Inherent Vice (17 page)

as usual these days,
Fritz was back in the computer room, staring
at data. He had that ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit look Doc had noted before in newcomers to the groovy world of addictive behavior.

“
Word is that your girlfriend has split the country, sorry to be the one
to hand you the news.
”

Doc was surprised at the intensity of the rectogenital throb that ran through him.
“
Where
’
d she go?
”

“
Not known. She was aboard what the federals call a vessel of inter
est, to them and maybe you too.
”

“
Uh-oh.
”
Doc looked at the printout and saw the name
Golden Fang
“
And you got this from some computer that
’
s hooked up to your network?
”

“
This in particular comes from the Hoover Library at Stanford—
somebody
’
s collection of countersubversive files. Here, I printed it all
down.
”
Doc went out in the front office and drew a cup of coffee from the urn, whereupon Milton the bookkeeper, who had been acting dif
ficult lately, got right into a hassle with Fritz about whether Doc
’
s coffee
should be charged to travel and entertainment or to company overhead.

Gladys the secretary turned up the office stereo, which happened to be playing Blue Cheer, either to drown out the argument or suggest gently that everybody pipe down. Fritz and Milton then began screaming at Gladys, who screamed back. Doc lit a joint and began to read the file, which had been put together by a private intelligence operation known
as the American Security Council, working out of Chicago, according to
Fritz, since around
‘
55.

There was a brief history of the schooner
Preserved,
of keen interest to the countersubversive community for her high-seas capability. At the time of her reappearance in the Caribbean, for example, she was on some spy mission against Fidel Castro, who by that point was active up in the mountains of Cuba. Later, under the name of
Golden Fang,
she was to prove of use to anti-Communist projects in Guatemala, West Africa, Indonesia, and other places whose names were blanked out. She often took on as cargo abducted local
“
troublemakers,
”
who were never seen again. The phrase
“
deep interrogation
”
kept coming up. She ran CIA heroin from the Golden Triangle. She monitored radio traffic off unfriendly coastlines and forwarded it to agencies in Washington, D.C. She brought weapons in to anti-Communist guerrillas, including those
at the ill-fated Bay of Pigs. The chronology here ran all the way up to the
present, including Mickey Wolfmann
’
s unexplained day trip just before
he vanished, as well as the schooner
’s
departure last week from San Pedro
with known Wolfmann companion Shasta Fay Hepworth on board.

That Mickey, known to be a generous Reagan contributor, might be active in some anti-Communist crusade came as no big surprise. But
how deeply was Shasta involved? Who had arranged for her passage out
of the country aboard the
Golden Fang
?
Was it Mickey? was it some
body else paying her off for her services in putting the snatch on Mickey?
What could she have gotten into so heavy-duty that the only way out was to help set up the man she was supposed to be in love with? Bummer, man. Bumm. Er.

Assuming she even wanted out. Maybe she really wanted to remain
in
whatever it was, and Mickey sto
od in the way of that, or maybe
Shasta was seeing Sloane
’s
boyfriend Riggs on the side, and maybe Sloane found out and was trying to get revenge by setting Shasta up for Mickey
’
s murder, or maybe Mickey was jealous of Riggs and tried to have him iced only the plan misfired and whoever had contracted to do the deed showed up and by accident killed Mickey, or maybe it was
on purpose because
the so-far-unknown hitperson really wanted to run off
with Sloane.
...

“
Gahhh!
”

“
Good shit, ain
’
t it,
”
Fritz handing back a smoldering roach in a roach
clip, all that was left of what they
’
d been smoking.

“
Define good,
’”
Doc muttered.
“
I am, like, overthinking myself into brainfreeze, here.
”

Fritz chuckled at length.
“
Yeah, P
I
s should really stay away from drugs, all
’em
alternate universes just make the job that much more complicated.
”

“
But what about Sherlock Holmes, he did coke all the time, man, it helped him solve cases.
”

“
Yeah but he ... was not real?
”

“
What. Sherlock Holmes was—
”

“
He
’
s a made-up character in a bunch of stories, Doc.
”

“
Wh— Naw. No, he
’
s real. He lives at this real address in London.
Well, maybe not anymore, it was years ago, he has to be dead by now.
”

“
Come on, let
’
s go over to Zucky
’
s, I don
’
t know about you, but I
’
ve suddenly got this, what Cheech and Chong might call matzo-ball jones?

Entering the legendary Santa Monica delicatessen, they came under
the red-eyed scrutiny of a crowd of freaks of all ages who seemed to be
expecting somebody else. After a while Magda showed up with the usual
Zuckyburger and fries, and rolled beef on rye, and potato salad and Dr.
Brown
’
s Cel-Rays plus another bowl of pickles and sauerkraut, and look
ing more than ordinarily imposed upon.
“
Joint sure is jumpin,
”
Doc observed.

She rolled her eyes up and down the establishment.
“
Marcus Welby,
M.D.
freaks. You ever notice how the Zucky
’
s sign shows up for half a second in the opening credits? Blink and you
’
ll miss it, but it
’
s more than enough for these people, who come in asking if that
’
s, like, Dr. Steve Kiley
’
s motorcycle parked out in front, and where
’
s the hospital, and who also,
”
her voice rising as she left the table,
“
get confused when they can
’
t find Cheetos or Twinkies on the goldurn menu!
”

“
At least it ain
’
t
Mod Squad-er
s?
Doc grumbled.

“
What,
”
Fritz innocently.
“
My favorite show.
”

“
Pro-cop fuckin mind control
’
s more like it. Inform on your friends, kids, get a lollipop from the Captain.
”

“
Listen, I came up in Temecula, which is Krazy Kat Kountry, where you always root for Ignatz and not Offisa Pupp.
”

They got into face-stuffing activities for a while, forgetting if they
’
d ordered anything else, bringing Magda back over, then forgetting what they wanted her for.
“‘
Cause
PIs
are doomed, man,
”
Doc continuing his
earlier thought,
“
you could
’
ve seen it coming for years, in the movies, on
the tube. Once there was all these great old
PIs—
Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, the shamus of shamuses Johnny Staccato, always smarter and more professional than the cops, always end up solvin the crime while
the cops are folio win wrong leads and gettin in the way.
”

“
Coming in at the end to put the cuffs on.
”

“
Yeah, but nowadays it
’
s all you see anymore is cops, the tube is saturated with fuckin cop shows, just being regular guys, only tryin to do their job, folks, no more threat to nobody
’
s freedom than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the viewer population so cop-happy they
’
re beggin to be run in. Good-bye Johnny Staccato, welcome and
while you
’
re at it please kick my door down, Steve McGarrett. Meantime
out here in the real world most of us private flatfoots can
’
t even make the rent.
”

“
So why do you stay in the business? Why not get a houseboat up in the Sacramento Delta—smoke, drink, fish, fuck, you know, what old guys do.
”

“
Don
’
t forget piss and moan.
”

sunrise was on
the way, the bars were just closed or closing, out in front of Wavos everybody was either at the tables along the sidewalk, sleeping with their heads on Health Waffles or in bowls of vegetarian
chili, or being sick in the street, causing small-motorcycle traffic to skid
in the vomit and so forth. It was late winter in Gordita, though for sure
not the usual weather. You heard people muttering to the effect that last
summer the beach didn
’
t have summer till August, and now there probably wouldn
’
t be any winter till spring. 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.

For the last few weeks now, St. Flip of Lawndale, for whom Jesus Christ was not only personal savior but surfing consultant as well, who rode an old-school redwood plank running just under ten feet with an
inlaid mother-of-pearl cross on top and two plastic skegs of a violent pink
color on the bottom, had been hitching rides from a friend with a little fiberglass runabout far out into the Outside, to surf what he swore was
the gnarliest break in the world, with waves bigger than Waimea, bigger than Maverick
’
s up the coast at Half Moon Bay or Todos Santos in Baja.
Stewardii on transpacific flights making their final approaches to LAX reported seeing him below, surfing where no surf
should’ve
been, a figure in white baggy trunks, whiter than the prevailing light could really account for. ... In the evenings with the sunset behind him, he would ascend again to the secular groove of honky-tonk Gordita Beach and grab a beer and silently hang out and smile at people when he had to, and wait for first light to return.

Back in his beach pad there was a velvet painting of Jesus riding goofyfoot on a rough-hewn board with outriggers, meant to suggest a crucifix, through surf seldom observed on the Sea of Galilee, though this hardly presented a challenge to Flip
’
s faith. What was
“
walking on
water,
”
if it wasn
’
t Bible talk for surfing? In Australia once, a local surfer,
holding the biggest can of beer Flip had ever seen, had even sold him a fragment of the True Board.

As usual among the early customers at Wavos, there were differing opinions about what, if anything, the Saint had been surfing. Some argued for freak geography—an uncharted seamount or outer reef—
others for a weird once-in-a-lifetime weather event, or maybe, like, a volcano, or a tidal wave, someplace far away out in the North Pacific, whose
swells by the time they reached the Saint would have grown suitably gnarlacious.

Doc, also up early, sat drinking Wavos coffee, which was rumored to
have double-cross whites ground up in it, and listening to the increasingly hectic conversation, and mostly observing the Saint, who was waiting for his morning ride out to th
e break. Over the years Doc had
known a surfer or two who
’
d found and ridden other breaks located far from shore that nobody else had the equipment either under their feet or in their hearts to ride, who
’
d gone alone every dawn, often for years,
shadows cast out over the water, to be taken, unphotographed and unre
corded, on rides of five minutes and longer through seething tunnels of solar bluegreen, the true and unendurable color of daylight. Doc had noticed that after a while these folks would no longer be quite where their friends expected to find them. Long-standing tabs at frond-roofed
beer bars had to be forgiven, shoreside honeys were left to gaze mourn
fully at the horizons and eventually to take up with civilians from over
the berm, claims adjusters, vice principals, security guards, and so forth,
even though rent on the abandoned surfer pads still got paid somehow and mysterious lights kept appearing through the windows long after the honky-tonks had closed for the night, and the people who thought they
’
d actually seen these absent surfers later admitted they might have been hallucinating after all.

Doc had the Saint figured for one of those advanced spirits. His guess was that Flip rode the freak waves he
’
d found not so much out of insanity
or desire for martyrdom as in a true stone indifference, the deep focus of
a religious ecstatic who
’
s been tapped by God to be wiped out in atonement for the rest of us. And that one day Flip, like the others, would be someplace else, vanished even from GNASH, the Global Network of
Anecdotal Surfer Horseshit, and these same people here would be sitting
in Wavos arguing about where he was.

Flip
’
s friend with the outboard showed up after a while, and amid a clamor of anti-powerboat remarks the two split down the hill.

“
Well, he
’
s crazy,
”
summarized Flaco the Bad.

“
I think they just go out and drink beer and fall asleep and come back when it gets dark,
”
opined Zigzag Twong, who had switched last year to a shorter board and more forgiving waves.

Ensenada Slim shook his head gravely.
“
There
’
s too many stories about
that break. Times it
’
s there, times it ain
’
t. Almost like something
’
s down
below, guarding it. The olden-day surfers called it Death
’
s Doorsill. You
don
’
t just wipe out, it grabs you—most often from behind just as you
’
re
heading for what you think is safe water, or reading some obviously fatal
shit totally the wrong way—and it pulls you down so deep you never
come back up in time to take another breath, and just as you get lunched
forever, so the old tales go, you hear a
cosmic insane Surfaris laugh,
echo
ing across the sky.
”

Everybody in Wavos including the Saint proceeded to cackle
“
Hoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo—Wipeout!
”
more or less in unison, and Zigzag and Flaco started arguing about the two different
“
Wipeout
”
singles, and which label, Dot or Decca, featured the laugh and which didn
’
t.

Sortilege, who had been silent till now, chewing on the end of one braid and directing huge enigmatic lamps from one theoretician to another, finally piped up.
“
A patch of breaking surf right in the middle
of what
’
s supposed to be deep ocean? A bottom where there was no bottom before? Well really, think about it, all through history, islands in the
Pacific Ocean have been rising and sinking, and what if whatever Flip
saw out there is something that sank long ago and is rising now slowly to
the surface again?
”

“
Some island?
”

“
Oh, an island
at least!
’

By this point in California history, enough hippie metaphysics had oozed in among surfing folk that even the regulars here at Wavos, some
of them, seeing where this was headed, began to shift their feet and look
around for other things to do.

“
Lemuria again,
”
muttered Flaco.

“
Problem with Lemuria?
”
inquired Sortilege sweetly.

“
The Atlantis of the Pacific.
”

“
That
’
s the one, Flaco.
”

“
And now you say this lost continent, is it
’
s rising to the surface again?

Her eyes narrowing with what, in a less composed person, could
’
ve been taken for annoyance,
“
Not so strange really, there
’
s always been
predictions that someday Lemuria would reemerge, and what better time than now, with Neptune moving at last out of the Scorpio death-trip, a water sign by the way, and rising into the Sagittarian light of the higher mind?
”

“
So shouldn
’
t somebody be calling
National Geographic
or some
thing?
”

“
Surfer
magazine ?
”

“
That
’
s it, boys, I
’
ve had my barney quota for the week.
”

“
I
’
ll walk you,
”
Doc said.

They moseyed south down the alleys of Gordita Beach, in the slow
seep of dawn and the wintertime smell of crude oil and saltwater. After a
while Doc said,
“
Ask you something?
”

“
You heard Shasta split the country, and now you need to talk to somebody.
”

“
Readin my thoughts again, babe.
”

“
Read mine then, you know who to see as well as I do. Vehi Fairfield
is the closest thing to a real oracle we
’
re ever gonna see in this neck of the
woods.
”

“
Maybe you
’
re prejudiced cause he
’
s your teacher. Maybe you
’
d like to place a small wager it
’
s only all that acid talking.
”

“
Throwing your money away, no wonder you can
’
t keep your IOUs straight.
”

“
Never had that problem when you were working at the office.
”

“
And would I ever consider coming back, no, not without benefits
including dental and chiropractic, and you know that
’
s way beyond your
budget.
”

“
I could offer freak-out insurance maybe.
”

“
Already have that, it
’
s called
shikantaza,
you ought to try it.
”

“
What I get for fallin in love outside my religion.
”

“
Which
’
d be what, Colombian Orthodox?
”

Her boyfriend Spike was out on the porch with a cup of coffee.
“
Hey,
Doc. Everybody
’
s up early today.
”

“
She
’
s tryin to talk me into seeing her guru.
”

“
Don
’
t look at me, man. You know she
’
s always right.
”

For a while after he got back from Vietnam, Spike had been keenly paranoid about going anyplace he might run into hippies, believing all
longhairs to be antiwar bombthrowers who could read his vibrations and
tell immediately where he
’
d been and hate him for it, and try to work
some sinister hippie mischief against him. The first time Doc met Spike,
he found him a little frantically trying to assimilate into the freak culture, which sure hadn
’
t been there when he left and had made returning
to the U.S. like landing on another planet full of hostile alien life-forms.
“
Trippy, man! How about that Abbie Hoffman! Let
’
s roll us a couple of numbers and hang out and listen to some Electric Prunes!
”

Doc could see that Spike would be fine as soon as he calmed down.
“
Sortilege says you were over in Vietnam, huh?
”

“
Yeah, I
’
m one them baby killers.
”
He had his face angled down, but he was looking Doc in the eyes.

“
Tell the truth, I admire anybody
’
s had the balls,
”
Doc said.

“
Hey, I just went in every day and worked on helicopters. Me and Charlie, no worries, we spent a lot of time in town together hanging out smoking that righteous native weed, listening to rock n
’
roll on the Armed Forces Radio. Every once in a while, they
’
d wave you over and
go, look, you gonna sleep on the base tonight? you
’
d say, yeah, why? and
they
’
d say, don
’
t sleep on the base tonight. Saved my ass a couple times like that. Their country, they want it, fine with me. Long as I can just work on my bike without nobody hassling me.
”

Doc shrugged.
“
Seems fair. Is that yours outside, that Moto Guzzi?
”