I threw these poems away twenty years later when I ran across them in a folder full of old writing, of course. Their only value was to connect me to my younger self, and my need for that connection was dwindling. I did not hear about the other Milpitas murders—the ones at Devil House in 1986, the ones that occurred just as River’s Edge began making the festival circuit—until many years later. The town had, of necessity and in a very short period of time, developed a reflex for dealing with eventualities. They knew to turn away inquiries. People had learned how to say “No comment.” They circled the wagons.
A little research reveals that the case did get a drizzling of national coverage, but these years were busy times for ugly spectacles. In Southern California alone, the McMartin preschool case started staking its claim on the top of the news hour as early as fall of 1984; Richard Ramirez, meanwhile, was drawing pentagrams on the walls of tract homes in Monrovia, and in Glendale, and in Monterey Park. In the Aztakea Woods of Northport, Long Island, there was Ricky Kasso, high on blood and angel dust, heaping dry leaves over the mutilated body of his friend, Gary Lauwers. I remember hearing about Sean Sellers in Oklahoma, stripping down to his underwear before shooting both his parents with a handgun; and about Robert Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher, who kept logs of the tortures he inflicted on his victims across extended periods of time: days, weeks.
I was emerging from that time in my life when I would have enthusiastically immersed myself in the details of stories like these. Such enthusiasms are like the tides; you can’t usually fight them effectively, but you can learn to wait them out. I had learned. Gage’s book did not pull me back in.
* * *
SO I DIDN’T ACTUALLY SIT DOWN with The White Witch of Morro Bay until a few years later, when the movie they made from it came to broadcast TV. The stations treated its arrival to the airwaves as an event; the panic years were ebbing slowly, and television people had been among the first to note that nostalgia and an addiction to the news cycle were two sides of the same coin. I watched the broadcast—both nights; they divided the film at a key point in the action, and tacked on half an hour’s worth of archival footage at the end of the second night.
I recognized the terrain in the background of that footage. It called out to me from behind the action—those low, brown hills of Central California, those tall palms that shaded the wide, lazy boulevards. This milieu, which the movie had tried without success to reproduce, had passed out of existence and could not be brought back to life, though the conjuring of it in set design seemed to awaken its memory in me like dormant bacteria.
The teenagers talking, passing their rumors along to the newscaster, shooting knowing glances at one another: these might have been the older brothers and sisters of my preschool classmates. Their secrets were my secrets, not in substance but in weight. The coded messages of their shared glances spoke, specifically, to me: not about the specifics of my life as it was playing out in its particulars, but about the architecture within that life, about the frame within which all the action occurred. We were from the same place.
Gage’s book had been reprinted in anticipation of new interest; I bought a copy from a wire rack at a Thrifty. Several loose strands came together for me as I read. Most of what I took from it was tangential to its central aim, but that didn’t matter to me. It was more talisman than treasure—I’m reasonably certain I only read through it from cover to cover twice—but it became a constant and familiar presence on my bookshelf, no matter how many times I moved house. The sight of it tethered me to something real in myself. The fashioning of an anchor is, for some of us, a lifelong errand. Mine traveled with me.
* * *
THE WHITE WITCH OF MORRO BAY is a nostalgic book, and a personal journey. When I thumb through it, I’m looking for signposts: landmarks I half remember seeing from the backseat of my father’s Chrysler, street names that might offer me a road back into the easier days of early childhood. These totems, when I find them in Gage’s book, resonate at a frequency I find almost nowhere else. The Taco Bell with its outside firepit. The sign out in front of the Cork ’n’ Bottle on Foothill Boulevard. Jordano’s. The beach.
The scenes at the beach, especially, seemed to stick with me. Gage’s family and mine had been to that very beach when we were both freshly out of our toddler days; I had fading Kodaks of the day in a shoebox somewhere, totems of a disappeared age. Gage’s book, and any reemergence of his name in my field of vision, served as a conduit between where I’d landed in the world—grown-up, en route after some lost time to somewhere hopefully fairly uncomplicated but rewarding—and the times before in-between times, the Edenic glaze we often superimpose onto our memories of childhood.
I wondered if these scenes rode similar currents for Gage, and so I wrote to him. Why not? There was a New York address opposite the title page, I figured somebody must be in charge of forwarding mail. I didn’t want to seem weird or intrusive, so I thought carefully about what to tell him—I limited the present day to a few details about my work and my family, and sketched a broader outline of the paths I’d traveled in the intervening time. Places I’d lived since he last heard from me. Chicago, Grinnell, Durham; Bavaria, briefly.
Gage wrote back about a month later to say that he’d actually spent several years living in the very town from which I used to write him all those years ago. He had stories to tell, he said, that he thought I might like, if I was at all like the kid he’d known long ago. He invited me to meet up with him sometime, if I should ever have an afternoon to kill in the Bay Area and didn’t mind making a detour: he was back in San Luis Obispo, could I even believe it? He signed the letter with his name, an odd symbol that looked like a shield, and his phone number.
As it happened, I traveled through San Francisco at least once a year for business. It was a reliable stop, and I usually spent several days in town. And so I looked at my calendar, and we talked briefly over the phone to set coordinates, and I began making plans.
4.
ON THE MORNING I WOULD DRIVE down to see Gage, I left my hotel early and took a long walk. When I’m in San Francisco I stay in Japantown; I ambled down Post to Fillmore and went left, in search of a coffee shop. I was a kid the first time I went walking around in the Haight; that would have been 1979 or 1980. To me, at that time, the whole place felt like Shangri-La in eclipse: I wore my hair long, and favored loose-fitting shirts in dyed cotton. The vanishing age spoke to me, and the one just dawning looked a little too cool to hold an invitation with my name on it.
Of my younger time in the neighborhood, I remember record stores offering drug paraphernalia behind beaded curtains; stores that mainly sold incense and Tibetan imports; movie theaters that had couches instead of chairs, and whose concession stands offered brewer’s yeast on your popcorn for an extra quarter. These places are all gone now; you can maybe make out the shapes they used to occupy if you squint.
I found a café where the menu was written in yellow and green chalk on an immense blackboard above and behind the front counter. My phone buzzed while I was thumbing through the Chronicle. It was Gage. He was in town; he had an idea. Specifically, what he said was:
couldn’t sleep. drove up. I have an idea, where are you at
* * *