Every evening the breeze off the Pacific wreathed the coastal towns north of San Diego in a thin mist. The clear moisture clung to the flowers and fruit trees of Encinitas throughout the night and the dew lingered on the pedals well into the morning. Some time before noon the sun seared through the fog and evaporated the teardrops into a miasma of scents unknown to the residents of Eastern Seaboard.
Life had taken on a comfortable regime over the past three weeks, once Pam and Helen went to the art school off the PCH, AK and I answered the siren call of our mutual muses. This morning Euterpe was kinder than Erato. I had not written a single word in the three hours AK had banged out McCoy Tyner’s version of IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD on the stand-up piano in the living room.
A ten-finger coda signaled the end of my friend’s practice session. Several seconds later AK stood at the doorway, flexing his hands. A glean of sweat wet his forehead and the muscles on his forearm quivered from the extended exertion.
“How’s it sound?” He was seeking perfection as proof to Pam that he was serious about the piano.
“You’re getting closer.” The modal chorus of the song was etched into my brain by the constant repetition.
“Closer how?” AK expected the truth.
“I don’t know. I’m not a musician.” I put down my pen. My opinion was not as important as his effort to best the tune.
“You listen to jazz.”
“It doesn’t make me a critic.” I hated lying.
“You’re not deaf.” AK was desperate to improve, since he had only started playing three years ago. “Why? What’s wrong? I’m a big boy. I can handle it.”
“Nothing’s wrong.” It was the truth, but things weren’t 100% right. AK’s left hand was covering the low bass, but his right hand struggled to match the speed of the legendary pianist’s spontaneous improvisations. I went easy on the truth. “But McCoy’s been playing from before we were born. It’s a game of catch-up and one day you’ll be where he is, but that day isn’t today.”
“Thanks for the encouragement.”
“I don’t know anything.” To my ear AK was ready to be in a band.
“At least you accept that.”
“Well, ignorance is always easier to achieve than enlightenment.” I had been staring at a blank page for an hour. My poetry needed inspiration. it wasn’t far away. “You ready for a swim?”
“Sun’s breaking through the gloom.” Our daily routine was paced by the clockwork of the heavens., we worked the morning and swam in the afternoon. Acceptance of the nature’s cues was an integral part in Southern California and the two of us had adapted to the regularity with pleasant obedience as had Pam.
“I’m ready when you are.” I picked up my towel and packed my bag with the journal, fruit, and a canteen of water. Moonlight beach was a beach. There was no refreshment stand.
“Me too.” AK stuck an African thumb piano in a backpack. Helen had bought the kalimba for his birthday. He had mastered the steel tines in less than a week and his fingertips were as tough as dog’s paws. “The girls will meet us in a couple of hours.”
“Like clockwork.”
“As is to be expected from another day in paradise.”
AK and I exited from the low bungalow and walked through acres of flower fields. The young farmer was tending to jasmine at the far end of his property. The long-hair was cool with our using the path to the PCH as long as we didn’t pluck any of his reefer crop on the way.
Several minutes later we crossed the Pacific Coast Highway and strode up to the parking lot overlooking a rugged beach. A steep trail zigzagged down the cliff. Waves pounded the sand. None of the cliff top houses dated back further than the 40s and standing on the cliffs facing the Pacific it was easy to imagine yourself as a shipwrecked sailor from the 16th Century, if it were for surfers slicing into the barrel of tubes.
“What you think the Spanish thought sailing up this coast?” My father’s side of the family came over on the Mayflower. My Irish grandmother had sailed across the Atlantic in the Year of the Crow. AK’s family possessed similar roots and his friend Helen was pure Yankee stock.
“Where’s all the people probably, but it was some Portuguese that first discovered this part of California over 400 years ago.”
“How you know that?” I prided myself in my knowledge of history.
“I think I read it in National Geographic. I can’t remember the captain’s name, but his fleet went to winter on Catalina and he broke his ankle getting off the launch. He died of gangrene. Watch your step down the cliff.”
His warning did not fallen on deaf ears. Careless stumbles were fatal from this height. Two people had already lost their lives tumbling down the steep ravines in the next town up the road. The loose sand provided treacherous footing and we grabbed onto shanks of withered grass, hoping the roots held our weight. Several minutes later we set foot in the sand. There wasn’t a car or house in sight. The sloping strand was shared by surfers, hippies, seagulls, and seals.
The year was 1974 and the season was the endless summer of Southern California.
AK and I spread our towels and stripped down to our shorts. Our bodies were hardened by the weeks of swimming in the heavy surf. Our skin was bronzed to our veins. My hair was going blonde. We were on a long vacation and I didn’t see any reason for it to end with the fall.
“What you think about staying here?” The wind wafted off the sea and I held out my arms like wings.
“We can’t crash at Helen’s pad forever.” His friend’s bungalow had two small bedrooms. AK had been there a month and I had crashed on the porch for three weeks.
“I know that.” Encinitas got cold at night. “I was talking about California.”
“You mean not go back to Boston?” The New Yorker had a teaching job starting in September and his faithful girlfriend was waiting on the South Shore.
“It’s not like I have a job like you.” I had graduated from college in May. Recruiters from the banks and corporations had sneered at my stammer as a disability. I had only gone on the interviews to please my mother. My future was an unknown commodity.
“But Boston is your home.” AK had left Long Island at the age of 18. The pianist had lived away for five years. His home could be anywhere.
“I’ll always be from Boston no matter what.” The collapse of last year’s Red Sox hadn’t weakened my New England roots, but the cold, snow, and ice were hard to take in the winter. “But I like it here.”
“What’s there not to like.” AK admired our surroundings and then stated the obvious, “If we stay, we need to make some money
“I know.” My vacation stake was down to $400. Boston was 3000 miles to the East.
“That means a job.” AK stretched his body, as Helen had taught him. She was into yoga.
“I know.” I had driven taxi back in Boston. They had to have cabs here. Not everyone in California had a car. “If something came up, I’d stay.”
“What you think Pam is going to do?” AK and Pam had been sleeping the guest bedroom.
“Go back to school.” As far as I knew they were just friends. I wasn’t asking any questions. The blonde nursing student had another year left till graduation.
“It’d be nice, if she stayed.” AK liked Pam more than a friend. Any man would.
“Let’s see what happens when it happens. What about that swim?”
“Sounds good.” Neither of us were ready to hit the road and we raced into the ocean for another session with the waves.
We caught an undertow to the break. The local surfers greeted us by our nicknames. AK was Flotsam and I was Jetsam. We timed the swells. Some formed better than other. We gave the surfers first choice. It was their spot. There were plenty of waves for everyone and we propelled our launch with hard kicks and frantic strokes. Our bodies accelerated down the face and we ducked under the water before the wave closed out on the shallow sand bar. Sandpaper was made out of beach sand for a good reason and our shoulders and shins bore the scars of hitting bottom. We repeated this process for the good part of an hour.
Each surge was spawned from a menage a quatre between wind, earth, sun, and water. The waves of our native Atlantic were too small to feel this union of the four elements. Everything about the Pacific was big. The swells originated thousands of miles from shore. The current ran from the Arctic south to Antarctica from to the south. We were one with nature and the planet. Finally AK rode all the way to the beach and I joined him on the sand. The two of us rested for ten minutes, then drank half our water and ate all the fruit.
Later that afternoon AK plucked a familiar tune on the kalimba, while I wrote in my journal. He was getting good.
“I know that song.” I had danced to it last week at a gay bar in San Diego.
“Number 1 in America.” He rocked on his hips to ROCK THE BOAT. “C’mon, dance.”
“Not now?” I was trying to complete a poem about my first sighting of the Rockies from the Great Plains. The view had been from a bar in Sterling, Colorado. It was called the Inferno Lounge. Pam had met a cowboy there. I wrote ‘fields of wheat fly across the earth with the wind’.
“Let’s see that.” AK snatched away my journal and after reading a few lines, said, “The key to writing is putting the seat of your trousers on the seat of the chair.”
“Didn’t Graham Greene say that?” I loved his books POWER AND THE GLORY and OUR MAN IN HAVANA.
“He might have said it, but the quote comes from Mary Heaton Vorse, who was an American journalist and labor activist who predates Greene by a few decades,” AK said with convinced authority. He had a degree in English.
“I stand corrected, but what does that have to do with my writing?”
“Just that you have to keep writing. Every day. As much as you can. Sandy Koufax didn’t become a great pitcher by accident. He worked at it.”
“So my poems are nothing.” They didn’t even rhyme.
“No, but they need work. Same as my piano playing.” AK practiced on the keyboards three hours in the morning and two at night. He read the page and then handed back the book. “Work, work, work and maybe one day your books will be next to Graham Greene.”
“I doubt it.” Graham Greene’s name began with G and mine started with an S, but I lay on my stomach and scratched words describing the gleam of snow on faraway mountains. The white crests of the waves mimicked the Rockies. The time disappeared into the ocean and the high tide ran closer to the cliffs.
“Let’s go.” AK grabbed his towel and we scrambled to the dirt trail with water surging over our ankles. The surfers crowded the path ahead of us. Getting caught on the beach was flirting with death.
Atop the bluff we regained our breath. A long-haired hippie in a flowered sarong sat cross-legged playing a flute. He was a regular at sunset.
His tune wandered through tempo and his body rocked with the movement of his fingers. Pursing his lips with purpose he blew a shrieking high note.
I winced, as if my ears had drunk bitter lemon.
He opened his eyes. They were shiny as glass. He nodded to AK.
“Didn’t realize I had an audience.” His accent was from the cornfields. “How was that last note?”
“It wasn’t a C 3rd Octave. More like an A.”
“Some people think the highest note is a D.” The hippie looked like John Lennon without the tinted glasses. He spoked with a disjointed voice, as if her body and mind were more than one. “Are you a musician?”
“I play piano.” AK was modest about his talents.
“And your friend?” He studied my face. The pupils behind the glasses were huge.
“I play the kazoo.” I had attempted the bass in 1965. My fingers had been ripped to shreds.
“Fran Zappa used the buzz of the mirliton on HUNGRY FREAKS and Jimi Hendrix played a paper-covered comb to get the busted amp effect in CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC.”
“I love FREAK OUT.” The Mothers of Invention was the first and only record that I stole from a store.
“Cool.” The hippie nodded with the bliss of musical communion. He turned his head to the setting sun. It disappeared into the ocean within a minute. The flute player rose from the ground with the grace of a trapeze artist. “I’ll see you around.”
“Later.” Good-byes were short on the bluff.
“He any good?” I asked once we were out of earshot.
“Not bad, but he’s no Herbie Mann.”
“MEMPHIS UNDERGROUND.” Herbie Mann combined with Larry Corryll on guitar to create a funky LP, but I preferred the breathless pacing of Jeremy Stieg on HOWLING FOR JUDY.
“He plays like a hippie. No sense of anything.” AK tended to regard music with the seriousness of a late convert.
“He was high on LSD.”
“How could you tell?”
“The eyes.” The black pools were wide-open for light. “And the way he spoke.”
“It seemed like a good trip.” AK was into pot. Hash was hard drugs to him.
“It’s all about your surroundings.” I had dropped acid more than twenty times. The good outnumbered the bad 10 to 1.
“Would you do it here?” he asked entering the local grocery store.
“MY mind is open to anything.”
We bought wine and vegetables for dinner and discussed jazz walking through the flower fields. I had argued for buying some meat, but Helen was a strict vegetarian. As her guests Pam, AK, and I respected her wishes and we had eaten nothing but rice, vegetables, and beans for weeks.
My farting was terrible.
The two of us showered off the salt of the sea and stripped off our bathing suits. With towels wrapped around our waists we entered her bungalow with the eastern sky turning to night. Helen sat at the kitchen table sketching an apple by candlelight. Incense was burning next to the sink. The scent was jasmine. AK looked over her shoulder.
“A nude.” Helen attended private art classes in La Holla. Her teacher was well-known for his seascapes and drinking. The slight brunette scheduled her classes for noon. By that time her teacher had recovered from his hang-over. Pam worked as their model.
“Is it any good?” All artists sought approval.
A glance at her journal confirmed that she had captured the soft curve of Pam’s back with the stroke of a pencil. She had even caught the color of her blonde hair curling down her spine in black, white, and gray.
“I wished that my poetry was as good as your drawing.”
“I’ve got a long way to go.” She put down her sketch book and helped us unload the groceries. “Victor’s coming this weekend.”
Her boyfriend had studied dance at the same college as AK and Helen. He had been hired as a choreographer working at a small movie studio in Hollywood. Every night Helen lit candles in front of his photo on the wall and I swore that her lips moved, as she stared at his picture a semi-naked young man in a toga. The mousy brunette was very much in love.
“You want us to leave?” AK didn’t want to stand in the way of romance.
“No, Victor is looking forward to having a good time with all of us.” Helen cooed with anticipation and fingered the ancient Byzantine gold chain around her neck. The brunette acted like she was broke, but her ethnic dresses came from an expensive boutique in La Holla and none of her shoes had holes in the soles. According to AK her trust fund was worth millions.
“I could make myself scarce.” I offered, since I was freeloading on AK’s connection.
“No, he wants to meet you and Pam.” Helen opened the bottle of red.
“Me?” Helen had barely spoken to me in three weeks.
“I told him about your fight in the Haight, making love to lesbians in Big Sur, and your ex-girlfriend Jackie.” Helen smiled with a sly shyness. “You didn’t think I was listening, did you?”
“To be truthful, no.” I had a tendency to tell long stories after a few drinks.
“I said you were a poet. He likes poetry. Maybe you can read him something of yours.”
“Sure.” I glanced at AK in panic.
“I like LUCKY’S RIDE.” The poem was an ode to broken hearts and country music.
I’ll rewrite it a little.” I hadn’t read a poem aloud since high school.
“Where’s Pam?” The sexuality between them was strictly cerebral.
“She went out for a walk in flowers. She likes walking in the fragrance of the night jasmine and the flowers don’t think she looks like Patty Hearst.” Helen and Pam spent their days together. The painter was very protective of the younger woman.
“No one stopped you today?” AK asked with concern. Police from coast to coast were hunting for the renegade heiress, to whom Pam bore a small resemblance.
“No, but people look at her funny.”
“Is she okay?” AK looked out the window.
“She’s fine, but she could use a friendly face.” Helen pointed toward the San Diego Botanical Gardens abutting the flower fields. “She went that way.”
“Thanks.” AK left the house and I opened a bottle of red wine, as Helen lit a few candles. The nights were dark away from the suburban tracts blanketing the coastal plains.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but what are you planning to do?” Helen pulled on a sweater. The nights were colder than the days along the coast.
“With what?” The subject of her question wasn’t a mystery to me.
“With you life? I know you have some money, but it doesn’t last forever. Our friend will head back to Boston to teach school and Pam will go back to finish school. What about you?” Helen sat on the sofa.
“I had been hoping to relive that surfing movie ENDLESS SUMMER.” The director Bruce Brown had poisoned a good segment of American teenagers with the allure of spending the rest of our youth on a beach. I poured us two glasses of wine and joined Helen. She had my best
“You have been doing a good job of it too, but that was a movie and this is real life. I’d say that you can stay here with me, but I’m leaving for Paris in the fall to study art at the Sorbonne, so I rented the place. Sorry to be a bummer, but it’s not easy being a hippie beach bum in a recession and most of the jobs around here pay the minimum wage.”
“Which isn’t enough to live on.” An forty-hour week at $2/hour came to $80 before taxes. A small room in Encinitas cost $60/month. LPs were $3.99, but stereos were a hundred times that. Food was relatively cheap and I didn’t have to worry about the price of gas, since I didn’t have a car, although life in Southern California was almost impossible without a vehicle.
“What did you study in college?”
“Economics.” My original major had been Math. Pot smoking had interfered with my absorption of Multivariable Calculus. My grades in economics had been far from stellar, but I had been able to avoid the Draft with a college deferment. Now the Pentagon was winding down the war, the outlook was complicated by a depressing reality. “I tried to get a job with banks, but they said I had a stammer.”
“Only a small one, but I don’t see you working in a bank.”
“Me, neither.” I didn’t see me working anywhere.
“Me neither what?” AK asked, as he entered the bungalow with Pam.
“We were talking about his future.”
“I see his glass is almost empty. It must have been a serious conversation.”
“When I was in grammar school the nun asked Joe Tully, what he wanted do after school, meaning his life. Joe wasn’t the smartest kid in the class, but he had an answer all ready and he said he wanted to ride his bike. We laughed at him, but I feel a little like Joe Tully today.”
“I saw a ten-speed bike for sale on the PCH for $30.” AK filled my glass.
“At least he had a plan other than being a hippie beach bum.”
“This is your vacation. We return to Boston, you get a job.”
“Driving cab.” Corporate America wanted no part of me and to be truthfully I wanted no part of them.
“You’re good at it.” AK had hacked at the same company. His earning were half mine, mostly since I worked twice as long. He raised his glass. “To the King of the Checker Cab.”
We clinked glasses and after my third I accepted my present fate. The fourth and fifth glasses rose-colored the world and my prospects. The sixth and seventh stole my sense of balance and I went to bed on the porch before the others. A owl hotted in the eucalyptus trees. I crashed into unconsciousness without taking off my clothes or slipping into my sleeping bag. I had no other choice.
The next morning I woke late. My eyes were coated with shredded glass and I put on my sunglasses to protect the back of them from the sun piercing the gloom. AK was pounding on the piano. His forward movement on the Tyner piece was apparent with each renewed effort, but the strident bass chords burrowed into my sodden head with the force of a burro’s kick. I surrendered to the power of gravity for another hour. By the time I got to my feet, it was time to go to the beach.
AK recognized my misery and we walked to the beach in silence. The buzz of the bees bore a loud eagerness and the freeway hum with the the purpose of cars and trucks. Encinitas along the PCH was mercifully spared of commercial activity and late-morning quiet deepened on the streets of the suburban neighborhood abutting the bluffs above Moonlight Beach. The sun was sparkling on the Pacific and a light breeze wafted over the lip of the cliff. I breathed in deeply the tonic of nature.
“Thanks for not saying anything.”
“I can be a man a few words.” AK was spreading suntan oil on his arms. “Only one thing. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You graduate from college. Sure, your grades sucked. You might not be executive material for a bank, but you can get a job. Finally you’re 22 years old, we’re in California, and a beach is waiting for us.”
“Put that way, life is good.”
“And it only can get better.”
The two of us climbed down the path to the beach. The surfers were in place. We lay out our towels and went for an hour swim in the ocean, after which AK and I returned to the warm sand. He read John Steinbeck’s CANNERY ROW, while I wrote in my journal. An hour later I got to my feet.
“Listen to this.”
“LUCKY’S RIDE?”
“Yes.”
“No way.” AK clapped his hands over his ears. “I hear that fucking poem in my sleep. This isn’t an oral application to grad school. Demosthenes practiced his oration with pebbles in his mouth. Go tell your poem to the waves.”
AK turned his back to me.
I could have attacked his incessant repetition of IN A SENTIMENTAL WAY, but instead walked down the beach for an hour and then back. By the time I returned, the poem’s twenty lines were stuck in my head forever.
AK wasn’t alone. He was sitting with the scrawny hippie from yesterday, only now he had a guitar. The long hair’s skin was tight over his bones and his torn denim shorts were several size too big for his waist. Fragile sunglasses rested on his long nose, as he strummed familiar chords. AK accompanied him on kalimba. A golden blonde girl kept time with a tambourine.
Leather bracelets adorned her slender wrists and glass beads glistened around her neck. A tan macrame top covered her breasts, although her hardened nipples protruded against the loosely woven material. A matching skirt was hiked high on her thighs. Her head nodded to the guitar’s bass line and AK accompanied the two on his kalimba.
My friend looked up and said hi.
They stopped playing and AK introduced Rockford and Carol. The blonde was more comfortable with her near-nakedness than me. She made no attempt to cover herself.
“You seem interested in Carol.” Rockford wrapped his guitar with a towel.
“She reminds me of someone.” As soon as I said those words, I placed the face. “Did you go to Woodstock?”
“I was 14 in 1969.” Her smile was bemused by the thought of being at the Aquarian gathering in Upstate New York.
“Funny, you look like the girl from the first full-page photo of LIFE magazine’s special on Woodstock.”
“Not me. Maybe my double. We all have them. Maybe even more. Besides I was living with my parents in Texas.”
“You don’t have an accent.” I had a copy of LIFE magazine’s special edition on Woodstock. Carol
“I was an Army brat. We moved around.” She arranged the bracelets and shook out her hair. “Were you at Woodstock?”
“No, I worked that weekend, washing dishes at a hotel.” I had been 17.
“Doesn’t matter where you were as long as you have the feeling.” Rockford aimlessly strummed on his guitar before singing, “I just seen a face I can’t remember the place.”
After a few bars Rockford segued into another Beatles song.
It was the dreaded HEY JUDE. The 1968 hit was over seven minutes long with Paul McCartney singing eighteen ‘Hey Jude’. To my sixteen year-old ears I thought that the Cute Beatles had repeated the two words a million times.
“Watch out. He hates the Beatles.” AK warned the thin hippie.
“How can anyone hate the Beatles?” Rockford was visibly hurt by my rejection of his idols.
“It’s a long story.” It dated back to before HEY JUDE.
“We have time. The tide is still out.” Rockford glanced at the ocean, as if its substance had shifted from water to gold.
“I’ll tell the short version. I had a girlfriend in 7th Grade. I sang her Ginny rejected me, because I didn’t look like any of the Beatles. BEATLES 65 was the last record I bought. I’ve boycotted them since.”
“You didn’t buy MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR?” Rockford was shocked by my apostasy. The Beatles were gods to most members of my generation.
“No, they weren’t rock and roll anymore.” The control of the band had been taken over by the studio engineer and Paul McCartney’s drive to become the Elvis of the 60s.
“Weren’t rock?” The hippie played BACK IN THE USSR. “That’s not rock.”
“Okay, I’m wrong about that song.”
“And what about this one?” Rockford changed the chords for BABY I’M A RICH MAN.
“John is not Paul.” Lennon would have never written YOUR MOTHER SHOULD KNOW.
“Deep.” Rockford zoned into a buzzing haze and turned to AK. “Your friend is deep.”
“Some times deep as the ocean and other times shallow as an evaporation stain on a desert highway.” AK was getting a contact high from the tripster.
“That girl was right.” Carol kneeled on the sand and studied my face. Her eyes were an intense blue and she smelled of musk. “You don’t look like any of the Beatles.”
“And that was a good thing. I was more into the Stones.” HIS SATANICAL MAJESTY’S REQUEST was my favorite theme LP. Still Ginny’s kisses had been sweet. “I just wanted to be me.”
“Me is never a bad thing as long as you are me.” Her statement verged into the simpleminded mysticism. She smiled with a question mark. Her pupils were expanded to the rims of her retina. Rockford and she were tripping on LSD.
“Who do you think this ‘me’ looks like?” I was asking Carol to be my mirror. LSD gave visions. Some visions were true.
“A drifter. Someone without anywhere to go. Don’t look so hurt. Everyone on this beach, everyone in California is a drifter. Rockford and me. We’re drifting with the weather, the wind, and our whims. Some drifters are good, some are bad.” She wasn’t trying to hurt my feelings. This was her view of the world for right now.
“And some are in-between.” I had seen the good and the bad hitchhiking down the coast from San Francisco.
“Not some. Only those not willing to decided whether they like good better than bad.” She reached up for my hand. “Let’s go for a swim?”
I pulled the blonde to her feet. She stripped off her top and skirt and ran toward the sea.
Rockford winked at me, as if to say Carol was on her own.
I shrugged to reply that her freedom was her own business and followed the naked blonde to the edge of the sea.
The shore break was a vicious maze of undertows.
“Why is the water always this cold?” She dipped her toe into the spreading fan of a dying wave.
“Humboldt Current.” Geography was my best subject in grammar school.
I drew its path in the sky.
“Past Japan, Kamchatka, the Bering Sea down the West Coast to here. This coast knows nothing, but cold.”
“Cold from the cold.” Carol plunged into the sea and I swam after her to where several surfers bopped on their short boards. They greeted her by name.
“You have a lot of friends.” I treaded water in the swells, as we drifted south from the surfers.
“I’ve been living here since April. I get to know people’s names, then they know you. It makes life easy. You ask a lot of questions.”
“I like to know people too.”
“You want to hear my story. It won’t take long.” Carol paddled on her back. Her breasts, belly, and thighs were islands of flesh in the sun. “I left home at 18 heading for Haight-Ashbury. It was a tough place. Speed freaks and junkies ripping off the flower people.”
“I went through there last month. It’s not a nice place. Some people tried to rob me.” I stroked to keep close to her. The current was running strong. I wanted to stay near the beach. “I was lucky to get away from them.”
“Those people are a bummer. I fell into a bad crowd and did some drugs I shouldn’t have done.” She wasn’t filling in the blanks. “It could have been worst, but two years ago I ran into Rockford. He sort of rescued me from that scene. We traveled up and down the coast staying at communes. The people were always groovy.”
I checked the beach. We were being hauled out too far.
“We’re caught in a riptide.”
“I’m a good swimmer.”
“Me too.”
Carol swam to the side rather than fighting the offshore stream. The riptide released its grip and we bodysurfed closer to the beach.
“You know he never touched me once.”
“Rockford?”
“Yes.”
“Not once?” The crest of the wave lifted us ten feet in the air. The break was shifting with the tide. The surfers scrapped at the water to reach the change in the break.
“Never, but that didn’t stop him from talking about it.” She looked at the beach. AK and Rockford were not at the blanket.
“Men talk about it a lot. At least when women aren’t around.”
“Rockford is all talk. I really liked him too.” Carol neared me and brushed against my body. Her nipples were hard against my chest. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
“Yes.” The next swell was even higher. If the water wasn’t so cold, my erection would have been straining against my denim shorts.
Rows of waves cordoroyed the sea.
Our conversation was cut short by AK and Rockford joining us in the surf.
“Looks like a big set building up.” Rockford eyed funnels of foam circling to the left. The surfers crouched inside the tubes and skated over the tops of the waves with ease. We rode them straight to the beach. One caught me in a washing machine and slammed my body into the sand.
Carol pulled me out of the water.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine.” Stars flashed across my eyes. I shook my head to clear away the cosmos.
As a child on the South Shore of Boston my parents had packed the station wagon for a venture to the beach. The waves at Nantasket and Horseneck beaches were ripples in comparison to the growlers at Encinitas.
“I’m ready when you are.”
I dove into the next wave and raced Carol to the break. She beat me by a body length. Pelicans floated on the rise of wind. A seal popped its head from the water. Its eyes were coal black. Palm trees rimming the bluffs hid most of the cliff top houses. The sky was shear blue.
This was the land of beach bums. We were hippies. The surfers were family. Carol and I dove under a breaking wave and surfaced a foot from each other.
“I’d like to trip with you some time.” She held my hand.
“Me too.” I hadn’t dropped LSD in a year.
“You turn on?”
“Last time I was in the White Mountains with three friends. We sat in the Saco River. It was ice-cold, but we heard it talking, then some kid comes out of the forest and asked if we knew the way home. My friend thought that he was Jesus and we freaked a little, then his sister came out of the woods and grabbed him by the ear, telling him not to talk with strangers. It was a good trip.” I knew that the young boy wasn’t Jesus. Even on acid I was still a non-believer.
“Acid’s good at opening your mind.” Carol nodded her head to the incoming wave. It was a monster. I caught the swell right and my body stuck out of the face like a log for a good fifty feet before I was buried by a few hundred tons of ocean.
Exhausted after a half-hour in the heavy surf the four of us dragged our bodies from the sea like shipwrecked sailors.
“Can you get my back?” Carol handed me a towel.
“He probably wouldn’t mind getting your front, if you asked him nice.” Rockford resumed his meditative pose with his feet tucked into his ankles.
“My front I can do myself.” Carol took back the towel, as AK, Rockford, and I smoked a joint of Acapulco Gold. Laying on the sand, I stared at the sky and remembered that for the last hours I had forgotten about work, my future, and America, for below the bluffs the world was simply sea, sun, skin, and sand.
As the sun lowered closer to the horizon Carol pulled on a macrame top and skirt and shook out of her hair. The color was a streaked blonde.
Rockford pointed to the rising tide.
“We better go. Newcomers get caught against the cliffs all the time.” The solemnity of his voice indicated that not everyone survived the sneaky sea.
“We wouldn’t want that.” AK collected his things and we headed for the cliff path.
A minute later we had reached top of the bluff and surveyed the ocean with eyes of adoration.
“A fine day.” Rockford stared into the sun, as if it were his creation. “You should come to our house. We can play music and I have some serious LSD.”
“Clear Light.” Carol rolled her eyes, as if she was experiencing a flashback.
“I’m in.” The sky prismed red to blue above the Pacific. “Where better than here.”
“You might have a point.” AK wasn’t into heavy drugs.
“Any time you want.” Rockford hooked his arm with Carol and pointed out a low bungalow surrounded by jasmine trees. “That’s our place. Give us a day or two to recover, then we’ll talk, brothers.”
“Peace.”
AK watched the two enter the house.
“What you thinking?” I had to ask.
“That I wouldn’t mind not leaving here.” AK was in love with where we were at this moment.
“Me too.” We left the bluff with the sunset at our back. We were back in the world of cars, but tomorrow the beach was ours again and tomorrow was six hours away from today and today was right where it was supposed to be in late June 1974.
California and it was good to be a hippie beach bum, because I was not alone.
