to Edward, had been the sense that for once we longhairs, peaceniks, appeared not to be a tiny minority of the population. For the first time we looked like a significant group, a power growing fast, a force that would have to be reckoned with.
“There were even some pictures of guys with long hair wearing hard hats and driving bulldozers, preparing the site,” I said. “I’d never seen freaks working construction.”
“You know, I had a chance to be there and turned it down.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure if this was one of Edward’s “stories.” I hadn’t ever known him to lie, exactly. He frequently produced tales, however, of previous encounters with famous men and women from the art, literary, or political worlds, stories we had no means of verifying.
Edward explained he’d been over at Bridget’s, a friend of ours from Irvine who had a house near the south end of town where we hung out sometimes. I knew vaguely that her boyfriend, who was the father of the child she was expecting when I left in June, worked at concert promotion in the Bay Area. Edward told me Don’s company wanted him to be present at Woodstock and had given him two tickets. Bridget this late in her pregnancy couldn’t fly. Don had been home in Laguna the night Edward had dropped by, and late in the evening after he and Don had gotten suitably loose, Don asked if Edward was interested in attending this big rock festival in the East. Edward had decided the New York deal sounded too flaky to be worth quitting his summer job early to attend.
“Bummer,” I said. “Hey,” I added, suddenly feeling guilty for not asking sooner, “did Bridget’s baby get born all right?”
“A boy. Both mother and child doing well. Jacaranda Eldridge Buzz O’Conner. We should go see them.”
“Eldridge, as in Cleaver?”
Edward nodded. “A flower, a Black Panther in exile, and ‘Buzz,’ as in Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut. Did they cover the moon landing in Canada?”
“It was quite a summer. I was at the SDS convention in Chicago in June. Then Apollo 11 landed in July, and the Woodstock Festival blew everyone’s mind in August.”
We pondered this list for a few moments. The seals had become silent, leaving only the recurring thunder of the surf.
I asked Edward how he had liked his summer employment. He had been hired by Laguna’s Chamber of Commerce to help with publicity, mainly promoting Laguna’s Pageant of the Masters. This was a bizarre, long-standing theatrical extravaganza whereby townspeople appeared onstage in Laguna Canyon, forming a tableau that reproduced as nearly as possible some famous painting. Each year the work of several Old Masters and the occasional modern art piece were rehearsed and presented. Why anybody would want to view a group of people pretending to be a painting was beyond me. Yet the pageant was an important tourist draw, injecting hundreds of thousands of dollars into the town’s economy. Undoubtedly, Edward had secured this job on the strength of the art gallery experience he either had, or hadn’t had, in Hawaii.
I was in the midst of a futile attempt to extract concrete information about Edward’s day-to-day duties for the pageant, when his brother and his brother’s friend emerged from the living room onto the porch. As they pulled up chairs, Jay revealed that their chemical experiment had been a failure. He and Pump endured with good grace Edward’s mockery of their earlier optimism. Jay produced an example of his namesake, claiming it was Mexican in origin, though unfortunately not the celebrated Acapulco Gold. We settled into some diligent toking.
The smoke I inhaled was landing in my brain after eleven hot hours on the road, not to mention a beer and a half. I felt almost immediately a humming exhilaration pervade my consciousness. En route to the porch, the boys had put a record on the stereo I recognized, an album Willow had frequently played last spring when I was over — a band called H.P. Lovecraft, named after the horror author. Their music, though, was laid-back, with intricate vocal harmonies that impressed me. My attempt to learn more about Edward’s summer employment floated away while he and his brother and Pump discussed household matters. Despite my mind having become sugarcoated, I managed eventually to insert an inquiry concerning Willow’s whereabouts.
“She’s living here, man,” Pump told me. “She’s re-upped for another year at you guys’ school.”
“Phil and her are up to Garden Grove to see his mom,” added Jay. “They’ll be back tonight.”
A master plan sprang into my pleasantly ruined brain. I had some idea that the Willow-Meg-Janey link might yield news that could prevent me making a fool of myself by trying to reconnect with Janey. No point in asking her out again if, for instance, she had become hot and heavy with somebody over the past two months. I was too shy to raise the subject with Edward. But if Willow showed up later, I could casually broach the topic. Even then the inquiry would have to be phrased delicately. On the turntable, H.P. Lovecraft were uttering a melodious complaint about a girlfriend’s betrayal. Behind the words, two electric guitars spoke back and forth. Except when the loss being articulated by the lyrics became too painful, an organ and some mellifluous scat wove to and fro under the song’s sad tale. A background chorus, “Shawn — shawna-wanna-way-o,” was repeated soothingly. Yet resentment was decidedly being voiced in the forefront:
How could you
Be so cool
To sit and let me
Play the fool
And pick up all the tabs
For all your fu-un?
I bought your
Brand-new clothes
And heaven only knows
That all the time
I thought that I was
Number one.
Well, I saw Fred yesterday.
He says he saw you in L.A.
Well, I hope the weather’s groovy
Way out west.
If that’s how much you love me, baby,
More or less.
I tripped out on the song, cautioning myself to be ready to learn — if not tonight, then sometime in the next few days — that Janey had indeed found somebody else over the summer. Not someone else, I corrected myself: she and I didn’t really have anything going.
From a distance I heard Edward’s voice stating that he had run into one of my SDS colleagues, or should he say, comrades, the day before yesterday downtown on Forest. He had been told that the SDS convention had been wild. The bubble that had been slowly expanding within my mind unexpectedly popped, and I perceived I was both deliciously and thoroughly stoned and at the same time possessed an augmented capacity to be articulate, to communicate a penetrating and convincing utterance on any topic.
“Who did you talk to?” I succeeded in asking.
“Emma.”
Emma was a main energy source for UC Irvine’s SDS chapter. A Ph.D. student in anthropology, tall and gangly and about my age, she was already immersed in the organization when I started attending the occasional meeting my first September at Irvine. During the initial couple of months, I regarded her as far too involved in protest politics. On my first visit to her ground-level apartment
