The Purple Decades - a Reader

  All right, Mother gets worried about all this, but it is limited worry, as John Shine says. Mainly, Mother says, Sayonara, you all, and you head off for the beach.

  The thing is, everybody, practically everybody, comes from a good family. Everyone has been … reared well, as they say. Everybody is very upper-middle, if you want to bring it down to that. It’s just that this is a new order. Why hang around in the hubby-mommy household with everybody getting neurotic hang-ups with each other and slamming doors and saying, Why can’t they have some privacy? Or, it doesn’t mean anything that I have to work for a living, does it? It doesn’t mean a thing to you. All of you just lie around here sitting in the big orange easy chair smoking cigarettes. I’d hate for you to have to smoke standing up, you’d probably get phlebitis from it—Listen to me, Sarah—

  —why go through all that? It’s a good life out here. Nobody is mugging everybody for money and affection. There are a lot of bright people out here, and there are a lot of interesting things. One night there was a toga party in a garage, and everybody dressed in sheets, like togas, boys and girls and they put on the appropriated television set to an old Deanna Durbin movie and turned off the sound and put on Rolling Stones records, and you should have seen Deanna Durbin opening her puckered kumquat mouth with Mick Jagger’s voice bawling out, I cain’t get no satisfaction. Of course, finally everybody started pulling the togas off each other, but that is another thing. And one time they had a keg party down on the beach in Mission Bay and the lights from the amusement park were reflected all over the water and that, the whole design of the thing, those nutty lights, that was part of the party. Liz put out the fire throwing a “sand potion” or something on it. One can laugh at Liz and her potions, her necromancy and everything, but there is a lot of thought going into it, a lot of, well, mysticism.

  You can even laugh at mysticism if you want to, but there is a kid like Larry Alderson, who spent two years with a monk, and he learned a lot of stuff, and Artie Nelander is going to spend next summer with some Outer Mongolian tribe; he really means to do that. Maybe the “mysterioso” stuff is a lot of garbage, but still, it is interesting. The surfers around the Pump House use that word, mysterioso, quite a lot. It refers to the mystery of the Oh Mighty Hulking Pacific Ocean and everything. Sometimes a guy will stare at the surf and say, “Mysterioso.” They keep telling the story of Bob Simmons’ wipeout, and somebody will say “mysterioso.”

  Simmons was a fantastic surfer. He was fantastic even though he had a bad leg. He rode the really big waves. One day he got wiped out at Windansea. When a big wave overtakes a surfer, it drives him right to the bottom. The board came in but he never came up and they never found his body. Very mysterioso. The black panthers all talked about what happened to “the Simmons boy.” But the mysterioso thing was how he could have died at all. If he had been one of the old pan-thuhs, hell, sure he could have got killed. But Simmons was, well, one’s own age, he was the kind of guy who could have been in the Pump House gang, he was … immune, he was plugged into the whole pattern, he could feel the whole Oh Mighty Hulking Sea, he didn’t have to think it out step by step. But he got wiped out and killed. Very mysterioso.

  Immune! If one is in the Pump House gang and really keyed in to this whole thing, it’s—well, one is … immune, one is not full of black pan-thuh panic. Two kids, a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy, go out to Windansea at dawn, in the middle of winter, cold as hell, and take on 12-foot waves all by themselves. The girl, Jackie Haddad, daughter of a certified public accountant, wrote a composition about it, just for herself, called “My Ultimate Journey”:

  “It was six o’clock in the morning, damp, foggy and cold. We could feel the bitter air biting at our cheeks. The night before, my friend Tommy and I had seen one of the greatest surf films, Surf Classics. The film had excited us so much we made up our minds to go surfing the following morning. That is what brought us down on the cold, wet, soggy sand of Windansea early on a December morning.

  “We were the first surfers on the beach. The sets were rolling in at eight to ten, filled with occasional 12-footers. We waxed up and waited for a break in the waves. The break came, neither of us said a word, but instantly grabbed our boards and ran into the water. The paddle out was difficult, not being used to the freezing water.

  “We barely made it over the first wave of the set, a large set. Suddenly Tommy put on a burst of speed and shot past me. He cleared the biggest wave of the set. It didn’t hit me hard as I rolled under it. It dragged me almost 20 yards before exhausting its strength. I climbed on my board gasping for air. I paddled out to where Tommy was resting. He laughed at me for being wet already. I almost hit him but I began laughing, too. We rested a few minutes and then lined up our position with a well known spot on the shore.

  “I took off first. I bottom-turned hard and started climbing up the wave. A radical cut-back caught me off balance and I fell, barely hanging onto my board. I recovered in time to see Tommy go straight over the falls on a 10-footer. His board shot nearly 30 feet in the air. Luckily, I could get it before the next set came in, so Tommy didn’t have to make the long swim in. I pushed it to him and then laughed. All of a sudden Tommy yelled, ‘Outside!’

  “Both of us paddled furiously. We barely made it up to the last wave, it was a monster. In precision timing we wheeled around and I took off. I cut left in reverse stance, then cut back, driving hard toward the famous Windansea bowl. As I crouched, a huge wall of energy came down over me, covering me up. I moved toward the nose to gain more speed and shot out of the fast-flowing suction just in time to kick out as the wave closed out.

  “As I turned around I saw Tommy make a beautiful drop-in, then the wave peaked and fell all at once. Miraculously he beat the suction. He cut back and did a spinner, which followed with a reverse kick-up.

  “Our last wave was the biggest. When we got to shore, we rested, neither of us saying a word, but each lost in his own private world of thoughts. After we had rested, we began to walk home. We were about half way and the rain came pouring down. That night we both had bad colds, but we agreed it was worth having them after the thrill and satisfaction of an extra good day of surfing.”

  John Shine and Artie Nelander are out there right now. They are just “outside,” about one fifth of a mile out from the shore, beyond where the waves start breaking. They are straddling their surfboards with their backs to the shore, looking out toward the horizon, waiting for a good set. Their backs look like some kind of salmon-colored porcelain shells, a couple of tiny shells bobbing up and down as the swells roll under them, staring out to sea like Phrygian sacristans looking for a sign.

  John and Artie! They are—they are what one means when one talks about the surfing life. It’s like, you know, one means, they have this life all of their own; it’s like a glass-bottom boat, and it floats over the “real” world, or the square world or whatever one wants to call it. They are not exactly off in a world of their own, they are and they aren’t. What it is, they float right through the real world, but it can’t touch them. They do these things, like the time they went to Malibu, and there was this party in some guy’s apartment, and there wasn’t enough legal parking space for everybody, and so somebody went out and painted the red curbs white and everybody parked. Then the cops came. Everybody ran out. Artie and John took an airport bus to the Los Angeles Airport, just like they were going to take a plane, in khaki shorts and T-shirts with Mac Meda Destruction Company stenciled on them. Then they took a helicopter to Disneyland. At Disneyland crazy Ditch had his big raincoat on and a lot of flasks strapped onto his body underneath, Scotch, bourbon, all kinds of stuff. He had plastic tubes from the flasks sticking out of the flyfront of his raincoat and everybody was sipping whiskey through the tubes—

  —Ooooo-eeee—Mee-dah! They chant this chant, Mee-dah, in a real fakey deep voice, and it really bugs people. They don’t know what the hell it is. It is the cry of the Mac Meda Destruction Company. The Mac Meda Destruction
Company is … an underground society that started in La Jolla about three years ago. Nobody can remember exactly how; they have arguments about it. Anyhow, it is mainly something to bug people with and organize huge beer orgies with. They have their own complete, bogus phone number in La Jolla. They have Mac Meda Destruction Company decals. They stick them on phone booths, on cars, any place. Some mommy-hubby will come out of the shopping plaza and walk up to his Mustang, which is supposed to make him a hell of a tiger now, and he’ll see a sticker on the side of it saying, “Mac Meda Destruction Company,” and for about two days or something he’ll think the sky is going to fall in.

  But the big thing is the parties, the “conventions.” Anybody can join, any kid, anybody can come, as long as they’ve heard about it, and they can only hear about it by word of mouth. One was in the Sorrento Valley, in the gulches and arroyos, and the fuzz came, and so the older guys put the young ones and the basket cases, the ones just too stoned out of their gourds, into the tule grass, and the cops shined their searchlights and all they saw was tule grass, while the basket cases moaned scarlet and oozed on their bellies like reptiles and everybody else ran down the arroyos, yelling Mee-dah.

  The last one was at Manhattan Beach, inside somebody’s poor hulking house. The party got very Dionysian that night and somebody put a hole through one wall, and everybody else decided to see if they could make it bigger. Everybody was stoned out of their hulking gourds, and it got to be about 3:30 a.m. and everybody decided to go see the riots. These were the riots in Watts. The Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union were all saying, WATTS NO-MAN’S-LAND and STAY WAY FROM WATTS YOU GET YO SE’F KILLED, but naturally nobody believed that. Watts was a blast, and the Pump House gang was immune to the trembling gourd panic rattles of the L. A. Times black pan-thuhs. Immune!

  So John Shine, Artie Nelander and Jerry Sterncorb got in John’s VW bus, known as the Hog of Steel, and they went to Watts. Gary Wickham and some other guys ran into an old man at a bar who said he owned a house in Watts and had been driven out by the drunk niggers. So they drove in a car to save the old guy’s house from the drunk niggers. Artie and John had a tape recorder and decided they were going to make a record called “Random Sounds from the Watts Riots.” They drove right into Watts in the Hog of Steel and there was blood on the streets and roofs blowing off the stores and all these apricot flames and drunk Negroes falling through the busted plate glass of the liquor stores. Artie got a nice recording of a lot of Negroes chanting “Burn, baby, burn.” They all got out and talked to some Negro kids in a gang going into a furniture store, and the Negro kids didn’t say Kill Whitey or Geed’um or any of that. They just said, Come on, man, it’s a party and it’s free. After they had been in there for about three hours talking to Negroes and watching drunks collapse in the liquor stores, some cop with a helmet on came roaring up and said, “Get the hell out of here, you kids, we cannot and will not provide protection.”

  Meantime, Gary Wickham and his friends drove in in a car with the old guy, and a car full of Negroes did stop them and say, Whitey, Geed’um, and all that stuff, but one of the guys in Gary’s car just draped a pistol he had out the window and the colored guys drove off. Gary and everybody drove the old guy to his house and they all walked in and had a great raunchy time drinking beer and raising hell. A couple of Negroes, the old guy’s neighbors, came over and told the old guy to cut out the racket. There were flames in the sky and ashes coming down with little rims of fire on them, like apricot crescents. The old guy got very cocky about all his “protection” and went out on the front porch about dawn and started yelling at some Negroes across the street, telling them “No more drunk niggers in Watts” and a lot of other unwise slogans. So Gary Wickham got up and everybody left. They were there about four hours altogether and when they drove out, they had to go through a National Guard checkpoint, and a lieutenant from the San Fernando Valley told them he could not and would not provide protection.

  But exactly! Watts just happened to be what was going on at the time, as far as the netherworld of La Jolla surfing was concerned, and so one goes there and sees what is happening and comes back and tells everybody about it and laughs at the L.A. Times. That is what makes it so weird when all these black pan-thuhs come around to pick up “surfing styles,” like the clothing manufacturers. They don’t know what any of it means. It’s like archaeologists discovering hieroglyphics or something, and they say, god, that’s neat—Egypt!—but they don’t know what the hell it is. They don’t know anything about … The Life. It’s great to think of a lot of old emphysematous pan-thuhs in the Garment District in New York City struggling in off the street against a gummy 15-mile-an-hour wind full of soot and coffee-brown snow and gasping in the elevator to clear their old nicotine-phlegm tubes on the way upstairs to make out the invoices on a lot of surfer stuff for 1966, the big nylon windbreakers with the wide, white horizontal competition stripes, nylon swimming trunks with competition stripes, bell-bottom slacks for girls, the big hairy sleeveless jackets, vests, the blue “tennies,” meaning tennis shoes, and the … look, the Major Hair, all this long lank blond hair, the plain face kind of tanned and bleached out at the same time, but with big eyes. It all starts in a few places, a few strategic groups, the Pump House gang being one of them, and then it moves up the beach, to places like Newport Beach and as far up as Malibu.

  Pretty soon the California littoral will be littered with these guys, stroked out on the beach like beached white whales, and girls, too, who can’t give up the mystique, the mysterioso mystique, Oh Mighty Hulking Sea, who can’t conceive of living any other life. It is pathetic when they are edged out of groups like the Pump House gang. Already there are some guys who hang around with the older crowd around the Shack who are stagnating on the beach. Some of the older guys, like Gary Wickham, who is 24, are still in The Life, they still have it, but even Gary Wickham will be 25 one day and then 26 and then … and then even pan-thuh age. Is one really going to be pan-thuh age one day? Watch those black feet go. And Tom Coman still snuggles with Yellow Slacks, and Liz still roosts moodily in her rabbit fur at the bottom of the Pump House and Pam still sits on the steps contemplating the mysterioso mysteries of Pump House ascension and John and Artie still bob, tiny pink porcelain shells, way out there waiting for godsown bitchen set, and godsown sun is still turned on like a dentist’s lamp and so far—

  —the panthers scrape on up the sidewalk. They are at just about the point Leonard Anderson and Donna Blanchard got that day, December 6, 1964, when Leonard said, Pipe it, and fired two shots, one at her and one at himself. Leonard was 18 and Donna was 21—21! —god, for a girl in the Pump House gang that is almost the horror line right there. But it was all so mysterioso. Leonard was just lying down on the beach at the foot of the Pump House, near the stairs, just talking to John K. Weldon down there, and then Donna appeared at the top of the stairs and Leonard got up and went up the stairs to meet her, and they didn’t say anything, they weren’t angry over anything, they never had been, although the police said they had, they just turned and went a few feet down the sidewalk, away from the Pump House and—blam blam!—these two shots. Leonard fell dead on the sidewalk and Donna died that afternoon in Scripps Memorial Hospital. Nobody knew what to think. But one thing it seemed like—well, it seemed like Donna and Leonard thought they had lived The Life as far as it would go and now it was running out. All that was left to do was—but that is an insane idea. It can’t be like that, The Life can’t run out, people can’t change all that much just because godsown chronometer runs on and the body packing starts deteriorating and the fudgy tallow shows up at the thighs where they squeeze out of the bathing suit—

  Tom, boy! John, boy! Gary, boy! Neale, boy! Artie, boy! Pam, Liz, Vicki, Jackie Haddad! After all this—just a pair of bitchen black panther bunions inching down the sidewalk away from the old Pump House stairs?

  THE MID-ATLANTIC MAN

  i

  Roger! Have you met George? Cyril! Have you me
t George? Keith! Have you met George? Brian! Have you met George? Tony! Have you met George! Nigel! Have you—

  —oh god, he’s doing a hell of a job of it, introducing everybody by their first names, first-naming the hell out of everybody, introducing them to George, who just arrived from New York: George is an American and the key man in the Fabrilex account. A hell of a job of introductions he is doing. He has everybody from the firm, plus a lot of other people, English and American, all calculated to impress and flatter American George, all piled into this sort of library-reception room upstairs at the——Club amid the lyre-splat chairs, bullion-fringe curtains, old blacky Raeburn-style portraits, fabulously junky glass-and-ormolu chandeliers, paw-foot chiffoniers, teapoys, ingenious library steps leading resolutely up into thin air, a wonderful dark world of dark wood, dark rugs, candy-box covings, moldings, flutings, pilasters, all red as table wine, brown as boots, made to look like it has been steeped a hundred years in expensive tobacco, roast beef, horseradish sauce and dim puddings.

  The Americans really lap this Club stuff up, but that is not the point, the point is that—Christ, Americans are childish in many ways and about as subtle as a Wimpy bender: but in the long run it doesn’t make any difference. They just turn on the power. They have the power, they just move in and take it, introducing people by their first names as they go, people they’ve never laid eyes on, pals, and who gives a damn. They didn’t go to Cambridge and learn to envy people who belonged to the Pitt Club and commit the incredible gaffe of walking into the Pitt Club with a Cambridge scarf on. They just turn on the money or whatever it takes, and they take it, and the grinning first names shall inherit the earth, their lie-down crewcuts as firm and pure as Fabrilex—and—