The Kings Of Cool s-1

by Don Winslow

  She’s carefully picking the beef out of her taco and laying it on the curb.

  “The cow is sacred to the Hindus,” she says to John.

  “Are you a Hindu?” John asks.

  He doesn’t know what a Hindu is.

  “No,” the girl says, like his question makes no sense. Then she adds, “My name is Starshine.”

  No it isn’t, John thinks. He’s talked with plenty of hippie runaways before-Laguna is crawling with them-and they always call themselves Starshine or Moonbeam or Rainbow, and they’re always really Rebecca or Karen or Susan.

  Maybe a Holly, but that’s about as crazy as it gets.

  Hippie runaway girls annoy the shit out of John.

  They all think they’re Joni Mitchell, and he hates Joni Mitchell. John listens to the Stones, the Who, the Moody Blues.

  Now he just wants to finish his tacos and get out of there.

  Then Starshine says, “After you finish eating? I’d like to suck you off.”

  John doesn’t go home.

  Ever.

  41

  Ka

  Boom.

  Stan’s head explodes.

  It’s like the sun rises in his skull and the warmth of the rays spreads to the smile on his face.

  He looks at Diane and says, “Holy shit.”

  She knows-the blotter acid just melted on her tongue, too.

  Not holy shit, holy communion.

  Across the PCH, Taco Jesus is holding his daily service. Beyond that, the ocean rises in a blue so blue it outblues all other blues in this universe of blues.

  “Look at the blue,” she says to Stan.

  Stan turns to look.

  And starts to cry it’s so bluetiful.

  Stan and Diane

  (“This is a little ditty about Stan and Diane

  Two American kids growing up in…”

  Ah, fuck it)

  Stan isn’t your tall, stringy hippie-he’s your shorter, plumper, Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies hippie with a fat nose, Jewfro, full black beard, and beatific smile. Diane does have the skinny thing going-plus long, straight black hair that frizzes in the humidity, hips that hint at the earth-mother thing, and breasts that are at least partially responsible for Stan’s beatific smile.

  Now, cranked out of their minds, they stand on the porch of the decrepit building they want to turn into a bookstore. Recent immigrants from Haight-Ashbury, they knew that the scene was disintegrating up there so they’re trying to replicate it down here.

  Don’t hate them-they never had a motherfucking chance.

  East Coast leftie parents (“The Rosenbergs were innocent”), socialist summer camps (“The Rosenbergs were innocent”), Berkeley in the early sixties, Free Speech Movement, Stop the War, Ronald Reagan (“The Rosenbergs did it”) Is the Devil, Haight-Ashbury, Summer of Love, they got married in a field on a farm in the Berkshires with garlands of flowers in their hair and some dipshit playing the sitar and they are perfect products of their times

  Baby Boomers

  Hippies. who came to Laguna to create a little utopia in the cheap rents of the canyon and spread the good word about love and peace by building a bookstore that will sell, in addition to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Anarchist Cookbook, and On the Road,

  — incense, sandals, psychedelic posters, rock albums, tie-dyed T-shirts, macrame bracelets (again, try not to hate them), all that happy shit — and distribute acid to the turned-on.

  There is a flaw in their plan.

  Money.

  More accurately, the lack thereof.

  It takes money to buy even a shitty building, money to renovate it into even a hippie bookstore, and they ain’t got none.

  Which is the problem with socialism.

  No capital.

  Enter Taco Jesus, surfing in as a savior like a cowboy on his horse to…

  Again, fuck it. The surfer/cowboy analogy, the end of the American West at the edge of the Pacific, Manifest Destiny reversing itself with the incoming tide-who gives a shit?

  Suffice it to say that the Surfers met the Hippies in Laguna Beach.

  It had to happen.

  The difference between a Surfer and a Hippie?

  A board.

  They’re the same cat, basically. The surfer was the original hippie; in fact, he was the original beatnik. Years before Jack and Dean hit the road searching for dharma, the surfer was cruising the PCH looking for a good wave.

  Same thing.

  But we’re not going to get into all that. We could, we could, we’re sorely tempted, but we have a story to tell, and the story is Stan, Diane, and the tribe are trying to build their store a block from one of the best breaks on the OC Coast — Brooks Street where Taco Jesus, aka “Doc,” surfs and distributes free food to any and all

  (socialism) so Stan asks Diane, “Where does Taco Jesus get the money to be Taco Jesus?”

  “Trust fund?”

  “He doesn’t look like the trust fund type.”

  In this Diane is intuitive, because Raymond “Doc” Halliday grew up in a blue-collar bungalow in Fontana and did two stretches in juvie for, respectively, burglary and assault. Ray Sr.-a roofer-left his son with certain skills with a hammer, but money?

  No.

  Eventually Doc migrated down to the south coast, where he discovered surfing and marijuana and also discovered that you could make enough money to support the former by selling the latter.

  Now Stan and Diane watch him hand out tacos and decide to ask him where the bread for the loaves comes from. Crossing the PCH, which under the influence of blotter acid has become a river and its cars fish, they approach Doc.

  “You want a taco?” Doc asks.

  “You want some acid?” Diane replies.

  Cue the 2001 theme.

  This is a moment.

  The seminal mind-fuck that gives birth to the group that will become known as

  The Association.

  (And then along came Mary.)

  42

  Here’s how it happens Doc gives Stan and Diane tacos.

  Stan and Diane give Doc a tab of blotter acid.

  Doc goes back into the water, gets into a wave, and discovers that the molecules that form the wave are the same molecules that form him, so that he does not need to become one with the wave, he is already one with the wave, in fact, we are all the same wave…

  And goes and finds Stan and Diane and weepingly tells them so.

  “I know, ” Diane gushes.

  She can’t know, she’s never been on a board, but we’re all on the same wave, so…

  “I know you do,” Doc says.

  Doc comes back with his surfer buddies and they all turn on. Now you have Republican Orange County’s baddest nightmare-the worst antisocial elements (surfers and hippies) gathered on one combination plate in a demonic, drug-induced love fest.

  And planning to institutionalize it, because

  Stan and Diane share their problem-lack of funds-with Doc and the boys and Doc offers a solution.

  “Grass,” he says. “Dope.”

  Surfing and dope go together like… like… uhhhh…

  … surfing and dope.

  Surfers had been hauling grass back up from safaris in Mexico for years, the 1954 Plymouth station wagon being the smuggling vehicle of choice, because all of its interior panels could be removed, the insides stuffed with dope, and put back on.

  “We can get you the money to fix up this place,” Doc says, volunteering not only himself but his surfing buddies. “A few Baja runs and that’s all you need.”

  Doc and the boys make the requisite runs, sell the product, and donate the proceeds to Stan, Diane, et al. to spread love, peace, and acid throughout Laguna Beach and its environs.

  The Bread and Marigolds Bookstore opens in May of the year.

  It sells The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Anarchist Cookbook, On the Road, incense, sandals, psychedelic posters, rock albums, tie-dyed T-shirts, macrame bracelets (You know what? Go a
head and hate them), all that happy shit, and distributes acid to the turned-on.

  Stan and Diane are happy.

  43

  The store opens, but — the guys keep making runs.

  Because “enough” is a self-contradictory word.

  Enough is never enough.

  Finally- finally — surfers found something they could make money at without getting a j-o-b. And money they make. Fuck, they make money. Millions of dollars of the stuff. They even buy a yacht to hang out in and sail dope up in from Mexico.

  Cool and cool.

  But Doc Doc is a visionary.

  A pioneer, an explorer.

  Doc hops a plane to Germany, buys a VW van, and drives drives to Afghanistan.

  Doc has heard stories about the amazing potency of Afghan hashish.

  The stories turn out to be true.

  Grass is fine, but Afghan hash?

  Synaptic pinball, lighting all the lights, ringing all the bells.

  Winner, winner, winner.

  So Doc loads his van up with hash, drives back to Europe, and ships the van to California. Throws a few tasting parties, gives some samples away, and creates a market for his product.

  It isn’t long before the other Association boys follow Doc’s footsteps to Afghanistan and load cars, trucks, and vans up with hash. The most ingenious smuggling vessel, though, is the surfboard. One genius ships a board to Kandahar, hollows it out, and stuffs it with hash, because nobody at the airport knows what a surfboard is or, critically, how much it should weigh. And no one even asks what a guy is doing with surfboards in a place where there’s no ocean.

  All this shit comes back to Laguna.

  Pretty soon Laguna Canyon fills up with houses full of dope and houses full of dopers. The canyon is so full of outlaws that the cops dub it “Dodge City.”

  44

  The little girl lives in a cave.

  Not metaphorically-not a run-down house with no natural lighting source-a cave.

  As in Neanderthal.

  The cave is in the hills near the lakes that give Laguna its name.

  A cave in Laguna in the summer isn’t such a bad place-it’s actually kind of congenial. The days are warm, the nights are merely cool, and the inhabitants of the cave do have some basic amenities.

  They have candles for light and Sterno stoves for what little cooking they do. They have sleeping bags and blankets, rolled-up shirts and jeans for pillows. They shower and use the toilets at Main Beach, although they’ve dug a latrine down a path through the brush outside the cave.

  The little girl, Kim, hates it.

  Six years old, she already has a sense that there’s something better out there.

  Kim imagines a room (of her own, Ms. Woolf) with walls, pink wallpaper and bedspread, dolls lined up neatly along the big pillows, and one of those Easy-Bake Ovens where she can make tiny little cupcakes. She wants a real mirror to sit in front of and brush her long blonde hair. She wants a bathroom that is immaculate and a house that is…

  … perfect.

  None of this is going to happen-her mother’s name is “Freaky Frederica.”

  A year ago, Freddie ran away from home and (abusive) husband in Redding and found her way to some shelter (and a new name) with the hippie commune in the cave. For her, it was the best thing that ever happened-for her daughter, not so much.

  She hates the dirt.

  She hates the lack of privacy.

  She hates the chaos.

  People come in and out-the commune’s population is transient, to say the least. One frequent visitor to the cave is Doc.

  He owns a house down in Dodge City, but sometimes he hangs out at the cave, smokes dope, and talks about the “revolution” and the “counterculture” and the revelatory powers of acid.

  And fucks Freddie.

  Kim lies there, still as a doll, pretending to sleep as her mother and Doc make love beside her. She shuts her eyes tight, tries to tune out the sounds, and imagines her new bedroom.

  No one ever comes into it.

  Sometimes the man with her mother isn’t Doc but someone else. Sometimes it’s several people.

  But no one ever comes into Kim’s “room.”

  Ever.

  45

  John likes living in the cave.

  He started bunking with Starshine, but one night snuggled up with a runaway from New Jersey named Comet (presumably after the celestial phenomenon, not the household cleaner) and, as they were virtually indistinguishable, he didn’t care.

  It’s just better than home.

  The commune is a family in its own way, something John doesn’t have a lot of experience with. They sit down to meals together, they talk together, they do common chores.

  John’s parents barely know that he no longer lives at home. He comes back every two or three days and leaves little traces of his existence, says hello to whichever parent is there at the moment, grabs a few clothes, maybe some food, and then goes back to the cave. His father is mostly living up in L.A. now, anyway, his mother is consumed with the details of the impending divorce, and it’s summertime, and the livin’ is easy.

  John smokes grass, partakes in a little hash, but the LSD trips scare him.

  “You lose control,” he tells Doc.

  “You lose it to find it,” Doc says cryptically.

  No thanks, John thinks, because he’s had to talk people down from their trips, or sit there during tedious acid sessions while people freak out and Doc reads from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  Other than that, there’s nothing for a fourteen-year-old boy not to love living in the cave that summer. He goes down to the beach, Doc lends him a board to take out. He hangs out with the surfers and the hippies and gets high. He goes back to the cave and one of the hippie girls cuts him in on the free love buffet.

  “It was like summer camp,” John would say later, “with blow jobs.”

  Then summer ends and it’s time for school.

  46

  John doesn’t want to go home.

  “You can’t live in the cave year round,” Doc says. Like, September through October would probably be fine, but then the weather changes and Laguna gets cold and damp at night. But cold and damp is exactly how John would describe the atmosphere at his house, his mother being remote and, more often than not, drunk.

  What happens is, John moves mostly into Doc’s house.

  It’s a gradual thing-John comes after school and hangs out, stays for the big spaghetti dinners, everybody gets stoned, John falls asleep on the couch or in one of the three bedrooms with one of the chicks who make up what is basically Doc’s harem.

  After a while, John is just there, a fixture, a mascot.

  Doc’s puppy.

  He goes surfing with Doc, he helps Doc pass out tacos, he gradually comes to understand where Doc’s money comes from.

  Dope.

  Just hanging out, John gets an idea what the Association is and who they are. The boys make thinly veiled references around him to their runs down to Mexico and the bigger expeditions to South Asia.

  One day John tells Doc, “I want in.”

  “In on what?”

  “You know,” John says.

  Doc gives him that charismatic, crooked grin and says, “You’re fourteen.”

  “Almost fifteen,” John says.

  Doc looks him over. John is your basic grem, but there’s something special about him-the kid has always been this little adult-the chicks around the place sure as hell treat him like a grown-up-and he’s not so little anymore.

  And Doc has a problem maybe John can help him with.

  Money.

  Doc has too much of it.

  Well, not too much money per se-nobody has Too Much Money-but too much cash in small denominations.

  So now you have to catch this image John skateboarding to banks in Laguna, Dana Point, and San Clemente with a backpack full of singles, fives, and tens that Doc gets from his street sales. John walking into the bank
and exchanging the small bills for wrapped stacks of fifties and hundreds.

  And John knows which tellers to go to, which ones get birthday presents and Christmas bonuses from Doc.

  And if the cops see a skinny kid with long brown hair, a T-shirt, and board trunks pushing his street board along the sidewalk, he’s just one of dozens of pain-in-the-ass skateboarders, and it doesn’t occur to them that this one has thousands and thousands of dollars slung over his shoulder.

  Some kids have paper routes-John has cash routes.

  Doc kicks him fifty bucks a day.

  Life is good.

  John puts up with school, does his route, gets his fifty, goes back to the house, and slips into bed with girls who are now more often in their twenties than in their late teens and who are giving him an education he can’t get in the classroom.

  Yeah, life is good.

  But it could be better.

  47

  “I want to deal my own shit,” he tells Doc one day as they’re sitting out in the lineup waiting for the next set.

  “Why?” Doc asks. “You’re making money.”

  “Handling your money,” John answers. “I want to handle my own money.”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “I do,” John says. “Look, if you won’t supply me, I’ll go to somebody else.”

  Doc figures that if the kid goes somewhere else he could get burned or ripped off or walk right into a police setup. At least if I sell to him, Doc thinks, I know the kid will be safe.

  So now, in addition to his cash over his shoulder, John has fat joints taped to the bottom of his skateboard and sells them for five bucks each.

  Now John is making money.

  He doesn’t spend it on albums, clothes, or taking girls out. He saves it. Not even sixteen, he hands Doc a pile of money and asks him to buy him a car.

  A beautifully restored 1954 Plymouth station wagon.

  48

  Dig our brother John.

  Seventeen years old, he rents not one but two houses in Dodge City.