Blow (8 page)

Fisher's assessment, unfortunately, was all too correct, in that George's smashing finish did not quite obliterate the general dismalness of his high school record. His first SAT scores, from the tests he had taken in the spring of his junior year, were less than stellar—a total of just over 600, out of a possible 1,600, on the math and verbal combined. He did have one more chance the following fall to take the SATs again, which is when he thought of enlisting the help of his best pal, Malcolm MacGregor. Malcolm had scored a perfect 1,600 the previous spring, even without much sleep the night before, and thought that sufficient to get him into his first-choice college, which was Worcester Polytechnic Institute. So he had no reason to take the tests again. And he didn't—at least not under his own name. In a fit of ill-advised friendship, he agreed to go into the testing room that Saturday morning in the fall, take the SAT, and forge George's signature. And it could well have worked. Indeed, Malcolm finished fifteen minutes early, and there was no challenge when he left by the outside proctor hired to monitor the exam, who didn't know George or Malcolm from a Pygmy warrior. But Malcolm forgot to do one thing. For some reason, possibly a Freudian explanation, it never occurred to him to lard the test with any purposeful mistakes, at least enough so George's scores turning up this time at the Springfield College admissions office wouldn't add up to a perfect 1,600.

The unraveling of the scheme occurred swiftly enough. At Springfield, the admissions officer took one look at the thousand-point difference and called down to Mr. Wallace L. Whittle, then the principal of Weymouth High School. Whittle knew enough about George to become overwhelmed with doubt concerning the validity of the startling improvement, and called in George and his parents to wring out the truth. He also called in Malcolm and his parents and informed them that he was going to have to notify Worcester Tech about their son's lapse of judgment. In the end Malcolm's father had to perform fancy feats of influence to keep his son from getting deleted from the acceptance list. As for George, for all the effort he'd put into his courses that year, the principal allowed him to graduate on schedule in spite of everything. But college certainly was out, at least for the next year. And although he listed himself optimistically in the 1961 edition of
Campus,
the school yearbook, as heading off into a career of “business administration,” George's immediate prospects did not appear too bright.

Uncle George, on hearing about the unfortunate situation, did step in and offer to help. For all his faults, his nephew was still family, after all. In a telephone call to Fred, he said that as an engineer for the state of Massachusetts he was not without influence in certain places, and it might just be possible to find George employment. He knew some people down at the Boston Edison power plant, the one located on the line between Weymouth and Quincy, and it might be arranged, just might, for George to get work at the plant as a floor sweeper. Informed of the offer, George replied to his father that he didn't feel of a mind to accept the job. Indeed, Uncle George could take the fucking sweeper job and ram it right up his ass, was what he could do with it. George would rather go out and see what he could pick up on his own.

TWO

Manhattan Beach

1967–1968

I'd be safe and warm,

If I was in L.A.

California Dreamin'

on such a winter's day.

—T
HE
M
AMAS
&
THE
P
APAS
, “C
ALIFORNIA
D
REAMIN
',” 1966

F
ROM JUST ABOUT ANYWHERE IN
M
ANHATTAN
B
EACH
you can look out between the houses and see the Pacific Ocean washing up along the broad expanse of sand that runs from one end of town to the other. Some local historians say the town got its name from a land developer from New York in the first decade of the twentieth century who wished to memorialize his hometown; others believe that it came from a rich lady of Dutch ancestry in honor of the fact that her forebears had been in on the deal to buy Manhattan Island from the Indians. Whatever the case, Manhattan, the beach, twenty miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles, with a population of 32,500 souls, bears as little resemblance to its namesake back East as any other coastal city in Southern California. Its soft pastel frame-and-stucco houses line a series of terraced streets that work their way up to the top of a sand hill sitting 245 feet above sea level, allowing each resident a wide glimpse of the ocean over a neighboring rooftop. In the early days the dunes of Manhattan Beach supported so little vegetation that they'd shift about from the winds. To stabilize the place, ladies from the Neptunian Club took to planting the dunes with mossy green ice plants that now abound everywhere, thus earning them the name “moss ladies.” During the summer the town is cooled by the prevailing westerlies that blow off the water and in the evening fill the air with the perfume of hibiscus and night-blooming jasmine. Most of the time the winds also manage to blow the looming pall of brownish-yellow smog from the freeways back into the inner recesses of Los Angeles proper, leaving the local atmosphere clear and dry. Considering its location and its weather, the local chamber of commerce needed little poetic license to promote the town in its tourist brochure as truly “a little bit of heaven on earth.”

As with the neighboring beach towns—El Segundo, Hermosa, Redondo, Palos Verdes, Santa Monica, Venice, San Pedro—it was World War II that spurred the real growth in Manhattan Beach, which for the course of the conflict played host to a pair of eight-inch railroad guns operated a little to the east of town by the men of Shore Battery E from New Jersey. The guns created such an uproar during artillery practice that a warden had to warn housewives beforehand to take their heirloom china down from the display cabinets. Since the only local action came on Christmas Eve of 1941, when a Japanese submarine snuck up the 245-fathom deep Catalina ship channel and torpedoed a schooner carrying a load of lumber, the boys of Battery E had a pretty soft billet; and a goodly number, like many other soldiers who came through the state, decided after V-J Day that what awaited them back in New Jersey didn't stack up so well compared to what they'd seen of California.

Manhattan Beach also stood right next to the burgeoning Los Angeles International Airport, which meant you could get in and out of the place quickly. But more to the point, it meant the town served as home base for the people who worked out of the airport, notably some one thousand nubile young airline stewardesses, who in short order made it into the reigning party town of the southern coast. “You've got to remember that in the 1960s you didn't have the kind of labor laws you have now, where the stewardesses can be sixty years old and ugly and weigh three hundred pounds,” says Frank Yamamoto, a Berkeley graduate who in those days ran a restaurant, three doors up from the beach. “The airlines were a glamorous business. Everyone who was flying had money, and if you wanted to work for the airlines, you had to be really good-looking, and you had to have good boobs.”

So from cock's crow to evensong the beach teemed with gorgeous women stuffed into bikinis of every variety, lying out on the sand, bouncing up and down around the volleyball nets, eyeing the ranks of surfers shooting toward shore on the eight-foot curlers. Bars and restaurants lined the approach streets; at night people jammed into the Buccaneer or Pancho's or Cisco's, a large rock-and-roll emporium owned by the Smothers Brothers. After closing time the parties came to life in the apartments off the strand where the “stewies” lived three and four together, loaded up with pot and free booze from the airlines. On Sunday afternoons the golden hordes repaired to an open terrace at Mike's Restaurant at the end of Manhattan Beach Boulevard to drink beer and dance and watch the surfers slalom in and out of the pilings underneath the town pier, while Mike “the Greek” slathered coats of his special barbecue sauce over the 75-pound lamb turning slowly on a spit. “I tell you, it was a very hedonistic situation,” says Yamamoto, who eventually parlayed his restaurant into a large set of real-estate holdings. “This town was just one big nonstop fucking party all day and all night.”

George showed up in Manhattan Beach in the summer of 1967, an occasion he soon regarded as one of the uneclipsable events of his life. “Coming from Weymouth, I thought somebody had dropped me out of an airplane and I'd landed in paradise,” he says. He was twenty-five years old then, and was distinguished in town by his broad Boston accent, his great-looking muscles, and his shaggy hair made blond in the California sun, enhancing his luminous hazel-green eyes. That was the year when, among other events, Dustin Hoffman appeared in
The Graduate,
when the Mamas and the Papas came out with “Monday, Monday,” and the Rolling Stones were singing “Ruby Tuesday.” It was the year the jails were beginning to fill up with young people protesting against the Vietnam War, and it was when Timothy Leary issued his famous call to a Gathering of the Tribes summoned to San Francisco by Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin, which was to “Turn on to the scene. Tune in to what is happening, and drop out.” It was also the year George Jung looked at the diminishing legitimate opportunities open to him in his yearning to acquire wealth and esteem and decided the best chance for someone of his talents and brashness lay somewhere in the upper echelons of the burgeoning marijuana business.

*   *   *

In the six years since he'd graduated high school George had achieved little in the way of personal success. Stuck in Weymouth, and needing to earn money and to find a college that would have him, he ended up going to work as a bricklayer's helper for his old baby-sitter, Russell Delorey. The work itself, carrying hods of bricks and mixing mortar, seemed made to order for George, who could pick up two 94-pound bags of Portland cement, raise them over his head, and if need be, walk around like that all afternoon. “George had such great strength and endurance for physical work,” Russell wrote in a little memoir of the period, “that I began to refer to him as the Crane.” George also proved a valuable asset in the area of customer relations. Once, when Russell found himself getting stiffed by a contractor after installing a Tennessee-marble fireplace in one of his houses, he simply told the contractor that if he didn't get paid for the fireplace, he would take it back. “Whereupon I told George to get the two 16-pound sledgehammers from my truck, and we proceeded to crash the entire marble fireplace onto the new hardwood floor. We ruined the living room floor, the walls, the ceiling, the baseboard heating system, and wood trim. The dispute was finally resolved, but the news of our confrontation traveled around the Cape, and people got the message: Don't attempt holding up payment on Delorey, especially when the Crane is available.”

In the fall of 1962, after a not-very-taxing review by the admissions office, George began college life as a matriculated freshman at the University of Southern Mississippi, located in Hattiesburg, in the sultry southeastern part of the state. “The word got around,” he recalls, “that this particular college was a shithole going nowhere, but it was an easy place to get into and that that's where you could go if you were a fuck-up.” He started off with mixed results, but by the spring, having scored two B's, with an A in Introduction to Business, George found himself on the dean's list.

It was the environment at the school that caused George some discomfort. The dorms were always oppressively hot and sticky. And one of the Saturday-night social activities among the fraternity boys was to get blitzed on beer, take up broom handles and other kinds of clubs, and proceed down to the area of town that ran along the Bowie River where the black people lived and engage in the sport known to the locals as “nigger knocking.” Growing up in Weymouth, where there wasn't a single black student in the high school, George had little reason to give any thought, one way or the other, to the general racial situation in the country. But on the one occasion at Mississippi when he went along to watch the fun—swatting black people from behind out of the car window—the spectacle so repelled him that he began sounding off on the subject around the campus. After all, Jack Kerouac would never have countenanced anything like that. He noised off so loudly and often enough that one night a friendly bartender in a student hangout warned George and his date to beat it out the back way, because waiting in the front parking lot was a crowd of white boys who intended to beat the shit out of him.

He eventually left school, but not because of racial intolerance. Seeking to augment his funds from bricklaying, he had gotten hold of a corporate telephone credit card from a friend back in Weymouth and began touring the college dorms selling long-distance phone calls for five dollars apiece to boys who wanted to talk, sometimes for hours, with their girlfriends back home, a scam that earned him forty to fifty dollars a night. So the calls couldn't be easily traced, he warned customers to ring up their girls only at pay phones. But not everyone followed the directions conscientiously, and pretty soon George got caught. To keep the offended corporation from pressing charges, his father had to send down somewhere around a thousand dollars in payback money, which, much to his embarrassment, Fred had to get from Uncle George. The school suspended George for six months, which was why, when the news came that John F. Kennedy had been shot, George remembers he was back on a scaffold, passing bricks up to Russell, who was finishing off an ornamental rim on the top of a chimney in North Weymouth.

George picked up his old ways and his old friends, including MacGregor, who much to his parents' annoyance had gotten suspended from Worcester Tech after a drinking incident. Shortly afterward he and George took a couple of girls out in a little cherry-red Austin-Healey George had bought with extra money earned from digging clams off Wessagussett Beach. With everyone drunk as usual, Malcolm totaled the car by driving it four-square into the rear end of a parked vehicle outside a house in downtown Worcester. One girl suffered a broken arm, and George had his ear nearly torn off. As the boys were furiously getting rid of the evidence, throwing the beer cans and bottles over a hedge before the police could arrive, a middle-aged gentleman in a white shirt and tie suddenly appeared demanding to know just what the hell was going on. Who was he? George asked belligerently. “I live here,” the man responded, “and that's my yard where you're throwing the liquor bottles and beer cans, and this is what's left of my car you just ran into. That's who I am.”