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.
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