Ted warms up the tedmobile van, which has two captain chairs and lots of carpet. It’s early, people are still asleep. Most pile into the open back with pillows and blankets, sleeping bags, and each other. Santa Cruz, we’re going to Santa Cruz. Oh yeah! Ted sips coffee and I play with my cheap tape recorder. We are on the road. Young men and women, an extended family. Lots of love. Lots of lust. We’re on our way to paradise.

Gary and Mark play their guitars. We sing silly, tired songs. I record the whole thing:

Going on a road trip…
Goooing on a ro-wo-wo-oad trip…
We’re going! We’re going! We’re leaving now!
And as we go, I can say “Hey babe…”
Hey babe!
We’re going on a road trip…
Road trip!
We’re going to… San-tah Cruuuz!

A period of talking and singing passes, and we pull up at a house in the country. We’re picking up a tent trailer and three more girls. Two are Swedish exchange students. One is an American rah-rah country-girl cheerleader slut. Not that we have anything against her. We’re all for it, actually. She’s not interested in us, though … we don’t have cocaine or a Camaro. She’s the outsider.

The tedmobile rumbles back onto the highway, towing the dingy tent trailer behind it. We’re not on the road for more than 20 minutes when one of the trailer’s tires explodes. We pull over at a McDonalds and wile away the time as the tire is fixed. The two Swedish girls try to teach me their language. They’re laughing a lot. Little did I know they were actually making fun of me. The cheerleader keeps trying to make jokes, but they all fall flat, somehow. It’s hard to sympathize, though. Her attitude is that we’re beneath her anyway.

Tire fixed, back on the road. Over the hills, across the Silicon Valley, up into the green coastal mountains. The tedmobile begins to overheat, not being used to lugging a trailer over a mountain. We’re forced to pull over and let it cool down. Ted transfers water from a stream to the van using a Dixie Cup and a lot of walking.

Tony, who was following in his VW Bug, drives Mark and I to a nearby grocery store to score some beer. I’m the one who looks 21 years old. I grab two entire cases and slam them down at the register. No one will dare challenge that. They don’t, and the purchase is made. We have beer!

Beer! Beer! Beer!
Let us make this perfectly clear!
If you drink enough you’ll have no fear…
Let’s all hear it for beer!

The tedmobile is up and running again. Over the top and down toward the ocean. Ted has camping space reserved, and we pull in amid beautiful redwoods. The trailer is set up. Tents are pitched. Aki, our Japanese exchange student, still has no idea who any of us are or how we’re related. He thinks my friend Ted and his girlfriend Stephanie are the mom and pop of the operation. Alex and I get him to say words with an “L” in them. “Telly Savalas” for example – he says “Terry Savarus.” We all laugh and Alex hugs him, because she wants to make sure he knows we’re not laughing at him. Aki doesn’t seem to mind, especially after having a beautiful girl hugging him.

With the camp set up, we pile into the tedmobile and rumble out toward the ocean. There’s not a whole lot of the day left because of the delays. We throw Frisbees and build sand castles, and generally romp about. Mark plays his guitar and we all sing, drunken and off-key. When the sun sinks low we head back toward the camp for dinner. Ted and I build a campfire and we roast marshmallows and tell jokes. Then we retire to our various sleeping spaces, which are for the most part communal, all snuggled together and touching. Mark and Alex keep getting frisky, which isn’t fair. Meanwhile, our cheerleader has found two cocaine abusers with a Camaro and settles into a small tent with both of them. Aki, not knowing where to go, ends up in the back of Tony’s Volkswagen with a blanket, and the poor guy freezes all night. Ted and Stephanie get the tedmobile all to themselves, which isn’t fair either, but hey – it is his van.

The next morning I get the fire going again, and we sit around and have a breakfast of beer and marshmallows. By 10am I am already drunk. I keep turning on my cheap little tape recorder and interviewing people, as if I were doing a radio show. The person most picked on is the cheerleader – I keep asking her where she spent the night. Then I go interview the two guys she’d slept with. They turn out to be nice guys, and go along with the joke of the tape recorder. They’re a bit sheepish for sleeping with the 16 year old rah-rah, but tell me that she obviously wasn’t a virgin as she had no problem going down on both of them. The conclusion is that no matter what happens to her, she has a future as a porn star.

I interview Aki about sleeping in the back of the VW. “Fuck you,” he says, and despite his accent it comes though loud and clear.

After eating and waking up a bit, we head back to the beach. A beach-side grocery store sells us more beer. Oh, the good fortune! We’re set for the day! I remember sitting in the soft sand, feeling the cool ocean breeze, hearing the sound of seagulls, and staring at the vast Pacific Ocean. All my best, most wonderful friends surround me. I love them all. I love everything. Sitting there, I attain a true state of nirvana. An ultimate peaceful happiness, no doubt brought on by the Lowenbrau, but still … I was there. I had attained that state. It was like the most perfect drug. It was like talking to God. I can’t explain it any other way.

Windswept beaches in sweet sunlight
The happy sounds of waves and laughter
Lowenbrau in my hand, buzz in my head
I am complete.

Gary and Mark sing songs. Tony takes pictures. The girls bury Aki’s legs in the sand. Morning stretches into afternoon, and the beach grows more crowded. I take out my tape recorder and go around interviewing people at random, asking them what had brought them to the beach. I introduce boys to girls. I introduce girls to myself. At one point I came across some teens who’d buried one of their friends in the sand to the point where all you could see was his head. “I’ve stumbled across a man with no body!” I say into the tape recorder. “He’s just a head sitting on the sand at the beach. I have to interview him…” I approach the guy, who is already laughing. “As you’re there,” I say, “contemplating the sand and surf, the wind and the waves … what are your thoughts?”

“I’m on acid!” he says.

Some beautiful, near-naked girls walk past, and I ask him, “Is there anything you’d like to say to these ladies?”

“Yeah…” he starts.

“Yeah,” one of his friends yells, “give me head!”

The disembodied head sitting in the sand blushed crimson.

The girls had stopped, and were laughing with us, and when I move on I’m surprised that they follow me. “What are you doing?” they ask. “Why are you doing this?” I guess they thought I was actually a celebrity or something, doing recordings for a radio show.

“For fun,” I tell them.

“But why are you doing it?”

“Just for fun,” Tony answers for me, zooming up at the sight of the beautiful girls. “We’re just doing it for fun. You know, just to do it.”

“Oh!” They’re both instantly entranced with Tony. “You have beautiful eyes,” one of them says.

“Thank you,” he replies, grinning back.

The girls introduce themselves as Brandy and Cheyenne, and we give them wine coolers, and they sit with us and ogle Tony for the rest of the afternoon. Alex, Stephanie, and the Swedish girls don’t seem to like them much. Stephanie refers to them as “Jerry’s girls” as if I’d brought home stray animals. Really, they were only mine briefly. Afterwards they were all Tony’s.

I didn’t care. Nothing mattered. I was still in that state of nirvana, and I kept drinking, and the rest of the memories all blurred together into a fog. I don’t remember if we stayed another night or headed home that afternoon. I don’t remember getting Cheyenne’s address, either, but I ended up with it somehow. All I really remember is riding home in the back of the tedmobile, lying against piles of blankets, and Alex was laying on top of me but making out with Mark, and I kept hearing her intimate, love-induced sighs and wishing they were for me.

Later, Stephanie summed up the trip rather tartly, as she hadn’t attained the same state of nirvana that I’d somehow found. The trip, from what I gather, wasn’t that enjoyable to some of the gang. But I took the recordings I made, edited them and added narration, and called it “The Great Santa Cruz Experience” and made copies for everyone. The tape turned out to be very precious, like a time capsule holding our last moments of youthful freedom. For some it changed the memories they had. The trip became immortalized, and those who hadn’t enjoyed it suddenly did, like I’d somehow managed to infuse them with my memories of nirvana.

Strangely, Cheyenne wrote me letters, and it turned out that wasn’t her real name. I guess “Denise” wasn’t exotic enough. We were pen pals for years.

From Tales of the Lizard Hunter
By Jerry J. Davis

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