some tender armsTo hold me tight.
I observed to my surprise that the passenger’s head and then upper torso were emerging through the window of the microbus racing alongside me. In the heat and roar of the traffic we were rounding an ever-ascending curve. The passenger’s left hand gripped some handhold inside the cabin, while the asphalt tore past beneath his precariously positioned body. At the end of his straining form his right arm unfolded in my direction. The hand at the end of his extended arm proffered the joint. The hairy face at the other end of the arm was one big beaming invitation.
I waved the doobie off. This would be too weird, toking up vehicle-to-vehicle as we powered up past Tejon Ranch toward the Pass. My benefactor gestured at me with the joint a couple of times as if to ask, “You sure?” I yelled my “Thanks, anyway,” took my hands off the wheel, and pretended to steer to indicate I didn’t want to smoke while I was driving. He caught my meaning, shrugged, and made a wry “Okay, man” face. A moment later he retracted himself into the front seat of the bus and flashed me the peace sign. I returned it, then added the power-to-the-people fist to show that peace and love were all very fine, but something more was needed to bring about the changes we all wanted. He nodded, but gave me the peace sign again as he sucked once more on the joint. The Supremes were still insisting:
“You can’t hurry love.
No, you just have to wait.”
She said to trust, give it time,
No matter how long it takes.
We crested the summit. The highway now cut across fifty miles of arid mountain wilderness that would end at the rim of the San Fernando Valley. There I’d pick up I-405, the San Diego Freeway, which would lead me down through the San Fernando range and then up over the Santa Monica Mountains into L.A. proper. The microbus had vanished ahead, as the moon-like landscape shot past in a series of rapid climbs and even faster lengthy descents. Miniature green towns that seemed all palms and mall and gas stations broke up the tawny, shimmering landscape. Strangest to me were the signs that informed the motoring public we were in the Angeles National Forest. Not a tree visible for twenty miles, only some scrubby mesquite bushes scattered amid the baking rocks.
The Supremes’ song and my ever-more-impending arrival at the Gold Coast had focused my mind on Janey. I felt a surge of delightfully anxious anticipation: only hours or at most days until I saw her. She was an undergraduate who had been in an upper-division Contemporary European History course with me last year. She was stunning, gorgeous, with blondish-brown long hair, dangling earrings, and a body that could have been in Playboy. She wore miniskirts and skimpy tops — usually with no bra, so talking to her you could enjoy her nipples rising into view and subsiding, although you weren’t supposed to notice such things.
To be honest, we didn’t have a lot in common. She didn’t have an opinion on much of anything, even the war, although she wasn’t a supporter. Nor did she express much about what she wanted to do with her life. I wasn’t sure she even knew where the Frozen North was. But she didn’t refuse when I patched together enough courage to ask her to one of our parties at Guantanamero Bay. I had undertaken an intelligence sweep, first by questioning Remi’s girlfriend Meg, as obliquely as I could, what she knew about Janey’s status. I had found out Meg knew Janey from Orange County College before both transferred over to UC Irvine in their junior year. Meg told me Janey had broken up with her boyfriend and wasn’t particularly seeing anybody. But still I dithered about asking her out until early April.
She didn’t seem like the type who would ever be interested in somebody like me whose only claim to fame was being a grad student. Yet she agreed to accompany me to the party, and I think she had an okay time. In any case, we went out twice more: once we took in a movie at the Port Theater in Corona del Mar, and another time went to Sid’s Blue Beat on the Balboa Peninsula with some other history grad students for a meal. I still couldn’t figure out whether she was interested in me or not. Our end-of-date goodbyes were pretty stiff — a hug and a peck. Maybe she was waiting for me to make the first move. Or maybe she was simply heeding that Ann Landers advice I read once. A single woman who had been invited on a date by a guy she didn’t much care for asked Ann if she should accept the invitation. “Go with the creep and look over the crop” was Ann’s suggestion, which I thought pretty cold.
I had written Janey on a slow night in the Sun newsroom as soon as I got back to Vancouver. Before I left campus I had asked for, and she’d given me, the address of her folks in Fullerton where she would be spending the summer. To my surprise, she sent a letter right back, so I wrote her again. Her letter wasn’t particularly warm, but not a brush-off, either — just sort of newsy. My second letter to her was in mid-July. Since then I’d received a postcard in August from Santa Barbara, where she had an aunt with a place near the beach that Janey visited every year. I was hoping my absence had made her heart grow fonder. But I wasn’t counting on it. Probably she’d fallen madly in love with somebody in Fullerton over the summer. As I used to tell Remi, I absorbed a ton of pleasure merely staring at Janey. If she was around the History Department again this year, I’d get more of that, even if she wasn’t inclined to continue whatever it was we had going.
I tried hard in July and August not to obsess about her. I had dared to ask out an astonishingly beautiful girl, yet didn’t know how to increase the ante, or even if she wanted me to. Maybe, given our lack so far of anything resembling a communion of souls, the question was: physical considerations aside, did I want more to happen between us? Meantime, simply picturing Janey, let alone festering about what might or might not develop, was another means to while away the miles.
I signalled, and at the risk of my life, started to ease across the various lanes of speeding vehicles to accomplish the exit to I-405. Minutes later the Volksie was roaring through the built-up areas of the San Fernando Valley, a jumble of eucalyptus and palm trees, rooftops, and surface streets lined with businesses stretching off under the freeway. Then the climb out of the valley over the green Santa Monica Mountains. And from the top of that rise, there it was, extending in the haze below in every direction farther than eye could travel or mind could imagine: El Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles.
My radio had picked up 93 KHJ just before we blasted over the final ridge. I knew there was no point tuning in XERB, Mighty Ten Ninety, Fifty Thousand Watts of Soul Power. The mad excitement of XERB’s DJ Wolfman Jack wouldn’t be happening till late in the evening, with his all-black-except-for-the-Stones playlist, his crazed bellows of “Haaave Mercy,” his shilling for Ziegler and Ziegler’s alligator shoes, and his abrupt termination of conversations with on-air callers via an explosive “Baaah” — his pronunciation of “Bye.” KHJ’s DJs, the Boss Jocks, were meagre fare compared to the “Woofman,” as he referred to himself. Nevertheless, the moment I crested the Santa Monicas and dropped toward Westwood, KHJ serendipitously spun The Doors’ “Break on Through to the Other Side.” The urgent drum riff kicked it off, followed by a sequence of jingly notes on electric piano, succeeded by the same run on electric guitar. Then the whole band crashed into line behind Jim Morrison’s fervent:
You know the day destroys the night,
Night divides the day.
Tried to run,
Tried to hide:
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side, yeah.
The Other Side was pulling out all the stops. As the cranked-up traffic on 405 accelerated deeper into the heart of L.A., visible ahead toward the ocean was an immense plume of black smoke pouring upward and spreading east. Shades of Watts: was L.A. burning?
