The Birth of the Boytoy

At 22 Christa had a thing for the sort of very pretty boys 12-year-old girls bought Tiger Beat magazine to ogle with their pals at slumber parties. The first time I took LSD, Christa and my very pretty friend W— (think Keith Richard crossed with Barry Gibb) sat in the back of my VW minibus, Christa backcombing W—’s hair to make it resemble Roger Daltrey’s, circa 1967, as we drove up to San Francisco together, there to stay, to his considerable dismay, at the home of the noted music and critic social critic Greil Marcus high in the Berkeley hills. I hadn’t mentioned that I wouldn’t be coming alone, you see.

I ingested more acid before beginning the long drive home on the coastal route, the one that took us past Big Sur and Wm. Randolph Hearst’s predecessor to Mar-a-Lago, San Simeon.

The drug had come on in a big way by the time we reached Gaviota, a few miles north of Santa Barbara. W— and I played Frisbee® on the crowded beach, shrieking, “Drug-addled hippies invade Gaviota!” and then screaming with laughter at our own wit. Christa wasn’t happy about our shenanigans ruining the Roger Daltrey circa 1967 coiffure she’d worked so hard on for W—.

Once home in Venice many hours later, I suffered excruciating abdominal pain, which I might have attributed to the LSD being laced with strychnine if there’d been such a thing as the Internet at the time. I’d have been wrong to do so.

A few weeks after the Greil-’n’-Gaviota adventure, its principals, joined by W—’s blubbery incel roommate Jeff, resolved to take more LSD, up in Tuna Canyon, a couple of miles north of Topanga Canyon, which such notables as Neil Young preferred to much more centrally located Laurel Canyon.

Hiking up through the it, we came upon a little pond, and agreed that it needed to be swum in, nekkid. We all disrobed — Christa most becomingly — and dove in, giggling as though under the influence of drugs. What a very pleasant experience, at least until the sudden appearance of two snaggle-toothed outdoorsmen with crossbows. Unapologetically heterosexual, they took a great interest in Christa, and I very clearly envisioned their shooting me, W—, and Jeff, and having their way with her. Or maybe they’d break with tradition and…enjoy Jeff, whom I recognized in the actor Ned Beatty years later when I saw Deliverance.

Four people had never gotten out of a pond and back into their clothes so quickly.

I sat down on the edge of the large rock our prospective rapist/murderers had sat on to leer at Christa, and tried to engage them in conversation to keep them from killing or raping anyone. It’s entirely possible that I asked if they came often to Tuna Canyon, and unlikely that I asked, “What are two lovely chaps like you doing in a dump like this?” I do know that when one of the canyon’s non-human residents, a rodent, came boldly over to me, I tried to impress the rapist/murderers as a fellow outdoorsman by petting it. It bit my hand, and the rapist/murderers, apparently thinking that they were in the presence of a lunatic, lost interest in Christa and disappeared into the lush foliage.

Frightened that I might be exposed as being under the influence of illegal substances, I foolishly didn’t get myself a tetanus shot, but seem not to have contracted tetanus.

Nine years later, I saw Christa again, at Bob Marley’s Los Angeles debut, waitressing at the Roxy Theatre. She’d dyed her black hair blonde, and I didn’t recognize her, but this was years before I lost my own looks, and I asked our own server to give Christa a note suggesting we go into the darkroom together and see what developed. She recognized me, and liked my suggestion, and came over after work to my greasy (I wasn’t a terrific housekeeper) bachelor pad right across Sunset Blvd. from the Continental Hyatt House and Comedy Store.

Hubba hubba!

Four years later, I encountered her again, in the Westwood boutique for which I was designing a catalog. She’d resumed being a brunette, and remained gorgeous. At 33, she was too young to be the mother of the pretty young man with whom she seemed to be shopping for New Wave couture. Maybe his aunt?

He was her latest boyfriend, and the last thing she needed was a grizzled fellow 33-year-old such as I.

I am here depicted admiring the famous totem pole at the north end of Santa Monica’s Palisades Park in 1951. It was still there as of 2014.

How does everyone like the idea of referring to Mar-a-Lago as San Simian?)