living at the Bay since he’d been hired by a roofing company in Costa Mesa. I was curious, as I rounded the corner onto Cliff Drive, if Phil would still be there, or if he and Willow had maybe gotten a place together closer to his work up in Newport or Costa Mesa itself.
Edward’s TR was parked at the curb in front of the Bay. A Ford Econoline van and a Chevy four-door sedan rested on the short paved drive leading to the garage. I didn’t recognize the other vehicles; the van had a FTA bumper sticker. The initials, I knew, stood for “Fuck the Army.” There was no sign of Willow’s microbus, but perhaps she’d traded it in for the van. The Chevy wouldn’t work for her without roof racks to carry boards.
A light was on in the living room, and Edward answered my knock on the door. “Wayman,” he said, his face brightening when he saw me. “You’re back.” His brown hair was impeccably cut as usual, and he wore crisply pressed shorts and a red Hawaiian shirt decorated across the midsection with a broad brand of white flowers. Draped around his neck was a thin band of beads.
We shook hands. After three days on the road, I was glad to talk to somebody familiar.
Edward led me toward the kitchen. “Grab a beer. Now you’re with us again, the Revolution can begin.”
That was his kind of humour: a teeny bit of the needle, but good-hearted, really, underneath.
“How did your summer —?” I began, but stopped. Two young guys I’d never seen before were absorbed in concocting something in a boiling saucepan on the stove.
“I’d like to present my younger brother, Jay. This is his friend, Pump.”
The two swivelled around and regarded me. Both had moustaches and wore T-shirts and gaudily patched bellbottom jeans. The shorter of the pair, Edward’s brother, had a ponytail, and a beaded necklace similar to his sibling’s.
“Wayman here has just driven down from Canada,” Edward announced.
“Far-out,” Jay observed.
“Glad to meet you, man,” Pump said.
The three of us shook hands. “I didn’t even know Edward had a brother,” I admitted to Jay. My host was extracting a couple of Olympia beers from the refrigerator. I was pleased to see the bottles of Oly; everybody had been low on money by term’s end, and we had been reduced to drinking Brew 104 — an inexpensive L.A. brand reputed to be the result of 104 different attempts to brew beer properly, after which the company conceded defeat and marketed the horrible product regardless.
Edward was lifting down two plastic glasses from a cupboard over the sink. “Jay isn’t really his name. But the handle is apt. These two got out of the army about a month ago and they’ve been stoned ever since.”
“We’re making up for lost time, man,” Pump said.
“Not that we didn’t get ripped a few times when we were in,” Jay observed.
Pump giggled. “Yeah, right. A few times.”
“There’s been some outasight Colombian boo around,” Jay said. “Do they smoke grass up in Canada?”
I accepted a full glass from Edward, nodded, licked the overflow from one side, and took a sip. “Were you guys in Nam?”
“They never made it out of the Land of the Free,” Edward said.
“We were in electronics,” Jay explained. Pump had turned to check on the steaming utensil on the burner.
“The last eight months we were stationed in California,” Jay continued. “When we got our discharge, the natural thing seemed to be to hang out at Eddie’s for a while.”
“You mean the easiest thing,” Edward said.
Pump had swung around toward us again. “Till we figure out what we want to do.”
Edward held up his glass in my direction. “Besides getting stoned, he means. Anyhow, Wayman, welcome back to the Gold Coast, to the California madness.”
We clinked glasses. “Do you have other brothers and sisters?” I asked.
Edward twisted his face into a mock grimace. “One’s enough. Who knows what friends any others might bring by?”
The young guys giggled.
“How did you get the name Pump?” I asked.
“Some army deal,” Edward said, dismissing the question before Pump could reply. “Let’s you and I remove ourselves to the porch. You know what these idiots are doing?”
“Cooking?”
Edward shook his head, as if saddened. “They read in the Barb or the Free Press or Rolling Stone you can get off by boiling the meth out of the top of a nasal decongestant spray bottle.”
“Sounds like mellow yellow,” I said. A year earlier the rumour had gone around, apparently based on the lyrics of a Donovan song, that smoking dried banana skins would prove hallucinogenic. Despite valiant attempts by thousands of freaks in hundreds of kitchens, nobody got high.
“I think the caterpillar has eaten huge holes in their brains,” Edward declared. “I told them the best stone known comes from brick walls. You find a brick wall, lower your head, and run at it several times. It’s a fantastic trip — knock you right out. Really gets you wasted.”
He scooped two more Olys from the fridge and led the way among the elderly stuffed chairs and sofa of the living room through the open French doors onto the porch. I paused at the railing for a moment to reacquaint myself with the vista while Edward stretched himself out on a deck chair.
The tide was full. In the thickening light, the swells reared and crashed onto sand, then foamed up the beach. A few sandpipers, the last of the day, hunted for sustenance at the edge of the surf ’s frothy residue as each sweep of onrushing sea withdrew toward the Pacific. The air was a little misty with windblown spray. Above the regular cannonade of the surf, I heard the seals’ raucous sounds from the rocks offshore of the cove’s northernmost promontory. To the south along the curving coastline, the lights of the town flicked on behind Main Beach and up into the hills beyond.
“This makes driving two thousand miles worth it,” I said.
Edward was watching me dig the night. “You really like California, don’t you?”
“Who wouldn’t?” I hauled up a rickety wooden folding chair and sat beside him. Under the influence of the beach scene and the beer, I felt the tension of three days on the road start to leave my body. “Being here in California is like a trip to the future for me. This place might be crazy. But what I see here will make its way to the Frozen North in a couple of years.”
“You mean, eventually Canadians will be boiling up Vicks VapoRub?”
“Probably.” I told Edward about being offered a joint at sixty-five miles per hour approaching Tejon Pass.
He laughed. “Did you hear up in Canada about the Woodstock Festival?”
Working my second-last-for-the-summer Tuesday at the Sun, I’d seen spiked
