WORK IN PROGRESS: Werewolves of Malibu

When I was young I worked one summer as a gardener for a pair of doctors who hadn’t got around to building their house yet. They lived in a converted horse stable while I got a tent in what would one day be the back yard. In that formative summer I met a number of the often eccentric but always interesting people who could afford to own the sort of places you find out there. And I came to see that what I believed to be my unique position was simply part of a peculiar underground of college students, adventurers, easy-going drifters and parasites who lived with and off the wealthy. Werewolves of Malibu isn’t a memoir or even a roman a clef—a barely disguised narrative or real people and real events. It’s wholly fiction, but I hope it captures that time and place and particular world.

Werewolves of Malibu

Drifting Into the Land of Nod

“. . . and twelve dollars the night of the concert. Southland weather will continue hot. Ninety-two right now in L.A., a hundred and one in the Valley, eighty-four in Santa Monica. Surf report in ten minutes. Be listening to KRUT at midnight when Sibyl plays the new album by Grunt and talks with lead singer, Running Sore. You know Sibyl gives good radio."

LA radio in the seventies. Punk rock coming on, funk sizzling, singer/songwriter stuff starting its long slide toward elevator music. Elvis was dead.

Revving the engine of his ten-year-old Chevy, Colin Baker idled in the turn lane of Pacific Coast Highway, the dividing line between city-bound and beach-bound traffic. Grunt and Running Sore were mysteries to him, as was Sibyl and how she gave good radio, but he knew this beat listening to Beatles oldies back home in Fresno.

A couple miles behind him, Sunset Boulevard, after threading through the palm-lined neighborhoods of the rich and fatuous, ended at the water’s edge, vaguely marking the border of that almost mythic domain called Malibu. 

Seashadows stood here like a border post between Malibu and the real world, an upscale restaurant where tourists could stop for a seafood dinner and look out at the ocean, later telling their friends they had visited the fabled land of movie stars and beach bunnies.

Dreaming of the day he would be able to tell his friends he had launched his storied musical career at this chichi restaurant, Colin nosed his car closer to the yellow line that divided Coming from Going, Here from There, Now from Then.

A break appeared in the line of traffic and he mashed the accelerator to the floor, skipping across the oncoming lanes in a cloud of tire smoke before screeching to a halt in the nearly-empty parking lot.

For a long moment he did nothing but look out across Santa Monica Bay and listen to the crack and ping of his engine as it cooled off after the long trek down the Central Valley of California and across the baffling, sinister ganglia of L.A.’s shimmering-hot freeways. Here, at the water's edge, a steady breeze blew off the sea, pushing the worst of the heat back into the city.

To the south, the long sweep of the bay sparkled with the string of small beach towns that served as a buffer between the city and the sea—Manhattan, Playa del Rey, Venice—each name borrowed from another place, another vision, speaking to the contradictory dreams of this would-be paradise. Halfway along the curve of the bay a jetliner climbed into the sky, silent at this distance, the sun glinting off its wings as it banked west, starting its journey across the Pacific.

Colin took a few deep breaths to calm his jangled nerves, then peeled his sweaty back from the car seat and got out. He turned his face toward the fabled Southern California sun and felt the tang of the sea air. Raising his arms high, he let the wind blow away the stink of five hours on the road and, he hoped, the spiritual residue of nineteen years—the whole of his life—living in the flat and dusty bounds of California’s Central Valley.

After a last expulsive breath, he lifted the black leather guitar case out of the back seat, knelt on the asphalt and popped it open. The dark wood, the inlaid mother of pearl, the new strings all shone richly in the sunlight—like a conquistador's sword, he liked to think. He put the guitar across his knee, strummed a chord, tweaked the tuning pegs and picked a couple of bars. The notes rose out of the instrument like incense before blowing away in the wind. He returned the guitar to its case, squared his shoulders and walked into the restaurant.

Seashadows was cool inside and its darkness after the bright sunshine blinded Colin to everything but the sea and the sky shining through the tall windows at the far end of the dining room, the brilliance of the light and the water as vivid—and unreal—as the image on a movie screen. On the other side of the windows a man and a woman, both of them tanned and blond, almost naked in their swimsuits, strolled along the beach, walking in the sun like gods.

A shifting pulse of blue flickered over the restaurant bar, where a TV mounted on the wall was showing, like every TV in America, the Watergate hearings—a parade of dark-suited witnesses laying out corruption in the White House to a horrified public, like a cat throwing a dead mouse onto the welcome mat.

As he had been doing all summer, Colin looked away, disoriented by their intent to overturn the world he thought he knew, one he had always taken for granted as right and good.

"We're closed."

Colin jumped at the sound of the voice coming out of the near-darkness. Intermittent flashes of light knifed through a pair of swinging doors, silhouetting a short, stocky man with his arms crossed over his chest.

"Lunch is over. We open again at five."

The man looked to be about forty, with curly black hair going thin on top, arms like a wrestler and a face bludgeoned by bitterness.

"Yeah, I know." Colin stood up straight, wanting to make an impression. "But, Doug Kipe, he sent me and he said—”

"Who?" The man wrinkled his nose, as if Colin were a three day-old fish.

"Doug Kipe? He used to be the manager here.”

The man shrugged. "A lotta guys used to be the manager here. I got work to do. I don't get at it, I'll used to be the manager here too.” While he spoke he twisted a towel in his hands, like the Boston Strangler getting ready for a night on the town. "So, Kripe sent you. What for?"

"Kipe. Mr. Kipe. He . . . I met him up in Fresno . . . playing the guitar." Colin felt he was making phrases in a foreign language and not getting them quite right.

"What are you saying? Kripe's taken up the guitar at this late stage in his life?"

“No." Suppressing the impulse to choke this guy until his tongue turned black, Colin laughed, trying to show what an easy-going L.A. kind of guy he was. "No. I worked for him—Mr. Kipe—up at the Charthouse, a restaurant, singing, playing guitar. But I wanted to come to L.A., and he said you might need someone.”

The man's eyes opened wide in mock wonder. "Oh, a guitar player! And you're going to take L.A. by storm starting from Seashadows. Wow, am I excited!" He turned toward the kitchen doors behind him, "Hey everyone, come on out! We got the new James Taylor here." No response came from the kitchen. “Look, kid, whaddya play? No, leave the guitar alone. Just tell me what you play.”

"Anything you want. I can—”

“You do 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon'?"

"No.”

"How about 'My Way'?"

"Uh, no."

"Great. You're hired. What's your name?"

"Colin Baker." He held out his hand.

The man gave it a quick, crushing shake. "Jerry Morgan. Look, you ever wait tables?"

"A little bit, but—”

"Yeah, yeah, I know. But I already got a singer. Maybe I can give you a shot later. Come back tomorrow morning at eleven. You're over twenty-one, right?”

“Uh . . .”

“Black slacks, white shirt. We'll give you a tie." He balled up the towel and threw it into a hamper. "Okay, Conan . . . “

“Colin.”

“. . . say hi to Kripe for me."

He disappeared into the kitchen, the blades of light flashing again as the doors thwack-thwacked back to stillness, leaving Colin Baker once more in the dark.

Wheedling, begging, cajoling, Colin had braced himself to try all of them to land a job as the new singer for the restaurant that Doug Kipe talked about as if it were the last terrestrial stop before heaven. Instead, he had, in two stuttering minutes, landed the wrong job at a place that didn't look much different from the Charthouse. The only part of his plan that survived was the walking away, though he felt less like a conquistador than a rube who’d come to market with what he’d thought was a handful of magic beans.

Rebounding quickly from success—he had, after all, landed a job his first hour in L.A.—he spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the long narrow geography of Malibu, a domain where the cliffs edged the shore for the better part of thirty miles, leaving between their rocky base and the sea a thin shelf of overvalued real estate dancing on the edge of the abyss, threatened by pounding tides, earthquakes and fires. Onto this imperiled ribbon of land ambitious Angelenos had crammed the four lanes of Pacific Coast Highway and a palisade of shoulder-to-shoulder beach houses broken by the occasional restaurant, real estate offices, a couple of motels, surf shops and a few small stores that spoke of high-end merchandise and exclusive clientele.

Enchanted by this new world, Colin stopped a couple of times to walk the beaches and look up at the brown hills. As the sun grew low in the sky, he looked into his wallet and realized the damage that even one night in a motel would do. So, after scarfing a stale Jack-in-the-Box burger, he drove along Pacific Coast Highway until he found a narrow road that twisted up into the hills for maybe half a mile before dead-ending at the base of a steep bluff. He turned off the end of the pavement into the shadow of a twisted oak.

After hiding his life savings—a few hundred dollars from the Charthouse—under the spare tire in his trunk, he leaned his car seat back, expelled a long sigh and closed his eyes, imagining each mile between L.A. and home as a layer of skin he’d shed as he embarked on a new life.

Weary from hours on the road, lulled by the distant metronome of the waves, he fell asleep in moments.

Deep into the night, Colin woke to the howling of the wind rocking his car and the scritch of the sagebrush scratching against his door—and the sound of a cry that had only that instant stopped reverberating. He tried to tell himself that the shout had been nothing more than a note struck by the wind. But he sensed it had come from him.

Gulping a ragged breath, he waited for the last echo of his voice to fade and, with it, the quickly receding notion of having seen his brother again. Eddie, clear as life, trying, as he did almost every night, to say something to him. But Colin knew he didn’t want—couldn’t bear—to hear it.

As his heartbeat slowed, Colin tried again to persuade himself that he’d heard nothing more than the play of the wind on his weary mind, innocent except that it lured him into the familiar nightmare, forcing him to acknowledge that he was not chasing his dreams but running from them.

He wiped the sweat from his hands and turned on the radio, twiddling the dial in search of a human voice.

At first he found only static punctuated by weak, overlapping signals, faint as the pulses from distant planets. Then, like a genie emerging from a lamp, Sybil entered his car for the first time. "Okay," she whispered, her smokey voice rich with intimacy and insinuation. “Lean a little closer to your radio. There. It's different in L.A., isn't it, my wandering friend?" The words hit Colin like a slap to the back of the head. "You're chasing a new life. That’s great, really gutsy. Unless you’re only running from the old one."

He felt the blood rise to his face. He waited for more, but Sibyl slipped away from him, her voice fading back into the chaos of overlapping radio waves from which it had emerged.

A moment later, as quickly as she had disappeared, she returned through the ether, her tone different now, no longer speaking directly to him, but to the night, to anyone who might be listening, making him wonder if he had dreamed the words he thought she had spoken only to him.

"For those of you who tuned in earlier, don't worry, county paramedics have revived Running Sore, and his manager promises we'll have him back on the program as soon as he gets out of rehab."

For half an hour Colin listened to the radio, waiting out Sybil’s dark, unfamiliar songs and her sexually charged patter, hoping for further prophecy. But she ignored him now, making jokes he didn't understand and taking requests from teenies calling in from towns with names like Bellflower and Orange and Reseda. None of them said anything about living in any place called Los Angeles. He began to wonder if L.A. might exist only in the movies, like Gotham City, and the name, Los Angeles, was simply a collective term for the terrifyingly endless suburbs he had seen from the freeway, stretching out to the horizon.

Colin turned off the radio and closed his eyes, battling his fear that Eddie would come to him again if he fell asleep.

You can't go crazy in just one night, he told himself.

Then it was morning and the sea shone below, bright and new with the wind blowing across the water, making white ripples in the brilliant blue. Colin punched the radio on. Sibyl had disappeared, replaced by morning traffic reports and bouncy tunes made for people rising from bed after a restful sleep.

Too early to head for work, he drove down to a tiny mall near Malibu Creek, bought a coffee and walked around the shops. A fleeting thought from the previous day came back with revelatory clarity: The important thing about the fabled beach community was not the hills or the water or the sand but the sun, a different sun than he’d known in Fresno, which in summer fell on people like a hammer, and in winter cast watery shadows over the gray farmland. Here it gave off a light that didn't so much reflect off objects as radiate from them, undergoing some kind of strange photosynthesis that energized everything and everyone—the housewives with kids in tow, the blond skateboarders, brown as walnuts, the vital big-bellied guys in their fifties wearing shorts and sandals and smoking expensive cigars—all of them animated by the sun, like those tiny solar-powered windmills-in-a-bulb from his high school science class.

Savoring this revelation, he stopped at a gas station on the beach, washed his face in the men's room, changed into the white shirt and black pants he’d once worn at the Charthouse and headed toward his first shift at the restaurant.