In the early part of that summer I was living with my girlfriend in Santa Barbara. My marriage had gone to hell a few years before mostly because I couldn't deal with the arrival of my son. I was a twenty-four year old hippy with little or no sense of how I would make a living and I just wasn't ready for the responsibility of a child at that time. That's been my excuse ever since, and it really hasn't held up; it's just a way to justify what I did, which was to run like a bat out of hell.
Anyhow, I had just returned from a friend of mine's wedding in Flafstaff, Arizona. We had spent the majority of the three days I was there drunk and coked up, and all I could remember was that I was trying very hard, and not all that successfully, to look the part of the good serious best man I was meant to be, though pictures of the event show a scowling red-faced creature who looks more like a hitman than anything else.
Be that as it may, the wedding went off without a hitch and they were married, not particularly happily but at least the deed was done though it wouldn't last more than the four or five years and the one child that almost all these early seventies marriages produced. My friend, Tom, took me to catch the overnight train back to L.A. and on to Santa Barbara, and, with the help of a couple of morphine tablets we fished out of his company first aid kit, I slept like a little drugged angel all the way. I was still so out of it in the morning that I left my Levi jacket on the train; it wasn't till I was half way to Santa B that I noticed my loss, and at that point I just blew it off.
When I got to Santa Barbara I was feeling kind of out of it. I picked up my old red International pickup and headed up the hill to see if I could score a quarter gram of coke off my man up there. Much to my delight he was home and we quickly consummated the deal over a couple of fat lines. Feeling much the better, I took off and headed down to the beach. I thought I'd while the afternoon away down below the cemetery, in a private little spot only the locals went to. I parked my truck up by the Biltmore and walked down there. I was kind of spaced from the traveling and the coke, but once I got down to the beach and went for a swim I started feeling pretty good. I lay out naked in the sand and kind of drifted off.
The sound of the Rolling Stones singing "Honky-Tonk Woman" brought me back into the world. Opening my eyes, I saw a pretty young girl, standing maybe eight feet away from me, checking me out. Music was blaring from a ghetto-blaster in her hand. She looked like she was still in high school, maybe 16 or 17, real pretty with long brown hair.
"How you doing?" she asked and I was coming right up for the bait. "Can I join you?" She put down her blaster and started taking off her clothes.
We talked for a while. She was your typical Montecito teenager, badrapping her mom and her rich dentist dad, telling me how they wouldn't let her do what she wanted and on and on. I was trying to zero in on her but she was pretty young. I kept thinking maybe I can take her back to my place while my girlfriend's at work, all kinds of fantasies. But then she got up just as suddenly as she had come and said she had to split. I tried to talk her into coming with me but, no deal, she was off. She wheeled around and gave me a big kiss just before she was leaving. "What's your name?" I asked her and she told me. "Lori." "Hey, write down your phone number for me," I said and she did. "I'll call you some time." She cruised off down the beach with her blaster on and I just kind of shook my head.
A couple of weeks went by. I was living with my girlfriend over on Garden Street in this old Chinatown house. I swear it was haunted with old opium smoking Chinese. I kept thinking about Lori but I didn't want to get in a scene with my old lady so I thought I'd better play it cool. I found her folks' name and address in the phone book and I cruised by there a few times. They were rich all right, with the full-on Spanish hacienda up in the foothills of Montecito, the BMW and Mercedes out front. Finally one day I called her from a friend's place. She sounded just like a kid then, the classic teenage girl voice, impossible to get anywhere with. Still, I was enjoying it. I told her we'd have to get together again sometime, and she said sure.
I never talked to her again. My scene with my girlfriend went off the handle and the next while was a big mess. The next thing I knew was living with my old buddy Chris up in the mountains behind town. We scored this cool funky old rock house for about a hundred a month and we were just kicking it up there, smoking sensa and lying around in the hammock. One night I was making a fire in the old drum stove we had in the living room. I was scrunching up page from the local newspaper when a picture and the notice caught my eye. It was a picture of Lori. "$25,000 reward for information leading to the killers of Lori Trainer. Found bludgeoned to death at her home at 319 Orchard Road on 9/26/75. Contact John Dewalt at the Santa Barbara Police Station."
That was it. They never found out who killed her. She was a wild little kid and it could have been anybody. Her folks ran the ad in the paper for a long time, but nothing ever came from it. Sometimes when I drive past their house, it makes me wonder
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