As in her earlier version the night before, she admitted that she had picked Chris up on Tuesday morning. Only where in that version she and Chris had gone to the beach house and spent the next day and a half in endless talk and sustained sexual continence, now she confessed that there had been very little talk in the beginning and even less continence, for she had had him in bed before noon on that first day and they had left it only sporadically during the next thirty hours, only to eat and drink and bathe, and twice to walk on the beach. And, as in the earlier version, Mrs. Rubin had been furious with her for letting Chris stay at the beach house, but now Liz added that the lady had done something about her fury, had called Douglas long-distance Wednesday afternoon in Los Angeles, where he had gone on business with Parnelli and Ferguson, and reported to him that some “hippie kid” was sleeping with his mistress and drinking his booze and even lounging around the house in his pajamas. Douglas, supposedly not a jealous type, nevertheless had come back to Santa Barbara that same night with his two assistants in tow, stopping along the way only long enough to get comfortably high before they finally arrived around eleven o’clock. Douglas and Parnelli were not really angry, Liz insisted, just good and smashed, like college kids out for a high old time, some innocent roughhouse at the expense of this unknown hippie kid. With Ferguson standing idly by and Mrs. Rubin urging them on, the two of them had overpowered Chris, stripped him of Douglas’s pajamas and tossed him out of the beach house naked. Liz had tried to help the boy but Parnelli had stopped her dead with a playful yank of her hair that sent her sprawling across the floor. Then while he and Douglas symbolically wiped their hands clean and went to the bar to celebrate with more drinks, Mrs. Rubin gathered up Chris’s clothes and backpack and threw it all out the door after him.

But the boy had not left. Fifteen or twenty minutes later Parnelli spied him sitting out in the front in the dark near the cliff edge, dressed by then, and apparently waiting for the men to leave. Liz said Parnelli had seemed genuinely elated at the discovery, this chance for more physical contact. Douglas had wearily followed, as if he were heading out to finish some irksome chore.

“And this time we’re going to kick hell out of him,” Parnelli had said. But Chris had kicked back.