Tending to the lion’s den planting
Californian poppies for Richard Nixon in 1977, eating Pozole at Musso and
Frank’s, and farting in the general direction of Mexico – the lingua franca of
which is Spanish. Middle-hood miss-spent, whiling away my thirties,
initially drafted on 405 Hilgard, just off Portola Plaza, up at the old UCLA
draft counselling centre. Told that those who did not want to fight should stop
“bumming it” and get a real job, which I did, and which meant accompanying our
embattled ex-President on three trips around the sun, a man by that point El
Dorado bound and squishy, a man for whom I left my virtues in Los Angeles, my
mother in Arkansas, and my virginity at Lakeside Highschool. Uneasy but
employed, I packed myself up down the coast to where the Pacific slish slosh
eroded tender Dicky’s erroneous rock, so to destabilise his home, absolving his
flaws and my contentious objections into the sea.
Near the glowing cliffs between Dana Point and Trestles Beach I found the town of San Clemente and the great ‘La Casa Pacifica’, Richard’s western White House, raved about on those sunset radiograms that bleated from Pontiacs going up the 10 doing 70. Brezhnev, Ordaz, Sato, and me, with my own little room looking out to a hacienda style patio with a hand-painted tile fountain at its centre. Far from home, them warm California winds blow, struck out with broad lawns and dust and with folks I didn’t know, it was the decade of public paradox. All of what happened in Haight Ashubry was behind me. The summer of love had ended with a funeral for the “Death of the Hippie”; this meant life on the downbeat, it left Jimmy Carter house sitting for the Republicans in Washington, kept housewives buying over-the-counter Benzedrine, and hairstyles growing to new heights.
Near the glowing cliffs between Dana Point and Trestles Beach I found the town of San Clemente and the great ‘La Casa Pacifica’, Richard’s western White House, raved about on those sunset radiograms that bleated from Pontiacs going up the 10 doing 70. Brezhnev, Ordaz, Sato, and me, with my own little room looking out to a hacienda style patio with a hand-painted tile fountain at its centre. Far from home, them warm California winds blow, struck out with broad lawns and dust and with folks I didn’t know, it was the decade of public paradox. All of what happened in Haight Ashubry was behind me. The summer of love had ended with a funeral for the “Death of the Hippie”; this meant life on the downbeat, it left Jimmy Carter house sitting for the Republicans in Washington, kept housewives buying over-the-counter Benzedrine, and hairstyles growing to new heights.