Silver Man shows his mettle on the Promenade

HE gleams like an edifice of solid chrome in the afternoon sunlight, all bright and silvery in top hat and tails.

Sometimes he moves about in the robotic strut of a mechanical man and at other times freezes statue-like to suddenly move and scare the hell out of those who touch him to see if he’s real.

He’s not hard to miss in the middle of Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. The guy stands 6 feet tall and probably weighs in the neighborhood of 250 pounds, in addition to which he’s silver from head to foot. Even his face glows with silver makeup.

There is a quality of surreality to his existence in a mid-

week crowd on a day that glows with the effervescence of spring. Even among the street performers who vie for attention with loud music and energetic

dancing, the Silver Man stands out.

His attraction embodies the unexpected, a sudden anomaly among the ordinary. Tourists who ignore other acts stop to watch him even if he’s just standing there, the way they might stare at a clown taking a break in the third ring of a circus.

It’s the costume that partly captures the attention of the passersby, but it’s a little something more too, the anticipation of what he might do next. He doesn’t do a lot actually. During the time I watched him standing in the street in front of the Criterion Theater, he was mostly posing for pictures, for which he charges $1.

Other times, he plays the statue or the robot, having perfected a move that allows him to stiffen his muscles to create the impression of a large automated toy. The business card he passes out says, “Automatic. The Silver Man.”

I’ve seen him off and on for the nine years he’s been performing at the Promenade for the dimes and dollars people drop into his silver can or into the large paper coffee cup he thrusts at them if they take his picture. How much might that be? “Enough.”

My childlike fascination with a guy who does himself in silver is probably rooted in the old Saturday matinee Flash Gordon serials I used to see, which abounded with silver space robots. They evoked a dreamscape of magic and mystery that remain a part of the inner kid.

Cinelli and I saw a silver man in Paris a few years ago performing as a statue on the Left Bank, and she couldn’t pull me away from him. He didn’t have the style of Santa Monica’s Silver Man, who has a way of mugging and winking that establishes the living person within the platinum disguise. Obvious by appearance but secretive by nature, he wouldn’t give me his name, age or even his actual weight, preferring the anonymity of a costume to any vital statistics. He’s the Silver Man, period. Take it or leave it.

But I did spend about an hour talking to him at an open-air coffee shop, fueling his conversation with a large mocha drink and one of the biggest chocolate eclairs I’ve ever seen. He didn’t have a lot of time because it was late in the afternoon and he had to get ready for his real job, which is that of an emergency medical technician. He rides an ambulance four nights a week from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

He’s a bright guy with a quick sense of humor who sometimes gets bit parts in movies or TV shows, but his first love is being the Silver Man. He made a point of saying he didn’t just like it. He loves it. He really does. It saved his life.

Born in L.A., he lived in Berkeley off and on because his father was here and his mother there. The way he tells it, “I attended ninth grade in Berkeley, 10th in L.A., 11th in Berkeley and 12th in L.A.”

It was in San Francisco that he first saw a robot act in a street show and decided to try it down here. “It didn’t work at first,” he says, “but then me and a friend added the silver, and that was it.” Now he’s like an institution on the Promenade, a shiny robot who moves to a whistle hidden in his mouth that beeps to every strut and jerk.

For a while, the Silver Man says, he was drinking too much beer to fuel his energy, but he went to Hawaii to pray and reconnect with himself, and now he doesn’t need it anymore. The costume itself, which he credits with saving his life, energizes him with the power of silver that is not unlike those Flash Gordon robots that were imbued with special glowing cores of a secret strength.

Today’s animated supermen and special-effects action heroes are the Flash Gordons of a new era. They’re produced with considerably greater expertise than was ever displayed in the Saturday afternoon serials I used to watch. I didn’t care back then that the robots were guys in cardboard costumes sprayed with silver paint.

They were real enough to this kid early in his life just as the Silver Man is real enough to the kid later in life. He’s not just another guy in a shiny, sunlit costume looking to make a few extra bucks. He’s a robot from another planet, and I can’t take my eyes off of him.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@ latimes.com.