pickax and pan, and one among many of his alchemical hypotheses is a method by which gold flakes from the ocean can be cheaply extracted. It doesn’t bother him that every last gold story ends up with the finder cursed or dead. I suppose that makes him a hobbyist. At any rate, he waves warmly and invites me in. He has beer in his dorm fridge and reefer to smoke. If he doesn’t have any of his own stash, he goes door-to-door, alms for the poor. Fellow students don’t seem to mind when Big Mountain wakes them.
And now he’s a regular at our evening gatherings as well. One night my roommate Larry has gone back home to Grass Valley, and because our dorm room is so orderly and clean, we decide to have a drinking contest there. About three in the morning Mountain is declared the winner, after which Karlo pulls down my pants and I fall over pants around my ankles, collapse the Styrofoam cooler, flooding the room with ice water that makes the carpet stink for weeks. Larry is not pleased when he returns. I also overhear the Living Group Advisers the next day plotting against me. Apparently I am a bad influence on the younger students. Perhaps, I mutter to my compatriots, there will be a tribunal in which hemlock is involved. Good thing the semester is almost over.
2.
MOUNTAIN IS A SAN DIEGO BOY—CLAIREMONT HIGH IS his alma mater—and I’m able to get him a summer job at the Del Mar racetrack, where I’ve worked the last two summers. It’s just a seven-week season, perfect for an academic interlude and a few extra bucks. Mountain and I toodle around in an electric cart and fill concession stands with hot dogs, relish, buns, candy bars, and the like, before the admission gates open at twelve. I usually drive so Moses can salute bystanders and say, “Smoke’em if you got ‘em,” or “Manga la puerta,” a phrase he believes is Italian for “Eat the door.” It’s a six-hour shift, and except for getting up early, it’s easy work. We’ve rented a small studio apartment in the barrio of Solana Beach, just down the street from the Blue Bird Mexican Restaurant, one of five Mexican restaurants on our street, about two miles from the track.
Throughout the day Mountain emits rarely explained chortles, snickers, and squeaks, his eyes crinkling and moist with mirth, as if talented mice have assembled privately in his brain to do special reenactments of Rogers and Hammerstein. Rarely, like most of my friends, can I predict what he will say. Sincere one moment, devil-may-care the next, he pronounces the anthem of his youth in a side-mouthed Hollywood gangster voice : “Get maaaxed, go on a triiiip, one WAY!” Midsentence he’ll strike one of a myriad of madcap action-photo poses: a cross-eyed racecar driver, a gay tap dancer, an inbred tobacco heir, a hapless prizefighter, Maria the flirtatious tortilla maker. He possesses a merry and absurd sweetness, a politeness bordering on sheepishness that, combined with a body mass that can block out the sun, endears him to most everyone. Except for the constant flux of women, towels on the bathroom floor, and an occasional nosebleed, Mountain is the perfect, but always delightful, roommate, spontaneous and easygoing as you please.
We eat hamburger and beans, party every night (one WAY!), and lose our money on the horses. None of the neighborhood bars ever asks us for our IDs (“Why do you think they call it a barrio?” says Mountain), and we both know a couple of other places where I can drink. Mountain drinks anywhere he wants. Despite his sorry excuse for a mustache, he looks twenty-eight, and even though he’s got a first-rate fake ID, he rarely has to show it. Everyone seems eager to accommodate the big man. America is all about the Big Man. One more point about Mountain Moses: despite his guilt, sensitivity, deeply marred Catholicism, and courteousness, he’s got a sadistic side. He loves to fight when he gets a little booze in him, and he’s very clever at stirring up trouble. For a while there, because of his size, I thought he was the type who innocently attracts violence, but more than once now, like that time with the Huns in Ocean Beach, when he was almost arrested for using a guy’s face to clear a row of trophies off a shelf, I’ve seen him throw an elbow, sit in the wrong chair, or deliberately spill someone’s drink just to get the ball rolling. If he likes you he’s inclined to call you “Johnny.” But if he calls you “Burt,” get ready to swallow some teeth.
When Mountain’s women appear, I have to disappear. I could stay if I liked, but the apartment is small, and he gets the strangest territorial jackass mating stupor in his eyes. For friendship and health reasons, I don’t want to get on the wrong side of Mountain Moses. I don’t ever want to be “Burt.” And given the choice, I’d rather not watch him melt into a lump of helpless jujubes. Maybe this is one of the reasons the women never stay long—he’s too easy, too lovey-dovey, too sweet. So I don’t mind taking a stroll while he gets the fructose out of his system. I’ll wander up to the Blue Bird for a margarita, borrow Mountain’s car and drive down to the beach to whump on a few waves, or if the horses are running I might fool around with a few bets since I can park and get in with my employee card for free.
On the evening of my twenty-first birthday, Mountain is off with one of his girlfriends. I couldn’t expect him to remember that today was my twenty-first. We haven’t been friends that long. Anyway, a twenty-first birthday isn’t that big a deal. Halfheartedly waiting for the phone to ring, I study his altar, a short bookcase at the head of his bed containing photographs including several mousy-looking girls I don’t know, his knockout sister, and his thenvery-young mother and father; a baseball signed by LA Dodger Maury Wills; two Rolling Stones ticket stubs; a glass doorknob; several treasure maps; some kind of weird washing machine spring; and his five “traveling classics”: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Brothers Karamazov, In Watermelon Sugar, The Principia Mathematica, and Smither’s Definitive Guide to Lost and Hidden Treasure.
I don’t know why I got all dressed up. Most of my friends don’t even know where I live. I wonder for a minute if I should call and tell them. It’s getting late. I’m certainly not going to go out by myself to celebrate my twenty-first. What could be sadder than that? Sitting on a park bench with an inflatable doll?
I switch on Mountain’s little black-and-white TV. A pretty face introduces her potbellied guests, who are proud to be unemployed. They brag of their affairs. America mocks her heroes, embraces her slobs. I switch over to the news: G M is on strike. There’s another oil embargo, long lines at the gas stations. A serial killer named Johnny Jumpup or something like that has popped up and if I’m not mistaken the journalists are thrilled.
I hate the 1970s. It’s the pimp rococo decade, dull-eyed complacency, endless consumption, and softheaded children in clown clothing finding an excuse to give each other gonorrhea in the park. The previous generation represented ideals such as love, equality, landing on the moon, and civil rights. My generation represents teen pregnancy, disco music, Sun Myung Moon, escalating crime rates, big gas-guzzling cars with wheel covers and chrome that falls off and doors that don’t close and all the people who make them out on strike and scratching their venereal sores. America is dying and no one cares.
I stick my head into the fridge. Along with many cartons of leftover Chinese food, I find a half-gallon carton of Tropicana, sniff cautiously, and sip. Carton in hand, I stare out the window. I wonder how many serial killers, glorified extortionists, and environmental criminals they have in India. But what’s this, headlights in the driveway? My heart soars. It’s Mountain Moses.
Mountain strolls in showing that big gap between his two front teeth. He’s dressed in tie and suit jacket and slacks. Everyone at school says he looks like Silly Stallone, but with those big chimp ears, that twinkle in his blue eyes, that bent honker, those pin-striped pleated slacks, and that faint excuse for a mustache, tonight he looks like a dead ringer for Clark Gable. Mountain, I’ve decided all at once, is the best friend I could ever have.
“Well, looka who’s here,” I say, turning off the television.
“Where is everyone?” he says, looking about with a tug at the sleeves of his jacket.
“You’re looking at them,” I say. “Where were you, at a costume party? You look like the maitre d’ on Leave It to Beaver.”
He glances at his wing tips, then holds out his arms, hands backward, as if he’s about to leap from a thirty-meter board. “Had to go to her parents’ house for dinner. Croquettes. No beaver. Begged off