Prologue
January 1971, EL CAMINO
If it was for sale, you could buy it in El Ca-mi-no. Anything. Five hundred shares of General Motors, live lobster fresh from the Maine seacoast, shoes hand-stitched in Italy.
All this and more were available, quickly, though the nearest stockbroker's office, seafood distributor and custom bootery were forty miles south in San Francisco. You simply said, "I'm calling from El Camino," and the people at the other end of the line busted their asses to satisfy. They knew that anyone with an El Camino address had it made. Services follow wealth the way a hound trails the bitch in heat, with his nose in it.
The luxurious life of rural seclusion in El Camino was enjoyed by an elite corps of seven hundred, who retained an almost equal number of servants and owned half as many horses.
But their money, all the millions in real estate, securities and numbered Swiss bank accounts, did not intimidate the elements.
There was no one they could pay to influence the sudden fierce streams of air, whipped up by bellows from somewhere far out in the Pacific, that nourished and angered the ocean breakers until they threatened to impale the small sailing craft on the treacherous underwater reefs or smash them against the jagged rocks that lay offshore. The helpless helmsman could only shake his fist at the sky and strongly steer a course for protected calm water, to wait. Wait and watch as the waves pounded harshly at the sandy stretch of private beach that leveled off from awesome steep cliffs topped by wind-misshapen trees. The cliffs served as the rock solid foundation for the estates of El Camino, surrounded by gently rolling greenery that contrasted sharply with the unpredictable foamy turquoise Pacific below.
When fog appeared, life in El Camino held its breath. The lush hills submitted to suffocation in the damp dense clouds without a protest. Nothing moved save the pleasure horses, snorting fearfully and nervously pacing and pawing in their stables. The women dialed the plush Bay Area offices of their commuter husbands and advised them to spend the night in town, wondering if they had something stashed away on the side for times such as this.
Nature, more often than not, smiled benignly on El Camino. Understandably so, or the favored ones would have chosen to live elsewhere.
If any one thing tangibly symbolized the genteel lifestyle of El Camino, it was the Seaview Country Club, a low rambling monument to wealth designed by the best California architect money could buy and constructed of native stone and mortar.
It was nestled in a protected valley like an impregnable medieval castle-fortress, an appearance that had been the stated desire of the syndicate of landowners that financed it. They wanted an imposing structure, one that said, "Stay away, riffraff, until you've made it like us." The master planners, every single one of them quick to contribute generously to humanitarian causes from their temples of commerce in the city-providing they could write it off-exhibited a more basic nature in El Camino. Here they were country squires, ruling lords of households and of the castle they had paid to see erected, and no threat to their ex-halted social station could be tolerated. They were entitled by the fortunes they had inherited or amassed to expect finery and to demand obsequious conduct from all those beneath them.
The serfs who tended their country club, with its golf course, tennis courts, swimming pool, bowling lanes, polo field, bars and dining rooms, were faceless replaceable cogs in a machine built solely for their regal leisure, mere bootblacks undeserving of notice, with no bodies or passions, no thoughts save how better to serve their masters: stupid inferior peasants they, these lackeys who fed on crumbs from the floor at the castle-fortress.