The Gold Coast

  The fact is, he buys his drugs in an advanced state, so the molecular engineering he does to make his new products is nothing really supercomplex, though he has a reputation for genius that he does nothing to try to dispel. Actually, he has got a talent for pharmacometrics—taking the basic drugs from the companies and then guessing, with the aid of a structure/activity relationships program pirated from Upjohn, which alterations in chemical structure will shift the psychoactive properties of the drugs in an interesting way. Pharmacometrics is really quite an art, still, even with the program’s indispensable aid: structure/activity relationships is a big and complex field, and no one knows it all. So to that extent he is a kind of artist.

  Into the second hour of work. Sandy moves among the various endomorphins and alkaloids and solutions on the shelves in their bottles and flasks, and the reference texts and papers that spill over one big bookcase, and the bulks of the secondhand centrifuges, refrigerators, the g.c./mass spec … It would be easy to impress any visitors allowed to drop by. For a few minutes he attacks again the problem of the synergistic self-assembly effects of La Morpholide 15 and an enkephalin introduced into the brain at the same time—a sophisticated problem in pharmacokinetics, sure, and interesting as hell, but a little bit much for this morning. Easier to return to the final plans for fitting 5-HIAA to the serotoninergic neurons, which he’s already almost mastered. Should be a nice hallucinogen, that.

  So it’s a fascinating couple of hours in the lab, as always. But he’s supposed to meet one of his suppliers, Charles, at noon, and looking up at the clock he finds he’d better hurry. Sure enough, he shows up at Charles’s place in Santa Ana at 12:05. Nothing to complain about, right?

  However, the inevitable process of getting behind schedule begins immediately, with Charles inviting him in to share an eyedropper, followed by a close discussion of Charles’s difficulties in life. So the simple pickup of a liter of Sandoz DMT takes him until 1:30.

  He then heads to the first of his distributors, in Garden Grove, and discovers no one home. Twenty minutes of waiting and they show up, and it’s the same program there; only really need to lay twenty eyedroppers on them and collect the money for them, could take five minutes, right? But no. Got to blink another eyedropper of Social Affability, light up a Sandy spliff, and socialize for a bit. That’s sales for you, it’s a social job and you can’t escape that. Not many people realize how full Sandy’s schedule of deliveries actually is, and of course he doesn’t want to make too big a point of saying so. It’s a test of his diplomacy to get out in under an hour; so now it’s almost three. He hurries up to Stanton to make a drop at June’s, then tracks at street level to La Palma to meet Sidney, hits the freeway to get back to Tustin and the Tunaville drug retailers’ weekly meeting, down to Costa Mesa to see Arnie Kalish, on to Garden Grove to see those Vietnamese guys in Little Saigon … until he’s over three hours behind schedule and losing ground fast, with a dozen more people who want to see him before dinner. Whew.

  Luckily this happens every day, and so everyone expects Sandy to be late. It’s an OC legend; stories abound of Sandy showing up for lunches at dinner, for dinners at midnight, for parties the next day … By this time it would no doubt actually shock people if he showed up on time. But, he thinks, it’s never my fault!

  So he works his way along, tracking like a maniac to sit through one glacial transaction after another. It’s a bit of an effort, when he’s tired or depressed, living up to the task of being Sandy Chapman; he’s expected to show up at a friend/client’s house and galvanize the day, burst in with manic energy and his crazy man’s grin, discuss all the latest developments in music, movies, sports, whatever, shifting registers from full-blown culturevulturehood to astonishing mallworld ignorance … pull out yet another eye-dropper, of Affability or Funny Bone or California Mello or the Buzz, whatever seems to be called for at the moment, eyes bugging out with manic glee as he holds up the dropper and pulls his face under it.… He’s used to operating rationally under the weight of monumental highs; in fact it’s just everyday reality for him, stonedness, it’s a handicap he barely notices anymore. His tolerance level is so high that he only really notices the effect of that first drip of Apprehension of Beauty at the beginning of each day. So he lids with whatever household he has reoriented to party mode, smokes dope with them, inhales capsules of snapper, giggles at them as they exhibit the first signs of brain damage, fills them full of that comic spirit that is surely the main thing he is selling. It’s quite a performance, though he seldom feels it as such. Method acting.

  Long after sundown he finishes making his last delivery, some five hours late. On the way home he stops and buys the ten-trillionth Big Mac fries and a Coke, eats while tracking home. Reaches home, but it’s no rest for the weary; the party there is in dormant mode and reflexively he sparkplugs it, gets it ontrack and rolling. Then into his bedroom, to check on phone messages.

  The answering machine can barely hold all the messages that have been left, and Sandy sits on the bed buzzing like a vibrator, watching the surfing on the wall screens and listening to them. One catches his wandering attention and he repeats it from the start:

  “Hey, Sandy. Tompkins here. We’re having a small party tonight at my place and we’d like to see you, if you can make it. We want to introduce you to a friend from Hawaii who has a proposal, too. It’ll go late so don’t worry about when you arrive. Hope this reaches you in time—later—”

  Sandy goes out to the game room. Jim is absorbed in the hanging video screens, and Sandy checks them out. Collage city. “What’s on, Jim Dandy?”

  Jim gestures at one flickering black-and-white square. “Best Hamlet ever filmed. Christopher Plummer as the Dane, shot by the BBC at Elsinore years ago.”

  “I like the old Russian one, myself. His father’s ghost, ten stories tall—how could you beat it?”

  “That’s a nice touch, all right.” Jim seems a bit down. He and Virginia looked to be in a heated discussion when Sandy walked in, and Sandy guesses they have been arguing again. Those two are not exactly the greatest alliance ever made; in fact they both keep saying it’s over, although it seems to be having a long ending. “Do you think you can drag yourself away from the Bard for a jaunt to La Jolla? My big-time friends have invited us to a party at their place.”

  “Sure, I’ve got this at home.”

  Sandy collects Arthur, Abe, Tashi. “Let’s see if we can get Humphrey to drive,” he says with his wicked grin.

  They laugh; Humphrey keeps his electric bill down by driving as little as possible. He’s an almanac of all the shortest distances, he can give you the least expensive route between any two points in OC faster than the carbrains can. They approach him in a gang, Sandy says, “Humphrey, you’ve got a nice big car, give us a ride down to La Jolla and I’ll get you into a party there you won’t forget.”

  “Ah, gee, what’s wrong with this one? Can’t ask for more, can you?”

  “Of course you can! Come on, Humphrey.…” Sandy waves a fresh eyedropper of the Buzz, Humphrey’s favorite, in front of his eyes.

  “Can’t leave your own party,” Humphrey starts to say, but founders in the face of the statement’s absurdity. Sandy steers him to the door, stopping for a quick kiss and an explanation for Angela. Remembering Jim and Virginia, he runs back in and kisses her again. “I love you.” Then they’re out, followed by Arthur, Abe, Tashi and Jim, who elbow each other and snicker as they all clump down the rarely used stairwell. “Think Humph’s got the coin slots installed on his car doors yet?” Abe asks under his breath, and they giggle. “Taxi meter,” Tashi suggests. “Better profit potential.”

  “Subtler,” Arthur adds.

  Humphrey, next flight down, says to Sandy, “Maybe we can all go shares on the mileage, huh?” The four above them nearly explode holding the laughs in, and when Sandy says, “Sure thing, Humphrey, and maybe we should figure out the wear on the tires, too,” they experience catastrophic failure and burst like balloo
ns. The stairwell echoes with howls. Tashi collapses on the banister, Abe and Arthur and Jim crumple to the landing and take the next flight down on hands and knees. Humphrey and Sandy observe this descent, Humphrey perplexed, Sandy grinning the maniac’s grin. “You men are stoned.” Which lays them out flat. Maybe they are.

  They scrape themselves off the floor in the parking lot and get in Humphrey’s car, carefully inspecting the door handles and the car’s interior. “What are you guys looking for?” Humphrey asks.

  “Nothing, nothing. Can we go now? Are we gone yet?”

  They’re gone. Off to San Diego.

  25

  On the track down 405 they sit in the three rows of seats in Humphrey’s car and talk. Sandy, slumped in the front passenger seat, just smiles; he looks zoned, as if he’s catching some rest before he dives back into it in La Jolla.

  Humphrey tells them about a trip he and Sandy and some others took to Disneyland. “We had been in the line for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride for about forty-five minutes when Chapman went nuts. You could see it happen—we were all standing there just waiting, you know, hanging out and moving with the line, and suddenly his eyes bug out past his nose and he gets that happy look he gets when he’s got an idea.” The others laugh, “Yeah, yeah, show us the look, Sandy,” and half-asleep Sandy shows them a perfect simulacrum of it. “So he says real slow, ‘You know, guys, this ride only lasts about two minutes. Two minutes at the most. And we’ll have been in line for it an hour. That’s a thirty-to-one ratio of wait to ride. And the ride is just a fast trackcar going through holograms in the dark. I wonder … do you think … could it be … that this is the worst ratio in Disneyland?’ And he gets the insanity look again and says, ‘I wonder, I just wonder … which one of us can rack up the worst ratio for the whole day?’ And we all see instantly we’ve got a new game, a contest, you know, and the whole day is transformed, because it’s a miserable day at Disneyland, totally densepacked, and there’s some real potential here for racking up some fantastic scores! So we call it Negative Disneyland and agree to add points for stupidest rides combined with the worst ratios.”

  The four in back can’t believe it. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No, no! It’s the only way to go there! Because with Sandy’s idea we weren’t fighting the situation anymore, you know? We were running around finding the longest lines we could, stepping through our paces like we were on the ride itself, and timing everything on our watches, and every time we turned another corner in the line we’d see Sandy standing there up ahead of us towering over the kids, eyes bugged out and grinning his grin, just digging these monster delays to get on Dumbo the Elephant, Storybook Canal, Casey Junior, the Submarine…”

  Sandy’s smile turns blissful. “It was a stroke of genius,” he mutters. “I’ll never do it any other way, ever again.”

  “So who won?” Jim asks.

  “Oh Sandy, of course. He totaled five and a half hours of waiting for eighteen minutes of ride!”

  “I can beat that,” Tashi says promptly. “Hell, I’ve beaten that trying positive Disneyland!” Sandy denies it and they make a bet for next time.

  They leave OC and track through the immense nuclear facility at San Onofre, eighteen concrete spheres crowding the narrow valley like buboes bumping out of an armpit, powerlines extending off on ranked towers to every point of the compass, glary halogen and xenon and mercury vapor lamps peppering spheres, towers, support buildings. “Camp Pendleton,” Jim announces, and they all pitch in together: “Protecting California’s Precious Resources!” Or so the neon sign says. The motto is a joke; aside from the nuclear plant, the Marines have contracted with the towns of south OC to take all their sewage into a gigantic treatment facility, which covers the hills south of San Onofre. Concrete tanks and bunkers resemble an oil refinery, and altogether it’s as extensive as the power plant north of it. Then comes the land they’ve leased for the desalination plant that provides OC with much of its water; that means another immense complex of bunkers and tubes, nearly indistinguishable from the nuclear facility, and a whole stretch of the coast blasted by salt mounds and various processing tanks.

  After that they’re into the supercamp for Marine recruits, then into Oceanside, and the precious resource is passed. Past Oceanside it’s like OC on a rollercoaster, same condomundo and mallsprawl and autopia, broken up only by some small dead marshes in the low parts of the rollercoaster ride. Yes, San Diego, along with Riverside and Los Angeles and Ventura and Santa Barbara, is nothing more than an extension of OC.…

  They get off on La Jolla Village Drive and track west, around the megaversity to La Jolla Farms Road. Here they are stopped at the security gate, Sandy calls his friends, and they’re in. La Jolla Mansion Road, it should be called; they track slowly by a long series of multimillion-dollar homes, all single-family dwellings. Abe, who lives in an annex of his parents’ house on Saddleback Mountain, isn’t impressed, but the rest of them stare. Humphrey goes into his real estate mode and estimates values and mortgage payments and the like in religious tones.

  Sandy’s friends’ house is near the end of the road, on the ocean side, therefore on the crumbling edge of Torrey Pines Cliff. They find parking with difficulty, go to the door and are only let in after Sandy’s friend Bob Tompkins comes and okays them. Bob is fortyish, tanned, golden-haired, perfectly featured, expensively dressed. He shakes all their hands, ushers them in, introduces them to his partner Raymond. Raymond is if anything even more perfect than Bob; his jawline could open letters. Perhaps they got their start in modeling.

  But now the two are partners in major minor drug dealing, and this is sort of a party for field reps. Sandy recognizes quite a few people he knows. He starts pingponging among them, and rather than follow him his OC friends grab drinks and go out onto the cliff-edge lawn, which is on three terraced levels some three or four hundred feet over the black sea. They’ve got a perfect view of the hilly curve of La Jolla jutting into the dark water, its sparkling skyscraper hotels reflecting like fire off the bay in between; and to the north stretches the whole curve of the southern California coast, a white pulsing mass of light. Major light show, here.

  It’s a class-A party. Among the guests on the lawn are some Lagunatics they know, and happily they fall to drinking and talking and dancing.

  Jim notices Arthur disappearing down the wooden staircase that leads down to the beach below, following—was that Raymond? Arthur was caustic indeed about the mansions on this road, so seeing him with Raymond is a bit of a surprise to Jim.

  This turns some key in Jim’s sense of curiosity. Ever since their raid on Parnell Jim has been asking Arthur questions, and Arthur has been putting him off. It’s better if Jim doesn’t know too much, he says. Jim is up on the theory of revolutionary cells, sure, but it seems to him to be going too far not even to know the name of the group he’s part of. Sure the cause is just, but still … And Arthur—well, who knows exactly why he came along tonight? It isn’t something he’d ordinarily do. And once he said he got his equipment from “the south” … could be that Raymond used drug smuggling as a cover … well, that would be crazy, but …

  Jim’s curiosity is aroused. He wanders down the wooden steps of the staircase, into the dark.

  The stairs switch back from platform to platform down the steep sandstone cliff: thick planks are nailed into parallel four-by-fours that are bolted to telephone poles driven into the cliff face, and the whole structure is painted some bright color, yellow or pink or orange, hard to tell in the dark. Spectrum band, no doubt. Iceplant and some bushy trees have been planted all around the staircase in semisuccessful efforts to stop the erosion of the cliff. Through one thick clump of trees the stairway proceeds in a groomed tunnel of foliage, and beyond that, on the next platform, Jim sees two dark figures standing. Above them stereo speakers facing westward challenge the even roar of the surf with the majestic end of The Firebird Suite, cranked to high volume.

  Curious, and pitched to a bold
er level by the music, Jim slips off the staircase into the iceplant. Ho, it’s steeper than it looks! But he can hold his footing, and very slowly he descends through the bushy trees. Any noise he is making is overwhelmed by waves below and music above, which has segued from the Firebird to “Siberian Khantru,” brilliant lead guitar piercing the night and leading the supple bass on a madcap ramble. Fantastic. The last knot of trees overhanging the stairway is just above the platform, fine, Jim wiggles his way down through the low branches, slips on iceplant and jerks to a halt jammed down into the fork of two thick branches. Ribs a little compressed. Hmmm. Seems he might be a little stuck, here. On the other hand, he’s just above the platform, and the two figures, seated on the rail looking down at the faint white-on-black tapestry of breaking waves, are just within earshot. Wouldn’t want to be much closer, in fact. Jim gives up struggling to escape, accepts the salt wetness of his perch, concentrates on listening.

  Arthur seems to be making a report, although the booming of the surf makes it difficult to hear everything. “What it comes … the campaign has got its own momentum … supply material and give … do a one-night … bigger operation than there really is.”

  “Do any of your” krkrkrkrkrkrkrrr asks Raymond.

  “… assume, well, whatever. They don’t know anything.”

  “So you guess.”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “And you think a concerted action could bring in the people we’re trying to find?”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it? They” krkrkrkrkrkrkrrrr

  “Possibly. Possibly.” Raymond jumps down and stalks the deck of the platform nervously, looking right up at the clump of trees that holds Jim. “If that happens, we might have a hard time finding out about it. Being sure.”

  Arthur’s back is now to Jim, and Jim can’t hear his voice at all. But he can hear Raymond’s reply: