A Thousand Steps

13

The camper van putts down Coast Highway, pulling to the right. Matt feels the gears shifting under him as he pushes the squishy clutch and moves the stick from gear to gear. His mom has coached him on timing the shift to the rpms and keeping the clutch all the way down until you’re in the next gear. It feels funny to have control over this much power and weight, even though this Westfalia camper has only thirty horsepower. The non — power steering wheel is large and takes some muscle.

It gets Matt down to Ninth Street, where he finds a place to park. No driving mistakes and no cops. He’s pleased to have broken the law and gotten away with it. Wonders what else he might get away with. Puts a sketchbook and a box of pressed charcoal sticks into his backpack, a burly thing made by his mother from outgrown blue jeans with surf shop patches and emblems. Slings it on and begins his long descent down Thousand Steps.

Which are actually 219 steps. Matt has counted them once every year since his ninth birthday — another day he very clearly remembers — when his mom and dad took him and Kyle and Jasmine to the big wide-open sandy beach here, perfect for surf-mattresses, bodysurfing, tidepool-combing, and getting tan. The menfolk had fished the south-end rocks that day because that’s what Matt had wanted on his birthday and there weren’t too many tourists. Matt, now at step number eighty-eight, remembers a keeper-sized halibut he caught that became dinner that night. Remembers the Boston cream pie his mom made and the Rapala lures his dad got him. Less than a year later his father was suddenly gone.

Now he’s nearly to step number one-seventy-two. The steps are concrete, and narrow, and they are bordered closely by steel railings. The dense shrubbery of the oceanfront lots line the railings on either side. It’s like being on a path through high jungle, and he thinks of Kyle on real paths in real jungle, in narrow dark tunnels filled with men and women waiting to spear or shoot you. “Sunshine of Your Love” plays on his left, and “Foxy Lady” on his right. Voices and laughter and the smell of marijuana. He remembers Kyle telling him he wasn’t scared of war and he’d “kick Victor Charlie’s sorry ass” or die trying. Jack Bruce sings about waiting so long to be in the sunshine of somebody’s love. Hendrix sings about a sweet little lovemaker.

The beach is still crowded, the tide low. He walks into the suntanning bodies and their bright swimsuits, sees the skim-boarders and surfers out in the crashing white-foam waves. Two pale jarheads throw a football, faces and backs burnt pink. Hippie girls in cutoffs and genie pants play hacky sack. Young people try to keep their Frisbees from beaning old people. Acres of sunbathers recline on their colorful rectangles, radios play, a biplane pulls a banner for Tab across the sky, and the sexy aroma of suntan lotion hovers over it all.

He stops, looking for the photo shoot that Laurel described: the bossy photographer with the cameras draped over him, the fumbling assistant with his windblown reflectors, the muscleman in his tiny swimsuit. And all of the beautiful young people as models, some of them locals that Matt will certainly recognize. But no sign of these. Not here, not south, not north.

So he heads south along the waterline toward the fabled Thousand Steps Pools, thinking that they would be a perfect place to photograph young people doing beachy things. There is also the tunnel you can pass through when the tide isn’t too high, and some dramatic rock outcroppings. And the sweeping, yellow-sand beach.

The pools — big concrete rectangles built by a Hollywood movie director who lived here back in the twenties — are busy with waders and pool-gazers eyeing the swift croaker and perch. But no photographers. Matt stands on one of the walls, watches the fish surge and slash.

He finds a place above one of the big pools and sits. Lets his good strong eyes scan the beach. Maybe if he waits and watches, Jazz will show.

He gets out his sketchbook and a good charcoal stick and does another Laurel in the Gauguin painting. He does an Officer Brigit Darnell sitting across from him in the station; a decent Jordan Cavore looming over him on the Sapphire Cove walkway. He makes people he doesn’t like look uglier than they are, and people he likes look better. Cavore looks pretty bad. He does another Jazz, based on his favorite drawing of her, pretty much wrecked by Cavore. At home, Matt has flattened and pressed that crumpled thing between the pages of a heavy Impressionism tome he bought at a Laguna Beach Friends of the Library sale for a nickel. The best five cents he’s ever spent.

Now he tries his mom in the embarrassing wench’s costume, and manages to capture her expression of whatever’s been eating at her these last weeks. But what is it? Does she have a disease she doesn’t know about? Or worse, she does know about but won’t admit? Ernie’s dad got cancer but lived.

Matt looks up to note that the evening sky is a deepening blue, and a band of low gray clouds lies on the horizon like insulation.

Which is when a man with cameras dangling around his neck, another man carrying large black duffels, and a very big guy in a maroon robe come traipsing south toward him. Camera Man wears a baggy white suit and white sneakers. A caravan of young men and women follows along well behind them, the girls in bright bikinis and hot pants and sheer cover-ups and sun hats; the boys in canvas surf shorts and colorful T-shirts or Hawaiian shirts or no shirts at all. One carries a shiny new twin-fin surfboard balanced on his head like the guys on Matt’s Endless Summer T-shirt. Some have packs and bags or small duffels. Matt studies every one of them. No Jazz. No one he recognizes.

He watches as Camera Man stops and raises his hand like a patrol sergeant. His platoon stops too, except Robe Giant, who approaches the leader. They talk, then Robe Giant goes back to the group and returns to Camera Man with one of the young women by the hand. In her other hand she’s got a pink skateboard with white daisies on it, one of the cool new models with the wheelie deck and fat wheels. She looks a little like Jasmine — a suntanned blonde with square shoulders and long legs. Younger, maybe. Matt counts nine young people against the backdrop of golden beach sand.

Camera Man turns his back to the descending sun and scans his people with a long-lensed camera.

Duffel Guy drops his bags, kneels and unzips one. Robe Giant reclines in the sand on his side before the young woman with the skateboard, his wine-colored robe parting to reveal his sculpted chest and bulging swimsuit. Skateboard Girl looks down on him skeptically.

Matt moves closer, climbs a gentle dune, and settles cross-legged into the warm sand. Opens the sketchbook across his lap and swiftly cuts in the twelve figures, using both pages without even looking at them, trying to set the scene.

Camera Man approaches Robe Giant and Skateboard Girl, kneels, and, cranking the focus, starts shooting. Matt hears the muted clicks carrying on the breeze. Duffel Guy sidles up behind Camera Man, holding a big silver fabric disc that reflects the sunlight onto Robe Giant and Skateboard Girl. Camera Man barks something that Matt can’t make out, but Skateboard Girl drops her board to the sand and hops on. She lifts her arms for balance, and bends her knees as if she’s riding straight at Robe Giant, who gazes up at her with what at this distance looks to Matt like a bored leer.

Matt is drawing fast, barely looking down, letting his eyes and hand do the work, no thoughts to interfere. Turns the page without a glance. Really trying to get those faces right, not just the details but the attitudes. Can make adjustments later.

Camera Man squats and shoots, rises and shoots, circles, changes cameras, backpedals and shoots again. Skateboard Girl kneels with her arms out in a good pantomime of speed. Then squats almost all the way down and raises her hands, the wind catching her hair just right, blowing it back as if from sheer velocity.

The other young models activate. Matt watches them dig through their packs and duffels and produce treasures: a fringed buckskin vest, a pair of Stars and Stripes genie pants, a suede miniskirt quickly zipped on by a girl in a Day-Glo green bikini. Then, two tie-dye peace-sign flags with handles, skillfully deployed by a smiling redhead, as another girl pulls what looks like an enormous unmelted ice cream sundae from her bag. A young man straps a small guitar over his naked shoulder and strums a chord; Surfboard Boy approaches Skateboard Girl, stabs his twin-fin into the sand and starts rubbing on board wax in long suggestive strokes as Camera Man swivels, changes cameras and continues shooting again. Robe Giant, rising, lets his maroon cover drop to the sand, revealing his bulging biceps and armored six pack and the tiny American-flag water polo briefs that revolted Laurel. Matt realizes for the first time how tall the guy is, six and a half feet maybe, a tower of oiled muscle who now squats and lifts Ice Cream Sundae onto one shoulder where she curls her legs up like a mermaid on a rock, smiles greatly, and proffers the ersatz sundae to Camera Man with one outstretched hand.

Matt can’t draw fast enough, but he gets decent faces of the photo crew. By then a crowd has gathered, so he joins them to watch this strange circus, this twisting, ever-changing double-helix of weirdness.

It goes on and on. Matt circles the action and the crowd but it’s not as if different angles give him any more understanding of what he’s seeing. Camera Man has given up shouting direction and the young people seem to be improvising.

By the time the photographer calls it a wrap, Matt and dozens of other spectators are loitering under a magnificent orange and black sunset. The actors and the audience all applaud Camera Man, who opens his arms and calls out.

“Thank you so very much, my friends,” he says. His voice is rough and strongly accented. “Once again we have made our art with our hearts and our bodies. Some of these images will come to be in history and some will be used only to sell products. But you my friends are the soul of art. Thank you. Tomorrow is Diver’s Cove at six P.M. Please reimagine your costumes and your props so that we do not repeat ourselves.”

Most of the audience is still hanging around, and as Matt circulates through he realizes that most have stayed on to see about joining this strange circus.

I got a Barbarella suit that looks great on me!

What, you just do whatever comes into your head and hope the pictures turn out good?

Can me and my old lady get into this scene?

Matt’s got the fresh picture of Jasmine right there in the sketchbook and he opens to it. Robe Giant eyes Matt steadily as he cinches the robe sash. Something tells Matt that these people might like him and his drawing about as much as Jordan Cavore did last Saturday night. But he holds it up to Robe Giant anyway.

“Have you seen her?”

Robe Giant shakes his great head and turns away.

So Matt joins some people taking flyers from Skateboard Girl.

“You were great,” he says. “Your performance.”

“Far out,” she says, handing him a sheet of paper. “Here. If you come to the Evolution Ceremony tonight, I’ll get you in for half price. Good food. I’m an Evolver.”

“Bitchen. I’m Matt.”

“Sara.”

He shows her his sketch of Jazz. “Do you know Jasmine Anthony?”

Sara squints at the drawing and nods. “I saw her at a couple of these photo shoots, and I saw her once at the Vortex, pretty sure.”

“Vortex?”

“Read the flyer.”

“She’s my sister and she’s missing.”

Sara squints again and shades her eyes against the lowering sun. Studies Matt’s face. “She’s cute, like you. I haven’t seen her in days, though.”

And she’s gone in a flurry of breeze-blown hair, her flyers in one hand and a beaded bag for her skateboard in the other.

The flyer is glossy and expensive looking, with a pale blue background that could be a sky or a swimming pool without ripples, and puffy, cloudlike letters: