Acid Christ by Mark Christensen

Author:Mark Christensen [Christensen, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-936182-00-8
Publisher: Schaffner Press, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

while sixteen year-old Frank smoked a joint as if it were a Marlboro, and flirted with the teeny-bopper carhops.

Los Angeles seemed made for a West Coast generation that, in writer Charlie Haas’s words, grew up under an incredible lack of oppression: the Promised Land. Extraterrestrial. The Pearly Gates writ in hookah smoke. At 19, I had died and gone to the next heaven, resurrected surf flotsam, New Jerusalem by way of yesterday’s paradise. Getting off a plane from Hawaii, I saw LA for the first in the form of two new white Lincoln Continentals waiting for me, and my new girlfriend, Suzie, who had a dandelion poof of platinum pale hair, red bee-stung lips, and who called her mom Jeanie.

The two Lincolns were suave white barges of unreality, blatant reminders that LA was a blatant world. There was something going on, but I didn’t know what it was, that made Jeanie instead of Mom not ridiculous. As Jeanie passed the smoking wand of a Kent filter to her daughter, I realized, poof for poof, bee sting for bee sting, Jeanie was pretty much Suzie, just more etched. Same hip-hugger bell bottoms, potsmoker languid mannerisms and far-out mind. My emotional vocabulary did not include middle-aged teeny-bopper, but, hey, why not?

From the back seat of the Lincoln, I could see we were driving up a local Mt. Olympus. Hard blue sky above, a chrome bright sliver of Pacific Ocean through the smog below. Jeanie pulled into the Appian Way that was driveway to the most impressive home I’d ever seen. The Parthenon in Pacific Palisades for a Greek construction god. Doric columns as wide as tree trunks beside a massive front door. Inside, miles of marble floors.

I was introduced to Suzie’s father. I cut, for Dad, quite a figure. Two plus yards of human coat-hanger wire, hair brushing my shoulders, wearing pretty much my entire wardrobe: a blue rag of a T-shirt and Levis stitched from laundry lint. Simion the Stylite with a worse haircut. From the look of horror that congealed around his wrinkled eyes as he shook my hand, for the first time since I got off the plane I saw something Norman Rockwell normal: A terrified father who loved his daughter and who looked under this meet-the-zombie circumstance, a million years old.

I was handed a goblet—Sprite, not hemlock. Suzie said she wanted to go see the mom of a friend. We drove to a ranch house of aircraft-carrier majesty. Suzie knocked on the front door. When nobody answered, she let us in. In the foyer was a life size oil painting of Bob Hope. But nobody else was home. Where were we? Phyllis Diller’s.

I had left paradise for LA, bored. Water as clear as the air and as warm as blood, salt white sand, pretty girls who—gone native—would do anything (what happens under a palm tree in the middle of the night in Kapiolani Park stays under a palm tree in Kapiolani Park) even excellent fast-food violence thanks to

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