It worked in 1904 and it can work in 1969. I believe that beginning can reach across the decades and serve the purpose of this story because this is California – we can do anything we want to do – and a rich young literary critic is taking a ferryboat from Sausalito to San Francisco. He has just finished spending a few days at a friend’s cabin in Mill Valley. The friend uses the cabin to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche during the winter. They all have great times together.

While travelling across the bay in the fog he thinks about writing an essay called The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.

Of course Wolf Larsen torpedoes the ferryboat and captures the rich young literary critic who is changed instantly into a cabin boy and has to wear funny clothes and take a lot of shit off everybody, has great intellectual conversations with old Wolf, gets kicked in the ass, grabbed by the throat, promoted to mate, grows up, meets his true love Maud, escapes from Wolf, bounces around the damn Pacific Ocean in little better than a half-assed rowboat, finds an island, builds a stone hut, clubs seals, fixes a broken sailing ship, buries Wolf at sea, gets kissed, etc: all to end this story about contemporary life in California sixty-five years later.

Thank God.

Pacific Radio Fire

The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend’s wife had just left him. She walked right out the door and didn’t even say goodbye. We went and got two fifths of port and headed for the Pacific.

It’s an old song that’s been played on all the juke boxes in America. The song has been around so long that it’s been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.

We sat down on a small corner-like beach surrounded by big granite rocks and the hugeness of the Pacific Ocean with all its vocabularies.

We were listening to rock and roll on his transistor radio and sombrely drinking port. We were both in despair. I didn’t know what he was going to do with the rest of his life either.

I took another sip of port. The Beach Boys were singing a song about California girls on the radio. They liked them.

His eyes were wet wounded rugs.

Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can’t help at all.