Pacific Drift

By Richard Weaver

Dawn over the Arroyo Seco (the Rose Bowl) finds two homeless buddies starting their day with a boot kick in the ass and the security patrol order to “Move on!”

Wiggie and Fargone take the reader on a day’s and night’s journey inside their meandering lives, filled with whimsy, humor, bravado, compassion and the daily rounds of surviving on the streets of the glass and steel canyons of the late 1970s.

Their story ties in with a Bel Air entrepreneur club owner, an Afro-American grad student employed by the club, a classmate of the black grad student whose life is intertwined by young, immigrant female housekeepers and the unexpected outcomes of these relationships coming full circle and reconnecting with the homeless men as they decide to leave LA.

The stories are fictional but based on some of the “real” people I encountered during my life as a City of Angels wannabe artist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Weaver
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370999859

Richard Weaver

Richard ‘Rick’ Weaver’s first fiction piece, Rumble, was selected for his high school literary magazine. His second work of fiction, The Infinity Man, a sci-fi movie script, won a second place award from American Pen Women in Sacramento. But the two works were over sixteen years apart. Why?“I loved action-mystery stories. I spent solitary winter afternoons reading kids fiction classics. In high school and university, of all writers perhaps John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler and playwright Tennessee Williams most influenced me.My eclectic tastes ranged from classic horror to epic Russian novels. Film, however, became the medium that most attracted me. Great war novels adapted to films like From Here to Eternity, The Young Lions, The Bridges at Toko-Ri and All Quiet on the Western Front as well as novels like The Naked and The Dead and A Rumor of War also proved influential in my literary development.During those sixteen years however, I never considered writing as a profession. I served in the military as an officer including a tour of duty during the Vietnam War. Afterwards, I worked in a variety of jobs from teaching to telephone sales to performing arts. It wasn’t until I wrote children’s puppet plays that developing my abilities as a professional writer seemed possible.”Earning an MFA degree in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California, Richard started pursuing that career. Unfortunately, he had been exposed to toxins in the war. In mid-life the full force of those chemical elements hit him as blindness rolled in, a chalky white fog. Forced to leave his professional employment, he set about learning entirely new skill sets to cope with the loss of sight. It took years until he began writing again.Today, using computer screenreading technology, the software enables him to write a variety of fiction including short stories, novellas, scripts and novels, which he loves the most.Pacific Drift – City of Canyons is his first eBook in this new series of novellas. It is loosely based on life in Los Angeles from the 1970s forward.Richard lives near a rustic, California beach town.You’re invited to visit his website: www.surfsidepress.comThere you can:*download his other writings*read blog posts*view his photographs*explore a palette of art, publishing and writing links*offer/share your critiques, comments or ask questions via the E-mail Contact Form

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PACIFIC DRIFT

Richard Weaver

Pacific Drift

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 Richard Weaver

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

For information about the contents of this book, or permission for reproducing portions of this book, please email the author at [e-mail].

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States of America

Prologue

The canyons wind around L.A. Tujunga. Coldwater. Laurel. Bel Air. Benedict. Malibu.

Carved by wind, rain, flood.

There be other canyons in L.A. shaped by iron, steel, glass. The Santa Ana winds know them. And the drifters who blow through.

I one of them. WG.

Part One

Summer 1978

Arroyo Seco

One

Horse with No Name rolls out of the portable radio next to his head, sleeping as he done in the shadow of the Rose Bowl. Wednesdays and Fridays at the Bowl. Safer here. Coyotes wander in but no danger he says.

He, sleeping so deep and rich like it was a Swedish bed, goose feathers stuffed.

Sleeping like he was king of the thirty-nine yard line.

Saturdays he told nobody where he lay his head.

Sundays you’d catch a back of his tore Army fatigues beneath the Santa Monica Pier. He’d scrounge for cig butts, lost wallets, jewelry, any pawnables fell off the boardwalk overhead.

Tuesdays and Thursdays in the dry brush behind the lion’s cages at the zoo. He got himself a lean-to. Said learnt it somewhere. I’m thinking Scouts. Says he don’t know. Says the smells of the lions keep all the varmints away.

Mondays he’s in church. That monster church with the gold dome. I seen it from the freeway on the bus.

But Saturdays is secret. Disappears like a fox down a hole. Tried followin’ once. Lost me Vine and Melrose. Runs through traffic to a bus headed in the opposite way.

So, I moves toward a taco man sells homemade tacos and dope. Sees him wrap a dollar bag in a tamale husk. I picks his trash, got me a whole tamale. Lucky.

At the Seco now. Sun’s beatin’ hard on him. Beatles Norwegian Wood, smoothin’ outta the little radio.

A big man with a gun at his side slams his boot into the back of petrified sleeping man.

Move out, scumbags, the man yells at us.

Get a life, petrified man yells, lets a fart. Worse smell than Brea tar pits. Groans, curses, for sleep easy guy and the radio blows Sinatra’ Summer Wind.

Mother Fuckering L.A. Day, shouts sleeping man.

Everybody hoots.

Move out assholes, the big man in neon blue shouts. He lifts a black stick. Baton. Whipped me once.

We’re the Mangies, I says to sleeping man now stumbling man.

Shit. Fucking toilet bowl cleaners, he shouts back.

He’s always brave when we’re downwind some few blocks. Real brave when nobody’s facing you up.

Give me a ciggie, Wiggie, he says, playful like a little kid.

You owe me, Fargone. You owe me ‘cause nobody got’s friends and youse got me.

He slides the mostly clean ciggie from my brown fingers. Lights. Drags, long and smooth and deep like a mural of sounds.

"Wiggie, you’re too nice, man. Don’t be so nice. Be hard. Don’t give a shit. Let the goddamned wind blow through you like you were a skeleton. No cares. Free to