Edward held up his glass in my direction. “Besides getting stoned, he means. Anyhow, Wayman, welcome back to the Gold Coast, to the California madness.”
We clinked glasses. “Do you have other brothers and sisters?” I asked.
Edward twisted his face into a mock grimace. “One’s enough. Who knows what friends any others might bring by?”
The young guys giggled.
“How did you get the name Pump?” I asked.
“Some army deal,” Edward said, dismissing the question before Pump could reply. “Let’s you and I remove ourselves to the porch. You know what these idiots are doing?”
“Cooking?”
Edward shook his head, as if saddened. “They read in the Barb or the Free Press or Rolling Stone you can get off by boiling the meth out of the top of a nasal decongestant spray bottle.”
“Sounds like mellow yellow,” I said. A year earlier the rumour had gone around, apparently based on the lyrics of a Donovan song, that smoking dried banana skins would prove hallucinogenic. Despite valiant attempts by thousands of freaks in hundreds of kitchens, nobody got high.
“I think the caterpillar has eaten huge holes in their brains,” Edward declared. “I told them the best stone known comes from brick walls. You find a brick wall, lower your head, and run at it several times. It’s a fantastic trip — knock you right out. Really gets you wasted.”
He scooped two more Olys from the fridge and led the way among the elderly stuffed chairs and sofa of the living room through the open French doors onto the porch. I paused at the railing for a moment to reacquaint myself with the vista while Edward stretched himself out on a deck chair.
The tide was full. In the thickening light, the swells reared and crashed onto sand, then foamed up the beach. A few sandpipers, the last of the day, hunted for sustenance at the edge of the surf ’s frothy residue as each sweep of onrushing sea withdrew toward the Pacific. The air was a little misty with windblown spray. Above the regular cannonade of the surf, I heard the seals’ raucous sounds from the rocks offshore of the cove’s northernmost promontory. To the south along the curving coastline, the lights of the town flicked on behind Main Beach and up into the hills beyond.
“This makes driving two thousand miles worth it,” I said.
Edward was watching me dig the night. “You really like California, don’t you?”
“Who wouldn’t?” I hauled up a rickety wooden folding chair and sat beside him. Under the influence of the beach scene and the beer, I felt the tension of three days on the road start to leave my body. “Being here in California is like a trip to the future for me. This place might be crazy. But what I see here will make its way to the Frozen North in a couple of years.”
“You mean, eventually Canadians will be boiling up Vicks VapoRub?”
“Probably.” I told Edward about being offered a joint at sixty-five miles per hour approaching Tejon Pass.
He laughed. “Did you hear up in Canada about the Woodstock Festival?”
Working my second-last-for-the-summer Tuesday at the Sun, I’d seen spiked on the wire desk a number of photos of the enormous crowds jammed onto Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate New York. What had impressed me, as I related to Edward, had been the sense that for once we longhairs, peaceniks, appeared not to be a tiny minority of the population. For the first time we looked like a significant group, a power growing fast, a force that would have to be reckoned with.
“There were even some pictures of guys with long hair wearing hard hats and driving bulldozers, preparing the site,” I said. “I’d never seen freaks working construction.”
“You know, I had a chance to be there and turned it down.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure if this was one of Edward’s “stories.” I hadn’t ever known him to lie, exactly. He frequently produced tales, however, of previous encounters with famous men and women from the art, literary, or political worlds, stories we had no means of verifying.
Edward explained he’d been over at Bridget’s, a friend of ours from Irvine who had a house near the south end of town where we hung out sometimes. I knew vaguely that her boyfriend, who was the father of the child she was expecting when I left in June, worked at concert promotion in the Bay Area. Edward told me Don’s company wanted him to be present at Woodstock and had given him two tickets. Bridget this late in her pregnancy couldn’t fly. Don had been home in Laguna the night Edward had dropped by, and late in the evening after he and Don had gotten suitably loose, Don asked if Edward was interested in attending this big rock festival in the East. Edward had decided the New York deal sounded too flaky to be worth quitting his summer job early to attend.
“Bummer,” I said. “Hey,” I added, suddenly feeling guilty for not asking sooner, “did Bridget’s baby get born all right?”
“A boy. Both mother and child doing well. Jacaranda Eldridge Buzz O’Conner. We should go see them.”
“Eldridge, as in Cleaver?”
Edward nodded. “A flower, a Black Panther in exile, and ‘Buzz,’ as in Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut. Did they cover the moon landing in Canada?”
“It was quite a summer. I was at the SDS convention in Chicago in June. Then Apollo 11 landed in July, and the Woodstock Festival blew everyone’s mind in August.”
We pondered this list for a few moments. The seals had become silent, leaving only the recurring thunder of the surf.
I asked Edward how he had liked his summer employment. He had been hired by Laguna’s Chamber of Commerce to help with publicity, mainly promoting Laguna’s Pageant of the Masters. This was a bizarre, long-standing theatrical extravaganza whereby townspeople appeared onstage in Laguna Canyon, forming a tableau that reproduced as nearly as possible some famous painting. Each year the work of several Old Masters and the occasional modern art piece were rehearsed and presented. Why anybody would want to view a group of people pretending to be a painting was beyond me. Yet the pageant was an important tourist draw, injecting hundreds of thousands of dollars into the town’s economy. Undoubtedly, Edward had secured this job on the strength of the art gallery experience he either had, or hadn’t had, in Hawaii.
I was in the midst of a futile attempt to extract concrete information about Edward’s day-to-day duties for the pageant, when his brother and his brother’s friend emerged from the living room onto the porch. As they pulled up chairs, Jay revealed that their chemical experiment had been a failure. He and Pump endured with good grace Edward’s mockery of their earlier optimism. Jay produced an example of his namesake, claiming it was Mexican in origin, though unfortunately not the celebrated Acapulco Gold. We settled into some diligent toking.
The smoke I inhaled was landing in my brain after eleven hot hours on the road, not to mention a beer and a half. I felt almost immediately a humming exhilaration pervade my consciousness. En route to the porch, the boys had put a record on the stereo I recognized, an album Willow had frequently played last spring when I was over — a band called H.P. Lovecraft, named after the horror author. Their music, though, was laid-back, with intricate vocal harmonies that impressed me. My attempt to learn more about Edward’s summer employment floated away while he and his brother and Pump discussed household matters. Despite my mind having become sugarcoated, I managed eventually to insert an inquiry concerning Willow’s whereabouts.
“She’s living here, man,” Pump told me. “She’s re-upped for another year at you guys’ school.”
“Phil and her are up to Garden Grove to see his mom,” added Jay. “They’ll be back tonight.”
A master plan sprang into my pleasantly ruined brain. I had some idea that the Willow-Meg-Janey link might yield news that could prevent me making a fool of myself