Orbital Refuelling 1

    “You have the impression in the States of not having taken enough cocaine.”
                                                                                Saint Bris Gonzague




I landed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, like Newton’s forehead bouncing off the apple- sunblind, sore, and ripe for revelation. Gravity was involved. A regiment of Japanese schoolboys walked by. The taller ones in the front of the column wore glasses with thinner lenses, than the coke bottle thickness of the younger ones bringing up the rear. Their baseball caps, and the telephoto Nikons draped around their necks, also got bigger toward the back, just as the uniforms got smaller. The last little guy could barely see. His head was bent forward by a monstrous camera. I guess that’s why he saw it first. The squeal was inhuman. In a heartbeat, a dozen clicking automatic drives and flashes were burning Mickey Mouse into the sidewalk. It was payback nuclear inferno time. Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
I was waiting for Steve, and redemption. Steve of the Jacuzzi. We had met five years before, at NASA Ames, working on a project to build a colony for 10,000 inhabitants in space. He was the Physicist; I was the Life Sciences guy. We had both been at M.I.T. but I didn’t know him there. I knew him here, in California. We shared a trailer in Manzanita Park at Stanford, and became fast friends. We played tennis, went to Vegas, and laughed at each other’s nerdy clumsiness with women. But Steve had evolved as I went on to sensory deprivation. He moved to Seal Beach, California. In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille filmed Moses parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, on the flat shores of Seal Beach. Fifty-seven years later, Steve, breaking a few on the way, had turned the Jacuzzi into an artform.


                                      *         *        *



                                   “Cannot use one bed too long,
                                     But must get ‘ence, the same as I ‘ave done,
                                     An’ go observin’ matters till they die.”
                                                                 Rudyard Kipling



I spent two weeks at the Oakwood Apartments with Steve and his roommate, Charlie. It was all good. Steve had to work during the day, so I spent my time reading his books, playing Charlie’s guitar, running on the beach, and shopping for those few ‘last minute things’ that any Odysseus would need, on a five year sojourn around the world. Serendipity weighed in at almost sixty pounds by the end of it. I went to Universal Studios, and ‘hung out’ at the apartment complex pool. I read ‘The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in Individuals and Society.’ Except that, in Southern California, the neuroses, like the food portions, were supersized, even then. Bodies, businesses, and bleached brains. Like Don Quixote, I was looking for giants, and surrounded by windmills.
When Steve got home at night, we went out to the Red Onion, Legends, Gulliver’s, or Panama Joes, and on to Bobby McGee’s disco. It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I was a celibate twenty-six year old in L.A. in 1980, or a monk on my subsequent epic journey. I was young and free. There were appetites, and I was no master of sublimation. But I was a romantic fatalist, waiting for rainbows, never chasing them. One rainbow was named Linda. She had being going out with the same guy for seven years. She was getting married in a week, and told me she wanted to find out if it was the right decision. She finally told me it was the right decision. But we spent an awful long time, making absolutely sure.