Woodstock Rising

By Tom Wayman

It’s late 1969 and Communist China has successfully launched its first satellite. Inspired by this feat, a group of college students in Laguna Beach, California, set out to put their own satellite into orbit in homage to the recent Woodstock Festival.

A young Canadian graduate student at the University of California finds himself at the centre of the mayhem when he and his friends break into a mothballed missile silo and commandeer everything they need, including a nuclear warhead, to blast the Woodstock Nation into the space age. The activists have big plans for their loot, schemes that may well culminate in the Light Show to End All Light Shows in the Nevada desert.

An extraordinary black comedy shot full of the social and political issues of the time, Woodstock Rising is a coming-of-age tale couched in free love, rock anthems, and revolution as well as a chronicle of an era whose causes continue to speak to us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Sep 28, 2009
• ISBN: 9781770700000

Tom Wayman

Tom Wayman has published 25 previous books, including High Speed Through Shoaling Water, Boundary Country, A Vain Thing, and the 2003 Governor General's Award nominated volume of poems My Father's Cup. He divides his time between the University of Calgary, where he teaches, and his estate in Winlaw, British Columbia.

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WOODSTOCK

RISING

WOODSTOCK

RISING

TOM

WAYMAN

Copyright © Tom Wayman, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Michael Carroll

Design: Erin Mallory

Printer: Marquis

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Wayman, Tom, 1945-

Woodstock rising : a novel / by Tom Wayman.

ISBN 978-1-55002-860-7

I. Title.

PS8595.A9W66 2008 C813’.54 C2008-906209-4

1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

This book is a work of fiction, even the true parts. Locations, events, names, and characters, whether historical or not, are portrayed solely for fictional purposes.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

www.dundurn.com

Dundurn Press

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Dundurn Press

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U.S.A. 14150

For Dennis Saleh: always three steps ahead in words and deed. Also for Peter Nelson, Stuart Peterfreund, and the Arab-Israeli Axis. In memory of James B. Hall, who brought us together. And with admiration and respect for Dr. Michael Klonsky.

* * * * *

The road is long

With many a winding turn

— He Ain’t Heavy by B. Scott and B. Russell, for The Hollies

Contents

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part 2

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Acknowledgements

PART 1

THE ROAD

Chapter 1

I reached the end of the San Joaquin Valley about four o’clock in the afternoon. I had the old Volksie Bug cranked to about sixty-eight or sixty-nine, full throttle, blasting along Interstate 5. South of Bakersfield, I’d begun peering down the freeway through the heat haze to catch that first glimpse of the mountain wall. My shirt was off, I had both windows open, and rills and rivulets of sweat were trickling down my ribs. Every so often I leaned forward to unstick my back from the seat.

As always happened, traffic seemed to materialize out of thin air as we approached ever closer to the start of the climb out of the San Joaquin, that moment after Grapevine when I-5 began its abrupt lift from the valley floor toward Tejon Pass. The highway hadn’t been busy most of the day, except for the usual jam-ups through Sacramento and Fresno. Around Bakersfield an accident had slowed us to a crawl for about ten minutes, but then the road had cleared once more. Lots of cars had ripped past me on the asphalt as the hours ticked by, but I had overtaken my share of slowpoke sedans and strings of tractor trailers. Inevitably, I had felt a rush when I scooted by one of the Los Angeles– Seattle Motor Express rigs. LASME and I shared most of my three-day route, except I had started three hours north of Seattle and would stop a couple of hours south of L.A.

Sweltering weather had been with me since I’d left the Frozen North. The calendar might have turned into September, but nature hadn’t gotten the word. The first night of the drive I had set up my tent in a county park I liked outside Grants Pass, Oregon; the second, the night before, I had camped at Colusa in a state park on the banks of the Sacramento River about ten miles off I-5. Both nights I was broiling while I hammered pegs into the campsite’s tent pad and coaxed the big old canvas umbrella more or less vertical. Then I scummaged together a dinner out of the soggy mess in the cooler — last night, spaghetti. The best moment car camping was when I had the dishwater heating on the hissing Coleman stove. I could officially mark the end of the long day’s run by sitting at the picnic table savouring a cup of coffee out of the instant jar, idly checking the map to review the ground I’d covered and anticipate what tomorrow would bring. Eventually, though, I had to put the coffee aside, wash up, and pack the cooking gear back into the still-heated rear seat and trunk. Once I’d huffed and puffed up my air mattress, I tied down the tent flap from inside. The interior was an oven.

Both nights I read by flashlight for a half-hour, even though it wasn’t completely dark out. I was finishing a book of short stories by Régis Debray, the guy who had argued that Fidel Castro’s guerrilla model for revolution was the path to the future in Latin America. When I stopped reading, I lay naked and sweating on top of my sleeping bag for quite a while, listening to the dim sounds of somebody else arriving at the campground, and the evening bird calls, until I woke in the pitch-black, a little chilled. I crawled into the fart sack, and next I knew it was morning.

When I pulled out of the Colusa campsite and gassed up in Williams, back at I-5, both the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner in their coin boxes had screamers about Ho Chi Minh dying the day before. Heart attack at seventy-nine: I knew Ho was old but was surprised he was that ancient. After I drained the cooler and bought fresh ice, I picked up an Examiner full of speculation about what his death might mean for the war.

As I steered past huge fields and orchards of olive trees, I thought a lot about old Ho. Last year I’d bought a poster of him that displayed, underneath a photo of his head and shoulders, the quote from JFK: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. I recalled a poem of Ho’s I’d seen reprinted about fifteen times in various Movement newspapers and pamphlets:

The wheel of the law turns

without pause.

After the rain, good weather.

In the wink of an eye

the universe throws off

its muddy clothes.

For ten thousand miles

the landscape

spreads out like a beautiful brocade.

Light breezes. Smiling flowers.

High in the trees, amongst

the sparkling leaves

all the birds sing at once.

Men and animals rise up reborn.

What could be more natural?

After sorrow, comes joy.

Actually, I would have welcomed rain, anything to beat the heat as I powered along, all twelve hundred cc’s of the Volksie’s pistons flawlessly performing despite being air-cooled and with only blistering air available. By Sacramento, sweat was dripping off my eyebrows onto my glasses. I tugged out my handkerchief and kept it on the seat beside me to mop my forehead occasionally so the drops wouldn’t interfere with my vision. I knew the heat would moderate once the mighty Bug and I at last were up and over Tejon Pass and down by the Gold Coast’s bright blue sea.

I kept mulling Ho’s death. To go like that in the middle of the war. Lots of people had died in the war, of course, but it would have been great if he had lived to see the outcome. I started to sing, accompanied by the thrum of the tires and the pulse of the engine, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? I followed that ballad of mournful resignation with a couple of Joan Baez tunes — Gospel Ship and Matty Groves. Then I serenaded the car’s cabin with Ian & Sylvia’s You Were on My Mind. I didn’t have much of a musical voice, but since there was nobody in the vehicle but me, who cared? It was either sing or fiddle with the radio dial to find a station with a signal strong enough to last more than ten minutes as I rocketed by. And singing helped the miles disappear.

My thoughts kept returning to how Ho would never learn how the war ended. Last March, a little more than a year after the first big Tet Offensive, the National Liberation Front had again come close to taking Saigon. In mid-June, Richard Nixon had declared he would pull a hundred thousand U.S. troops out of Nam by the end of the year, since, he claimed, the South Vietnamese army was doing such a fine job. Everybody was aware Nixon’s announcement was a shuck: probably he was calling the standard troop rotations a withdrawal. A hundred thousand out, you bet, but a hundred and fifty thousand in. More than half a million were now on the ground, and there was no sign of any de-escalation of the fighting and bombing. I sang as much as I could remember of Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth:

There’s battle lines being drawn.

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.

Young people speakin’ their minds,

Gettin’ so much resistance from behind.

It’s time we stop, children,

What’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s goin’ down.

What a field day for the heat.

A thousand people in the street,

Singin’ songs and carryin’ signs.

Mostly saying, Hooray for our side.

It’s time we stop, children,

What’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s goin’ down.

I swung around a tanker truck carrying milk, to judge from the exhortations painted on its side urging everyone to drink more moo. I remembered the article in the Los Angeles Times in June, the week after Nixon swore again he was scaling down the war. I’d just gotten back from Chicago and was about to return to the Frozen North for the summer. An L.A.-area dairy had won a huge contract to supply the U.S. forces in South Vietnam. Like we chanted at demonstrations: War is good business. Invest your son.

All morning as I drove, Ho’s death surfaced and receded in my thoughts. Naturally, I was also wondering what the fall would bring in the way of actions I’d be involved in to oppose the war. Despite the heavy factional dispute at the Students for a Democratic Society national convention, in the din of that giant hall in Chicago, I was confident we had now cleared the air internally. The organization would be able to confront the causes of the war more effectively than ever. Still, I couldn’t wait to rap with Emma and Bruce and Kathy and the rest to figure out how our SDS chapter should deal with the big changes arising from the June convention.

I spent quite a few miles, too, speculating as well on what the fall term would hold for me academically. I had to complete the M.A. by spring. My degree originally was supposed to be a two-year deal, and what with various distractions and makeup courses, I was about to start my fourth year. I had finished additional pages of the thesis during the summer, but not nearly as many as I had hoped. My job the past two months had been three shifts a week as a summer-replacement reporter for the Vancouver Sun, British Columbia’s major daily. This part-time arrangement was supposed to let me also focus on research and writing my dissertation. Close to thirty new pages were in the cardboard box labelled school in the Volksie’s trunk, but I had intended to accomplish twice that number.

My shifts for the city desk were the night trick — 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. After work a bunch of us invariably would go over to the all-night Sportsman Café on Dunsmuir Street for coffee and pie and a good yak. Most mornings I wouldn’t get back to the house until dawn, which pretty well screwed up the next day for making progress on the thesis. I considered yet again what to tell Dr. Bulgy, my thesis supervisor, about my retarded progress. Plus, on Friday, during my last shift of the summer, the night city editor had beckoned me over and conveyed the message that management — which meant Herman the German, the managing editor known more for his temper than his talents — felt strongly that if I wanted a career at the Sun I better return in the spring, degree in hand or not, prepared to work full-time. In short, they weren’t going to carry me with this summer part-time gig another year.

I assured myself I was used to deadlines. Yet I couldn’t help brooding on how I better tuck down and complete the damn degree. I attempted to snap myself out of my preoccupation with my occupational future — and prevent myself slipping into an equally absorbing, though just as unproductive, calculation about where I might stand with Janey — by breaking into the Kingston Trio’s Buddy, Better Get on Down the Line. Since I was in that groove, despite manoeuvring through a stretch of heavy traffic approaching Stockton, I warbled the boys’ plaintive Colorado Trail. Noting mileage signs for Salinas and Monterey, I let loose with their San Miguel, followed by South Coast. At a rest stop between Modesto and Merced, I hauled my cooler over to a picnic table and ate lunch. Then it was on once more through the steamy valley day. About when I decided I was doomed to parboil on the freeway before arriving anywhere, a line of distant clouds resolved themselves into mountains — first tinted a faint azure, but after another twenty minutes displaying the dry summertime brown of the un-irrigated California hills.

An extra lane abruptly materialized on the right. Now the road began to be crowded with clusters of cars and trucks as we raced toward the ascent marking the gateway to the fabled L.A. Basin, to the Southland. An additional lane, and another, merged onto the roadway. We were eight lanes abreast as we lost the big rigs for a few minutes while they docilely exited for an inspection station. Then the files of tractor trailers rejoined our pack of accelerating cars, vans, and pickups as we began to rise toward paradise.

Earlier, I had become a little bored with my own voice and with my brain churning over the war, the year ahead, and Janey. As I pounded past Bakersfield, I had shifted the radio dial through Buck Owens and Merle Haggard until I hit the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Woman, which had been number one in the Frozen North when I’d left. At the start of the climb toward Tejon, grooves in the pavement after the Grapevine exit caused my tires to throb loudly and rhythmically. The Bakersfield DJ announced another golden gasser from three years ago, the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love. Their four-four drumbeat matched perfectly the tempo of the track my tires were laying down — dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum:

I need love, love,

To ease my mind.

I need to find, find,

Someone to call mine.

A chill of awe and excitement swept up the back of my arms and neck. I was in the thick of it now, pedal to the floor, gunning sixty-five miles per hour up amid a forest of huge trucks on every side while maniac sedans and sports cars screamed by me left and right, or loomed behind, jockeying through the dense flow of other vehicles for a shot at an open expanse of blacktop.

But mama said:

"You can’t hurry love.

No, you just have to wait."

She said: "Love don’t come easy,

It’s a game of give and take."

A tractor hauling a train of two semi-trailers lurched unexpectedly into my lane inches in front of me to avoid a slow-moving van pulling a large boat. I braked hard to save my life, glanced in my mirror en route to a lightning-quick shoulder check, then swayed around the rig. The Supremes were confessing:

Right now the only thing

That keeps me hanging on

When I feel my strength,

Yeah, it’s al-most gone,

I remember mama said:

"You can’t hurry love.

No, you just have to wait."

She said: "Love don’t come easy,

It’s a game of give and take."

A gaudily coloured Volkswagen microbus chugged alongside to my left, a mass of flowers depicted on its side as it swept upward with the rest of us toward the summit. The bus momentarily held station beside me. Through its open passenger window, I watched the long-haired driver take a deep pull on a hand-rolled cigarette or joint. From how he held the smoke in, no question it was a doobie. The driver handed the number across to his equally long-haired and bearded buddy beside him. The passenger held up the joint in front of him to contemplate its pleasures while he struggled to retain smoke. For some reason he glanced at me.

When I registered with the passenger, his face broke into a huge grin. Maybe he recognized a fellow freak, though I’d had my hair trimmed and had cut back my beard to ease my transition across the border at Blaine, where I had to produce my student visa papers. Or maybe as the microbus had overtaken me he had read my rear bumper stickers.

END CANADIAN COMPLICITY IN THE VIETNAM WAR was one I had affixed there. The Frozen North was a member of the International Control Commission that supposedly monitored violations of the 1954 Indochina ceasefire. That arrangement had established the two Vietnams on either side of the Seventeenth Parallel when the French were kicked out. The current war was unquestionably one big violation of the peace agreement, yet Canada never squawked.

My other bumper adornment had been purchased by Thad, probably the gutsiest member of our SDS chapter at UC Irvine. He had obtained twenty copies from the local John Birch Society and handed them out at the first of our weekly meetings last semester. The sticker featured a drawing of the UC Berkeley campanile and the advice: GO TO COLLEGE. LEARN TO RIOT. The Birchers intended the slogan as satire, but I had no problem with the literal meaning. Given that the Birchers’ message was situated next to the anti-war statement, my endorsement of what the Birchers meant as a complaint was evident. I was once pulled over by a California Highway Patrol black-and-white outside Corona del Mar, and the cop seemed plenty choked, even though I hadn’t been speeding or anything. He was probably a Bircher himself, who took a dim view of the display of their material by some hippie radical. He ticketed me for not having a passenger-side outside mirror, mandatory — according to him — under California law. The citation didn’t make sense, since I had B.C. plates and a B.C. driver’s licence, and I knew California didn’t impose its vehicular regulations on every tourist visiting the Golden State. I threw the ticket away and nothing happened.

The Supremes were assuring one another:

No love, love,

Don’t come easy.

But I keep waiting,

Anticipating,

For that soft voice

To talk to me at night,

For some tender arms

To hold me tight.

I observed to my surprise that the passenger’s head and then upper torso were emerging through the window of the microbus racing alongside me. In the heat and roar of the traffic we were rounding an ever-ascending curve. The passenger’s left hand gripped some handhold inside the cabin, while the asphalt tore past beneath his precariously positioned body. At the end of his straining form his right arm unfolded in my direction. The hand at the end of his extended arm proffered the joint. The hairy face at the other end of the arm was one big beaming invitation.

I waved the doobie off. This would be too weird, toking up vehicle-to-vehicle as we powered up past Tejon Ranch toward the Pass. My benefactor gestured at me with the joint a couple of times as if to ask, You sure? I yelled my Thanks, anyway, took my hands off the wheel, and pretended to steer to indicate I didn’t want to smoke while I was driving. He caught my meaning, shrugged, and made a wry Okay, man face. A moment later he retracted himself into the front seat of the bus and flashed me the peace sign. I returned it, then added the power-to-the-people fist to show that peace and love were all very fine, but something more was needed to bring about the changes we all wanted. He nodded, but gave me the peace sign again as he sucked once more on the joint. The Supremes were still insisting:

"You can’t hurry love.

No, you just have to wait."

She said to trust, give it time,

No matter how long it takes.

We crested the summit. The highway now cut across fifty miles of arid mountain wilderness that would end at the rim of the San Fernando Valley. There I’d pick up I-405, the San Diego Freeway, which would lead me down through the San Fernando range and then up over the Santa Monica Mountains into L.A. proper. The microbus had vanished ahead, as the moon-like landscape shot past in a series of rapid climbs and even faster lengthy descents. Miniature green towns that seemed all palms and mall and gas stations broke up the tawny, shimmering landscape. Strangest to me were the signs that informed the motoring public we were in the Angeles National Forest. Not a tree visible for twenty miles, only some scrubby mesquite bushes scattered amid the baking rocks.

The Supremes’ song and my ever-more-impending arrival at the Gold Coast had focused my mind on Janey. I felt a surge of delightfully anxious anticipation: only hours or at most days until I saw her. She was an undergraduate who had been in an upper-division Contemporary European History course with me last year. She was stunning, gorgeous, with blondish-brown long hair, dangling earrings, and a body that could have been in Playboy. She wore miniskirts and skimpy tops — usually with no bra, so talking to her you could enjoy her nipples rising into view and subsiding, although you weren’t supposed to notice such things.

To be honest, we didn’t have a lot in common. She didn’t have an opinion on much of anything, even the war, although she wasn’t a supporter. Nor did she express much about what she wanted to do with her life. I wasn’t sure she even knew where the Frozen North was. But she didn’t refuse when I patched together enough courage to ask her to one of our parties at Guantanamero Bay. I had undertaken an intelligence sweep, first by questioning Remi’s girlfriend Meg, as obliquely as I could, what she knew about Janey’s status. I had found out Meg knew Janey from Orange County College before both transferred over to UC Irvine in their junior year. Meg told me Janey had broken up with her boyfriend and wasn’t particularly seeing anybody. But still I dithered about asking her out until early April.

She didn’t seem like the type who would ever be interested in somebody like me whose only claim to fame was being a grad student. Yet she agreed to accompany me to the party, and I think she had an okay time. In any case, we went out twice more: once we took in a movie at the Port Theater in Corona del Mar, and another time went to Sid’s Blue Beat on the Balboa Peninsula with some other history grad students for a meal. I still couldn’t figure out whether she was interested in me or not. Our end-of-date goodbyes were pretty stiff — a hug and a peck. Maybe she was waiting for me to make the first move. Or maybe she was simply heeding that Ann Landers advice I read once. A single woman who had been invited on a date by a guy she didn’t much care for asked Ann if she should accept the invitation. Go with the creep and look over the crop was Ann’s suggestion, which I thought pretty cold.

I had written Janey on a slow night in the Sun newsroom as soon as I got back to Vancouver. Before I left campus I had asked for, and she’d given me, the address of her folks in Fullerton where she would be spending the summer. To my surprise, she sent a letter right back, so I wrote her again. Her letter wasn’t particularly warm, but not a brush-off, either — just sort of newsy. My second letter to her was in mid-July. Since then I’d received a postcard in August from Santa Barbara, where she had an aunt with a place near the beach that Janey visited every year. I was hoping my absence had made her heart grow fonder. But I wasn’t counting on it. Probably she’d fallen madly in love with somebody in Fullerton over the summer. As I used to tell Remi, I absorbed a ton of pleasure merely staring at Janey. If she was around the History Department again this year, I’d get more of that, even if she wasn’t inclined to continue whatever it was we had going.

I tried hard in July and August not to obsess about her. I had dared to ask out an astonishingly beautiful girl, yet didn’t know how to increase the ante, or even if she wanted me to. Maybe, given our lack so far of anything resembling a communion of souls, the question was: physical considerations aside, did I want more to happen between us? Meantime, simply picturing Janey, let alone festering about what might or might not develop, was another means to while away the miles.

I signalled, and at the risk of my life, started to ease across the various lanes of speeding vehicles to accomplish the exit to I-405. Minutes later the Volksie was roaring through the built-up areas of the San Fernando Valley, a jumble of eucalyptus and palm trees, rooftops, and surface streets lined with businesses stretching off under the freeway. Then the climb out of the valley over the green Santa Monica Mountains. And from the top of that rise, there it was, extending in the haze below in every direction farther than eye could travel or mind could imagine: El Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles.

My radio had picked up 93 KHJ just before we blasted over the final ridge. I knew there was no point tuning in XERB, Mighty Ten Ninety, Fifty Thousand Watts of Soul Power. The mad excitement of XERB’s DJ Wolfman Jack wouldn’t be happening till late in the evening, with his all-black-except-for-the-Stones playlist, his crazed bellows of Haaave Mercy, his shilling for Ziegler and Ziegler’s alligator shoes, and his abrupt termination of conversations with on-air callers via an explosive Baaah — his pronunciation of Bye. KHJ’s DJs, the Boss Jocks, were meagre fare compared to the Woofman, as he referred to himself. Nevertheless, the moment I crested the Santa Monicas and dropped toward Westwood, KHJ serendipitously spun The Doors’ Break on Through to the Other Side. The urgent drum riff kicked it off, followed by a sequence of jingly notes on electric piano, succeeded by the same run on electric guitar. Then the whole band crashed into line behind Jim Morrison’s fervent:

You know the day destroys the night,

Night divides the day.

Tried to run,

Tried to hide:

Break on through to the other side,

Break on through to the other side,

Break on through to the other side, yeah.

The Other Side was pulling out all the stops. As the cranked-up traffic on 405 accelerated deeper into the heart of L.A., visible ahead toward the ocean was an immense plume of black smoke pouring upward and spreading east. Shades of Watts: was L.A. burning? Vehicles bunched and slowed past the airport in the tail end of rush hour, and I could see the column of smoke was heavier toward El Segundo. An oil tank farm in flames? Waterborne Vietcong frogmen bringing the war home to America? KHJ was airing In the Year 2525, a whiny song I didn’t much care for, so I flipped around the dial, trying to pick up a news broadcast that accounted for the fire. I got some evangelical enthusiasm: "This is not our home. I say again: This is not our home." Also chatter in Spanish, and lots of car ads. I almost rammed into a truck when I glanced up from changing the station to observe that the lane I was in had stopped moving. But I wasn’t any the wiser about the blaze.

Past Long Beach, black cloud behind me now, the freeway unclogged. When I departed the Gold Coast in June, the official estimate was that the San Diego Freeway would be pushed southward to at least MacArthur Boulevard by the end of summer. I decided to explore another day how far construction had actually reached and exited 405 where I usually did at Harbour Boulevard. After Harbour merged into Newport Boulevard, I powered down that until it teed at Pacific Coast Highway. I turned left.

The evening air was noticeably cooler by the water, and at a stop light on PCH I reached across and wound up the passenger window. I felt I should park for a moment and put on a shirt. This close to Laguna, though, I was anxious to reach my destination after the long, hot day in the saddle. I glanced up MacArthur Boulevard as I putt-putted by, thinking how after the weekend I’d be headed there to campus to reconnect with Janey, Professor Bulgy, the latest developments in SDS, and of course to start the two seminar courses I had signed up for this term. As well, I needed to check in with the university’s Information Office in case they could use me as a PR writer again this year. MacArthur Boulevard looked as it had when I left, except the four-lane was bathed in golden light from the sunset streaming between the palms and stores of Corona del Mar. At the junction of MacArthur and PCH, the Zoo Restaurant — famous for its half-pound of fries with every burger — appeared busy as ever.

Then I was out among the wheat-coloured hills of the Irvine Ranch that rolled down to greet the Pacific. To my right, the sinking sun glittered off rows of combers. Immediately before Laguna was a cove like an illustration in a travel brochure: a half-circle of house trailers set back amid palms along a wide, sandy crescent where high surf was breaking. I caught the reflected light off some boards in the water. Then I was steering by LAGUNA BEACH CITY LIMITS: pop. 12,510. Moments later I slowed to signal left onto Cajon Street, gearing into low to help the Volksie pant up the steep last fifty yards. I cut the engine by the mailbox at the top of the driveway to 283.

Clambering out of the car, I stood. The air was fragrant with citrus perfumes, thick with the sea and the moaning of doves. In the quiet spaces between the traffic rumbling along PCH, I could hear the barking of seals on the rocks at Shaw’s Cove, a few blocks below the highway.

I had found this two-storey rental cottage when I arrived at UC Irvine for my second year of grad studies. I occupied the upper floor for the school term, and in July and August the owners, who lived in Altadena, rented my apartment for as much per week as I paid per month.

The driveway down to the building was densely enclosed by banana palms, purple-and-red bougainvillea flowers, and additional subtropical foliage I couldn’t identify. An expanse of ice plant formed the shoulders of the pavement, which was used only as a walkway due to its nearly vertical descent. The past year a couple I knew from UCI had rented the bottom half of the cottage — he was a grad student in English. They were supposed to renew their lease this year like me, though there was no indication they had arrived back yet. At the bottom of the stairway up to my deck, an orange tree burdened with fruit promised me a juicy welcome home for tomorrow’s breakfast. The lemon tree nearby was laden with samples of its offerings each three times the size of any I could buy in the Frozen North. I climbed the steps, crossed the deck, and dug out of my wallet the key the landlords had mailed me a couple of weeks ago — on receipt of my first month’s cheque. The door opened into the stuffy living room.

I rented the place furnished, so it didn’t take me long to get settled. Before I began humping my stuff down from the Bug, I strode through the beamed front room toward the dining nook in the southwest corner of the place. Two large windows were shut together at right angles, and I pushed them open wide. Below, the view was the lane between Cajon and the adjacent street. But when I raised my eyes above cascades of flowering bushes in the neighbours’ backyards, the distant horizon line marked where ocean met sky. The house began to fill with the sea breeze.

Half an hour later I had the tent airing, draped over the porch rails and deck furniture. My portable typewriter and boxes of books were in the bedroom, which also featured a built-in desk. I’d dug out my Ho poster and a couple of other inspirational ones, and thumbtacked them to various walls. In the kitchen I excavated the interior of my cooler and stowed away in fridge and cupboards the food left over from the trip. Then I cobbled together a quick meal. While I ate I watched the last of the sun slip under the water.

I should have been exhausted. Instead I was buzzed from having arrived at last and unpacked. The phone couldn’t be hooked up until tomorrow, so there was no point in considering phoning Janey or anyone. A pay phone outside the liquor store just down PCH from Cajon was available, except I wasn’t sure if Janey was still at her folks’ in Fullerton, or had checked into residence on campus, or had decided to rent off-campus this year. I didn’t even know if we had the kind of friendship that would warrant a phone call the moment I reappeared in the area. I determined to wait until I saw her at school next week. My immediate plan was to stretch my legs, head over to Guantanamero Bay, and see if anybody was around. If not, I’d stop in at Beach Liquors to pick up a bottle of Almaden red, toast my return to the Gold Coast, and call it a night.

Chapter 2

Evening light remained in the sky as I ambled down Cajon, darted across the highway, and strolled toward Shaw’s Cove. The heat of the day had considerably lessened, so before leaving my place I had slipped on over my T-shirt my usual cool weather attire in the Southland — a Canadian army field jacket. Many people around campus wore pieces of surplus military uniforms, but I guessed I had the only Canadian gear around. The khaki combat jacket displayed my SDS button over the left breast pocket, and a Mao button attached to the right.

As I neared Shaw’s Cove, the barks of the seals were louder, and I could hear the measured, relentless breaking of the surf. Chirping of various birds mixed with the coo-cooing of doves. I took deep breaths, relishing the bouquet of spicy scents from vegetation that crowded the front yards of homes along the streets.

Guantanamero Bay was a rambling wooden house above the beach that Edward and some others had rented the previous year and that Edward had managed to hang on to through the high-rent period of the summer. How the latter feat was accomplished was mysterious, but Edward himself was professionally mysterious. He was a few years older than most of us grad students, which made him twenty-six or twenty-seven. The degree he was pursuing was either in fine arts or anthropology, or maybe some combination. He was difficult to pin down. His favoured attire was Hawaiian shirts, and he may or may not have previously operated an art gallery in Honolulu, depending on what he hinted at different times. I can neither confirm nor deny my ownership of an art gallery on the Islands, he would respond when pressed for a definitive answer. He did admit to growing up in Encinitas, north of San Diego.

Edward had dubbed the house Guantanamero Bay, a conflation of the name of the U.S. military base on Cuba, Guantánamo Bay, and the title of the folksong "Guantanamera" made popular by Pete Seeger. The song, Edward had explained once, was based on a poem by the nineteenth-century Cuban revolutionary hero José Martí. No one quite got Edward’s point — was he pro-Cuban, which meant being, like me, pro-Castro and a fan of the late Che Guevara? Edward certainly was anti-war, having participated in a couple of demonstrations that I knew of. Yet he belonged to no peace or radical organizations. He merely smiled his mysterious smile when anyone asked him about his motivation for the name. His sports car, an old English TR-6, boasted a sticker: FIDEL, Sí. CASTRO, NO.

Still, Guantanamero Bay was party central for the group of Irvine grad students I ran with. The large living room at the Bay was made for dancing. I’d hosted a couple of blowouts at my place, but Cajon Street’s front room was about half the size of the Bay’s. Plus I hated cleaning up the spilled beer and wine and chips and salsa and unidentified other goop the morning after. The air inside reeked of cigarette smoke for the next few days, despite open windows and doors.

Wherever the party was, however, we had developed the habit of rocking out until the cops arrived. The Laguna police at the door — always in pairs — invariably explained that whereas their peace could not by law be disturbed, a noise complaint had been duly registered by a neighbour and we had to shut down the music immediately. They never failed to warn that they would not take kindly to having to return a second time on the same complaint. The cops, whether big or average-size, invariably looked like what they probably were — ex-Marines. Their close-cropped hair, large sidearms, and weighty equipment belts clashed fundamentally with the shoulder badges of Laguna’s finest: an artist’s palette. The city regarded itself as an art colony and wanted even its law-enforcement division to reflect this image.

By the time the police showed, one of our group, Alan, a grad student in psychology, would be drunk and belligerent toward anybody he thought was an affront to his dignity. A vital task of the party host was thus to simultaneously mollify the cops and attempt to rein in Alan. Alan was not a large guy, coming up to maybe the middle of the cops’ chests. He wasn’t the Alan Ladd type, either, with his incipient potbelly and a scraggly goatee. But if not headed off, he’d be out on the doorstep prepared to hassle the representatives of law and order about our right to enjoy ourselves and inquiring what kind of person would want to make a living going around bothering people who were simply having fun. The police seemed to regard him as a yappy terrier, and no threat. The risk was that he’d say exactly the wrong thing to a cop having a bad night and provoke some incident that would endanger everybody. Due to the various chemicals being inhaled, swallowed, and snorted at the gathering, the last thing you’d want would be for the police to decide that the situation called for them to enter the premises.

A corollary problem involving Alan was that, if the scene at the door featuring him, the host, and the police went on long enough, certain other party-goers swacked on some legal or illegal substance would stagger forward to see if they could resolve the situation. The worst offender was Myron, one of the English grad students and a pal of Alan’s. A couple of times Myron had insisted on mediating, as he put it, between Alan and a cop. In Myron’s alcohol-sodden condition, such intervention simply multiplied the chances of incensing the authorities. Edward was much better than I was at deflecting or muzzling the likes of Alan or Myron while assuring the police that the neighbours’ peace would be promptly restored.

Tense moments at the front door or not, the rear of Guantanamero Bay boasted a large, open covered porch overlooking the cove, a wonderful place to cool out when you were drenched in sweat from a spell of dancing. A path led sharply down below the porch to the sand, a perfect arrangement for slipping off into the moonlight for a while with somebody you intended to get close to. Not that I’d ever done that: mostly I danced with whoever was sitting this one out, except the time I brought Janey to a party. But forgoing use of the beach in this manner didn’t stop me from appreciating the porch as a spot to reduce your body temperature after rocking through several cuts on a Stones album or, a couple of hours into the party, stomping through the full six minutes and thirty seconds of The Doors’ Light My Fire.

On a night with a full moon, the view from the porch was itself worth taking a breather to witness. Rows of huge cumulous clouds were often borne in from the Pacific, their puffy surfaces luminous in the moonlight. The eerie airborne structures resembled enormous white galleons arriving from another planet.

Besides Edward, the other steady inhabitant of Guantanamero Bay was Willow, an art major at Irvine. She and Edward were housemates, rather than boyfriend-girlfriend. Beach houses were more expensive to rent than the cottages I and the other students obtained in Laguna or back up the highway on the Balboa Peninsula or Balboa Island, or apartments in Costa Mesa. Edward required additional residents like Willow to defray costs. She was everyone’s image of a surfer girl: thin, fit, long blond hair, and out on the water with her board every chance she got. Whether she was in her bikini around the house, or in her wetsuit climbing down the path to Shaw’s Cove beach, she was heart-stopping lovely. Her breasts weren’t particularly large, but she was perfectly proportioned and moved with such grace she could have been a delicate onshore wind. She was always pleasant to talk to, interested in what was happening with you. Edward said she could be moody to live with, but I never knew when he was being contrary or when he was accurate.

As with Janey, Willow was a delight merely to stare at. When she swayed across the living room in the afternoon South Coast light, with the sound of the surf rising from the beach through an open window while birds twittered from the oleanders and fan palms, the air scented with pungent eucalyptus and perhaps a sandalwood incense stick burning in the room, this feast for the senses brought to mind the opening guitar chords of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Coconut Grove. The song’s tune and lyrics proceeded as languorously but inexorably as Willow’s locomotion, or as combers curling onto sand:

Don’t bar the door. There’s no one comin’.

The ocean’s roar will dull the drummin’

Of any city thoughts or city ways.

The ocean’s breezes cool my mind,

The salty days are hers and mine

Just to do with what we want to.

Tonight we’ll find a dune that’s ours

And softly she will speak the stars

Until sun-up.

It’s all from havin’ some one knowin’

Just which way your head is blowin’,

Who’s always warm like in the morning

In Coconut Grove.

Willow had a boyfriend, Phil, who lived up in Venice. They’d visit back and forth. I’d met Phil a couple of times at Guantanamero Bay: he was a surfer, too, and seemed a nice guy, though I had never ascertained if he was interested in anything much beyond the location of the best reef or shore break, or what had occurred the last time he shot the pier at Huntington. He was tanned almost mahogany, and even his muscles had muscles. Phil was a ringer for the after panel in Charles Atlas’s before and after bodybuilding advertising — the photo slightly retouched with blond hair slicked back wet from a day’s surfing, a Hawaiian shirt like Edward’s, and a trim moustache. I never saw Phil at our parties.

Willow, too, was usually absent from those events. Edward said she didn’t care for parties much and decamped to Venice when we had one scheduled for the Bay. As always, I didn’t necessarily believe Edward: maybe she simply didn’t like our parties. I was never clear how she and Edward had ended up sharing a place. Had he met her through his art classes, if indeed he really was studying fine arts? Or did he know her from Hawaii? Once she had spoken about her parents living on the big island, so maybe that was somehow the connection with Edward, if indeed he really had operated a gallery in Hawaii. Being in art, she also knew Meg, Remi’s girlfriend, so there could have been a link there.

Not that it mattered; Willow was part of the ambience of the Bay, as were a couple of male housemates. The latter were acquaintances of Edward’s, although never Irvine students. During the past year, these individuals had shared the rent for a few months, then disappeared. Later you encountered their replacements drinking beer on the porch and were introduced. When you inquired after the former inhabitants, Edward was vague about their whereabouts.

The one cryptic letter from Edward I’d received during the summer said that Phil was temporarily living at the Bay since he’d been hired by a roofing company in Costa Mesa. I was curious, as I rounded the corner onto Cliff Drive, if Phil would still be there, or if he and Willow had maybe gotten a place together closer to his work up in Newport or Costa Mesa itself.

Edward’s TR was parked at the curb in front of the Bay. A Ford Econoline van and a Chevy four-door sedan rested on the short paved drive leading to the garage. I didn’t recognize the other vehicles; the van had a FTA bumper sticker. The initials, I knew, stood for Fuck the Army. There was no sign of Willow’s microbus, but perhaps she’d traded it in for the van. The Chevy wouldn’t work for her without roof racks to carry boards.

A light was on in the living room, and Edward answered my knock on the door. Wayman, he said, his face brightening when he saw me. You’re back. His brown hair was impeccably cut as usual, and he wore crisply pressed shorts and a red Hawaiian shirt decorated across the midsection with a broad