The Police
Station
We all live in a yellow submarine.
The Beatles, "Yellow
Submarine"
Before Sandra and Mindi left for Philadelphia, a disturbing incident brought the old element of terror back into Michael's life. During his salad days he had dated a young woman whose boyfriend was serving a prison term in San Quentin. It was one of many mistakes he had made, and with the passing of time he forgot about it. But now the man had been released, and he was on the warpath. Michael was at the car lot one evening when he received a call from the police, telling him that someone had broken into his house.
He arrived home to find that Sandra and Mindi were safe, but a crowd had gathered and police and sheriff's cars were on the scene. Investigators were taking fingerprints and photographers were taking pictures. A man had come with a tire iron, looking for Michael, and had broken in the front door. Neighbors were aroused, and as a result the intruder had driven off with his girlfriend, but not until his license number had been noted.
Michael was sure the man was the ex-convict, so he went outside and told the police, "Let's just forget it. I made
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some mistakes and my mistakes have caught up with me." Afterward he decided he had better try to smooth things over, so he looked up his adversary and found his telephone number. "I know you're mad," Michael told him, "and you're after me, and I'm sorry. I'm sure God wouldn't have anybody kill anybody. I've talked to the police, and why don't we just forget the whole thing?"
The man's response was a threat. "You'd just better hope the police get to me before I get to you!"
Next day the sheriff sent an investigator to see Michael at the car lot. "I've talked to this guy," Michael said, "and he's still threatening to kill me."
"If I were you," said the investigator, "I'd keep away from him. He has bad friends, and he's a tough character."
"Aren't you going to do anything?" Michael asked.
"Just keep away from him."
Shortly afterward Sandra and Mindi left for Philadelphia, and Michael had to move out of the Irvine house. He was selling well and making several hundred dollars a week, but one day, after he had taken some LSD, he told his boss about the impending divorce and asked if he could get away.
"Sure," he was told, "just get in a corner and don't listen to anybody's advice. Take a few days and get your head together." Michael took that advice, rented a place down by the beach, and with his bag of LSD he sat and watched the waves.
One day a man he recognized came up to him and said, "MacIntosh, what are you doing alive?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your friend has put a contract out on you."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not kidding. He was at our place when the FBI
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raided it and arrested him for smuggling dope. He had just got through telling two Mexican guys to get you."
Michael's heart sank. He became suspicious of people. He wondered how it would happen — would they shoot him, stab him, or break his arms and throw him over a cliff? It affected his job; he couldn't sell cars anymore. His roach-ridden little beach house became his hideaway. He increased his drug intake and made it a daily dosage. Thinking he would "try to find" himself, he started attending the popular rock-and-roll concerts, but it was a whirlpool that kept getting deeper.
One night he drove to the Shrine auditorium in Los Angeles and found the place packed with kids listening to four different rock groups. The strobe lights were flashing and giant screens were showing rapid-fire stills of flowers, Hitler, soldiers parachuting, and other scenes, most of them ugly.
There is something bigger than a concert going on here, Michael thought. These people are putting hate into the audience without the audience knowing it.
He climbed up on one of the stages where the Vanilla Fudge group was playing. The pills made him bold, and he knew the musicians were equally loaded; but behind the giant screen he found something that truly amazed him. A wholly different group from those dancing out front were squatting on the floor looking at the backside of the screen. They seemed quite at home, and they were watching pictures of Satan, with goatee, pitchfork, and grotesque demons all around. Kneeling on the platform, Michael prayed, "God, if you're real, please get me out of this. There is a conspiracy going on. I need a Christian girl to help me, one I can explain this to. This concert is nothing but a front to brainwash people and sell drugs."
The concert ended and people started to leave. Michael,
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well spaced out, went up to a man and asked him where he could find a Christian girl. The man said, "Go stand in that line there."
After he had stood in line a while another man came and asked him, "What's your number?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Your stage or union number."
It turned out they were handing out paychecks to the people in line. Michael studied them and recalled seeing them in the auditorium. They were all dressed like hippies, wearing freak haricuts and coveralls; the girls wore T—shirts and no bras. They were actually actors, serving as trend-setters to impress the patrons and teach them what they should be like. Once the truth struck him, Michael began yelling, "You're all phonies!" A man quickly stepped up and warned him, saying he was a narcotics officer and if Michael didn't leave, he would take him downtown. He left.
That evening, a friend introduced him to Ron, the long-haired leader of the mystic cult that soon afterward took Michael to the desert to wait for flying saucers to land at Giant Rock Airport. Ron and his followers were talking up heroin, but Michael wasn't interested. He had known a pusher in Huntington Beach who sprinkled heroin into his marijuana to hook teen-age girls. Then the girls would come back with, "Hey, I need some more of that other kind; I'm not getting high." But Ron's people were also into yoga and Zen, and Michael wanted to hear more about that.
Three weeks after his trip to Yucca Valley, Michael's friend Rick, who drove the Volkswagen van, gave him some pills and dropped him off at Ron's house. It was then that Michael had the nightmarish experience of feeling the side of his head blown off by a gun blast — a feeling
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that persisted for two years and convinced him for much of that time that he was dead. Rick came back for Michael late in the evening and dropped him off at his house in Huntington Beach. He woke up his brother Kent. "Help me, please."
"What's the matter?"
"I've been shot in the head."
"You what?" Kent turned on the light and said, "You're O.K. Don't tell me you've been taking that LSD garbage again."
"I have, but it's real. Please just love me and help me."
Kent was kind and gentle with his younger brother and talked with him when he couldn't sleep. Michael would wake up in the night hearing the gun go off all over again and start to panic. He would get up and walk out into the front yard and look at the stars and slap himself, just to make sure it was his body he was inhabiting.
After a few days Michael moved to Laguna Beach at the invitation of some friends. While he was there he listened to a new Beatles record, and the old conviction came back in all its fantasy:
I belong with the Beatles! He was on his usual high, and to prove his point he decided to do something different. Going to a well-known "head shop" in Laguna Beach called "Mystic Arts," he walked into the meditation room. There he thought he heard voices telling him to go down to the beach and baptize himself in the ocean. He did so. Next the spirit voices told him that the Beatles were in town and were located somewhere in the Laguna Beach hotel. Michael began a wild search for them, but it proved fruitless. At last he returned to the house where he was staying, collected all the rock-and-roll records he had with him, and walked out and stood on the Pacific Coast Highway, handing them out to the hippies he met. He even
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wandered out into the bumper-to-bumper traffic, giving the peace sign.
Late that afternoon Michael reached the end of the trail. He walked into the Laguna Beach police station and spoke to the receptionist. "Ma'am," he said, "I'm with the Beatles, and they're in town doing a nude pop art reproduction of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in a yellow submarine."
She said, "What?"
Michael said, "Well, you're going to get phone calls because I just walked nude up Coast highway, and that was my part for the Beatles."
She asked, "Would you mind just telling that to the sergeant?"
He did, and the sergeant of police said, "Would you tell that to the lieutenant?" It was just like the movies.
Michael spoke to the lieutenant, who had been warned, and his reply was, "Well, we'd like to take you to see some friends. Would you mind going with us?"
"No," said Michael, "but when Paul, John, George, and Ringo get here, would you tell them where I am?"
"Oh, sure," said the lieutenant. Michael was then driven to the Orange County Medical Center.
