Chapter 2
Zane and Maureen had been expecting us. I had called ahead from a phone booth just north of Santa Barbara, and they both were wide awake and waiting for us with big hugs. We rolled in late and threw our things down and crashed right in their living room.
“Spending all this time in Los Angeles?” Zane said, “You’ll never catch me down that way unless I’m driving through on my way to Mexico . . . and Lowell? I’m not ever going back again!”
He seemed content to just stay right there on the beautiful golden Central Coast and maybe live in a trailer someday and hunt wild boar with his crossbow in the beautiful oak tree hills that covered the grade around San Luis Obispo. Zane wanted to live off of the grid just like a hermit and never have to pay taxes again.
But for me, I felt that I needed more than that. Life was still one big riddle that needed to be solved. Notoriety, happiness, security, love, comfort, faith, it was all connected somehow. I was determined to figure it out before it was all over. Perhaps Zane already had figured it out.
Declan, Lucas, and I were driving cross-country until the road ran out, and then we were going to jump on a plane with a one-way ticket to London and then maybe backpack across the whole European continent until we found our dream jobs working in the entertainment industry somewhere along that path; a music video production job in England would be great.
When we all awoke at Zane’s the following morning, Zane and I talked about New England and all of the vivid memories that went with it. Aidan Maloney, God rest his kindred soul, lived at the MacNamara boarding house with us on the New Hampshire coast back during those high school summers. Aidan “Lones” (as we called him), Robert Hillyard, and I shared a little room off of the front porch of the MacNamara main house when we were all about fourteen in 1973. Lones was an arcade hand for the summer at the Paradise Beach Casino; Hillyard was a busboy, and I was a dishwasher. Zane was sixteen then and lived in another room in the back of the MacNamara house where he had his own door and no underage eleven o’clock curfew to fear. But Lones loved going out with Zane and the older guys and used to sneak back into our off-porch closet room through an open outside window every night around one o’clock in the morning. I remember one night Mrs. MacNamara busting into that little room after curfew and throwing that light switch on right in the nick of time to catch Aidan crawling through that side window after he had been out all night drinking with Zane and the older kids.
“Aidan Maloney! I’m calling your mother in the morning and sending you home!” she screamed.
“No, please, Mrs. MacNamara, please don’t send me home! Please, please, Mrs. MacNamara!” Lones begged her.
Zane and I remembered Robert Hillyard (who is now a priest). Robert Hillyard, sitting in that rocking chair at the MacNamara house at eight o’clock the next morning just eating his plain toast with butter in the corner of the front porch, rocking away, just like he had never been woken up the night before.
“Beautiful morning, isn’t it, Mrs. MacNamara?” Robert asked her as she passed through on her way to her yard.
“Not if your name is Aidan Maloney!” she snapped back at him.
I had seen my first concert with Zane. It was Roy Buchanan playing that sweet blues sound at the Paradise Beach Casino the summer after we graduated high school in 1976. I had never heard someone make sounds like that from a guitar, sounds that truly touched the soul. How come I had never heard of this guy before? And he was doing it all as drunk as a fool. He walked to the end of the stage that night at Paradise Beach and fell off it just like he had walked over the edge of a cliff, and the show was over, and that was it. Roy Buchanan, plastered, lay on the floor, and the show was cut short. There was no catcher in the rye for Roy that night. Crazy, mad, and beautiful life; it was everywhere.
How I wanted to play that sweet sound just like Roy Buchanan, or Jeff Beck, or Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. I wanted to be that good but didn’t want to put the time in with guitar lessons, and could never get past the first few weeks of calloused fingers. That was too much time, so that was that.
Unbeknownst to me and the world back then, but Roy would cut another thing short a few years later in 1988—his life. He hung himself in jail after getting arrested for driving under the influence in Pennsylvania. All that sweet talent only with us mere mortals for such a short time and then gone forever. But everyone doubted that he killed himself. His captors did it to him, they said.
The American Graffiti movie had put that dream of California in me too. Even though it had been released a few years before, I finally got to see it with Zane in that summer of ’76 at the Paradise Beach movie theatre. I imagined myself someday cruising some beautiful California boulevard, chasing beautiful blondes like Suzanne Somers in a white T-Bird and the Beach Boys and The Mamas and The Papas singing everywhere.
After I graduated college in 1980, one night while the summer Massachusetts night air blew through the screens in my bedroom on Eighteenth Street in Lowell, I had my first vision of her, my sweet Colette. The fireflies briefly lit the bushes running our concrete driveway while my thoughts looked past the open window into the blowing trees of a soft summer rainstorm. The lyrics of Led Zeppelin played aloud on my bedroom turntable and told me that I would find her there, out in California.
It wasn’t until the following year in 1981 that the journey out west did come to pass, though. I was driving a truck for the Lowell Sun, my third three-month job since graduation, when my friends Richie Clark and Sal Caprissi approached me at a men’s softball league party outside Charlie McIntyre’s Pub and asked me if I wanted to move to Newport Beach with them.
“Newport Beach, Rhode Island?” I asked, “What do you want to go there for? Isn’t that where all of the rich people live? Huge houses, rocky coast, shipbuilder descendants, tales of prohibition bootleggers and whalers from Moby Dick?”
“No, California!” Richie said with his eyes lighting up the August twilight. “You know, Beverly Hills! We’re gonna be movie stars, Mike!” He screamed aloud and began singing the jingle from TV’s “The Beverly Hillbillies.” After this, he just let out one of his characteristic loud, infectious laughs, and Sal and I laughed with him. We planned to leave three weeks from that night.
But there was a hiccup. Richie had always been a lady’s man, tall, good-looking; he even kept two girlfriends at both ends of the state, both of them named Sarah, so when they called he wouldn’t mix them up. That was, until the day that he did mix them up. He thought he was talking to one of them instead of the other and really screwed things up and one of the Sarahs consequentially broke up with him. Because of this, Richie wanted to postpone the trip for a month or so and see if he could work things out with the Sarah’s, but Sal and I thought differently.
Sal Caprissi and I, after already quitting our jobs, couldn’t wait for poor Richie. We jumped into my red Mercury Comet with the “three gears on the tree” on the date that we had planned and headed west with Taboo. Taboo was Sal’s sweet, amicable-as-long-as-you-knew-her pit bull. We drove for a week on the Auto Club highways of America until we finally got to the other side. California! We put up at Zane’s near San Luis Obispo. We stayed with Zane for about a month but found no work in the sleepy sixties hot tub college town, so we packed up our stuff (and Taboo again) and headed south for Los Angeles.
Back then, poor Zane was probably glad to get rid of us, for he was out of work and only trying to be as hospitable as his own money could stretch in accommodating his two jobless friends. But that’s what people did when you were friends; you’d let them overstay their welcome, maybe for months at a time, before finally booting them out.
One morning, with all of the stress that Zane was under, he drained the oil out of his new Honda and put brand-new oil in the transmission fluid reservoir and his car seized on him while going up Questa Grade. It was that very afternoon that Sal and I left.
Three years later, Declan, Lucas, and I were here at good old Zane’s again. Colette had left me just months before in Huntington Beach, and I needed to leave the beautiful coast through the same open door that I had come in from.
Zane and I reminisced some more about the Paradise Beach, New Hampshire, days. We talked about another Lowellian, Larry Bordeaux, who left Lowell for San Diego in the summer of 1979.
“Whatever happened to Larry? He seemed to disappear forever,” I said.
“Remember Larry tying himself to the chimney before he got into his sleeping bag those nights we used to sleep on that slanted third-story roof of The Penthouse in Paradise Beach?” Zane laughed. His heavy laugh started at his mouth and soon took over his whole face as he threw his head back. Passing his eyes, the laugh changed the color of his skin a warm red all the way back to his jet-black Native American hairline.
“Yeah, Larry was afraid of sleepwalking off of the edge. He didn’t want a surprise three-story ride!” I told Declan, Lucas, and Zane’s girlfriend Maureen.
“It’s a good thing Roy Buchanan never slept on that roof with us!” Zane laughed.
We had nicknamed that apartment “The Penthouse” because it sat atop two stories of a shingled, dilapidated beach house with a rickety staircase going up on the outside. We had even bought red and black silk-screened T-shirts that advertised the party palace to all of Paradise Beach as we walked to and from our restaurant jobs. During that particular summer, I was seventeen and Zane was nineteen. Nothing was in our refrigerator back in those days save for a few bricks of processed cheese that had been stolen from the restaurant we both worked at . . . Cheese that kept us from starvation some of the days; we seemed to subsist on cheese and beer.
I remembered waking up on that Penthouse roof beside Larry one morning who was tied to the chimney in his sleeping bag. A rooftop of sleeping bags, we all watched that huge red ball of sunrise pushing up through the water of the deep Atlantic Ocean. Zane was tapping me on the shoulder and pointing to the sun’s magnificence, with no spoken words, just all of us watching it happen; the sun itself coming from an eleven in the morning London tea, or somewhere else out over that same curved horizon that once mesmerized the Native Americans.
Here in California, I had watched that same beautiful sun set so deeply over the Pacific on its way somewhere else. It was time to find out where it was coming from, that magnificent, warm ball of light.
That morning in Pismo Beach, Zane and Maureen took Declan, Lucas, and I to brunch at a roadside restaurant right off the 101 where a giant cowboy sculpted from a redwood stood at watch out in the parking lot looking westward. The wooden cowboy looked out toward the Pacific Ocean; consternation appeared in his face, as if he was frustrated that he had come all this way and run out of west. For him, there were people everywhere, college students, and no more open land. This was San Luis Obispo, where Cal Poly “Dollies” roamed the streets of yesterday’s hippy girls; where hot tubs and freethinking, hairy armpits clashed with upturned-collared Izod Lacrosse shirts and sweet daddy’s money.
“Tell Zane and Maureen your sleeping-in-the-refrigerator-box story,” Declan said at breakfast.
“All right then,” I obliged. “There was a late-night party in Covina a few months ago where our friend Henry and one of his ex-marine buddies had asked me to come along,” I began. “I fell asleep in the back of Henry’s friend’s Z28 before we even got to the stupid party, so Henry and the marine just locked the doors of the car to let me sleep. They went off to the party somewhere down the street on their own. Around one o’clock in the morning, I awoke in the back of the car to the sound of someone peeing all over the Z28 door! It startled me. And then, as I jumped up, the guy bolted!” I said. “This guy didn’t know someone was in the car he was pissing on, and I scared the crap out of him. I was so disoriented that I got out of the car in a stupor and automatically locked the stupid door behind me, leaving my dungaree jacket behind. I walked the streets up and down but couldn’t find the party my friends were at. I was freezing in the windy Covina night! Full of weary despair, I pulled an empty refrigerator box out of a flatbed truck in the alley and dragged it behind a garage to get warm, to find sweet sleep, because that is all I wanted to do. While I lay in the box with an opening for my face to look out, all of a sudden, another guy was peering in at me! He said that he had watched me from his window and asked if I wanted to get warm in his apartment until my friends came back. It was cold, and he kept insisting that I sleep on his couch inside. I hesitatingly accepted and lay there wide-eyed on his couch for a few hours as my observer paced the floor of his apartment. Wondering all sorts of crazy things that might happen to me, I abruptly jumped to my feet, and bolted out the door and back to the side of the car in the early-morning light.”
“Once the little creepy guy had seen me gone, he quickly found me again beside the car and was back to try to convince me to come back in,” I told them. “But it was all too freaky, and I was spooked now. I had seen too many scripts where this wasn’t going to be a good ending.”
“It was a few more hours before Henry and the ex-marine ever returned laughing and wondering why I hadn’t just stayed in the car. I told them about the guy first peeing on the car, then the empty box maneuver, and finally the little guy that had coaxed me upstairs.”
“‘Where does he live? Let’s go rough him up,’ the ex-marine laughed, but I wouldn’t point out the place to them. I wouldn’t have it. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to the poor little guy; he probably meant me no harm,” I said to Zane and Maureen.
“Things that would happen only to you, my friend,” Zane laughed.
I looked over at Maureen’s pretty face, her sweet smile, her long, dark hair and her beautiful curvy body and thought at that moment of just how lucky Zane was.
We talked of all kinds of things before we left them: Tina Turner on the radio, the beautiful Aegean Sea, and the Greek Isles. Zane wanted to sell his earthly possessions and join us for a minute, but then what about hunting wild boar and his own vision of paradise? He had to stay in Pismo. We talked about random things like Vanessa Williams, pretty girls, and how many chin-ups we could do, but in the blink of an eye, we were back on the road, and Zane and Maureen were gone. It was two forty in the afternoon, and we headed north out of Pismo. Lucas got out of the car one last time to adjust and readjust the bungie cord on the Fairlane, the bungie cord that held down Declan’s surfboard on the top of the car, just to make sure the surfboard wouldn’t vibrate too much on the ensuing drive up sweet rocky California Route 1 just south of Big Sur.