Venice - The Last Word
Once it became clear that the military-industrial complex was not going to draft past lottery #195, I felt a deep sense of relief. (I was #198, if you recall.) I no longer had to worry about what to do if I got an induction notice, didn’t have to consider heading north to Vancouver, but instead could return home. That being Massachusetts. To repurpose the phrase, “You can take the boy out of New England, but you can’t take New England out of the boy,” sums up how I was feeling.
But there was more to it than that. Over the course of one weekend there were three minor earthquakes in the Los Angeles area. One morning I woke up with my bed lightly bumping against the wall. That cinched it for me. I had to get out of there.
You might consider it an unrealistic fear, even a phobia, but the possibility of an earthquake was not something I could get used to. As it turns out, later that winter, in February of 1971, once we were back East, there was a major (6.5-6.6) quake centered near Sylmar, California. It collapsed overpasses onto freeways and badly damaged the VA Hospital in which Roy (Mary’s brother) had been a patient several weeks before
In the meantime, Malibu Media had begun a period of rapid growth. No longer the dream of a couple of countercultural types with savvy fashion sense, it was expanding its line, gaining popularity and beginning to pay off. When I told Richard that I was thinking of leaving, he said he had plans to begin profit sharing and he wanted me to stay on. He offered me a raise. It was a tempting, but not enough to dispel my concerns vis a vis Plate Tectonics.
Then there were the cultural differences between the East and West Coasts, the aggressive policing, and frankly, a gnawing desire to return home.
We left Venice in early December, 1970 with a friend named Mike who was returning to his home town, Chicago. He invited us to stay over with him at his brother’s apartment before the last leg of our trip. Mike’s brother was a pot-smoking Chicago cop, who got is high and fed us a great dinner before dropping us at O’Hare the next morning.
While I don’t recall precisely who it was that picked us up at Bradley, if I were to hazard a guess it would have been George, in essence closing the circle since it had been George who got us started on our journey: Montreal, Toronto, Milwaukee, Venice Beach, Chicago…home.
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