Read The White Album for Free Online Page B

fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind . “Lead a simple life,” the neurologist advised . “Not that it makes any difference we know about . ” In other words it was another story without a narrative .
    Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abrup tly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled Uke brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true . The tension broke that day . The paranoia was fulfilled . In another sense the Sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971, when I left the house on Franklin Avenue and moved to a house on the sea . This particular house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history—a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf—but after a while we did some construction, and between the power saws and the sea wind the place got exorcised .
    I have known, since then, very little about the movements of the people who seemed to me emblematic of those years . I know of course that Eldridge Cleaver went to Algeria and came home an entrepreneur . I know that Jim Morrison died in Paris . I know that Linda Kasabian fled in search of the pastoral to New Hampshire, where I once visited her; she also visited me in New York, and we took our children on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty . I also know that in 1975 Paul Ferguson, while serving a life sentence for the murder of Ramon Novarro, won first prize in a PEN fiction contest and announced plans to “continue my writing . ” Writing had helped him, he said, to “reflect on experience and see what it means . ” Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on “Midnight Confessions” and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means .

    1968-1978
     

 

     
     

    II. CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC
     

 

     
     

    James Pike, American
     
     
    it is A curious and arrogan tly secular monument, Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, and it imposes its tone on everything around it . It stands direc tly upon the symbolic nexus of all old California money and power, Nob Hill . Its big rose window glows at night and dominates certain views from the Mark Hopkins and the Fairmont, as well as from Randolph and Catherine Hearst’s apartment on California Street . In a city dedicated to the illusion that all human endeavor tends mystically west, toward the Pacific, Grace Cathedral faces resolutely east, toward the Pacific Union Club . As a child I was advised by my grandmother that Grace was “unfinished,” and always would be, which was its point . In the years after World War I my mother had put pennies for Grace in her mite box but Grace would never be finished . In the years after World War II I would put pennies for Grace in my mite box but Grace would never be finished . In 1964 James Albert Pike, who had come home from St . John the Divine in New York and The Dean Pike Show on ABC to be Bishop of California, raised three million dollars, installed images of Albert Einstein, Thurgood Marshall and John Glenn in the clerestory windows, and, in the name of God (James Albert Pike had by then streamlined the Trinity, eliminating the Son and the Holy Ghost), pronounced Grace “finished . ” This came to my attention as an odd and unsettling development, an extreme missing of the point—at least as I had understood the point in my childhood—and it engraved James Albert Pike on my consciousness more indelibly than any of his previous moves .
    What was one to make of him . Five years after he finished Grace, James Albert Pike left the Episcopal Church altogether,