California Dreamin'
I made the move to Los Angeles at a strange time
in the history of the youth movement that Charlie
and his Family so reflected and finally helped
to destroy. The great "summer of love"
in San Francisco was just over, already starting
to sour, with rip-offs and people OD'ing in the
alleys. Charlie and his group had left the Haight
months before and started wandering, looking for
a home.
The "hippie trip" was already becoming
big business, with the mass culture slowly picking
up and capitalizing on the counterculture. Aging
male movie stars were wearing love beads and letting
their hair grow. Computer technicians were starting
to sprout beards and mustaches. Beverly Hills
lawyers bought grass and served it with the after-dinner
drinks. Expensive department stores began selling
faded jeans and India-print dresses-at their usual
high prices-while middle-class, middle-aged couples
went to see professional hippies take off their
clothes in Hair. Within a few short years, a movement
which had seen itself as a radical rejection of
the whole materialistic, business-governed American
bag had become just another tool of the corporate
machine, another way to make a buck.
There were some deeper changes, of course, that
went beyond the clothes and the turquoise jewelry
and the water beds. The sexual freedom that a
few bohemians and radicals and artists had been
practicing and advocating for generations became
an accepted option within mainstream American
mores, at least in the more urban areas. And drugs
became a permanent part of the life-style of American
young people. Both these changes were all right
with me.
My parents had made me promise that if I moved
to California I'd finish school, so I enrolled
at Cal State Los Angeles in business administration.
I'd bought myself a new car on the final trip
out before I told them about the decision to move-a
yellow 1959 Thunderbird convertible-and now I
found an apartment in the Silverlake district
just east of Hollywood. It was on an ugly, busy
street, but I was on my own and that was all that
mattered. The big song at the time was The Doors'
"Light My Fire," but I was sure nobody
needed to light mine; it was going strong already.
All the Joe College clothes I'd been so proud
of in Texas started to look a little square. I
wasn't ready to become a hippie-I still thought
they were strange and I liked too many of the
material things they had no time for-but I let
my hair grow a little longer and found myself
using the freaked-out jargon that seemed to be
the new universal tongue.
During my last year at Denton I'd written a paper
on drug addiction. I'd treated it in the usual
fifties' manner-as a bizarre aberration of a few
lower-class individuals. It was still in the style
of The Man With the Golden Arm-as far as I knew.
But this was different, all new. Everyone you
talked to, everyone your own age anyway, was into
grass at least, and often more. People talked
a lot about acid: LSD. One of the clubs on the
Strip advertised itself as the "acid experience"
- but that scared me a little. You heard too many
horror stories of people walking out of third-story
windows, thinking they could fly, or ending up
like drooling vegetables after a bad trip.
Grass was safe, though; grass was good. It gave
me a peace I'd never had before-especially in
the middle of all the changes that were going
on in my life-and was a better high than all the
beer I'd guzzled back in Texas. Not that I stopped
drinking, but weed was taking the place in my
social life that booze had before. Sharing a joint
was the basic social ritual between friends, and
it was one of the things that set us apart from
the square world of cops and parents and teachers.
Shortly after I arrived in Los Angeles, I read
an ad in the paper offering a job as salesman
for a wig shop in Beverly Hills. "Salesman"
turned out to mean walking up and down sidewalks
giving girls a card that entitled them to a free
wiglet if they came into the shop. There was a
gimmick. You had to pay three dollars for styling
what was actually about a fiftycent wiglet, and
once the girl was in the shop she got a hard sell
for a full wig at considerably more than three
dollars. Before long I was one of the in-shop
men, doing the hard selling and making so much
money that there didn't seem to be much point
to staying in school; it just cut into my party
time. I quit Cal State.
Life looked good for me in the fall of 1967-nothing
but more money and more women and more fun ahead.
Then I got word that my high-school buddy Tommy
Caraway had been killed. In Vietnam. I went home
to be a pallbearer. I couldn't believe it: Tommy
Caraway-whom I'd driven all those back roads with,
worked on the sports page with, confided my fledgling
sexual exploits with-dead. Death had not been
part of the world we'd lived in, not sudden death
like this in some jungle half a world away. Only
old people died. But there was Tommy in that box.
I wish I could say that it made me more politically
aware, or finally brought home to me that there
were bigger things going on in the world, more
important issues than getting high and making
money and racing around the Hollywood Hills in
my T-Bird, but it didn't. It didn't even particularly
affect how I felt about the adult, conservative
society around me that had made this war and killed
my friend. All it did was make me even more determined
to have a good time.
When I got back to L.A. it seemed like the pace
kept getting faster and faster. The wig shop moved,
and I spent hours building new fixtures and cabinets
for Mike and Phil, the owners. They were low on
money so I did it all on the promise of payment
later when the new shop got established. Rich
had moved in with me while I was still at the
place in Silverlake. Once I quit school we moved
to an apartment in West Hollywood, then to a house
on Wonderland Drive, up in Laurel Canyon behind
the Strip.
The Canyon was a strange place. Somebody told
me it had started as a place for summer cottages
back in the first part of the century, when there
were still miles of open country between Hollywood
and Los Angeles. It still had a little bit of
that feeling, with trees and narrow canyons running
up into the hills, but now the cottages were run-down
shacks jumbled in between expensive houses where
actors and writers and musicians lived crammed
together on the narrow streets. At the bottom
of the hill, just before you reached Sunset Strip,
there was a market and restaurant where street
people hung out, right alongside movie stars and
singers and agents at the tables in the open-air
cafe. Sometimes, at a distance, it was hard to
tell who were the hippies and who were the show-business
types. In the other direction, behind the Canyon,
the huge San Fernando Valley spread out, and if
you went far enough north and west to the other
side, you'd reach the Santa Susana Pass and a
run-down movie ranch called Spahn.
I had been sticking to grass since I came to
the city-Rich kept telling me I wasn't ready for
anything heavier-but when I got back from Texas
and putting Tommy in the ground, I decided to
try some rosewood seeds our next-door neighbors
had brought back from Hawaii.
I wasn't ready for what they did to me. It seemed
like everything outside of me came crashing down
and everything inside, too-all the frustrations
I'd felt at home, all the things that scared me
here, all the pressures between what I'd been
raised to think and believe and do and what I
wanted for myself. Suddenly the whole world seemed
to turn blue and threatening. I'd never thought
of myself as having violence in me; I always thought
I was a happy, gentle kind of person. But as all
this pressure started coming down on me, something
came rushing up from inside, deep in my gut, something
like an explosion-and I wanted to fight back and
break and smash and tear into the world and I
didn't even know why, except that I felt angry
and confused and pushed. I ended up putting my
fist through a door. For a long time I was afraid
to try any hallucinogens again, afraid of what
I'd seen inside myself.
As 1968 began, my life started quietly disintegrating,
so quietly I wasn't even aware of it at the time.
It began with a car accident one rainy morning
on the way to work with Rich, who'd been working
at the shop with me for a month or so. Laurel
Canyon is tricky, especially when wet, and the
friend who was driving us skidded into a head-on
collision that messed up my knee badly enough
to put me in the hospital for an operation. Although
the whole thing didn't seem all that important
at the time, the accident and the lawsuit that
followed had a number of consequences later-keeping
me out of the army, involving me with two lawyers
(who would later come to Texas and fight for the
right to represent me and obtain the publicity
such a trial could bring them), creating an insurance
claim that would later be the excuse for a bizarre
odyssey back to Death Valley, looking for Charlie
after I'd run away from him.
But the most immediate result of the wreck was
a visit from my mother. It would be wrong to say
I didn't have a good time. We showed her the sights
and she was suitably impressed with the house
and the furniture and the stereo I was buying.
But underneath it all there was tension. I could
tell she wasn't happy about the way she sensed
I was living, the kind of people who kept coming
and going. We'd smoke grass behind her back, and
I'd dodge her questions about the girls who spent
so much time at the house. After five days she
announced she was going home early because she
couldn't take the situation anymore. While she
was packing, she as much as begged me to come
home with her. Strangely enough, a part of me
wanted to do what she asked, wanted to go back
to the life I'd known, the values that I'd been
raised with. But I felt as if doing that would
be as much as admitting I'd been wrong, that I'd
made a mistake in coming to California in the
first place. I wasn't willing to do that.
"I'm never coming home again," I told
her. It was the last time I would see her until
nineteen months later when I ran away from the
desert, out of my mind and responsible for seven
deaths.
The car wreck was just the beginning. I started
dealing a little grass as well as smoking. Nothing
heavy, just enough to supplement what I wasn't
being paid at the wig shop. The back wages I was
owed piled up so far that I finally took the owners
to the Better Business Bureau, and Rich and I
decided to start our own shop. We figured if the
wiglet gimmick worked for Mike and Phil, it would
work for us. We called our place Love Locs-love
was the big word right then-and opened up in a
tiny former beauty parlor on San Vicente off La
Cienega. In the meantime, we'd gotten bored with
Laurel Canyon and moved out to Malibu, a house
right on the beach. The surf practically came
up under my bedroom. Now, I told myself, now I
would really get it together. Actually, "it"
was coming closer and closer to falling apart.
Love Locs was doomed from the start-we didn't
know very much about business and had gotten ourselves
into a lease that took 20 percent of our profits
off the top. After two months we hauled all the
wigs and supplies out to Malibu and decided to
work from the house. But it was spring and the
beach was too inviting. We ended up spending most
of our days smoking weed in the sun instead of
selling wigs. Finally, to pay the rent, we decided
to try dealing grass full time, but we didn't
seem to be much better at selling grass than we
had been at selling wigs.
I can't look back now and pinpoint at just what
moment I "dropped out." For a while
we kept telling ourselves that some kind of break
was just around the corner, some big score, but
all that was really starting to matter was being
stoned and going to rock concerts. I'd never been
that interested in music, but now the music started
to get to me. I'd always thought the hippies were
a little strange, but now I started thinking of
myself as part of something new, something different.
I couldn't have put it into words, but somehow
I had made the break from the last ties to my
past. I didn't care about working or making money
or acquiring things. I just wanted to lie back
and ride with the flow. Whatever it meant to be
a hippie, I guessed I was one, after all. I was
floating free-no more past that mattered, no more
future worth worrying about. Just then it was
the beach, the bright blue sky, the sun baking
through you, and the grass that brought it all
together. It was a lazy, late spring and that
was all.
I met Manson.
(Will You Die For Me? Copyright 1978, by Ray
Hoekstra. Published by Cross Roads Publications,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
|
