When the Moon Hits Your Eye

Memories from a double life working simultaneously as a private investigator by day and a Venetian gondolier by night. Originally written for the U.S. Gondola Nationals in 2013. All photos by author.

In David Fincher’s film The Social Network, Justin Timberlake (playing Napster founder and first president of Facebook Sean Parker) confides to a friend that he believes he's being followed by detectives. I can confirm this is true, because I was one of them. And believe it or not, I’m the one who finally got him.

For several months, Sean had masterfully evaded being subpoenaed for the now-famous trial over the founding of Facebook that is depicted in the film. So when the case got handed to me, I knew I had to come up with something radically unexpected to catch him. I had spent nearly a decade moonlighting as a gondolier, serenading guests while serving gourmet multi-course dinners with wine parings as we rowed through the Newport Beach harbor. My original

plan was to book Sean and his fiancée (whom we’ll call “K”) on a romantic gondola cruise, a short distance from the hotel where he’d be giving a keynote speech the following morning. It’s the last place Sean would expect to be subpoenaed, and he’d have to plunge into the harbor to escape.

But when Sean backed out of the cruise last minute, I had to quickly come up with a new plan. Donning a fake name and identity (President of The Prometheus Group, aptly named after the supreme trickster of the Greek pantheon), I wound up infiltrating the business conference where Sean was scheduled to give his keynote address. I wasn’t sure how long I could plausibly get away with posing as the head of a fictional corporation. But in an utterly mystifying coincidence, it turned out the conference was about privatizing water in a very remote part of India; a region I had actually spent considerable time in with activists fighting against the very same privatization of water. I was the only person at the conference that had any firsthand experience with its own topic, and gradually found myself encircled by a swarm of entrepreneurs listening intently to my expertise on their business venture, rather than the other way around. I blended in perfectly and Sean never saw what was coming.

If such an unlikely synchronicity doesn’t astonish, consider what happened next: a couple years later, a woman came to see my 2010 film The Reach of Resonance when it was playing at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. She was inspired enough by the film to approach me about curating and hosting her own screenings. This woman looked strikingly familiar, though I just couldn’t place her, even as we began to collaborate together. Until one day, a friend mentioned in passing she was once engaged to Sean Parker. That’s when it suddenly hit me: she was none other than Sean’s fiancée “K,” the same woman I planned to row on a gondola to subpoena Sean, and who was at his side when I did (they had split up since our last encounter). Who just so happened to be temporarily crashing with guitarist Nels Cline, the musician who originally inspired The Reach of Resonance (unbeknownst to either of us when we began promoting the film together). I wonder what a mathematician would have to say about the chances of any of this happening. But that story — and the remarkable fact that “K" and I became friends — are for another day. Today, we’re here to share some spicy confessions from our rare occupation as gondoliers. A job which seems to lend itself to such head-spinning synchronicities, raising questions about the invisible threads that connect us all.

It's an unexpected profession that has taken me to unexpected places. In my spare time between working as a private investigator and touring drummer, I began rowing gondolas in reality TV shows, starring in a Bertolli pasta commercial, and accidentally floating into the background of an episode of "Bacon Paradise." I've been involved in hundreds of marriage proposals, and sometimes marry couples on the boat as an ordained non-denominational minister. Eventually, I began restoring and painting gondolas as well, like the one I prepared as a surprise gift for Siegfried & Roy in the massive pool at their home in Las Vegas, or the one for Adam Sandler and Katie Holmes in some rom-com, or for the bizarre magazine ads of an Italian shoe company.

Gondoliering sometimes conveniently overlapped my day job as a private detective. I was once investigating a mayor of a well-known city, who had a reputation for having affairs. So we sent one of our agents to his office — a foxy young Cuban woman — posing as an intern applicant with a dream of one day being romanced on a gondola. Before you knew it they were wining and dining on my boat. It was the first of several "dates" that allowed us to infiltrate his secrets — and eventually his house — to obtain evidence that was used against him in a court of law.

Thanks to these boats, I was reunited with several long lost friends I thought I'd never see again, until they showed up for their gondola reservation not realizing I was their gondolier. More than once, I also became an unexpected accomplice to their engagement, secretly dropping a message-in-a-bottle into the water with their marriage proposal contained inside for them to "discover" when I rowed back for it. Another time, I discovered an acquaintance's affair

when he unknowingly booked a cruise with his mistress on my boat. That was an awkward two hours.

There were other uncanny reunions. I had a close friend in high school who worked as an undercover spy for a religious organization that did large-scale clandestine smuggling operations all over the globe. Whenever the school year started, and everyone asked each other what they did all summer, most people would share the typical teenage stories of surfing or baseball. But Matt's stories usually involved covert scuba diving missions in remote corners of the ocean and sometimes getting arrested by the secret service of this country or the defense forces of that.

Even though I knew the organization was real (Time magazine cited one of their operations as "the greatest smuggle of the 20th century," and Matt briefly recruited me to run their training simulations for new volunteers at a well known university), I still wondered how many of his incredible stories were fabricated. Until one night when I rowed a couple on a gondola who turned out to be none other than the founders of the organization Matt worked for. Using techniques

I'd honed as a private investigator, and replenishing their glasses with a magical elixir called wine, I walked away with detailed logistics of their most covert operations, which corroborated Matt's stories.

The canals were filled with an incredible cast of characters including Dennis Rodman (who owned the restaurant next door to us and was routinely kicked out of the city for violating noise ordinances), the last surviving crooner of the Rat Pack (who hung out nightly on the docks where we picked up dinner for our guests), Kobe Bryant (who sometimes romanced his wife on our gondolas), and singer Whitney Houston who would graciously emerge from one of the houses

on my route to cheer whenever she heard a gondolier singing.

I once rowed Chinese mega-pop-star He Jie and her husband He Ziming in a gondola. We were almost run over by Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony in his sea vessel which is aptly named the Kiss My Amps. That venerable wielder of the whiskey bass lived in one of the houses I rowed past every night where he’d frequently blast my gondola guests with his own hits like "Hot For Teacher" turned up to 11. Whitney Houston happened to witness the spectacle. This time she came to my rescue, using her well-honed lungs to call harbor patrol and school Mr. Anthony on the subtle art of slowing the fuck down.

After rowing gondolas on and off for a couple decades, it's easy to get philosophical wondering what unseen forces cause peoples' paths to cross in such unexpected ways over time. I was trained by an eccentric man named Greg who I originally met through some political activism I was involved in as a teenager. We often ran into each other when he was

performing spoken word poetry at early '90s hardcore shows. I never could have imagined he'd be the man sitting across from me half a decade later when I showed up for a gondolier job interview.

Greg's path to becoming one of the world's foremost experts on gondolas was a serpentine one to say the least, having braved the extreme conditions of living near the Bering Strait in Alaska, then homeless on the streets of Jamaica, before building a community of gondoliers that stretch from Venice to southern California. He is a dreamer who is not easily deterred: when political obstructions squashed his dream of becoming the first person to row a gondola across all 50 miles of the Panama Canal, he led the first team to row a fleet of gondolas 150 miles on the Hudson River from Albany to New York City. Their journey ended at Ground Zero to honor of the fallen heroes of 9-11.

Greg also founded the Gondola Nationals (a kind of “Gondola Olympics”) which brings together gondoliers from around the world to compete in various races and obstacle courses. It usually ends with us rowing the boats to the nearest bar and boisterously bellowing Italian songs over a pint, or two, or three.

Maybe one day, a book or sitcom can preserve the outlandish memories of the small tribe known as gondoliers. But life is often more fantastic than anything we could write about it, so no one would believe it.

Former private investigator, Venetian gondolier, and drummer for The Autumns, Fullerton native Steve Elkins has more recently been engaged as a filmmaker, author, educator, and photographer. His latest film Echoes of the Invisible premiered at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival, where Elkins was honored with the ZEISS Cinematography Award for “the very best imagery in storytelling.” The film turns its lens onto explorers who are pushing the human body and technology beyond known limits in the most extreme environments on Earth: Al Arnold, a blind man running through the deadly deserts of Death Valley; Rachel Sussman, a photographer scouring the globe for personal encounters with Earth's oldest living organisms (2,000 years or older); Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist devoting the remainder of his life to walking across the world in the footsteps of the earliest human migrations; and scientists building machines to look back nearly to the beginning of time. A mosaic of quests linked by their search for the fabric of our interconnectedness before it is lost in the noise of our distracted and divided world.

Previously, Elkins devoted seven years to making The Reach of Resonance (2010), a documentary which juxtaposes the creative paths of four musicians who use music to cultivate a deeper understanding of the world around them: Miya Masaoka using music to interact with insects and plants; Jon Rose, utilizing a violin bow to turn fences into musical instruments in conflict zones ranging from the Australian outback to Palestine; John Luther Adams translating the geophysical phenomena of Alaska into music; and Bob Ostertag, who explores global socio-political issues through processes as diverse as transcribing a riot into a string quartet, and creating live cinema with garbage.

Elkins' account of being asked to lead a riot in the largest slum of India - The Grammar Of Fire - was published by Warner Books in 2007. His work with Western Arrernte Aborigines is part of a permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Australia. A passion for rare and under-appreciated cinema in countries typically excluded from film history led him to found the Hibbleton Film Series, a weekly event in Fullerton where Elkins introduced and moderated community discussion about cinema from regions such as Iran, Mongolia, Mali, Uruguay, Kazakhstan, Tunisia and El Salvador from 2013 - 2019. In his spare time, Elkins serves as a film production mentor for at-risk youth in southern California, through the Youth Cinema Project founded by Edward James Olmos. For more on these and other projects: https://www.steveelkins.net/