The Gold Coast

25

On the track down 405 they sit in the three rows of seats in Humphrey’s car and talk. Sandy, slumped in the front passenger seat, just smiles; he looks zoned, as if he’s catching some rest before he dives back into it in La Jolla.

Humphrey tells them about a trip he and Sandy and some others took to Disneyland. “We had been in the line for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride for about forty-five minutes when Chapman went nuts. You could see it happen—we were all standing there just waiting, you know, hanging out and moving with the line, and suddenly his eyes bug out past his nose and he gets that happy look he gets when he’s got an idea.” The others laugh, “Yeah, yeah, show us the look, Sandy,” and half-asleep Sandy shows them a perfect simulacrum of it. “So he says real slow, ‘You know, guys, this ride only lasts about two minutes. Two minutes at the most. And we’ll have been in line for it an hour. That’s a thirty-to-one ratio of wait to ride. And the ride is just a fast trackcar going through holograms in the dark. I wonder… do you think… could it be… that this is the worst ratio in Disneyland?’ And he gets the insanity look again and says, ‘I wonder, I just wonder… which one of us can rack up the worst ratio for the whole day?’ And we all see instantly we’ve got a new game, a contest, you know, and the whole day is transformed, because it’s a miserable day at Disneyland, totally densepacked, and there’s some real potential here for racking up some fantastic scores! So we call it Negative Disneyland and agree to add points for stupidest rides combined with the worst ratios.”

The four in back can’t believe it. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, no! It’s the only way to go there! Because with Sandy’s idea we weren’t fighting the situation anymore, you know? We were running around finding the longest lines we could, stepping through our paces like we were on the ride itself, and timing everything on our watches, and every time we turned another corner in the line we’d see Sandy standing there up ahead of us towering over the kids, eyes bugged out and grinning his grin, just digging these monster delays to get on Dumbo the Elephant, Storybook Canal, Casey Junior, the Submarine…”

Sandy’s smile turns blissful. “It was a stroke of genius,” he mutters. “I’ll never do it any other way, ever again.”

“So who won?” Jim asks.

“Oh Sandy, of course. He totaled five and a half hours of waiting for eighteen minutes of ride!”

“I can beat that,” Tashi says promptly. “Hell, I’ve beaten that trying positive Disneyland!” Sandy denies it and they make a bet for next time.

They leave OC and track through the immense nuclear facility at San Onofre, eighteen concrete spheres crowding the narrow valley like buboes bumping out of an armpit, powerlines extending off on ranked towers to every point of the compass, glary halogen and xenon and mercury vapor lamps peppering spheres, towers, support buildings. “Camp Pendleton,” Jim announces, and they all pitch in together: “Protecting California’s Precious Resources!” Or so the neon sign says. The motto is a joke; aside from the nuclear plant, the Marines have contracted with the towns of south OC to take all their sewage into a gigantic treatment facility, which covers the hills south of San Onofre. Concrete tanks and bunkers resemble an oil refinery, and altogether it’s as extensive as the power plant north of it. Then comes the land they’ve leased for the desalination plant that provides OC with much of its water; that means another immense complex of bunkers and tubes, nearly indistinguishable from the nuclear facility, and a whole stretch of the coast blasted by salt mounds and various processing tanks.

After that they’re into the supercamp for Marine recruits, then into Oceanside, and the precious resource is passed. Past Oceanside it’s like OC on a rollercoaster, same condomundo and mallsprawl and autopia, broken up only by some small dead marshes in the low parts of the rollercoaster ride. Yes, San Diego, along with Riverside and Los Angeles and Ventura and Santa Barbara, is nothing more than an extension of OC.…

They get off on La Jolla Village Drive and track west, around the megaversity to La Jolla Farms Road. Here they are stopped at the security gate, Sandy calls his friends, and they’re in. La Jolla Mansion Road, it should be called; they track slowly by a long series of multimillion-dollar homes, all single-family dwellings. Abe, who lives in an annex of his parents’ house on Saddleback Mountain, isn’t impressed, but the rest of them stare. Humphrey goes into his real estate mode and estimates values and mortgage payments and the like in religious tones.

Sandy’s friends’ house is near the end of the road, on the ocean side, therefore on the crumbling edge of Torrey Pines Cliff. They find parking with difficulty, go to the door and are only let in after Sandy’s friend Bob Tompkins comes and okays them. Bob is fortyish, tanned, golden-haired, perfectly featured, expensively dressed. He shakes all their hands, ushers them in, introduces them to his partner Raymond. Raymond is if anything even more perfect than Bob; his jawline could open letters. Perhaps they got their start in modeling.

But now the two are partners in major minor drug dealing, and this is sort of a party for field reps. Sandy recognizes quite a few people he knows. He starts pingponging among them, and rather than follow him his OC friends grab drinks and go out onto the cliff-edge lawn, which is on three terraced levels some three or four hundred feet over the black sea. They’ve got a perfect view of the hilly curve of La Jolla jutting into the dark water, its sparkling skyscraper hotels reflecting like fire off the bay in between; and to the north stretches the whole curve of the southern California coast, a white pulsing mass of light. Major light show, here.

It’s a class-A party. Among the guests on the lawn are some Lagunatics they know, and happily they fall to drinking and talking and dancing.

Jim notices Arthur disappearing down the wooden staircase that leads down to the beach below, following—was that Raymond? Arthur was caustic indeed about the mansions on this road, so seeing him with Raymond is a bit of a surprise to Jim.

This turns some key in Jim’s sense of curiosity. Ever since their raid on Parnell Jim has been asking Arthur questions, and Arthur has been putting him off. It’s better if Jim doesn’t know too much, he says. Jim is up on the theory of revolutionary cells, sure, but it seems to him to be going too far not even to know the name of the group he’s part of. Sure the cause is just, but still… And Arthur—well, who knows exactly why he came along tonight? It isn’t something he’d ordinarily do. And once he said he got his equipment from “the south”… could be that Raymond used drug smuggling as a cover… well, that would be crazy, but…

Jim’s curiosity is aroused. He wanders down the wooden steps of the staircase, into the dark.

The stairs switch back from platform to platform down the steep sandstone cliff: thick planks are nailed into parallel four-by-fours that are bolted to telephone poles driven into the cliff face, and the whole structure is painted some bright color, yellow or pink or orange, hard to tell in the dark. Spectrum band, no doubt. Iceplant and some bushy trees have been planted all around the staircase in semisuccessful efforts to stop the erosion of the cliff. Through one thick clump of trees the stairway proceeds in a groomed tunnel of foliage, and beyond that, on the next platform, Jim sees two dark figures standing. Above them stereo speakers facing westward challenge the even roar of the surf with the majestic end of The Firebird Suite, cranked to high volume.

Curious, and pitched to a bolder level by the music, Jim slips off the staircase into the iceplant. Ho, it’s steeper than it looks! But he can hold his footing, and very slowly he descends through the bushy trees. Any noise he is making is overwhelmed by waves below and music above, which has segued from the Firebird to “Siberian Khantru,” brilliant lead guitar piercing the night and leading the supple bass on a madcap ramble. Fantastic. The last knot of trees overhanging the stairway is just above the platform, fine, Jim wiggles his way down through the low branches, slips on iceplant and jerks to a halt jammed down into the fork of two thick branches. Ribs a little compressed. Hmmm. Seems he might be a little stuck, here. On the other hand, he’s just above the platform, and the two figures, seated on the rail looking down at the faint white-on-black tapestry of breaking waves, are just within earshot. Wouldn’t want to be much closer, in fact. Jim gives up struggling to escape, accepts the salt wetness of his perch, concentrates on listening.

Arthur seems to be making a report, although the booming of the surf makes it difficult to hear everything. “What it comes… the campaign has got its own momentum… supply material and give… do a one-night… bigger operation than there really is.”

“Do any of your” krkrkrkrkrkrkrrr asks Raymond.

“… assume, well, whatever. They don’t know anything.”

“So you guess.”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“And you think a concerted action could bring in the people we’re trying to find?”

“Makes sense, doesn’t it? They” krkrkrkrkrkrkrrrr

“Possibly. Possibly.” Raymond jumps down and stalks the deck of the platform nervously, looking right up at the clump of trees that holds Jim. “If that happens, we might have a hard time finding out about it. Being sure.”

Arthur’s back is now to Jim, and Jim can’t hear his voice at all. But he can hear Raymond’s reply:

“That’d be one way to find out, sure. But it would be dangerous, I mean some of you might just disappear.”

Jim feels his throat and stomach take a big swallow. Disappear?

His paranoia quotient soars into the megapynchons, his understanding of his sabotage adventure with Arthur trapdoors out from under him, leaving him hanging like, well, yes, like a man stuck in a tree on the side of a cliff. His ribs begin to complain vociferously. But he definitely doesn’t want to move until Arthur and Raymond leave.

Relief for his ribs, and frustration for his mounting curiosity, arrive in the form of night beach partyers climbing back up the stairs. Raymond greets them cheerily, and he and Arthur ascend with them. Soon Jim is alone with Torrey Pines Cliff, in his tree. He’d love to take time and think over what he’s just heard, sort it out some, but his ribs protest at the idea and he tries to extricate himself. Arms up, hands on branches to each side, push out. This frees him to fall down the iceplant slope, he lets the branches go when his arms begin to snap out of their sockets, and one branch clips him in the ear as he slides by, heading down here uh-oh, turn into the iceplant and clutch, feet digging, thump, thump, thump! Stopped, thank God. Below him it gets markedly steeper, in fact kind of vertical. All alarms go off in the McPherson body, he convinces one hand to declutch with great difficulty, resets it a foot over toward the stairway. Footwork is trickier, need knobs or clumps of iceplant, the usual spread of the stuff is damned slippery, not that he’s complaining; without it he would be one with the sandstone blocks on the beach, still a couple hundred feet below. Carefully he makes ten or twelve heartstopping handhold transfers, and traverses to the stairway. Leeches onto it, heaves up and over the banister. A group descending the stairs catches him in the final act of rolling over the banister to safety, and they laugh at his evident inebriation. “Fell off, hey? Come on down with us and swim it off.”

“Is he sober enough to swim?”

“Sure, a blast of ocean water will do him good.”

Jim agrees in as calm a voice as he can muster. It’ll be a good way to wash some of the dirt and crushed iceplant off of his hands and face. They descend to the beach, strip, walk to the water. The white, almost phosphorescent rush of broken waves over Jim’s ankles feels good. It’s cold but not anywhere near as bad as he expected. He runs into the water, dives into the chill salt waves. A great rush, cleansing and refreshing. Broken waves tumble him about and he lets them. Maybe Tashi has something in this night surfing idea. Jim does a little desultory bodysurfing in the shore break.

While he’s at it he tumbles into a young lady from the group; she squeaks, clings to him, her body incredibly warm in the ocean chill. Legs wrapped around his middle, arms around his neck, a quick kiss, whoah! Then a wave knocks them apart and she’s off, he can’t find her.

He swims around in an unsuccessful search, chills down, walks out of the water and up the beach. Major refreshment. Remarkably warm out. Beautiful naked women emerge from the surf and walk up to him, give him one of their towels, towel-dry before him. Dryads would they be, or Nereids?

Some quality of the encounter in the dark sea has quickened something in him; it’s not the same as his usual lust, not at all. The others dress, he dresses. Up the stairway, back to the party. No time to sort it out; but some part of him remembers.…

Up top people are dancing in three rooms. Tashi and Abe are in one, doing the beach boy bounce, dance considered as a helix of pogo hops. “Been swimming?” Abe asks, panting. “Yeah. Plus a small mystical experience.” And a big mysterious conversation. Jim joins in the dance. It’s The Wind’n’Sea Surf Killers, singing their latest hit “Dance Till Your Feet Are Bloody Stumps.” Perfect.

And so the party progresses as parties do. Jim never manages to identify his oceanic love. Along about three he finds himself very tired, and unenthusiastic at the prospect of any chemical reascendance. No. He sits in a fine leather chair in the front room, where he can see the entryway. Lot of people in and out. Humphrey and Tash come sit with him and they talk about San Diego. Humphrey enjoys it because of all the deals down in Tijuana. “Of course,” Abe cries as he joins them and sits on the floor. “You should see Humphrey in Tijuana! He grinds those shopkeepers like you can’t believe! ‘Two hundred pesos, shit, you must be joking! I’ll give you ten!’” The others laugh as Abe catches Humphrey’s tone of indignation and pleasure exactly. Humphrey nods, grinning. “Sure.”

“Man, those poor people open up on a Saturday morning and see Humphrey coming in first thing in the day, and it’s like disaster for them, they know they’re going to end up selling half their stock for a couple handfuls of pesos.”

“Rather see an armed robber come in the door,” Tash adds.

“Better deal—”

“Less pain—”

“Safer—”

Arthur shows up. They sit and wait for Sandy. Quietly Jim watches Arthur, who seems the same as always. No clues there.