by Herbert Gold
The Sixties and the Summer of Love survived on steep slopes just off the highway. He could justify a few days of retreat as a test of his deliberations. His struggles with Amanda exhausted him. Other people lived with many confusions; he had made a life that eliminated confusions. Now he was paying the price – many confusions flooding over him. It was time and past time to get clear about matters; someday, somehow, he surely would. Absolutely.
“Yeah, okay, why not?” he replied to Ferd’s offer.
“Hey buddy, is that enthusiasm I hear?”
What Kasdan already planned about Ferd was the first drastic action he had ever taken. He said, “I was surprised, that’s all. I guess I always need things to sink in.”
“You’ll be comfortable! I’ll drive in my fine sports vehicle, personally make all the arrangements. And talk hardly no business. What’s not to be comfortable?”
“Thanks,” Kasdan said.
“And what if you learn things, you really get to liking me, the way I feel about us, how do you feel about that? What if?”
Kasdan didn’t have an answer to this question. He would face the problem if he came to it.
Silence was always difficult for Ferd Conway. He repeated, “What if, Cowboy?”
Kasdan was preparing himself. When the time came, he hoped to be ready. For now, he said, “Sure, thanks, I haven’t been to Big Sur in years.”
Dan used to pass his life without making things happen. Ferd made things happen every day. Dan found a daughter he hadn’t known – that was a thing that happened – but he wasn’t geared for surprises. Ferd seemed to be geared for anything, even an annoying traffic stop on the road out of Carmel. The highway patrolman wanted to know why Ferd wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. Ferd said he had been reaching for a “hankie.” The patrolman looked startled at the word. He fixed his gaze sternly on the culprit. Ferd met his eyes briefly, then dropped them toward the electronic book, poised ready to emit the summons, until he said, “Your nails, Officer. I love your nails. How could I get nails like that?”
The highway patrolman had a manicure with neatly trimmed crescents of cuticle, his fingernails shining under clear polish. He beamed and leaned into the Mercedes. “Gelatin capsules, plus a high-pro diet’ll do the trick. Your nails look pretty healthy yourself.”
“Not like yours, Officer. When I make a left turn, I use the turn indicator, but if I had nails like yours, I’d be proud, I’d extend my arm into traffic. A legal left-hand turn, it goes without saying.”
The patrolman rose into an elevated mood. “Go and sin no more, Champ,” he said, strolling tight-assed, aware of being watched, back to the patrol car. Ferd turned to Dan. “Learn, my friend, always learn to be nice when it’s appropriate.”
He waited until the patrol car sped ahead. He waved to the officer, who lifted his hand in a salute. “Sometimes charm helps,” Ferd said. “It’s a cost-free asset, which you can’t always count on, but sometimes. How about an omelet for brunch? Eggs Benedictus? On this special occasion, break your diet of no-fun eating?”
This weekend started out to be nonstop hour charm.
“You know that song?” Ferd was asking. “‘You Can Take My Wife, But Please Don’t Take My Boyfriend?’ That cop sure had clean pink nails, didn’t he?”
Charm all the way south.
Kasdan aimed to avoid discordant elements, although his aim didn’t always succeed. He felt his eyebrows knitted together in a frown. Here on California Route One, on a weekend of fellowship, he was taking the air amid the low music of a fine German motor and the nourishing sights of redwood and pine, green mountains, the Pacific Ocean below the road. He tried for Zen or yogic or some other valid go-with-the-flow unknitting of eyebrows. To be at one with the universe, that was the ticket. Since he had agreed to just hang out with Ferd for a weekend, he had better hang out with a willing heart – at ease, goddammit. And his eyebrows obeyed the command. The frown came unknitted.
Ferd seemed to respect an effort Dan was making, himself breathing the air, also respecting the sea and shadowed mountains, driving silently at peace.
“Hey! That’s a deer!”
Not silently at peace for long, however.
Dan intended to test the boundaries of friendship, something beyond his hours with Harvey and the guys at the Caffé Roma, now that he was learning about something else with Amanda and Sergei, his only grandson. Something else? The difficult practice of love. So he could also practice, try to, friendship with Ferd, who was no stranger, who wanted to be his pal, who needed him. Dan wanted to take charge of himself and make things happen. Other people did that.
It was a day of clouds, sunlight, breezes, salt air; hum of tires, hikers along the road, Ferd startled by a deer. Although Dan had reached the time in his life when he scanned a menu and thought of cholesterol, he decided that a nice three-egg Denver omelet, or maybe a Spanish one, cooked soft with a dash of cream, might be a good choice when they stopped for lunch. Or maybe huevos rancheros with a fat glop of guacamole. It was only right to celebrate life’s surprise sudden turns.
Lulled, Dan wondered if he could learn to value Ferd’s friendship. He would face the problem if it arose. Ferd had a powerful way of insisting on their bond and it was Dan’s obligation to take it under due consideration.
After a life in the city, Kasdan knew about the weed tree ailanthus, the scavenger gulls, pigeons, and an occasional circling hawk, the stubborn green stems pushing through sidewalks, the moss extruded on breaks between cement steps; but here on the winding coastal highway, he came close to speaking aloud to Ferd about wildflowers and lichen, ferns and squawking bird heads in their nests. He resisted making appreciative remarks to his companion, who glanced at Kasdan’s head turning this way and that, peering toward the hills, peering toward the sea, blinking as the road turned and sunlight sparkled on the windshield. Ferd recognized what Dan was observing. “Nature,” Ferd said.
Kasdan agreed. There was nature out there.
Ferd elaborated: “Different. A change.”
He was expressing mellow solidarity; Dan was his guest; decency was required. Dan made an effort. “I had a friend, we were kids, he didn’t know the names of trees, called everything he didn’t know ‘dogwood.’”
“Plants, too?”
“Yeah. He even called dogwood ‘dogwood,’ but he didn’t know that’s what it was.”
“He still your buddy?”
“That was when we were kids. Lost track of him.”
Ferd was delighted by this news and the sudden burst of conversation. He pointed out the window as they negotiated a switchback. “Hey, there’s a dogwood out there.” Kasdan remembered reading that before the white people came to California, when this part of the coast was the domain of a band of Indians, a person could step no place without stepping on flowers. He said to Ferd, “Let’s pull over a few minutes.”
“You need to pee?”
“No, just get out and move around.”
“We’re almost there.”
Kasdan could wait to bend for a wildflower descended from times before the Russian trappers, the Spanish explorers, the gold miners, and tourists like Ferd and Dan. What he was planning was bad enough. He would try not to step on a carpet of wildflowers.
Kasdan closed his eyes. The low drone of the motor was like consoling music. He thought of Amanda and his grandson. He saw a buck deer with tangled antlers leaping across the road, then mashed against the hood of the Mercedes and howling with death grief; he saw himself ending his confusion with his head on a deer’s body; he jerked awake and saw that he was not drunk but hungry, low sugar, a symptom of needing that omelet.
“Dreaming, Cowboy?” Ferd asked. “I thought I lost you there.”
“Started to doze…”
“Hey, you can do that, sleep sitting up? I can’t do that. You got talents I don’t even know about.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Natur
e, raw nature plus human nature…” And he added after a moment: “What a combination.”
Kasdan thought of snow; he missed it sometimes, that shift from white to gray in cities, and the melting, the gray flow pumping into underground pipes. He didn’t ski. In San Francisco, you only saw a light dusting of snow on hilltops, erased by the morning sun. People with money went to Squaw Valley to ski among white blankets of snow, hills draped in snow. If he had money, he might try that, if it wasn’t too late for him.
“Nature’s a kick,” Ferd was saying. Probably he had been making other ecological remarks while Dan was busy spacing out. “To me, sometimes I’d like to be a farmer, a nice red barn, or a guitar player with a little organic garden, if I had my druthers about things.” Ferd was swaying to the music playing in his head. Upon further thought he amended his agricultural and guitar career interlude. “Sometimes, anyway.”
Dan respected a man with a sense of rhythm, music in his soul. Even if the music was inaudible to Dan, it could still be a comfort for another, such as Ferd. But then, fully emerging from a car-induced, swerve-induced doze, he heard the radio softly playing a song about love and eternal loyalty, a classic rock station in Carmel.
Around a sharp bend in the road, their first destination announced itself. “Here we are. They got the beverages, postcards, redwood souvenirs, all the stuff, plus a full-service view, Pacific Ocean down there. Man, they got it all organized. A grampa can probably order up whales on the menu, kids want to see them spout. Those citations – that the word? – they burp up a storm.”
“Cetacea,” said pedantic Dan Kasdan, court translator.
Ferd pulled into the parking lot and snapped open his seat belt. “It’s Nepenthe, man. Paradise on earth since maybe 1952.”
Here in this narrow coastal strip, perched above the eager appetite of the sea against rocks, stood a dressed-up survival of the days when Henry Miller took refuge in a nearby canyon. The house first built by Orson Welles for Rita Hayworth later became a café where Joan Baez sometimes sang around an outdoor fireplace for gatherings of rapt flower children, lovers of folk music and barbecue. This was still America, so Nepenthe grew, now with a parking lot big enough for tour buses, long-haul trucks, and families pursuing cheeseburgers and other essential road trip amenities.
“Well, when you gotta go, you gotta go,” Ferd was saying.
“I didn’t mind waiting.”
“What a prostate you must still have, man!”
They were thinking of different goings. Dan was shaking his head and Ferd asked, “What’s that about?”
“Talking to myself. Sorry.”
“Well, say it to me. You think too much and you don’t decide enough.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m here to remedy that. Try to help a little, okay?”
“Sorry,” Dan repeated.
Ferd waited a moment. “Okay, whatever. It’s beverage time for me.”
On Route One, the road from Carmel into Big Sur and then south, the ancient Sixties survived. Hitchhikers put out their thumbs and expected rides. Kasdan jerked forward against his seatbelt as, rounding the curve out of Nepenthe, Ferd braked for a young woman holding a cardboard sign: a smiley face in yellow marker with a red balloon within which she had inscribed the word ‘PLEASE!!!’ Ferd mouthed the word and squealed to a stop as the girl, probably no more than nineteen, ran nimbly toward the Mercedes convertible and jumped into the backseat, twisting her backpack but not objecting to her cramped place behind two traveling gentlemen. Wisps of straw-colored hair poked under a woven yarn hat. “Hey, guys,” she said, “can you guess how long I had to wait for you two?”
Neither guessed. She pulled off the hat, shook her hair free, raked it with her fingers.
“Love your wheels,” she said. “So where we going?”
We? There was a sudden sharp animal stink, far gone in decay, a skunk or a fox, wheels skidding over the oily residue. Neither Ferd nor the girl seemed to notice. We? Kasdan thought. Ferd was suggesting to the hitchhiker that they stop someplace, maybe turn back to the River Inn, maybe just down the road to Dietgen’s – which, he explained, is now called the Big Sur Inn, where he and his buddy had reservations – or maybe someplace else that looks nice; enjoy something; get to know each other a little… We, the girl had said.
The straw-haired girl had a happy giggle. She had said her name, but Kasdan asked, “Your name again? I think I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You should. Lulu,” she said. “Hey it’s not my name back home, but I call myself that, ’cause I’m an inspiration to people, specially men.” She didn’t explain why the name, how the inspiration, all the external or internal workings of it, but added merrily, “So you can call me that.”
“Lulu,” Ferd said appreciatively. “Wanna be my boyfriend?”
Even looking straight ahead, Kasdan could feel her start upright (no seatbelt, of course). “You mean girlfriend?”
Ferd was in the swing of adventure. “Whatever! Just kidding, Lulu. Cowboy here’s my girlfriend.”
Kasdan felt previous San Francisco judgments returning. Alone together on the highway, Ferd Conway had seemed like a different person. Now he was Ferd again, but a Ferd who glanced sideways at him, worried that he might be a disappointment. “Hey, I don’t know what gets into me when I’m together with a great lady and an old – he’s not that old – best buddy. Apologies all around, okay?”
“So let’s cut to the chase,” said Lulu. “I’m working this road. A threesome suit you nice boys okay?”
“Pardon?” murmured Kasdan, but no one felt it necessary to take account of his question. Ferd took account, instead, of Lulu’s question. “Inneresting,” he drawled.
“Here’s the deal, but only if you nice boys wanna. You spring for a room, one of these places, motels, campgrounds, Dietgen’s, whatever, or if you’re in a hurry, we can go for the Vacation Special, Road-Trip, Bargain Package, which we manage with our natural-born equipment here in this cramped nice luxury sports car.”
Ferd laughed. “I got a strong back, but I’m not so sure about my friend here’s spine. What do you think, Cowboy? You got an opinion?”
Lulu was waiting. Ferd was waiting. Dan said, “Please pull over to the gas station.” He turned to look at Lulu, sitting on the edge of her seat, no seatbelt, smelling nice, leaning over between Ferd and him.
Kasdan undid his seatbelt, Lulu noticing, taking it as an agreeable sign of things to come, but Kasdan was reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a crumpled twenty dollar bill. He regretted it wasn’t a ten because there was frugality in his nature, unlike Ferd’s nature. “Please take this,” he said, handing her the crumple. “I’m going back to the Men’s.” And to Ferd: “Please, I’d like her to be gone when I come back.”
She looked startled at the word please. Ferd looked startled in general. Kasdan did what he announced he would do, scrubbed his hands with abrasive powdered gas station soap, dried his hands on his pants because the towel was oily, studied his face in the mirror not because he was interested in his face but because he wanted Ferd and Lulu to finish whatever transaction they had in mind before he emerged. He wondered if he had been rude, decided he had been, and added this incident to the debits in his conscience. Now his hands were desiccated claws, thanks to gas station soap and bad karma. He waited. He opened the door when another motorist rattled it. He had compassion for the need to pee; his conscience didn’t need any additional burdens.
Lulu was already in a corner of the lot, her face shining, discussing matters at a diesel semi’s high door. Ferd turned the ignition key with no comment. Then he commented anyway, “A twenty was that? Hey, big spender! She had a repartee with us, all she had, and you slipped her a twenty? Well, in the future, no need to worry about frugal, because you’ll be the proud shopper for wheels like this one, plus whatever else… And you know, don’t you? I was just putting her on. Just gassing for the companionship of it, you knew that, didn’t you? I was o
n your side the whole time.”
When Dan just nodded, Ferd nodded also. He had to get used to Dan’s sometimes not participating in repartee.
“Lulu Clapped-Up is what I’d call her, but hey, you have to agree she was cute bad news, wouldn’t you? Don’t you?”
They didn’t have far to go now.
At the inn, Ferd’s selection, little Hansel and Gretel cottages, caves, nests, low-roofed nooks of reclaimed lumber and harvested rocks, had been tucked helter-skelter into a rising slope. Pride and gaiety filled Ferd’s face. “Loving hands made this, you dig?” He was channeling the time warp, getting into the time warp spirit of their adventure. “Listen up, not for economy or anything, but just because, we could ask for a pad with twin beds, because the serenity can get pretty heavy sometimes. You know, talk to each other? Converse?”
“You only reserved one room?”
“I left it open with a maybe, this time of the year.”
“I think I snore,” Kasdan said. “I like to read in bed. We better…”
“Okay, okay, it was just an idea. Sometimes people get lonesome, Dan.”
Kasdan was trying to remember if it was a witch or the big bad wolf that interrupted the serenity of Hansel and Gretel. It was the witch. Kasdan’s cottage had a fireplace with a musty smell of ashes lingering in the air. Logs and kindling lay in a metal basket nearby, a nice comforter on the single bed. Ferd gave him no argument, just a little repartee, on the matter of separate rooms. Whatever Dan desired this weekend was perfectly fine with him.