She told people she had to go back East and take care of her ailing mother. She had five hundred dollars saved, and by spring she finally reached the West Coast. She would get an airtight ID, and she would be safer in a big city. She moved randomly from place to place on the outskirts of L.A. These were the days of pale-beneath-the-tan partying, roller skates and halter tops. And harder, meaner drugs. It was as if someone had taken the aura of the counterculture and extracted every decent aspiration. What was left was the easy liberation of sex and drugs. Was this a function of Southern California, or was every place as weary as this now? Surely the sunshine and beach made the boardwalk a magnet for every marginal person in America. Southern California was full of off-the-grid illegals: draft dodgers, ex-cons, undocumented workers. It was exactly what she wanted. Here she could disappear into the everyday. She could stay far from the rads.

She drank beer and smoked pot all the time. She walked on the beach and had short relationships with men who lived off her.