1 Entrance Examinations and Other Tortures of Youth.

Sit down, my friends, and make yourselves comfortable to hear a confession. Don’t repeat this to anyone. It began when I ran off on my girlfriend, but if you pay attention, you’ll find plenty of other mistakes, other moments when I should’ve turned off the cameras, put away the drugs and gone to bed. What choice does anyone have, really, if they lust after fame and fortune? Once you’ve hit the big time, especially in California, the only way out leads to places even more difficult to escape.

It was late in January, the Tule season, and a postcard arrived from Craig Andersen. Craig and his older brother Stan had once been my constant companions, slamming underage liquor and tossing missiles out of car windows, the lights of nameless burgs sparkling Led Zeppelin diamonds on sweltering Bakersfield nights. After we’d graduated, I went up to Berkeley and Craig moved down to San Diego, two jaded lives under clouds of pot smoke. Two years had gone by since my last visit, and the arrival of Craig’s postcard gripped me with paranoia. What is this shit, I thought, the golden age ready for rebirth, time to dust off the reggae records? Without knowing, I’d been rotting there in Bakersfield, stoned out of my head, waiting for a message, and the message had finally come.

Craig had fallen under the hex of Art. He didn’t indulge himself academically, as I had, but instead he went into private practice, opening a gallery with his roommate. Craig’s brother Stan lived across the street, working on cars and women, savoring the crumbs of San Diego’s nascent art scene. They’d already had one show in their space, a famous gay-lib painter and professor, David Allbreath. Their next show would be none other than Joe Franco, the famous Los Angeles Pop artist. After all the struggling I’d seen in Berkeley and San Francisco, this quick brush with celebrity impressed me. Perhaps somebody I knew could make money in the art gig after all. I flipped Craig’s postcard around, listening to Neil Young while rain battered the windows of the apartment I shared with Rosie Palestine, turning the card in my hands like a kidnap demand.

I phoned Craig downstairs at Brody’s, describing a fake idyllic life with a promise to visit soon, both of us turgid with green dope and lying wit. But the slam of the payphone couldn’t scare away all the things I’d left out of the conversation. He could hear my pathetic existence going nowhere. There was no longer any kidding myself that Bakersfield held any artistic opportunities, or any prospects in my present job, staff photographer at the Oildale Register. If I slunk off to grad school, I’d be deep in debt until middle age, enabled only to teach fine art to other innocent children and repeat the wretched cycle. I ordered a double Jack and Coke, grinding the ice in despair at the unfairness of the universe, and to my discredit, I bought my future at Rosie’s expense.

“You’re going to leave me,” she said in horror that night. I’d arranged a special tableau for her birthday, our room strewn with wildflowers and candles around the bed. Her outburst caught me by surprise; I’d just gotten her bra off, my lips on her breasts.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snapped at her tit.

“Just like Brian. All he ever fucking talked about was going to LA, how he could never make it in Bakersfield, blah blah blah.”

“What the hell does this have to do with your ex-boyfriend? I’m not a longhair or a musician, and I’m not going to LA.” Rosie rarely mentioned Brian. He’d come to Bakersfield from Ridgecrest, an even less useful town, with just his guitar and Bob Dylanish ambitions, and ditched Rosie after a year for the friendship of a coked-up Malibu producer. I predicted modest success and then a metal plate in his nose by the age of thirty. Rosie, who usually tried to laugh at my jokes, kept quiet at that one.

“You said the secret word, man. Los Angeles. Los Angeles, the capital of the music scene, the movie scene, the glamour scene, the art scene.”

“But I didn’t say anything about moving to Los Angeles.”

“You implied it. You said the exact same thing as Brian. ‘It’s happening there.’ Well, it could happen here, too. You said so before.”

I mumbled a sweet nothing, but she was fooling herself. Nothing ever happened in Bakersfield.

I slept badly that night. Rosie cried herself to sleep as the rain eased off, and I settled into a dream. I was deep in a winter coat, my hands in the pockets, concealed by a movie theatre somewhere in a Bohemian district of London. There was a woman next to me, not Rosie, but dark-haired, light-skinned, with a sharp smile full of collaboration. “Who are you?”

I followed her into a pass through barren hills below an orange sky. Craig Andersen stood at the top of the pass, gesturing beyond it. Colossal dirigibles floated in the air, and strange machinery like refineries jutted up from the ridges. A white cross glowed on the hill. I woke suddenly, and everything dribbled away like sand, except for that glowing cross.

I called Craig from the Register office the next day. “So, are you ready for my next visit, man?”

“I’ll buy the whiskey and the cigarettes today, Daddy-o.”

A week went by. I stopped smoking pot to clear my head, and through vodka tonics at Brody’s, the bar below our apartment, I tried to fit Rosie into my future. The evil Tule fog clung to everything, chilling at some moments and revoltingly lukewarm at others. Driving a block put your life in peril from the thick miasma over the cotton fields. As a kid I’d loved the Tules, especially when the school called a fog delay. At the bar in Brody’s, adult worries continued without a break. Rosie and I scored a large amount of weed from a busload of Deadheads following the tour, and started every morning by putting on the Clash and lighting up the bong. Usually I complained about Ronald Reagan when I should have enjoyed my buzz and paid more attention to Rosie’s mouth, blowing smoke-rings past my ear. She cuddled in my lap while I raged death against the President of the United States of America. Reagan was a shill, I howled. Later I hated other people more, but I never vocalized my fury as much. I held Rosie while fog curled against the window, and we pretended the world was burning in hell.

“Honey, let’s have a real authentic Bakersfield date,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Get loaded, do some crank and screw!” She waved her arms in the air.

I was paralyzed by the future, especially during those boring fog-bound days in the unheated office of the Register. I filed, played cards, and told horror stories to the newest reporter, a kid named Tony. Then a terrible sign came that my time in Bakersfield was really up.

“Don’t scare the fresh meat,” a senior reporter yelled in a fake Southern accent. “Leave him to us.” Tony snorted, aware how pathetic our whole Thirties newspaper-room routine was, sitting in the asshole of the Central Valley on rickety furniture. The editor, Gramps, came out of his office sweating as usual. He’d been daydreaming by the police scanner, feet up and hands behind his huge head. I glanced at the Tule out the windows and pulled on my leather gloves. I knew what was coming.

“What’s happenin’, man?” I howled.

“Get your feet off the furniture, kid. You and Tony get up Highway 65. There’s a big smash-up, and I want pictures before those bastards down on I Street get them.” He meant our rivals at the Bakersfield Californian. Tony and I took off for the Porterville Highway, where the scanner had described a scene of Pulitzer Prize-winning gore. I brought two cameras.

“Color and black-and-white?” Tony asked nervously as he drove.

“Yeah, I figure Gramps might want to pay for color under the headline. Red splashes! How many people? Five?”

“That’s it so far,” he said, sucking on his lip and glancing at the stereo. “Five Dead in Tule Bloodbath.” He laughed hysterically and ran a hand through his greasy hair. Probably straight off the student newspaper at Bakersfield College, I thought, Jesus, what the fuck was I doing there, speeding through oil-pumps and cotton fields. We hit the Tule’s heart outside town, and it hugged the car thick as a dream. If Tony didn’t slow his ass down, we might also make the front page of the Register, Two Brave Journalists Killed in Tule Irony. Then colored lights began to flash around us in psychedelic rhythm, a white haze disco. A police car blocked the road.

“Okay,” I hissed. “Here’s tomorrow’s Corn Flake Special.”

The cops waved us back, and we ditched the car at the roadside. We jumped the barbed wire and took a stroll across a pasture, wet grass, sage and sheep-shit, the aroma of the Valley heavy in the fog. Near the accident we jumped the wire again. A dump-truck had crushed a small Chevy head-on, and at least three other cars had wedged themselves into the wreckage. The colored lights whirled inside the crazy, blood-covered party. I snapped away, feeling good I’d timed the mushrooms for my arrival at the matinee. Tony, suddenly green, went over to interview the cops supervising the tow-truck drivers. The dump-truck driver sat at the side of the road, crying.

“Stupid Mexicans, lookin’ to pass in a Tule…” He moaned bitterly to no one. He was Latino himself, his thick mustache moist from fog and tears. I took the photo. People in the other cars were dead and covered with sheets on the side of the road. I took the photos. I went over to the Chevy. They couldn’t cover that driver up; she was stuck half out the window, the rest of her a mess. I recognized her immediately, Yesenia, Griselda’s best friend in high school. Griselda, my first love Griselda, Flaca to us, double-dates, I heard Yesenia moan, her punk boyfriend from Shafter caressing her tits with his blackened muscle-car mechanic hands, they were behind us in Flaca’s ‘64 Ford Falcon, the drive-in of all places, how fucking corny is that. Yesenia, we called her Colorada because of her reddish hair, and I remembered how strong her laugh was, and how she had big plans after she got into Porterville College.

“Hey, Colorada,” I said. Very slowly, I reached out and touched her hand. It was cold. She looked surprised, and I started to laugh. Feeling sick, I walked around the car. I saw the passenger door wrenched off by an inhuman claw. Somebody was under a sheet nearby, long black hair fanned across the asphalt, and oversized plastic platform shoes.

“Oh, no,” I said, and the sound of my voice shocked me, high and whiny. “You went to New York. You went away to fucking New York.” Sure, Colorada had many dark-haired friends, Chicanas, right? But I sat down in the road anyway, staring at that long black hair. That was the first hair I’d ever felt as a man. I could smell Flaca’s hair, a sweet burnt smell like twilight after a scorcher.

Five years had gone by since my graduation from frightened child to obnoxious asshole. It started with the tough Mexican chicks at Garces High School, taking the bus from the other side of the Kern River. The refugees from Central America and Laos hung out in shy groups under the pepper trees, but the Chicanos liked even faster cars and louder music than we Okies, cussing each other in violent Spanish. The Chicanas drew stylized Aztec portraits of themselves and their novios on their books, the insides of their locker doors, wherever. In my junior year I fell in love with Griselda, a scrawny, hunched-over girl everyone called Flaca. She had hair down to her waist and pale, ashy skin, and after we started sitting alone together in the dark corners of the school, she drew me constantly.

“Why d’you keep doing that?” I asked her one afternoon. We’d ditched school to lounge along the railroad tracks, kicking at greasy rocks soiled by passing trains with our heavy black shoes.

“I’ll remember you when you’re gone.”

I laughed at her. “I’m not going anywhere. We’re in fucking Bakersfield, remember? It ain’t the jumping-off point of the world.”

“We gotta go, man. If I see your fat ass hanging over a barstool on Chester Avenue in twenty years, I may have to fuckin’ kill you, mi’jo.” And she was right; there was no early retirement on Chester for me. God or luck or some talent of my own got me into the University of California. I chose UC Berkeley, overlooking the mad city of San Francisco. I wanted to perform on a weird stage at the end of the Seventies. A year later, at the icy dawn of the Reagan years, Flaca got into NYU and moved to New York City, and like so many friends who later tuned into New York, she disappeared with enthusiasm.

I remember her waving good-bye, or not waving really, standing there in a white tank-top and a trench coat, watching my Greyhound pull out like a zombie. Maybe she could see the future, that beautiful Chicana, she always could. We wrote once a month. We were fucking crazy in love, but under all that devotion was the truth of our parting. After a few years all the color faded out of our love. I hadn’t heard from her since my college graduation. Maybe she was planning to come back to Bakersfield and kill me.

“Hey kid,” I heard behind me in the ultimate cop voice. Without even turning I jumped and took off down the Porterville Highway, hurtling the barbed wire and running all the way back to Tony’s car. He could’ve shot me in the back, that pig, but he just yelled obscenities as I ran through the fog, alone except for his cursing. I should have departed the mortal world that day, if that cop hadn’t kept yelling like the fucking Boy Scout troop leader he probably was. My hatred for him kept me alive.

I quit the Register and took the motorcycle to San Diego that night, about two-hundred and fifty miles away. Getting my few possessions was easy, since our building had back stairs and Rosie had already gone to work down in Brody’s. A note was on the table in her perfect handwriting, MOM CALLED FLAKA HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. Sure, why not? Why not come home from New York City just to get wasted?

On the way south I took the long, winding Interstate from the snowy Grapevine at an obscene speed, weaving between semis and cars, and saw Los Angeles for the first time in years. The horizon of ugly buildings faded into a bejeweled carpet, and the clouds flashed with reflections of searchlights and skyscrapers. The Olympics were coming that summer. I felt reborn. No more Berkeley and no more Goddamn Bakersfield. I was going to live.

A few hours later I slipped through San Clemente, the end of the coastal metropolis, a half-digested meal on LA’s concrete intestines. The gray tits of the nuclear plant at San Onofre stood watch over my passage, and across the dark plains of Camp Pendleton I spied the lights of Oceanside, the first suburb in San Diego’s orbit. I stopped for gas and a quick bowl of soup at Denny’s, the best bowl of soup I’d had in my entire life, the soup of Picasso in his garret, the soup of an underworld scumbag fleeing the chains of his devoted woman, the soup of deadly liberty. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper buzzed their hippie swan-song in my ears. The exhaust fumes intoxicated me, mixed with the salt spray of the Pacific, and that’s the smell of freedom, man. Oceanside, a neon-cold town full of Marines, seemed the right place for epiphany. I bought a postcard of a bikini queen leaning on a palm tree and wrote to Rosie. There wasn’t much to say, but I told her to keep away from artists, and never to leave Bakersfield unless it drove her crazy. Bakersfield, I wrote, will keep you safer than any man.

The next few months delivered on the promise of escape, adventures in new cities, and my return to the Art World. San Diego faded through blue sea air and marijuana smoke, tumbling down arroyos and onto sexy beaches. I loudly hated every minute, but secretly I thought the place could rival paradise. Then the boredom really started to get me.

Craig Andersen lived in Hillcrest, the hip gay quarter, a glossy strip of candy-colored houses and storefronts across from Balboa Park. His roommate was a Midwesterner with a shit-eating grin under a blond Beatle haircut. “Benjamin Smart,” he told me, “but call me Ben, baby.” I drew back warily, then reached forward for the full pipe he offered. Another fucking art student, I thought. How lucky could I get.

Craig and Ben had converted their own apartment into the art gallery, slanting false walls around the living room. Across the front window the words NEXT WAVE GALLERY shone glossy black in the afternoon sun. I met the small Greek landlord coming down the front steps, screaming and howling just as I pulled up in my new used car, loaded with folding chairs for that evening’s opening. I’d been crashing there a week.

“Who the fuck are you?” he screamed as I tried to get by.

“A lawyer for Renter’s Aid,” I said without missing a beat.

He waggled a finger so close to my mouth I wanted to bite it. “Yeah? I know my fucking rights. These assholes are running a business in my place without a license, and not in the fucking lease either. I’ll have them outta here, don’t matter what you say, scheister.”

I laughed, too stoned to care. I was back in the Thirties noir of the Oildale Register. “You just haven’t got your cut yet, pal.”

The landlord leaned back, suddenly thoughtful. Yeah, there’s money in art. Ben and Craig surrounded the landlord in the street, getting down to the size of his bribe. He was a cheap little shit and settled for an extra hundred a month, beer money.

“You set that up nice,” Ben said, patting me on the back. I knew right off I had more in common with Ben than my old pal Craig, who only talked about the mysteries of the universe. The mysteries of the human animal, their base desires and ephemeral curiosity were more to my liking. I’d been an art student too.

“What’s for dinner?” I yelled, mixing myself a triple vodka tonic. Craig came out with the big red bong, slamming it on the kitchen table, bowl loaded.

“Not Mexican again?” I squawked. Ben cracked up.

“Who is this fucking guy?” he yelled at Craig.

Craig again quoted my legendary drug excesses at Berkeley. Apparently addiction and insanity could fill out an artist’s resume; Ben, who’d done time at a private school in Kentucky, had a similar history. But Ben didn’t dwell on the particulars of the past, preferring the swiftness of a modern art Blitzkrieg to remake the future. He would be my escort onto the stage, and combined our mouths could take us from the artist’s garret to the collector’s villa. Until, of course, we turned on each other.

Yet now, friends, I speak in hindsight; analysis of the beginning sheds less light on the end than you might hope. We were young and loved attention, and art provided a motive to the reach that epitome of youth. I pitied the poor lazy bastards who posed every night in the bars, impressing lanky women with their tans and muscles. We flashed artistic immortality at those chicks, hovering in the twenty-two year-old helicopter of an optimistic prime. Come over and step into the limelight, ladies. You’ve heard of Picasso, haven’t you? And Weegee and Warhol and Malanga and Joe Franco? It’s the summer of ’84, and they’re all here waiting for you in Hillcrest.

How did I fall into this world? I was never exposed to art as a child. Bakersfield during the Seventies promised few opportunities at enlightenment, just fast cars, juicy hamburgers, shitty beer and skunk weed, sweetening intolerably hot afternoons of silent televisions with heavy metal soundtracks. I can’t complain. I survived a normal California youth with an older brother and a younger sister, an occasional adventure with bored cops, bored farm girls and bored friends. Ah, but those innocent girls of Bakersfield. You big city types are used to fast, insincere women tottering around on five-inch heels, but I know a place where a lady can polish off a pint of Jack and still smile at a stranger without bitterness.

“Open a bottle,” I said to Ben, as we set up the chairs and tables on the sidewalk. The opening was about to begin, the moon clearing the treetops in the east and inviting the world to dance. Craig’s older brother Stan worked at ignoring us from under a car-hood nearby, puffing a joint and insulting us like a redneck Popeye. Nearing thirty, he claimed to know something we didn’t but refused to say just what, and I couldn’t tell yet if he was really holding back or was just a dumb asshole who hadn’t figured out jack-shit himself.

“Why don’t you guys get real?” Stan sneered. “There’s no fucking Scene in San Diego. You gotta go to LA if you want to get shit done.”

“Why don’t you fucking help us?” Craig yelled. “Look at all these Goddamn chairs, you lazy bastard.”

“I notice you’re not in LA,” I said with a smirk.

He hissed like a flat tire, running a hand through his bleached hair as he tightened a spark plug. “I’m not part of anyone’s dumb Scene any more. I just follow the pussy.”

“You’ve gotta work for pussy,” Ben replied coolly, smoothing a tablecloth. “Joe Franco, man, he’s bigger than any pussy you can name.”

Stan snorted. “I could paint better than Joe Franco.”

We chuckled and glanced at him derisively, sure, Stan, sure. We’d topped the old man tonight and he knew it. I mean, Joe Franco, the Pop artist, Warhol’s California protégé! Ben owed it to Michael Quinn, a La Jolla entrepreneur who anticipated the real estate boom and wisely bankrolled the introduction of classic Pop to San Diego. His city had only recently emerged from the shadow of Los Angeles, and Quinn aimed every penny of his elderly father’s wealth at that sunrise. He redeveloped century-old buildings in the Gaslamp District, a decayed warehouse quarter of the city; he invested in chic Hillcrest businesses like the Next Wave; he broke the stranglehold of the tourist industry on the Chamber of Commerce; he even supposedly allotted large “donations” to members of the City Council, and urban renewal suddenly became their priority. A few short years later, in a transformation only possible in a city as small and affluent as San Diego, the empty warehouses and forgotten flops filled up with boutiques, law firms, coffeehouses, lofts and art galleries, including the contemporary Michael Quinn Gallery on Avenue I. Yeah, the Eighties were like that. Wherever you looked, a rich bastard got the Midas touch and up sprung a new village of rich bastards.

For this opening of the Next Wave, Quinn fed them Joe Franco. Craig had flipped out; Joe Franco, the real thing, fame, Pop Art money and power. We glowed from our delusions of grandeur. Maybe the art life could be real life; maybe we would be the next rich bastards. But I couldn’t help questioning, watching the homeless stagger up Sixth Street; who the hell is Joe Franco, anyway? And who the hell are we?

My education in culture began just after my eighteenth birthday, a freshman in the Berkeley dorms. Revelations abounded that year, as exotic women from Morocco and Wisconsin buzzed about, and a whole Universe of unimagined possibilities manifested with the clarity of trees emerging from morning fog. For every drawing Flaca made of me, I’d taken a photograph of her. At Berkeley I took photos of everything: preppies, exaggerated expressions, beautiful ugly faces, sudden emotions. Buildings towered over silent streets and dead animals washed up on empty beaches. Life changed from an idle pleasure to an intense competition for it. It was fucking beautiful, man.

Gertrude Williams, a grad student painter from San Francisco, lived down the hall, but the grad students were light years apart. They only lived in the dorms because they were on scholarship. An aura seemed to float with them as they trudged to their afternoon seminars; I hung near them faithfully, for I might be following that path someday. These embittered scholars, rejecting the good things to spend decades in college, killed time drinking gallons of coffee and smoking pot between packs of low-tar cigarettes. We’d come a long way since the first experiments in academe.

I met Gertrude through her roommate Christine Chang, an undergrad who shared my unhealthy interest in New Wave music. Chris had transferred from a community college up in the Wine Country, and came bouncing into my room one day, her bleached hair floating above her porcelain features, her zebra-stripes hypnotizing me.

“Who’s blasting that crazy music?” she yelled at me, the only other person in the room.

“Me,” I yelled over Nina Hagen. I was lying on my bed, half-asleep on a warm day, imagining Nina Hagen twitching across a Berlin penthouse in a red wedding dress.

“That’s the soundtrack for my life!” she yelled.

“That tape is driving me out of my skull,” Gertrude told me a few days later, after Christine had borrowed and played it non-stop.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Here’s my revenge.” She handed me an invitation to her first solo show at the Art Department.

The gallery in Kroeber Hall was an empty white room, Gertrude’s paintings on the walls and a table of crackers, meat, cheese, bottles of gin, vodka, and tonic by the door. Listen up, jaded Scenesters. Here was my first opening, and so forever the sweetest. Nature cooperated, warming the building with a breeze, heavy with a flowery scent. “Whoa!” I said to Christine as we entered together. “I smell a party.” I pointed out the liquor.

She giggled. “Silly freshman, Trix is for kids. It’s just an art opening. Don’t get too excited. Besides, there’s that little acid party tonight in Ehrman Hall, isn’t there?” She grinned wickedly under her bangs.

But this was a new one on me. It was a Monday, and here I stood drinking gin and tonics, eating Brie cheese with salami, talking politics and feeling good about myself. I don’t remember the name of that gallery or even what Gertrude’s paintings looked like, although I can tell you they were better than most of the crap I saw in Los Angeles a decade later. People filtered in and out, making obscure, often bizarre analytical statements. Everyone dressed a cut above the hippie garb of Berkeley. Gertrude, who never wore dresses, had an enormous one on that evening, blue and wide like a sharp iceberg ready to leap in front of the Titanic.

“I’m so glad you could make it,” she said, her eyes wrinkled with delight as she leaned over the dress to give each of us a buss on the cheek, another first for me, a Continental kiss from a casual acquaintance, her perfect white teeth standing out in the room like a distant Roman ruin. The gin sang in my heart. Paris in the Twenties, and I was Man Ray out on the town. All we needed was a few rails of coke, and the evening would be perfect.

“So this is an art opening.”

“You didn’t have them in Bakersfield?” Christine drawled.

“Not as many as Petaluma,” I noted, referring to her own hometown, a mini-Bakersfield full of chickens and white people an hour north of San Francisco. She chuckled and punched me in the shoulder. I chuckled and poured myself another drink. I can still taste that oily gin, meshing perfectly with the cheese and the breeze. It was a perfect appetizer for the LSD party.

I could be found at Kroeber every Monday after that. I thought I could live on cheese, crackers, art and gin. Nobody questioned my presence, and I discovered that the world of art appeared exclusive only to the uninitiated. If you could talk the talk, walk the echoing gallery walk, and dance in a winter coat, you were in. Just for fun I took a few classes in art and architectural history, not realizing until later that by browsing a few books I could drop enough names to sound properly obnoxious. I made good friends, who soared like skyrockets, and we faded as fast.

Still, I kept my distance from art; I was majoring in geology, my grandfather and father’s profession, not conducive to proper gallery conversation. But through artists I found parties, drugs, and beautiful women in designer clothes who liked to fuck you once and then lost your address. The Art Scene consumed my life, night by night, and I dressed up in my art uniform and chatted up every artist I could find. It was never boring unless you wanted to be bored. I enlarged my expertise to the galleries in San Francisco, and younger art students began to seek me out for the night’s happenings when Friday came around. Finally I switched my major to art and never hung out in Kroeber, I was so sick of the place from classes. But I kept my geology books. I studied photography and became, in somebody’s opinion, competent. By junior year I must have been the most flamboyant gossip in the Art Department.

But eventually I also left that University scene behind. Berkeley, once spread out like a new continent, instead became the small town it really is. We joked that a person could score at Gilman and San Pablo, and ten minutes later his friends would be warming up the razor blades cross-town at Alcatraz and Telegraph. Berkeley held me like a prison, and through the bars I could see the real centers of the Universe, San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin. Even going down on some nameless hippie chick, the incense twirling in the candlelight, my mind would wander to the prices of plane flights. Art gave me the disease, and instead of the world being my ashtray, it became my playground. The language of art, so I’ve heard, is international.

I only saw Gertrude once more after her graduation. It was a cold night before my own graduation, three years later, and the Art Department threw a big party in Kroeber for the graduating students. Nearly everyone I knew showed up, and most of us dropped acid to make the end more interesting; but instead, everyone acted strange, and not in a trippy way. If I hadn’t already known them, I would say my fellows suddenly became arrogant and glamorous just from staring blind into the future. The implications of this strange transformation didn’t register in my drugged brain. I’d become nearly immune to the Scene, and the symptoms of real artistic ennui need years of obviousness and stupidity and lost friends to surface. And sickness it was, of the worst kind, which takes intelligence and converts it into sales and fashion.

Gertrude came in as I was leaving. The acid left me nauseated, and instinct told me to head for the City, to smoke cigarette after cigarette and laugh with the punks in the cold humidity, sharing a bottle. Gertrude wafted down the stairs, reminding me of a person that I hadn’t yet met. Years later, lights dim as I remember Gertrude’s smile, plain but radiant, one of the few real smiles, her teeth resting easily in her happy mouth. On this confused night, she again wore a dress, so out of character I didn’t recognize her, and my first instinct was to fall in love.

“Hey there, angel.”

“Hey you! How have you been?” She hugged me violently.

My entire body flushed and I reached for the support of the cocktail in my hand, blue with a dry-ice haze pouring out of the top. “Jesus, Gertrude, it’s been forever. But I was just leaving.”

“Yeah, I’m not staying long. Just came by to check out the old dump. So what have you been doing with yourself?”

“I’m graduating. I’m also, well, kind of tripping.”

She nodded and looked sad. I have an important warning for you, she probably thought, but you won’t get it. She patted me on the back. “Well, good luck to you. Write me sometimes. You still have my address?”

I knew it, a warm little house on the good side of Twin Peaks, facing the ocean. I leaned close to her. “I wouldn’t stay in there long. It’s like a vipers’ nest.”

Gertrude smiled and shrugged with one shoulder. “It’s art. What can you say? It’s the job everyone wants who doesn’t want a job.” She looked back into the room, her dark curls falling into her eyes. “You’ll dig it, buddy.”

She tottered rather ungracefully inside. I left and never saw her again. But everything that happened since, I owe her in a way. Thank you, Gertrude, and I owe you a Brie wheel. I hope your career made it way past the cheese and gin stage.

It seemed about five minutes later when the sun came up in fury over Lake Isabella, the smog of the Central Valley already simmering on a May Sunday. Much bigger than when I left four years earlier, and still homemade as any distant outpost of the Empire, I shuddered and stared down at Bakersfield, California. The only worse place to be, I thought, was San Francisco, surrounded by junkies. I’d spent a four-year lifetime in Berkeley, but now I was back home and no one gave a shit.

The sun went down over Point Loma as the opening began. I read passages from Bright Lights Big City to Ben while he chopped out three good lines of good cocaine on the kitchen counter. “Would you stop fucking reading, man?” Craig shrieked. Ben encouraged me. I kept reading. A glass of Jack Daniels on the rocks appeared, and I looked up. A short-haired girl named Tommy smiled down at me with desperate eyes, and later ended up in my lap. Couples went through the rooms, whispering. The moon stood full dead center above Balboa Park. New friends showed up, then a few of Quinn’s Downtown connections, then a few rich bastards from La Jolla. A student told stories about hanging out at a bar full of mercenaries in the Sudan. Two neighborhood queens started a catfight over designer clothes. A suburban girl flattered everyone to death. Oh, how she loved art. A few people studied the Joe Franco paintings on the walls, warm in golden pools from the track lights, the sea air drifting through the apartment with the kerosene smell of Lindbergh Field. The jets fly in low over Downtown San Diego, between the tops of the skyscrapers, right over Hillcrest and into the airport. No one cares; the air in San Diego can’t conduct even a small charge of danger.

“I’m moving to New York!” I screamed down the alley at three in the morning, laden with bags of Mexican take-out. “That’s it! Fuck all this blond-haired-taco-beer-surfer bullshit!”

Stan laughed from the porch, cradling an empty fifth of vodka. “You wouldn’t make it one day in LA, man, forget Manhattan.”

“Fuck you,” Ben yelled back around a mouthful of burrito. “We’re going to watch you beg for change from the top of Bel Air.”

Stan looked back at the Joe Franco pieces inside. “Just don’t get so high up, idiot, that I can’t reach your wallet.”

Every sunny day we woke up, put on the Clash or pulsing reggae music, smoked about an ounce of weed and staggered outside in the darkest sunglasses we could find. A basket sat by the front door, full of extra shades in case a pair got lost; without shades, we’d be trapped in the dark apartment, waiting for killers. We ate out every day, and Hillcrest suited this purpose excellently, bright cafes lining the streets, going out of business so quickly that we rarely dined at the same place twice. Every day was a new movie.

Sometimes after brunch we’d drop by the Escape, a gay bar round the corner from the Next Wave. Fixed to a stool facing the door, his ass nailed there since the Seventies, sat our pot dealer. Needless to say, he knew us well, and we thought we’d know him forever. Getting kicked out of Eden seemed impossible. On money nights, we went Downtown and hit the pubs, wedging loud Australian blondes away from their soccer-hooligan boyfriends. On broke nights, we headed west to Ocean Beach, rubbing elbows with speedfreaks and bikers, wandering from the country bar to the reggae bar with no trouble at all, drunk and in love with everything below the sky.

Ben and I began a hazy spring in Ocean Beach on wings of crystal meth, floating down the dark roads afraid of nothing. We fixated on beer cans vanishing into raging bonfires and the terrible laughter of forgotten children facing the Pacific, realizing that their wandering had reached an impasse. Rather than go back, they stayed, and OB burst its seams with homeless punks. With a healthy crop of Berkeley smarts and Bakersfield charm, I soon ingratiated myself into their midst, and by summer I had a portfolio of nearly a hundred perfect photographs of these runaways. Some were black-and-white, some appallingly nostalgic Kodachrome, whichever brought out the horror of life’s punishments with clarity, like Larry Clark. My favorite showed a young woman from Nebraska, Deronda, shooting heroin at a kitchen table, her skin blue in the morning light, her dirty T-shirt pulled up to reveal an obviously pregnant belly. She was a pro with a needle, not even looking at her arm, but instead staring out the window, her eyes empty of feeling or intelligence.

“Where’d you get that camera?” she asked me on a tape-recording.

“My folks bought a new Grand Prix and gave me their Dodge, which I sold, and spent the money on a used motorcycle and this vintage Leica 35.” I remember fondling the camera, letting her touch it. I loved my first camera, of course, a very serviceable Olympus, but I never held anything in my life, not the most beautiful chick, fitting my hand like that Leica. It always nestled perfectly in the crook of my arm when it hung from my neck, and it magically transformed every square of reality I saw through the viewfinder into poetry. I could take it apart in the dark, and lavished it with expensive lenses and accessories. I worshipped that fucking camera. I kept it by my bed on silk and it never let me down. I bought other cameras later, but everybody knew they were going to bury me with the Leica.

“How old are you?” I asked Deronda on the tape.

“Seventeen or eighteen, I think. Do you want me?”

“Sure,” I lied. “Where are you from?”

“Same as you, dude.” I played these tapes of her and the other street kids during my first solo opening, a trendy bookstore in the Gaslamp District. Michael Quinn, in a sharkskin suit, nodded over a Martini, an expensive smile on his face.

Ben was nervous. “Watch out for that guy,” he said, nodding back at Quinn. He thought he’d lost me, not as a friend, but as a potential client of the Next Wave. Nothing got by Ben in those days.

Of the ten Franco pieces hanging in the Next Wave, Ben and Craig sold six. Not bad. Quinn, ever magnanimous, arranged for them to meet the artist himself. “You’ve got the greatest ability a dealer can have,” Quinn said over cocktails at the Escape. “The ingenuity to sell a product, no matter what. That’s the spark of real genius.” He stared at us. “You should talk to Franco. Drive up to LA next weekend and drop off the unsold lots at his space in Venice. I’ll set it up.” Nope, Ben’s talent as a grifter couldn’t be confined to cajoling women into bed, when he could be making millions for himself and Michael Quinn. “San Diego is a limitless market, guys. This city is busting out, and all those new houses in the Highlands and up on the Mesa need art on their walls. Like Franco’s. Like yours.”

“Yeah, why not Smarts?” Ben asked.

Quinn laughed. “Sure, sure.” He’d never shown much interest in Ben’s art. Why paint when you could fill the world with the sticky canvases of others? So much less effort.

Craig, on the other hand, became more the scientist every day, collecting antique chemistry books and pondering the nature of the Universe over long afternoons. He forgot the gallery and got into road-trip mode for our trip to LA, cashing a student loan check for a gram of speed, an ounce of pot and some mushrooms. Completely stoned and hefting the Leica, I documented the whole sordid trip to Venice Beach with Eugène Atget’s realistic style. We did drugs and fed comps into the tape-player all the way up Interstate Five, and by the time Craig’s sputtering VW bus got stuck in morning traffic, we were in Orange County, surrounded by blinding haze and identical buildings. Craig asked a bunch of Latinos on a corner in Long Beach where the hell Venice Beach was. They spoke almost no English and tried to sell us heroin. My own poor Spanish got us as far as West Los Angeles, and from there Venice drew us in effortlessly. As high as we were, LA wanted us higher still.

“Bring a Goddamn map next time,” Ben yelled at Craig over a Pink Floyd tape.

I passed him another joint and took off my sunglasses. The air was salty and white. “Why? You don’t even know how to read, retard.”

“We’re a half-hour late, for chrissakes.”

“Shit!” Craig screeched.

“We might interrupt the master at work,” I observed.

“Fuck you, man,” Ben yelled. “I got forty grand in primo artwork in the back of this rattling hippie junk-heap.” I glanced at Craig, wondering if he’d react to another negation of his half-ownership in the gallery. He didn’t. I’d declined a share of the profits in lieu of free rent and drugs.

“Lincoln Boulevard,” Craig called, pulling off.

“Get off! Get off!” Ben yelled, one hand flailing over the seat as if he meant to take the wheel. I looked around at the vast city, like any California place on the surface. No, the streets are wider, the rows of shops darker and more battered. There’s a homeless guy pushing a shopping cart loaded high with aluminum scrap. We sure the hell weren’t in San Diego.

When we located Franco’s studio two blocks from the beach, no one was in but his secretary, a small unhappy woman attractive after an urbane fashion. She dressed like a San Franciscan. I studied her while Ben unloaded the goods, demanding to shake hands with Franco personally.

“Are you from the City?” I asked her abruptly.

“What city?”

I took that as a no; any San Franciscan would know what I meant. She invited us to a party at Billy America’s house that evening, just up the street. Joe, she assured us, would be there to thank us personally for the delivery.

Ben could barely contain his glee as we drove off. “Did you fucking hear that? Billy America!” I only knew America as a has-been actor from the Sixties, more famous for drug abuse than acting. But he knew art when he saw it, and he’d known Franco and the other creators of Pop from the beginning.

We got lost again, then found the freeway and headed for Downtown Los Angeles. Ben wanted to drop in on an artist, a guy recommended by David Allbreath, the art professor who’d opened the Next Wave.

David Allbreath was the first San Diego artist I liked, and he returned my kindness by purchasing my motorcycle, which I frequently saw afterwards outside the rougher leather bars in Hillcrest. Unlike the other artists in San Diego, who suffered an inferiority complex similar to summer-stock actors, Allbreath acted the primadonna. He was a skinny conceptualist carving sexual imagery into pink sandstone, adding faded photos of himself as a youth beside his relatives and their Fifties cars. He worked and lived in a huge loft in the Gaslamp District, full of overstuffed Victorian furniture and luxuries unknown to us, like cigars and new-fangled CDs. Allbreath was also a player of sorts; he surfed nude at Black’s Beach and knew how to ride the wave of his own fame just as well.

Just before our hell-ride he’d handed Ben a copy of Basic magazine over dinner, driving instructions scribbled across the half-naked model on the back cover. “Go see this bitch,” he said dryly. “He’ll give you an idea of what the Art Scene in LA is all about.” Then he laughed in a way I didn’t care for.