragile and tenuous moments. It is the Hagrid to my emotional Hogwarts. My brain is Batman and Malibu is my Alfred. It helps me, it soothes me, and I have also gotten diarrhea in a lot of restaurants there.

With that being said, Malibu is a strange place. Its beaches and homes are roved primarily by the wealthy, successful businesspeople who have outgrown the lifestyle, workflow, and tax bracket of Los Angeles. Residents of Malibu are exhausted, half-retired, bored and lonely. As a youthful-leaning transient of these shores, that’s a deadly mixture to encounter. What I’m trying to say is: there are a lot of middle-aged men in Malibu.

Back to today. My sister and I drove out to the beach. Everyone has different beach modes; she’s a tanner, I’m a swimmer. When the heat overtook me and it was time for a dip, I knew I’d be going in alone — which is fine — a solo-float is one of my favorite activities. As I stood in the shallow ocean, saltwater kissing my ankles, I noticed a man and his daughter wading nearby. He and I were both doing that dance where you’re trying to dunk, but your body tells you the temperature isn’t quite right yet. The waves hit, you retreat. You squint your eyes and bare your teeth, wincing at the cold licking your newly wet skin. He was digging up seashells and showing them to the young girl. I realized she was Asian and he was white, though I figured she could still be his daughter. He turned to me and offered, “The water’s warmer here than 3 miles north.” He pointed in the direction of Zuma Beach, which is where my sister and I were originally headed, until we saw that it was covered by clouds. I smiled politely and agreed, saying we tried Zuma, but ended up retreating this way. (Note: Do men memorize distances between arbitrary locations so they can tell women about distances? My dad will tell you the mile count between any hot spot in Southern California. Is it always accurate? No, but he loves to tell people about it. He’s a good guy. Let’s keep him out of this.)

The long-haired, brunette, leathery man showed me a shell he had palmed and noted that it was thin and frail. I responded — for god know’s what reason — that the Jersey Shore has much better seashells. I shouldn’t have said that. As soon as it slipped out of my mouth, I thought, goddamnit Jill, why did you mention New Jersey? Simultaneously, the little girl ran gleefully toward the dunes to show her family her new seashell — they were also Asian. I quickly realized, ‘Oh no. This man is alone.’

Here’s where the weird thing happened. Well, it’s not so much weird as it is specific. The man happened to be from the Tri-State area as well. They always are. He first asked if I was on vacation, to which I replied, “No, I’ve lived here for five years.” He began talking to me (at me) in great lengths about the difference between LA in the 1990s versus today. Then he ventured into New Jersey in the 90s versus today. Then he began rambling in garbled, nonsensical Trump-talking-to-Haberman tongues about a “mass exodus” of New Jersians flocking to LA in the 90s. THEN (aren’t you so bored already? There’s more) he dove into the return of East Coasters heading back to New Jersey when LA became “unbearable.” Is any of this true? Did any of this even happen? I don’t know. Also, I don’t give an ephemeral fuck.

I nodded along, all the while hoping for him to take a breath long enough that I could walk into the sea and drown. It’s worth noting that I was facing the ocean and he was facing the shore, always maintaining eye contact with me and positioning himself in a way that made him feel powerful. Ironically, waves kept continually crashing onto him, buckling his knees and forcing him to fumble. He never once turned around, so as to fix the problem of not being able to see when he was about to eat shit. I warned him about a few waves, then eventually stopped, because it was the only thing bringing me flashes of joy in this nightmarish dimension. Eventually, I dove into the ocean and swam away. I was in such a hurry, I scraped the knobby part of my ankle on some rocks. The rest of my time at the beach (about 20 minutes) was spent sitting on my towel with my sister, having her warn me every time he stared at me, got rocked by a wave, or literally pointed at me. When he tried to use the innocuous Asian girl as a carrier pigeon to deliver another frail shell to me, we decided to jet.

This has happened to me more times than I can count — and I know you think I’m just talking about unwanted conversations with strange men, but I’m not. Another time in Malibu, I was grabbing lunch at a beachside restaurant called Paradise Cove. I was with a female friend of mine. A greying man sitting kitty-corner to us, wearing a pitiful mixture between a straw hat and a fedora, leaned over the booth and said, “I couldn’t help but overhear you’re from New Jersey.” In another entrapping, one-sided conversation that lasted 20 minutes, the man went on to explain the difference between Los Angeles and New Jersey in the 70s versus today. APPARENTLY PEOPLE MOVED FROM NEW JERSEY TO LOS ANGELES IN THE SEVENTIES, TOO!!! Listen, man, people pack up and leave all the time. I did it, you did it — it’s alarmingly common. Also, I DON’T FUCKING CARE. Just because I’m from New Jersey and live in Los Angeles does not mean I want to know about your experience with New Jersey and Los Angeles 30 years before I was born.

This happened to me on a job in Los Angeles, too! When I was a fresh transplant, I worked at Nickelodeon on a TV show called “Sam & Cat.” A crew guy found out I was from New Jersey, and LITERALLY TOLD ME ABOUT THE MOVEMENT BETWEEN NEW JERSEY AND LOS ANGELES IN THE SEVENTIES. Adjusting his Billabong trucker cap that he was 30 years too old for, he told me that he moved to LA in the 70s for the film industry, which is now “dead.” He explained that everyone was shooting in Atlanta or Vancouver nowadays. Newsflash: I fucking know this! I know it’s impossible to grasp that a small, girlish, Whovillian imp could have a job like you, but I, too, work in this industry!

This is why earlier, I noted that it was my mistake for disclosing my birth place. I don’t want to victim-blame myself, but at this point it’s my fault for not finding some fucking literature on this shit. Something obviously went down in the 70s and a lot of people moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles, and then back at some point, for some reason, and men are the only people who seem to remember it! Now the only reason I want to know about this “mass exodus” is so that middle-aged white men can stop TELLING ME ABOUT IT. Does anyone know what happened??? Based on my research that I didn’t ask for, it seems like a bunch of white dudes left New Jersey in the 70s for the sole purpose of telling women in the future about their uninteresting voyage.

Men feel entitled to women’s time. We know this. I’m young, white and small. For middle-aged white men, this screams, “approach her.” It’s like a tiny, Hillary Clinton-shaped angel is sitting on their shoulder shouting, “leave her alone,” and a blustered, bloviating Bernie Bro-shaped devil is seductively whispering, “tell her things. She needs to know the things.” But I am not approachable. I have the meme-turned culturally relevant demeanor referred to as “resting bitch face.” I am a gay loner who wears all black and would literally wear a pin that says “don’t talk to me” if someone bought it for me on Etsy. I want to say that as a young woman in the entertainment industry, men love explaining the industry to me, but that alone is not true. This is: as a young woman who merely EXISTS ON THIS PLANET, older men feel urged to explain ANYTHING to me — especially the things that happened before I was born. If I didn’t exist yet, if my cells hadn’t yet materialized and conjoined, then there’s no way I could know about things of the past, right? Guess what? I know a lot of things! And I shouldn’t have to defend myself or feel like I have to reassure you that I know things! I also don’t know a lot of things, and that doesn’t mean I want you, a stranger, to explain them to me!

Often times, these encounters happen when I’m alone. Sometimes, I’m surrounded by other women. But I have NEVER had one of these encounters when another man is with me. The Silvered Explainers of New Jersey must see men in my perimeter and think, ‘oh, someone is already explaining things to these women. The women will learn things because that man will tell them.’

It is not your job, as a man, to tell women about distances to places or about obscure and uninteresting moments in history. Women are not property of the men in their life. We are not objects to project thoughts on to or soak up your stories and ideas. We are fully functioning, literate, astute beings who are capable of learni — jesus fuck I don’t want to finish this sentence. I shouldn’t have to. Just leave women alone. Let me walk into the sea in peace.

Jill Gutowitz

Written by

a haunted pair of overalls // humorist // writer @glamourmag @broadly @VICE

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