His mother’s lucky Chinese coin had made this place on Third Street in Laguna possible. Inevitable?
So yes, Matt will miss this house, and the hard garage that’s been his lair for two years. All the sketches he’s done there, all the music he’s played on the rinky-dink Motorola portable stereo with the pop-up lid and the needles that get dull every few months. He’ll miss lying back on that mattress and imagining what fish he might catch the next day, and how to make better time on his paper route with smart short-cuts, and picturing Laurel Kalina, the girl he’s been furtively admiring since fourth grade and now has told him, I like you so much.
Again, spurred by fears for Jazz, hounded by images of her in pain, Matt drives to Laguna’s beaches — Thousand Steps, Brooks, Main, Crescent Bay — hoping for a glimpse of his sister...
The evening is cool and breezy. Scores of young people walk the shores, trailing smoke and laughter.
But no weird LA Moves photo shoots, no Jazz.
At Diver’s Cove the sun has just set when three girls come over and ask him where’s the nearest party. They’re older than him, maybe Jasmine’s age: one with a red satin cape over leopard-print leotards, another wearing a long rainbow-pattern duster, and a barefoot redhead in shorts and a macramé sweater with beads woven in. The redhead has a joint going and they all three huddle in close to him, and she offers it to Matt, who declines, but the girl takes a big hit and aims her exhale into his face, leaning in close, lightly kissing his lips. Her kiss is pungent and warm and it sends a lightning bolt of lust through him.
“Michoacan,” she whispers. “You ought to try it.”
Suddenly there’s a hand on his crotch and Matt almost jumps out of his shorts.
“You sure you don’t want a hit?”
The hand still moving on him.
“No, thank you.”
By the time he realizes what they’re doing, Red Cape is handing off his wallet to a muscular guy in jeans and biker boots who has appeared from nowhere, and he hands off the wallet to a little guy who turns and runs like a rabbit toward Coast Highway. Then from the dark comes a third man, fists up and ready to fight, joining his muscular buddy to corral Matt from the escaping rabbit. The girls dance around Matt, a swirling circle of cape and coat and sweater, the redhead shaking her tangle of curls into his face.
“Come on girls,” says Muscles. “Kid, you stay the fuck right there. The wallet will be in the trash can.”
“Longton! Move it, man!”
Laughter trails into the night.
A few minutes later he’s driving toward home, hands shaking and stomach muscles locked. He’s got his wallet, license, student ID, and not one dollar. His incredible twenty-dollar tip from Sungaard is gone. The dollars he had before that windfall are gone too. All of which could have fed him for weeks, bought him a new sketchpad and some used clothes from Fade in the Shade, paid for ice cream sundaes and dinners for Laurel. The loss is almost what he makes in a month delivering papers. Eighty-three fucking cents left in his pocket.
But his adrenalin won’t let go and he really wants to fight, though he’s only been in one fight in his life, which he lost.
Add those girls kissing and rubbing him — which makes Matt feel depraved and deprived and wanting Laurel — and he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to feel. He screams out the open window into the PCH traffic, just a scream, no words.
Making it all even worse, Matt has suspected since he last saw Jasmine two nights ago that it’s basically useless looking for her like this. As if she’ll appear again, running crazily free, and he’ll magically be there to rescue her. It’s futile.
Flattened by tonight’s sorry events, this futility hits him like a wave breaking over the rocks where he fishes. He feels angry and stupid. He has been robbed by hippies.
“This is idiotic, Matt,” he says. “You are an idiot.”
25
He gets to Mystic Arts World before it opens, waves through one of the onion-dome windows at Johnny Grail. Grail is feather-dusting hookahs in the head-shop section of the store.
Two Jasmines stare back at Matt from the middle of the weirdly shaped window. Matt is seeing her all over town now, and every time she confronts him, his emotions swing from sadness and frustration over Jazz to anger at the cops for how damned little progress they appear to be making, if they’re making any at all. Zip, is his guess.
Grail lets him in. Without customers and music, the store has the feel of a counterculture museum — all things foreign, subversive, and mystical. Grail leads him back to the hookahs, some of them large enough to sit on a floor and be smoked standing up, some no larger than a coffee mug. There’s a replica of Emperor Jahangir’s jade hookah in New Delhi for $25, brass shisas from Egypt, copper-alloy Qaelyans from Persia, and a few featuring ceramic chillums made by a local surfer-craftsman named Greg Nichols. Matt has seen him speeding around Laguna in his raised, four-wheel-drive F-150 with the custom gray paint, his longboard racked on the top.
“Any good news about your sister?”
“None. The cops aren’t doing much. Much that shows, anyway.”
Grail shakes his head and resumes his dusting of the exotic hookahs.
“These ceramics draw like a dream and keep the water cool,” he says, tapping the top of a large, floor-standing Nichols with his duster. “And this one holds an ounce and a half of hash.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Why are you here so early?”
“I need money. I wanted to make some more deliveries if you have any.”
“Interesting.”
“I got ripped off down at Diver’s Cove last night. My own fault.”
“I can loan you some.”
“No thanks, Johnny. I want to earn it. I have enough to get by for now.” Eighty-three cents, he thinks.
“You and Jazz have been good to the brotherhood, Matt. Let me make some calls. You stay here.”
Grail hands Matt the duster and heads out through the meditation room. Matt hears a door close, then takes up dusting the beaker bongs with the psychedelic paint jobs, the bubble-based vapor bongs, the double-recyclers, the dab-rigs, quartz bangers, and the Gandalf pipes. He picks up a beaker bong and examines the paint job, sees he could probably do as good with the right materials. It’s beautiful — red roses on clear glass. Wonders how a mini-tableau of Laurel and Rose in the Gauguin would look. The smoke would swirl around behind them like fog and you’d have a werewolf kind of trip. Then he carefully dusts the comedy bongs and pipes: a red-and-white candy cane, a clear cobra, a vanilla ice cream cone, even a frosted-glass hand-grenade pipe with a swiveling pull-pin.