by Jimmy Webb
At first I thought I was hearing things. I thought my survivor’s guilt had finally wrested away control of my innermost helm.
“Hippie asshole.” I felt something rattle against the paper cup of water I held in my hand.
“Go back where you came from, sissy.” Something hit me right on top of the head and then bounced into Miss Shrimp Boat’s coif where it was clearly visible. The mutterings of mutiny were all too real. It was a shrimp. Suddenly it became the thing to do. Pelt the songwriter with prawns, everyone! Shrimp began to arc over the crowd and fall into the backseat of the Cadillac.
“Welcome to Galveston!” A whole cup of boiled shrimp landed in my lap. I became concerned for the welfare of my escort who had committed no crime except to sit in the same car with me. I leaned forward and talked mean to Tiny.
“Get us out of here before someone gets hurt.”
“Yokay.” Tiny grinned.
Miss Shrimp Boat Festival was on the verge of tears.
At the end of the parade route I gallantly kissed my queen on the cheek, disengaged myself from my hosts politely, and quickly as possible escaped from the greater Galveston area. I never wore a Pierre Cardin suit or scarf again. Ever.
1973
Rosemarie decided one day out of the blue that everything would be fine and she could see a future for us but only if we lived at the beach. If she thought this would discourage my ardency she miscalculated. I drove her down to Malibu and checked into a nice hotel on Carbon Beach and spent the afternoon on the phone setting up real estate appointments.
The next day we saw five houses. Rosemarie went over these different offerings with concentrated precision. I offered no resistance. I even managed to show a little enthusiasm for these overpriced gilded cages. I remember looking at one particularly elaborate mansion that was tagged at an outrageous $400,000. It was the one Rosemarie wanted. Today that four hundred grand would probably not pay the property taxes.
“Let’s get it, doll!” I exulted, taking her into my arms. “If it makes you happy!” I called Jerry Rubinstein and told him I was putting Campo on the market and buying a beach house. He was stunned but he didn’t argue with me. He started putting together an offer and a loan.
That night we were watching television in bed as the ocean chanted through the open balcony doors at the hotel. A caressing breeze toyed with the curtains and then subsided. Rosemarie arose from the bed slowly and calmly. She picked up the telephone and ordered a cab. I could only watch. She took her street clothes out of the closet, cast her sleeping gown into her bag, and got dressed.
“You’re leaving again.”
She said nothing, just closed her overnight case and checked her Louis Vuitton tote bag to make sure she had everything. She walked over to my side of the bed and sat down on the mattress. She gave me a sad smile and kissed me sweetly on the cheek. She walked out and closed the door softly, leaving me miles from my own bed on that lonely beach. There was finality to her silent good-bye. I lay there for a while and then stoically put my shit together and checked out. When I got back to Campo I called Jerry Rubinstein.
“Jer. You know that beach house thing?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Don’t,” I said, and hung up.
I didn’t hate her. I loathed myself for being such a schoolboy. Nobody makes a fool of anybody, country music notwithstanding. Fools are volunteers and when the dust settles they have no one to blame, no lawyer, no sympathy, and no recourse.
I hired a yacht out of Marina del Rey: a symbolic voyage to celebrate the ending of such a brutal affair. Gary Kellgren, who owned the Record Plant, had been talking about the possibility of taking a recording studio to sea as a business venture. I frequently chartered a small ship called Magnifico, a World War II hospital ship, the sister ship of John Wayne’s famous Wild Goose. Kellgren decided we would put a studio on board and take her on a trial voyage. In my unfettered state I jumped at the project and made further preparations for my album with David Geffen. Enough howling at the moon. I became a proponent of Ava Gardner’s famous theorem: “Love is nothing.”
It had taken two full days to install the studio aboard ship and waterproof everything. The handsome, unflappable Gary Kellgren (with his briar pipe clenched in his teeth) joined Harry Nilsson, Micky Dolenz, Garth Sadler Webb, Jesse Ed Davis, and other legendary sidemen. My father and his new lovely girlfriend were there. The boat’s owner, an ex-con named Rick Compton, was at the helm and backing him was his faithful first mate and cabin valet Sid. A dozen berths were filled with nameless souls who are lost to this feeble memory, but many of them were exceedingly beautiful girls.
Spirits were high when we shipped out for Avalon on Catalina one sunny afternoon. We were somehow convinced we were making history. Margaritas were traditional on the Magnifico and virtually the entire crew had one as we exited the tight network of slips and pilings and headed west through the outer harbor, huge man-made jetties a half mile apart on either side. Kellgren’s playback system cranked into life at plane crash volume, rendering Eric Clapton’s forbidding version of “Cocaine.” A cheer went up on the boat. All scientific considerations aside, this was going to be one hell of a party.
Under ideal conditions we found recording at sea was not so hard. We recorded in the gentle swell, a test track whose basis was a publishing discovery by Kellgren called “Mothertrucker.” There were some conflicts between the noise of auxiliary generators and soundproofing but nothing that could not be solved in a prototype. Both the vessel and the players rocked gently.
That evening the entire crew went ashore using various forms of transportation, including a monstrous Boston Whaler, as Kellgren and I chartered a small restaurant on the waterfront. Compton had left the ship—all sixty-two tons of her—securely anchored and, to discourage intruders, with the television in the main salon on and turned up loud. Lights burned everywhere there was a lightbulb. It seemed to my rudimentary maritime judgment that someone should have been left on watch, but I wasn’t the skipper.
We tucked into the catch of the day and ordered bottles of wine for twenty people. I am sure we made a serious dent in their cellar. Kellgren also brought along his famous Igloo cooler, a tiny thing that held a bottle of iced Champagne and a quart of fresh orange juice, baking soda, and cocaine at all times. There was a particular ritual associated with these items but not one that would be demonstrated in a public place.
Ribald stories were told, laughter in ripples dominated the conversation of our intrepid adventurers. It was easy to get lost in overlapping accounts of studio lore featuring all the big players: Lennon, Jagger, Clapton, and other members of Kellgren’s glittering clientele.
Suddenly Compton roared, “Shit!” The veins on his big bull neck were about to explode. “The friggin’ boat is loose!”
A glance out the picture window revealed the lights of the Magnifico just disappearing over the horizon. All the guys piled out the front door in a mob leaving the ladies to settle the astronomical bill. Half of us jumped into the swift Boston Whaler with its 70 hp Mercury engine and took off chasing our home, our belongings, and a quarter-million-dollars’ worth of recording gear. The Whaler was a rubber inflatable that tended to bounce over the water. With each bounce most of us caught a mouth full of the old briny. We closed with the Magnifico quickly.
“We have to be careful here,” Compton warned in a hoarse yell. “If there are people aboard they could be armed. This could be a drug deal.”
He cut the throttle and we came up gingerly on the big flat stern with its proud name.
“The boarding ladder’s still down,” I contributed, thinking of all the exotic weapons I had in my cupboard in Encino. That’s the problem with lethal arms. You can never find one when you need one.
“She’s not making way. She’s in the tide,” asserted Compton. The currents in the Catalina channel are notorious for their strength and unpredictability. We crept up by the boarding ladder, engine idling, and Compton hoppe
d on board. We waited uneasily, half anticipating a ruckus until Compton’s hulking silhouette appeared at the top of the ladder.
“Sid! Come aboard and get down to the engine room. Let’s get power on this bastard before we hit something! You guys come on up. This is just a case of incompetency.” He shot the long-suffering Sid a look that would shrivel bacon as he passed him at the top of the ladder and the rest of us trooped aboard. A subdued captain guided us back into the Harbor where we retied ourselves to the mooring with several newly minted experts looking on. With everyone back aboard it was grass and booze and a little coke and then, quite late in the morning, there was bed. My father was aboard but shunned the drug use and stayed in his cabin. We brought our languorous Hollywood schedule with us.
LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE, Lou Adler had printed on his business cards. I thought of Rosemarie as I drifted off and resolved that I would savor my share of that revenge.
I was awakened by the smell of scrambled eggs and bacon. There were a dozen people lounging on the stern and eating breakfast. Down below someone was playing “Mothertrucker” on the console and seemed to be doing a rough mix. I heard the soloing of individual instruments and the repetition of certain sections, part of the ordinary studio routine but nevertheless remarkable on a sparkling blue ocean.
After a few minutes the engines rumbled and the keel shivered for a moment as the big Cats came on line. I walked up to the bridge and saw Compton hunched over the chart table, my favorite part of the ship. We would head north out of the San Pedro Channel and, just skirting Santa Monica Bay on our starboard beam, make for the Anacapa Islands, three big rocks—one with a lighthouse—about seventy miles north by northwest of our position. These rocks were the gateway to the Santa Cruz Islands: Cruz, Rosa, and Miguel, each one an uninhabited ecological treasure. It was a playground to those who knew its secrets.
I went to the portside rail and looked over to see my father steering a little boat up to the boarding ladder. In the early morning he and his pretty date had gone fishing. Their skiff was filled with enough fish to feed everybody aboard. At least three yellowtail tuna in the fifteen- to twenty-pound range and a half-dozen cod, some of them distended by the difference in pressure when they were hauled up from two hundred feet or deeper.
Once aboard, Pop stripped off his shirt, borrowed a butcher knife out of the kitchen, and began the task of turning the fish into seafood on the swim step. He had a stomach of iron and he carved his way through the shocking disembowelment with a smile on his face as a crowd formed among the passengers, many who had never seen a spectacle of such forensic interest. Harry was paler than I’ve ever seen him.
“Jimmy, I mean no offense, but your father is a fucking barbarian.” He spit on his way to the head where he spent quite a long time.
Later, I was at the helm with the skipper when Gary came flying through the door.
“There’s something back here, man. You have to come check this out!” His voice was high and excited. Virtually everybody on board was focused on something in our wake. It was not something in the sea they were pointing at, but something above water. A disc-shaped object was about a thousand yards off our stern, floating a thousand feet above the water. The upper surface of the disc had a domelike swelling that blended gently into its smooth round shape. Most of the people on that deck were half in the bag already. We were as unreliable and unqualified a band of dopers and alcoholics as one could have amassed on the whole West Coast and in no sense do I expect this story to meet with even polite skepticism; and yet it was there, calm as cheese, and we were there, crazy and giddy, but seeing it.
I took it to be about forty or fifty feet in diameter at least, with a possible one hundred. That it was following us was undeniable. Compton stood there, and Kellgren and Harry and I just grinned at one another. Sure. Why not?
Champagne was opened and guests began to drink toasts to the “spacemen” and to talk to them as though they were alongside. This took a disturbing turn.
“Why don’t you just come over here and kiss my ass?” one of the second engineers shouted out.
“Yeah, fuck you guys from outer space. Chomp on this!” somebody else said, and it quickly became a vulgar display of human manners culminating in the dropping of pants and the mooning of fellow voyagers in violation of the most ancient rules of maritime courtesy.
It seemed as though in a huff, the effortlessly agile craft disappeared in a straight line over the scruffy ridge of Santa Catalina. The party doubled down on this departure. Comments meant to be amusing were launched such as: “That’ll show the little green bastards.” Or, “C’mon down and have a snort, shorty, join the party?” Finally there was a shout twice as loud as all the rest: “Fuck you, interstellar assholes with your little gray dicks! Invade us already!”
The disc cruised back slowly, only nearer. The merrymaking ceased. I ran toward the bridge where Sid was tending our course.
“Is the radar on?” I asked even as I saw it was. There was a sizeable blip four hundred yards off our stern and trailing us. There was abject silence on the stern, only the sound of wind, waves, and the grumbling diesels. Our vaunted white yacht was not even a toy compared to this thing, whatever it was.
The brief interval of involuntary communion ended suddenly. My ears popped and the miracle was gone. It darted away in classic UFO fashion, disappearing over the island in a starting display of technical superiority. Ours was a tough audience indeed but even my irrepressible shipmates were subdued by these events. The crew drifted into small groups and conversed quietly, glancing at the sky occasionally.
By sunset we could see Anacapa light and no wonder. All aboard crowded to the bow, undaunted by spray and wind to see the three short flashes of white light separated by almost forty seconds of darkness until the three dashes were repeated again. We passed by the Anacapa Islands and moved toward Santa Cruz, a gigantic undecipherable shadow. The lighthouse faded behind in a corona of Joseph Conrad’s “opaline mist” suffusing its probing beam, and then we passed beyond as though entering another world, reering west toward the big island of Santa Cruz. It was getting late, at least ten o’clock, and still we powered into the night looking for Devil’s Cove, a spectacular landscape of beach and cavernous rocks on the south shore.
I started out of a nap on the big bench seat at the back of the wheelhouse. “There it is,” said Compton, examining the radar intently. He held a big fat thumb up against the fiery image that illuminated once every thirty seconds as the radar signal made its sweep.
With a lot of shouting, a little cursing, and much backing off of the anchor to ensure it was firmly buried, we came to rest. The insistent vibration of the engines ceased. Placidity descended over the craft as we watched the surf glowing with phosphorescence some distance away. An acoustic guitar materialized above decks and Jesse Ed Davis played “Blackbird” and variations. Steaks hit the grill in the galley and a pipe was passed around, rich with aromatic, honey-flavored hash. Smoke drifted. It was chilly above decks and sweaters proliferated among those who hadn’t already collapsed in sleep.
The skipper had found a calm spot in the lee of one of the island’s outthrust haunches. As the ship’s systems were powered down and only essential lighting remained, the evening softened further into the flicker of lighters and glow of candles and cigarettes and joints. Voices ceased their cacophonous silliness and became a murmur that rose and fell with the swells, disturbed only by the odd wiseass remark and disembodied laughter from somewhere far forward.
I found Kellgren sitting in a chair on the poop with his little Igloo cooler. In these surroundings its workings could be revealed. Gary took a pinch of baking soda and placed it under his front lip like a chaw of tobacco. To this was added a healthy line of top-quality cocaine. There was an immediate chemical reaction between the two accelerated by a shot of Champagne held in the mouth and then purged by orange juice. This process, as far as I know his exclusive invention, would supercharge the alkaloid d
irectly through the membranes of one’s mouth into the bloodstream. I indulged in the experiment with mixed emotions. Cocaine was already becoming a problem for me. Making it more potent was something I shied away from. I was doing my best to “manage” a problem that was overtaking me anyway.
I went to sleep in my private stateroom. I had a tiny sink and two bunk beds but I didn’t invite anybody inside. I still thought about Rosemarie at the most inopportune moments. She had a way of invading my thoughts whenever I saw a very pretty girl.
The sun was high when I awoke to a clamor of seagulls at the stern. One by one the beguiled travelers came awake in a wonderland from the dust jacket of a Jules Verne novel. The vampire kings and queens of Hollywood’s night life stood on deck with mugs of wickedly strong black coffee and gaped at the opening shot of some gothic horror tale or better yet, the lair of King Kong.
The Magnifico was precariously close to the island. The scarred, cracked face of the cliff was only perhaps fifty yards away. When I stepped up on the deck I was in the middle of a silent crowd lining the railings. They all stared intently at something high above us on the face of the cliff.