Down to the Shore : Crossed currents: What with crime, trash and the ‘pagoda people,’ beach-going ain’t what it used to be. But that doesn’t stop the faithful.

The red snapper Tim Dwyer is dining on tonight came from someone else’s trash. So did everything he’s wearing, from his leather running shoes to his red sweat shirt. Everything, that is, except for his squishy brown felt hat.

“That was a gift,” Dwyer sniffs.

It is nearly tomorrow, and Dwyer is scraping fish bits out of a frying pan. His kitchen, such as it is, offers the unlikely pleasure of a celestial ceiling. Dwyer’s home away from no home is a peeling green pagoda on the Venice boardwalk, located somewhere between the purveyors of dog hats and refrigerator magnets.

By this hour, the Venice Beach boardwalk looks nothing like it should. It is dark. It is deserted. It is the perfect place for the pagoda people--homeless folk who collect among the rickety beach shelters--to conduct business.

Dwyer is one of them, a burly, bearded man who looks older than his 42 years. By night, he does his damnedest to redistribute the area’s considerable wealth. For here, one man’s trash is another man’s keep, and Dwyer, who tries to sell what he can’t use, likes to think of himself as a man for the ‘90s--the ultimate recycler.

“I don’t dig in garbage,” says Dwyer, “unless there’s gold in them thar garbage.”

Beach blanket bingo isn’t the name of the game by the ocean anymore. Things seem rougher. The getaway of day has become the black-market place of night. Sun and surf, those elements of the good life, are turning out to be not so good for you after all, as the ozone layer goes the way of rotary phones and unmentionable substances wash up on the beach. Even Zuma Beach, that sliver of Malibu perfection, underwent a bizarre transformation last month when a middle-aged saleswoman was stabbed to death in a restroom during the afternoon.

But if all signs point to hard times by the beautiful sea, you’d never know it. Because the throngs who brave the shore continue to increase as summer tempts. And they have one thing to tell you--it’s all still, well, a day at the beach. “It’s status quo,” says veteran Los Angeles lifeguard Lt. Phil Topar. “Life goes on.”

This is a tale of five beaches, five small universes from Manhattan north to County Line. These are oceanfront zones with little more in common than sun and sand, with temperaments as distinct as, say, hometown-y Larchmont Boulevard or towering Wilshire.

Pick a beach. Any beach.

Carol Ann Carr comes to Zuma even though she’s mindful of how unforgiving the sun’s rays can be. So she huddles under a watermelon beach umbrella, a sun visor, a sweat shirt and, if any bits of errant flesh remain to be buried, a pile of towels.

“We love the beach because we do believe we came out of the sea, and it’s in our genes,” Carr, 48, philosophizes over a London guidebook. “It calls us back. Constantly.”

But the message isn’t always soothing. At Zuma, the recent murder tugs at the corners of people’s consciousness. Sixteen-year-old Ashley, at the beach last week with a group of friends, won’t tell a stranger her last name. She’s not supposed to be there “because of all the stabbings going on.”

The thing is, in Ashley’s crowd, Zuma is still the place to be, specifically the vicinity of lifeguard station No. 6. It’s a singles bar en plein air for the post-pubescent set, which is good enough for Ashley’s crowd, a merry band of 10th-graders from a Catholic girls’ school in Woodland Hills.

Hail Mary. It’s the last day of school.

“This is where the guys are supposed to be,” says Suzy Lewis, 15. “But they’re not here.”

Chrissie Baker, 15, doesn’t want you to get the wrong idea about her social milieu. “There are some of us who don’t come for the guys,” she says adultly. “The beach offers serenity. The waves are a pacifying experience.”

Rita Saldarriaga, 16, isn’t there to be pacified. “Girls need a tan,” she instructs.

As it happens, the boys are up the beach a ways, dangling in the surf at the unprepossessing County Line, a beachette really, a nearly anonymous strip of sand a mere surfboard’s length into Ventura County.

The boys aren’t happy. But it isn’t because there aren’t any girls.

The waves this afternoon are 2 feet high, tops--pure, unadulterated mush. County Line is serious surfing territory, and the serious surfers are mostly just bobbing in the swells.

Crummy waves make a man mad. Madmen cut each other off, even on a surfboard.

Jim Mauceri, 20, plops down on the sand beside his surfing buddy, 21-year-old Ceasar Krauss. Mauceri is the aggrieved party.

“This guy cut in front of me,” Mauceri says. “We hit our boards. But I don’t come to fight. I come to surf.”

“You got your people who own the beach,” Krauss says, “and your cool surfers.”

Let there be no doubt as to which side Krauss is on. “If they have the right of way, I let ‘em have it,” he says coolly.

Down at Dockweiler Beach, the only heat around is rising in sheets from a lone barbecue pit. As a soft lavender dusk settles on the beach, three women are discovering a strange thing about Dockweiler. It is the only beach in Los Angeles County with barbecue pits--a spare 20 in all. It is also directly beneath the flight path of all four runways at nearby Los Angeles International Airport.

This makes for a unique recreational experience.

“I didn’t think this part of the beach was Runway 3,” yells Diane Fulton, 30, squinting up at the belly of a plane, “but it’s like every 45 minutes so it’s not that bad.”

The fact that it’s actually every three minutes does nothing to quench her spirits, which seem to muffle the din overhead. Fulton and friends came to the beach with high hopes and a mission: “This was a spur of the moment, we-need-a-mental-health-day-from-work-and God-wouldn’t-it-be-great-to-come-to-the-beach-on-Friday kind of trip.”

Fulton and Michell White, 24, both library assistants at UCLA, are making it their business to enjoy the pacific Pacific, which on any ordinary day seems so close and yet so far.

“Just the quiet and the breeze and the sunshine,” White says. “You may leave the office for lunch, but it’s not the same sun.”

If it’s sun you want, try Manhattan Beach farther south, where even an uneventful weeknight draws locals to wring out the last bit of waning light. A purplish sun hovers above the volleyball courts, which are the athletic equivalent of the neighborhood bar. The regulars come because the courts are flash points for that Los Angeles rarity--a sense of community.

“It’s a lot like pickup basketball,” says volleyballer Ron Rubine, 31. “I live a block away and you get to know everyone.”

Rubine is dedicated to his fun, to say the least. He used to live five miles inland, but he moved so he could be closer to the courts. Indeed, even though his right ankle is thick with bandages, he’s languishing beside a net, waiting to play.

The wiry athlete is garbed in equal-opportunity sports regalia--a soccer sweat shirt and volleyball shorts. He gestures toward the pastel infinity stretching before him, like a game-show spokes-model demonstrating a prize. “You forget here that it’s a rat race on the 405,” he says dreamily.

It is a typical day at Venice Beach, which is to say the motorized disembodied hands are moving briskly on the boardwalk.

In fact, they’re wiggling out of a paper bag and a cardboard box, all to trump up sales for those in need of a hand.

“Freshly cut today, folks,” howls hand barker and aspiring filmmaker Steve Perry, 33. “Put ‘em in a salad bowl. You too can own your own severed hand and scare those you love.”

A man in a maroon polo shirt examines one of Perry’s hands, but he quickly returns it, seemingly unimpressed.

“In New York, you see the real thing on the street,” he scoffs.

The teeming Venice boardwalk is not exactly where one goes for any real thing, unless one is in search of a real tuba-and-accordion duet or a real “echo man” or dancing roller skaters or psychics or psychotics. Not to mention a real limbo dancer who also plunges into a carpet of broken glass. The new kid on the block is Jindrich O. Zigmund. Zigmund is his name. Robots are his game.

Zigmund is wearing a white lab coat and a knit cap stitched with Budweiser labels. He is standing in front of his creation--a robot-like contraption cobbled from trash cans from Home Depot, a JC Penney hair-dryer, gas stove burners from K mart and a computer from Radio Shack. Zigmund, who describes himself as a former nuclear physicist from Czechoslovakia, is proud of his achievement.

“It’s an amazing piece of trash,” he says.

The robot’s calling is mundane in comparison. It spits out prosaic stuff like horoscopes and romantic profiles. But Zigmund, a Venice fixture for a mere two months, loves his robot anyway, which almost makes sense when you consider its background.

“It’s a woman,” he swoons, “and it talks Radio Shack English.”

Soon the computer couple will be on their way, and the beach will be left to those with nowhere else to go. As that shift leaves, Tim Dwyer returns from a day of trashing to display his wares under a pagoda.

Dwyer looks at his enterprise like any businessman. For his efforts, he has found three motorcycles in varying stages of being, cameras, food, binoculars, hundreds of LSD stamps, even an illustrated copy of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” Dwyer is amazed at what some people consider trash in this town.

“It’s unfair to say sheer piggery but the overabundance . . . ,” he scolds. “Why didn’t they give them to somebody?”

Nothing exotic is for sale tonight. Laid out beneath Dwyer’s pagoda is a tidy line of goods--a travel iron with mister, an answering machine, a makeup mirror, bottles of nail polish, pairs of ladies’ shoes.

“If I had a million dollars, I’d still be out here,” he insists, while muted blues spill out of a nearby bistro. “It’s like treasure hunting. I make money, more than it takes to eat.”

He takes stock of both his inventory and precarious existence, which leads him to one unalterable fact: Tim Dwyer of Venice Beach is one happy man.

“It’s a great life, actually,” he says. “You can’t get me out of here with a crowbar.”