GOODBYES by Peter Nolan Smith

The night over Encinitas was obsessed with the cosmos. Stars spun in colors unknown to Man and the moon glowed green. When the LSD faded from my blood I joined my friends in the bungalow down on the grass behind the bungalow. AK, Pam, Helen, Cuchillo, and Victor were dancing to soul music and drinking wine. Pam poured me a big glass and AK lit a joint.

"That was a trip." Victor sat next to me on the couch. "But I'm confused about that scene at the parking lot. AK told me that he had thrown that hick out of the car in Boston and the two dykes with him were the same as the two from Big Sur."

"A funny coincidence."

Even more so since Bill had tried to rip me off in San Francisco with his junkie friends.

A rock in my hand had stopped the robbery.

"But not so ha-ha." Victor passed me the joint.

"No, not so ha-ha." I shook my head and he handed it to his handsome boyfriend.

"Floe freaked out big time."

"She isn't into violence."

"It as only one punch and that creep deserved it." Pam was sticking up for me. She had hated Bill from the second we picked him up on the Mass Pike

"Not in her mind.

"Let her sleep off the acid. She'll be fine in the morning." Pam reached over to pat my hand.

"I hope so." I downed the wine and filled my glass.

AK let me play DJ.

Every record sounded sad.

Blues, jazz, or rock.

I couldn't get Floe out of my head.

After midnight I went outside to crash on the lawn. The summer air was intoxicated by the fragrance from the nearby flower farms. I buried my face into the sleeping bag. Floe had slept on it for weeks. Her ghost haunted the shadows and I expected her to appear from the darkness.

I fell asleep certain of one simple truth.

Floe wasn't coming here.

SPEAKING WITH SEALS by Peter Nolan Smith

August turned hot in San Diego. Floe and I slept outdoors under the stars. Two sleeping bags served as our mattress and a single sheet covered our bodies throughout the night.

I told her everything.

After recounting the fight with the junkie thieves in Haight-Ashbury, she said,

“You scare me.”

“Why?” I was telling her the truth.

“I left home, because my father beat me. I thought I was possessed by Satan.” She didn’t explain why.

“Was he religious?”

“An Army chaplain.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

"But you have a violent streak.”

“I’m trying to leave it behind.” I held both her hands loosely. “You’re helping me.”

“I can’t be around violence.” This was a warning.

“I’ll never show you any.”

A soft kiss sealed our pact.

We woke to the morning mist melting off the flower fields around the bungalow. Floe and I made love with the dawn.

This heaven was meant to last forever.

Within two weeks forever ended with the last day of summer.

Our hostess’ aunt and uncle were coming home.

Helen said they were cool, but even cool people had a problem with strangers sleeping on their lawn, especially when one of them was only seventeen.

“Rockford wants to heads up to San Francisco.” Floe lay close.

“And do what?” Her friend was a wanderer.

“Play music on the street.”

“And live where?” I had passed through the Haight in June. The hippie era had been replaced by a blight of speed freaks.

“We know some people there. I’d like you to come.”

“I’d like to come too.” I offered another option. “Or you could come with me to Boston.”

“That’s so far away and cold. I don’t like the cold anymore.” She was a child of the sun. Her light brown skin had been toasted golden by the months on the beach. The sun had deposited blonde in her dark curly hair. She was a goddess in my eyes.

“It’s a nice city.” It was a half-truth.

I was white and she was black. Boston wasn’t nice to mixed couple, but I could protect her from any harm. I was half-Irish. My family came from Jamaica Plain. We took care of our own.

“Where would we live?” Her ‘we’ included Rockford. They were only friends, but she owed him for saving her from a bad scene.

“There are cheap houses in Mission Hill. Several hippie communes are in that neighborhood. I’ll drive cab at first and then teach school in October.”

“Sorry, but I don’t think I’m ready to settle down. Not on the East Coast.” California was stronger than her Texas blood.

“We don’t have to decide today.” I was a big believer in putting off the inevitable.

“No, we don’t,” she smiled and caressed my thigh. “Today’s the day. We’ll all trip today.”

“Mark is back?”

Rockford and she had been staying with a professor from San Diego State. His field of study was the effect of LSD on the human mind. The two of them were his guinea pigs. They got $20 a trip.

“With a new patch of LSD-25 from Sandoz.” The Swiss-made acid was the purest in the world.

“Then today is the day.” I pulled her on top of me. She liked it that way.

Afterward we joined the rest of the summer commune in the bungalow. Helen was making omelets.

“LSD is better on an empty stomach,” Rockford said, sipping at green tea.

“Not better.” Floe shook her head. “If your stomach is empty, then it takes half the time for the acid to hit.”

“Fastest with the mostest.” Rockford raised his cup of tea.

“Anyone else following Doctor Rockford’s path.” Helen held two plates in her hands. Vincent and Cuchillo loved her cooking.

“We’re in.”

“Me too.” AK was a hearty eater.

“I’m not tripping, so I’ll have a good breakfast.” Pam wasn’t jeopardizing her nursing career with an acid trip.

“Just toast for me.” I popped two slices in the toaster and turned to Floe, who said, “I’ll have the same as you.”

Rockford went over to the stereo and put on Tim Buckley’s HAPPY SAD.

“Timothy Leary said mind set was as important as setting. We have Moonlight Beach. A setting doesn’t get better than that and I love STRANGE FEELING.”

The opening song of the LP mirrored the atmosphere of an early morning in Southern California. We ate recapping old trips like a sports team preparing for a big game.

A little after ten Rockford rose to his feet.

“Enough talk. Let’s do it.”

We looked at each other. No one was bailing out and we exited from the bungalow. The sky was clearing up and the bouquet of mist off the flowers was a dream to our senses.

After piling into Cuchillo’s Mercedes convertible, Helen drove us down Encinitas Boulevard across the PCH to the bluff overlooking the beach.

Mark was standing in his front yard.

The lanky professor was wearing a seersucker suit. He introduced himself and wrote down our names in a journal.

“I want you to have a good time and don’t freak out if you see me writing down anything. It’s strictly for my research.”

“The CIA tested LSD on soldiers in the 50s.” AK was anti-Pentagon like the rest of us. The Vietnam War was almost over, but the government had been saying that it had been almost over since Nixon took office.

“I’m not with military. I’m more after opening the mind to other worlds.”

“Same as Aldous Huxley.” Looking at his suit I recalled Huxley grooving on the texture of his gray flannel suit. “Will you be tripping?”

“Not today.” He shut the journal. “But I like it. Now this young lady is studying nursing?”

“Yes.” Pam was going to enter her last year of nursing school in the fall.

“And you’re not tripping either?” Mark asked Helen.

“I like my world the way it is.”

“So it will be the five of you. Normally I would prefer you to stay in the house.”

“We want to be on the beach.” Rockford understood the end of the summer meant the break-up of our temporary commune. “I can handle the beach.”

“Swimming can be dangerous on LSD.”

“We’re all good swimmers other than Vincent,” I explained to Mark.

“I have no intentions of going in that ocean. I’ll be grooving on the beach.” The dancer loved the feel of the sand under his feet.

“I won’t stand in your way, but no one is climbing that cliff high. Understood.”

“Yes.” The five of us replied in unison.

The path to the beach was steep. No one wanted to end up in the hospital.

“Then here it is.” Mark handed us each a small slip of paper. “The dose will be 100 micrograms. Basically the same as a grain of sand. The trip should last about 8-10 hours. I’ll be there to help you through any rough moments, but this stuff is very pure. Happy trails.”

We looked at the small white blotters. Vince was first to go, then Cuchillo, Floe, Rockford, me, and lastly AK. Pam was looking at him with disapproval.

“No one has ever died from LSD,” he said after swallowing the tab.

“No, they’ve only gone crazy.” Pam was very straight about drugs.

The newspapers loved reporting stories of trippers staring in the sun for hours, losing their minds, hurting themselves, and crying for hours.

“RD Laing felt that most bad trips are a result of shaking off the trauma of birth, but there’s no proof of that or that anyone ever destroyed their cornea looking into the sun for hours.”

“Newsweek printed that story.” I had read it in 1968.

“And they reported that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked a US navy destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.” AK distrusted any news other than baseball box scores.

“Bad trips do happen,” Mark admitted, but never on this LSD.

“I dropped it ten times this summer.” Rockford opened his hands and said, “And nothing bad ever happened to me.”

“This acid is pure.” Floe was another devotee.

“It’s your picnic.” Pam shrugged to AK. “I don’t want anyone to call me a ‘buzzkill’.”

“No one can say that about you.” AK kissed the blonde. She never nagged him about smoking pot.

“Now that’s out of the way.” Floe held out her tab to me.

I opened my mouth and she put the LSD on my tongue.

“Welcome to the New Church.”

I reciprocated in kind. Cuchillo and Victor put their tabs on their tongues and swapped them with a soul kiss. AK simply flicked his into his mouth.

Victor held out his hand.

Mark gave him another tab.

Victor offered it to Helen.

“Be with us.”

She couldn't refuse the man of her dreams and we applauded her joining the clan.

“I suggest we go to the beach by car.” Mark was playing it safe.

The LSD would take about an hour to hit, two hours to peak to a psychedelic plateau lasting till sunset and then the gradual return to reality.

“Fine with me.” I embraced Floe. She was a good feeling in my life.

Our group divided between Mark’s Saab and Cuchillo’s Mercedes convertible. We listened to Joni Mitchell on the short ride to the Moonlight Beach parking lot.

Weeks ago I had seen the two lesbians with whom I had spent a sordid weekend in Big Sur. They had been with Bill. The drifter and I had fought in San Francisco. He was bad news, but not seeing the girl’s pickup was a good thing and I opened my mind to the world.

Our troupe tramped down the beach to our driftwood shack.

Surfers greeted Mark with hugs and longhaired girls kisses him on the cheek. He was well-liked by everyone and this greeting warmed my heart with a fuzzy glow. We were all part of the great experiment.

“I love it here.” Floe unfolded our blanket. “But there are other places along the coast. I’d like to show you them.”

“I’ve seen Big Sur.”

“Not with me.” She stripped off her top, baring her breasts to the sun. Her body had no tan lines. “And I’m much nicer than those lesbian ax-murderers.”

“Please, no more mention of them.” I grimaced thinking about the three nights lost to their sexual mania. Nymphomania was a dream better left to fantasy.

“Sorry, I won’t bum you out.”

“You never could.” I pulled my shirt over my head and lay on the blanket.

AK and Rockford were respectively playing the African thumb piano and guitar. Floe picked up a tambourine and handed me a kazoo.

“Join us when you feel the mood.”

Moonlight Beach wasn’t a nude beach, but the high cliffs prevented any voyeurs a view of our camp and the police never came down this far from the parking lot. We were free.

Helen, Cuchillo, and Victor peeled down to the state of Adam and Eve. Pam joined them and for the first time I saw what everyone else saw in their mind’s eyes.

Pam possessed the ideal body to satisfy the desire of an American male and probably many females. Her breasts were soft handfuls of flesh tipped by rose nipples and her firm belly curved to an angel tuft of blonde pubic hair separating taut thighs and shapely calves. Even here feet were pretty.’

Her skin crawled with arcane etchings and the sun shadowed runes of lust.

“Stop staring.” Floe whispered without a hint of jealousy.

“I think I just got off.” I turned to Floe.

Her eyes shone a fluorescent green and I grinned with an ignorant understanding of the universe.

“Me too.” Her pupils had consumed her green irises with the hunger of a black hole. “Let’s go let the sea touch us.”

Floe and I rose from the blanket.

The wind off the ocean bore the scent of Arctic brine and the crashing surf revved with the thunder of a herd of Harley-Davidson.

All my other trips had been practice for this day.

A hand unbuttoned my jean shorts. It wasn’t mine.

“We don’t need clothes.” Floe was naked.

We had been sleeping together for almost a month.

“I never saw you before.”

“That’s because before you only looked.” She tugged off my jeans.

They fell to my knees and I kicked free of them.

I was naked.

Floe was naked.

All we wore was the wind.

“Now.”

We dove into the ocean.

It spoke every language of the sea.

I broke to surface and turned to watch my friends charging into the surf.

Millions of years ago we came from the sea.

Today we returned home.

The surfers shouted out a welcome.

Seals popped up their heads from the foam.

Pelicans skimmed the rims of waves.

“Are you feeling anything?” AK treaded water by my side.

“I’m feeling everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.” I was in contact with Alpha Centurai. The extraterrestrial Morse Code borrowed the bassline from Booker T and The MGS. The galaxy embraced the day and I told AK, “It will hit soon. Be prepared.”

“The Boy Scout motto.”

The sun’s dappled reflection prismed on AK’s face. I lost him in the kaleidoscope and swam to Floe.

She bobbed every surge. I joined her. The beach was getting distant.

“We’re caught in a riptide.”

She woke from the trance of eternity.

“Let’s get back to shore. It’s safer there.”

She shouted to Rockford who had been tugged farther out on the unseen stream. His eyes widened in acknowledgement of his situation and he skirted the undertow to a cresting wave. It took him closer to shore. Two seals accompanied him through the surf. Floe and I reached the beach and shook the sea from our flesh.

Beads of water hung in her hair like pearls waiting to melt in the sun.

I popped them between my thumb and index finger.

“My hands was made for this.”

The water rained on her face like tears.

Floe pulled my hands to her breasts. Her nipples were cherry pits after the swim in the cold sea. Goosebumps armored her flesh. My hands were bleached white from the Humboldt Current. Floe’s skin was the color of treasured dust.

We were one.

“Your hands were made for this.”

I couldn’t argue with her logic.

AK, Pam, Rockford, and Cuchillo straggled out of the surf like shipwreck survivors. The swell monstered to triple overhead were and the surfers fought the cruel sea with fearless determination.

Victor came to the water’s edge with eyes blinded to everything, but the young surfers.

“They are Gods.”

“They challenge the Gods.” I had read more Bullfinch’s Mythology than the Bible.

“You really are high.” Pam was right.

“But a nice high.” I kissed Floe.

Her smile fired my heart.

All the cracks melted from it.

“Floe, someone is happy to see you.” Victor pointed at my groin.

“It’s not a sexual erection, but a psychedelic erection.”

They all laughed and we danced up the sloping sand to our driftwood refuge. Helen and Victor were happy to see us.

“Welcome back to land.”

“We have returned from the sea.” Rockford picked up his guitar. He winked at me. “No Beatles.”

“Play what you want.” The LSD had washed away the rejection of a teenage girl in love with Paul McCartney.

AK and Rockford played songs from Monterrey Pop, Woodstock, and Altamont. They reincarnated the 60s.

We sang, we danced, we cried, and we touched the sky.

We stopped our revels, when a seal pup waddled onto the beach. He stared at us with big black eyes. I tried speaking in English and French.

He barked out a command.

I jumped back from his snarling teeth.

“What is he saying?”

“He’s saying the same thing every animal says.” Floe threw the pup an apple. He caught it with circus expertise. “He’s saying that he’s hungry. Sorry, seal, we don’t have any fish.”

The baby seal spit out the fruit and scampered into the surf.

Mark wrote down everything.

I went over to him and stared at his journal.

The words belonged to forgotten race.

“What do you feel?”

“Before everything and now the goodness of the day.” I hugged him. “Thanks.”

“Thank me later.” His smile was a child of the Summer of Love. “Your friends are already saying it.”

I turned my head.

Underneath the bluff Cuchillo, Helen, and Victor were locked in a menage-a-trois. Their three bodies shape-shifted between species and Floe bushwhacked me with a whisper.

“Leave them alone. Be with me.”

“Forever.” Seconds were paralyzed minutes and minutes expanded to hours.

I was peaking.

“Forget forever. I want you now.”

Our embrace carried us to the end of galaxy.

We held our course through the stars.

Our bodies formed a comet.

Its flight brought us back to now.

AK, Rockford and the rest were laughing hysterically.

Sand covered us from head to toe.

“Beach donuts.” Victor was burnt red from the sun.

My flesh felt torched.

Floe was hot to my touch.

At least none of us had stared into the sun.

It was dropping into the Pacific.

The tide was rising up the beach.

I was coming down.

“Home.”

I was exhausted and Floe said, “Not home, but not here.”

I knew where her was and also that I didn’t want this summer to end.

“You asked if I wanted to go north with you.”

“Yes.” Her eyes gleamed with expectation.

“I’m joining the circus.”

Floe threw her arms around me. I lifted her off her feet and we wheeled on the sand around and around until I set her down.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Questions are good answers on LSD.

We put on our clothes and headed for the parking lot.

Traces of the LSD flashed across the cliffs. The Mayans had carved images in the sand. I couldn’t read the hieroglyphics. No one else saw them, but as we approached our cars, Floe said, “Shit.”

I saw why.

Bill and the two lesbians were sitting in the back of the battered pickup truck. The drifter was wearing a leather vest and torn jeans. His beard was coming back. He looked like a deserter from Quantrill’s Legion ready to burn Kansas.

I had told Floe about the fight in the Haight.

She stepped closer to me.

Everyone had heard the story about Joey and Jill in Big Sur.

They stopped walking.

“Well, well.” Bill hopped from the flatbed.

The bruise from my punch had faded from his face.

“Fags, niggers, and Jews.” The southerner cracked his knuckles.

Joey and Jill recognized me.

“The redwoods.”

Their drug had been speed. It still was speed.

Bill licked his lips like a lizard.

Speed made him a brave man.

LSD made us vulnerable.

“When Joey and Jill told me about some guy they fucked in Big Sur, I thought maybe it was you. Then I thought I saw you at Black’s Beach, but Joey said you had a smaller penis, right, Joey?”

“Everyone is small compared to you.” Joey was in love.

Jill didn’t look happy.

She liked women, especially when the only man in their life was Bill.

“So fag boy, how’s fucking a nigger whore.”

I stepped forward with clenched fists.

“Don’t,” begged Floe.

My ears were blind.

Bill raised scarred knuckles.

This was one-on-one.

He bobbed and weaved with cunning.

It was Ali versus Sonny Liston.

I came from Maine.

We don’t believe in boxing.

I slipped a right under his guard and connected with his jaw.

For all this talk Bill was a pug.

He dropped on his ass.

“Do me a favor and keep your hole shut.” I turned to guide Floe past him.

She was running down the beach.

I chased her.

She ran faster.

Waves cut at her feet.

The tide was slapping against the cliff.

Voices shouted out warnings.

“Floe.”

A knee-deep surge knocked her down and sucked her into the ocean.

I grabbed her arm.

“Stay away from me.” She scrambled to her feet. “I told you I didn’t like violence. I told you more than once. I told you about my father. You’re no different than him.”

I had killed three days of Woodstock with a second of Altamont.

The surf swirled up to my thighs.

A path led up the bluff.

Surfers were shouting from above.

“Floe, we have to get out of here.”

I pointed to the cliff.

She snapped out of her trance.

We were in danger.

“Go.”

A wave thundered behind us. I pushed her up the trail. She reached back for me. The sea wanted an offering. I scratched my hands into the dirt and crabbed to safety.

A minute later we were on top of the bluff.

The surfers asked if we were okay.

Floe walked away down 3rd Street.

I wasn’t supposed to follow her.

“Floe.”

She became a shadow in the dusk.

I cried good-bye.

She never saw my tears.

This was a bummer.

“Floe.”

I raised my eyes to the night sky.

The moon rose in the east and meteorites scarred space.

“Floe.”

It was short for something and I knew that I would never know what that was.

I rubbed my knuckles and walked toward the PCH.

Alone.

HIPPIE BEACH BUMS by Peter Nolan Smith

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.