Evergreen, Chapter 13
December 16: Long Beach
The front door of my parents’ house is half open; light streams out onto the covered walkway, accompanied by the echoes of a handful of well-lubricated voices. It’s around midnight. I knew my parents were having friends over, but I expected they would be gone by now.
The night began, or so I thought, as a date with Emily to see Jesse Colin Young at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach. But when I got to Emily’s house, her friend Alison was with her, along with Marty Sloane. The thought of a double date was a bit disappointing, but Alison and Marty are usually good company, so I was happy to see them, at first. But when Alison jumped into the front seat with me, and Emily slid in next to Adam in the back, sitting much closer to him than necessary, as if saving room for a third, I realized that my hope for an intimate evening with Emily had been unfounded. She called me yesterday, soon after I got home from the airport, and told me she had an extra ticket to Young’s show, but neglected to mention Alison and Marty’s inclusion in the evening.
Alison was in high spirits and seemed genuinely glad to see me. She asked me about Evergreen, so I ran down the highlights of my first semester as we drove down Pacific Coast Highway, but Emily and Adam ignored the front-seat conversation, whispering to each other as if there was an invisible barrier between front and back seats, as if Alison and I were chaperones, or parents. I thought back to Emily’s phone call and wondered if I had missed something—that wanting this to be a date with Emily, my mind made it so.
I chattered nervously to Alison to distract myself from the scene behind us, and Alison’s interest in my account of life in the north woods seemed genuine, though, perhaps sensing my discomfort, she may have encouraged my monologue to deflect attention from Emily and Adam’s backseat tête-à-tête. Not that anything untoward was happening, but after three months apart, I didn’t expect to be ignored so blatantly by Emily, and was disconcerted to see her doting on Adam. Emily and I had talked for five or ten minutes on the phone, and maybe she thought that was all the catching up we needed to do, or that we would have more time for conversation at the Golden Bear. It could also be that this was the first time she had seen Adam in a while, though he was in his first year at San Diego State, just a couple of hours down the highway.
But the pairing that began in the car continued for the rest of the evening. Emily and Adam walked together from the parking lot to the club, and when we were unable to find four seats together, they grabbed a couple chairs near the front, while Alison and I wound up at a small, wobbly table in the back. It made sense for Emily to take the best seats, since her liking for Jesse Colin Young’s latest album was the reason we were there in the first place, but it put an end to my hope that Emily’s attachment to Adam was temporary. That she chose him to join her up front made it clear that the seating assignments in the car were no accident.
I liked Alison and would have had no problem spending an evening with her, possibly even flirting a bit. She has a classic Southern California beach-girl beauty, with long, sun-bleached blond hair and a golden complexion, but without the stereotypical self-absorbed, air-head personality. She told me that she had broken up with her boyfriend a couple days ago, after he informed her—by telephone, from France, where he was spending a year abroad—that he would not be coming home for the holidays. I could have taken this as an opening, an invitation to redirect my attention from Emily to Alison, newly unattached and presumably lacking in any kind of physical or romantic contact for a few months. But my discomfort at seeing the person I had recently referred to as my girlfriend flirting and canoodling with another guy, seemingly unaware that this might be a problem for me, kept me from responding to Alison. It also kept me from enjoying the music. I liked the little I had heard of Jesse Colin Young’s new album, but as my mood curdled, his sentimental soft-rock songs and Hollywood lounge-jazz band—talented but a little too heavy on the flute solos—grated on me and increased my feeling of isolation. I was happy that his set didn’t last much more than an hour.
After we left the Golden Bear, Emily suggested a walk along the beach, since it was still early. But by then I had become sullen and withdrawn. Alison, undoubtedly tiring of my bad temper, left me alone to walk with Emily and Adam toward the Huntington Beach pier, and I let the distance between us grow, trudging resentfully behind the three of them until, by the time they reached the stairs that led down to the beach, they were a good twenty feet in front of me. So they didn’t notice when I continued out onto the dimly lit pier alone. Forbidding and dirty, garbage-strewn, with only a few working streetlamps, the pier is not a safe place to walk on cloudy nights like this, when there is no moon to illuminate any lurking peril.
My pace increased as I walked out to where the waves were breaking. It was close to high tide and the long, slow whoosh and thump reminded me of my first body-surfing experience, at age eight, close to the looming pillars of the Seal Beach pier. After a few inelegant attempts to catch a wave, I had suffered an underwater thrashing that left me with a bloody toe and a respect for the ocean’s power. The injured toe prompted a warning from my brother that the blood would attract sharks—although, of course, it wouldn’t, not in a crowded, churning sea of school-age frolickers. But after seeing me emerge from the water spitting, choking, and bleeding, my head covered in sand and seaweed, my mother became hysterical, yelling at me to get out of the water and refusing to let me back in until she had calmed down and we had moved our towels to a spot away from the pier and directly in front of a lifeguard station. The experience did nothing to deter me from the ocean waves, but it left me forever wary of piers, above and below the water line.
After feeling the crunch of glass beneath my feet, I abandoned my petulant detour and turned to walk back down the pier, thankful that my sneaker hadn’t been pierced through. Emily arrived at the top of the stairs just before I got there and turned toward me, while Alison and Adam set off in the opposite direction, back to the street and the car.
“Where’d you go?”
“I wanted to see a little of the pier.”
“Really? It’s dangerous up here.”
“I know. I haven’t been here in a while. I didn’t realize it had become this rundown. But I always liked looking down at the breaking waves from above. I don’t know why.”
“Are you OK? You seem kind of distant or ticked off.”
“I’m . . . you know, a little tired. I don’t like traveling very much, and my stomach has been funky ever since the plane flight yesterday.”
“OK, well, maybe we ought to head back. The beach is dark, and there are some sketchy characters around. I think we might have interrupted a drug deal.”
“So, not really a better choice than the pier, huh?”
“No . . . What? Anyway, Adam has to be at work tomorrow, early, so he doesn’t want to stay out too late.”
“Sure, whatever Adam needs to do is totally copacetic by me.”
“Lucas, what’s with the weird vibe? I thought you and Adam were friends?”
“ We are, I . . . I just thought, I don’t know, since you and I haven’t seen each other in three months, you might want to hang out a bit. But, apparently Adam is more interesting.”
“What do you mean? We are hanging out. And Adam is the one who suggested inviting you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You complained so much about that Seals and Crofts show we went to last year, I figured Jesse Colin Young would be the same. I know you prefer edgier stuff.”
The news that Emily hadn’t even been the one to invite me to the show silenced me. I suppose I should have known. I had received only two letters from her in three months, after all. But her call yesterday made me think she was eager to see me. Now it appeared to be just a matter of timing. My ticket must have been intended for Alison’s boyfriend. I was just the first person any of them thought of when they realized they had an extra.
Maybe Emily had been dreading seeing me—did I say something weird in one of my letters? Had I written too often? Maybe she figured an invitation to a concert with a group of friends was better, or easier, than avoiding me completely.
“Do you guys want to get something to eat?” Alison interrupted my paranoid, self-pitying thoughts as they were about to careen out of control, appearing suddenly from behind Emily, thinking perhaps that Emily needed rescuing, which was more prescient than she knew. “We could go to Bob’s Big Boy or something.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “I haven’t had a triple-decker in months.”
“You’re not a vegetarian anymore?” Emily said.
“I’m kidding. I could go for a shake and fries, though.”
“But you said your stomach was bothering you?”
I shrugged and took Alison’s arm to lead the way back to the car. I’m a terrible liar, and, though I wasn’t eager to watch Emily and Adam cuddle in a Bob’s Big Boy booth, I was hungry, and I figured that if I was Alison’s date, it was time to take advantage of it. She, at least, didn’t seem eager to be rid of me.
But by the time we reached Bellflower Boulevard, the turnoff for Emily’s house, she and Adam, huddled in the backseat again, had decided they weren’t hungry, so I agreed to drop them both at Emily’s. After perfunctory goodbyes, Alison and I continued on to Bob’s Big Boy, where, over a vanilla milkshake and large fries, I confessed my frustration with the evening.
“I don’t think Emily has any idea how you feel about her,” Alison said, in response to my whining. “I don’t know why. It’s always been clear to me. I know she’s always loved hanging out with you, but she doesn’t really talk about you. I can tell it was a bummer for you to see her with Adam; she should have told you he was coming tonight. Although, confidentially, I don’t know how long that’s going to last. She’s always complaining about having to listen to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple when she goes over to his house.”
“She goes to his house?”
“Well, yeah. He comes home from San Diego nearly every weekend.”
Emily had never been to my house, never had dinner with my family, nor I with hers. I had only ever been to her house to pick her up for concerts.
“So, I guess they’re really a . . . a thing?”
“I don’t know exactly what they get up to behind closed doors; Emily doesn’t say. But they spend a lot of time together, and yeah, if asked, they’d probably say they were a couple. But, like with you, Emily doesn’t talk much about Adam.”
“Is that weird? I figured girls talked about the guys they’re with all the time.”
“Like we have nothing else to talk about?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. Listen, you’re a good guy, but you gotta let go of this infatuation with Emily. There must be girls at Evergreen you’re into? Some back-to-nature free spirits that could help you forget her?”
“Maybe, although nothing’s really gone anywhere. I thought something might happen with Janie, but the timing was always off.”
“I heard she’s transferring to the University of Colorado.”
“Really? She told me she was taking a leave of absence. But I haven’t talked to her since Thanksgiving.”
“Nobody else?”
“I’ve made a couple of friends, one of whom I had a little, er, a little thing with, although she turned out to be gay, or bi. I really pissed her off a couple of weeks ago, though. Unintentionally, but . . .”
“Well, be patient. You’ll find someone.”
I pause at the partially open front door, deciding whether to enter or not. There are at least four different voices, arguing, laughing, all a little too loud, above the faint sound of Stan Getz and Joȃo Gilberto on the stereo. My parents will have been drinking since the party started, four or five hours ago, and my father’s voice is the loudest, arrogantly correcting someone about some meaningless error of fact, no doubt. A woman’s voice, not my mother’s, responds, stridently, but almost seductively.
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Why don’t you come over here and show me what you’ve got?”
“Helen, keep your blouse on.” My mother’s voice.
I don’t know what kind of scene I would be walking in on, but a creepy, drunken, parental tableau is the last thing I need, so I quietly close the door and turn back to the car. I’m too anxious and wired to sleep anyway.
As I pull out of the driveway, I crank the radio without bothering to see what station it’s on. Steve Miller’s moronic “The Joker” fills the car, and I quickly hit another preset, bringing up Zeppelin’s “D’yer Maker.” Not a favorite, but worth blasting and singing along with:
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
Every breath I take, oh, oh, oh, oh
Every move I make, oh, oh, oh, oh
Oh, baby, please don’t go
I roll the windows down, letting the cool night air in and my tuneless bellowing out. I wonder what Angelica would make of my pitiful, fratboy-reggae singalong. Is it odd that her advice to me about Emily was the same as Alison’s? Or is it that obvious? I suppose I can now tell Angelica she was wrong about Emily being gay. That is, if I ever have a heart-to-heart with her again.
Angelica’s anger had abated after seeing me stagger out the door of the DeLuxe holding a bloody hand to my head. It wasn’t a serious injury, but the shallow cut behind my ear produced a fair amount of blood and probably left me looking rather gruesome, as if I had gotten into a fight with one of the bikers instead of clumsily falling onto my guitar case. After fetching me a towel from the bar, Angelica had convinced Sandy, who was already waiting outside in her car, not as enamored of the Fruit Stand clan as Angelica was, to drive me back to campus. I sat quietly in the back as Sandy and another woman chatted in front, Sandy apparently having decided that whatever crime I had committed, whatever had instigated Angelica’s tirade—she didn’t seem to know or care—a bloody head and an ignominious exit from the bar were punishment enough.
Though Angelica and I saw each other at the final meeting of book group, where I was partnered with Shelley and Ted for our term-paper discussion—a rambling, disjointed session filled with non-sequitur, misunderstanding, and puerile, uninformed opinion—we hadn’t had a real conversation since the incident at the DeLuxe. She cancelled her last guitar lesson, saying she was too busy with end-of-semester schoolwork, a legitimate excuse, and left a generic greeting card in my dorm mailbox wishing me “Happy Holidays,” which I discovered after she left for Illinois.
I find a parking spot on Fourth Street in Seal Beach, a block from Ocean Avenue, closer to the breakwater than the pier. The clouds have withdrawn, and a half moon lights the alley that leads between two beach-side houses to the strand. The beach is wide here, and the sand is fine, dry, and loose, so it takes me a while to reach the water. Moonlight ricochets off the metallic roofs of the lifeguard stations, lined up like border guards fifty yards from the water, and ignites sparkles on the slow, silent wavelets, darker than deep purple, breaking rhythmically on the firm, wet sand at the shoreline. I stand alone, empty, by the edge of the sea, as if waiting for a prompter to feed me a line, and then turn and walk toward the pier. A dull pain courses through my upper chest, possibly from the fries, possibly from the image of Emily and Adam that is pasted to my brain.
It occurs to me that I could turn and walk into the waves, like some morose B-movie cuckold, and it might be days before anyone discovered my fate. But this seems like an uncomfortable way to die. The water is not that cold, and the waves break halfheartedly to the ocean’s plangent sighs; I would have to swim out a long way, far past the breakers, before I would tire enough to sink beneath the surface. As miserable as I feel, I have no desire to do away with myself at the moment.
I’ve become estranged from three of the four women I’ve been attracted to over the last few months, and the fourth, Janie, has apparently now migrated outside my sphere. My friendships with Angelica and Jenny are probably salvageable, now that a romance with either of them has been ruled out, but I don’t know about Emily, assuming I still want a friendship with her. It would take a lot of trips to McCabe’s and the Troubadour before the sting of rejection wore off, and, unless Adam commits some unforgivable sin while I’m here, Emily has probably become too distant and uncaring for me to return to or chase. Maybe that’s for the best. I’ll be heading back north in a couple of weeks, and after that, why return to Long Beach at all?
When I first thought about what I might be doing on the two-week trip home, I imagined a few days or evenings spent with Emily, but after tonight, my imaginary dance card is clear. I checked the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times this morning and didn’t find any musical events of interest, and if Emily wants to go out to hear music in the next two weeks, I’m unlikely to be her companion. So, I’ll have more time to play my guitar and maybe dig further into my dad’s record collection. He’ll be at work during the day, so the house will be quiet. I will have to find something to do at night to avoid the usual family holiday drama, but I’ll be gone before New Year’s Eve, which is always a nightmare for a teetotaling introvert like me.
I haven’t been in touch with any high school friends while I’ve been at Evergreen, so I don’t know who’s around or whether anyone will have the time or desire to see me. Do I care? I see no need to nurse any ties to Long Beach at this point, and I’m usually happier checking out the used book and record stores in Westwood and Santa Monica alone. I’ll see what’s playing at the Art Theater, always a good, cheap escape. Perhaps another holiday viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life, or a bleak French film like The 400 Blows?
When I reach the pier, I turn up Main Street to walk into town and away from the beach. The few bars that are still open are quiet, reminding me that it’s Sunday night. At the corner of Central and Main, I turn left and head back toward the car, remembering that Marty’s house is in the next block. An older grad student of my father’s, Marty made his living for years as a road manager for English rock bands like Faces and Free when they toured the States. He snuck me into a few big concerts when I was in high school, and we have similar tastes in music. During a hiatus in Faces’ touring schedule, he went back to college to work on his doctorate with my dad, but I heard that he had recently returned to the road, this time with the Eagles.
The lights are on in his cabana, the first in a row of three small beach houses—the size of studio apartments, crowded together onto one narrow lot. I knock quietly on his door and moments later I’m greeted by Marty’s booming voice and wry smile peeking out from his long, flowing, rust-colored beard.
“What it is, my man? Your dad told me you were around. Kinda late, though. Everything OK?”
“Yeah, I was just taking a walk on the beach. I spent the last three months in the woods, you know, not a wave in sight. I got in last night but was stuck at home all day and felt a sudden urge to feel the sand between my toes.”
“A little chilly for that, isn’t it? But come in, come in. Sling me the skinny on college life and all that.”
Marty’s apartment is small and cozy. Curious gewgaws and tchotchkes he’s collected on his travels adorn every flat surface, and Indian bedspreads are draped over the wicker furniture, including the tiny, hard, cushion-less sofa I plop onto. Marty returns to his rocking chair and half-empty beer bottle.
“I’d offer you one of these, but I take it you’re driving, and the Seal Beach pigs have nothing to do at night but hassle randoms. Your dad would kill me if you got busted off a handout of mine.”
“Thanks, but you remember I don’t drink.”
“If you say so, pardner. Hard to imagine college with no suds. So, clue me in, how’re you liking the lads and ladies of the sodden northlands?”
I give Marty the rundown, not much different from what I told my parents, or Alison on the way to the Golden Bear. I also tell him about some of the music I’ve been listening to, since I know he’ll be interested. Then I ask him about touring with the Eagles.
“It’s a good gig. They’re not that busy, which I like, ’cause it gives me time to try to finish my thesis, which is a bitch, believe me. I don’t know if I’d even attempt it if it wasn’t for your dad. Anyway, the music’s good—you’ve heard the records. And Bernie and I have become pals, of a sort. He’s an ace guitar player, way better than you’ll hear on their records, and the most down-to-earth of all of ’em. But I don’t know how long it’ll last. They’ll never be big stars, like the Stones or Faces; they don’t have a frontman the likes of Mick or Rod. That’s what’s far out about them, though, just four guys in a band, not a lot of power trips or massive egos, none of that. But that kind of band will never make big dough, that’s the stone truth.”
Marty finishes his beer and goes to the fridge to get another. I look around the room and notice a hardback with an intriguing cover splayed on the coffee table in front of me: Great Jones Street, by Don DeLillo. I pick it up and scan the page it’s opened to, filled with song lyrics of some sort: rough, incoherent ramblings, but nothing I recognize. I wonder if it’s a novel or some sort of music criticism.
“You read that?” Marty says when he returns. “Some crazy shit.”
“No, never heard of it. Is it good? You like it?”
“Too soon to tell. It’s strange. It’s supposed to be about the music biz, well, this one quirky rock star at any rate, and some secret new high that everyone’s hankering after. But I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be satire or if this DeLillo guy thinks that’s what the scene is really like. It’s all about stardom and the machine, but almost nothing about actual music. This one dude, the leader of this cult-fave band, has dropped out, deserted his mates, and is holed up in the Big Apple at this skanky bohemian dive. I think he’s modeled on Dylan, or maybe Lou Reed, I can’t tell. But if he is, the writer is no fan of the music. There are all these mindless, incoherent lyrics in the book, as if anyone could hit the big time behind such drivel, and the only mention of this dude making music is some shit about him in a drug-induced trance randomly spewing out rootsy bullshit in some remote mountain studio, producing a tape that has become the bootleggers’ holy grail.
“The book is entertaining; I’ll give it that. It’s a little like Robbins, but not so hippy-dippy. The writing is far out—evocative, inventive—but it’s full of this music-writerly crap I can’t stand, making these guys out as primitive geniuses, or trying to anoint some messiah of the counterculture, some ziphead of the zeitgeist, which, all it’s doing is filling up a bunch of bigwigs’ pockets at the agencies and labels and ticket-hubs, ignoring the fact that most of these guys are just musicians who work hard at this shit. I don’t know, it’s like the only thing all these Lester Bangs posers can write about is the stardom thing, and drugs, and sex, all that. I just get tired of these Hunter S. Thompson wannabes and unemployed English majors trying to get laid or score some cheap, turbocharged stash. DeLillo is better than most of them, as good as Thompson, if not better, and I get that he’s trying to be some scribe of the counterculture. Or maybe it’s all just a hoot to him. Maybe he’s figured out that all the hyped hippie geniuses are willing pawns of the star-making machine, I don’t know. You can borrow the book when I’m done if you want.”
“Thanks, maybe I will.”
Marty’s soliloquy has made me realize how tired I am. I stand and say goodbye, telling him to let me know when the Eagles are in Seattle or Portland.
“Yeah, sure, although, I get so busy on tour, I hardly know what city I’m in until I stumble out of the bus in the morning. The rock ’n’ roll bubble, you know.”
“I thought you were the road manager?”
“I am, but mostly day-to-day stuff. Management books all the hotels and handles all the transpo. I tend to ignore the itinerary till the day of. I’m too busy anyway. Like, I have to go find the guys all their favorite bottles of booze every night, that kind of thing. Which is weird. I get handed ten hundred-dollar bills every night along with a list of hooch, which never changes, each of them has their favorite: cognac, champagne, single malt. But when I’m not on the road, I’m lucky to haul in a grand every couple months, scraping the bottom of the beehive trying to find rent money. But, you know, it’s rock ’n’ roll. Just another American band on the run. I just live in it, let it happen.”