The Sea, the Sand and ‘All These Mad People in Between’

Amid evangelical Christian rap dancers, turban-swathed tour guides/masseurs and half-nude roller-bladers, Richard Gehman calmly makes his way down Venice Beach.

“One Superman,” he calls to a vendor mid-route, ordering a slushy, five-fruit juice drink.

Gehman--philosopher, mystical thinker and Venice boardwalk mail carrier for more than 20 years--has, by his own admission, adapted well to his environment.

“The public creates its own mailman,” says Gehman, a wiry man with curling grayish-black hair, a small mustache and round, black-rimmed glasses. A small gold hoop earring dangles from his left lobe.

“The Beverly Hills mailman will be different from the South-Central mailman. One bends to the purpose of the community, as it must bend to yours, too.”

Before Gehman became a postal carrier, the 50-year-old self-proclaimed “sociable hermit” worked at a mental institution in New York City. Perfect training, he says, for delivering mail in colorful Venice.

“What is Venice, but an open air nuthouse?” asks Gehman, who moved to the beach because an anarchist poet he admired lived here.

“The post office is like the monastery was in the Middle Ages,” he surmises. “People with various social and political beliefs can go there and make a living.”

Gehman, who liberally sprinkles his speech with esoteric references to Freud, Jung, Lenin and philosopher John Dewey, says he likes the methodical, detailed work.

“It’s predictive; I don’t have to use my thinking power--I save that for when I’m off work.”

Indeed, while those who have to think creatively on the job might go home and play basketball, Gehman, who begins work at 6 a.m. five days a week, goes home and reads philosophy and books on the “new physics,” and visits art exhibitions. He also collects wine and books on the occult, hence the pentagram he wears around his neck (for protection), and his pierced ear, which he insists he had done for “astrological reasons.”

“I was going to take the earring out later,” he says. “But my dentist told me gold is good for the body. Besides, it fits in well here. The people are more trusting because I look more like they do.”

During his tenure on the highly sought-after route (“I’d better retire soon or I’ll be killed or poisoned!”), Gehman has seen eras come and go, trends go in and out and hundreds of businesses open and close.

He regularly encounters movie stars, scores of homeless, as well as the tourists visiting for a taste of the bizarre. He used to run into ‘60s LSD-promoter Timothy Leary, who was always “babbling on about the sun belt and virtual reality. . . .”

After 25 years of close encounters, Gehman describes himself as unshockable.

Two months ago, he was held at gunpoint by an apartment tenant who mistook him for a burglar. The gun went off, barely missing him. After the incident, Gehman continued on his route, thinking: “It’s just Venice.”

But for Gehman, who calculates that he makes 700-plus stops daily, it’s all in a day’s work. It’s a sociological study, an anthropological experience and, he says, he could not picture delivering the mail anywhere else.

“See that man with the bag?” he asks, pointing to a scraggly looking man passing by. “He’s usually in a dress. He’s in a different phase now.

“Residential routes would be too boring; Venice changes every day,” he says. “Here I get the sea and sand on one hand, the palm trees and houses on the other, and all these mad people sandwiched in between.”

But Gehman is quick to defend the Venetian quirkiness, from the men in dresses to the tailless cat that archly passes in front of his cart.

“Everybody is somebody’s weirdo,” he remarks, in typical aphoristic-style.

As he moves systematically along the boardwalk and side streets, people call “Hi, Richard!”

“He’s the best mailman there is,” says Bob Chambers, who--with his, wife, Gail--has lived on Gehman’s route for 14 years. “If we’re not here, he sticks things in secret spots or finds a neighbor. He does things others don’t.”

Gehman estimates that he walks about seven or eight miles a day on his route, which borders Windward and Park avenues, Main Street and Ocean Front. He commands great respect in his portion of the city, which he attributes as much to the uniform as to the service.

“People have childhood memories of postmen,” he says. “They see the uniform and they switch back to those memories. Plus, everyone gets something they like in the mail. They usually remember the good things, rather than the bad.”

His years on the same route have allowed Gehman to see the neighborhood change, often to his dismay. Although he’s been through hippies, skinheads and punks without blinking an eye, he’s also seen vendors push out residents, senior citizens evicted from their homes, and developers tear down old homes and buildings and replace them with pricey condos.

Still, this disillusionment is just another aspect of his bond with Venice.

“It’s important to have a love-hate relationship with the place (where) you live,” the postal pundit says. “If you love it too much, you slip into lassitude; if you hate it too much, you can’t get anything done.”

And in wild Venice, where people constantly come and go and the only permanence is change, the conscientious carrier endures through sand, sun, wind and rain, providing some yearned-for stability.

“The mail reaffirms people’s sense of proportion,” he says. “If they think the world is falling apart, the mail reassures them that it isn’t. There may be bombs in the sky, but if the mail is coming on time every day, it’s not so bad.”