PAGAN
LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS
24.
Refocusing
Oklahoma was soon a fading vision in my
rear-view mirror. The Texas panhandle also passed without incident. I hollered when I
reached New Mexico. Now I was on my side of the world. I welcomed mesas and plateau
panoramas and the fragrance of sweet summer sage, Indian colors, hawks diving, pheasants
routed, ducks. And the Triumph purred and rolled like thunder across the land. Arizona
went by in the night for coolness; the stars and the moon, warm nightwinds in my face and
California drawing nigh.
I no sooner crossed into California than I was
surrounded by five highway patrol cars and probably ten officers: red and yellow lights
flashing and sirens shattering the silence of the surrounding wilderness. They gave me a real hard time.
My
Triumph seemed to be lacking some of their prerequisites. I had no registration, no
license plate, no mufflers, a busted mirror, no tail light lens and no picture on my
driver’s license. Plus, although I technically possessed a helmet as mandated by
California law -- it was so small it only fit over the very top part of my head and
squeezed my temples fiercely, causing excruciating pain. But it was the only helmet I had.
So I had to use it since California had a stupid helmet law and that was the only thing
the cops laughed about. They enjoyed seeing the pain I was willing to go through to
fulfill their dumb law. They wrote me up a hundred and fifty dollars worth of tickets. I
drove fifty miles further and was stopped again by different cops and given another
seventy-five dollars worth of party favors. But they didn’t daunt my spirit much. Not
after what I had already been through. These cops were just giving me paper. They
weren’t trying to murder me. Definite improvement. Soon I was dissolving myself into
the heavy California traffic as the freeway raced to the sea.
When I got to my mom’s home I got a hearty
welcome from her and my step dad and my little brother Eric. After plenty of hugs and a
sloppy face-lick from Demetrious, I was ushered into the kitchen where mom shoved food
down my throat. I was famished. They all wanted to hear about the trip and I sure had some
stories to tell. (And a few that I would keep private...) I rubbed my slobbery St Bernard
behind the ears and wrestled him to the ground. He was sure happy to see me.
The next day I putted south to Laguna. What a
fine feeling it was to slowly roll along those streets! Who could ever realize what I had
gone through to bring my motorcycle to that town?
***
I suppose it would make more sense if I tried
to explain again why exactly I had it in my head that Laguna Beach was the place I was
supposed to be. With all the dramas I had to go through to be there anyone would wonder
why I didn’t simply find some friendlier beach on which to roll out my bedroll. There
were several reasons. I had a vision of myself living there, as a successful artist in a
nice house up on the hill. I was young and headstrong, and I was determined that my
artistic skills would somehow blossom there. Even if I had to live for a time in a
sleeping bag on the beach, it wouldn’t be for long. Because somehow my artistic
skills would be recognized and I would get a hand up onto the ladder that would lead me to
my dream. Like for instance, my jewels would suddenly be very valuable and in demand, or I
would sit there with my guitar and compose twenty or thirty songs over a month or so and
people would hear them and WHOOSH, I would be swept away into a musical career. Or I would
spend a hundred dollars on canvas and oils and whip out twenty oil paintings while staying
in someone’s garage, and a gallery owner would hear about them and put them on
display and VOILA! I would be on my way to fame and fortune. Or I would write. I would get
a big thick blank book and start filling it with my observations on life while sitting in
coffeeshops, and SHIZZAMM! Some editor from a local magazine would come over and sit at my
table in the cafeteria and ask if she could have a look at what I was writing – and
she would hire me on the spot to write a weekly column. None of these dreams were
impossible. Any of them could come true in some form or other. But I would have to be in
Laguna for them to happen quite the way I imagined them to happen. So that is why I was
trying so hard to be there.
***
So
anyway, I had a juggling act going on now, what with the Triumph and Demetrious and my
bedroll and gear. I couldn’t leave the gear sitting on the bike while I hung out on
the beach or it would be stolen. And Demetrious could easily be stolen too if I left him
on the beach alone while I moved my bike from one parking meter to another—in
addition to whatever other trouble he could cause if left alone. The Triumph needed a
permanent parking space. If I left it sitting alongside Pacific Coast highway one minute
too long a cop was right on it writing up another citation. So I had to constantly worry
about leaving Demetrious and my gear while I moved the bike around several times a day.
The
cops were terrible. They did not want transients in Laguna and they were known to grin at
times when thinking about how the citation they were writing would add one more financial
hardship to the struggling poor people who wanted to hang out together on the beach. The
cops loved to see us writhe at the thought of the jail time we would do if we failed to
come up with the money to pay the fine.
Eve was a
beautiful tall, boxum young woman with the most gorgeous cascade of white-blond hair that
flowed all the way to her waist. The name fit her perfectly. We could have been lovers; we
liked each other that much. We even talked and laughed about doing it. We became really
close friends and sat together frequently on beaches and curbs and in cafes. This woman
was a colossus of beauty and sensitivity—and intelligent, too—she even had a
pilot’s license. She was angry because of the way the cops were treating her when she
was driving her car. Usually she’d be on her way to the beach and so she’d be
wearing a sensational skimpy bikini and the cops would pull her over for the most vague of
reasons. They’d make her get out of her car so they could see her better. Morosely
she told me that more than once she was told she could get herself out of a big ticket if
she’d do a “favor” for a cop. Of course she wasn’t that sort of
person. I mean, dig it: She was EVE—primal woman. Had they no respect for things
sacred? Not them. Consequently she had a hard time arranging her budget to pay off their
frivolous fines.
One day I came
upon her in the Safeway parking lot. The beauty was a terrible mess; black eye, scratches,
bandaged nose. She told me what had happened. A cop—No, a cop, whose name I simply
will refrain from mentioning, and two other cops had busted into her
apartment—supposedly looking for drugs. She’d asked them to wait since she was
just getting out of the shower and wasn’t dressed—but they didn’t
wait—they busted down the door and the big cop and the two little cops dragged her
out into the street screaming—and nude. She told me they were grabbing at her breasts
and she was fending off their hands and generally struggling as best she could. In the
process they broke her nose and blackened her eye, and she showed me several less obvious
black and purple bruises. Her father had had to come and bail her out. Eve leaned on me
and sobbed for an hour.
So that’s
what we were up against.
I tried about
every scheme I could think of to park my bike in a safe place where it wouldn’t be
ticketed. Moving it every so many hours just didn’t work. And feeding parking meters
was impossible as well as illegal. I looked for some local person who lived near the beach
who would allow me to park it in their driveway. No luck. I put it in the Safeway parking
lot—but they had a habit of towing away vehicles, too.
My biggest fear was that the cops would find some reason to take me to jail
and that would leave my bike sitting beside the street and I would lose it to the impound
yard.
The bike
developed a burnt valve and I rode it into the Newport Beach Honda shop for repairs. Weeks
passed. Every time I phoned them to see if it was done they told me they hadn’t
gotten around to it yet. Well at least it wasn’t causing me any more cop problems and
I didn’t really need it much, inasmuch as in Laguna everything was within walking
distance.
Later when it
was finally repaired I took it to my mom’s home in Huntington Beach and parked it in
the back yard. The only problem with that was my step-father Earl inevitably wanted to lay
claim to it and I had to put my foot down. But it sat there much of the time. If I wanted
it I just had to go get it. They lived only twenty miles away from Laguna.
So I was back to
my old haunts; sleeping up on the cliff; sitting on the beach in the vibrant sunsets
drinking a pint bottle of Boone’s Farm Red Ripple wine with Demetrious lolling in the
sands beside me, his tongue hanging out a mile; back to loving-up Diane in our hideaway
spot beneath the beach house.
Sometimes I
walked to a seacave in north Laguna where I’d enjoyed spending time since my
highschool days. The cave was thirty of forty feet deep; a great place to make love but a
rough place to awaken in the middle of the night with the tide coming up fast.
***
Demetrious and I had a crummy experience with
the local dog catcher atop the sea-cliffs near the Victor Hugo restaurant. He was turning
into a real bully, fighting with other dogs and I was tired of apologizing to people for
his behavior. On that day he actually hurt a much smaller dog and I lost my temper and
gave him a bit of a spanking on the haunches while reprimanding him. There were better,
more intelligent ways I should have handled it. I was not at my best. I should have done
things different, certainly. What made it worse was that the humane officer showed up
right in the middle of it. I was lucky he didn’t take me straight to jail. Many years
previous, back in 1967 I owned a Rhesus Pigtail Mecaque monkey in Newport Beach California
and it had a real nasty meanstreak that I tried to cure by spanking it, which only made
matters worse. I should have learned from that experience. But there I was in Laguna going
through those lessons all over again. It was a new age where disciplining your pet is
considered cruelty to animals. You cannot spank your dog, or your cat anymore in
California. And you certainly can’t spank your monkey.
But I was very upset with Demetrious. I know
full well that I was reacting to all the pressures in my life. I had certainly been through enough of them lately.
The
humane officer continued to plague me, long after I had recovered from my fit of
distemper. The thing that bothered me about his attitude was that he didn’t know
me—he just assumed I was a violent and abusive person, not fit to have a dog.
There
was a leash law in Laguna which we violated regularly.
After all, it didn’t seem necessary to me to have to keep Demetrious on a
leash in my hand even when he was curled up asleep at my feet—but the cops ticketed
me for it nonetheless. And it seems like a dog aught to have a run now and then on an
empty beach, but the cops never agreed. So we broke the law and consequently the humane
officer had Demetrious in his pound more than once and it was always a real problem
getting him back out. So I left him more and more at my mother’s home.
***
In the fall of the year whenever I had the
Triumph in Laguna it contributed significantly to some wonderful adventures with pretty
girls, but they probably don’t require much depiction. It’s funny how
motorcycles excite women though. A motorcycle makes love a cinch. Just invite women to go
for a ride in the early morning, run down to a lonely beach in south Laguna, lay out a
couple towels… What a great way to spend the morning!
But an even better thing happening was the hot
springs ten miles inland from San Juan Capistrano. Once upon a time they had been
developed, and famous. In the 1880s people came up the canyon to the resort in horse-drawn
wagons. But all that remained in the fall of 1974 were some crumbling cement pools amidst
a huge thick wilderness. Hippies camped all over the area. There was even a half-assed
commune. But mostly people just sat together in the hot waters and partied. Whenever
Laguna started getting really weird I rode my Triumph out and camped at the hot springs
for a few days.
One thing nice about a place like
that—there’s no beating around the bush. Everyone is nude. Women in the nude
don’t play the games women do in bathing-suit worlds. If you meet someone you like
you may leave the nude hot pools and take a walk together out into miles and miles of tall
grass and trees. Maybe find a special space in the sun to stretch out and do some massage
and whatever. I was in my element there. I loved it.
But life has a way of putting us through
changes, making us see things differently, too…
***
Heck, I was getting entangled in love affairs.
I was 26 years old and full of the old spunk and I made lots of messes and hurt feelings,
my own included. There came a point where I realized I couldn’t even remember all the
faces of the women I had made love with. I was meeting some of them again down the line as
if they were total strangers and they would remind me that we had been lovers once a year
or so ago. That was embarrassing and made me think I was losing my mind. And sometimes a
wonderful sexual adventure ended up making a shambles of love. That is a very unkind
thing...
I took a beauty to South Laguna on the Triumph
and we made love. She began meeting me under
the beach house, too. Sensational sex. I don’t remember her name. But I remember her
long-haired hippy boyfriend’s name—it was the same as my given name, Tom. And
when he found out about my affair with his girlfriend he came to me crying. He wanted to
know if I realized how much he loved her. He wanted me to know they’d been together
for a year and had been planning to get married. He asked me if she meant anything to me
at all? I felt as if he were a mirror image of myself standing there crying, the way he
needed a woman who really loved him to share his life. And there I was ruining his dreams.
I told him I wouldn’t see her anymore.