Chapter Five
From the crest of Mount Madonna, Ram looked down through the mist to the flats of the Pajaro River Valley. The scimitar curve of Monterey Bay swept south from its hilt at Refugio until it disappeared into a scabbard of fog at its tip in Pacific Grove. Ram sucked at the briny air, ingested it, and let out a whoop. “God, I love this place,” he shouted to no one other than himself and the gently curving landscape.
This was the part of California that Ram loved best, the old Spanish kingdom with its stone-fence-enclosed yellow, rose, and lime-colored adobe houses behind screens of sage-green camphor-scented eucalyptus trees planted 200 years ago by the first settlers to help calm the coastal winds. Here was still the old Californio heritage of cattle and equine husbandry and the cycles of planting, maturation, and harvest. Here too were the canyons and creeks, rivers, bays, and harbors brim full with lore both mythic and mystic. And if you listened closely to the wind soughing in the stands of eucalyptus and cypress trees, you could almost hear them retelling those legends of long ago in the windblown music they made.
Ram remembered the story an old San Gregorio Indian told him one night at a harvest party in Corralitos, of the first non-native arrivals here in Refugio, a shipload of Spaniards under the command of Vizcaino who turned back from shore when they saw a beached gray whale being torn to shreds by a gang of grizzly bears on the beach.
The colonists who settled Refugio in the 1700s were not-so-sainted clerics and press-ganged settlers who didn’t survive the first winner, driven mad by isolation and the elements, reduced to banditry, wandering the shaggy mountains until they perished from starvation. These unfortunates were followed by pioneers who petitioned the Spanish, and then the Mexican governments for land grants and got them; vast tracts of raw land cut off from the hardscrabble settlements like Monterey, San Jose, and San Francisco, the nominal centers of civilized society. Then the Gold Rush brought the Argonauts and the Bear Flaggers who came and squatted, slicing the land grants to pieces, keeping the richest parts for themselves, driving the pioneers who were entitled to them out into the hills where they too reverted to banditry, stealing back the horses and cattle that had been stolen from them, living out of the saddle, deep in the vastness of the most unreachable and inhospitable canyons of the coastal range, waging private wars of vendetta until they too went mad, or starved to death, or were brought to yield, most often at the end of a rope.
It was now two years since Ram had returned from Amsterdam and he remembered standing on this very spot with Fran as they hitchhiked south from San Francisco Airport to Tor’s house in New Monterey. Tor was the nickname for Mike Boswell, given him by Ram when Boswell bought a frightful Tor Johnson head mask when they were out Christmas shopping one day. Johnson was one of Ed Wood’s troupe of actors and he had a huge bald head with mad eyes. Fran thought they could stay with Boswell for a while until they found their own place to settle, which they did, a few months later, in a little hamlet called Camp Steffani out in the Carmel Valley. And beyond that, it was five years since Ram looked back at this very spot through the window of Fran’s pickup window when he was heading in the opposite direction—to Vancouver when he first left California, finally, he thought, for Canada, leaving with Jonas and Walt and Shaughn to live in political exile. Then, after Canada, when that cycle of expatriation concluded, Ram headed for Europe, completing the cycle, it seemed, by running into Fran in Amsterdam. Now he and Fran were in business together with Michael “Tor” Boswell, building stores and fixtures for Endymion Records, living a vagabond life as they traveled throughout the western states.
Ram wandered over to his idling Ranchero, which he called “The Roacho,” reached for his cigarettes and lighter, and killed the engine to better hear the silence and rhythms of his own thoughts. He lit a Camel Light, inhaled deeply and walked along the turnout to the fence above the drop into the canyon below. He was thinking of those first days back when he didn’t have a clue as to what he’d do or how long he could last before the Amsterdam option asserted itself again as the best choice available. For he felt, in those first days back, that he would surely be back in Amsterdam by fall. But then luck or chance or both or something other reared its head and Ram fell into the job with Tor and Fran, never expecting that he would come as far as he had been doing something that he was entirely ignorant of until Tor gave him the chance and discovered that Ram had a modest talent for building.
The discovery was entirely accidental and Ram remembered how it was when he first returned. Ram thought about it, quickly cataloging the events, remembering those uncertain days bordered by fear and anxiety over how it would all work out and whether or not he could cut it. But those gray days were gone now and Ram felt it was best left that way; that if it was luck that had intervened in taking his part and given him all that he had, Ram could live with it. After all, Fran said this was the way it was supposed to be. Fran said Ram deserved all he had because he’d worked for it and earned it. And besides, what was the good of questioning all that? “Just take it and ride with it,” Fran said, and right now, Ram was riding it.
These were good days now, and as Ram was fond of saying, “I wouldn’t trade my life for anybody’s. I’m right where I want to be.” So he stuffed the insecurities back in their box, finished his cigarette, hopped in the Roacho and fired it up for the thirty-mile descent into Refugio.
Winding down the grade, Ram could see the mist starting to burn and lift, peeling away to reveal Refugio in all her splendor. “Aye, laddie, there she sits,” he crowed in his best imitation of his Uncle Jack’s Irish brogue. A host of turkey vultures hugged close to the currents on the mountain’s hips, ascending and disappearing into the mist as Ram spiraled down the mountainside into orchards aflame with apple blossoms, the earth redolent with the fecund smells of fertilizer, churned earth and silt from the winter runoff in the Pajaro.
Refugio, ah Refugio, there was a magic to it. And to be young there at that time and in that Endymion gang of which Ram was a part and helping to define, was to be living a life of endless possibilities with a future limited only by one’s imagination. On that score, Ram was secure, for his imagination of what life held available then was limitless.
Refugio was magic. The sweet and sunny little city where the party never set and the night birds like Ram and the Endymion crew wailed away into the dawn. Refugio was the crossroads of the world back then, or so it seemed to Ram.
Sixty miles south of San Francisco and forty miles past Devil’s Slide, the sandstone cliffs give way to wider headlands fronting out onto the vast Pacific, alternating between fields of artichokes and pumpkins to groves of wind-sculpted cypress and willow. And though it was springtime now, when Ram descended Madonna, it was in autumn, just after Indian summer, when this stretch of coast was at its most enchanting. The khaki-colored earth of sun-suffused summertime would turn a smooth chocolate brown, and the diffused light from the angling sun off the low-bunched cumulus stacked offshore—the as yet impotent vanguard of the still marshaling Northwest storms—made distinct the variations in green: the artichoke, shrub, eelgrass, and willow—the fruit of the wider headlands just north of Refugio; the contrasting scatters of wild mustard and lupine and heather infiltrating the multiform multicolored swatches of green, so that to the Red Tail hawks, had they the painterly ability, the land probably looked like an ear of Indian corn, which perhaps, in some greater sense, it was anyway.
And as the earth transformed in the season of harvest, so too did the sea. In the fall, the mottled brown-green of summer gave way to a brilliant blue that was flecked with black. The offshore winds would make the surf glassy, crystalline almost. It was in mid-autumn when the summertime tourists and drifters and hangers-on thinned out, and the town regulars came out of their hibernation and repopulated the town again. The carnival atmosphere would tone down a notch or two and Refugio would settle into a rhythm that still had its native edge but was less frantic. But Ram was still learning these things then, and
he’d yet to spend a whole summer in Refugio due to the vagabond nature of his job on the Endymion Records Mad Dog crew.
In the past two years, Ram and the Mad Dog crew traveled throughout the West, building new stores in San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, Phoenix, Tempe, and remodeling existing stores in Salinas, Las Vegas, Refugio, and Monterey on Cannery Row, where, for Ram, the whole Endymion odyssey had begun when he came to visit Fran and Tor when they lived behind the record store in little rooms at the top of the abandoned cannery. Ram thought of that time and smiled at the memory—the Flexie Flyer roller coaster, The Hamburger Joynt next door, the ferro-cement-hull-littered Boatworks, and Flora’s.
Now, Ram was on a mission. He had to get to Rancho Bracero by noon or risk Tor’s wrath. He sucked on the last of the cigarette, flicked it away onto the gravel, and headed down the grade toward Refugio, still thirty miles northwest.
Ram thought back over the recent past—from Tor’s house on Spencer Street in New Monterey in the beginning, to the house in Camp Steffani out in Carmel Valley which he and Fran moved into and remodeled in their spare time. He thought about the desert days in Phoenix and Las Vegas and Tucson, where something indefinable clicked in for Ram. It was a whirlwind of activity while Endymion raced to keep pace with Monument Records, the firm they’d grown out of through outright larceny it was said. It was like a range war out of the Old West, was what Ram thought with the two record store barons—Glenn Blair of Endymion and Sol Sampson of Monument—angling for the edge in a high-stakes hand of who’d be left standing in the end. And Ram and the Mad Dog crew, like their counterparts at Monument, were the Billy the Kids and Nate Champions in the Lincoln/Johnson County wars that spanned the West. It struck a chord in Ram, for it resonated off the outlaw strings that he still cultivated. And besides, it was a lot of fun.
Like the Earps in Tombstone, the Endymion gang absolutely ran Refugio. Everybody knew the main players—Tor and Fran and Sally and Phil—from the heads of the record company majors who entertained them and comp’d them to rock shows to the rack jobbers and one-stoppers who supplied them with records and tapes, to every bar and restaurant owner in downtown Refugio who let them run up tabs and never asked they be paid off because of the collateral business that the crew brought along with them and the prestige associated with their patronage. There might be a party of ten for lunch at the Tampico—with Blair and Tor and Ram, and Ted Templeman and Phil Walden accompanying a couple of Allman Brothers and Bonnie Raitt. They’d eat ravenously, drink copiously, and excuse themselves frequently to go to the bathroom and recharge their jets with cocaine. Then a mock battle would ensue over who paid the tab, and just as often as not, the restaurant owner would fire the final shot by announcing that the check was a dead letter; that they were dining on him.
It was a time of almost constant motion in those days—three weeks in Tucson, a month in Tempe, ten days at Camp Steffani to unwind and party with friends, a weeklong planning session in Refugio to discuss the next targeted expansion. And the nights were as full as the days, with rock-and-roll shows and nightclub openings, and parties and dinners for out-of-town friends of the Endymion family, up on business or down for some rock-and-roll, bar-trolling for ginch, or surfing, or any other good time you could have in Refugio, and you could get almost any kind of good time you wanted in Refugio. It was fun then, and Ram was doing well, but the attraction of peripatetic motion was beginning to wear a bit thin for him.
Ram thought back to that November day four months back—just before they’d been summoned out to his father’s house in San Diego for the deathwatch—when he and Fran and the Endymion crew were in Flagstaff for a skiing weekend. Ram wandered the town and looked it over. When he got back that evening, he put forward a plan. “Listen, Fran, why don’t we set up the Endymion shop right here? I checked into some light industrial space and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper here, we can just build all the fixtures here and then truck them to wherever and put the stores together in a couple of weeks.”
“It’s an interesting idea. I’ll talk it over with Tor.”
“You want me to call him?”
“No, let me do it.”
“When’s he getting back from France?”
“I don’t know, sometime in the spring, I think.”
“You think it’s a good idea?”
“It’s a great idea. It’ll get us out of the Endymion office politics in Refugio. It’s just a question of whether or not Tor will go for it.”
Tor didn’t and neither did Blair. “I want my Mad Dogs in Refugio where I can keep a leash on them, not out in Flagstaff where I don’t have a fucking clue as to what they’re up to.” And so, that was that, and although Glenn “Bull” Blair, a moniker also bestowed on him by Ram, tried to downplay the power move and assuage the Le Doirs by renting for them and Tor a state-of-the-art, warehouse-sized shop just north of Refugio, Ram saw it as a lost opportunity.
Just past Izquell, Ram took the exit and headed to Venetiana. He passed through the little beach town with canals cut through it so it somewhat resembled its namesake, with an air of decay just as omnipresent as the original but not nearly as poignant. Ram turned right on Esplanade and drove past the Doge’s Palace, the 1920s relic of a hacienda hotel that was now near ruin and populated in the main by junkies and welfare bums.
Venetiana was still asleep and Ram didn’t stop, heading north past Pearl Cliffs to Heaven’s Gate, where Sally lived. Ram drove past the house to the end of the street and parked alongside the market on the bluff. He went inside, bought a quart of chocolate milk, and sat on the hood of the Roacho, looking out on the ocean.
The fog was still thick on this, the westernmost point of the Bay, and Ram could barely make out the surfers. All that was visible were the colored tips of the boards as they lightly rose and fell in the slight swell. Ram watched for a while and a girl surfer passed him on her way down the cliff path. She called over her shoulder, “Nothing worth watching today, man.” Ram wasn’t ready to give up hope of seeing one good ride. He shook out a cigarette and lit it, waiting for a set. Finally, a rattle of three-footers broke outside the point. Ram watched one surfer manage a decent ride, a long tube shot, and half a dozen cutbacks. He smiled, rose up, and left.
At Sally’s, Ram pulled out his bags and headed toward the in-law apartment next to the garage in back—the Mad Dog clubhouse, Sally called it. It was a small, unfurnished apartment with bathroom and kitchenette. A collection of sleeping bags and backpacks marked the turf of the tenants residing there. Along the far wall, furthest away from the window, a sleeping bag moved.
“That you, Cisco?” Ram asked.
A mumble preceded a massive clump of hair protruding from the sleeping bag. Below the hair was an ashy face and a giant handlebar mustache.
“Go away, Le Doir. It’s early.”
“It’s almost eleven, man.”
“Too early for me. I got in late.”
Ram put his bags and sleeping bag over in a distant corner, showered, shaved, and changed clothes. He was almost out the door when Cisco called out. “There’s a party tonight at Oscar’s place. Some theater party, I think. We’re meeting at The Union around seven. The usual crew—Milo and Phil and me.”
“What about Sally?”
“Not her scene, she says.”
“Maybe see you then.”
“Where are you off to?”
“I’m heading up to Bracero. I gotta see Tor.”
“Catch you around seven then.”
“Yo, Cisco, until that time,” said Ram walking out the door.
Ram drove north along the cliffs, past the lagoon and the yacht harbor, heading for downtown Refugio. It was a different town now from the one Ram remembered from his high school days when he and his friends from Sagrada would come here on weekends. Then, it was surfers, hot-rodders, retirees, and families on holiday taking in the Boardwalk with its bumper cars and roller coaster, arcade games and fun house.
Then two things occurred almo
st simultaneously to transform Refugio. The first was the University’s arrival—a new campus of the UC system was established just outside Refugio in the hills northeast of town. Then the Haight went to hell in 1968, and the hippies who lived there left The City and headed “back to the land.”
Refugio was one of the places where the land was cheap enough for them to afford. Fran, who was living in Refugio then and working for Endymion, told Ram what it was like. “We’d be sitting at my house in Bangor Creek, watching these little buses full of hippies going up and down the highway with tape players blasting, pennants flying from their antennas, looking for a piece of land they could buy cheap.”
Refugio was transformed from a car culture surf-focused collection of youngsters on the one hand and retirees on the other, into a broader multi-various populace with middle-aged professors and professionals, the twenty to thirty crowd from the Haight, teenaged university students, and the alternative consciousness crowd of every ethnic background and age group imaginable. Whether that consciousness was altered through chemicals (and much of it was) or meditation or Zen or Rolfing or past-life regression or the Guru Maharaj Ji, didn’t really matter. So long as it was outside the suburban model that most of these new émigrés derived from. Refugio was one of the capitals along the Hippie Cosmic Jet-stream Trail, as Jimmy Ray used to call it.
It was near noon as Ram headed up Meridian Street, and Refugio was starting to wake up. When he could see his destination just ahead, Ram parked the Roacho and walked inside the San Luis Rey Hotel lobby, then entered the narrow courtyard that funneled into The Lotus.
The Lotus was like something out of Amsterdam—the Milky Way more than the Paradisio, which was maybe why Ram liked it so much. As you entered from the Meridian Street side, passing the hotel front desk and walking into the narrow court that looked like any hotel hallway, the door at the other end opened into a different world.
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