The Kings Of Cool

40

John McAlister rolls his skateboard down Ocean Avenue, then puts the board under his arm and walks along Main Beach up to the Taco Bell, because sometimes guys get their food, then go into the men’s room and leave their tacos on the table.

The tacos and Johnny are both gone when they come out.

Dig young Johnny Mac.

Tall for his fourteen years, wide shoulders, long brown hair that looks like it was cut with hedge clippers. Your classic grem-T-shirt and board shorts, huaraches, shell necklace.

When he makes it up to Taco Bell there’s a crowd standing around.

Big guy with long blond hair is buying food for everybody, handing out tacos and those little plastic packets of hot sauce to a bunch of surfers, hippies, homeless drug casualties, runaways, and those skinny girls with headbands and long straight hair who all look alike to John.

The guy looks like some kind of SoCal surfer version of a sea god. John wouldn’t know Neptune or Poseidon from Scooby-Doo, but he recognizes the look of local royalty-the deep tan, the sun-bleached hair, the ropy muscles of a guy who can spend all day every day surfing and who has money anyway.

Not a surf bum, a surf god.

Now this god looks down on him with a friendly smile and warm blue eyes and asks, “You want a taco?”

“I don’t have any money,” John answers.

“You don’t need money,” the guy answers, his face breaking into a grin. “ I have money.”

“Okay,” John says.

He’s hungry.

Guy hands him two tacos and a packet of hot sauce.

“Thanks,” John says.

“I’m Doc.”

John doesn’t say anything.

“You have a name?” Doc asks.

“John.”

“Hi, John,” Doc says. “Peace.”

Then Doc moves along, handing out tacos like fishes and loaves. Like Jesus, except Jesus walked on water and Doc rides on it.

John takes his tacos before Doc changes his mind or anyone there makes him as the kid who filches food off tables, goes out into the parking lot, and sits down at the curb beside a girl who looks like she’s nineteen or twenty.

She’s carefully picking the beef out of her taco and laying it on the curb.

“The cow is sacred to the Hindus,” she says to John.

“Are you a Hindu?” John asks.

He doesn’t know what a Hindu is.

“No,” the girl says, like his question makes no sense. Then she adds, “My name is Starshine.”

No it isn’t, John thinks. He’s talked with plenty of hippie runaways before-Laguna is crawling with them-and they always call themselves Starshine or Moonbeam or Rainbow, and they’re always really Rebecca or Karen or Susan.

Maybe a Holly, but that’s about as crazy as it gets.

Hippie runaway girls annoy the shit out of John.

They all think they’re Joni Mitchell, and he hates Joni Mitchell. John listens to the Stones, the Who, the Moody Blues.

Now he just wants to finish his tacos and get out of there.

Then Starshine says, “After you finish eating? I’d like to suck you off.”

John doesn’t go home.

Ever.