you love me?”
“Madly,” she said.
He’d hand her some Red Hots, that cinnamon candy, and drive them farther up Laurel Canyon, because to him Laurel Canyon was a country road; he liked to drive out in the country.
Colman introduced her to all his friends, men who were junkies and actors and gamblers and cat burglars and jazz musicians. His idol was Chet Baker.
Colman had been depraved in his youth and understood entirely her desire to be depraved in her youth, too.
“Get it while you’re young, kid,” he said.
The best thing he told her, though, was in response to a remark she made about how two people they both knew couldn’t possibly be married and oughtn’t to be together. He said: “Honey, don’t ever try to figure out what’s going on between two people.”
After she moved out of his house, he resumed life as a married man, and on the face of it it didn’t seem right that they were still in love.
“But what will happen with Colman?” April asked. “How will it end?”
“End?” she said. “What would end it?”
For a while (five years) they met in an apartment in West Hollywood that belonged to one of Colman’s students, Gilbert Wood, whom Jacaranda never met in all the years she and Colman spent afternoons there. She knew that Gilbert was an actor, that he sold marijuana, and that he kept his surfboard on top of his TV.
The Sixties
West Hollywood during the sixties, when life was one long rock-’n’-roll, was easy to live in with its $120-a-month two-bedroom apartment and landlords who were used to weirdness. Though there were such things as Families with Children and a Dog, most of the people who lived in West Hollywood were dope dealers, rock-’n’-roll musicians, road managers, groupies, waiters who were really actors but were writing screenplays in their spare time, and writers who were writing four screenplays each and collecting unemployment. Hairdressers, models who did commercials, and youngish people with no visible means of support, too, resided in that area, between Melrose and Sunset Boulevard, from La Brea to Doheny. In the sixties, West Hollywood was like an open city, a port at the crossroads of all directions.
Jacaranda offered to help a friend of Colman’s out for a few days a week with his business. She circled and Xeroxed the names of all of his clients in the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and those “Teen Come” magazines, as she called them. And it more or less turned into a steady job. She made enough money to get her own West Hollywood apartment, gas, and drugs, and not have to be in a regular office where they expected her to wear shoes. Colman’s friend, Hal, paid her $175 a week for going to rock-’n’-roll concerts and hanging around backstage, an occupation that her friends who were groupies thought was the luckiest thing they’d ever heard of.
She drank Southern Comfort with adorable rich young men who were often smart, and spent more and more nights up in those mansions above Hollywood and Beverly Hills where ambulances often lost their way and where handsome devils sat around on their amps trying to outdo each other in songs, blondes, and downers.
She went to the Monterey Pop Festival, though she never really remembered how she’d gone, come back, or what she’d done for the two days in between. Everyone took Sunshine acid and smoked grass called Icepack. And then, of course, there was all that tequila and rum and Courvoisier that rock-’n’-roll was finding out about after deciding grass wasn’t enough.
She wore skintight satin pants and purple satin blouses. Her hair tangled down her back in blonder streaks of bleached disarray. She spent a lot of time in front of mirrors putting on brown eyeliner and mauve rouge, trying to see from behind her bangs, which still grew down to her nose and made her face look sweeter and more vulnerable when she was quiet and didn’t smile.
“I hate rock-’n’-roll,” she said, one night in the middle of the Stones at the Forum, and left.
HER SURFBOARD WAS lashed onto the top of her new old ’59 Plymouth station wagon but she hadn’t even been outside in the daytime, it seemed to her, since she took up with rock-’n’-roll. She was all white like an adult, not tan.
“I probably can’t even stand up anymore,” she moaned to April.
“Yeah, and it serves you right, too,” April said.
“God, this thing is so heavy,” Jacaranda complained, lugging her surfboard along to the beach near April’s Santa Monica apartment. Jacaranda thought her lungs were going to rip.
She got to the water and touched it with her foot. It was February and wasn’t very hot on the beach. But once Jacaranda was out where the waves broke, she found she could stand up and that her balance soon was intact. And she remembered how nothing else mattered.
“See, you can do it,” April yelled from the shore.
April was now twenty, and because she was truly sympathetic to the human condition, she was besieged by a band of stars and handsome devils, who came to her when life for them stayed too glamorous for too long and didn’t seem real. Eventually, April went to sea and became a sailor.
“I think I’ll move back to the beach,” Jacaranda said, panting and wet from throwing herself headlong into a battle of cold and tides. “I wonder if I still could make money painting surfboards.”
They paused together to take one last look back at the ocean.
“God,” Jacaranda said, “it’ll be so nice to read a real book instead of the Daily Variety.”
“Mother will be so relieved that you’re going to settle down,” April said.
“Me?” Jacaranda asked.
The Apartment
The apartment was in Santa Monica on Third Street, just a few blocks from the ocean, in a tumbling hillside alive with butterflies and cats. It was a long rectangle divided by two walls into a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. All three rooms looked straight out into a horizon of blue, gray, green Pacific with sunsets blazing orange in summer and glowing pink in winter. The bathroom was minute and the whole place had a rickety temporary attitude with a roof that leaked, but it only mattered when it rained and Jacaranda, being from L.A., thought the rain was more than a fair trade for damp rugs and puddles in the kitchen.
Three friends of hers from high school had opened the Eye of God Surf Company and offered to pay her thirty-five dollars per board for airbrushing tertiary and rainbow fades over the smooth surfaces of new boards.
The woman who rented her the apartment let her rent a garage in the back for twenty dollars a month where she could paint boards.
For the first six months, all she wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf. She was clean again, for the ocean salt water was purifying and good for washing away the ravages of depravity.
“What’s all that light doing in here?” Colman asked, on his first visit.
“It’s from the windows,” Jacaranda explained.
“But aren’t you going to get sick of looking out at that ocean all the time?” Colman asked. “Look at this place, it’s bright as day in here,
