Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  He smiled. Sure, but not right away.

  Okay, they giggled and scampered back to their seat.

  And don’t worry about the sharks, he called back to them. If any show up, we’ll baptize them too.

  The bus idled as another pulled into the parking lot to disgorge their cargo of the Lord’s children onto the beach. Dejected beachgoers trudged up the hill lugging chairs and coolers, looking like a line of refugees fleeing a war zone. They had all seen this sort of shit before. It was 1973, after all, and this was Southern California.

  Someone in the bus began to sing and the others followed.

  Accept Him with your whole heart

  And use your own two hands

  With one reach out to Jesus

  And with the other bring a friend.

  The bus crept forward and came to a stop, the air brakes hissing. Those on the bus grabbed beach towels and moved excitedly through the center aisle toward the doors. The young man remained in his seat, eyes fixed on the beach and its growing number of Believers. George Wayne Smith was just twenty-one years old, looking for some sort of purpose to his life.

  If one were looking for purpose in 1973, Orange County, California, was a tough place to find it. It was “fly-over” country, little more than a giant, faceless suburb of Los Angeles. Tying it together was an inadequate freeway network coursing with vehicles moving ant-like through the system at all hours of the day. Here and there, an orange grove could be seen still holding out against the voracious housing development of the past two decades, which had all but eradicated the county of its eponymous fruit. Taken altogether, it was a not unpleasant, yet wholly uninspiring place.

  George’s father, Walter Smith, had left the oil fields of Wyoming to join the great postwar westward migration in 1956, moving his wife, Judy, daughter Patricia, and four-year-old son to Southern California. Once settled into the little house in Buena Park just a short bike ride to the newly opened Disneyland, Walter and Judy quickly added two more children. Like most young families, they struggled to make ends meet. But the Smiths felt far more at home in postwar Southern California than they had in Casper, Wyoming. Judy was Japanese, Walter Anglo-American. Mixed-race couples in general, and Japanese in particular, had not always been a welcome sight in Wyoming in the early 1950s. But in California, Asians, mixed-race couples, and Amerasian children like George were just another part of the cultural landscape, as common as palm trees, surfboards, and Stage 3 smog alerts.

  George and Ralph stepped off the bus, walked over the sandstone bluffs, and went down into Pirate’s Cove, a sheltered crescent of beach. They filtered through the crowd of Believers, hundreds strong now and still growing. They kicked off their flip-flops and felt the warm, grainy sand pushing between their toes. The Way, Calvary Chapel’s house band, stood on a ledge of the bluffs that ringed the cove, the three woolly faced musicians playing acoustic guitars and singing contemporary songs of praise. Those at the gathering quickly took up the tune until the sound of hundreds of voices drifted up from the beach. The two young men sang as they walked, George’s voice clear and in-key. A nice voice.

  Two Newport Beach police officers appeared at the top of the bluffs, bemused by the scene. This was one place they did not need to worry about for the next few hours, not with all these Jesus freaks running around. George paused, his dark eyes fixed coldly on them. George had a deep distrust of police even though he had never been in trouble with the law. It was something he got from his father.

  There was another reason Walter Smith had wanted to put Wyoming behind him. After three years of blue-collar work, Walter had finally landed a job as an officer with the Casper Police Department. The only thing Walter ever wanted to be was a cop, and he hoped the job with the Casper PD would be the first step in a lifelong career in law enforcement. What he found instead was a culture of corruption and criminal activity on the part of his fellow officers. After being reprimanded for arresting two officers he found burglarizing a shop on Main Street, Walter Smith quit the force after only a year and a half. Feeling disgusted and betrayed, he abandoned any hope for a career as a cop. It was not an experience Walter shared openly with his young children, but somehow George knew.

  To Protect and to Serve, George muttered bitterly.

  Ralph studied his friend’s face. Come on, George, something’s going on over there.

  A middle-aged man with a receding hairline ascended a low outcropping of rock still wet from the swells washing over it at high tide, its newly replenished tide pools teeming with sea anemones and hermit crabs. It’s Pastor Chuck, voices began, hushing the crowd, everyone moving closer and straining to hear what the founder of Calvary Chapel had to tell them.

  Pastor Chuck Smith, dressed in casual slacks and white button-down shirt open at the collar, stood with the vast ocean and late afternoon sun as his backdrop and smiled warmly at the flock assembled before him. Today you make that next step of identification, totally and completely with His death, with His burial, with His Resurrection, he called out to the hundreds standing on the sand below him. In baptism, the water is actually a symbol of the grave, the old life, all of the past to be buried here today. They looked up at him dreamily. An ocean breeze ruffled the pastor’s comb-over. You are becoming a dead person. All of the past life is being buried. That’s all gone, he said, sweeping his hand through the air to emphasize the totality of the statement. That is all dead.

  The pastor hopped from his stone pulpit onto the wet sand. A small group of associate pastors and senior church members clustered around him. The gathering of “Jesus People” began to move forward and fan out along the tide line, the water sweeping up the sandy beach and swirling around their ankles. Others scurried up the sandstone bluffs to sit on beach towels along with a smattering of curious passersby to watch. Mexican fishermen stood on the long jetty of boulders with their buckets and poles and stared dumbfounded at the scene unfolding on the beach below. The Way launched into another song, the voices rising again as one.

  When they were done conferring, Pastor Smith and his four fully clothed associate pastors spread out and waded waist-deep into the gentle swells of Pirate’s Cove. The atmosphere on the beach became more energized, the air charged with anticipation. A young man with a thin mustache began to sway, eyes closed, head tilted back, face to the heavens. Two young girls clutched beach towels to their chests and bounced giddily on the balls of their feet.

  The senior church members acted as shoreline ushers, processing members into the water one at a time, directing them to an available church official or the pastor himself. Quiet words were spoken, a hand placed on their chest and a second on their back as they were gently turned to face the shore. The attending church official encouraged them to hold their nose and close their eyes before lowering them beneath the surface of the water and then lifting them back up, their past now buried with nothing but the Kingdom of God stretched out before them.

  George and Ralph moved toward the shoreline to wait their turn. They each had their own reasons for wanting to bury their past. For Ralph, it was the haunting memories from a recently completed tour of duty in Vietnam where he had seen those around him killed while being repeatedly doused in Agent Orange. For George, it was the memory of how Ralph’s little sister Rosie had left him within months of their wedding after George had shipped out to Germany for his two-year tour in the army.

  George might have felt confused, abandoned, and brokenhearted, but Rosie had had her reasons. George’s immaturity and adolescent insecurity had worn her out. She was a playful yet serious young woman even at age seventeen and wanted to have babies. Maybe not right then, but someday. George said no way, that a baby would only come between them. One day, Rosie told George she might be pregnant. It was just a small prank that Rosie figured he would see right through. But George flew into a rage, told her he would cut the baby out of her, and even tried to kick her in the stomach.

  Maybe the insecurity, selfishness, and fear of having childre
n were things he would eventually outgrow. But all that talk about wanting to rob an armored car someday and what it would feel like to kill a person? That was different. At first, Rosie figured he was just trying to sound tough, just bullshit teenage boy talk. But he kept at it, even telling her they would be like Romeo and Juliet, joined in double suicide to a life together in eternity. He began to frighten her. There seemed to be an almost pathological detachment between his proposed actions and their inevitable consequences. His disregard for the impact of his actions on others was chilling. You’re going to toss a hand grenade into the cab of a Brink’s truck? What about the people inside, George? When she asked him questions, it was as if he had never even considered them before. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

  By the time they were married, Rosie knew she wanted out. George was eighteen, Rosie seventeen. Their reception was held within the cinder block walls of the Miranda backyard. A month after the wedding, George went to Germany and three months after that, Rosie got herself a boyfriend. It was Ralph who finally told George, writing him a letter to say his sister had run off with another man and was not coming back.

  The baptism was proceeding with remarkable efficiency. Only thirty minutes in and dozens had already been brought into the water, dunked beneath its surface, and led back onto the sand. Dozens more waited their turn. The profound effect of the experience was on display all along the shoreline. The baptized broke the surface of the ocean trembling, sobbing, arms lifted to the sky in pure joy. Others stood shaking uncontrollably, their eyes rolling back in their heads. They staggered back toward land, their knees giving out, collapsing into the shallow surf and flopping around like grunion washed up at high tide. The eerie babbling of the tongue speakers could be heard rising up from the crowd like the collective mutterings of madmen.

  PEOPLE SAY I AM TRYING TO LOOK LIKE JESUS, SAID A MAN STANDING AMONG a group of youngsters seated on the sand, motioning to his beard and stroking the long brown hair falling past his shoulders. Well, there’s no one else I’d rather look like. The group crowding around him on the sand laughed, starstruck, hanging on his every word, while George and Ralph stood nearby listening in.

  With his flared bell-bottoms, leather sandals, love beads, and multicolored African dashiki shirt, the man could have passed for any acidhead in the swirling crowd at a Grateful Dead show. But that was Lonnie Frisbee’s gig: “The Hippie Preacher.”

  Articulate, charismatic, and handsome in a Jesus–meets–Jim Morrison sort of way, Lonnie Frisbee had burst onto the Orange County born-again scene at eighteen and was now in high demand as a guest on the televangelist circuit. One of the primary founders of the new “Jesus movement,” he was also its perfect poster child, a hippie–turned–good guy. The anti-Manson. He was also Pastor Smith’s star associate preacher and Calvary’s biggest rainmaker. Lonnie Frisbee could round up disillusioned hippies off the boardwalk at Newport Beach the way wranglers round up stray cattle on the range.

  Wouldn’t that be outta sight? Frisbee said, turning to the subject of Adam and Eve. He stared off into the dreamy distance, the Bible tucked under his arm. Walk with God. Eat the fruits of the trees in the garden. Trip around with the animals. An audible sigh came from the circle around him. Lonnie Frisbee and God were blowing everyone’s mind.

  Frisbee let his arms drop to his side, his whole demeanor darkening in an instant. The crowd held its collective breath. But God is not in every man, he went on, voice rising sharply. That’s a lie of Satan. That’s the same old trip he was trying to lay on Adam and Eve. You need to receive Him, let Him in, because darkness is coming more and more and more. He looked around him, eyes pausing briefly on one and then the next sheep in turn. These are the last days and Jesus Christ is returning soon to judge the quick and the dead. So repent and save yourself because if you don’t . . . He let his voice trail off to allow his audience to finish the thought the same way Mick Jagger let an audience sing the last few words to a popular song. They all knew the consequences if they did not heed the Word of Lonnie Frisbee, the Word of Chuck Smith, the Word of Revelation, the Word of God Himself. Get right with Jesus or when the Rapture comes, you will be left behind.

  Revelation might be the last book in the New Testament, but it was first in the hearts of Chuck Smith and the other preachers of the movement. End Times, Rapture, Tribulation, and the Second Coming were the ideas around which their ministries revolved. It was the carrot-and-stick approach to theology intended to keep members immersed in church life. The carrot was salvation; the stick, damnation. In Orange County, they went heavy on the stick.

  At Calvary Chapel, the biggest stick of all was the Rapture. When it comes, those who believe in Jesus Christ will be lifted up to the sky to meet the Lord. Those who do not will be left behind to ride out seven years of fireballs, earthquakes, oceans of blood, locusts with human faces, and all the other horrors of the Tribulation. The message was simple and one that Calvary pounded relentlessly into the souls of its young membership.

  Once he was back from Germany and trained by Calvary Chapel in the art of interpreting biblical prophecy, it had all become so clear to George. All the signs were there. He had seen the pillars of smoke and fireballs from heaven foretold in the book of Revelation. He had stood on the fields of Armageddon upon which the great battle of East versus West would be fought. He had fired the very weapons that would bring about the annihilation of mankind. George Smith had seen the end of the world and had no doubt it was coming soon.

  WHEN THEIR TIME CAME, RALPH PULLED HIS SHIRT OFF, LET IT DROP TO THE sand, and entered the water. George watched as his friend was received by one of the associate pastors. The man spoke to him, said a prayer, and then lowered Ralph into the water. Ralph came back up smiling broadly, wiping the saltwater from his eyes. It was the happiest George had seen him since Ralph’s return from Vietnam.

  George pulled his own shirt over his head and waded into the ocean. He approached a church leader and stood beside the man, both up to their waists in the gentle swells. George could feel the sun on his skin, the breeze across the ocean’s surface, the smell of seawater. The man placed a hand on George’s chest and a second on the back of his neck. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

  George fell back, the cool waters of the Pacific enveloping his body. He opened his eyes underwater and stared up at the shafts of sunlight streaming beneath the surface and glinting off the specks of fool’s gold drifting about him. A calmness and clarity came over him, his purpose in life settled at last. He had been trained as a warrior by the United States Army, shown the light by Calvary Chapel. Soon he would be a foot soldier of God in the battle against the Great Demon.

  George got his legs beneath him, pushed off the sandy bottom, and broke the surface, seawater streaming off his body. He swept the salty water from his eyes and fixed his stare across the Pacific, to where the curve of the earth fell away beneath the clear blue sky. When the Apocalypse came, George Wayne Smith would be ready.

  1

  THE JUPITER EFFECT

  April 1980. Mira Loma, California.

  CHRIS HARVEN WAS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIT. HE SET THE SHOVEL DOWN, leaned against the cool dirt sides of the hole, fished another joint out of the pocket of his denim shirt, and sparked it. He drew in deeply, held the smoke for a long few seconds, and blew it out through his nose. It was his third joint of the day and not yet one o’clock in the afternoon. He might have been out of a job and almost out of money, but he sure as hell was not going to go without weed. Or without guns.

  Harven took another drag and looked straight up at the rectangle of blue sky visible above the coffin-shaped mouth of the hole. A figure darkened the opening to the pit, a big man with a full beard and a mound of black curly hair circling his head. Stop bogarting and pass it up, the man said.

  Harven reached up with the joint, but the pit was too deep now to hand anything out of it. Throw down that bucket.

  The man disappeared for a fe
w seconds. Harven took another hit. A wooden bucket on a rope was lowered into the pit and dangled beside him, a single can of Brew 102 inside. Harven took the beer out and dropped the joint into the bucket. The bucket was hoisted back up by the rope, scraping moist dirt off the walls of the pit and onto Harven.

  George Wayne Smith took a toke off the joint and surveyed the hole. It was now twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and ten feet deep, three of the sides crumbling dirt and the fourth partially made of the foundation of the house. Smith crouched down at the edge to inspect Harven’s progress in extending the main chamber beneath the foundation of the garage. We better start reinforcing these sides, he said, expelling smoke as he spoke.

  Yeah, especially if you’re going to stand there on the edge, said Harven. He lifted the ring to the pull top and the beer opened with a hiss. He tilted the can up and drained it, crushing the empty with one hand and tossing it out of the pit.

  You just got fuckin’ beer all over me, Smith said, dropping the joint back down to Harven and then disappearing from the opening of the hole.

  Harven climbed the homemade wooden ladder out of the pit and into the choking smog of another scorching-hot Riverside County afternoon. He raised his hands above his head and stretched out his back, muscles hardened by eight years working as a city parks landscaper. Five days a week of shoveling dirt, wrestling lawn mowers, and stacking pallets of mulch had made him a strong six feet tall, 190 pounds. Not fitness-club strong, but the real kind of strong. Hard-labor strong. Harven had a rugged look that went along with his build. His sandy brown hair was thick and a bit unruly but never worn too long. There was something of a Clint Eastwood squint to his blue eyes, and his mustache curved down at the corners of his mouth.

  Christopher Harven and George Smith met on the job, maintaining parks and the grounds of municipal buildings for the city of Cypress in 1973. The two young men hailed from the same sort of working-class Orange County neighborhood, both with very strong personalities, but each in his own way. George was evangelical, engaging, outgoing. Many afternoons mulching out flower beds were filled with his running monologues about the Bible, anarchy, social collapse, and the big plan he had for riding out the great catastrophes soon to befall mankind.