Quick Take
Max Talley, a writer living in Santa Barbara, set two pivotal chapters of his recent book “Peace, Love & Haight” in Santa Cruz. Here, he explains why the Beach Boardwalk and the drive north up Highway 1 figure into his hippie crime novel set in 1969. His hero longs for the Summer of Love, but is confronted with the reality of mob bosses peddling hard drugs and pushing him to join them. Sounds a little like “Breaking Bad” on the Boardwalk.
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When I wrote my recent novel, “Peace, Love & Haight,” I made San Francisco’s Haight District the epicenter of action, but I soon realized my main character, Freddie Dorn, would need to roam the California coast – and that Santa Cruz would play a role.
Dorn, who owns an art gallery in the Haight, enjoyed the peaceful hippyhood of San Francisco in the early 1960s. But in 1969, when the novel is set, the West Coast mob has muscled in and brought heroin and speed. Unethical dealers have started selling tainted psychedelics that send users to the hospitals, and on the streets, runaways, drunks and junkies have started camping out. Dorn faces hard choices as he pushes back against the mobsters and soon realizes he has to get out of town.
That need leads him to Santa Cruz, which I visited most weekends when I lived in Monterey in the 1990s. My memories helped me set two crucial chapters in Santa Cruz – one at the Beach Boardwalk, the other along Highway 1. Dorn longs for the peace-infused days of the Summer of Love and wants to dial the clock back to those better days. He decides to help police arrest the worst local dealer, Rat-Man Rathkin. Dorn also has a personal stake: His ex-girlfriend overdosed on heroin that Rat-Man likely supplied, and Dorn’s best friend, Van Monk, had his brain fried by an experimental hallucinogen from Rat-Man.
But nothing goes as planned, and both the police and the West Coast mob scramble to get Dorn to work for them.
I’ve always loved amusement parks and carnivals as background scenes for crime. I date this to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” in which the fictional “Metcalf’s Kingdom of Fun” serves as the terrifying backdrop for the iconic finale. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and the interior of the (former) Cocoanut Grove ballroom were the location for Clint Eastwood’s “Sudden Impact.” (The Giant Dipper features in the dramatic ending.)
I had enough recall of the Boardwalk rides, concert stage, the interior game rooms and neighborhood to feel I could visually set a reader there, regardless if they’d visited or not. As someone from New York, I’d also gone to a seedy Coney Island, with its boardwalk rides and games. For my book, I liked the family fun and Americana mixed with the lurking danger of conmen and lowlifes wandering among the innocent.
I was born in the 1960s, so I was not in Santa Cruz during the time of the novel. But I understand it was a quieter, more conservative community until UC Santa Cruz opened in 1965. It had a much smaller student population than today’s, and by 1969, the campus was radicalized (like many other California colleges), which means the counterculture was in full flower by the time my book takes place.
Though 1969 was a time of change, the Boardwalk remained a reassuring slice of an older America that was being challenged on every front. My visits to Santa Cruz in the 1990s made me love the funky redwood mountain towns, the city’s mix of beauty and grit, and The Catalyst, where you could drive by and see “Neil Young tonight” on the marquee, back when the rock legend still lived at his Skyline Drive ranch. In some ways, the 1970s lingered into 1990s Santa Cruz, with record stores, used-book shops, thrift stores, clubs, bars and acres and acres of free parking all abundant.
Visiting for a whole day is more expensive now. My hangouts then were Zachary’s, Palookaville, Bookshop Santa Cruz, The Red Room, Logos Books & Records, the Catalyst Atrium and the Del Mar the Nickelodeon theaters. Thankfully, most of those places still exist.
Many cities in California are victims of their own success. Though Santa Cruz still retains a skunky whiff of its wild outlaw past, it has become incredibly expensive to rent or live there, and housing needs, like in so many cities, outweighs supply. And locals know, hell is driving Highway 1 south after 3 p.m. on weekdays.
I also included the coastal drive north of Santa Cruz in my book. During this journey, Dorn contemplates the legacy of the 1960s in the decade’s final months. Preservation and private ownership has kept that long stretch where he rides up to Half Moon Bay largely undeveloped. State parks, open land, ranches, farms, Pigeon Point Lighthouse. He passes it all. For a glimpse into past decades and even the past century of our California coast, drive Highway 1 north and absorb it. A treasure.
It was the chiaroscuro, the contrast of light and dark elements that made Santa Cruz the only place I considered for these two pivotal chapters. I am thrilled that “Peace, Love & Haight” is available in bookstores in Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Marin County, so that residents can judge for themselves if I captured anything they recognize — with either a smile or a wince.
Max Talley is a writer and musician from New York who lives in Santa Barbara. Talley has two published novels and three short story collections. The most recent, “Destroy Me Gently, Please,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His hippie crime novel, “Peace, Love, & Haight,” has been nominated for an Edgar Award. He is also the author of over 60 stories in literary journals.