Story: Dreams Die In Hollywood These Days

We slept most of the way to the coast, only waking in the pre-dawn haze to see the firelights of San Bernardino. The road became infinitely sadder as the pale grey light reflected on the ghost-like morning and we knew we were on the road to Los Angeles. The light made everything appear sharper and more defined and somewhat less beautiful. As we rolled from the valley into L.A. the sun appeared to make the town more real and we caught our first glimpse of the city by the sea, where all good dreams go to die.
Highway 1 begins at San Luis Obispo and thereafter we started to feel normal once again. We needed to be on the move and to keep on moving. After the turn-off the road curved down the hill away from the town but the view was poor and hardly strategic. The land on either side was mainly agricultural but sometimes vineyards were raised and brown-skinned Mexicans were working under large straw hats to protect themselves from the sun directly overhead. Nobody looked cheerful but a few of the older labourers were sharing a bottle of wine and they just seemed numb, not many were drinking.
Ahead of us the road carried along the plateau for a while and then started to climb upwards, towards the hills that marked the beginning of the coast. From here you couldn’t yet see the sea but every so often the breeze came through the sun-roof and it was salty, Bill smiled and said we’re going home and then the Pacific Ocean lay before us as we crested the rise and carried on down the other side and it really did feel like home.
The ocean lay before us, rich as a Persian carpet at a doorway’s entrance, it was jewelled with white crests as far as the eye could see, and where the sea and the sky formed the horizon you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Below us the road dipped sharply towards the coast and then hugged the cliff-sides until, away off, you could see where it turned round the headland and then you couldn’t see where it carried on anymore.
We drove for a while with the waves crashing against the sea wall, whilst on the other side old beach houses sat empty for the winter season against the sad backdrop of the sandy scrubland.
“I really did rather well with the girls at school, I was quite renowned.”
“I’m not going to tell you who she was.”
“Pray tell.”
“Never.”
“I know her?”
“Indirectly.”
“Fascinating.”
At Morro Bay we stopped the car on a verge overlooking the beach, to take photographs. There was a hole cut into the fence that lined the bank and so we snuck through and jumped onto the seashore. It was fantastic to feel the sand under our feet again after so much concrete and hard dirt.
“One thing a man needs more often is a good woman and a beach, I certainly can’t get the two together mind you.”
There were some serious looking fishermen doing some serious fishing on the shoreline and they didn’t look to happily on our running along the beach. Not that we cared much, I was just glad to get out of the car.

One hundred and fifty miles to the north the road ended, I’ll tell you about it someday. Sometimes we would be a hundred feet above the sea and other times we would descend quite rapidly to the shoreline and there were sea-lions basking in the sun on the flat, grey rocks that ran alongside the verge.
We would often stop the car on the sand by the side when there was no-one around, just to take pictures of nothing but the road disappearing into the distance; once, there were two photographers on the other side setting up their tripods to take staid portraits of the bluff of the cliff, or the sun, or some other repetitive detail and they looked on, fascinated, as we photographed the straight road ahead.

The sun went down behind a forgotten navy base that sat in the lee of a lighthouse, to warn passing ships of the rocks at its feet. The bright oranges and reds and browns kissed the bottom of the clouds above and way up on the cliff-tops, three or four hundred feet above where we sat, houses of lost generation hippies and new age gurus from the 1960s perched precariously, at any moment ready to commit to a discussion of the years that have passed. We drove on to Monterey with the Beach Boys on the stereo and with the windows open, lavender-scented memories came flooding back.
Often there’d be signs warning you of an impending rock-fall and you could see how it could become quite impassable at certain points of the year. But no rocks fell on our roof and we made it into town that evening in one piece.