Inherent Vice (22 page)

DECIDING ON A PROFESSIONAL LOOK, DOC PULLED HIS HAIR BACK
in a tight ponytail, securing it with a leather clip he only remembered
later Shasta had given him, and put a black vintage fedora on top of that,
then slung a tape machine over his shoulder. In the mirror he looked plausible enough. He was headed up to Topanga that afternoon to visit the Boards, pretending to be a music reporter for an underground fan
magazine called
Stone Turntable.
Denis was along posing as his photog
rapher, wearing a T-shirt with the familiar detail from Michelangelo
’
s fresco
The Creation of Adam,
in which God is extending his hand to Adam
’
s and they
’
re just about to touch—except in this version God is passing a lit joint.

All the way up to Topanga, the radio cranked out a Super Surfin
’
Marathon, all commercial-free—which seemed peculiar until Doc realized that nobody who would sit through this music-teacher
’
s nightmare of doubled-up blues lines, moronic one-chord
“
tunes,
”
and desperate
vocal effects could possibly belong to any consumer demographic known
to the ad business. From this display of white-eccentric binge behavior
only once in a while, mercifully, would there be a departure—
”
Pipeline
”
and
“
Surfin Bird,
”
by the Trashmen, and
“
Bamboo,
”
by Johnny and the Hurricanes, singles by Eddie and
the Showmen, the Bel Airs, the
Hollywood Saxons, and the Olympics, souvenirs out of a childhood Doc
had never much felt he wanted to escape from.

“
When are they gonna play
‘
Tequila
’
?
”
Denis kept wondering, till
just as they were pulling up the drive of the Boards
’
rented mansion, on
it came, the Spanish modality and flamencoid roll strokes of the surfer
’
s
sworn enemy, the Lowrider.
“
Tequila!
”
screamed Denis as they slid into
the last parking space.

The house had once belonged to half of a much-loved hillbilly act of
the forties, and currently the Boards were renting the place from a bass player-turned-record-company executive, which trend watchers took as
further evidence of the end of Hollywood, if not the world, as they had
known it.

Like girls at Hawaiian airports, a couple of house groupies named
Bodhi and Zinnia came forward with leis, or actually love beads, and
put them around Doc
’
s and Denis
’
s necks, then led them off on a tour of
the place, looking at which, a less tolerant person might think right away,
Wow, this is what happens when people make too much money in too
short a time. But Doc figured it depended on your idea of excess. Over the years business had obliged him to visit a stately L.A. home or two, and he soon noticed how little sense of what was hip the very well fixed
were able to exhibit, and that, roughly proportional to wealth accumu
lated, the condition only grew worse. The Boards had so far managed to
escape serious impairment, though Doc had his doubts about the coffee
tables made from antique Hawaiian surfboards, until he saw that all you
had to do was unscrew the legs to get back to a ridable plank. Thanks
to ingenious
porte-cochère
arrangements, many of the closets here were
not just walk-in but drive-thru, full of costumes from past and future worlds, many obtained in Culver City at the MGM studio
’
s historic
sell-off of assets a few months back. Catered meals for twenty or thirty
got trucked up here every day from Jurgensen
’
s in Beverly Hills. There
was a dope-smoking room with a huge 3-D reproduction in fiberglass of
Hokusai
’
s famous
Great Wave of
f Kanagawa,
arching wall to ceiling to
opposite wall, creating a foam-shadowed hideaway beneath the eternally suspended monster, though now and then this would tend to freak a visi
tor into declining his hit whenever a joint came around, which was fine with the Boards, who were still at an arrested stage from back in their
surf-punk days when every crumb of dope counted, and as greedy on the
subject as ever.

Outside, on a terrace with a view across the canyon, longhaired short-skirted cuties drifted around in the sunlight tending the marijuana plants or wheeling huge trays of things to eat, drink, and smoke. Dogs
came and went, some reasonably calm, others obsessive-compulsive,
bringing you back the otherwise ordinary rock you had been throwing, farther and farther away each time, for the last half hour (
“
It
’
s his trip, man
”
), and now and then one fallen afoul of that breed of human that finds amusement in feeding a dog LSD and watching what happens.

Doc was reminded for the uncountableth time that for every band like this one there were a hundred or a thousand others like his cousin
’
s band Beer, doomed to scuffle in obscurity, energized by a faith in the imperishability of rock n
’
roll, running on dope and nerve, brother- and
sisterhood, and good spirits. The Boards, though keeping their voicing—
the traditional two guitars, bass and drums, plus a horn section—had changed personnel so often that only meticulous music historians had any kind of a handle on who was or had been who anymore. Which didn
’
t matter because by now the band had evolved into pretty much a
brand name, years and changes away from the tough little grommets, all
related by blood or marriage, who used to stomp as a cadre barefoot into Cantor
’
s Delicatessen on Fairfax and spend all night eating bagels, hang
ing out, and trying not to trigger any rock-star bodyguards into some
kind of episode. When at length the once hippie-friendly eatery, growing
concerned about possible lawsuits and insurance costs, started putting up signs saying Shoes Required, the Boards all went down to a tattoo parlor in Long Beach and got sandal straps tattooed on their feet and ankles, which fooled the managerial lev
el for a while, and by then the
band had moved on anyway to fancier places farther west. But there were
a couple of years when you could always tell who the original members
of the band were by those ink sandals.

For a week or so now, the Boards
’
houseguests had included Spot
ted Dick, a visiting British band who were getting some local airplay on those stations where the pulse was less hectic, being themselves often so
laid back that people had been known to call the ambulance, mistak
ing the band
’
s idea of a General Pause for some kind of collective sei
zure. Today they were wearing wide-wale corduroy suits in a strangely
luminous brownish gold and sporting precision geometric haircuts from Cohen
’
s Beauty and Barber Shop in East London, where Vidal Sassoon
had once apprenticed and where every week the lads were piled onto a
small bus, given their weekly cannabis allowance and brought out to
sit in a row giggling over back issues of
Tattler
and
Queen
and getting
scissor-cut asymmetric bobs. Last week in fact the lead vocalist had decided to change his name legally to Asymmetric Bob, after his bath
room mirror revealed to him, three hours into a mushroom experiment,
that there were actually two distinct sides to his face, expressing two
violently different personalities.

“
They
’
ve got a tube in every room!
”
Denis reported excitedly.
“
A-and
these zapper units you can change the channel with and not even have to
leave the couch!
”

Doc had a look. These control boxes, recently invented and found
only in upscale homes, were large and crude, as if sharing design ori
gins with Soviet sound equipment. Operating them required a forceful
touch, and sometimes both hands, through which you could feel them
buzzing, because they used high-frequency sound waves. This tended
to drive most of the house dogs here crazy, except for Myrna, a wirehair
who, being older and a little hard of hearing, was able to lie patiently
through all sorts of programming, waiting for a dog-food commercial
to come on, which because of some strange dog ESP she knew was due a minute before it actually showed up on the screen. When it was over,
she would turn her head to any humans in the vicinity and nod emphati
cally. At first, people thought this meant she wanted dinner or at least a
snack, but it seemed to be more of a social act, along the lines of,
“
Some
thing, huh?
”

At the moment she was lying in an unlit room of uncertain size, which
smelled of potsmoke and patchouli oil, watching
Dark Shadows
along
with selected Boards and Spotted Dick personnel, plus those members
of the entourage who were not elsewhere in the house running their ass
off indulging band whims that required deep-frying Hostess Twinkies, ironing each other
’
s hair on the ironing board to maintain some muse
image, and going through fan magazines with X-acto knives and cutting
out all references to competing surf acts.

This was around the point in the Collins family saga when the story
line had begun to get heavily into something called
“
parallel time,
”
which was confounding the viewing audience nationwide, even those
who remained with their wits about them, although many dopers found
no problem at all in following it. It seemed basically to mean that the
same actors were playing two different roles, but if you
’
d gotten absorbed
enough, you tended to forget that these people were actors.

After a while the concentration level among the viewers had Doc
feeling a little restless. He realized the scope of the mental damage one
push on the
“
off button of a TV zapper could inflict on this roomful of
obsessives. Luckily he was near the door and managed to crawl out with
out anybody noticing. He hadn
’
t seen Coy Harlingen around here yet,
and figured this would be as good a time as any to go looking.

He began to wander the great old house. The sun went down, the
groupies flocked together briefly, transitioning into nighttime mode.
Denis ran around like a dog chasing pigeons in the park, snapping pic
tures, and girls obligingly scattered, going
eww
.
..
eww.
Something like
a security detail appeared now and then out on the property, making perimeter checks. From an upper window came the sound of Spotted
Dick
’
s keyboard player Smedley, doing Hanon exercises on his Farfisa,
a little Combo Compact model he had obtained on the advice of Rick
Wright of Pink Floyd and which was never observed far from his person.
He called it Fiona, and witnesses had reported him having long conver
sations with it. Earlier, Doc, pretending to interview him for
Stone Turn
table,
asked what they talked about.

“
Oh, what you
’
d expect. Association football, the war in Southeast Asia, where can one score, sort of thing.
”

“
And how
’
s, how
’
s Fiona enjoying it here in Southern California?
”

Smedley got glum.
“
Loves everything but the paranoia, man.
”

“
Paranoia, really?
”

His voice dropped to a whisper.
“
This house—
”
At which point a scowling young gent, maybe one of the Boards
’
roadies, maybe not, entered and leaned against a wall with his arms folded and just stayed
there, listening. Smedley, his eyeballs oscillating wildly, fled the area.

A private eye didn
’
t drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops, and truth was, since crossing the doorsill of this place, Doc couldn
’
t help noticing what you
’
d call an atmosphere. Instead of a ritual handshake or even a smile, everybody he got introduced to greeted him with the same formula—
”
Where are you at, man?
”
suggesting a high level of discomfort, even fear, about anybody who couldn
’
t be dropped in a bag right away and labeled.

This seemed to be happening more and more lately, out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he
’
d seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everybody else at the
psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like
the operatives who
’
d dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at
that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc knew these people, he
’
d seen enough
of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts,
they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye
on anything that might become a threat.
If everything in this dream of
prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven
world to reassert
it’s
control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who
’
d make it happen.