“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, macrame 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
