When I walked out the front door of my oceanfront condo in Long Beach and found that Showtime’s Dexter was being filmed there on the beach, I felt like I’d arrived.
I got hooked on the series about the serial killer with the heart of gold in 2007 while I was visiting Finland and hatching my first escape plan from Florida.
Normally adventurous and independent, I’d tried taking public transit into Helsinki from the snowy suburbs while my host went to work, but I, who’d always thought anything below 70⁰ F. was chilly, couldn’t get past the freezer burn at the bus and train stops. So I watched downloaded episodes of the first season while I waited for my host and his heated car to return.
As odd as it seems, the American show became part of my Finnish experience. As I watched, I warmed up by drinking in images of sun-saturated Miami and slurping up giant bowls of pea soup garnished with a ribbon of bittersweet mustard. In Finland, I sorted out my identity on a couch while Dexter sorted out his on screen.
Abroad, I recognized that Finnish introversion is connected to the freezing temperatures, a sort of contraction against the cold, their insulation as physical as emotional. In myself, I recognized an extroversion that mirrored the expansiveness of subtropical heat – the throwing off of caution like the casting off of clothing. I realized then that the places we inhabit inhabit us, too.
When I returned home, I appreciated Florida differently as I plotted to leave it. I wanted my drinks garnished with fruits and umbrellas, I had a new penchant for tourist-y stuff, and I craved the heat.
After I resigned my jobs as a columnist and an educator, my plan to move to Finland was thwarted by a falling out with my host. I stayed in Florida a couple years longer while my daughter, who had moved out of her father’s place and into mine, finished high school.
Meanwhile, as I worshipped the sun and enjoyed places I’d formerly snubbed, like the Mai Kai, I attended a low-residency MFA in creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles, which had been a remnant of the Finland plan. Visiting a couple weeks at a time twice a year cemented a plan to move to L.A. When my girl went off to college in Jacksonville, I finally split.
The move to Los Angeles was huge. I’d left Florida before, but only for a few months at a time, and always with the intention of returning. This time, I had little to return to. Most of my family and close friends had left or were leaving. Ever since my father died in 2006, I found my reasons for staying in Florida becoming fewer and fewer.
At 42, I finally left home. It was the first time I really felt like a grown-up. I was no longer a Florida girl; I was an L.A. woman. I said as much to a software engineer from Belarus at a pub on Ventura Boulevard while we shared a couple pints of beer.
“How different can it be?” he asked, the question riding a condescending laugh.
It was clear that compared to the culture shock and language barriers he’d endured as an immigrant from Eastern Europe, he thought I was making much ado about nothing. But he retained his citizenship in Belarus, and I’d had to forfeit my Florida residency when I applied for my California driver’s license.
Thousands of miles and seven degrees of latitude felt like another world to me. In nature, the hills and the pebbly terrain were completely foreign. I fell several times – on foot and on my bike – until I realized I was a flatlander through and through. Inclines just weren’t my thing. I was completely out of my element.
And in the neighborhood, I was equally thrown. Studio City seemed like it would be a great location, just over the Hollywood Hills, close to everything. But I felt like I was suffocating in all the dusty dryness of the San Fernando Valley. I hated the tickle of the (comparatively) cool, light air. I disdained the subtle filter of sunlight. And there was this constant sense of shift – maybe related to the tectonic plates? – that L.A. had that Palm Beach County hadn’t. And so, once again, I turned to television for doses of the familiar.
But Dexter wouldn’t provide the fix it used to. Once I was familiar with L.A., including Long Beach’s landmarks, I began to notice them in my favorite show. That big circular building painted with marine life in the background as Dexter is hunting his victim: the Long Beach arena. The 16-story French Gothic building with the green roof in the distance: Long Beach’s historic Villa Riviera. After the first season, which I’d watched in Finland, the show had been filmed in Los Angeles, mostly – you guessed it! – in Long Beach.
I decided to quit Valley living and when I moved, I splurged and rented a beachfront condo in Long Beach. I joked that I’d grown gills in Florida and that I needed the seaside humidity to breathe. My desire to get back to the water, to something familiar, felt urgent, more desperate than the first compulsion to build a life outside of my hometown. I felt a sense of relief when I first entered the apartment and looked out at the sea.
In the first month that I lived in the new place, it was clear that I’d moved to a popular filming location. The large beach parking lot regularly filled with the trucks, equipment, and trailers that unloaded cast and crew to shoot feature films and TV series.
One morning, my attention was piqued by some Miami-Dade police cars in the parking lot.
“Tonight’s the night,” I guessed.
My suspicion was confirmed when the crew offloaded the folding chairs with “Michael C. Hall” (Dexter) and “Jennifer Carpenter” (Deb) stenciled on them, and so I changed my plans for that day, skipping my usual yoga class to stand on the beach and freeze (65⁰ F.) to witness the making of Episode 601, Those Kinds of Things.
As the sun began its climb over the hills of Palos Verdes, taking its warm fingers from the cold (but moist) Pacific breeze, I stood on the pier for what felt like forever chatting with a production assistant, whose job was to quiet onlookers and make sure they didn’t take pictures.
“Long Beach is the Miami of Hollywood,” the P.A. told me, pointing out that beaches like Santa Monica with cliffs were too distinctive to be Florida’s stunt double.
“It’s like I never left home!” I laughed.
A half hour or so later, I spotted Hall and the rest of the cast. Soon, the extras – lifeguards and a beachcomber, who appeared to be struggling not to shiver and destroy the tropical verisimilitude of the show – were cued, and then the stars approached the crime scene, lifted the yellow plastic tape to enter, and then exchanged their dialogue. They repeated the process several times. Then the stars went to sit in their chairs beneath a vinyl canopy where I could see only their backs, and I became too cold to care any longer. I turned to go inside.
“Here you go,” the P.A. said, extending the daily call sheet, “a souvenir for a diehard fan.”
Some things do die harder than others. Sometimes when I watch Dexter, I play a game where I try to distinguish what is Florida and what is California. I suppose you could play that same game with me. I’ve got goosebumps in 70-degree temperatures, a Marimekko purse slung over my shoulder, my face turned toward the sea.
Marya Summers is a veteran arts writer from South Florida who now lives in Southern California. She can be reached at www.maryasummers.com.