Woodstock Rising. Tom Wayman
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and thirty seconds of The Doors’ “Light My Fire.”
On a night with a full moon, the view from the porch was itself worth taking a breather to witness. Rows of huge cumulous clouds were often borne in from the Pacific, their puffy surfaces luminous in the moonlight. The eerie airborne structures resembled enormous white galleons arriving from another planet.
Besides Edward, the other steady inhabitant of Guantanamero Bay was Willow, an art major at Irvine. She and Edward were housemates, rather than boyfriend-girlfriend. Beach houses were more expensive to rent than the cottages I and the other students obtained in Laguna or back up the highway on the Balboa Peninsula or Balboa Island, or apartments in Costa Mesa. Edward required additional residents like Willow to defray costs. She was everyone’s image of a surfer girl: thin, fit, long blond hair, and out on the water with her board every chance she got. Whether she was in her bikini around the house, or in her wetsuit climbing down the path to Shaw’s Cove beach, she was heart-stopping lovely. Her breasts weren’t particularly large, but she was perfectly proportioned and moved with such grace she could have been a delicate onshore wind. She was always pleasant to talk to, interested in what was happening with you. Edward said she could be moody to live with, but I never knew when he was being contrary or when he was accurate.
As with Janey, Willow was a delight merely to stare at. When she swayed across the living room in the afternoon South Coast light, with the sound of the surf rising from the beach through an open window while birds twittered from the oleanders and fan palms, the air scented with pungent eucalyptus and perhaps a sandalwood incense stick burning in the room, this feast for the senses brought to mind the opening guitar chords of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Coconut Grove.” The song’s tune and lyrics proceeded as languorously but inexorably as Willow’s locomotion, or as combers curling onto sand:
Don’t bar the door. There’s no one comin’.
The ocean’s roar will dull the drummin’
Of any city thoughts or city ways.
The ocean’s breezes cool my mind,
The salty days are hers and mine
Just to do with what we want to.
Tonight we’ll find a dune that’s ours
And softly she will speak the stars
Until sun-up.
It’s all from havin’ some one knowin’
Just which way your head is blowin’,
Who’s always warm like in the morning
In Coconut Grove.
Willow had a boyfriend, Phil, who lived up in Venice. They’d visit back and forth. I’d met Phil a couple of times at Guantanamero Bay: he was a surfer, too, and seemed a nice guy, though I had never ascertained if he was interested in anything much beyond the location of the best reef or shore break, or what had occurred the last time he shot the pier at Huntington. He was tanned almost mahogany, and even his muscles had muscles. Phil was a ringer for the “after” panel in Charles Atlas’s “before” and “after” bodybuilding advertising — the photo slightly retouched with blond hair slicked back wet from a day’s surfing, a Hawaiian shirt like Edward’s, and a trim moustache. I never saw Phil at our parties.
Willow, too, was usually absent from those events. Edward said she didn’t care for parties much and decamped to Venice when we had one scheduled for the Bay. As always, I didn’t necessarily believe Edward: maybe she simply didn’t like our parties. I was never clear how she and Edward had ended up sharing a place. Had he met her through his art classes, if indeed he really was studying fine arts? Or did he know her from Hawaii? Once she had spoken about her parents living on the big island, so maybe that was somehow the connection with Edward, if indeed he really had operated a gallery in Hawaii. Being in art, she also knew Meg, Remi’s girlfriend, so there could have been a link there.
Not that it mattered; Willow was part of the ambience of the Bay, as were a couple of male housemates. The latter were acquaintances of Edward’s, although never Irvine students. During the past year, these individuals had shared the rent for a few months, then disappeared. Later you encountered their replacements drinking beer on the porch and were introduced. When you inquired after the former inhabitants, Edward was vague about their whereabouts.
The one cryptic letter from Edward I’d received during the summer said that Phil was temporarily living at the Bay since he’d been hired by a roofing company in Costa Mesa. I was curious, as I rounded the corner onto Cliff Drive, if Phil would still be there, or if he and Willow had maybe gotten a place together closer to his work up in Newport or Costa Mesa itself.
Edward’s TR was parked at the curb in front of the Bay. A Ford Econoline van and a Chevy four-door sedan rested on the short paved drive leading to the garage. I didn’t recognize the other vehicles; the van had a FTA bumper sticker. The initials, I knew, stood for “Fuck the Army.” There was no sign of Willow’s microbus, but perhaps she’d traded it in for the van. The Chevy wouldn’t work for her without roof racks to carry boards.
A light was on in the living room, and Edward answered my knock on the door. “Wayman,” he said, his face brightening when he saw me. “You’re back.” His brown hair was impeccably cut as usual, and he wore crisply pressed shorts and a red Hawaiian shirt decorated across the midsection with a broad brand of white flowers. Draped around his neck was a thin band of beads.
We shook hands. After three days on the road, I was glad to talk to somebody familiar.
Edward led me toward the kitchen. “Grab a beer. Now you’re with us again, the Revolution can begin.”
That was his kind of humour: a teeny bit of the needle, but good-hearted, really, underneath.
“How did your summer —?” I began, but stopped. Two young guys I’d never seen before were absorbed in concocting something in a boiling saucepan on the stove.
“I’d like to present my younger brother, Jay. This is his friend, Pump.”
The two swivelled around and regarded me. Both had moustaches and wore T-shirts and gaudily patched bellbottom jeans. The shorter of the pair, Edward’s brother, had a ponytail, and a beaded necklace similar to his sibling’s.
“Wayman here has just driven down from Canada,” Edward announced.
“Far-out,” Jay observed.
“Glad to meet you, man,” Pump said.
The three of us shook hands. “I didn’t even know Edward had a brother,” I admitted to Jay. My host was extracting a couple of Olympia beers from the refrigerator. I was pleased to see the bottles of Oly; everybody had been low on money by term’s end, and we had been reduced to drinking Brew 104 — an inexpensive L.A. brand reputed to be the result of 104 different attempts to brew beer properly, after which the company conceded defeat and marketed the horrible product regardless.
Edward was lifting down two plastic glasses from a cupboard over the sink. “Jay isn’t really his name. But the handle is apt. These two got out of the army about a month ago and they’ve been stoned ever since.”
“We’re making up for lost time, man,” Pump said.
“Not that we didn’t get ripped a few times when we were in,” Jay observed.
Pump giggled. “Yeah, right. A few times.”
“There’s been some outasight Colombian boo around,” Jay said. “Do they smoke grass up in Canada?”
I accepted a full glass from Edward, nodded, licked the overflow from one side, and took a sip. “Were you guys in Nam?”
“They never made it out of the Land of the Free,” Edward said.
“We were in electronics,” Jay explained. Pump had turned to check on the steaming utensil on the burner.
“The last eight months we were stationed in California,” Jay continued. “When we got our discharge, the natural