A Thousand Steps

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.

Matt is craving the organic breakfast muffins in the health food bakery when Grail returns. He’s carrying a ream-sized box.

“This is like totally unreal that you showed up here today, Matt. Talk about Karma. Okay, there’s two hundred and fifty of these things. Enough for every business in town, and some left over. They need to be delivered by tonight, and my prior arrangements just fell through. They’re invitations to our Summer of Eternal Love Experience a week from Sunday. You can save me lots on postage. Just take you a few hours. I’ll pay you five dollars when you’re done.”

Talk about the nick of time!

He opens the box and hands a sheet to Matt. It’s a hot fuchsia background with dizzying Day-Glo green psychedelic letters. A bright orange quarter-sun beams its rays down from the upper left corner, like in a child’s drawing:

“Nice graphic,” Matt says. “It actually makes my eyes hurt.”

Grail gives him a grinding little laugh. “Exactly. I designed it myself to take the eye into another dimension. Like seeing a double-helix that keeps rolling over and over while being lit by a strobe. Plus that incredible sun up in the corner.”

“Free food and live music? Sycamore Flats will be packed.”

“We hope.”

“Does Furlong know about this?”

“Make sure he gets his invite, Matt. All the pigs are welcome!”

Matt loves the idea of this easy money. And the idea that the flyers will take him into the heart of the city where — somewhere — Jasmine’s abductors must be holding her. He might see her, hear her, sense her. Find the connection he needs. She has to be out there, right?

“Okay. I’ll deliver. It’s what I do.”

“Don’t use the mail slots or the federales will come after me. Just slide them under the doors or into the jambs, under the welcome mats, wherever. So cool of you do to this, Matt. So out-of-this-world, boss-Karma cool.”

“You’re welcome, Johnny. Oh, I’d like two of those organic poppy-seed muffins and a small milk.”

Grail goes behind the counter, picks up the pastry tongs. “Yesterday’s stuff, so I’ll discount it,” he says.

Matt sets the coins on the glass, thirty cents, but the muffins will be worth every penny. He’s hungry enough to eat ten of them. He still has fifty-three of his last eighty-three cents, with Johnny Grail’s five dollars coming sometime soon.

And an idea hits him.

Brigit Darnell seems suspicious of Matt’s motives, but she radios Furlong about Matt Anthony’s request to see the sergeant immediately on a matter of “some importance.”

They meet in the gift shop of the Laguna Art Museum on Coast Highway. Matt’s idea. He has spent some hours here, lost in the plein air oils that Laguna is famous for — landscapes and beach scenes, pastoral and pleasing. The watercolors by Millard Sheets and Rex Brandt are terrific too. His sketchbooks are filled with earnest attempts to copy some of this art, though the one he now holds in one hand has only recent drawings.

Furlong leads the way to the upstairs gallery, jangling with each step.

As Matt intended, they’re alone up here.

Furlong speaks quietly. “What.”

Matt hasn’t rehearsed this, so it all comes tumbling out: Diver’s Cove looking for Jazz, the hippie girls blowing smoke in his face and kissing him, the grope, the three guys and the warning and his wallet in the trash, minus his money. He tells Furlong it was close to thirty-five dollars of paper route earnings — not mostly a gift from one of the richest men in Southern California.

“Describe the perpetrators in detail, Matt.”

He does, right down to the red satin cape and the tie-dye duster and the beaded macramé sweater.

“And, that’s not all.” He made one good sketch late last night, of the girl who blew the smoke in his face. He opens the sketchbook and shows Furlong.

“Hmmm. Darnell can take a report and we’ll BOLO them. But there are a lot of drugged-up hippies out there.”

“BOLO?”

“Be on the lookout.”

“I actually was hoping you’d pay me for this information and drawing. This was a robbery on a city beach. I’m an eyewitness victim, and I’ve made a good drawing of one suspect. And — this is important — I know the last name of the man who threatened me.”

Furlong waits, looking down at Matt, his bigness amplified in the cool, clean light of the gallery.

“You said five bucks for good information you can use.”

“About the Brotherhood.”

“These guys had drugs alright. From Michoacan.”

“I’m after bigger fish, Matt.”

“I’ve even half identified one of them. Longton — the leader.”

“If they had a weapon I wouldn’t hesitate.”

“If you pay me for this, I’ve got something else. It relates directly to the Brotherhood.”

“No, Matt. That’s not how it works. What happens is you give me your best information, all of it, and I decide whether it’s worth my money or not. We don’t negotiate first.”

“Then I’ll need to consider this.”

Matt walks away to the stairs, looks down into the stairwell. Then stands before a dazzling triple-perspective Wayne Thiebaud painting. Someday. Then comes back to Furlong, opens his sketchbook again and hands the sergeant one of Grail’s fuchsia-and-Day-Glo-green Summer of Eternal Love invitations.

Furlong stares at it. “Where did you get this?”

“Mystic Arts.”

“I knew nothing about it until now. An experience?”

“I think the invites are going out today.”

“How?”

“The Post Office, I guess.”

“Offers of free sex through the U.S. Mail?”

“It says free love, not sex.” Matt knows he’s digging a hole for himself but all he can do is hope Furlong doesn’t see it.

“What else do you have for me?” Furlong asks quietly.

“That’s it. An authentic eyewitness victim’s account. A sketch of one perpetrator, and the last name of the leader. And an invite to a BEL event in Laguna Canyon you didn’t know about, at which drugs will be all over the place. I lost almost all the money I had last night, Sergeant.”

Furlong gets out his wallet and hands Matt two fives. “Take the sketch to Darnell. I’ll keep the invite. Later today I want a list of the streets you ride on your route, delivering the papers. Leave it with Darnell with the sketch. I may want to find you.”

Matt likes that idea not one bit, but he likes the ten dollars a lot. “Alright.”

Furlong taps two fingers to his lips, which becomes a brief salute.

Late that night Matt finishes delivering Johnny Grail’s flyers. He’s tired and hungry. But Johnny owes him five bucks and Furlong’s ten dollars are in his wallet. He’s had nothing to eat since a skimpy peanut butter and jelly burrito for lunch.

But worse than hunger is his failure to come so much as one inch closer to Jazz, even after delivering those hundreds of flyers all over town. He hasn’t found the elusive connection. Had he actually gotten close to her? He had not sensed her. What’s she doing right now? Does she have enough to eat? Are they hurting her?

Putt-putting toward the Hotel Laguna in the van, he asks himself a difficult question: If what you’re doing doesn’t work, if you’ve looked everywhere and don’t find what you’re looking for, what do you do?

One, he thinks, you look again.

Two, look somewhere else.

Three, learn to see in a different way.

Mahajad Om had said something like that at the end of the Evolution ceremony. How exactly do you see in a different way?

Luckily, Ernie is working tonight.

Matt sits in the folding chair, hidden from management between the walk-in and the shelves of foodstuffs. His stomach growls and churns. Ernie delivers half a prime rib that may be the best thing Matt has eaten in his life. The horseradish stings his sinuses and brings tears to his eyes. Also on the plate are two halves of two different potatoes, one drenched in sour cream and the other in butter. And a slab of chocolate cake the shape and size of a peaked SS cap, which Matt suspects is a non-leftover Ernie has lifted from the desert rack.

Ernie sits. “No Jazz?”

“Eight nights.”

Matt tells Ernie about Jazz running down Third Street Tuesday night after the Leary show at Mystic Arts, the guys in the green VW van with peace-sign curtains, grabbing her out of the fog and stuffing her into the vehicle like she was a doll. He knows he’s not supposed to talk details like this, but the idea that the Laguna cops aren’t doing their best for Jazz comes jumping up at him again, like an ugly little jack popping out of its box.

“I made out with Laurel,” he says.

“Woah, that’s been coming on awhile.”

“Like forever.”

“How was it?”

“She’s choice. I really like her.”

Matt goes to work on the cake.

“I read the Bonnie Stratmeyer article in the News-Post today,” says Ernie. “Now they say she could have been murdered.”

Matt thinks of big-eyed Detective McAdam briefing the reporters the previous morning. “Yeah, I heard.”

Ernie gets an unusual look, shaking his head. “Unbelievable that a guy can have the total hots for a girl at school and she gets murdered. Out of all the girls. Out of all the girls in all the high schools in the world, and Bonnie gets murdered. And the article said the FBI still hasn’t figured out what drugs were in her. And how they got there. And she drowned but not there at Thalia. Not in salt water. The cops say the contusion cracked her skull.”

“Suicide is still a maybe,” says Matt.

“Bash your own head in?”

“Right. No.”

“A weird thing is, I saw her months before she died, and I had this really strong emotion to talk to her. Even though she was out of my league, by a lot. And now I realize that if I had just gone up and talked to her, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

“I don’t get that.”

“Well, just think. Say she was murdered. That means someone had to come across Bonnie at just the right time to get away with it. The right time to hit her, or shoot drugs into her, or drown her. But if I had just talked to her for even one minute, months earlier, that would have changed the timing of everything that followed. Meaning that whoever killed her might not have met up with her at all because of the one minute she talked to me. Get it?”

“I do,” Matt says. “Even just a few seconds could mean a whole different reality.”

Like Mahajad Om talked about, he thinks.

“Exactly,” says Ernie.

Matt finishes the cake. He never knew Ernie was so keen on Bonnie. “Where was she that last time, when you could have talked to her but didn’t?”

“March. I was at the Vortex for Sal Proetto’s Evolver graduation. And she was one of them. An Evolver.”

Like Sara, Matt thinks, who had seen Jasmine at the Vortex. Or was pretty sure she had.

Bonnie, Jazz, and Sara. LA Moves. The Vortex of Purity.

Now comes that rushing in Matt’s ears again, his early warning system, his oracle. He has two important questions for Mahajad Om.