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  Whatever image of himself George was projecting to his friends, his own life at home, from junior high on up, became progressively less happy as the wrangling between his parents grew more strident. Today his memories of that period flow like lava and appear as fresh as if it all had happened just the other day. “There were constant fights in that house. My sister would go into her bedroom and close the door and read books. At the time I was young and wasn’t into reading, so I had to listen to it—the same argument, over and over, my mother saying, ‘I could have done better. It was my mother who wanted me to marry you.’ But then, what was the matter? I think. My father took care of the family, he never betrayed them or left them. The old man was doing the best he could. He bought a new car every two or three years, he paid the bills, there were plenty of groceries in the house, he never owed anybody. He gave you anything he had on the face of the earth. But he just wasn’t what she wanted him to be. Because she loved the violin—we had a Stradivarius in the house—and she loved the theater and the opera. Do you know my grandmother knew Sophie Tucker? That she once had a date with Cy Young? My father, his big day was to come home and read the newspaper and have a couple of drinks, smoke a cigar and watch television. He didn’t know anything about the theater or classical music.”

  For purposes of comparison, Ermine would bring up Uncle George, as well as her brother, Uncle Jack O’Neill, also fairly prosperous, who owned the music stores down in Baton Rouge. George recalls, “It was, My brother has this, and Uncle George—it was, Uncle George was better, he had a better house, the sword over his mantel. We had to go up there every goddamn Sunday. He was the god to everyone. At Christmas when Marie was going to college, he’d give her a present of a little Christmas tree with hundred-dollar bills tied on in bows all over it, for her tuition that year. Then it would get dark and we’d drive home and the car would be filled with boxes and ribbons and presents from Uncle George and my mother going on about wasn’t it all so wonderful and how generous he was. What he did was always more than my father gave us on Christmas morning. And how did that make him feel? He never said anything. There was nothing to say. I’d be sitting in the back seat and that’s when I began to hate Uncle George, and I decided in my mind I was going to get that son of a bitch. And I was just a kid.”

  George’s father was popular enough with his son’s friends, could talk football and joke in a manner that didn’t put them off, as adults can do sometimes when they try to be too chummy. He also struck his friends as fairly tolerant of his son when word came back that he’d gotten into another scrape. “His father was always very easygoing,” remembers Grable. “We’d be out late drinking beer, fooling around, and the next day he’d say, ‘You guys had a good time last night,’ and give you a little wink, letting you know that he knew. But never any lecture. My father would have taken my head off, some of the things we did. I think George had a freer hand from his parents than the rest of us had.”

  In the fall of George’s junior year in high school, Fred suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell down on the kitchen floor. For a year his speech was severely affected, and soon his oil business died. After that he was never really his old self, not kidding much anymore, prone to become easily emotional. He got part-time work as a superintendent in a cemetery, where he worked out of a little shack and could be seen trimming around the headstones with a lawn mower and now and then helping to set up a burial monument. He also worked occasionally sweeping out a laundromat. George’s mother still had her job at Remick’s, George remembers, but things got tight now. Uncle George had to begin helping the family out financially. Uncle George liked to help out members of the family. After his and Fred’s father died in 1952, he’d send his mother on vacations to Boothbay Harbor in Maine. He’d helped his sister, Aunt Jenny, buy a house. When his nephew Bobby, George’s cousin, came home from being in the army in Germany and started working in the banking business, Uncle George gave him the down payment for a house for his young family; young bankers, he felt, shouldn’t have to live in an apartment. After Marie and Otis got married, and Otis started graduate school at Michigan State University, Marie came to Uncle George. She’d been supporting them with a teaching job, but now she was pregnant and had to quit; they needed help or Otis would have to leave school. “I remember him saying, ‘Otis has too good a mind to let it go to waste,’” says Auntie Gertrude. “And so he sent the money for tuition.”

  * * *

  By the end of his junior year George needed to confront the fact that he was in serious trouble as far as going to college was concerned. Athletic recruiters from both the University of Massachusetts and Springfield College, the sports school that he’d long dreamed of attending, had discussed offering him a scholarship on the basis of his discus prowess. But he still had to pass the admissions standards when it came to grades, and during his sophomore and junior years he’d accumulated a record of six D’s and six C’s. His only B was in mechanical drawing.

  George wanted so desperately to go on to college that in his senior year he made a heroic effort to improve his academic standing. For one, he got himself into the “general” class in English, an all-boys unit that served as a refuge for students who had problems with Miss Toomey and other grammar hardballers. It was taught by Clem Horrigan, a retired naval commander like Uncle George, but there the similarity stopped short. Silver-haired, with the rosy nose of a hearty drinker, Horrigan was plain-spoken in ways not then common in public high schools. He was in the habit, for instance, of giving colleagues the finger when he wished to make a point during faculty meetings, and endearing himself to the guys in his class by referring to fellow teachers as “assholes” and “fairies.” “Horrigan was not your traditional-type teacher, but he was very effective,” says Buzzy Knight, who was on the faculty then. “He had a wonderful sense of humor, and in class he could butter up a story so you’d be living it rather than just reading about it.”

  Horrigan lived in a sea captain’s house overlooking Weymouth Landing, and he encouraged George and Malcolm and Mike Grable and Frank Shea and the other guys to come by on Friday nights, when he would sip his Scotch, tell them navy stories, and talk about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. “He was really a wonderful man,” recalls George, who honors few of the adults he ever knew with a compliment. “He tried to give you knowledge without making you feel insecure about it.” In school, his assignments ran more toward Nordhoff and Hall than Shakespeare, and “if you wrote a composition,” says George, “he’d say you had great ideas here, but not much grammar. But that was okay, because when you grow up and become a writer, they had people to put the grammar in, secretaries, people like that.”

  Whether or not it was Horrigan’s approach that lifted George’s spirits, certainly something made a difference that year, because his scholastic record took a big jump upward. Besides the not-too-unrespectable C he managed to get in physics, he ended up with a B in English, another B in economics, and an A in Problems of Democracy. In fact, that final spring he made it to the dean’s list, truly a flabbergasting event for any of the faculty who’d encountered George in the other years. “I remember, Jack Fisher called me in and said, ‘What’s this, George, a mistake?’ Then he said, ‘You know, George, have you ever heard the expression a day late and a dollar short?’”

  Fisher’s assessment, unfortunately, was all too correct, in that George’s smashing finish did not quite obliterate the general dismalness of his high school record. His first SAT scores, from the tests he had taken in the spring of his junior year, were less than stellar—a total of just over 600, out of a possible 1,600, on the math and verbal combined. He did have one more chance the following fall to take the SATs again, which is when he thought of enlisting the help of his best pal, Malcolm MacGregor. Malcolm had scored a perfect 1,600 the previous spring, even without much sleep the night before, and thought that sufficient to get him into his first-choice college, which was Worcester Polytechnic Institute. So he had no reason to take the
tests again. And he didn’t—at least not under his own name. In a fit of ill-advised friendship, he agreed to go into the testing room that Saturday morning in the fall, take the SAT, and forge George’s signature. And it could well have worked. Indeed, Malcolm finished fifteen minutes early, and there was no challenge when he left by the outside proctor hired to monitor the exam, who didn’t know George or Malcolm from a Pygmy warrior. But Malcolm forgot to do one thing. For some reason, possibly a Freudian explanation, it never occurred to him to lard the test with any purposeful mistakes, at least enough so George’s scores turning up this time at the Springfield College admissions office wouldn’t add up to a perfect 1,600.

  The unraveling of the scheme occurred swiftly enough. At Springfield, the admissions officer took one look at the thousand-point difference and called down to Mr. Wallace L. Whittle, then the principal of Weymouth High School. Whittle knew enough about George to become overwhelmed with doubt concerning the validity of the startling improvement, and called in George and his parents to wring out the truth. He also called in Malcolm and his parents and informed them that he was going to have to notify Worcester Tech about their son’s lapse of judgment. In the end Malcolm’s father had to perform fancy feats of influence to keep his son from getting deleted from the acceptance list. As for George, for all the effort he’d put into his courses that year, the principal allowed him to graduate on schedule in spite of everything. But college certainly was out, at least for the next year. And although he listed himself optimistically in the 1961 edition of Campus, the school yearbook, as heading off into a career of “business administration,” George’s immediate prospects did not appear too bright.

  Uncle George, on hearing about the unfortunate situation, did step in and offer to help. For all his faults, his nephew was still family, after all. In a telephone call to Fred, he said that as an engineer for the state of Massachusetts he was not without influence in certain places, and it might just be possible to find George employment. He knew some people down at the Boston Edison power plant, the one located on the line between Weymouth and Quincy, and it might be arranged, just might, for George to get work at the plant as a floor sweeper. Informed of the offer, George replied to his father that he didn’t feel of a mind to accept the job. Indeed, Uncle George could take the fucking sweeper job and ram it right up his ass, was what he could do with it. George would rather go out and see what he could pick up on his own.

  TWO

  Manhattan Beach

  1967–1968

  I’d be safe and warm,

  If I was in L.A.

  California Dreamin’

  on such a winter’s day.

  —THE MAMAS & THE PAPAS, “CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’,” 1966

  FROM JUST ABOUT ANYWHERE IN MANHATTAN BEACH you can look out between the houses and see the Pacific Ocean washing up along the broad expanse of sand that runs from one end of town to the other. Some local historians say the town got its name from a land developer from New York in the first decade of the twentieth century who wished to memorialize his hometown; others believe that it came from a rich lady of Dutch ancestry in honor of the fact that her forebears had been in on the deal to buy Manhattan Island from the Indians. Whatever the case, Manhattan, the beach, twenty miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles, with a population of 32,500 souls, bears as little resemblance to its namesake back East as any other coastal city in Southern California. Its soft pastel frame-and-stucco houses line a series of terraced streets that work their way up to the top of a sand hill sitting 245 feet above sea level, allowing each resident a wide glimpse of the ocean over a neighboring rooftop. In the early days the dunes of Manhattan Beach supported so little vegetation that they’d shift about from the winds. To stabilize the place, ladies from the Neptunian Club took to planting the dunes with mossy green ice plants that now abound everywhere, thus earning them the name “moss ladies.” During the summer the town is cooled by the prevailing westerlies that blow off the water and in the evening fill the air with the perfume of hibiscus and night-blooming jasmine. Most of the time the winds also manage to blow the looming pall of brownish-yellow smog from the freeways back into the inner recesses of Los Angeles proper, leaving the local atmosphere clear and dry. Considering its location and its weather, the local chamber of commerce needed little poetic license to promote the town in its tourist brochure as truly “a little bit of heaven on earth.”

  As with the neighboring beach towns—El Segundo, Hermosa, Redondo, Palos Verdes, Santa Monica, Venice, San Pedro—it was World War II that spurred the real growth in Manhattan Beach, which for the course of the conflict played host to a pair of eight-inch railroad guns operated a little to the east of town by the men of Shore Battery E from New Jersey. The guns created such an uproar during artillery practice that a warden had to warn housewives beforehand to take their heirloom china down from the display cabinets. Since the only local action came on Christmas Eve of 1941, when a Japanese submarine snuck up the 245-fathom deep Catalina ship channel and torpedoed a schooner carrying a load of lumber, the boys of Battery E had a pretty soft billet; and a goodly number, like many other soldiers who came through the state, decided after V-J Day that what awaited them back in New Jersey didn’t stack up so well compared to what they’d seen of California.

  Manhattan Beach also stood right next to the burgeoning Los Angeles International Airport, which meant you could get in and out of the place quickly. But more to the point, it meant the town served as home base for the people who worked out of the airport, notably some one thousand nubile young airline stewardesses, who in short order made it into the reigning party town of the southern coast. “You’ve got to remember that in the 1960s you didn’t have the kind of labor laws you have now, where the stewardesses can be sixty years old and ugly and weigh three hundred pounds,” says Frank Yamamoto, a Berkeley graduate who in those days ran a restaurant, three doors up from the beach. “The airlines were a glamorous business. Everyone who was flying had money, and if you wanted to work for the airlines, you had to be really good-looking, and you had to have good boobs.”

  So from cock’s crow to evensong the beach teemed with gorgeous women stuffed into bikinis of every variety, lying out on the sand, bouncing up and down around the volleyball nets, eyeing the ranks of surfers shooting toward shore on the eight-foot curlers. Bars and restaurants lined the approach streets; at night people jammed into the Buccaneer or Pancho’s or Cisco’s, a large rock-and-roll emporium owned by the Smothers Brothers. After closing time the parties came to life in the apartments off the strand where the “stewies” lived three and four together, loaded up with pot and free booze from the airlines. On Sunday afternoons the golden hordes repaired to an open terrace at Mike’s Restaurant at the end of Manhattan Beach Boulevard to drink beer and dance and watch the surfers slalom in and out of the pilings underneath the town pier, while Mike “the Greek” slathered coats of his special barbecue sauce over the 75-pound lamb turning slowly on a spit. “I tell you, it was a very hedonistic situation,” says Yamamoto, who eventually parlayed his restaurant into a large set of real-estate holdings. “This town was just one big nonstop fucking party all day and all night.”

  George showed up in Manhattan Beach in the summer of 1967, an occasion he soon regarded as one of the uneclipsable events of his life. “Coming from Weymouth, I thought somebody had dropped me out of an airplane and I’d landed in paradise,” he says. He was twenty-five years old then, and was distinguished in town by his broad Boston accent, his great-looking muscles, and his shaggy hair made blond in the California sun, enhancing his luminous hazel-green eyes. That was the year when, among other events, Dustin Hoffman appeared in The Graduate, when the Mamas and the Papas came out with “Monday, Monday,” and the Rolling Stones were singing “Ruby Tuesday.” It was the year the jails were beginning to fill up with young people protesting against the Vietnam War, and it was when Timothy Leary issued his famous call to a Gathering of the Tribes summoned to San Francisco b
y Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin, which was to “Turn on to the scene. Tune in to what is happening, and drop out.” It was also the year George Jung looked at the diminishing legitimate opportunities open to him in his yearning to acquire wealth and esteem and decided the best chance for someone of his talents and brashness lay somewhere in the upper echelons of the burgeoning marijuana business.

  * * *

  In the six years since he’d graduated high school George had achieved little in the way of personal success. Stuck in Weymouth, and needing to earn money and to find a college that would have him, he ended up going to work as a bricklayer’s helper for his old baby-sitter, Russell Delorey. The work itself, carrying hods of bricks and mixing mortar, seemed made to order for George, who could pick up two 94-pound bags of Portland cement, raise them over his head, and if need be, walk around like that all afternoon. “George had such great strength and endurance for physical work,” Russell wrote in a little memoir of the period, “that I began to refer to him as the Crane.” George also proved a valuable asset in the area of customer relations. Once, when Russell found himself getting stiffed by a contractor after installing a Tennessee-marble fireplace in one of his houses, he simply told the contractor that if he didn’t get paid for the fireplace, he would take it back. “Whereupon I told George to get the two 16-pound sledgehammers from my truck, and we proceeded to crash the entire marble fireplace onto the new hardwood floor. We ruined the living room floor, the walls, the ceiling, the baseboard heating system, and wood trim. The dispute was finally resolved, but the news of our confrontation traveled around the Cape, and people got the message: Don’t attempt holding up payment on Delorey, especially when the Crane is available.”