← Back

The Summer of '71 - Mosaic Essay Experiment

This is a philistine desert.

All palm trees and freeways and California dreaming. It’s the tidying, the entertaining, the full belly laughs and sunshine and smoking by the patio. Dinner parties like these last right through Sunday to Monday. No amount of canapes: devilled eggs served on shiny platters can quench their thirst for glasses of Manhattan, Whiskey Sour or whatever it is those people keep drinking. They make empty promises they know they won’t keep - introductions to friends-of-friends, trips to this-or-that restaurant, “we have to do this again!” - it’s all accompanied by vigorous head nodding and more inconsequential lies. I stand. My feet ache. I wander to the back studio to the futon by the lime-green geometric wallpaper bathed in mid-afternoon warmth and plan to take a nap. And life changes in an instant.

The summer of ‘71 was filled with a dry, everlasting aridity that made cacti grow right out to the sea and tumbleweed grow right by your window. Everything was all dried up. The drought exposed the cracked and crinkled earth at Nicasio Reservoir, a once plentiful dam of eight-hundred and forty-five acres. It made neighbours brick-up their pool, turn off the tap while brushing teeth, attempt to control the utterly uncontrollable. This land of rock and roll and Cadillac convertibles and John F. Kennedy was not, in the least, hospitable to extensive settlement.

Aqua Net is a kind of aerosol hairspray that stinks of chemicals and leaves everything sticky to touch. It is quintessential to any woman’s morning routine. So is the fit and flare, the miniskirt, black turtlenecks, bikinis, psychedelics. The girl on the sidewalk is just as likely to be wandering barefoot and aimless as booted up in vinyl or leather, ready for the Sunset Strip or a day in the office. The wardrobe. Be free, texture on texture.

Sharon Marie Tate Polanski was twenty-six years old and eight and a half months pregnant on the night she was killed. Her and four others all gone in an instant. By whom they called the Manson Family: a communal religious cult dedicated to Charles Manson and his eccentric prophies and science fiction. It all happened right down the road when I was sleeping (again on the futon) and awoke to sirens and men in uniform. Sharon was another actress slash model slash filmmaker’s wife. Another American hybrid of sorts. She seemed sweet - I think I met her at a party once.

The home is designed for welcoming and waking and warmth. That’s what the tacky labelled doormat and ranch style hallway arches tells you. My home at first might seem a little unusual, eccentric even. Filled with leaning piles of books and records; spines bleached from time and sun, vintage decor you couldn’t find in magazines, more wine glasses than cutlery in the kitchen cupboard. A pantry filled with prescription medication. Most people who pass through this place, however fleetingly, usually choose to dutifully complement my choice of carpet while simultaneously boasting about their weekend plans. I suppose enough noise can drown out even the ugliest of sights.

The school nowadays is all about diligence and dreaming and disorder and decay. Desegregation. That’s what the kids are protesting for. On the buses, on the streets, on voting day. A radical future of equalness; where little William or Jennifer, no matter the colour of his skin or texture of her hair are entitled to an equal education. It’s funny: they say in the paper that times are changing, but still, they seem to have an awful lot to say.

I awake, bleary eyed on that futon to a small head full of brilliant, blonde curls and a nose that tilts up at the end just like mine. She’s lightly sucking her thumb and seems mildly concerned; I wonder how she got out of her room. “Are you tired again?” she asks.

There in my home, on the futon, in the middle of the dinner party, during the everlasting summer of 71’ I wonder –

If only she truly knew.