The Kings Of Cool

7

Chon tells Ben and O that he literally has to get packing.

He goes back to his efficiency apartment on Glenneyre and packs a baseball bat into his ’68 green Mustang — in honor of Steve McQueen — the King of Cool — and drives down to San Clemente, not far from Richard Nixon’s version of Elba and hence known in the latter half of the 1970s as

Sans Clemency.

(Nixon, poor Nixon, the only truly tragic hero in the American political theater; the only recent president more Aeschylus than Rodgers and Hammerstein. First there was Camelot, then The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, then Richard?)

Chon drives not to the old Western White House

The real name of which was, with presumably unintended irony,

La Casa Pacifica

“Peaceful House.”

There was Nixon in Exile, prowling around the Peaceful House chatting with paintings, while down on the actual Pacific, Secret Service agents chased surfers away from the nearby famous break at Upper Trestles lest they organize an assassination attempt, which is, it should be noted, probably the first time that the words “surfers” and “organize” have been used in the same paragraph.

Surfers? An assassination attempt?

Surfers?

California surfers?!

(“Okay, let’s coordinate our watches.”

Uhhhhhh… watches?)

Anyway, Chon drives to the hospital.