THREE

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

California, 1968

THE NEW THING IN SURFING—THAT WHICH GLENN KAULUKUKUI had seemed to me, in Waikiki, to be in the vanguard of—was, it turned out, the shortboard revolution. By luck, I saw its foremost progenitor in action the following winter, just before the underground movement surfaced. He was an Australian named Bob McTavish. I saw him at Rincon, a pointbreak north of Ventura that I had started surfing with Domenic when we could cadge a ride that far. Rincon, now known kitschily as the Queen of the Coast, was then known simply as the best wave in California, a long, hollow, wintertime right of astonishing quality. It was a big day, low tide, late afternoon, and we were resting on the rocks in the cove when somebody shouted and pointed to a brawny set standing up against the sky out at Second Point. Few people surfed Second Point, also known as Indicator, at that size. The great wave at Rincon was First Point. One paddled up to Second Point to escape the crowd on small days, settling for inferior waves. There were stories about huge perfect days when it was possible to surf all the way from Second Point through First Point and down to the cove, some eight hundred high-speed yards, but I had certainly never seen it done.

Now someone was doing it. He was doing it, moreover, on a board that seemed to have jets installed on the rails. My eye actually had trouble following the bursts of speed that each banking bottom turn produced. The rider would be suddenly ten yards ahead of where he was supposed to be, according to the physics of surfing as I understood them. He was getting comparable acceleration off his top turns. The result was that he was making it through long, heavy sections that would normally have ended a ride. It felt like, each time I blinked, some film in my head skipped, and the surfer reappeared farther down the line than he should have been. If you read some of the early published descriptions of surfing—Jack London’s and Mark Twain’s, each occasioned by visits to Hawaii, are the most often quoted—you’ll find them full of clumsy efforts to render action that was too quick, complex, and foreign to the observer’s eye to make any visual sense. That was how it felt to watch McTavish thread that eight-foot wave at Rincon. He rode through the First Point takeoff zone, past the crowd, as if it were just another section to outwit, and continued, blazing turn after blazing turn, all the way to the cove.

There are few corny Colosseum moments in surfing—it’s not that kind of sport—but I remember people running across the beach, me among them, to greet McTavish as he reached the sand. We mainly wanted to see the board. It was not like any surfboard I had seen. It was outlandishly short by the standards of the day, and the bottom was V-shaped, with two chines getting steadily deeper and more pronounced toward the tail. I had no words—not even “V-bottom”—to describe what I was seeing, and no notion who McTavish was. He was short, grinning, powerfully built. All he said was “G’day” as he trotted past, starting the long jog back to Second Point, his homemade monstrosity under his arm.

Nothing was the same afterward. Within months the surf mags were full of V-bottoms and other radical new designs, all dramatically shorter and lighter than the boards people had been riding for decades. The revolution was emanating from Australia and Hawaii, its gurus McTavish and a couple of Americans, George Greenough and Dick Brewer. Their test riders were some of the world’s top surfers, most notably Nat Young, an Australian world champ. But California, then still the sport’s imperial capital, eagerly converted en masse to the new faith. Surfing itself changed, with the speed and ultra-maneuverability of the new board. Nose-riding was a dead letter overnight. (Ditto drop-knee cutbacks.) Tube rides and hard, flowing, short-radius turns, banking vertically off the lip and riding always as close as possible to the breaking part of the wave—these weren’t exactly new ideas, but they were all newly elevated as the goals of progressive surfing, and they were all being realized at levels never seen before.

It was 1968. Across the West, with its restless youth, a great many things—sex, society, authority—were being rethought or sharply questioned, and the little world of surfing rose, in its way, to the insurrectionary moment. The shortboard revolution was inseparable from the zeitgeist: hippie culture, acid rock, hallucinogens, neo–Eastern mysticism, the psychedelic aesthetic. The peace movement, just entering its boom period nationally, never developed a coherent surfers’ wing (the environmental movement has been another story), but the world of surfing became, however incoherently, and pace Francis Ford Coppola, broadly antiwar. Many surfers dodged the draft. Even famous surfers, guys who could hardly paddle out anywhere without being photographed, but who were now wanted by the authorities, tried to go underground.

By spring I had my first shortboard. It came from a big boardmaker named Dewey Weber, in Venice Beach, who was scrambling, like every boardmaker, to meet the new demand. The model I got was called a Mini-Feather. It was bulbous and primitive, but for the moment it was state-of-the-art. Mine was 7'0". I could carry it by the rail, in one hand. I put my hard-earned second Harbour Cheater, which hardly had a ding yet, up in the garage rafters and never rode it again. At fifteen, with a solid command of the basics, I was at a good age to make the switch to shortboards. I was still very light, but strong enough to put the Mini-Feather up on a rail, hit the lip without losing control, and make the late drops that a small board, with its poor flotation and slow paddling speed, required. (Longboards, as they were suddenly being called, float higher in the water because of their greater foam volume, and thus paddle much faster.) I knew more surfers now who were old enough to drive, and so I started ducking out of family weekends in Ventura—California Street was a bit slow and mushy for shortboards—and surfing the south-swell spots closer to Los Angeles. Secos, County Line, First Point Malibu.

First Point Malibu was the center ring of the surfing circus, and had been so since the Gidget days of the late ’50s. It was ridiculously crowded even when it was terrible. On good days it was a beautiful wave, a long right mechanical pointbreak, peeling along a tapering rock shelf all the way to the sand. There were a few top-flight surfers who still surfed Malibu, despite the crowds, but most had fled. The undisputed king of the spot when I first surfed there was Miki Dora, a darkly handsome, scowling misanthrope with a subtle style perfectly suited to the wave. He ran over people who got in his way and scorned the mindless surfing masses in well-turned quotes in the mags, all while flogging his signature-model surfboard, Da Cat, in adjacent ads. But Da Cat was a longboard. With the arrival of the shortboard, many surf legends were shoved rudely into irrelevance. First Point Malibu became even more of a madhouse than before. With longboards, it had been possible, at least in theory, for a small number of surfers to share a wave. The frantic, quick-turning style required by shortboards, their need to be always in or very near the breaking part of the wave, meant that there was really room for only one guy on a wave now. The result was bedlam.

Oddly, I didn’t mind it. I had reached a stage where I actually felt quicker, better-balanced, more capable than most of the people around me, and I enjoyed weaving through them, calling them off waves, scaring them off waves with sharp turns, snagging waves to myself, driving my Mini-Feather hard through the sweet curves of inside Malibu like a sports car through a racecourse.

The larger satisfactions of the shortboard were to be found elsewhere, away from the crowds. First and foremost were tube rides, or barrels. A shortboard could fit much deeper and tighter inside a wave than a longboard. True barrels—successful passages through the inner chambers of a hollow wave—were suddenly more attainable than they had ever been. At Zuma Beach, Oil Piers, Hollywood-by-the-Sea in Oxnard, anywhere that got hollow, hard-breaking waves, a new code of risk and reward obtained, with a blown mind, in the best sense of that ominous phrase, now a real, happy possibility. “Pulling in”—trying to find the barrel by angling close to the wave face when it broke, rather than angling shoreward, toward the flats—was not without its dangers, to be sure, if one didn’t safely emerge from the tube, which one usually didn’t. Hollow waves normally break on shallow rocks, reefs, and sandbars. Falling off in the heart of a hollow wave can lead—often does lead—to a collision with the bottom. One’s own board also becomes something of an unguided missile.

The barrel disaster I remember most clearly from that first shortboard summer, though, was of a different type. It happened in Mexico, at a remote Baja reefbreak known as K-181. I was camping there with the Beckets, who by then had acquired an old school bus, which they had converted, adding bunks and a kitchen, for backcountry family use. The surf was good-sized, glassy, empty. Bill and I were exploring the performance limits of our tiny new boards. I pulled into a deep, smooth, blue-green barrel, and was straining every nerve toward the sunlight ahead, the sloping shoulder. Just as I thought I was coming out cleanly, there was a horrible chunk, my board stopped dead, and I flew over the nose. It seemed I had run over Becket. From inside the barrel, I never saw him paddling toward my wave, caught inside, trying to punch through. He had seen me disappear, figured I might still be in there somewhere, and quietly abandoned ship. So I had only struck his board, not him. Still, my fin had cut deep through his rail, nearly to the stringer. Our boards were actually stuck together, in a hideous tangle of smashed fiberglass and foam, and we had to struggle to get them apart. The damage was all on his side. He was heartsick, but he was good about it. After all, I had been looking God in the face before he got in my way.

 • • • 

BOARDMAKERS WERE STUCK with shops full of longboards they couldn’t sell. Some surfers were stuck with new longboards, bought on the eve of the revolution. That was the predicament of two friends of mine. Call them Curly and Moe. All their savings had gone into boards that were now suddenly obsolete—beautiful but embarrassing, no longer presentable at any self-respecting surf spot. Then somebody told us about homeowners’ insurance. A stolen surfboard could be claimed, it was said, and reimbursed at the purchase price, if your parents had homeowners’ insurance. Curly and Moe were fairly sure their parents had it. Nobody was going to steal their boards—they could not have given them away—but maybe, we thought, we could ditch them, report them stolen, and they could collect enough money to buy shortboards. It was worth trying. And so we drove out into the Santa Monica Mountains, far up a fire road, then carried the two boards on a trail deep into the brush until we came to the top of a cliff. There may have been some ritual mumbling. Certainly there were some strong emotions. Moe’s board, in particular, was immaculate—a Steve Bigler signature model, the deck a pale blue tint, the rails a solid copper—and I knew that owning and riding it had been his deepest desire for years. But he and Curly each stepped to the edge of the cliff and hurled their unfashionable boards into space. They hit the rocks far below, cartwheeling, snapping, settling horribly into gnarled manzanita.

I don’t remember if the insurance scam worked. I do know that that mint-condition Bigler, simply left in a garage, would be worth thousands of dollars today. What interests me, though, is what was in my head. I know I saw nothing wrong with insurance fraud, just as I saw nothing wrong with drug smuggling, or with anything else I considered a victimless crime. Draft dodging, still well in the future for me but already upending the lives of the older brothers of friends, I vehemently endorsed. The Vietnam War was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single oppressive mass—the System, the Man. These were standard-issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with.

But a more conscious, analytic, loosely Marxist disaffection was also taking root in my politics in my midteens. (And disaggregating, intellectually and emotionally, the mass of institutional power—sorting out how things actually worked, beyond how they felt as a whole—would turn out to be the work of many years.) In the meantime, surfing became an excellent refuge from the conflict—a consuming, physically exhausting, joy-drenched reason to live. It also, in its vaguely outlaw uselessness, its disengagement from productive labor, neatly expressed one’s disaffection.

Where was my sense of social responsibility? Not much in evidence. I marched in peace marches. I was still a good student, which really proved nothing except that I liked to read and was hedging my bets. I became a math tutor for a while for a couple of nerdy African American girls in Pacoima, a poor town at the east end of the Valley. I doubt they got much from our sessions. I know I felt like an impostor—a kid their own age playing teacher. My mother, who somehow managed to stay politically active while raising four children, roped me into canvassing door-to-door for Tom Bradley, Sam Yorty’s opponent for mayor, in our precinct in Woodland Hills. Bradley would be, if he won, the first black mayor of L.A., so it felt like a historic election. Bradley polled well in our precinct, and we were optimistic. Then Yorty won the election, and the precinct breakdowns showed that our neighbors had evidently been lying when they told us canvassers that they would vote for Bradley. It was a well-known phenomenon, apparently, among white voters, these voting-booth reversals. Still, I was outraged, and my cynicism about organized politics and the broad mass of what I was learning to call the bourgeoisie deepened.

Robert Kennedy was assassinated, as everyone knows, on the night of the 1968 California primary. I watched the news on a small black-and-white TV, sitting cross-legged on the foot of my girlfriend’s bed. Her name was Charlene. We were fifteen. She was asleep, believing I had left after our evening’s usual heated, inconclusive cuddle. I had stopped, however, to watch the TV after I saw that Kennedy had been shot. It was after midnight and Charlene’s parents were out watching the voting results with friends. They were Republican Party activists. I heard them pull in the driveway and come in the house. I knew that Charlene’s father, who was an older man, always came in to kiss her good night, and I knew, well, the way out her window and how to catfoot it down to the street. Still, I sat there, unthinking yet cruelly resolved, until the bedroom door opened. Her father did not have a heart attack at the sight of me, calmly watching TV in my underwear, though he could have. I snatched up my clothes and dived out the window before he said a word. Charlene’s mother called my mother, and my mother gave me a serious talk about different types of girls, emphasizing the sanctity of “good girls,” such as Charlene, who belonged to some debutante club. I was embarrassed but unrepentant. Charlene and I had never had much to talk about.

I actually spent more nights in those years at Domenic’s house than at my own. Like the Beckets’ perennial beach party in Newport, it was a looser place than the prim, do-your-homework home my parents ran. The Mastrippolitos lived in a big, dark, rambling two-story house that dated from the early days of the San Fernando Valley, from before the subdivisions like ours came. There were still orange groves across the street. Domenic’s mother, Clara, was an early devotee of right-wing talk radio, and she and I would have blistering arguments about civil rights, the war, Goldwater, communism. She loved William F. Buckley’s TV show, Firing Line. I would watch only when my hero, the actor Robert Vaughn, who was not only the Man from U.N.C.L.E. but was some kind of political scientist, with a PhD from UCLA, came on the show. Vaughn was an articulate liberal—he later published his dissertation, a critical history of Hollywood anticommunism—and in my opinion he demolished the polysyllabic poseur Buckley.

Domenic’s father, Big Dom, didn’t give a damn about anything but sports. He was officially a liquor wholesaler, I think, but he was really a bookmaker. He worked from home, and always had half a dozen TVs and radios going in his den, broadcasting different games and races of special interest. He rarely wore more than his bathrobe, and was constantly distracted, constantly on the phone, scribbling figures, squinting through the smoke from his cigarette. But he would occasionally come out and join in rowdy family games of gin rummy around the dining room table. Some days the family was suddenly rich and needed to spend cash fast—buy a new car, anything. Other times were grim and money was tight, especially after Big Dom got busted and was sent away for a while. But the general atmosphere was, again, loose. Many strays collected around the Mastrippolito house—alcoholic friends of Clara’s with nowhere else to go, hoodlum friends of Pete’s with nowhere else to go. Me. I felt welcome always, even as a deluded commie symp. Domenic’s house was worlds away from my house, where Time and the New Yorker were always neatly stacked and a third slice of bacon in the morning was verboten.

Domenic and me, Mastrippolito family picnic, ca. 1967

 • • • 

MY FATHER WANTED ME TO write a magazine article. He had taken up photography, and become surprisingly good at it. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising, since he was in the film business and knew all about lenses and cameras. His favorite subjects were his children, and he filled albums with our pictures. He also took some surf shots of me, Domenic, and Becket at Rincon, Secos, and Zuma, and that was where he got the article idea. He saw that I was always glued to the surf mags. He knew I liked to write. If I would just write a story for a surf mag, he would supply the pictures. I tried to explain that the surf mags didn’t care about writing, they cared about pictures, and that he would never in this life take a photograph they would publish—not unless he moved to the North Shore and followed the top surfers everywhere for a couple of winters and got very, very lucky. Nonsense, he said. The article was the thing. If it existed, he could supply adequate pics.

This argument drove me crazy. One reason was my dad’s obtuseness and refusal to listen to me, although I knew I was right. Then there was the way it underlined for me the distance between the ordinary, merely competent surfing that my friends and I were doing and the extraordinary, newsworthy, heroic exploits of the guys one saw in the mags. Mostly, though, it was the extension of another, more general argument between us. My father saw that I was always scribbling in notebooks, writing letters, papers for school. He knew I had been in ninth grade an editor on my junior high’s literary magazine (in the heyday of California public schools, even junior highs had literary magazines), where poems and stories of mine appeared. What I needed to do next, he said, was start writing for real publications. It didn’t matter what it was—sports roundups, ad copy, obits. The point was the discipline, the deadlines. He was thinking, I gathered, of a local newspaper, although I didn’t know if Woodland Hills even had a paper. What he was really thinking about, I guessed, was his own hometown, Escanaba, where he had gotten his start as a cub reporter. His career in journalism had veered into TV and film production, but he still knew how it worked, or believed he did. And he probably did know; I just couldn’t listen. My favorite writers in those days were novelists (Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer!) and poets (William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg!), not journalists. I had no interest in newsrooms. Also, I was petrified of being told that something I wrote was no good. So I wrote nothing for publication, not even for the high school paper.

My father, for all his Depression kid’s workaholic drive, had a dreamy, beachcomber side. He loved to skulk around harbors; my earliest memories of him are full of ships, piers, seagulls. Messing about on boats really was his idea of bliss. Before he was married, he lived on a sailboat anchored in Newport Bay. It was a small, sleek wooden sloop, and I liked to study the black-and-white snaps I found of him at the tiller—eyeing the windline, the luff in the jib, pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth, intent but thrilled, age twenty-two or twenty-three. The story was that my mother’s first condition for getting married was that he move off the boat. It was gone before I came along.

I didn’t share my father’s passion for sailing, but I did love the water, and even saw it, from an early age, as my own medium of escape from dull striving, from landlocked drudgery. I remember a summer day on Catalina Island. We had sailed over, twenty-six miles, on our Cal-20, which was the bargain-basement fiberglass sloop of choice in California at the time. We were moored in Avalon Harbor. The harbor had wonderfully clear water. When a passenger ship known as the Great White Steamer came in from the mainland, local kids would swim out to it and shout for the tourists on deck to throw coins. I was probably eight or nine and I joined them, chasing the dimes and nickels that fell near me, twisting and flashing into the turquoise depths. We stored in our cheeks the coins we snatched as we shouted and battled for more. I remember swimming back to my family’s boat and spitting my haul into my hands in the cockpit. I had enough for a corn dog on shore, maybe even one for Kevin. It was nonsense, but I had this vague idea that I could be completely happy as an idler, even a beggar, around the water. I wonder if my father saw that, and if it worried him because he had some of it too.

In reality, he had built a good balance between an endlessly demanding job and a famously bankrupting hobby, sailing, and had done so on a tight budget, without sacrificing time with his family. He became a bit of a tyrant, it was true, a weekend Bligh at the helm, when things went wrong, which they regularly did. He and Kevin and I once pitchpoled a Lehman 10 after going over the falls backward on a freakishly huge wave at a normally placid boat-launch spot called Carpinteria Beach. The mast spiked the bottom, snapped, and went through the hull. The three of us were thrown like bucked-off bull riders into the rigging. While the wreckage washed in, Kevin, who was four or five, immediately started diving to the bottom, still wearing sneakers, to retrieve shiny objects like Dad’s silver-plated lighter. I can still see his expression of triumphant delight each time he surfaced with some lost treasure.

What could rightly have worried my dad about me and surfing was the special brand of monomania, antisocial and ill-balanced, that a serious commitment to surfing nearly always brought with it. Surfing was still something that one did—that I did—with friends, but the club thing, the organized-sports part, was fading fast. I no longer dreamed about winning contests, as I had dreamed about pitching for the Dodgers. The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization. Robinson Crusoe, Endless Summer. This was a track that led away from citizenship, in the ancient sense of the word, toward a scratched-out frontier where we would live as latter-day barbarians. This was not the daydream of the happy idler. It went deeper than that. Chasing waves in a dedicated way was both profoundly egocentric and selfless, dynamic and ascetic, radical in its rejection of the values of duty and conventional achievement.

I slipped away from my family at an early age, and surfing was my escape route, my absence excuse. I couldn’t go to Ventura because I had a ride to Malibu, where the waves were sure to be better. I would sleep at Domenic’s. I couldn’t go sailing because I had a ride to Rincon, or Newport, or Secos, and there was a swell. My parents let me go with so little protest, it seems strange now. But it wasn’t strange then. Child rearing had entered, at least in the suburbs where we lived, an era of extreme laissez-faire. Of course, I could, up to a point, take care of myself, and my parents had three younger ones to worry about. My sister, Colleen, ended up being the sailor from our generation.

 • • • 

THE DREAM OF back-to-nature surfing solitude had a predictable by-product: rank nostalgia. A high percentage of the stories I wrote in my journals involved time travel, most often back to an earlier California. Imagine going back to the days of the Chumash Indians, or the Spanish missions, if you could just take a modern surfboard with you. Malibu had been breaking exactly like this, unridden, for centuries, eons. You would probably be worshipped as a god by the locals once they saw you surf, and they would feed you, and you could ride great waves with perfect concentration—uncontested ownership, accumulating mastery—for the rest of your days. There were a couple of photos in Surfing Guide to Southern California that illustrated, to my mind, just how narrow a margin in time we had all missed paradise by. One was of Rincon, taken in 1947 from the mountain behind the point on a sheet-glass, ten-foot day. The caption, unnecessarily, invited the reader to note “a tantalizing absence of people.” The other was of Malibu in 1950. It showed a lone surfer streaking across an eight-foot wall, with members of the public playing obliviously on the sand in the foreground. The surfer was Bob Simmons, a brilliant recluse who essentially invented the modern finned surfboard. He drowned while surfing alone in 1954.

Surfing Guide to Southern California didn’t trade in nostalgia, however. It was too optimistic and hardheaded for that. The book was a meticulous, thoroughly practical breakdown of nearly three hundred surf spots between Point Conception and the Mexican border. It was thickly illustrated with surf shots, aerial views of the coast, and maps, and was dense with specific information about swell directions, tidal effects, underwater hazards, and parking regulations. But its greatest pleasures were in its clear, dry prose, its sage judgments about the quality of different breaks, its little puns and inside jokes, and its discreet but deeply felt enthusiasms. Obscure local heroes like Dempsey Holder, who had been riding alone, for decades, a spooky deepwater big-wave spot called Tijuana Sloughs, hard by the Mexican border, quietly got their due from the guide’s authors, Bill Cleary and David Stern. And Cleary and Stern kept a sense of wry perspective in the face of the contemporary mess. Their caption for a shot of a large swarm of kooks struggling to ride the same six-inch ripple: “Surfing, an individual sport, in which lonely man pits his hard-won skill against the wild forces of the mighty ocean . . . Malibu, west swell.”

 • • • 

DOMENIC’S GRANDPARENTS had made a barnful of wine from a vineyard that no longer existed, and it was all turning to vinegar in blue plastic Purex jugs in the barn behind Domenic’s house. We took to helping ourselves to a jug on weekend nights, drinking it slug for gasping slug in the dark on the edge of a storm culvert behind the barn. The warm valley night would turn woozy, hilarious. I loved Domenic’s imitations of his addled, goodhearted grandpa, whose favorite exclamation was, for some reason, “Murphy, Murphy, Murphy!” I once tried to make my own contribution to our drinking cache by raiding my parents’ liquor cabinet, pouring half an inch from each bottle into a milk carton. Never mind that I was mixing bourbon with crème de menthe with gin—the tiny individual thefts would never be noticed. And they weren’t. But Domenic and I got sick as dogs from the concoction. Only the loose supervision at his house let us get away with our heaving and hangovers.

Not that drinking was considered a big deal there. Wine flowed at meals, European-style. The contrast with my house was, as usual, stark. My parents were both, for reasons noted, very light, cautious, social drinkers. They had plenty of friends who could put it away, and their liquor cabinet was always stocked, but their kids never got even a whiff of wine. Half noticing their abstemiousness as a teenager, I marked it as just another symptom of their “uptightness.”

But it was marijuana that drew the line between us and them, that bright generational line between the cool and the uncool. My timidity about pot, as I first encountered it in Hawaii, vanished when, a few months later, during my first year of high school, it hit Woodland Hills. We scored our first joints from a friend of Pete’s. The quality of the dope was terrible—Mexican rag weed, people called it—but the quality of the high was so wondrous, so nerve-end-opening, so cerebral compared to wine’s effects, that I don’t think we ever cracked another Purex jug. The laughs were harder and finer. And music that had been merely good, the rock and roll soundtrack of our lives, turned into rapture and prophecy. Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, the Doors, Cream, late Beatles, Janis Joplin, the Stones, Paul Butterfield—the music they were making, with its impact and beauty amplified a hundredfold by dope, became a sacramental rite, simply inexplicable to noninitiates.

And the ceremonial aspects of smoking pot—scoring from the million-strong network of small-time dealers, cleaning “lids,” rolling joints, sneaking off to places (hilltops, beaches, empty fields) where it seemed safe to smoke, in tight little outlaw groups of two or three or four, and then giggling and grooving together—all of this took on a strong tribal color. There was the “counterculture” out in the greater world, with all its affinities and inspirations, but there were also, more immediately, the realignments in our personal lives. Kids, including girls, who were “straight” became strangers. What the hell was a debutante, anyway? As for adults—it became increasingly difficult not to buy that awful Yippie line about not trusting anyone over thirty. How could parents, teachers, coaches, possibly understand the ineluctable weirdness of every moment, fully perceived? None of them had been out on Highway 61.

Becket, living down in ultra-conservative Orange County, got the word slightly later than we did in suburban L.A. He had grown eight inches in a year and was suddenly, at six foot five, a varsity high school basketball player. His teammates were a crew-cut, God-fearing lot, and they didn’t believe me when I told them, on a visit to Newport, that pot, the evil weed that was then all over the news, was also in their upscale beach town. If they gave me ten bucks and a ride to the pier, I said, I could score them an ounce in an hour. They called my bluff, and I got them an ounce in half an hour. We got loaded in the point guard’s parents’ house on Lido Island, and I went home the next morning.

Two months later, asleep in the little room that I shared with Kevin and Michael, I heard a tapping at the window. I looked outside, and there was Becket. It was a Friday night, and he and his friends had a house for the weekend, he whispered, no adults around—I should come with him back to Newport. His friends were waiting down the driveway in a car. This midnight visit, this proposal—the situation was unprecedented. But what snapped me awake was Becket’s shirt. It was diaphanous—very thin and rather shiny in the moonlight. The shirt was so utterly not him, it told me everything I needed to know. Apparently it had been a long two months on the Newport Harbor High basketball team. The mass conversion to stonerdom by the players struck me at first as funny. Later, though, as some of them crashed out of the program, and even out of school, I was not proud of my role, however incidental, in the collision between some of Newport’s teenagers and their families and the global social shock waves of 1968.

It wasn’t so different at my school, William Howard Taft High. The campus was already riven by Kulturkampf, mainly because of Vietnam. Team sports were effectively out of the question for students opposed to the war—the coaches were the most rock-ribbed members of a generally conservative, pro-war faculty and administration, and they were not shy about ragging on kids they suspected of being commies. I had two English teachers, Mr. Jay and Mrs. Ball, who changed my life’s course by introducing me to the difficult pleasures of Melville, Shakespeare, Eliot, Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Dylan Thomas, and, most devastatingly, James Joyce. I saw now, in Ventura, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea. The hobos from the old fairgrounds at C Street now came scuttling out of Dubliners. I became, in my own mind, Stephen Dedalus, privately sworn to silence, exile, cunning. (Regrettably, my hero was afraid of the ocean.) Los Angeles was a pallid stand-in for Ireland. But it had its own cultural bogs and treacheries.

I did go out for the track team, strangely, in the tenth grade, competing as a pole vaulter. Vaulters formed a little team within the team. The coaches knew little about vaulting, and were not about to risk their necks trying to demonstrate good technique. So we basically taught ourselves. We were excused from the grueling fitness drills the rest of the team performed, and our practices, we were often told, bore an unfortunate resemblance to long, lazy bull sessions. It was something about the vast amounts of lounging we did on the big foam-filled turquoise cushions that served as pits. Vaulting was a glory sport in those days, and vaulters were considered prima donnas. In fact, the flashy, antiauthoritarian vaulters were suspiciously regarded, often with reason, by the coaches and their more loyal athletes as Thoreau-reading, dope-smoking, John Carlos–loving hippies. I loved vaulting—the smooth upward snap and twist when you got the pole-plant right (not the rule with me), the never-long-enough moment when you threw back your arms, flicking the pole back the way you came, at the apex of the vault. But I did not go out for track again the next year.

More important, even to me, Domenic did not go out for football. In the tenth grade, he and I had been split up—sent to different high schools because of our respective addresses. He went to Canoga Park High, where Pete, who was a football player, had been ballyhooing the arrival of his fast, brawny little brother. So Domenic played. He was a halfback, and he liked the game, but practices were long, and the conditioning season started in summer. Football was eating up time when he could be surfing. Also, he and I missed each other. When he told me that he was transferring to Taft, I was delighted. But I was unnerved when he said that the main reason he was transferring was me. I would have done the same for him, I think, had it occurred to me. Still, I worried I might disappoint him. In any case, he said, he was finished with football. Life was too short to spend another day running wind sprints for the Man.