Twin Power

     I only remember bits and pieces from our night out with Gary. Truth be told, most of my memories from this time period are now the blurry and washed-out remnants of a treasure map torn to tattered pieces by natural aging. He took us to an upscale watering hole, an elegant place with nice fixtures and furnishings. We drank draft beers at a long, well-appointed bar. Then, at some point late in the evening, we ran into another pair of twins, twin girls, who naturally gravitated towards our twinly energetic charisma to the point of striking distance.

     "Hey, are you guys twins?" asked Lacy, swiping at the long, bleached-blond bangs covering her forehead. Her twin sister, Lisa, stood next to her with one hand on her beefy hip and the other hand holding a glass of white wine.

     Mars and I swiveled on our bar stools to face them. The pair of short and voluptuous young women with big boobs and darling faces looked amazingly identical. We looked at each other and then back at the girls.

     "Are you guys twins?" we chortled in unison. All four of us burst out laughing, instantly becoming the best of friends.

     We hung out with Lacy and Lisa for at the bar for roughly 30 minutes, talking about their lives as twins and our lives as twins. We offered them our seats but they declined, standing side by side at the bar in front of us, chatting up a storm. When we told them we were leaving for Humboldt State University the next day their big brown eyes lit up like Roman candles.

     "Oh my gosh, one of our best friends from high school goes to HSU," Lacy exclaimed. "He's actually one of Lisa's exes, but he's like a brother to us now."

     "Yeah, but sometimes he's my incestuous brother!" Lisa cackled. Then, almost to herself, she added, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe I just said that!"

     "Anyway, like I was saying," Lacy continued. "He rents a 3-bedroom house in Arcata. Maybe you guys could stay with him for a few nights while you look for a place to live. He has a roommate but I don't think either one of them would mind."

     "Oh, man, that would be so cool," I said.

     In credit cardless and play-it-by-ear fashion, the bro and I had failed to arrange for a place to stay once we landed in Arcata late on Sunday night. Our asinine plan was to walk around the town looking for a cheap hotel. But our newfound twin friends saved us from that certain misadventure.

     Lisa pulled an address book and a pen from her black Lea Frances purse and wrote down her ex-boyfriend's home telephone number on a fresh cocktail napkin. Along with the number she wrote the names Bob and Wade.

     "Here," she instructed, thrusting the napkin in my direction. "Call their house as soon as you get there and they can give you directions from the bus station. It's not far, you can walk to Bob's place in 10 minutes."

     "Bob's the ex?" I asked, taking the napkin and looking at it for a second before putting it in my right front jean pocket.

     "Yeah, and Wade's his roommate. We'll call them in the morning to let them know you're coming." Lacy chimed in exuberantly. "And what's your number?"

     "Yeah, give us your number so we can let you know they know you're coming." Lisa interjected. Classic twin talk, one constantly butting in on the other.

     Gary sat on one of the barstools next to me with an amused yet nonchalant look on his handsome mustached face. The coke had long worn off but his gorgeous green eyes still sparkled with robust masculinity. Gary knew how to get girls. And the twins, who knew a hot guy when they saw one, kept glancing in his direction.

     After initially introducing himself to Lacy and Lisa he'd been keeping his mouth mostly shut, delightedly and good-naturedly observing the perky, big-boobed twins while paying close attention to the conversation.

     Finally, Gary spoke up. "The twins are staying at my house," he explained, "so you'll need to get that number from me." Then, smiling like the hottest porn star on the planet, he added, "Why don't you come over here, Lacy, and I'll give it to you."

     "I've been waiting for you to give it to me all night!" Lacy cried, howling with laughter. Gary asked Lisa if he could borrow her pen and when she handed it to him he wrote his home phone number on another cocktail napkin and handed it to Lacy, who had just sat down in the empty bar stool next to him. Gary and Lacy started up a conversation while Mars and I continued talking to Lisa, who was still standing in front of us.

     "Would you like to sit down?" Mars offered, gesturing to the empty bar stool next to him. Lisa glanced in her sister's direction and then at the empty wine glass in her right hand.

     "Looks like I'm all out!" she cried.

     "Sit down," Mars cooed, "and we'll get you another one."

     Lisa sat down and ordered another glass of Chardonnay. Wedged between Gary and Lacy to my left and Mars and Lisa to my right, I spun around to face the bar and ordered another beer, sucking on it thirstily while jonesing for more nose candy. Vampire mode. It was early in the a.m. and the place had thinned out to a dozen or so patrons waiting for the last call. Buzzed and unfazed to the point of numbness, I quickly got lost in my own jumbled thoughts, pondering the events of the last two years in San Diego.

     I thought about my job as a busboy at Vacation Village, at a fancy tableside service restaurant right on the bay. The place had originally opened as Jack's Steakhouse in 1962, in honor of the property's original owner Jack Harold Skirball, but was later remodeled and appropriately renamed the Bayside Restaurant.

     Mars and I were living in a furnished one bedroom apartment on San Fernando Place in South Mission Beach. By coincidence, our digs in the double fourplex with small interior courtyard stood next door to the house our grandparents, Marshall and Molly Herman, had moved from Hillcrest to South Mission in the 1950s.

     During the construction phase of their double lot on Ensenada Court, Molly placed the relocated family home on top of two newly built ground floor apartments, one of which she'd eventually rent to our father. She turned the other half of the property into a long lawn and partially covered patio area along the backwall of a double garage located in the rear alley.

     That summer we turned 22, with friends and family all around us. Mars got involved with an athletic and bodacious 18-year-old girl named Lisanne. The dark-eyed, dark-haired seductress of Greek descent could be seen almost daily playing beach volleyball on the local courts and roller skating along Bayside Walk in her hot striped Dolfin shorts and colorful tank tops. When it came to dishy dream girls Lisanne easily fit the bill.

     Lianne's best friend was a heavily-pimpled 16-year-old girl named Caron, a nubile temptress with less attractive facial features but whose large shapely breasts and perfect body made her dangerously boneable. The four of us would play volleyball on the bayside at Mariners Basin and then swim across to Mariners Point singing the chorus to a 1977 Pablo Cruise song A Place in the Sun: It's time to find our place in the sun, find your place, find your place in the sun.

     I badly wanted to hook up with Caron but a voice in my head told me not to. The thought of her father, a science teacher at Kearny High School, putting me behind bars for taking his jailbait of a daughter's virginity stopped me in my tracks. Luckily, in my senior year of high school, I had learned how to have a coregasm, which is the ability to have an orgasm by doing abdominal exercises that contract the pelvic floor muscles to the point of ejaculation. After our swims the four of us would do sit ups in the soft wet sand of the shoreline and I climaxed many times gazing lustfully at her tight bikini-clad tits and body.

     It was perhaps the finest summer of our lives. And then it wasn't. Mars got a job as a dishwasher at Saska's, a popular and palmy family-owned eatery that opened in 1951 and went on to became one of San Diego's longest running steakhouses before closing for good in 2020.

     One morning I took Mars on my Yamaha SR 250 to pick up his paycheck at the Saska residence on one of the courts on the ocean side in Mission Beach. I dropped him off on Mission Boulevard and watched him saunter up the sidewalk and stop at one of the courtside gates, which he carefully opened and closed behind him before disappearing. After several minutes he suddenly reappeared, hurriedly pushing the gate open but not closing it behind him, and instead of walking back towards me he turned and bolted in the opposite direction towards Ocean Front Walk.

     I couldn't believe my eyes. I shouted at him but he never turned around. Where the fuck are you going, bro? I wondered perplexingly. He was getting out of Dodge! One of the Saska sons had left him alone for a few moments to go get his paycheck and that's when Mars had wasted no time in swiping a stack of money from their dining room table and splitting the scene.

     That night I came home from my busboy shift at Vacation Village to find two police cars parked outside our apartment, red and blue lightbars flashing, and the plate glass of our big bedroom window smashed in and broken. Inside, two cops were talking to Mars, and as soon as I saw his face I knew he'd done something wrong. It turned out that the Saska son who went to get his paycheck had thrown one of the wooden lawn chairs in the courtyard through the window. Mars told the cops he never saw the cash but after they left he admitted taking it. The next day, our father came to the rescue by calling Mr. Saska and arranging for Mars to return the money and for both families to drop any charges.

     Due to the incident my twin and I were politely asked to move out. But when one door closes another door opens, and Mars and I moved into a nice two bedroom house on Avalon Court owned by our childhood friend, Brad, whom we'd gone to school with from kindergarten to the second grade at Mission Beach Elementary.

     Brad lived upstairs in what was once the master bedroom but had since been remodeled into a self-contained one bedroom apartment. The mini spiral staircase leading up to the main bedroom on the second floor had been sealed off, and Brad now came and went to his place via the back alley and concrete backyard, a fenced-in enclosure with an old inward-opening gate and single car garage. The remodeling of the second floor included the construction of wooden stairs with a big balcony at the top just outside the front door to Brad's rear bachelor pad.

     And that's the house where the Lilly brothers briefly became cocaine dealers.

     I quit my busboy job at the Bayview Restaurant for a better gig as a banquet waiter at Atlantis SeaWorld, where I once saw Dean Martin walking alone outside in the parking lot and another time served lunch to Tom Chambers and the rest of the players on the San Diego Clippers that season. Mars had no job at the time so when our older brother Byron came down from Berkely to stay with us at Brad's house for awhile and told us he had a coke-dealing friend from his UC Berkely days ready to front him a kilogram of cocaine to sell, Mars pushed hard for the plan.

     Byron's friend drove down with the brick a few days later and we powwowed about ways to cut it and which fillers to use and how much to sell the carefully measured quarters, halves, and grams for. The next day I came home from a writing class at the University of San Diego to find Byron cutting and measuring out small cocaine bindles from a massive pile of pretty much pure powder on a portable card table he'd set up in my bedroom. He looked as pleasingly and pleasantly high as a swirling sunlit diamond kite.

     "Ready for a taste?" he asked, his legs bouncing like pistons but his voice sounding calm and collected.

     "Lay it on me, bro." I replied. I spent the next thirty minutes in the bathroom having one of the best bowel movements of my life.

     A few hours later Mars came home with Lisanne and the lovebirds found us drinking margaritas and smoking hashish in the dining nook adjacent the long, narrow kitchen.

     "Hey guys!" Lisanne purred, a big, pretty smile on her suntanned face. "Mind if we join you?"

     I quickly scooted over on my bench seat towards the big pane glass window. "Sit your sweet little butt down right here," I said, patting the brown, foam-filled cushion on the spot where my butt had just been. "I've been keeping it warm for you, Dizzy Ms. Lizzy."

     I'd given Lisanne the nickname Dizzy Ms. Lizzy, for the way she talked and acted like somewhat of a bimbette. Her being blazed much of the time probably had a lot to do with it.

     "I told you not to call me that," Lisanne shot back, giving me her don't fuck with me look.

     "Oh, sorry, I forgot." I said as sincerely as I could. Blow turns most people of all ages into assholes. "So what should I call you then?"

     "Lizzy is okay, just not the dizzy part."

     I raised my right hand holding the index and middle fingers together. "Scouts honor," I lied.

     The four of us partied all night. At some point we decided to hide the bindles Byron had so painstakingly filled inside a slightly deflated beach volleyball on the wall shelf in Mar's bedroom. It seemed like the perfect hiding place. But it wasn't.

     Each of us got an 8 ball out of the deal, roughly 3.5 grams, which we could either sell for profit or snort for fun. Mars, who'd been out of a job for awhile and entirely disinterested in finding a new one, was supposed to sell his share for profit. He did the opposite. I'd planned to snort half and sell half, but that didn't happen either.

     What did happen is after whiffing up each of our own 8 balls within the first week and selling most the remaining packets within the next two weeks, Mars and Lizzy got hammered one night and took the volleyball containing the remaining 5.5 grams to a house party on Bayfront Walk. The particular group of friends at the party that night, kids who grew up together in South Mission and called themselves the South Mission Beach Crew, snorted up an eight-ball-and-a-half's worth of free watch-the-sun-come-up house party fun. And Byron and I had missed it!

     So we ended up losing money on the deal. Byron had to pay his friend back the difference out of his own pocket, and soon headed back to Berkely to reunite with his UCB girlfriend, Nancy, whom he eventually married. And the Lilly bros were coke dealers no more.

     I thought about my job as a waiter at the Playboy Club in Mission Valley, where I worked for only a few months before blowing out the engine of the yellow 1971 Sunbeam convertible my sister, Anne, had sold to me when she and her boyfriend Mark along with our parents drove down from Anchorage, Alaska and stayed with us one night before checking into the Crystal Pier Hotel.

     My father had warned me about the engine oil, instructing me to check it every couple of days, but I forgot and two weeks later the engine seized up at the crosswalk in front of Mission Market. The halting thud of the broken rod cutting through the engine and bringing my cute little sun-colored sportscar to a screeching halt kills me to this day.

     I barely noticed Gary pulling on my left shoulder. "Hey...hey...Mitch...earth to Mitch. It's gettin' late buddy." He looked at me squarely and affectionately, his face filled with an oddly serious expression. "Time to scoot." He commanded.

     "Are you okay to drive?" I asked, thinking just one more for the road.

     "Yeah, I stopped drinking an hour ago." Gary answered. Then, glancing at his wristwatch, he gave me the reason for his dead seriousness. "I promised my mom we'd be home at a decent hour."

     And that was it. We said goodnight to the twins, who promised to call us in the morning. We couldn't thank them enough. They said they'd be back in Arcata one of these days and would love to meet up with us again. We couldn't agree with them more. The next morning they did call, and we were on our way to Humboldt with a better plan and a good place to land.