The Falcon and the Snowman (4 page)

There was an article in the paper about the fire and the young drug pusher's death, which Chris's father showed him. From then on, falconry was anathema to his dad.

Robin had clearly been an important factor. But what about Rick?

Rick was the archetypal California surfer—big, wiry, glue-footed on the boards, a potential South Bay champion. He spent every hour he could on the waves beneath the Palos Verdes bluffs, locked into curls, practicing his kickouts and coming up smiling even when he was “wiped out.” Rick was outgoing, happy—and before he had really begun to shave, a Marine.

Rick hadn't been in Vietnam long when a land mine blew off most of his right leg. After he came home on a creaking artificial leg, he and Chris sometimes went down to the bluffs to watch the surfers and check out the size of the combers. Eventually Rick managed to learn how to walk pretty well, without much sign of a limp, but his missing leg—and the nationalism that, in Boyce's mind, had removed it—sickened Chris.

“No cause or ‘just' war for peace, for honor, for freedom, for the people, for property; not Crazy Horse's charge at the Little Big Horn, nor Pickett's nor the Tet Offensive, nor Thermopylae, nor the Inchon Landing, nor the Alamo, nor even Château-Thierry and the Bulge, nor any of them were worth tearing off Rick's leg and his manhood,” Chris would say many years later. “I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now, and someday everyone won't.”

At sixteen, Chris had decided to reject nationalism and everything for which it stood.

5

There was not much for young people to do in Palos Verdes. The calculated isolation from the freeways of Los Angeles was a virtue to those who sought its serenity, ocean breezes and unpolluted air. But for adolescents, the town offered no youth clubs, bowling alleys or skating rinks and not even a movie theater until the early seventies. There was little public transportation on The Hill. Kids growing up there, for the most part, were left to their own resources to find entertainment and excitement.

Marijuana had been around for decades in Southern California, popular among some of the people who worked in the movie industry and in the Los Angeles Mexican-American
barrio
. But in middle-class Anglo communities, pot had been a taboo, especially so in a community like Palos Verdes that perennially voted Republican, went to church on Sundays and didn't experiment with new life-styles because most of the people there had already found what they wanted. Sharing a quick cigarette in the school rest room or a can of beer on a Saturday night was an acceptable forbidden fruit, but not drugs. This began to change in the middle sixties.

Robin hadn't been the only son of Palos Verdes to wander off The Hill and disappear into the Haight-Ashbury, the mountains of Big Sur or some other enclave of dropouts and return with full beard, long hair, a drug habit, a drug business with which to support himself and a falcon on his wrist. There was a small cult of people like him; there were Leroy and Weird Harold and Jon and a dozen more. Jon was Robin's partner, and he could make leather hoods for falcons as fine as any crafted by the artisans of Elizabethan England.

They were a nomadic breed, mostly from wealthy families—contemptuous of many of the indigenous values of Palos Verdes; hedonists who loved the wilderness for its solitude and marijuana for its psychic solace and who found a curious way of banking the money they made from selling marijuana, hashish, LSD and cocaine: they invested it in rare Oriental rugs from Turkey, Persia and the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. Prices for the rugs were skyrocketing, and who'd expect a hippie to have a fortune in nineteenth-century carpets?

Moreover, Robin and his friends weren't the only ones who returned to the Peninsula with values challenging those imparted by the parents on The Hill.

College students who had left The Hill for Berkeley, Stanford and elsewhere came home with samples of pot and other drugs—and advice to younger brothers and sisters to turn on. “It's no worse than alcohol,” they said, usually with a reference to their parents' nightly cocktail hour. Some of the returning college students and dropouts like Robin discovered that substantial amounts of extra spending money could be generated by the sale of a few marijuana cigarettes to the well-heeled kids on The Hill. This lesson was not lost on some entrepreneurial-minded students at P.V. High, including the eldest son of Dr. Lee.

At first the flow of illicit drugs into the community was little more than a trickle. But by the end of the sixties, the trickle had become a torrent. Experimentation expanded beyond pot to barbiturates, amphetamines, LSD, hashish, peyote, cocaine and heroin. From the high school, drugs filtered down to the junior high schools of Palos Verdes and even to some of the elementary schools. Not every young person in Palos Verdes used drugs, but the social pressure was such that junior high pupils who didn't pop pills or blow weed were called “lame” and ostracized by many of their classmates.

By the mid-seventies, like a wave that had crested, the drug epidemic had peaked. But in the years when Daulton and Chris were passing into manhood, drugs were as much a part of high school in their affluent community as history and biology, pep rallies and football games.

Inexplicably, a generation of parents did not realize what was happening to their children. Perhaps they didn't try to know. Lethargy, glazed watery eyes, erratic behavior—somehow, they missed the symptoms, and some didn't learn that their children were helplessly dependent on drugs until they were dead from an overdose; or, some didn't know until their children were scratching off their clothes and screaming from the hallucinations of a nightmarish experience with LSD; or they did not know until the children were just
gone
—runaways swallowed up by the adolescent underground, pursuing the capricious gods that they found in a pill, a snort, a joint or a fix.

The Palos Verdes schools tried to snuff out the drug epidemic, but they didn't have much success; when two-way mirrors were installed in the rest rooms for teachers to monitor drug sales and the lunchtime pot smoking, the kids went elsewhere; eventually, the junior highs cancelled most evening social events because it became impossible to have a dance or a class party without a mantle of sweet-smelling marijuana smoke in the air. “You could go to the schools and they were selling drugs on the street corner,” Dr. Lee would recall later of those times.

It was becoming clear to everybody, Daulton included, that he would not go to Notre Dame, because he wasn't making the grades that his parents insisted that he must earn to get into a selective university. Virtually the only time Daulton managed to bring home an A or B on his report card other than for Woodshop was when he gave it to himself. He erased a D or F on the report card, substituted a B or A and used a photocopying machine to produce a report card that was welcomed at home.

When things went poorly at school or he became depressed, Daulton could always find escape with his tools in the family garage. From a shop teacher at P.V. High who had recognized his skills and encouraged him, Daulton learned how to turn raw lumber into spectacular boxes of inlaid walnut, oak, ebony and teak; and as he got better, he crafted delicate bowls and inlaid tables and cabinets inspired by the work of artisans of eighteenth-century France who became his heroes.

When Daulton came home from school one day during his junior year after a session with his counselor, his mother noticed that he seemed unhappy and asked if anything was bothering him; Daulton confessed he was having troubles with his college-prep classes, and said that he had admitted this to his counselor that morning before asking him for advice about a possible career in woodworking. He said the school official had ridiculed the idea:

“You live in Palos Verdes; you don't work with your hands, you work with your brain.”

Years later, Daulton still remembered this confrontation with bitterness:

“He couldn't understand why somebody would want to work in a shop with all that sawdust and create a piece of art out of wood. That's how I looked at it; it was an art. Louis the Fourteenth period pieces are some of the most highly prized furniture in the world.”

Although his counselors insisted that Daulton was more than intelligent enough to be college material, school simply didn't interest him. “Maybe I was bored; I knew the information was in the books if I really needed to know it,” Daulton said, looking back on his failed high school career. “I saw all those kids trying to get grades and saw the pressures from their parents; if I'd found a reason to pursue a different course I might have gotten involved with it, but I was just content to move out of high school and get started on something else.”

As Dr. Lee continued to make more money, the family increasingly could afford to indulge a taste for fine art objects, which began to fill their home. Dr. and Mrs. Lee traveled frequently to Europe and the Far East, and they honed a taste for fine art initially acquired from her parents. Sharing the interest with their four children, they discussed it at meals, went as a family to inspect projected purchases and often took family outings to museums to see new exhibits. None of the children was more interested in the art—or in other material things of life—than Daulton. Listening carefully, he became more knowledgeable about his parents' collection, and when new friends visited he gave them a tour of the home, explaining proudly the finer points of each item of Oriental art or other objet d'art.

Daulton was not like the members of his generation who rejected the materialism of their parents. Indeed, he repeatedly told his brother and friends that when he was older he wanted to live exactly like his parents. In fact, Daulton had already found an enterprise that made him believe he could be just as wealthy as his father without having to work as hard.

It was to bring him not only money, but a kind of power he had never imagined possible.

Daulton was introduced to marijuana as a high school freshman, and before long, pot had become more than a Saturday-night substitute for a six-pack of beer. He began arriving late for midmorning classes, his eyes glazed—or not showing up at all; he became not only a user of pot but a proselytizer who eagerly solicited friends to drop by his home after school for a joint. After a year or so, he graduated to cocaine. He had discovered that a pinch of coke in a nostril was a marvelous psychic potion; it made him feel euphoric and eased the emptiness he felt about his size, his nagging failure to satisfy his father and a pain that increasingly weighed heavily on him—an inadequacy he felt with girls. Every doubt was exorcised—at least for a few hours—in the euphoria of self-confidence that the drugs yielded. After his first joint, Daulton was never the same again.

“Maybe you could call us the idle rich,” Daulton would recall of those years later. “We weren't opulent rich, but it was a group where you had all the money for everything you needed. Money wasn't at the level of scrounging; you had money for cars, concerts, yet you still had extra money to spend. We were the idle rich, like the ancient Inca priests who kept the coca leaves for themselves and kept them from the masses.”

Chris and Daulton had been friends but not buddies at St. John Fisher. After they both went out for the same football squad at Palos Verdes High, their friendship thickened as their common origins at the parochial school pushed them together—Catholics needed friends in a high school where most of the other students had spent years together at the same public elementary schools. Neither was large enough to make the varsity or junior varsity football squad—Chris stood five feet eight; Daulton was just a shade over five feet—but both made the backfield on the “C” team, the school's third team for smaller players. One day after practice, Daulton showed Chris some pictures that he'd taken of several barn owls. Since his encounter with Robin, Chris had been reading everything he could find about birds—and was fascinated when Daulton showed him a zoo of predatory birds that he was keeping in his backyard. Tethered to perches beside the Lee family's putting green were more than a dozen owls, hawks and falcons.

Their friendship began to flourish even more after that day, mostly because of this mutual interest in falconry, and soon they were best friends.

No one ever satisfactorily explained Daulton's unusual interest in animals. Besides his collection of birds of prey, he kept a pair of piranha fish in a tank at his home for a while and entertained friends by dropping goldfish into the tank to be eaten by the piranhas; later on, he bought a pair of armadillos to keep as pets.

Daulton's experiences with predators were not always successful. Once, he took Chris to a field near the top of the Peninsula to show him a new red-tailed hawk he had bought. She was a big bird, weighing perhaps forty-five ounces. Chris noted that the bird gripped Daulton's gloved hand like a vise, and he sat down at the edge of the field to watch as Daulton cast off the bird with a wave of his hand. When she was airborne, the bird started to lumber back ominously toward Daulton. He threw out a lure of pigeon meat used to train falcons, and the big bird hit it like a train. But she didn't stop; she bounded off the lure, caromed into Daulton's face and clamped her big hind talon into his gums. Meanwhile, her other three talons spread across his left cheek from his nose to his ear, while she held her other foot poised in reserve, as if looking for an opening through Daulton's flailing arms. Chris, twenty yards away, yelled solicitous advice to his friend, but the hawk clung tenaciously to Daulton's face while blood seemed to spring out of it in all directions.

After Daulton finally managed to shake the bird off, he gave her away.

Daulton was graduated from Palos Verdes High School in June, 1970, with the minimum number of credits needed for a diploma. Because his parents still wanted him to try college, Daulton enrolled at Allan Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria, about 150 miles north of Los Angeles, in September, 1970. The Lees had hopes that he might be able to turn his life around, get respectable grades at Hancock and transfer to a four-year college. But nothing at Hancock inspired Daulton, and he dropped out of college the following winter.