-Chapter 9-
It was early June, the first real turning of summer, the end of that unseasonably wet and dreary spring of 1975. I was 18, and contentment was the murder of the possible, I’d realized quite suddenly. It was in this newfound resolve that I’d decided to leave the Tri-State area for good. The staleness of a place half-realized, strung out like a bad coke binge of shopping centers and neat suburban driveways had unwound the methodical gearing of my mind to where everything threatened to come down. I needed to escape all this sewage spilling over from the excess of New York City, and the logical progression moved me westward with the big diesel locomotives and shiny chrome tanker trucks.
The shallow strip of dull black asphalt shot west like a laser, parting from it's earnest singularity not even for mountains or rivers, choosing instead to pierce the organic geometry of nature with man's insistent will. I had been accepted to Brown that fall, to my parents surprise and seemingly unending pride. Given my grades and penchant for telling authority to fuck off, my mother had secretly hoped for the state college, or even a 'work-study' experience as a runner-up. My essay, as arrogant and presumptuous as it was, must have hit some note of either frustration or brilliance with the admissions counselor, because when the oily white envelope arrived in the mailbox and was in fact not a single sheet of deferment, I’d ridden my bike all the way to the park to tell my burnout friends, hooting and hollering across the chasms of suburbia. I’d shouted to the birds and squirrels and split the dull suburban traffic down the middle, no handlebars and all.
I’d taken this pleasing of my parent’s goals as a great excuse to put off everyone’s expectation of me until the fall. I worked my ass off in 2 menial jobs that winter and spring such that I might travel the next summer instead of 'academic preparation' as my father so dryly put it. They loved me, nothing was perfunctory or banal about that, but their love was traditional, it had bounds and margins, it seemed. I needed to escape that for a summer to see if something different, not better, just different, might be found amongst strangers. When I left, I’d decided that the true 'experience' couldn't start from my doorstep, I had to ease into it, to gradually acclimate to life on the road, so I took a greyhound bus from Long Island across grimy, gridlocked New York and got off at the Delaware Water Gap at 7:00 am, where the humid stench of decaying leaves and morning fog filled the valley with alarming silence. I promptly got a ride with a man whose face looked like one of those high school earth science classroom maps of the lunar surface, deep pockmarks and craters telling a story of industrial woes and unkind weather. He was a man of few words, kind but difficult to pry open. Most importantly, though, he seemed to accept me completely; my odd collection of expensive sneakers and preppy jacket carrying a faux-bohemian external frame backpack and a whole pack load of issues.
I’d crossed sleepy, pastoral Pennsylvania early in the morning, the damp summer mist still hanging in the valleys like suspended thoughts. Soon, the man's aging pickup was in Ohio and amongst its native landscape, the Rust Belt, its notorious poverty somehow inexpressibly beautiful and raw. The countryside was littered with ghostly apparitions of half-abandoned towns and machines; unchanged since the height of American industry a quarter-century earlier. When I'd informed my parents of my plans to travel to the west coast that summer before college, they agreed in the forced sympathy of a different, more passive generation, where wealth and education converged along the same path, and any postponement of the inevitable middle class boredom was acceptable. So, with this modest approval still fresh in my thoughts, and the sharp pinprick of social stigma faded behind Brown's exclusive brick walls, I had set off.
I thought back to the urban wilderness of my youth in New York with hazy discontent, the kafka-esque groupings of featureless concrete edifices in Brooklyn and Queens where some people seemed to dwell all their lives awaiting nothing. This was not to say I wasn't going to miss the tremendous waves of creative light that swept the physically bleak cityscape, which gave it a youthful dimension I wasn't sure I'd find out west, wherever out west ended up being. I recalled a postcard I had received as a child of ten or so, July 1967 I think it was, which depicted ghostly lime green trees with sinuous branches reaching out over a long, fog-swept crescent of sand, with "Greetings from Santa Cruz" written in gaudy white letters at the top. The yellowed image of the mysterious California coast has fixated me since, and it had held a prominent position over my bed; a symbol of lost exotica suspended with scotch tape in a bedroom in Suburban New York.
A high school friend had mentioned with covert excitement this rogue hippy colony that apparently had taken up camp along the verdant green fringes of the U.C Santa Cruz campus, plotting domestic terrorism and writing LSD-fueled manifestos in the fog-shrouded redwoods. I was aware enough to see the entitled, righteous hypocrisy of the weathermen and the SDS-er's though, their pale white prophecies of equality hollow and plastic. Nevertheless, I'd gladly take hollow prophecies over the toxic arrogance of the blueblood minions that constituted my life at home, so the arrow of change still shot west to Santa Cruz. Life was so worthwhile, so tangible and green, I had to keep reminding myself, or the nervous anticipation of tomorrow threatened to overwhelm me.
The trip west was fantastic and surreal, framed in fleeting greenish-brown blurs of the fertile heartland, the earnest towns along the Mississippi and the rusting industrial cities scattered around the 2-dimensional expanse of cornrows and swampy lowlands. The man with the lunar face even bought me a cup of coffee, Walt Sanderson he introduced himself as, several hours into Pennsylvania. I slid 20 bucks in the glove compartment when he wasn’t looking. We talked harmlessly for a few hours about life, the economy, the inequalities [as if I knew anything about this], and the demise of American industry. I got a ride late that night with a somewhat surly long-haul trucker headed to Omaha with a load of wicker furniture, whose transport by this burly muscle man amused me slightly. The furniture-carrier only made it to eastern Indiana, however, before informing me that he was headed home to see his family for the evening on the way to Nebraska, and I better find another ride.
I considered sleeping in a nearby field, the ‘Huck Finn in the Midwest’ romanticism still misleading me. My still-bulging wallet directed me instead to a nearby motel, where I slept with fitful anticipation of tomorrow. The next morning, I walked a half mile or so to a quaint small-town diner, where old people talked in low, gossipy murmurs while steaming coffee and white porcelain plates of warm, amorphous things passed by in the arms of sturdy woman. I ordered coffee and some eggs at the little rounded tile counter, and, entranced by the starchy aromas of Middle America filling the little restaurant, added 2 pancakes to my order when a pleasant woman who called me 'honey' came over to refill the coffee mug. My neighbor was a gruff looking old man whose eyes were incongruously soft and watery, as if tired of looking tough all the time. We chatted a bit about the wet spring, and I managed to ad-lib some half-knowledge of crops and the local growing season, which seemed to please the man, a local beet farmer. Hearing of my cross-country travel plans, he mentioned that he had to haul a load of beet sugar to Grand Island, Nebraska that day, and offered me a ride in his old diesel freighter. I promptly paid for the man's breakfast and thanked him warmly. The old man smiled silently and his eyes wandered off into the distant cornfields, as if recalling some adventure of his own youth. I helped him fill the truck with beet sugar from a massive whitewashed silo on the man’s nearby farm. My veins quivered with exertion as I struggled to control the bucking hose suspended from the silo feeding the trucks main hold; the purposefulness of the exercise like a breath of fresh air to me. We set off later than morning into a vast, almost featureless gray plain, the green tendrils of summer belated and hesitant from recent cold and rain.
The monotony was broken somewhere around central Nebraska as I felt the imperceptible sensation of rising; indeed, each little town I passed now proudly announced its elevation, 3000, 4000, 5000, till suddenly I was crossing the high, windswept plains of Wyoming, huge snowcapped peaks dotting the otherwise even horizon. The beet farmer had left me off at Grand Island, a windy and transient-looking place, caught between the no-nonsense Midwest and the unpredictable true west. I’d waited a few hours on the edge of the highway, tempted to venture into the town to explore, but more focused on glimpsing the mythic Rocky Mountains by sunset, and eventually caught a ride with a small, wiry trucker bound for LA [LA!] who talked animatedly about anything that crossed his mind in a strange upper Midwest inflection.
Soon we had crossed decidedly from the high plains of eastern Wyoming and into the legendary and romanticized American west. It proved ever more vast and unkempt than I had imagined; somehow at odds with man’s vain insistence that it should be populated by cows and coal mines, rednecks and cowboys; order in solitude. The barren plains of Wyoming epitomized the potential of the true west, he thought; vast and uncharacterized, hewn of the same fabric that made men risk all their opportunities on one singular landscape. Silvery, crystalline, the interstate still burned west, resolved to escape the dry interior and dive headfirst into the ocean, reckless and abrupt like me. The long hours on the road strung indecipherably together, and soon the chipped red paint on the wiry mans truck bathed in the giant convex oven of the Great Basin, an ill defined, shimmering expanse between Utah and California.
The journey across it became a phantasmagorical experience as sunset changed to night; the mirages of each passing mountain range a promise of forever. The days with the animate little man, whose name was Wily, blended together- 48 hours stretching into what felt like a year. He was not a typical trucker, this one- he did not seem bound to anyone else's schedule. When he explained after some time that he owned this rusting red behemoth of a truck and worked freelance freight jobs only when his family needed money, I’d felt the instant bond of someone else who worked to live instead of living to work.
When I was thirsty, I drank from a voluminous steel Army canteen, cool chrome water in the growing stubble on my chin. When I was hungry I ate, heaping, steaming, plates of pancakes and potatoes, steak and fries nourishing the simple American ideal. When I was restless, I wrote, strangely nuanced sentences tripping over each other in my little brown notebook, mostly because writing connected the pinpoints of life into a single condensate, a map of the future coalescing out of the haze. I left Wily and his will-work-for-sustenance red truck early in the morning in Carson City, Nevada, where the baking heat of the June desert was already building up to be intolerable at 8 AM. The next week was unhurried and somewhat unmemorable, a lot of short rides west and then back east, camping on the beautiful but touristy shores of Lake Tahoe, climbing the silent, old growth pine forests of the Sierra foothills till my legs and lungs felt ready to give out, awaiting some unseen impetus to reach the coast. This delay was largely due to my fear of the coast somehow disappointing me, the sinuous green branches of the postcard disguising a western Coney Island.
One morning, I found myself sleeping in the bright, dewy mist along the imposing eastern flank of the Sierra, the tilted block of the North American tectonic plate suspended threateningly over the desert. People here believed in god and government, the preachers and the politicians, the endless landscape they resided in merely an aesthetic backdrop for a tough life. These days, it seemed everyone was so dulled, or perhaps just difficult, because for me, picking meaning out of so much fear and loathing was like sieving boulders through a screen; it just wouldn't fit. I felt myself surrounded by that lovely adolescent existential crisis in which the past and future where indistinguishable, and life was so colorful that a single monochromatic blur emerged from the fray.
The waves on Capitola Beach came in long, sweeping sets, their muffled arrival betraying energy carried across the whole Pacific. Their even geometry was at odds with the ragged coastline, and I marveled at the western end of America. The interstate had long since faded into neon reflections in the rear view mirror of a kid on his way back to school in Santa Cruz from a weekend home in the polyester Sacramento suburbs. Sleepy, vintage roadways of central California, winding down to the coast, replaced the laser-cut highway. I crossed the fertile, fog-shrouded Central Valley, its productivity a clever guise against nature, and crested the low Coast Ranges, where the Pacific plate eked slowly to the northwest in a barely perceptible struggle. It was 3 in the morning in late June and the cool evening humidity hung like a half-finished thought as we finally met with the mythical Highway 1, gateway to the promised land of Pacifica.
A half-mile to the north of where I now sat, we had coasted down a gentle grass terrace onto the gravelly beach, and, parking the truck behind some high bushes, stripped naked and ran into the fluorescent black mouth of the sea, the longest night of my life sealed with salty ocean water. The young man, Joe, apologized at having to leave his new friend to go home, but I brushed off his embarrassed 'sorry' with a broad, appreciative smile, and we parted into the night. A quarter mile or so to the south, the dull amber light of a bonfire lit the sand, and a half dozen bums and hippies huddled round the ephemeral warmth, a staged protest against a society they didn't want. I was one of them now, I mused, yet I still found their thoughtless, entitled disregard for work distasteful, and vowed to make my newfound vagrancy soulful and fulfilling, to myself at least. I was exhausted in the way the physique withers under stress, yet not in the soul, which flourished in this newfound expanse of space and sky, the tangled green edges of nature now firmly settled on me.
The sun rose slowly over the low, mysterious auburn hills to the east. Suddenly, cresting the broad, contemplative tops of the redwoods; was a brilliant looking-glass beside the sea, the ramshackle expanse of Santa Cruz spreading out to the north. I was hungry, and after a brief survey of the tangled blackberry bushes located nothing particularly edible or appealing, I decided a stroll up the beach into town was of the utmost importance. The town was pleasant, no- utopian in a sense, built essentially from nothing, the cultural crossroads of a place fresh and growing, sprung from wet moss and sharp rock falling into the sea. I bought food. I wanted to think of money as something transient and unnecessary, yet only when I had it in good supply, the upper class paradox I hated yet still hid behind.
Santa Cruz was slim and organic, ragged at the edges but bred from the wealth and easy contentment of the young people who had escaped from somewhere they thought mediocre and settled here. I walked into a downtown coffee shop with the air of feigned indifference; the cool calmness of someone terrified by his or her own potential. I was so human though, so bound by the sun and stars and ocean that the cheap smile of the boy behind the counter still shook my resolve to be neutral. The soles of my feet were now becoming raw and calloused, stubborn from too many sharp pointy things in the wild underbrush, clinging to the smooth quartz sand that squeaked under brisk footsteps. The barista was a young man much like myself, interjected into a sometimes contrived, contextually irrelevant paradigm, free will something to be considered and then forgotten. I was now a wild thing, I’d decided, a creature of the deep misty coastal valleys, where the sun never quite touched the ground the way it ought to, cast instead in steely oblique angles.
We made pleasant conversation that soon took on the delicious flavor of possibility, of an interest unspoken and perhaps unrealized, the quick exchange of intellectual flexing and playful one-upmanship stirring the restlessness- fueling the inevitable fuck up, I though detachedly. With this, I smiled and skipped out the rusty green door towards the ocean. The young people continued to gather down on the beach as morning lifted off. Their bright uniforms of feigned inequality were both shabby and purposeful, fraught with too much caring of what others thought, the opaque mud in the little tidal estuary to the north of their camp having colored their thoughts perhaps. They took me in as one of their own- indeed I was, I met the unspoken rules of conduct with exceptional fortitude, the girls all inquisitive and flirting, the boys casually masculine and offhanded.
Their unofficial ringleader, a swaggering, surreal young man who they all called Heavy, who wore filthy cowboy boots and old wrangler jeans a few sizes too small. His lean frame leered forward with intent and determination, balanced on comical, sharp heels, here on the beach in Santa Cruz. He proved earnest and likable though, his rambling stories infused with humble respect for the earth and plenty of self-deprecating humor. Heavy couldn't have been an ounce over a buck fifty, tops, and his skin was taunt yet robust over six feet of muscle and weatherworn freckles, tangled blonde streaks falling down his neck like a runaway train. The girls all liked him, they followed him and asked pressing questions with the urgency of unrequited attention; his answers always thoughtful yet illegible; written in the cryptic hippy language I had yet to learn. ‘Heavy had it figured out though man, he had tuned in and tuned out or whatever that fucking Leary guy had said’, I thought. He'd found a quiet place on the fringes of things to sit and think and watch the endless conveyor belt of society spin it's little metal wheels, sipping on cheap beer and drawing fine maps of the future in his head.
Heavy was a sketcher, an improvisational artist who took in the fleeting details of circumstance and made some meaning out of it. Me, well I was more of a landscape artist, romantic and thorough, processing the myriad subtleties of place long after everyone else had forgotten. A blessing and a curse, I thought, the comprehension of too much and too little. I needed something to take the edge off this reality a bit, and quickly accepted when one of Heavy's girls pulled out a tab of acid for me. Though the contemplative morning fog had scarcely lifted, I felt the heat and pressure of a New York disco in the damp, warm trip I was setting off on, and settled down on a dirty blanket on the sand, jesting and wrestling with Caroline and Emily, their defiant style both posed and effortless. Life was so strange and circuitous; full of unseen collisions with people who you wanted to meet from the start; the people who kept you awake at night squirming under the covers in some suburban hellhole.
I thought the California coast was beautiful yet spoiled. Exploited by slackers and the debonair, hippies and rednecks, all bent on experiencing the land in such a passive way, their grand beach houses and forest shack's appropriating a grandeur that needed no introduction. I always kept my body pointed forward, anticipating, ready to make a good introduction. I secretly despised the way Heavy carried himself with such effortless swagger, content to slouch and have the tribe come to him. The tribe, that’s what they were, not a family or a cult or a hippy clan- they had such minimal cohesion it amazed me that they all stayed together so tightly. The girls were well educated and pretty, their free-spirited demeanor a calculated escape from trim upbringings, caught in the claustrophobic confines of the 'establishment'.
The LSD and caffeine faded like a train whistle across the plains, and soon I caught the strong desire to climb something, anything- the beach had become filthy and gross, the sand itched as it clung to my feet and tan legs. I spotted a craggy gray outcrop a couple hundred yards to the north, and ran at it full stride, scrambling up the slick, mottled stone until suddenly I was the king of the world, or at least Santa Cruz. The bustling town spread out to the east before me. To the west, the horizon stretched unbroken to Japan, made of nothing but liquid and current. I heard a rough laugh and some jumbled dialogue below and turned to see Heavy and Meredith pointing and snickering, Meredith reeling backward a few feet and catching herself in the soft sand with each laugh. I quickly scrambled down the precipice and bear hugged the two before dragging them down into the sand, poking and laughing and tickling until they collapsed, gasping for air and breathing unspoken thoughts.
The air rang clear with the sharp call of the gull's and the shallow, heaving waves until Heavy broke the silence with a declaration. "Getting too warm here. How about you and me and Mer go up to my hideout in town and talk about the elements over tea, eh tiger?" Heavy called everyone tiger. He also spoke a lot of 'the elements', which as far as I could tell referred to drugs or sex. I was ok with either, as long as I was safe, safe from strangers, the cold, the dark, the wild, no!- I wanted the wild. But to be now was to be safe. The inside of Heavy's shack was warm and cozy. The uneven plywood and scrap walls were covered in tattered blankets, from which hung half-finished paintings, a brushstroke cut off suddenly like a car off a bridge. In one corner a huge mattress, or rather a stack of mattresses lay uneven and inviting, books scattered around their edges with bright little notes coming out of pages haphazardly.
Without warning, Meredith pulled me down onto the bed and demurely pushed me into the tangled mess of blankets and books. Soon, I was breathing shallow, ragged gasps, and slick with warm bare sweat, the three of us intertwined like some weird, organic machine, gears whirring with animal precision. I wanted this greatly and the mental fireworks came in uneven, staccato rhythms; yet somehow my mind still drifted lazily to ideas of the beach and the lime green trees, the ones that yellowed in harsh suburban glare back home. Heavy eased into me with smooth confidence, and I shivered with static joy as his hand came low across my abdomen, rough calluses on perfectly youthful flesh. ‘That's it tiger, I said god damn!’ said Heavy, and I smiled nervously. I was his; I was taken, Meredith now sat aside and watched in quiet awe- two men alive and connected. Clearly 4 years at Concord Academy hadn't prepared her for this. When we were done, I laid passively aside a filthy orange beanbag by the stove for a good spell, naked in a thin blanket and conscious of the vulnerability of the present as if for the first time.
Meredith came over and started kissing, tugging at me again, but I declined irritably, then relented and wrapped her blonde pigtails in the shallow bony nest of my lap, the afternoon sun filtering in obliquely over the stove. There always had to be a next, I thought morbidly as the little teapot restlessly heated on the stove- always a next, now never lasted against the neurotic leanings of self. I liked the silent, faithful ocean, the mountains framed in cold solidarity against man’s impudence, how the only thing really familiar against the wild edges of what we'd made. Heavy's shack was Spartan and cool, plugged in yet still off the grid to all the non-believers out there.
‘I’d rather be a whisper to stranger that a shout to a lover’ I thought in quiet mania, as if speaking the first words after a monastic retreat, vocalizing eons of trapped intent. With that thought suspended like the dewy morning ether, I bid Meredith a Heavy farewell for the moment and set off towards town, whistling and leaning back on his heels with a sharp spring in each step. The heavy afternoon air parted in swirling eddies in my wake, and soon I reached the colorful, pastel edges of downtown. I decided that a trip to the art museum [now free on Tuesday's after 5! a bold sign informed] was imperative, like Russia and America making peace or Nixon resigning, it just has to happen, goddamnit.
The bare white adobe walls framed a lot of hippy bullshit, and also some brilliant arrangements, bits of someone's life framed and hung out to dry in the intellectual oven of Santa Cruz. I half stumbled around, drunk on art and sex and youthfulness, until the older woman at the front desk politely informed me it was 6:50 and they would be closing in ten minutes. 10 minutes to the end of the world, I thought, and all I had to show for it were some fucking experiences, "tomorrow!" I whispered, and set off into the buzzing night. The Art museum was superb, yet he left with the keen sensory deprivation that comes with over exposure to everything, audiovisual assault, and my head reeled as if my eyeballs had been peeled back involuntarily. The early evening was the best part of the California summer, I thought contently, as the heavy oppressive sun faded over the green hills, replaced by intermittent whispers from the sea, fog moving over the sidewalk like a lost traveler. Such sudden encounters with other people were draining and physical; they demanded I brush up the rough edges of my personality. My last incident with Heavy and Meredith had been beautiful and unforgiving, and it left me wary of attachment. Perhaps it was the naive depth of experience I sought from strangers; either way it did little to elicit anything meaningful.
I impassively started back towards the beach, away from Heavy and Meredith and the claustrophobic inclusion of the cabin. I was filled with warm thoughts of the first night under the bright, the grass green trees in the sand, their crooked branches reaching out of the mildewy postcard. The beach was nature's democracy, the neutral zone between the familiarity of land and the flat, alien landscape of the sea. A martyred patchwork blanket bobbed in a neat bundle behind my back, the crown on a modest stack of all the earthly possessions I might call my own, right now at least. Lying in the itchy, plastic sand, making eyes with the dull cosmic particles in the sky, I realized I didn't have to wake up with any promises or expectations, just the honesty of the moment. My senses were still the master of me though, and I wanted the freedom the Bhagavad-Gita, the Indian holy text, promised: completeness only came when nothing was needed.
Suddenly he despised all the posers, the cretins, the cultural appropriators, they stole and worse, even worse they thought only when it pleased them, as if the experience was a part time gig. "Fuck those cowards who know only action and not consequence", he thought hotly, and with a pinprick of nervous hypocrisy, under the inky black sky. Soon he was crying, tugging at the sewn-together fragments of the blanket; he could be warm and content next to Meredith or some of Heavy's kids in the cabin, another tab of acid skewering his brainwaves; instead he was cold and alone on the wet sand. I didn't want them though, to be a follower, yet leading wasn't a goal either. I just wanted the acceptance of the quiet forest and heaving surf; nothing was even good enough for them. I stayed in Santa Cruz 2 more weeks, actually making a few bucks as a barista at the little coffee place he'd stumbled into the first day [I somehow managed to somehow charm the eccentric hippy matriarch of the shop into hiring him briefly]. At the end of these 2 weeks, the building summer haze and feelings of placeless drifting overwhelmed him, and, withdrawing the last of his cash, hitched north to San Francisco, catching the next flight back to New York and his parents nervous excitement; their boy was not only alive and well, but somehow cured of his dangerous wanderlust.
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