I am taking you to the beach today, says Mother Wracks, they called me in. Put on this shirt and they will think you are one of them.

What is it mother, asks Wracks, She says it is a hand-woven silk Hawaiian shirt sent by your uncle Duke.   Silk is the most comfortable fabric to wear and quite expensive, says Mother.

She drives up to the Bu in her blue Chevrolet Impala station wagon and lets the Wracks out with a brown bag lunch.

Stay close to Mickey says mom,   he won’t let anyone hurt you.  See you at five.

In the golden days, the Bu was a festival.   They played volleyball in the cove and sat around and smoked but most importantly, went surfing.  It seems the Bu was more consistent in those days but now it is long ago.  Hodad built a thatched hut at the first point to live in and would sit in the shade and play his guitar.  The only thing he would eat was hot dogs and he would give Wracks a piece sometimes.   Johnny told on him and the police made him tear it down so there was no place to go with crazy Kate.  He and Kate were a sight to behold him in a floral shirt and Kate running around in a wetsuit and surfing first point.  The Wracks sit and watch.   The best surfer to surf the Point was Lance and no one could figure out how he connected the points and he wouldn’t tell anyone how.  Then he stopped surfing the Bu and no one knew why. Rumor had it that he got drafted and a psycho general with an English name made him surf in Viet Nam in the middle of an artillery barrage.

One day on the beach the Wracks saw a girl with long brown hair with the briefest Bikini he had ever seen and the other girls would wear small swimsuits in loud colors.  The bikini she wore was brown and handmade and crocheted and blended into her dark tan.

Look away, says the girl in the brief bikini.

But you don’t have any clothes on, says the Wracks.

Look away she repeats.

Wrack can never forget that girl with steel grey eyes who now cuts her hair in a crew cut and hosts a successful talk show.  John, who would only show up when the surf was big and parade around the parking lot in a silver bathrobe, somehow got run over in that parking lot and never showed up again.  Maybe he crossed the line once too often.  They say he is from an extremely wealthy family but the people at Tranquil Hills got him.

There was an oriental man named Don who was the best nose rider in California along with the Huntington kid and he earned the name: the masochist.  He was a black belt in Shotokan and Jujitsu.

The beach would cry out to Mickey, “The masochist is in a fight again”,   and Mickey would have to go and break up the fracas.  Only Mickey was big enough and trained well enough to stop him. A girl they call Lava Girl had bright red hair yellowed by the sun.  She would come to the beach in a white full-length swimsuit and spend all day wading in the tide pools collecting things.   She brings things up to the wall like shells, crabs, sea anemones, and bric-a-brac and shows them to people.  She never smiled, not once.  A woman only smiles when they know someone loves them.  The Wrack wanders about trying to find someplace to stay.  A beautiful woman with black hair and violet eyes feeds him bits of a sandwich and Frito corn chips.  She is the only girl not in a bikini.  She was extremely nice to him and her given name was Gidget.  She eventually became an actress and married Richard Burton.

This exists as a compendium of the days at the beach when camaraderie existed and people worked together as one.  Those days are gone but a distant memory in the mind of a disgruntled worker.  Fall is here and the seasons roll around again and again, and the days go by like pages in a book. Time is a parameter like space and distance and becomes an engram in a future happening.  The Wracks is happy to relay the world as it was before the darkness overcame the nation.  His beautiful Hawaiian shirt was stolen, as was his tie-dyed denim shirt his grandmother made him.  He will never know and everyone thinks it is better that way.