A Commonplace Book

Santa Anas had been blowing all the smog out of downtown L.A., funneling between the Hollywood and Puente Hills on westward through Gordita Beach and out to sea, and this had been going on for what seemed like weeks now.

Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in everybody's skin of desert winds and heat and relentlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies.

The state liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming unstuck, is how dry the air was. Liquor-store owners could be filling those bottles with anything anymore.

Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody's dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all.

In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there'd only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight.

...it was like the beach, where you lived in a climate of unquestioning hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always expecting to be sold out...

Around nightfall Tito let Doc off on Dunecrest, and it was like landing on some other planet. He walked into the Pipeline to find a couple hundred people he didn't know but who were acting like longtime regulars. Worse, nobody he did know was there at all.... Doc looked into Wavos and Epic Lunch, and the Screaming Ultraviolet Brain, and Man of La Muncha, where the menudo got your nose running just looking at it, and each time it was the same story. Nobody he recognized. He thought briefly about going to his apartment but started worrying that he wouldn't recognize it either or, worse, it wouldn't know him—wouldn't be there, key wouldn't fit or something. Then it occurred to him that maybe Tito had actually dropped him in some other beach town, Manhattan or Hermosa or Redondo, and that the bars, eateries, and so forth he'd been walking into were ones that happened to be similarly located in this other town—same view of the ocean or corner of the street, for example—so he grasped his head carefully in both hands and, mentally advising himself to focus in and pay attention, waited for the next nonthreatening pedestrian to come by.

...hair styled by somebody who was trying to give up smoking...

Was it possible, that at every gathering--concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?

"Gee," he said to himself out loud, "I dunno . . ."