1 Entrance Examinations and Other Tortures of Youth.

Sit down, my friends, and make yourselves comfortable to hear a confession. Don’t repeat this to anyone. It began when I ran off on my girlfriend, but if you pay attention, you’ll find plenty of other mistakes, other moments when I should’ve turned off the cameras, put away the drugs and gone to bed. What choice does anyone have, really, if they lust after fame and fortune? Once you’ve hit the big time, especially in California, the only way out leads to places even more difficult to escape.

It was late in January, the Tule season, and a postcard arrived from Craig Andersen. Craig and his older brother Stan had once been my constant companions, slamming underage liquor and tossing missiles out of car windows, the lights of nameless burgs sparkling Led Zeppelin diamonds on sweltering Bakersfield nights. After we’d graduated, I went up to Berkeley and Craig moved down to San Diego, two jaded lives under clouds of pot smoke. Two years had gone by since my last visit, and the arrival of Craig’s postcard gripped me with paranoia. What is this shit, I thought, the golden age ready for rebirth, time to dust off the reggae records? Without knowing, I’d been rotting there in Bakersfield, stoned out of my head, waiting for a message, and the message had finally come.

Craig had fallen under the hex of Art. He didn’t indulge himself academically, as I had, but instead he went into private practice, opening a gallery with his roommate. Craig’s brother Stan lived across the street, working on cars and women, savoring the crumbs of San Diego’s nascent art scene. They’d already had one show in their space, a famous gay-lib painter and professor, David Allbreath. Their next show would be none other than Joe Franco, the famous Los Angeles Pop artist. After all the struggling I’d seen in Berkeley and San Francisco, this quick brush with celebrity impressed me. Perhaps somebody I knew could make money in the art gig after all. I flipped Craig’s postcard around, listening to Neil Young while rain battered the windows of the apartment I shared with Rosie Palestine, turning the card in my hands like a kidnap demand.

I phoned Craig downstairs at Brody’s, describing a fake idyllic life with a promise to visit soon, both of us turgid with green dope and lying wit. But the slam of the payphone couldn’t scare away all the things I’d left out of the conversation. He could hear my pathetic existence going nowhere. There was no longer any kidding myself that Bakersfield held any artistic opportunities, or any prospects in my present job, staff photographer at the Oildale Register. If I slunk off to grad school, I’d be deep in debt until middle age, enabled only to teach fine art to other innocent children and repeat the wretched cycle. I ordered a double Jack and Coke, grinding the ice in despair at the unfairness of the universe, and to my discredit, I bought my future at Rosie’s expense.

“You’re going to leave me,” she said in horror that night. I’d arranged a special tableau for her birthday, our room strewn with wildflowers and candles around the bed. Her outburst caught me by surprise; I’d just gotten her bra off, my lips on her breasts.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snapped at her tit.

“Just like Brian. All he ever fucking talked about was going to LA, how he could never make it in Bakersfield, blah blah blah.”

“What the hell does this have to do with your ex-boyfriend? I’m not a longhair or a musician, and I’m not going to LA.” Rosie rarely mentioned Brian. He’d come to Bakersfield from Ridgecrest, an even less useful town, with just his guitar and Bob Dylanish ambitions, and ditched Rosie after a year for the friendship of a coked-up Malibu producer. I predicted modest success and then a metal plate in his nose by the age of thirty. Rosie, who usually tried to laugh at my jokes, kept quiet at that one.

“You said the secret word, man. Los Angeles. Los Angeles, the capital of the music scene, the movie scene, the glamour scene, the art scene.”

“But I didn’t say anything about moving to Los Angeles.”

“You implied it. You said the exact same thing as Brian. ‘It’s happening there.’ Well, it could happen here, too. You said so before.”

I mumbled a sweet nothing, but she was fooling herself. Nothing ever happened in Bakersfield.

I slept badly that night. Rosie cried herself to sleep as the rain eased off, and I settled into a dream. I was deep in a winter coat, my hands in the pockets, concealed by a movie theatre somewhere in a Bohemian district of London. There was a woman next to me, not Rosie, but dark-haired, light-skinned, with a sharp smile full of collaboration. “Who are you?”

I followed her into a pass through barren hills below an orange sky. Craig Andersen stood at the top of the pass, gesturing beyond it. Colossal dirigibles floated in the air, and strange machinery like refineries jutted up from the ridges. A white cross glowed on the hill. I woke suddenly, and everything dribbled away like sand, except for that glowing cross.

I called Craig from the Register office the next day. “So, are you ready for my next visit, man?”

“I’ll buy the whiskey and the cigarettes today, Daddy-o.”

A week went by. I stopped smoking pot to clear my head, and through vodka tonics at Brody’s, the bar below our apartment, I tried to fit Rosie into my future. The evil Tule fog clung to everything, chilling at some moments and revoltingly lukewarm at others. Driving a block put your life in peril from the thick miasma over the cotton fields. As a kid I’d loved the Tules, especially when the school called a fog delay. At the bar in Brody’s, adult worries continued without a break. Rosie and I scored a large amount of weed from a busload of Deadheads following the tour, and started every morning by putting on the Clash and lighting up the bong. Usually I complained about Ronald Reagan when I should have enjoyed my buzz and paid more attention to Rosie’s mouth, blowing smoke-rings past my ear. She cuddled in my lap while I raged death against the President of the United States of America. Reagan was a shill, I howled. Later I hated other people more, but I never vocalized my fury as much. I held Rosie while fog curled against the window, and we pretended the world was burning in hell.

“Honey, let’s have a real authentic Bakersfield date,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Get loaded, do some crank and screw!” She waved her arms in the air.

I was paralyzed by the future, especially during those boring fog-bound days in the unheated office of the Register. I filed, played cards, and told horror stories to the newest reporter, a kid named Tony. Then a terrible sign came that my time in Bakersfield was really up.

“Don’t scare the fresh meat,” a senior reporter yelled in a fake Southern accent. “Leave him to us.” Tony snorted, aware how pathetic our whole Thirties newspaper-room routine was, sitting in the asshole of the Central Valley on rickety furniture. The editor, Gramps, came out of his office sweating as usual. He’d been daydreaming by the police scanner, feet up and hands behind his huge head. I glanced at the Tule out the windows and pulled on my leather gloves. I knew what was coming.

“What’s happenin’, man?” I howled.

“Get your feet off the furniture, kid. You and Tony get up Highway 65. There’s a big smash-up, and I want pictures before those bastards down on I Street get them.” He meant our rivals at the Bakersfield Californian. Tony and I took off for the Porterville Highway, where the scanner had described a scene of Pulitzer Prize-winning gore. I brought two cameras.

“Color and black-and-white?” Tony asked nervously as he drove.

“Yeah, I figure Gramps might want to pay for color under the headline. Red splashes! How many people? Five?”

“That’s it so far,” he said, sucking on his lip and glancing at the stereo. “Five Dead in Tule Bloodbath.” He laughed hysterically and ran a hand through his greasy hair. Probably straight off the student newspaper at Bakersfield College, I thought, Jesus, what the fuck was I doing there, speeding through oil-pumps and cotton fields. We hit the Tule’s heart outside town, and it hugged the car thick as a dream. If Tony didn’t slow his ass down, we might also make the front page of the Register, Two Brave Journalists Killed in Tule Irony. Then colored lights began to flash around us in psychedelic rhythm, a white haze disco. A police car blocked the road.

“Okay,” I hissed. “Here’s tomorrow’s Corn Flake Special.”

The cops waved us back, and we ditched the car at the roadside. We jumped the barbed wire and took a stroll across a pasture, wet grass, sage and sheep-shit, the aroma of the Valley heavy in the fog. Near the accident we jumped the wire again. A dump-truck had crushed a small Chevy head-on, and at least three other cars had wedged themselves into the wreckage. The colored lights whirled inside the crazy, blood-covered party. I snapped away, feeling good I’d timed the mushrooms for my arrival at the matinee. Tony, suddenly green, went over to interview the cops supervising the tow-truck drivers. The dump-truck driver sat at the side of the road, crying.

“Stupid Mexicans, lookin’ to pass in a Tule…” He moaned bitterly to no one. He was Latino himself, his thick mustache moist from fog and tears. I took the photo. People in the other cars were dead and covered with sheets on the side of the road. I took the photos. I went over to the Chevy. They couldn’t cover that driver up; she was stuck half out the window, the rest of her a mess. I recognized her immediately, Yesenia, Griselda’s best friend in high school. Griselda, my first love Griselda, Flaca to us, double-dates, I heard Yesenia moan, her punk boyfriend from Shafter caressing her tits with his blackened muscle-car mechanic hands, they were behind us in Flaca’s ‘64 Ford Falcon, the drive-in of all places, how fucking corny is that. Yesenia, we called her Colorada because of her reddish hair, and I remembered how strong her laugh was, and how she had big plans after she got into Porterville College.

“Hey, Colorada,” I said. Very slowly, I reached out and touched her hand. It was cold. She looked surprised, and I started to laugh. Feeling sick, I walked around the car. I saw the passenger door wrenched off by an inhuman claw. Somebody was under a sheet nearby, long black hair fanned across the asphalt, and oversized plastic platform shoes.

“Oh, no,” I said, and the sound of my voice shocked me, high and whiny. “You went to New York. You went away to fucking New York.” Sure, Colorada had many dark-haired friends, Chicanas, right? But I sat down in the road anyway, staring at that long black hair. That was the first hair I’d ever felt as a man. I could smell Flaca’s hair, a sweet burnt smell like twilight after a scorcher.

Five years had gone by since my graduation from frightened child to obnoxious asshole. It started with the tough Mexican chicks at Garces High School, taking the bus from the other side of the Kern River. The refugees from Central America and Laos hung out in shy groups under the pepper trees, but the Chicanos liked even faster cars and louder music than we Okies, cussing each other in violent Spanish. The Chicanas drew stylized Aztec portraits of themselves and their novios on their books, the insides of their locker doors, wherever. In my junior year I fell in love with Griselda, a scrawny, hunched-over girl everyone called Flaca. She had hair down to her waist and pale, ashy skin, and after we started sitting alone together in the dark corners of the school, she drew me constantly.

“Why d’you keep doing that?” I asked her one afternoon. We’d ditched school to lounge along the railroad tracks, kicking at greasy rocks soiled by passing trains with our heavy black shoes.

“I’ll remember you when you’re gone.”

I laughed at her. “I’m not going anywhere. We’re in fucking Bakersfield, remember? It ain’t the jumping-off point of the world.”

“We gotta go, man. If I see your fat ass hanging over a barstool on Chester Avenue in twenty years, I may have to fuckin’ kill you, mi’jo.” And she was right; there was no early retirement on Chester for me. God or luck or some talent of my own got me into the University of California. I chose UC Berkeley, overlooking the mad city of San Francisco. I wanted to perform on a weird stage at the end of the Seventies. A year later, at the icy dawn of the Reagan years, Flaca got into NYU and moved to New York City, and like so many friends who later tuned into New York, she disappeared with enthusiasm.

I remember her waving good-bye, or not waving really, standing there in a white tank-top and a trench coat, watching my Greyhound pull out like a zombie. Maybe she could see the future, that beautiful Chicana, she always could. We wrote once a month. We were fucking crazy in love, but under all that devotion was the truth of our parting. After a few years all the color faded out of our love. I hadn’t heard from her since my college graduation. Maybe she was planning to come back to Bakersfield and kill me.

“Hey kid,” I heard behind me in the ultimate cop voice. Without even turning I jumped and took off down the Porterville Highway, hurtling the barbed wire and running all the way back to Tony’s car. He could’ve shot me in the back, that pig, but he just yelled obscenities as I ran through the fog, alone except for his cursing. I should have departed the mortal world that day, if that cop hadn’t kept yelling like the fucking Boy Scout troop leader he probably was. My hatred for him kept me alive.

I quit the Register and took the motorcycle to San Diego that night, about two-hundred and fifty miles away. Getting my few possessions was easy, since our building had back stairs and Rosie had already gone to work down in Brody’s. A note was on the table in her perfect handwriting, MOM CALLED FLAKA HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. Sure, why not? Why not come home from New York City just to get wasted?

On the way south I took the long, winding Interstate from the snowy Grapevine at an obscene speed, weaving between semis and cars, and saw Los Angeles for the first time in years. The horizon of ugly buildings faded into a bejeweled carpet, and the clouds flashed with reflections of searchlights and skyscrapers. The Olympics were coming that summer. I felt reborn. No more Berkeley and no more Goddamn Bakersfield. I was going to live.

A few hours later I slipped through San Clemente, the end of the coastal metropolis, a half-digested meal on LA’s concrete intestines. The gray tits of the nuclear plant at San Onofre stood watch over my passage, and across the dark plains of Camp Pendleton I spied the lights of Oceanside, the first suburb in San Diego’s orbit. I stopped for gas and a quick bowl of soup at Denny’s, the best bowl of soup I’d had in my entire life, the soup of Picasso in his garret, the soup of an underworld scumbag fleeing the chains of his devoted woman, the soup of deadly liberty. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper buzzed their hippie swan-song in my ears. The exhaust fumes intoxicated me, mixed with the salt spray of the Pacific, and that’s the smell of freedom, man. Oceanside, a neon-cold town full of Marines, seemed the right place for epiphany. I bought a postcard of a bikini queen leaning on a palm tree and wrote to Rosie. There wasn’t much to say, but I told her to keep away from artists, and never to leave Bakersfield unless it drove her crazy. Bakersfield, I wrote, will keep you safer than any man.

The next few months delivered on the promise of escape, adventures in new cities, and my return to the Art World. San Diego faded through blue sea air and marijuana smoke, tumbling down arroyos and onto sexy beaches. I loudly hated every minute, but secretly I thought the place could rival paradise. Then the boredom really started to get me.

Craig Andersen lived in Hillcrest, the hip gay quarter, a glossy strip of candy-colored houses and storefronts across from Balboa Park. His roommate was a Midwesterner with a shit-eating grin under a blond Beatle haircut. “Benjamin Smart,” he told me, “but call me Ben, baby.” I drew back warily, then reached forward for the full pipe he offered. Another fucking art student, I thought. How lucky could I get.

Craig and Ben had converted their own apartment into the art gallery, slanting false walls around the living room. Across the front window the words NEXT WAVE GALLERY shone glossy black in the afternoon sun. I met the small Greek landlord coming down the front steps, screaming and howling just as I pulled up in my new used car, loaded with folding chairs for that evening’s opening. I’d been crashing there a week.

“Who the fuck are you?” he screamed as I tried to get by.

“A lawyer for Renter’s Aid,” I said without missing a beat.

He waggled a finger so close to my mouth I wanted to bite it. “Yeah? I know my fucking rights. These assholes are running a business in my place without a license, and not in the fucking lease either. I’ll have them outta here, don’t matter what you say, scheister.”

I laughed, too stoned to care. I was back in the Thirties noir of the Oildale Register. “You just haven’t got your cut yet, pal.”

The landlord leaned back, suddenly thoughtful. Yeah, there’s money in art. Ben and Craig surrounded the landlord in the street, getting down to the size of his bribe. He was a cheap little shit and settled for an extra hundred a month, beer money.

“You set that up nice,” Ben said, patting me on the back. I knew right off I had more in common with Ben than my old pal Craig, who only talked about the mysteries of the universe. The mysteries of the human animal, their base desires and ephemeral curiosity were more to my liking. I’d been an art student too.

“What’s for dinner?” I yelled, mixing myself a triple vodka tonic. Craig came out with the big red bong, slamming it on the kitchen table, bowl loaded.

“Not Mexican again?” I squawked. Ben cracked up.

“Who is this fucking guy?” he yelled at Craig.

Craig again quoted my legendary drug excesses at Berkeley. Apparently addiction and insanity could fill out an artist’s resume; Ben, who’d done time at a private school in Kentucky, had a similar history. But Ben didn’t dwell on the particulars of the past, preferring the swiftness of a modern art Blitzkrieg to remake the future. He would be my escort onto the stage, and combined our mouths could take us from the artist’s garret to the collector’s villa. Until, of course, we turned on each other.

Yet now, friends, I speak in hindsight; analysis of the beginning sheds less light on the end than you might hope. We were young and loved attention, and art provided a motive to the reach that epitome of youth. I pitied the poor lazy bastards who posed every night in the bars, impressing lanky women with their tans and muscles. We flashed artistic immortality at those chicks, hovering in the twenty-two year-old helicopter of an optimistic prime. Come over and step into the limelight, ladies. You’ve heard of Picasso, haven’t you? And Weegee and Warhol and Malanga and Joe Franco? It’s the summer of ’84, and they’re all here waiting for you in Hillcrest.

How did I fall into this world? I was never exposed to art as a child. Bakersfield during the Seventies promised few opportunities at enlightenment, just fast cars, juicy hamburgers, shitty beer and skunk weed, sweetening intolerably hot afternoons of silent televisions with heavy metal soundtracks. I can’t complain. I survived a normal California youth with an older brother and a younger sister, an occasional adventure with bored cops, bored farm girls and bored friends. Ah, but those innocent girls of Bakersfield. You big city types are used to fast, insincere women tottering around on five-inch heels, but I know a place where a lady can polish off a pint of Jack and still smile at a stranger without bitterness.

“Open a bottle,” I said to Ben, as we set up the chairs and tables on the sidewalk. The opening was about to begin, the moon clearing the treetops in the east and inviting the world to dance. Craig’s older brother Stan worked at ignoring us from under a car-hood nearby, puffing a joint and insulting us like a redneck Popeye. Nearing thirty, he claimed to know something we didn’t but refused to say just what, and I couldn’t tell yet if he was really holding back or was just a dumb asshole who hadn’t figured out jack-shit himself.

“Why don’t you guys get real?” Stan sneered. “There’s no fucking Scene in San Diego. You gotta go to LA if you want to get shit done.”

“Why don’t you fucking help us?” Craig yelled. “Look at all these Goddamn chairs, you lazy bastard.”

“I notice you’re not in LA,” I said with a smirk.

He hissed like a flat tire, running a hand through his bleached hair as he tightened a spark plug. “I’m not part of anyone’s dumb Scene any more. I just follow the pussy.”

“You’ve gotta work for pussy,” Ben replied coolly, smoothing a tablecloth. “Joe Franco, man, he’s bigger than any pussy you can name.”

Stan snorted. “I could paint better than Joe Franco.”

We chuckled and glanced at him derisively, sure, Stan, sure. We’d topped the old man tonight and he knew it. I mean, Joe Franco, the Pop artist, Warhol’s California protégé! Ben owed it to Michael Quinn, a La Jolla entrepreneur who anticipated the real estate boom and wisely bankrolled the introduction of classic Pop to San Diego. His city had only recently emerged from the shadow of Los Angeles, and Quinn aimed every penny of his elderly father’s wealth at that sunrise. He redeveloped century-old buildings in the Gaslamp District, a decayed warehouse quarter of the city; he invested in chic Hillcrest businesses like the Next Wave; he broke the stranglehold of the tourist industry on the Chamber of Commerce; he even supposedly allotted large “donations” to members of the City Council, and urban renewal suddenly became their priority. A few short years later, in a transformation only possible in a city as small and affluent as San Diego, the empty warehouses and forgotten flops filled up with boutiques, law firms, coffeehouses, lofts and art galleries, including the contemporary Michael Quinn Gallery on Avenue I. Yeah, the Eighties were like that. Wherever you looked, a rich bastard got the Midas touch and up sprung a new village of rich bastards.

For this opening of the Next Wave, Quinn fed them Joe Franco. Craig had flipped out; Joe Franco, the real thing, fame, Pop Art money and power. We glowed from our delusions of grandeur. Maybe the art life could be real life; maybe we would be the next rich bastards. But I couldn’t help questioning, watching the homeless stagger up Sixth Street; who the hell is Joe Franco, anyway? And who the hell are we?

My education in culture began just after my eighteenth birthday, a freshman in the Berkeley dorms. Revelations abounded that year, as exotic women from Morocco and Wisconsin buzzed about, and a whole Universe of unimagined possibilities manifested with the clarity of trees emerging from morning fog. For every drawing Flaca made of me, I’d taken a photograph of her. At Berkeley I took photos of everything: preppies, exaggerated expressions, beautiful ugly faces, sudden emotions. Buildings towered over silent streets and dead animals washed up on empty beaches. Life changed from an idle pleasure to an intense competition for it. It was fucking beautiful, man.

Gertrude Williams, a grad student painter from San Francisco, lived down the hall, but the grad students were light years apart. They only lived in the dorms because they were on scholarship. An aura seemed to float with them as they trudged to their afternoon seminars; I hung near them faithfully, for I might be following that path someday. These embittered scholars, rejecting the good things to spend decades in college, killed time drinking gallons of coffee and smoking pot between packs of low-tar cigarettes. We’d come a long way since the first experiments in academe.

I met Gertrude through her roommate Christine Chang, an undergrad who shared my unhealthy interest in New Wave music. Chris had transferred from a community college up in the Wine Country, and came bouncing into my room one day, her bleached hair floating above her porcelain features, her zebra-stripes hypnotizing me.

“Who’s blasting that crazy music?” she yelled at me, the only other person in the room.

“Me,” I yelled over Nina Hagen. I was lying on my bed, half-asleep on a warm day, imagining Nina Hagen twitching across a Berlin penthouse in a red wedding dress.

“That’s the soundtrack for my life!” she yelled.

“That tape is driving me out of my skull,” Gertrude told me a few days later, after Christine had borrowed and played it non-stop.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Here’s my revenge.” She handed me an invitation to her first solo show at the Art Department.

The gallery in Kroeber Hall was an empty white room, Gertrude’s paintings on the walls and a table of crackers, meat, cheese, bottles of gin, vodka, and tonic by the door. Listen up, jaded Scenesters. Here was my first opening, and so forever the sweetest. Nature cooperated, warming the building with a breeze, heavy with a flowery scent. “Whoa!” I said to Christine as we entered together. “I smell a party.” I pointed out the liquor.

She giggled. “Silly freshman, Trix is for kids. It’s just an art opening. Don’t get too excited. Besides, there’s that little acid party tonight in Ehrman Hall, isn’t there?” She grinned wickedly under her bangs.

But this was a new one on me. It was a Monday, and here I stood drinking gin and tonics, eating Brie cheese with salami, talking politics and feeling good about myself. I don’t remember the name of that gallery or even what Gertrude’s paintings looked like, although I can tell you they were better than most of the crap I saw in Los Angeles a decade later. People filtered in and out, making obscure, often bizarre analytical statements. Everyone dressed a cut above the hippie garb of Berkeley. Gertrude, who never wore dresses, had an enormous one on that evening, blue and wide like a sharp iceberg ready to leap in front of the Titanic.

“I’m so glad you could make it,” she said, her eyes wrinkled with delight as she leaned over the dress to give each of us a buss on the cheek, another first for me, a Continental kiss from a casual acquaintance, her perfect white teeth standing out in the room like a distant Roman ruin. The gin sang in my heart. Paris in the Twenties, and I was Man Ray out on the town. All we needed was a few rails of coke, and the evening would be perfect.

“So this is an art opening.”

“You didn’t have them in Bakersfield?” Christine drawled.

“Not as many as Petaluma,” I noted, referring to her own hometown, a mini-Bakersfield full of chickens and white people an hour north of San Francisco. She chuckled and punched me in the shoulder. I chuckled and poured myself another drink. I can still taste that oily gin, meshing perfectly with the cheese and the breeze. It was a perfect appetizer for the LSD party.

I could be found at Kroeber every Monday after that. I thought I could live on cheese, crackers, art and gin. Nobody questioned my presence, and I discovered that the world of art appeared exclusive only to the uninitiated. If you could talk the talk, walk the echoing gallery walk, and dance in a winter coat, you were in. Just for fun I took a few classes in art and architectural history, not realizing until later that by browsing a few books I could drop enough names to sound properly obnoxious. I made good friends, who soared like skyrockets, and we faded as fast.

Still, I kept my distance from art; I was majoring in geology, my grandfather and father’s profession, not conducive to proper gallery conversation. But through artists I found parties, drugs, and beautiful women in designer clothes who liked to fuck you once and then lost your address. The Art Scene consumed my life, night by night, and I dressed up in my art uniform and chatted up every artist I could find. It was never boring unless you wanted to be bored. I enlarged my expertise to the galleries in San Francisco, and younger art students began to seek me out for the night’s happenings when Friday came around. Finally I switched my major to art and never hung out in Kroeber, I was so sick of the place from classes. But I kept my geology books. I studied photography and became, in somebody’s opinion, competent. By junior year I must have been the most flamboyant gossip in the Art Department.

But eventually I also left that University scene behind. Berkeley, once spread out like a new continent, instead became the small town it really is. We joked that a person could score at Gilman and San Pablo, and ten minutes later his friends would be warming up the razor blades cross-town at Alcatraz and Telegraph. Berkeley held me like a prison, and through the bars I could see the real centers of the Universe, San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin. Even going down on some nameless hippie chick, the incense twirling in the candlelight, my mind would wander to the prices of plane flights. Art gave me the disease, and instead of the world being my ashtray, it became my playground. The language of art, so I’ve heard, is international.

I only saw Gertrude once more after her graduation. It was a cold night before my own graduation, three years later, and the Art Department threw a big party in Kroeber for the graduating students. Nearly everyone I knew showed up, and most of us dropped acid to make the end more interesting; but instead, everyone acted strange, and not in a trippy way. If I hadn’t already known them, I would say my fellows suddenly became arrogant and glamorous just from staring blind into the future. The implications of this strange transformation didn’t register in my drugged brain. I’d become nearly immune to the Scene, and the symptoms of real artistic ennui need years of obviousness and stupidity and lost friends to surface. And sickness it was, of the worst kind, which takes intelligence and converts it into sales and fashion.

Gertrude came in as I was leaving. The acid left me nauseated, and instinct told me to head for the City, to smoke cigarette after cigarette and laugh with the punks in the cold humidity, sharing a bottle. Gertrude wafted down the stairs, reminding me of a person that I hadn’t yet met. Years later, lights dim as I remember Gertrude’s smile, plain but radiant, one of the few real smiles, her teeth resting easily in her happy mouth. On this confused night, she again wore a dress, so out of character I didn’t recognize her, and my first instinct was to fall in love.

“Hey there, angel.”

“Hey you! How have you been?” She hugged me violently.

My entire body flushed and I reached for the support of the cocktail in my hand, blue with a dry-ice haze pouring out of the top. “Jesus, Gertrude, it’s been forever. But I was just leaving.”

“Yeah, I’m not staying long. Just came by to check out the old dump. So what have you been doing with yourself?”

“I’m graduating. I’m also, well, kind of tripping.”

She nodded and looked sad. I have an important warning for you, she probably thought, but you won’t get it. She patted me on the back. “Well, good luck to you. Write me sometimes. You still have my address?”

I knew it, a warm little house on the good side of Twin Peaks, facing the ocean. I leaned close to her. “I wouldn’t stay in there long. It’s like a vipers’ nest.”

Gertrude smiled and shrugged with one shoulder. “It’s art. What can you say? It’s the job everyone wants who doesn’t want a job.” She looked back into the room, her dark curls falling into her eyes. “You’ll dig it, buddy.”

She tottered rather ungracefully inside. I left and never saw her again. But everything that happened since, I owe her in a way. Thank you, Gertrude, and I owe you a Brie wheel. I hope your career made it way past the cheese and gin stage.

It seemed about five minutes later when the sun came up in fury over Lake Isabella, the smog of the Central Valley already simmering on a May Sunday. Much bigger than when I left four years earlier, and still homemade as any distant outpost of the Empire, I shuddered and stared down at Bakersfield, California. The only worse place to be, I thought, was San Francisco, surrounded by junkies. I’d spent a four-year lifetime in Berkeley, but now I was back home and no one gave a shit.

The sun went down over Point Loma as the opening began. I read passages from Bright Lights Big City to Ben while he chopped out three good lines of good cocaine on the kitchen counter. “Would you stop fucking reading, man?” Craig shrieked. Ben encouraged me. I kept reading. A glass of Jack Daniels on the rocks appeared, and I looked up. A short-haired girl named Tommy smiled down at me with desperate eyes, and later ended up in my lap. Couples went through the rooms, whispering. The moon stood full dead center above Balboa Park. New friends showed up, then a few of Quinn’s Downtown connections, then a few rich bastards from La Jolla. A student told stories about hanging out at a bar full of mercenaries in the Sudan. Two neighborhood queens started a catfight over designer clothes. A suburban girl flattered everyone to death. Oh, how she loved art. A few people studied the Joe Franco paintings on the walls, warm in golden pools from the track lights, the sea air drifting through the apartment with the kerosene smell of Lindbergh Field. The jets fly in low over Downtown San Diego, between the tops of the skyscrapers, right over Hillcrest and into the airport. No one cares; the air in San Diego can’t conduct even a small charge of danger.

“I’m moving to New York!” I screamed down the alley at three in the morning, laden with bags of Mexican take-out. “That’s it! Fuck all this blond-haired-taco-beer-surfer bullshit!”

Stan laughed from the porch, cradling an empty fifth of vodka. “You wouldn’t make it one day in LA, man, forget Manhattan.”

“Fuck you,” Ben yelled back around a mouthful of burrito. “We’re going to watch you beg for change from the top of Bel Air.”

Stan looked back at the Joe Franco pieces inside. “Just don’t get so high up, idiot, that I can’t reach your wallet.”

Every sunny day we woke up, put on the Clash or pulsing reggae music, smoked about an ounce of weed and staggered outside in the darkest sunglasses we could find. A basket sat by the front door, full of extra shades in case a pair got lost; without shades, we’d be trapped in the dark apartment, waiting for killers. We ate out every day, and Hillcrest suited this purpose excellently, bright cafes lining the streets, going out of business so quickly that we rarely dined at the same place twice. Every day was a new movie.

Sometimes after brunch we’d drop by the Escape, a gay bar round the corner from the Next Wave. Fixed to a stool facing the door, his ass nailed there since the Seventies, sat our pot dealer. Needless to say, he knew us well, and we thought we’d know him forever. Getting kicked out of Eden seemed impossible. On money nights, we went Downtown and hit the pubs, wedging loud Australian blondes away from their soccer-hooligan boyfriends. On broke nights, we headed west to Ocean Beach, rubbing elbows with speedfreaks and bikers, wandering from the country bar to the reggae bar with no trouble at all, drunk and in love with everything below the sky.

Ben and I began a hazy spring in Ocean Beach on wings of crystal meth, floating down the dark roads afraid of nothing. We fixated on beer cans vanishing into raging bonfires and the terrible laughter of forgotten children facing the Pacific, realizing that their wandering had reached an impasse. Rather than go back, they stayed, and OB burst its seams with homeless punks. With a healthy crop of Berkeley smarts and Bakersfield charm, I soon ingratiated myself into their midst, and by summer I had a portfolio of nearly a hundred perfect photographs of these runaways. Some were black-and-white, some appallingly nostalgic Kodachrome, whichever brought out the horror of life’s punishments with clarity, like Larry Clark. My favorite showed a young woman from Nebraska, Deronda, shooting heroin at a kitchen table, her skin blue in the morning light, her dirty T-shirt pulled up to reveal an obviously pregnant belly. She was a pro with a needle, not even looking at her arm, but instead staring out the window, her eyes empty of feeling or intelligence.

“Where’d you get that camera?” she asked me on a tape-recording.

“My folks bought a new Grand Prix and gave me their Dodge, which I sold, and spent the money on a used motorcycle and this vintage Leica 35.” I remember fondling the camera, letting her touch it. I loved my first camera, of course, a very serviceable Olympus, but I never held anything in my life, not the most beautiful chick, fitting my hand like that Leica. It always nestled perfectly in the crook of my arm when it hung from my neck, and it magically transformed every square of reality I saw through the viewfinder into poetry. I could take it apart in the dark, and lavished it with expensive lenses and accessories. I worshipped that fucking camera. I kept it by my bed on silk and it never let me down. I bought other cameras later, but everybody knew they were going to bury me with the Leica.

“How old are you?” I asked Deronda on the tape.

“Seventeen or eighteen, I think. Do you want me?”

“Sure,” I lied. “Where are you from?”

“Same as you, dude.” I played these tapes of her and the other street kids during my first solo opening, a trendy bookstore in the Gaslamp District. Michael Quinn, in a sharkskin suit, nodded over a Martini, an expensive smile on his face.

Ben was nervous. “Watch out for that guy,” he said, nodding back at Quinn. He thought he’d lost me, not as a friend, but as a potential client of the Next Wave. Nothing got by Ben in those days.

Of the ten Franco pieces hanging in the Next Wave, Ben and Craig sold six. Not bad. Quinn, ever magnanimous, arranged for them to meet the artist himself. “You’ve got the greatest ability a dealer can have,” Quinn said over cocktails at the Escape. “The ingenuity to sell a product, no matter what. That’s the spark of real genius.” He stared at us. “You should talk to Franco. Drive up to LA next weekend and drop off the unsold lots at his space in Venice. I’ll set it up.” Nope, Ben’s talent as a grifter couldn’t be confined to cajoling women into bed, when he could be making millions for himself and Michael Quinn. “San Diego is a limitless market, guys. This city is busting out, and all those new houses in the Highlands and up on the Mesa need art on their walls. Like Franco’s. Like yours.”

“Yeah, why not Smarts?” Ben asked.

Quinn laughed. “Sure, sure.” He’d never shown much interest in Ben’s art. Why paint when you could fill the world with the sticky canvases of others? So much less effort.

Craig, on the other hand, became more the scientist every day, collecting antique chemistry books and pondering the nature of the Universe over long afternoons. He forgot the gallery and got into road-trip mode for our trip to LA, cashing a student loan check for a gram of speed, an ounce of pot and some mushrooms. Completely stoned and hefting the Leica, I documented the whole sordid trip to Venice Beach with Eugène Atget’s realistic style. We did drugs and fed comps into the tape-player all the way up Interstate Five, and by the time Craig’s sputtering VW bus got stuck in morning traffic, we were in Orange County, surrounded by blinding haze and identical buildings. Craig asked a bunch of Latinos on a corner in Long Beach where the hell Venice Beach was. They spoke almost no English and tried to sell us heroin. My own poor Spanish got us as far as West Los Angeles, and from there Venice drew us in effortlessly. As high as we were, LA wanted us higher still.

“Bring a Goddamn map next time,” Ben yelled at Craig over a Pink Floyd tape.

I passed him another joint and took off my sunglasses. The air was salty and white. “Why? You don’t even know how to read, retard.”

“We’re a half-hour late, for chrissakes.”

“Shit!” Craig screeched.

“We might interrupt the master at work,” I observed.

“Fuck you, man,” Ben yelled. “I got forty grand in primo artwork in the back of this rattling hippie junk-heap.” I glanced at Craig, wondering if he’d react to another negation of his half-ownership in the gallery. He didn’t. I’d declined a share of the profits in lieu of free rent and drugs.

“Lincoln Boulevard,” Craig called, pulling off.

“Get off! Get off!” Ben yelled, one hand flailing over the seat as if he meant to take the wheel. I looked around at the vast city, like any California place on the surface. No, the streets are wider, the rows of shops darker and more battered. There’s a homeless guy pushing a shopping cart loaded high with aluminum scrap. We sure the hell weren’t in San Diego.

When we located Franco’s studio two blocks from the beach, no one was in but his secretary, a small unhappy woman attractive after an urbane fashion. She dressed like a San Franciscan. I studied her while Ben unloaded the goods, demanding to shake hands with Franco personally.

“Are you from the City?” I asked her abruptly.

“What city?”

I took that as a no; any San Franciscan would know what I meant. She invited us to a party at Billy America’s house that evening, just up the street. Joe, she assured us, would be there to thank us personally for the delivery.

Ben could barely contain his glee as we drove off. “Did you fucking hear that? Billy America!” I only knew America as a has-been actor from the Sixties, more famous for drug abuse than acting. But he knew art when he saw it, and he’d known Franco and the other creators of Pop from the beginning.

We got lost again, then found the freeway and headed for Downtown Los Angeles. Ben wanted to drop in on an artist, a guy recommended by David Allbreath, the art professor who’d opened the Next Wave.

David Allbreath was the first San Diego artist I liked, and he returned my kindness by purchasing my motorcycle, which I frequently saw afterwards outside the rougher leather bars in Hillcrest. Unlike the other artists in San Diego, who suffered an inferiority complex similar to summer-stock actors, Allbreath acted the primadonna. He was a skinny conceptualist carving sexual imagery into pink sandstone, adding faded photos of himself as a youth beside his relatives and their Fifties cars. He worked and lived in a huge loft in the Gaslamp District, full of overstuffed Victorian furniture and luxuries unknown to us, like cigars and new-fangled CDs. Allbreath was also a player of sorts; he surfed nude at Black’s Beach and knew how to ride the wave of his own fame just as well.

Just before our hell-ride he’d handed Ben a copy of Basic magazine over dinner, driving instructions scribbled across the half-naked model on the back cover. “Go see this bitch,” he said dryly. “He’ll give you an idea of what the Art Scene in LA is all about.” Then he laughed in a way I didn’t care for.

“Who the hell is this guy, anyway?” I whined nervously, crouched down in the back of the VW and remembering that laugh. The directions led to a brick warehouse in an industrial neighborhood, and one that looked rough; after the placid urbanity of San Diego, it was practically unbearable, trucks smoking through the streets, dirty sidewalks, the homeless so jaded they didn’t even hit you up for change, just glared murder. Through the smog and heat-haze, the glass towers of a futuristic city hung like a backdrop in a cheap sci-fi movie. I felt a strange sensation, which I didn’t recognize until the next day, as we drove back down the Interstate. I tasted the sour sensation of loss, a tragic loss, like seeing a beloved ex in the arms of another man. But I tasted a loss yet to come. The damage had already been done, and the heart followed a worn path into pain.

Los Angeles attracted me by a complete indifference to my existence. In other cities I walked the moist midnight streets conscious of an amiable place, a place where I could make a name and friends, where life meant something. As Craig, Ben and I walked down Central Avenue, watching the homeless army drill, I saw a city so enormous that even the rejects, the cast-offs and the unfortunate made up an entire community. I saw a city without the personality of history, so huge it assumed only the general essence of the human race, a bland and rushed ugliness, tinted with an animation more like mass hysteria than any redeeming quality. Perhaps my loud New York City ambitions were wrong. Maybe my answer waited closer. The horror stories I’d been told about Los Angeles could easily have been lies; I’d certainly been lied to about everything else. And I knew one truth about Los Angeles: whenever someone from Bakersfield had moved there, we never heard from them again. The messages got through from everywhere else, but never from LA. Los Angeles swallowed a body whole; you either sputtered straight into oblivion or transformed into something new, something with no interest in its past. I found that danger appealing. The greater the danger of failure, the greater the reward of victory.

We jaywalked across Central, dodging the afternoon traffic. The artist’s name was Jim Something-or-Other, and he lived in a rat-hole of a loft. I could almost hear Allbreath laughing at us. Jim, you see, composed his art using the soiled underwear of his recently divorced spouse.

“I’m trying to work my feelings through, can you dig?” he said. He bent over a filthy electric stove, making peppermint tea for us, holding his long, graying hippy hair out of the boiling water. We stepped through dusty geometric shapes of sunlight in disgust. Ben made small talk with the guy. I stood near the window, imagining life in the warehouse district of Tinseltown. But I was just a tourist, and LA is never experienced properly as a tourist. LA is a place of secrets.

I wandered onto the roof. New buildings climbed up everywhere, cranes rotating slowly above iron skeletons. Cars jammed the streets and helicopters hummed overhead, while higher passenger jets wheeled slowly across the blue sky. I thought of Alexander gazing on the army of Darius, the Persian campfires stretched to the horizon, confronted by an army ten times the size of his own, as uncontrollable as a force of nature. Faceless and huge as it was, a great city could be the ultimate test of a person’s spirit. Ben grabbed my shoulder, jolting me back into the present.

“C’mon, man. We’re going for a fucking drink.” Jim gave us directions to Al’s Bar, deeper in the industrial area. Oil-drums were suspended from the ceiling, and beneath them a row of tired laborers and street punks staggered through twilight. The bartender, a sickly woman like Rosie, fixed her eyes on me through the dark. She and the bar and the street outside attached to me like a parasite. But Ben and Craig thought we were about to get rolled, so we had one drink apiece and split west, back to Venice Beach.

Halfway across the city, Craig saw one of those family-style Mexican American places, the El Coyote. They make a wicked Margarita, he said, so we spent fifteen minutes scouting a parking space and picked a table near the windows, to observe the level of traffic. “I hate fucking hippies,” Craig announced as our first drinks came.

“No shit,” Ben added.

“This city is something, eh?” Craig added around a mouthful of tortilla. “Pretty fuckin’ gnarly.”

Ben and I exchanged a glance. The Margaritas had a headache floating around misshapen ice, and the fake food looked tasty only to the tourists lined up. We drank until nine o’clock, hopping from bar to bar, the sea breeze stronger each time we staggered out the door. Finally we reached Venice Beach and Billy America’s place, a blocky, forbidding structure that reminded me of an oversized Nazi pillbox.

A homeless guy offered us crack as we parked, even before we were out of the car. I started talking to him; I wanted to know what the fuck his deal was, but Ben and Craig pulled me away. “What are you doing?” Craig hissed. “Trying to get us shot?”

“He wasn’t gonna mug us, just rip us off,” I replied. “I thought I might get him to pose for me. A new series, ‘Dope Dealers at the Edge of the World’. How ‘bout it?”

Ben snorted. “I don’t think so, man. People with mansions in La Jolla don’t want pictures of junkie niggers on their walls.”

“How would you know?” I said too loud. We were already drunk through the front door, past the celebrities and other bon vivants, one foot in the gutter and the other at the Academy Awards. It was a perfect place for Ben to run around, drumming up business. I practiced holding my drink and my cigarette. The conversation, unfortunately, was extremely dull.

“We’re flying up to the City for the weekend to see Prince at the Warfield. He’s so beautiful.”

“Oh, you’ve got to see “Streetwise”. It’s sooo depressing.”

“Did you get tickets for the opening ceremonies?”

“I’m just glad I don’t jog as much as Jim Fixx!”

“I love the new wing at MOMA. The whole space just comes alive, just breathes life.”

“You’ll have to stay with us in the Hamptons.”

We were old enough to play grown-up, but I’d only recently outgrown playing games with cigarette smoke. Craig grabbed me. “Look over there, dude. Isn’t that William fucking Burroughs?” I followed his sight line to a mummified creature in a black suit. Just beyond him stood Timothy Leary talking to Captain Beefheart. I sucked in my breath.

“Holy shit, what kind of fucking party is this?”

Ben came over with a drink, having forgotten one for either of us. He looked ready to piss his pants. “I scored this time, man. I scored big time.”

“Where’s my fucking drink?” I yelled.

Ben disappeared into the crowd. I went to get my own drink, leaving Craig standing there agog. Everything is wrong, I thought nervously. Why was I born into this world, where I could rub elbows with the glamorous, sipping cocktails and watching smoke in the lights? I wouldn’t trade California for anything you could offer, even love and tranquility and security. We flourish, the blessed born into this world, we of the Mediterranean climate. Spaniard, Californio, Australian, Chilean, friends, we shrug at philosophy and enjoy the pleasures of simple living. And the raptures of high art, of course. If you could pick your home, you’d live with us, wouldn’t you? You’d abandon your farmhouses, your huts, your igloos, your high-rise apartments; you’d come visit Billy America and his cast of stars along the stinking Venice canals. Like the Lilies-of-the-Field or the Lotus-eaters, we have our ways, my friends. We’ll be remembered for very little.

I dove into a circle of strangers, borrowed their joint, broke in their conversation, and for five minutes they loved me. I can’t remember a single name. Then Ben came and took us over to Billy America, holding court in the best-lit center of the room, wearing an iridescent suit and laughing at everything. In my ignorance, knowing nothing about America, he was just like Quinn, someone with too much money, keeping other people around as entertainment. With that attitude, I grabbed the next passing bottle of champagne, glanced at the hundred-thousand dollar paintings on the walls, and let Ben drag me into my future.

Everyone was dressed to the nines. Ben chattered about art, and without speaking I examined everyone, especially those who also didn’t speak. The cool bottle rolled in my hand, the bubbles singing gently. Beautiful men in perfect suits, not a hair out of place, stood with a modern beatnik or two thrown in, T-shirts neat under Armani jackets. The women smiled for hidden cameras, fingering their jewels and reflecting the light off exposed skin. Somebody made a joke and I pretended to laugh. Ha ha ha, “La Dolce Vita”, yeah, man, yeah, I was living it at last. That was another movie we’d seen together, drunk on gin, full of spaghetti, stoned. The drinks were going to head; my feet floated away, and the cigarette came away from my mouth wet and delicious. I took another drag even before I could let the previous one out. The faces changed, became as young as me, younger still, the faces of runaways at Ocean Beach, laughing in the firelight, throwing in the empty beer cans and watching them melt suddenly into the flames. My poor children, lost.

A deeply tanned actor asked me a question very loudly. He looked straight through me, like a bouncer.

“What’s that?” Already in trouble.

“What brings you here?”

“Art, pal.”

“Art? What is there to like about art any more? Some people like the Thompson Twins. Is that art?”

I sipped my drink again and shrugged, reeling from the power of the champagne. What the hell did the Thompson Twins have to do with anything? I was too young, jaded, drunk and high at the moment to even care.

“The Thompson Twins won’t mean shit in five years,” a dark-haired woman in a sparkling dress announced, even drunker than me, the first words I’d heard her speak. She reminded me of Crystal Gayle, definitely out-of-place in her fancy dress. “Do you seriously think that “Miami Vice” will inspire any fan conventions in the year 2000? The Eighties will make the Seventies look like the Twenties. The Eighties are already bullshit.”

“Another hippie, dat’s for sure” Ben whispered, glancing at the woman, then at Billy America.

“And yet the children of the Sixties grab onto our icons. Just look at Burroughs over there.” The sparkling drunk woman made a grand flourish. “The old master still cusses and spits his way into our subconscious.”

“Right on,” Ben piped up. “German Expressionism meets New York nausea!” Everyone stared at him except me, and so her weaving head found me. “Well, what do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of William Burroughs as your icon, kid?”

I didn’t think about it for long. “I think he’s a fucking junkie asshole who murdered his wife and abandoned his son. I like his books, though.”

All the blood drained from Ben’s face. The woman glared at me, betrayed, and America noticed me, laughing nervously. “Wow,” he said, and walked away.

“I can’t believe you,” Ben said in horror.

“Sock it to ‘em,” a stranger said behind me. I stepped outside, rather proud to have broken that circle. I found Craig looking up at the stars, listening to a background of Roxy Music and giddy conversation as he told one disinterested woman after another about the mysterious nature of certain inorganic molecules. Now the night seemed familiar, the kind you read about in magazines, as one New Wave song declaimed. I’d seen another Rosie in the pink twilight, and in prophecy, I saw myself high in the lofts, looking out over the noise and pollution, trying to redeem myself.

I lay in the back of the VW bus down the coast, unable to rise even near home. The sky glowed blue, the earth glowed gold, and the young girls at the roadside glowed healthy and strong, but the memory of Los Angeles already taunted me. Wasn’t I an artist too, Goddamn it? What were we doing living in San Diego? We weren’t supposed to be living the bucolic life, we weren’t the Impressionists clad in wetsuits. George Orwell’s year had come at last, 1984, the fascist weasels were actually in command, and the world was in too much crisis to fuck around.

The day after we returned, a guy went bananas down by the Mexican border and machine-gunned a couple dozen people to death in a fast-food joint. The omen hit me like ice water. I had to leave the evil borders of this metropolis, and head for the center. I went to see Quinn privately. He’d always liked my stuff, he said, and offered me space in the next show at his Gaslamp gallery. Not the Next Wave, but someplace where I could get paid in more than marijuana and a piece of Brie. I’d skip the girls for the evening and play cool for La Jolla kingpins. “I’m glad you came to me,” Quinn said, pushing me a cup of black coffee across his desk, two sugars. The sun cast shadows across the beach, down a bluff from his La Jolla office. “I’ve been looking for work to contrast with Allbreath, and yours is perfect.”

“I dig your space. I’d rather show around there than Hillcrest.”

Quinn shrugged, reading my mind. “Benjamin will do all right for himself. He’ll be in Los Angeles soon enough, with plenty of money.” He lit his pipe, an old-guard habit I found endearing. “When are you leaving for Los Angeles?”

“Right after the show. How’d you know, man?”

“Benjamin told me about your trip there. So did Joe Franco. You’ll do just fine. But here’s my old-timer advice to a young punk like you. Don’t burn all your bridges. Keep in touch. You’ll go far. But hang onto your friends as long as you can.”

“If I want to go far. Maybe I just want to go away.”

“It’s the same thing. Most people don’t even know how to go. You know where, and you can. So you’re way ahead; make the most of it. You gotta blaze now and then you glide the rest of the way.” He leaned back with a wicked smile, and I thought his advice came from hard experience.

I called up Tommy, my sweet hippie child from La Mesa, and invited her down to the Pink Panther for a drinkie-poo. She squealed happily into the phone, and I timed my marijuana buzz so I’d be coming down right about eight o’clock, just before we met.

“I got news, but you have to keep mum about it,” I said, sliding my vodka tonic through a collection of water-rings on the bar. She sipped her third drink, eyes narrowing. “I’m leaving.”

Tommy shrugged. “Yeah, I gotta get up early too. But I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe? There’s a good gig…”

“No, sugar, I’m leaving San Diego.”

“Oh.” She opened and shut her third cocktail umbrella, suddenly fascinated by its mechanism. “You’re going home?”

“What home? I’m going to Los Angeles.”

She pursed her mouth. “That’s as far from home as you can get.”

“What choice do I have? I’ll never amount to anything here. I’ll end up like the runaway kids I photograph in OB, living in the sand, or worse, like one of the hustlers that prey on them. That’s no way to live.”

“Every place is the same. People are fucked up in Los Angeles too. More there than anywhere, I suppose.”

“You just contradicted yourself.” I felt annoyed. One tries to be a gentleman, say good-bye, all that crap, on some occasions. But like a typical San Diegan, she couldn’t let me go up to big bad Los Angeles without a poke. “What do you care? I never knew you as such a big booster for San Diego.”

“I’m not. San Diego is dull. Sometimes I hate it here.”

“Why don’t you leave?” I foolishly asked. She could’ve offered to come with me, and then what would I have done? She was too much a lady for me to refuse. Perhaps she was my penance for Rosie. Her hair fell across her eyes the same way when she frowned.

“It’s not the greatest place, San Diego, but it’s my place.” She took my hand. “You’ll be famous someday, I bet. You’ll go wherever you want. But I’m just ordinary. My apple will rest under this tree. Oh, dude, but I’ll miss you. I’ll miss you a lot.”

We stayed at the Pink Panther a while longer. Can you miss someone you don’t know? I didn’t think about Tommy much then, my friends, but I did later on, alone in a strange city, surrounded by greed, lust, stupidity, all out in the open, not tucked away waiting to be dug out. Maybe San Diego was too good for me. But if the road calls, leaping out in dark dreams or late-night freeway reveries, then take that road. The road must be the true life of an artist at the end of the Twentieth Century.

“Come home with me,” Tommy asked, and that surprised me. So I turned her down cold, and gave her one break I didn’t give Rosie. A man’s got to do…oh, whatever.

I’d loved Rosie Palestine, but she was an object to be destroyed by the likes of me. I’d been home from Berkeley four months, caught up in the war between my folks and my two younger siblings. After two months at the Oildale Register, I’d saved up for a lifestyle change, and decided, looking out the kitchen window at the hazy mountains across the Kern River, to live the life of a God-awful Bohemian. If I couldn’t live in San Francisco, maybe I could bring a few positive attributes to the great San Joaquin Valley. As John Steinbeck did for Salinas, I would be the man who shook Bakersfield. I cleaned up my Leica and packed my things. My mother stood in the doorway, crying.

“Mom,” I said like an idiot, “I’m only going Downtown.” I’d picked the perfect location, too, near the railroad depot on California Avenue. All the dropouts and drifters converged, and I rented an apartment above a bar where they’d sometimes find themselves. From my window I could see Bakersfield High, the Courthouse, City Hall and the old fleabags left along Chester Avenue. I shot a roll of film straight away, my elbows resting on the sill. God, I loved that fucking place.

That first month, October, I reveled in real solitude. I created a routine for the morning, went to work, came home up the shrieking stairs and sat by the window, looking across the city and smoking dope. No books, television or radio interfered with the purity of my hermitage. Memories leaked down the bricks and into the street below, and one day at sunset, clean emptiness burned me cool.

I went down into the bar, Brody’s Drift Inn, below my apartment. Even the hard cases felt paranoid in there. Since moving in, I’d heard numerous bouts of hysterical laughter, several fights, scorned women howling for their men, and the tragic dying whine of the cop sirens when they pulled up front. Large tinted windows opened through one wall above vinyl booths, the rest covered with the usual: signed photos of Sixties celebrities, license plates, old advertising signs, and a set of framed National Geographic pages on the Panama Canal. I picked the corner booth under a photo of Lyndon Johnson. The cuckoo clock chirped seven times. The only humans in the bar were the bartender, a skinny waitress and two tired-looking bikers, one of them rhythmically kicking the rail with his worn boot.

The waitress came over, and I immediately noticed that she didn’t chew gum. “What’ll it be, pardner?”

I smiled at her fake drawl. “Jack neat and a beer back,” I said, drawling a bit myself.

“I reckon that beer’ll be a BUD,” she said, winking, and went for the drinks. I watched her with more interest; she pulled her skirt tight around her ass, my lovely little waitress, as she sidled into the kitchen behind the bar. There was a small counter opening into the kitchen beneath the painting of Custer’s Last Stand. She said something through there to the bartender, a tough-looking middle-aged guy who eyed me pretty good. When she came back with the shot and the beer, I eyed her pretty good in return.

“What’s your name?”

“Rosie. I’m the official and only waitress at Brody’s Drift Inn.”

“Where’s Brody?”

Rosie showed her big teeth, her pale body loose in her wrinkled pink uniform, her dirty blonde hair tangled and her green eyes searching, and she remained like that always, even when her mascara dripped and smudged across half her face, always searching. “There ain’t no Brody,” she said in wonder. “I think he kicked it about twenty years ago.” She sat down across from me in the booth, slamming her order book down. “You know, my uncle got buried in a mine collapse. That’s the year I graduated from West High.”

“The classy part of Bakersfield.”

“Yeah. I was a cheerleader too. The minute I graduated I cut off all my hair. All the girls did, I mean, my friends did.” She wriggled and stared at the ceiling. I loved her immediately, and she loved me right back. You city slickers had to be friends for years before you fell in love, because of all the nutcases strolling around. In Bakersfield, what you see is what you get, sugar, and yes, I’ll have that piece of pecan pie, the one in the plastic case that’s been sitting there all Goddamn day. They taste great with a menthol and a Boilermaker.

Brody’s Drift Inn took the cake for hip. A big neon sign out front alternated between a Martini glass and a doughnut. Martini, doughnut, Martini, doughnut. I saw that fucking sign in my nightmares, leering through the Tule fog like a dungeon in a horror movie. Rosie stared up at the sign on rainy nights when no customers came in, green, red, green, red, Martini, doughnut, Martini, doughnut. I watched it with her. Of course I have photographs. America, baby, the ends against the middle, radical chic and white trash, Martini, doughnut, Martini, doughnut. I modeled my photographs of Brody’s on the amateur photographs of Heinrich Zille, bikers relaxing at the bar, old men playing checkers, dirty children pressing their faces to the windows while their mothers shared a beer.

Bored punk kids from Bakersfield High came in a steady stream, faking twenty-one as if the place was Studio 54. I couldn’t suss the allure. “Hey man, where you from?” one asked me.

I could have said Berkeley, I could have said Tashkent. So I said, “Garces.” That meant something to him, and he ceased speaking to me. The kids from Bakersfield High played tough, but they thought kids from Garces were evil and clever, like the rich kids from West High. Rosie stared at me, and told the kid to leave before she called his father on him.

“Garces, huh?”

“That was an eon ago,” I said, irritated. Who gave a shit?

“Dinosaur era. And then what?” She topped off my Irish coffee. “Taft College? Cal State?”

“Berkeley.”

Her eyes went wide and she sat down across from me again, still holding the pot of coffee. “Ber-ke-ley. Wow. You went to Berkeley. What was it like? Is it true what they say about it?”

“What do they say? That it’s a magnet for every insane, penniless idiot west of Boston?”

Her eyes were still wide and her voice quiet. “No, that you can do anything, whatever you feel. All the wildest folk, coming together in one place to raise havoc.”

“Not really. Just a lot of bratty children spending their parents’ hard-earned money on dope and fucking everything in sight.” I flinched at her sad look. “Well, I guess it had its moments.”

“It must have been fantastic,” she said brightly.

“Bakersfield ain’t so bad. It’s got loads of potential.”

She leaned forward, the coffee pot dangerously close to my arm. “Do you really think so? I do like it here, if it wasn’t so all-out damn boring.”

“An artist can make do wherever he is,” I said profoundly.

“Do you want to see my comic strips?” she said suddenly, and leapt up to get them from her bag in the back. I wanted to please her, but she made reading them difficult. Instead of sitting across from me, she sat beside me and handed the comic to me a page at a time, silent, staring like a nervous patient, pressed against me on the warm vinyl of the booth. The strips were hilarious in a sick way, drawn minimally, full of bug-eyed drunks and nutty railroad-jumpers fighting to get words in edgewise, while a bored, witty waitress explained the meaning of life to them.

“‘My best frey-end is a ‘67 El Dorado,’” she read off one of the callouts. The strip was called “Trouble in Pair O’ Dice”, set in a weird little town in Nevada. “It’s supposed to be Beatty, you know, a bunch of mini-casinos and whorehouses out by Death Valley. Well known to us Valley types, aye?”

On our first non-Brody’s excursion we went to see “Five Easy Pieces”, which I don’t recommend as a date movie. We made out in the back of the Fox through most of the picture, when Rosie’s eyes weren’t all swollen up with tears. “I guess we missed the movie,” I joked as we reached the street, the last credit rolling up the screen.

She shakily lit a Marlboro. “Nah, I’ve seen it about ten times.”

I went back to the theatre the next day and watched the film, looking for clues to Rosie’s character. What I saw freaked me out. Rosie was deep enough, anyway. I liked them smart, but also wet and laughing. And she was that. She fucked crazy, laughing most of the time, running her big lips all over my face and making baby noises. Most women I know don’t laugh. I should have married her straight off, stayed in Bakersfield, and been a beautiful nobody. But everything was sweet then, and laughter floated up like bubbles with no end in sight. When the champagne got flat, yeah, then I started bitching.

Every afternoon after work I went into the bar, ordered a Jack on the rocks, and took the corner booth under the photo of Lyndon Johnson. From there I could see outside and inside. Henry, the bartender, gave me a wink with one of his icy, wrinkled eyes. Regardless of the weather, he dressed like a retired astronaut in shirtsleeves and polyester pants, telling customers about meeting General MacArthur in Korea, or his nightmarish ex-wife in Fresno, or working the oil-rigs in Taft. He always managed to tell these stories around the Kool glued to his lower lip; I rarely saw him hold his cigarette and I never saw him ash it. Once, after whiffing ether with a Seattle runaway in the alley, I got real close to the floor of Brody’s by mistake and saw a trail of ashes where Henry had walked. Henry was a Taft boy. Right before closing, if he’d been sampling the company liquor, he’d tilt his blocky head and yell, “West Bakersfield faggots!”

“Did they actually teach you something up in Berkeley?” he asked me one night. Rosie, who’d just dropped a chicken-fried steak special in the kitchen, yelled at him not to be so nosy.

“Henry, the dope dealers used to stride through my apartment building, yelling for business like ice cream vendors. All the cabbies in the East Bay knew about my place. One time a guy in a suit came in, right off a jet from Miami, and bought a pound of weed off my neighbor. Another time the narks came by and kicked in the wrong door, and they caught London Lori naked with her ten-foot Boa Constrictor. That’s what I learned in fucking Berkeley.”

Henry stubbed out his smoke and grinned. He liked the wicked life; working in the Twilight Zone of the San Joaquin for so many years gave him a taste for noir. Then Rosie came over to sit with me and talk, holding my hand until a customer came in. The moon chose perfect angles in the windows.

On the weekends I hung out in the bar all day, drinking endless Irish coffees and coming up with great concepts. If I could score weed, I went out shooting around Downtown Bakersfield, looking for faces. Otherwise Rosie would sit with me in the bar, sketching customers or drawing her comic strip. John Broom, a whacked-out vet who lived in the apartment next to mine, read us his war poetry.

“‘A scar like a river across the canvas of my soul,’” he began one. Rosie grabbed my leg under the table. Stupid beatnik shit, I thought, but Broom was unquestionable. His voice shook the walls. I would have killed on his command, shit, both of us would. Henry barely tolerated him and told us, at least once a month, that the landlord was fed up and getting ready to put Broom in the street.

We took my motorcycle to parks. I liked Beach Park out on the unhurried Kern River, but Rosie preferred the old Union Cemetery out Tehachapi way. We both had talent in our lips and used it whenever we were alone. I didn’t feel artistically inspired by Rosie. Quite the opposite, with Rosie I thought art was a bore.

After a few weeks of wild sex and long bathtub conversations, we officially declared our love and Rosie moved in. We became a family then, surely, me loading my camera while Rosie pressed her uniform, a new habit of hers. We drank a pot of hot-plate coffee, used the bathroom and smoked a cigarette together, then made out for five minutes with that terrible aftertaste and went off to work. We kissed again gently downstairs, our eyes searching, and Henry usually waved. “Keep outta trouble!” he yelled. If only he’d known.

My opening at Quinn’s was on a perfect summer night, the stars blazing like an audience of millions. Ben had been wrong about rich people in La Jolla; some of them did want photos of penniless OB needle-freaks up on their walls. Not that their motivation was so pure, but I took their money and got out of their city for good. Allbreath and Quinn took me out for a last drink in Quinn’s new Mercedes, driving past crowds of upwardly-mobile nothings, lined up to sweat liquor under the neon. They raved about the possibilities of Los Angeles over costly brandy.

“You can’t imagine how I envy you right now,” Quinn said.

“Why don’t you get out, if you think it’s so hot?” I asked suspiciously.

He whipped the brandy around inside his glass, winking at Allbreath. “Man, let me give you some old-timer advice. Now remember this.” He tapped the table for emphasis. “Don’t ever mistake an art dealer for an artist. Artists pretend to have pure motives. Dealers only have wives, girlfriends, new cars, and houses in good neighborhoods. I live three hours from Downtown Los Angeles because that’s as close as I need to be. You, you might prosper, or I might see you picking cans off Mission Beach in a year. But you can go for it. You’re free, man, enjoy it.” He leaned back. “If you survive, then you’ll have my troubles, and you’ll understand me better then.”

I made myself comfortable on the way home, as Quinn weaved drunkenly across the centerline and Allbreath talked to no one. Maybe I wasn’t such a fuck-up. Like a snake charmer, by shutting up and swaying I could have it all, I could live among the straights, and still do my crazy thing. Success and fame don’t always ride together. Ben was a real artist, too ambitious to learn that. He followed his own peculiar green star. He might never get super-rich, but his name would grace the bored mouths between nibbles of Brie and sips of Chardonnay, as they stood outside the audition, never amounting to shit. And we would live forever.

Morning’s blue sky screamed with leaving. With the money from my opening in the bank, I packed my belongings and took a Polaroid of myself waving good-bye, leaving it where Craig and Ben would find it, in the kitchen atop the stereo, under the plastic film container of weed. They’d gone up the coast earlier, to Cardiff-by-the-Sea to gossip over somebody’s dope. I scribbled a brief note in honor of “Apocalypse Now”. Sell the art, I wrote. Sell the gallery, sell the kids, sell yourselves. I’m not coming back.

I never even saw San Diego disappear in my rear-view mirror. I cranked the radio as KROQ came in, Siouxie and the Banshees doing “Israel”. I lit my first cigarette of the day. After San Clemente the freeway turns inland, and I didn’t see the ocean again for months.