A Thousand Steps

4

The Sandpiper on Coast Highway is dead at five when Matt pushes open the heavy, decal-plastered front door. Chuck says Matt can only stay a minute, being way under twenty-one. Says Furlong could bust him for this. The club is small and dark, no windows, and it smells of cigarettes, beer, and bleach. The stage is stacked with amps and the walls are crookedly tacked with carpet remnants for better acoustics, giving the room a teetering, ship’s-hold kind of feeling.

Chuck wants to talk about Bonnie Stratmeyer but Matt does not, so he pretends he hasn’t heard. Chuck fills him in: Bonnie was found naked and possibly murdered below the Diamond Street stairway to the beach and she was probably a federal informant and that the cops were covering it all up. She’d been missing for nearly six months, says Chuck.

Of course, almost everything Chuck says about Bonnie is wrong. Matt thinks it’s funny how quickly the under-thirty Lagunatics like Chuck blame the cops, the government, and the very right-wing John Birch Society for whatever goes wrong in their town. And how the cops, the government, and the John Birch Society think the young are all drug addicts, draft dodgers, sex fiends, and communists. Matt wants to side with the young and free, of course, but he’s not sure how. Smoke pot? Wear that lame tie-dye hippie stuff?

However, Chuck did in fact see Jasmine last night, had served her and Miranda soft drinks and allowed them to hear Austin Overton. Why? Because Chuck had heard a “confirmed rumor” at Mystic Arts World that Sgt. Bill Furlong and most of the LBPD would be conducting another Dodge City raid last night, rather than busting underage drinkers around town. Jasmine had left after the last set, sober and apparently happy. Chuck gives Matt a conspiratorial look.

“Who with?”

“Austin Overton.”

Shit, Matt thinks. He knows the anger is showing on his face. He doesn’t care. Chuck tells him that the singer hangs out at Mystic Arts World, if Matt wants to find him.

“I know where he hangs out.”

Matt has seen Overton at Mystic Arts World more than once. He’s one of the celebrity acid-heads who spend a lot of time there — Dr. Timothy Leary and Johnny Grail being two others. Leary being the former Harvard psychology professor, and Grail being the founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which owns Mystic Arts World. Which Furlong says is nothing more than a drug emporium disguised as a head shop.

Matt hangs out at Mystic Arts World too, because he likes the artist who runs the MAW art gallery in the meditation room. Christian Clay not only lets Matt loiter around and paw through the expensive art books MAW sells, but also lets Matt help him hang the gallery paintings. Gives him a tattered demo book once in a while.

They talk about art, art, and art. Matt knows that Laguna was founded as an art colony and he wonders if growing up here led him to art or if he would have found art anywhere. Clay’s reputation is as a “psychedelic artist,” but Matt thinks his paintings and sculptures are much more than that. In those heavy art tomes, Christian points out influences on his work, some going back centuries. Matt wishes he had one-tenth of the talent Christian has. A hundredth.

He walks into Mystic Arts World at sunset, entering through a wall of incense smoke that thickens toward the ceiling.

The light is dim. A chorus of oms drones from the meditation room in back. The main room has shelves of books on mysticism, spirituality, metaphysics, philosophy, Eastern religion, illustrated sex texts, mind-expansion through drugs; separate stands for the bestselling quarterly Psychedelic Review, hardcover and paperback volumes of Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception; long glass cabinets and lacquered burl tables stocked with recreational drug paraphernalia; bins of bootlegged tapes from the Dead, Hendrix, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, the Beatles, and Dylan; potted plants growing lush throughout — ferns, ficus, creeping Charlie, and philodendron.

The store is crowded with shoppers, most young and well-haired, wearing loose clothes and smothered in bags — bags with straps over their backs or shoulders or around their waists, bags in their hands, bags on their arms and at their elbows — sewn bags, knit bags, woven bags, bags featuring feathers and seashells, wooden amulets, ceramic zodiacal symbols, and beads, beads, beads. Matt’s young instincts tell him that this world of mystic arts is funny and crazy and maybe a little dangerous. He feels an undertow of arousal every time he walks in. Jazz once described MAW as “horny.”

To Matt, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is cool, generous, and secretive. Christian has told him that lots of young men claim membership but only a few actually are. It is widely known that the BEL is a legally registered church in the state of California. And that they make no secret of worshipping Jesus, God, Buddha, LSD, and marijuana. They want to buy an island and create a utopia on it. Forever stoned to see god. Forever free to make love. Matt has heard that the island is already paid for.

Matt has also heard that the BEL makes large amounts of money smuggling hashish into Laguna from Afghanistan. He has seen that they are flagrant and prodigious drug users. Surfers. Motorheads. Petty criminals. Street fighters from inland. All on a mission to bring freedom, love, and LSD to the people. One day Matt saw Johnny Grail speeding down Pacific Coast Highway in a white convertible Cadillac Eldorado with the top down, screaming happily about love and tossing hundred-dollar bills in the air. Matt got one. BEL. Acid church. Religious cult with an eye for profit. A going concern.

But no Austin Overton here at Mystic Arts. Matt figures it might be too early for a popular rock musician to be showing himself in his adopted hometown. Probably eating, which reminds Matt how hungry he is, nothing since the peanut butter and jelly burrito before his paper route.

He stands near the entrance of the meditation room, looking in. One of Christian Clay’s huge psychedelic paintings, Cosmic Mandala, hangs illuminated on the far wall. It’s an awesome circular swirl of colors and shapes that explode outward from a coupled yin and yang, depicting — according to Christian — life from the beginning of matter to the end of time.

Seated cross-legged on a table beneath the painting is a large, dark-skinned, long-bearded man in a crimson robe, eyes closed and both hands resting on his knees in Gyan mudra — thumbs and index fingers forming loose circles. Matt knows the Gyan mudra from his mother, who took up meditation just recently and thinks the incense she burns while meditating in her room cancels out the marijuana she’s been smoking more and more frequently.

Except for the crimson-robed leader sitting on his table, everybody else in the meditation room is facing away from Matt. He studies the back of each hairy head for Austin Overton but doesn’t see him. What exactly would Matt ask him? Didn’t the singer have the right to go out with an admirer after his show? A small part of Matt thinks he might even find Jasmine here with Overton, both of them exhausted and meditating together soul-to-soul after having sex all night. He hates that idea because Overton is too old. Matt knows Jazz has had sex because she told him. He disapproves though knows it’s not his business.

Now Matt feels a grumble in his stomach and a lightness in his head. Bonnie Stratmeyer weighs on his thoughts, even more heavily now than she did this morning. In Matt’s mind, Jasmine’s failure to come home is darkly related to Bonnie — absurd and irrational as he knows this is. Bonnie as warning. Bonnie as fate.

Stepping outside Mystic Arts, Matt breathes the cool salt air and rubs his fists over his smoke-stung eyes.

He has a sudden hope that Jazz will be home when he gets there. Like Miranda said. Be so great to see her. So great to know she’s alive and well. To see there’s no connection to a girl who went missing two months ago in the same small town and was found dead on the beach just this morning.

He can cook up the sea bass fillets and hear about whatever she did last night, and where and who with.