Angela, always first in these things, pulls off her blouse and throws it on the floor of the balcony, in the middle of the marchers. Bra next. Can she get her jeans off while doing the can-can? In a manner of speaking. Howls scale the sky. Clothes begin to fly onto the pile, a flurry of shirts, pants, blouses, silk underwear, boxer shorts. Quickly they’re a ring of naked dancers, as in some pagan rite of spring, they can all feel it and for once it has that quality of primitive sensuousness, no all-American tits-n-ass consciousness in Abe tonight, it’s just the clean joy of having a body, of being able to dance, of Being and Becoming. The way the pink of skin jumps out of the night’s smeary darkness is just part of the joy of it. Freckled Sandy tosses all the couch cushions in the ap onto the big pile of clothing, and then he dives on, swims into the pile, ah-ha, a pile-on here. Naked Humphrey is dancing wallet in hand, can’t just throw that in a pile of other people’s clothes, right? Abe starts howling again, laughing and howling, he can’t get over how good everything feels, how happy every face looks to him, there’s Jim happy, Sandy happy, Angela happy, Tashi and Erica happy, Humphrey happy, all of them dancing in a circle and howling at the sky, Abe dives into the great mass of clothes and people and cushions, clean laundry smell, he’s buried, he’s coming up for air, coming up to be born, like the baby he helped bring into the world just hours before—born out of their clothes, naked, shocked at the pure glossy presence of things, their sensuous reality, their there-ness. For the second time that night Abe Bernard squeezes shut his eyes and wills the moment to stop, to stop while he and all his friends are happy, to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

Chapter 32

32

… In the 1790s the area still belonged mostly to the Indians, now called Gabrielinos. The Spanish rarely ventured away from San Juan Capistrano and the El Camino Real, and they avoided the swamps and marshes above Newport Bay, because these were difficult to traverse on foot or horseback.

But during those years the bay had some visitors. A party of French-American colonists, en route to Oregon by way of the long trip around Cape Horn, sailed into the bay and wintered there. The next year a small group returned from Oregon, and they lived on the mesa above Newport Bay for nearly twenty years. These were the first non-Indian residents of the area.