Free Blow by Bruce Porter Page B

Whittle knew enough about George to become overwhelmed with doubt concerning the validity of the startling improvement, and called in George and his parents to wring out the truth. He also called in Malcolm and his parents and informed them that he was going to have to notify Worcester Tech about their son’s lapse of judgment. In the end Malcolm’s father had to perform fancy feats of influence to keep his son from getting deleted from the acceptance list. As for George, for all the effort he’d put into his courses that year, the principal allowed him to graduate on schedule in spite of everything. But college certainly was out, at least for the next year. And although he listed himself optimistically in the 1961 edition of Campus, the school yearbook, as heading off into a career of “business administration,” George’s immediate prospects did not appear too bright.
    Uncle George, on hearing about the unfortunate situation, did step in and offer to help. For all his faults, his nephew was still family, after all. In a telephone call to Fred, he said that as an engineer for the state of Massachusetts he was not without influence in certain places, and it might just be possible to find George employment. He knew some people down at the Boston Edison power plant, the one located on the line between Weymouth and Quincy, and it might be arranged, just might, for George to get work at the plant as a floor sweeper. Informed of the offer, George replied to his father that he didn’t feel of a mind to accept the job. Indeed, Uncle George could take the fucking sweeper job and ram it right up his ass, was what he could do with it. George would rather go out and see what he could pick up on his own.

TWO
    Manhattan Beach
    1967–1968
    I’d be safe and warm,
    If I was in L.A.
    California Dreamin’
    on such a winter’s day.
    â€”T HE M AMAS & THE P APAS , “C ALIFORNIA D REAMIN ’,” 1966
    F ROM JUST ABOUT ANYWHERE IN M ANHATTAN B EACH you can look out between the houses and see the Pacific Ocean washing up along the broad expanse of sand that runs from one end of town to the other. Some local historians say the town got its name from a land developer from New York in the first decade of the twentieth century who wished to memorialize his hometown; others believe that it came from a rich lady of Dutch ancestry in honor of the fact that her forebears had been in on the deal to buy Manhattan Island from the Indians. Whatever the case, Manhattan, the beach, twenty miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles, with a population of 32,500 souls, bears as little resemblance to its namesake back East as any other coastal city in Southern California. Its soft pastel frame-and-stucco houses line a series of terraced streets that work their way up to the top of a sand hill sitting 245 feet above sea level, allowing each resident a wide glimpse of the ocean over a neighboring rooftop. In the early days the dunes of Manhattan Beach supported so little vegetation that they’d shift about from the winds. To stabilize the place, ladies from the Neptunian Club took to planting the dunes with mossy green ice plants that now abound everywhere, thus earning them the name “moss ladies.” During the summer the town is cooled by the prevailing westerlies that blow off the water and in the evening fill the air with the perfume of hibiscus and night-blooming jasmine. Most of the time the winds also manage to blow the looming pall of brownish-yellow smog from the freeways back into the inner recesses of Los Angeles proper, leaving the local atmosphere clear and dry. Considering its location and its weather, the local chamber of commerce needed little poetic license to promote the town in its tourist brochure as truly “a little bit of heaven on earth.”
    As with the neighboring beach towns—El Segundo, Hermosa, Redondo, Palos Verdes, Santa Monica, Venice, San Pedro—it was World