Chapter 1
It was a cool air summer night and palm tree silhouettes tripped the moonlit sidewalks. We were riding the line of chance as we packed up Lucas Coppens’s ’64 Ford Fairlane and prepared to leave Huntington Beach, the people, the beaches, the whole West Coast behind us forever.
Culminating in dirt roads and desire, I found my life at a crossroads. Like any twenty-five-year-old blue-collar kid from the East Coast drawn by the rich songs of The Beach Boys and The Mamas and The Papas and all else that was California in the sixties and the seventies, I had gone there for the girls, the beaches, and, of course, to be in the movies. But now, I had to leave.
I thought back now to the very first time I had ever heard “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and The Papas, my being in that quintessential moment in Lowell. I remembered thinking then that I had to find a way to get to California. Even though I had never been there before, all I could imagine as I heard that aching flute solo was beautiful beaches, cool and clean, unlike the blowing bitter wind of our New England coast, and beautiful women everywhere; their fine lines and soft words forever surrounding me in endless reverie.
It had been three hard years of conflict and struggle though.
Of my slumming Hollywood Boulevard working meager no-pay production jobs in my spare time and going to dive motels on The Strip to pick up still no-name directors with British accents while they opened up their trash in the backseat of my red Mercury Comet, I worked the clutch and the three-on-the-tree shift on the Comet’s steering column while I chauffeured them around from La Cienega to Sunset, back to La Cienega, and finally back to the studio. One loser left all of his food trash all over my backseat as I scurried him between production sets. I finally had had enough.
And my starving all of the time, raiding abandoned friends’ apartments who had since given up and moved back to Ohio or the Northeast, searching their empty refrigerators for meat but satisfied with the bread and the condiments, only to get through another few days before that meager production assistant check had arrived. I had so gotten used to condiments sometimes being our main course, like packing ketchup sandwiches for our lunch while we worked for free for the students at the American Film Institute, that when we were lucky enough to find meat, it almost made me hurl at first. It was funny how a whole loaf of white bread and a large bottle of ketchup could hold us over for three days. When you hurled, the Ohioans referred to it as “horking.”
The only rewards were short-lived, like sucking down those two Budweiser tall cans after our long day working at the Scientology building, helping more rich kids do their student films so they could get a good grade for their parents. But I couldn’t do it anymore. I remember this one Scientologist guy with two big Dalmatian dogs hanging around the hotel lobby set trying to talk us into his religion, but as hungry as I was, I didn’t seem to care any about Scientology. I had read The Martian Chronicles, and even thought to myself after his empty lecture that everybody knows there isn’t anyone living on Mars . . . It was just a good story.
I had even tried to sell reclaimed energy, just so I could make some money to break back into Hollywood again. It was 1984, and nobody was really serious about conserving energy though. I always believed that the world would eventually dry up; oil was a finite resource, just like gold and chocolate and coffee, but as soon as the fuel prices in America came back down again, no one really cared about reclaimed energy. Supply and demand; cheap and expensive; that is what they taught us in school. I felt really sorry for myself; down on my luck, completely out of it, the flame was flickering. I looked at my life as one big riddle that still wasn’t solved. It was always raining in California, and although I still wanted to chase my show biz dreams, I needed to do it elsewhere now.
So after borrowing about a thousand dollars off of my sister Ciara in Massachusetts and moving in with Declan Brady and Lucas Coppens in Huntington Beach and working an office job for a few months to try to save back up my cash reserves, we all began crafting a great expedition.
All three of us had the same and different mind-set. We snuck out at midnight in late August, Lucas, Declan, and me, northbound to San Luis Obispo, stealing away inside an hour where half the world was asleep and the other half was using up all of its energy.
I’d miss Huntington Beach, I thought, even those crazy oil derricks pumping midnight oil everywhere about our existence, the soft monotone of their grinding mechanisms, their heads dipping with indifference, accepting their blue-collar roles, seemingly not caring, not wanting to ask why as they sucked the fuel out of the ground below the quaking beds in which we slept.
It was really funny though that one of the oil derricks, the one in our backyard rental cottage lot, the digger that Luke had mounted to ride before, so quickly did come to a grinding halt like some sort of premonition. After pumping for who knows, maybe years endlessly, this giant grasshopper machine just stopped dead in the night as if it too was trying to tell us something, that maybe something had changed. It left the still backyard in the beach night eerie. The background hum we had become accustomed to for so long was gone. Like the grandfather clock in my grandmother’s kitchen that ticked endlessly throughout my childhood, the one that had suddenly stopped dead on the day of my thirteenth birthday, the oil derrick had also stopped. Declan ran in from the back porch with a few others to tell everyone who was huddled in our empty kitchen for the going away party what had happened.
“She’s stopped! The oil digger in the back lot has stopped! I think she wants to come with us!” he exclaimed laughing with animated wide eyes and the big white Declan Brady mouth filled with Brady teeth that all the Brady family seemed to have.
We had said our good-byes to the handful of misfit orphan friends, because in California in the eighties, even people with parents were orphans, all of them friends that we had collected over the past few years. We drove the Ford down to the end of Sixth Street and took a right on Pacific Coast Highway, heading north away from the pier and her ever-fainting lights, out past the concrete county of Los Angeles and into the darkness ahead of us.
We drove all night. After a good while, the three of us had been reduced to twenty-minute driving shifts, twenty minutes being all we could take before the road turned blurry and the divider bumps, bursts of reality within someone’s foolish dreaming, woke each of us up behind the wheel, and we resigned to pass the wheel over to the next driver. It was crazy dangerous to drive this way, we all knew it, but we were being pushed by some foolish, reckless desire to find ourselves, to somehow find a way to get to where we were supposed to be.
Up, through, and beyond Santa Barbara, we managed to pull off California 101 and into Pismo Beach around four o’clock, maybe five o’clock in the morning; the night was still dark.
Right off the 101, the old Ford climbed up to a house on a hill that overlooked the highway and the rolling sand dunes of Pismo Beach. It was a planned first stop, as thought out as a notebook plan of zigzag stops across the whole North American continent could only be. We just hadn’t planned on being so doggone tired and having such a tough time staying awake in order to get there on our maiden leg; after all, it was only our first four hours of liberation.
Pismo was my “friend” stop. The dots we had placed across the map were the respective contacts we had collected amongst the three of us, most of whom had some place in our past, be it a high school or college acquaintance or a family member or somebody else’s relative. This was the plan so we wouldn’t have to outlay tons of cash on our trip across the great continent.
Zane, now living in beautiful pink-sanded-reflections-of-sunset Pismo Beach, was originally from my old neighborhood, Christian Hill, in Lowell. We went to high school together, and both lived at Paradise Beach in New Hampshire for many summers, first at the MacNamaras’ green, two-story boarding house and then renting our own place, “The Penthouse,” with a few others. It was at “The Penthouse” that Zane had put a few holes in the drywall while suffering through the pain of an apparent heartache. That was before any of us knew what it was. The pain manifested itself with karate chops; he put them right through the moaning drywall between his bedroom and mine, the result being an irregular window in the partition wall. I remember being seventeen and driving in the maddening rain in the October nights with Zane in an old Buick that was sicker than we were as we headed from Paradise west into Nashua to take those karate lessons. And then back at Paradise Beach, he’d be throwing a twenty-five-pound plate into a green army backpack and running down the beach with it at the crack of the next beautiful dawn. One day, Zane and his girlfriend Maureen all up and moved to California. We had all graduated high school by then, and he wanted to move on. I guess they had both listened to all of those same songs from The Beach Boys and The Mamas and The Papas like I had.