Well, sir, you cain’t very well leave a place hateful once’t a place was good to you, though leave you sometimes must. No doubt about it, certain friends and aspects of the sunny south lingered in lovable recollection. The exclusionary code barring immigrants from true bubbahood would not be missed. The assessment was harsh, and so was its ring of truth. Do you really want to be a bubba?
California, on the other hand, waited to embrace another brother. Lazy went to laid back and the cool breeze felt rich with artistry. Eighty miles south of San Francisco at the top of Monterey Bay sat a little beach town famous for surf and great weather.
Decades later, with twice as many people occupying the same spaces, on-ramp traffic would thicken dramatically, friends of friends and brothers in the bond would no longer be welcome to crash on the couch. Soccer moms would discover artistic endeavor as quaint pursuits, as busy parenting schedules would allow, and a bumper sticker would proclaim: Not all those who wander are lost. Things would get crowded, impersonal, injurious and unstable. Human population will double again before too long with new bumper stickers. But at the front end of the 80s the California coast glowed with options.
A refugee from anywhere could come home to California. South Carolina faded to the east, where many friends would remain content in a culture of decomposition, compulsive for history and paper mills poisoning the estuaries to create jobs for the people—not to be confused with power to the people, because the jobs were awful and the power and money went to the brokers. Hey, they’d never pull that shit in California. Southbound U.S. 1 at sunset on a misty moonrise felt like a reunion of sorts and a whole new life of other sorts. It was a Moonlight Mile, Mick Jagger one more time, but this time different. Self entertainment included lyrical adaptation, so Mick’s refrain, With a head full of snow, changed to reflect a new world, a new mobility and a new reality. Isn’t that what the maturing process and money are all about? With a pocket full of dough, and maybe just a tiny taste of toot folded safely in a bindle for easy access, because nobody really needed a head full of snow when a little bump every hour or so would keep things moving right along. Hey, it was the 80s. Besides, a little toot going down the road was a safety measure, preventing nod outs and helping perspective.
Paper mill mentality and desecration was a straw too many for a very tired camel. A marsh man could avoid the stinky areas and live happy. But only a corrupt, skewed place like South Carolina said, Sho, come on down so spent nuclear rods could ship in for burial at the Barnwell “reprocessing” facility. A passel o’ folks had to be god-awful stupid to let their home get poisoned, or they cowed to employers scoring federal contracts in the billions on the Barnwell plant. Barnwell festered like a psychedelic downside in brown. From the Earth to the firmament it faded and tinged, dead.
Bummer.
The Barnwell line: Shoot, it ain’t but a degree or two is all it is—what them highbrow mucky mucks like to call thermal pollution—from all them hot nuke rods. Glowing in the dark is kind of nice, if you think about it. It weren’t such a bad thing. Folks might ought to figgur how to get that glowy shit up ‘ere to Myrtle Beach to light up ‘em pee wee golf links. Now that’d be fun!
How soon would the negative caricature and redneck persona go away? How long had it played in the background?
Santa Cruz caricature, on the flipside, defined California gothic, beyond liberal, past radical into pathological demands for fairness now, you fascist motherfucker. A rare benefit of gridlock and gentrification a few decades later would be confinement of the hairy street people to their proper politikal habitat under the bridge.
As The Murder Capital of the World, Santa Cruz was not statistically ahead of Houston or Detroit but led with singular flamboyance on blood and gore—and impressive garnish of gristle and bone. Homicide and carjacking were mundane next to West Coast grit. A jilted surfer snuck into his treacherous girlfriend’s bedroom at night to behead the new boyfriend and stab the girlfriend and stick the head on a surfboard stuck in the yard. He went back upstairs for altitude on a jump out a window but killed another surfer on impact—a bystander who proved to be the father of the girlfriend’s unborn child. Oh, the head was the girl’s brother, incestuous inflagrante, honing revenge to a sweet double-edge.
California citrus and murder/suicide were the best, so juicy. The jilted surfer’s suicide effort seemed sincere, but the cushioned fall only broke both legs. He had to stand trial, get convicted and begin a life sentence before successfully hanging himself.
Mother and child were doing fine, seen most mornings at the local coffee house, open-minded in their quest for a loving LTR, vegan, not over forty, non-smoking, bi-sexual OK.
An irate tenant compelled to demonstrate tenant’s rights drowned the landlord in a toilet when the landlord came by to demand rent payment. It was only the tenth, which is what? Five days late? Which is bullshit, you rotten motherfucker, if you know about tenant’s rights, and if you don’t, you need a few laps in the toilet bowl, if you get my drift. The tenant put more social injustice to rights by setting the house next door on fire to cure the blaring TV, which, by the way, had pissed him off for way too long, and those fuckers needed to know just what kind of bullshit they’d gotten away with until they didn’t. They didn’t call it Canna Screws for nothing, and the place screamed with culture shock to arouse an aspiring writer. And it wasn’t hot, as in sultry, humid and hot. And it didn’t choke on bumper-to-bumper traffic except on weekends, and only guys of African descent could get laid on demand, but Caucasoids could occasionally score some secondhand leg. And nobody talked with a southern accent.
How good could it get? That first summer of the Brave New West celebrated priorities restored with a Super Glide showing only four thousand miles for only four grand. Nobody reeks revenge on poverty like a poor boy with a windfall. Harley Davidson had been out of reach since ‘68 when Harris Pollman got a Sportster and lit up the flames of desire in the hearts of all the other guys on campus—flames that would not die in some of those hearts. A nutcase and founding member of Jews for Jesus, Harris sounded like a brimstone kvetch when he preached for Jesus, yet he alone in the campus crowd could muster the seventeen hundred clams for a new Sportster. Of course his suburban Jewish parents gave him the dough. So what? He had the focus to spend it right. He never let anyone drive it, but he took me on back once, and the feeling stuck.
The jump in cubic centimeters and engine rumble felt huge. Great minds think alike, and so do middle class minds; in the 80s Harley Davidson came clean. The big V-Twin wasn’t for greasers anymore but for old Triumph and BSA riders. Some tattooed toothless wonders still rode Harleys. They enhanced the “mystique.” Harley Davidson reached out to the new guys who had money, the preppies and yuppies. The motorcycle wave that covered Europe in the 60s wanted to wake up from its workaday world.
“Hey,” Pedro said. “Only a dollar a mile. Ha!” Notably thin and heavily inked with jailhouse doodles, Pedro said the odometer was broke, but he knew the motorcycle had four thousand on it, because he kept track.
“Hey, you know the ape hangers are long, so I pulled them back. You know.” The ape hanger handlebars pulled down from altitude to waist level put my hands where my pistols would have been if I was a gunslinger. The context was not lost on Pedro, who drew imaginary pistols and fired two friendly rounds at my face then blew the smoke off each barrel tip. Ah, California and those wild Californians, working together to keep the show going on. “It feels, you know, different at first. But you get used to it. You’ll see. I guarantee it.”
The engine sounded good, and the motorcycle cut a lean, muscular profile, though a tad unusual in lavender. Why lavender? Because. Pedro got a good deal on the lavender, and nobody yet come by to give him no shit. Pedro was tough, and it seemed fairly evident that anybody on that motorcycle could be tough too.
Tall Paul and I shared a little toot one evening to gain perspective on life. Clarity came on a bottle of wine, another line or two for momentum, a
nother bottle to take the edge off and a spliff for reverence. Reviewing life to date we agreed that it was largely the shits, except for the scootering parts. So he bought a Sportster in cherry red, not his choice but the color of the suitably priced unit.
I pointed out that cherry red and lavender looked like fruit punch. He suggested our club name: Los Fruitas. But that could indicate alternate sexual preference, which would make no difference in the wilderness, unless women came along. He modified, “Okay. Los Machos Fruitas.”
AMF owned Harley Davidson through the 70s and added poor build quality to Harley’s stone-ax engineering. The AMF models self-destructed like clockwork. Between Canna Screws and Idaho that Super Glide fell apart. Throttle cables and linkage failed in San Francisco, the brake rotors and pads went in Shasta, the clutch assembly in Bend and the transmission seals in Twin Falls. New components replaced failed components, and so on to both wheel hubs and tires in Boise, even with good tread, because failed wheel bearings caused the back tire to tilt off center and rub a fender bracket down to the sidewall cords.
Yet adventures endure in recollection of the high points. A sunrise piss is recalled as a bone trembling freeze—make that a frieze of unadulterated happiness, stoned again in the wilderness only twelve miles from coffee. Rolling down the road on a frosty morning can freeze your bones, numb your face and stiffen your joints. Breakfast on the Oregon plateau was dough balls in grim gravy. Forlorn people watched, wondering how two fellas could just walk in here and order up.
Small dark lumps floated beside the biscuits. “Looks like lizard chunks and peas,” Paul said.
“Them ain’t peas,” the big woman said.
Those scenes linger with the foothills, mountain passes and broad sweeps alongside streams meandering through lush valleys. We pulled off one evening or another or yet another and again near a bank to pitch camp. Paul built the fire while I moseyed on down to the flow, fitting rod sections, stringing light monofilament line and tying off to a Mepps spinner. Casting across the stream six or ten times yielded a half-dozen pan-size trout.
People still ate the trout in the 80s. Nature had begun to fall apart and die, but the hard evidence didn’t glare for a few more years, and that deep in the wilderness the trout seemed plentiful. The fire crackled. The hash pipe glowed. Pan fried trout and stream-chilled beer equaled perfection. As dusk thickened to twilight logs went on the fire till it flamed beside the burbling stream. The wilderness could renew perspective on growing complexity.
Firelight under big sky and a wealth of wilderness capped the milestones of recent months: migration from east coast to west, emergence from poverty to mobility and from youth to something else. The wilderness felt like home, and so did a new motorcycle. John Lennon had died the prior December. It was all too much for me to take too, the love that had shone all around us.
’69 to ’81 felt like a crackle in the flames, a blip in time with a lingering essence. John Lennon said, “Life is long.” And just as day follows night, the fire needed more wood and life would require more dough.
Moving north to the city by the bay made sense. People live in cities to make money. Country people don’t take well to cities, but San Francisco was different. With a reasonably tuned motorcycle and a decent flat in the Upper Haight, a heterosexual guy could do well in San Francisco. The artistry at hand felt like a resource, so the scooter got a makeover in deep sea blue with voltage arcing the tank sides and fenders. A wrench in Canna Screws rebuilt the top end and went ahead on new jugs since she was peeled open. Sorry: a mechanic in Santa Cruz replaced the valves and went ahead on new pistons (the bottom end), since the engine was already open. What the fuck. Why not?
She growled sweetly. Harley Davidson tried to patent the sound but lost in court to the growling yellow peril and officially introduced the next corporate phase at Harley Davidson: looking foolish.
Meanwhile, I could ride across town and back to a North Beach curb for a lazy latte and girl watching easy as drifting into a backwater over a deep hole for lunkers. North Beach was as far from the Castro as Neptune from Uranus, and coy passers-by offered hope. A bumpkin could have fun in the city.
But too much fun in the city closed in on cold cloud cover, concrete, chronic hangover and the cocaine cringe, in which the body wanted more and rejected too much, defaulting to one mo’ time. Then came the swinging dicks, so that a thin, healthy guy could not go to the grocery store without learning all about sexual objectivity. Maybe it was karmic. It felt creepy, possibly hateful; so it worked. Canna Screws was not warm and sultry and did not feel like home, but a house lot showed up for sale in the classifieds there and looked like good anchorage on a lee shore.
In the 80s a borrower could still draft a loan app and tax returns. Two stops, at the bank and the P.O., for blank forms, and a third at a CPA could align numbers. The banks were happy to lend, if the borrower could demonstrate no need and the ability to repay, and the loan apps could show comprehension of requirements. Fifty grand was a hefty construction loan in those days and got things well underway on a house that would go one-forty. Well, they all go over budget, and Canna Screws did call for extra artistry.
Something had to give, since a mortgage could not remain unpaid, and a man of no means was not king of the road. In that time of anxiety, bicycle riding felt meditative, a distraction of physical exertion, in which thoughts might sort out. One day I passed a twenty-two wheel cab and trailer in pearl burgundy with a chrome grill and red oval plaque: Peterbilt.
Native Americans and veterans of the 60s shared a weakness for beads and trinkets and color coming on in waves. The big rig sat in front of a house near a sign: FOR SALE. I leaned my bicycle on a bush and knocked on the door.
A hobbled man came out. Was the house for sale, or the rig? He said it’d come time to live in the house, and his rig had some miles but they didn’t show because of the rubdown she got every night, the grease in her joints and fresh oil in her system and all manner of things that keep a rig young. “Why, she cost you pert’ near fifty thousand dollars new. She worked good for me though, so all’s I need is eleven. Eleven thousand dollars.”
I didn’t have eleven thousand dollars but felt I could get it and then pay it back fairly soon, what with my youth and vigor allowing extra hours on longer hauls. Endless highway stretched into the future—the road future. I knew that place. “I think I might . . .”
The seller squinted, “Nah! You don’t want to be a long hauler. Why, you got your whole life ahead of you. What are you, twenty-three? Twenty-four maybe?”
“Thirty-four. I need to do something.”
He looked every bit of seventy-five. “I’m sixty-two. I can’t hardly find interest in life without a couple bennies and a quart o’ joe. This rig’ll break you, and you’ll never get out of it till you’re done for. Go on. Try something else. Not trucking. If it don’t work, never you mind. Try something else again.”
It felt like a kid getting chastised. I rode home to the new house I could cover for two more mortgage payments.
A visit to Hawaii seemed insupportable at the time, but it wasn’t for warm weather, ocean frolic and scantily clad women. Kenny B had also survived our prolonged youth with recreational values intact. He too had grappled with practicality traction and urged the visit, to see if two nickels might rub together for twelve cents.
The truth was that the tiger would soon eat us if we didn’t grab its tail. And over extended dreamy cocktails we agreed that the most gainful pursuit should include a yacht and a decent income. By chance, Kenny’s friend Drug—make that Doug—was driving a charter boat loaded with tourists every day, each one representing a fifty dollar bill and a fair number of them representing the old, adventurous spirit as well. So we fed the delusion of greatness, this time in the tropics. Back at the bank—not the same bank but a new bank, new tax returns backed a new loan app for a sailing yacht just like the one we’d imagined ourselves owning. A neurosurgeon we knew socially wanted in on the yacht deal
and agreed to stand behind the paper. Follow your dreams. They generally beat working.
Four months of an option to purchase the yacht ran a thousand dollars per month, but that money would be returned in cash at close of escrow, which occurred at ten minutes after five on the hundred twentieth day of the option period in a whirl away of mind, body and spirit and some solid new narrative coming right up.
The big problem with California was plain to see: fifty-six million Californians—few of them completely conformed to stereotype, but most dabbled in it. What was the last threat fled: idiom and repetition to the point of tedium?
Well, it hardly seemed to matter whether it was nuclear reprocessing and glowing in the dark or murder and mayhem scripted like a comic book. Exits were best with a flourish.
No sweat; change of scenery coming right up.
Steve Miller came on the radio, bidding farewell to friends at home and people trusted. He also needed further penetration into the world, where he might get rich or might get busted.
We didn’t head out on a 707 but set sail out of Canna Screws Harbor into breaking seas and funky grays, wondering once again where and when and feeling busted already.
Sea Time
ZEN TEACHERS SAY age thirty-five delineates the two primary phases of life, the formative years and the person defined. Age thirty-five is the minimum advised for sitting seishin, meditation lasting three days or ten.
Sunrise on my thirty-fifth could not delineate sea from sky but pitched into gray scud on twenty knots gusting to forty under dark clouds bruised purple. Cross-seas banged heads as the harbor at Canna Screws shrank and sails went up a mile into Monterey Bay. With the engine cut the fifty-foot racing sloop Whirlaway fell off and heeled, bearing 240º south southwest, twenty-four hundred miles to go.
Many people declined the heavy-weather-at-sea phase of the Grand Tour and lived rich, full lives all the same, satisfied with loose reference to maritime scenes, like Stephen Still’s fantasy lyric peppered with nautical phrases, like following seas and tradewinds, running downhill to Papeete on the outside, loving you and the Southern Cross, which was the name of the song. On the outside? Outside of what? Outside of the boat? Outside of the ocean? That was the problem when 60s rockers dabbled in imagery foreign to their experience; it came out silly or worse.
1969 and Then Some Page 20