The Kings of Cool Read online

  —except that liberals want to be loved.

  Ben disagrees—

  The liberals in the California State Legislature would not block a bill creating concentration camps as long as they got campaign contributions from the concrete manufacturers, the drivers hauling the inmates through the gates were unionized, and their trucks had the requisite minimum MPG standards and used the commuter lanes.

  Ben knows California would be zapping guys at the pace of the Texas Versus Florida Bush Brothers Sibling Rivalry if the electric chair were solar powered.

  “They don’t use Sparky anymore,” Chon tells him. “It’s lethal injection.”

  Right.

  Narcotics are illegal, so we use them to execute people.

  For crimes.

  36

  Anyway, this is all well and good

  verbal fun and games

  but what matters isn’t what Ben and Chon say to each other, it’s

  what they don’t.

  Chon doesn’t tell Ben about Sam Casey getting ripped off and beaten up, and his response to said provocation, because Ben wouldn’t approve and he’d get all bummed out about the necessity of force in a world that’s supposed to be about love and peace, blah blah.

  Ben doesn’t tell Chon about the weird interaction with OGR because, well, it’s just weird and random and probably nothing, and besides, what’s Chon supposed to do about it? He’s on his way to the Stan, he has enough to worry about (like staying alive), so Ben doesn’t want to bother him.

  And so they miss this critical junction, this intersection of events, this opportunity to put one and one together and get

  One.

  One same problem.

  They’re not stupid, they would have put it together, but “would have” is just another way of saying

  “didn’t.”

  37

  They walk Chon as far as the security line.

  Where O hugs him and won’t let go.

  “I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you,” she says, unable to stop the tears.

  “I love you, too.”

  Ben pries her off, hugs Chon himself, and says, “Don’t be a hero, bro.”

  As if, Ben thinks.

  Chon’s on his third deployment with a fucking SEAL team. He is a fucking hero and he can’t be anything but.

  Always has, always will.

  “I’ll be cowering at the bottom of the deepest foxhole,” Chon says.

  Yeah.

  They watch him go through the line.

  38

  Boland gets on the phone.

  “Good news,” he says. “Leonard is putting the hard case on an airplane. Looks like he’s deploying.”

  “You sure it’s him?”

  “He meets Hennessy’s description of the guy who trashed him,” Boland answers.

  That is good news, Crowe thinks.

  Very good news.

  Well, not for Leonard.

  39

  Ben doesn’t see the car that follows him out of John Wayne–Orange County Airport and stays behind him all the way to Laguna.

  Why should he?

  That isn’t his world, he’s bummed about Chon leaving, and then O drops this bombshell:

  “I threw myself at him.”

  “Who?”

  “Chon.”

  Boom.

  He’s not jealous—jealousy isn’t in Ben’s makeup—but Chon and O?

  It’s huge.

  But Ben is cool. Ben is always cool. “And?”

  “I bounced off.”

  The Wall of Chon.

  “Oh.”

  “Rejected. Spurned. Unrequited.”

  “You never hear about ‘requited love,’” Ben says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

  “I don’t, anyway.”

  “Pouting doesn’t look good on you.”

  “Really?” O says. “Because I thought it did.”

  A few seconds later she says, “I hate this fucking war.”

  She was fourteen, watching TV that morning, stalling going to school when she saw what she thought was cheesy CGI come across the screen.

  An airliner. A building.

  It didn’t seem real and still doesn’t.

  But Chon was already in the service by then.

  A fact for which she blames herself.

  Ben knows what she’s thinking.

  “Don’t,” he says.

  “Can’t help it.”

  She can’t because she doesn’t know

  It isn’t her fault

  It goes back

  Generations.

  Laguna Beach, California

  1967

  Said I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm,

  Going to join in a rock-and-roll band . . .

  —JONI MITCHELL, “WOODSTOCK”

  40

  John McAlister rolls his skateboard down Ocean Avenue, then puts the board under his arm and walks along Main Beach up to the Taco Bell, because sometimes guys get their food, then go into the men’s room and leave their tacos on the table.

  The tacos and Johnny are both gone when they come out.

  Dig young Johnny Mac.

  Tall for his fourteen years, wide shoulders, long brown hair that looks like it was cut with hedge clippers. Your classic grem—T-shirt and board shorts, huaraches, shell necklace.

  When he makes it up to Taco Bell there’s a crowd standing around.

  Big guy with long blond hair is buying food for everybody, handing out tacos and those little plastic packets of hot sauce to a bunch of surfers, hippies, homeless drug casualties, runaways, and those skinny girls with headbands and long straight hair who all look alike to John.

  The guy looks like some kind of SoCal surfer version of a sea god. John wouldn’t know Neptune or Poseidon from Scooby-Doo, but he recognizes the look of local royalty—the deep tan, the sun-bleached hair, the ropy muscles of a guy who can spend all day every day surfing and who has money anyway.

  Not a surf bum, a surf god.

  Now this god looks down on him with a friendly smile and warm blue eyes and asks, “You want a taco?”

  “I don’t have any money,” John answers.

  “You don’t need money,” the guy answers, his face breaking into a grin. “I have money.”

  “Okay,” John says.

  He’s hungry.

  Guy hands him two tacos and a packet of hot sauce.

  “Thanks,” John says.

  “I’m Doc.”

  John doesn’t say anything.

  “You have a name?” Doc asks.

  “John.”

  “Hi, John,” Doc says. “Peace.”

  Then Doc moves along, handing out tacos like fishes and loaves. Like Jesus, except Jesus walked on water and Doc rides on it.

  John takes his tacos before Doc changes his mind or anyone there makes him as the kid who filches food off tables, goes out into the parking lot, and sits down at the curb beside a girl who looks like she’s nineteen or twenty.

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

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

  “Are you a Hindu?” John asks.

  He doesn’t know what a Hindu is.

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

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

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

  Hippie runaway girls annoy the shit out of John.

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

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

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

  John doesn’t go home.

  Ever.

  41

  Ka

  Boom.

  Stan’s head explodes.

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

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

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

  Not holy shit, holy communion.

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

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

  Stan turns to look.

  And starts to cry

  it’s so

  bluetiful.

  Stan and Diane

  (“This is a little ditty about Stan and Diane

  Two American kids growing up in . . .”

  Ah, fuck it)

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

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

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

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

  perfect products of their times

  Baby Boomers

  Hippies.

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

  —incense, sandals, psychedelic posters, rock albums, tie-dyed T-shirts, macramé bracelets (again, try not to hate them), all that happy shit—

  —and distribute acid to the turned-on.

  There is a flaw in their plan.

  Money.

  More accurately, the lack thereof.

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

  Which is the problem with socialism.

  No capital.

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

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

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

  It had to happen.

  The difference between a Surfer and a Hippie?

  A board.

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

  Same thing.

  But we’re not going to get into all that. We could, we could, we’re sorely tempted, but we have a story to tell, and the story is—

  Stan, Diane, and the tribe are trying to build their store a block from one of the best breaks on the OC Coast—

  —Brooks Street—

  where Taco Jesus, aka “Doc,” surfs and distributes free food to any and all

  (socialism)

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

  “Trust fund?”

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

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

  No.

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

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

  “You want a taco?” Doc asks.

  “You want some acid?” Diane replies.

  Cue the 2001 theme.

  This is a moment.

  The seminal mind-fuck that gives birth to

  the group that will become known as

  The Association.

  (And then along came Mary.)

  42

  Here’s how it happens—

  Doc gives Stan and Diane tacos.

  Stan and Diane give Doc a tab of blotter acid.

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

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

  “I know,” Diane gushes.

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

  “I know you do,” Doc says.

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

  And planning to institutionalize it, because

  Stan and Diane share their problem—lack of funds—with Doc and the boys

  and Doc offers a solution.

  “Grass,” he says. “Dope.”

  Surfing and dope go together like . . .

  like . . .

  uhhhh . . .

  . . . surfing and dope.

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

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

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

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

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

  Stan and Diane are happy.

  43

  The store opens, but—

  —the guys keep making runs.

  Because “enough” is a self-contradictory word.

  Enough is never

  enough.

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

  Cool and cool.

  But Doc—

  Doc is a visionary.

  A pioneer, an explorer
.

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

  drives

  to Afghanistan.

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

  The stories turn out to be true.

  Grass is fine, but Afghan hash?

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

  Winner, winner, winner.

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

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

  All this shit comes back to Laguna.

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

  44

  The little girl lives in a cave.

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

  As in Neanderthal.

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

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

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

  The little girl, Kim, hates it.