Time and the Hour

Shakespeare wrote, “Come what may, time and the hour run through every day.”

Gil Borgos knew that and tried to live every hour to its fullest, realizing that what had passed could never be retrieved.

Even at the end he was found with a sketch pen in his hand in the cluttered apartment of the Venice he loved, a portrait of the ocean unfinished.

He was an artist on the beach, a character of the boardwalk for 30 years, sketching tourists for the few dollars they offered, painting buildings and sunsets for exhibits in his honor.

When he wasn’t drawing, he was hustling small parts in movies or in television commercials, selling a face creased by time and weather, but it was art that patterned his life.

I don’t mean to imply that time was an obsession with him. He could sit and watch the ocean without the necessity to rush or work, as much at peace with solitude as he was with crowds.

That too was an element of the hours he filled, the pleasure of observing, as an artist should, the facets of existence around him, the sea and the sand and the people that brushed his life.

He had a heart problem from birth and last week at age 74 it took him peacefully into what for some might be darkness but for Borgos I’m sure is pastels. Colors dominated his days.

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Friends called him the Mayor of Venice Beach, so pervasive was the presence he brought to the shore.

To see him riding his bicycle down the narrow streets was a scene as familiar as the surf itself, a thread of commonality that completed the colorful diorama, the way a final brush stroke completes a painting.

“He knew everyone and everyone knew him,” said producer Helen Bartlett. “Venice was never without Gil. I thought he would live forever.”

Bartlett is the wife of producer-director Tony Bill, also a friend of Borgos’ and co-owner of the restaurant 72 Market Street.

For years Borgos was its doorman, flamboyant in tuxedo jacket, shorts and cowboy hat or in a white linen suit and wide-brimmed plantation hat.

He kissed hands and opened doors with a flourish that was as memorable as the man himself, confiding once in a voice part growl and part bite, “You’ve got to be a character. Anyone can open doors.”

The growl was all show, but he made you believe he meant it. We met on the boardwalk when he asked to sketch me, snapping instructions as he peered out from under scruffy gray eyebrows: “Move your hands, move your toes, move any other damned thing you want, but don’t move your head!” I didn’t.

His face, part Popeye and part chicken hawk, belonged with the growl, but there was whimsy there too and youth and fun.

“He was the purest heart I ever knew,” Tony Bill says. “Like his paintings, he was of the moment, drawing what he saw, not trying to please or fit in.”

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I knew him best when my columns appeared only in The Times’ old Westside Edition because there was more time in those days for me to just hang out. As the tempo of my life speeded up, visits with Borgos became fewer.

But we still met occasionally along the beach and talked on the telephone when meetings weren’t possible. His answering machine message began, “Yeah, ya got Gil” and ended with “Have fun today.”

I learned all about his life the first time we met a dozen years ago. He had come to Venice from his native New York 20 years earlier “under cover of booze and debt. Everyone else was painting. I was getting drunk.”

He gave up liquor and marriage in 1971 and, in his words, “I haven’t touched either since.”

When I met him, he was sharing a small apartment with a woman. “She’s 57 and teaches piano,” he explained. “I pay $100 for rent, she pays $48. We don’t have sexual intercourse.”

He had very little formal art instruction, but his talent to interpret what he saw was real and deep, coming from that place in the soul where lines and color and shapes evolve.

What I didn’t learn until after his death was that, because of an abnormal heart, his mother was told at his birth that he would never leave the hospital alive. It explained why time and the hour were important to Borgos. Every day was a gift. As a columnist in a large city, I have many acquaintances but few friends. Borgos was a friend and I regret now, too late, that we couldn’t have spent more time together.

I keep recalling his voice on his answering machine, and I hope that heaven hears it too. Yeah, ya got Gil. . . . Have fun with him. I always did.

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Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com