1983: 1984 Surfing the Purple Wave

1983-1984

Surfing the Purple Wave

Ali Anthony Bell

Copyright © 2020 Ali Anthony Bell.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Most of the fictitious events in this novel are based on real events in the author’s life. Some names and identifying features have been changed to protect the identity of certain parties. References to real people or real places are used fictitiously. Certain names, characters, and events are products of the author’s imagination.

Book design by Ali Anthony Bell.

First e-book edition 2020 Published by Ali Anthony Bell at Smashwords Inc.

ISBN: 9780463480953 (e-book edition)

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Casablanca, Morocco

alianthonybell@gmail.com

This writing is dedicated to

Danielle Cézanne,

the star of my lost film The Purple Wave.

A wonderful woman, still in Minnesota,

who gave me the contact for my first pied-à-terre in Paris in 1984.

She was a risk taker like me and like much of our generation.

Contents

Chapter 1 From San Jo to the Mini Apple

Chapter 2 The Purple Wave

Chapter 3 Film in The Cities

Chapter 4 The Birthing

Chapter 5 The Fountain – Source of Inspiration

Chapter 6 The Screening

Chapter 7 Goodbye USA - Hello Paris

Chapter 8 The Froth of the Waves

Chapter 9 The Outcast (Despair)

Chapter 10 Gentle Blades

Chapter 11 The Castle

Chapter 12 The Question

Chapter 13 The Year of the Rat

Chapter 14 Honeymoon

Chapter 15 The Portrait – An Image of Love

Chapter 16 The Purple Wave Crests and Falls

Chapter 1

From San Jo to the Mini Apple

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain

Before we embark on the incredible story of the Purple Wave, let me give you a glance of what came before, so that you can get a feel of who I was. Believe me, it’s important. As for The Purple Wave, it started as a simple old, stained tent canvas.

When I left San Jo in the summer of ’78 I planned to come back to school in the Fall, but things happened differently.

I was happy in San Jo…the weather’s great, the California girls are everything that the Beach Boys said and more. I had a beautiful steady girl, Lizz Angelini, with magnetic jade green eyes, a mane of wavy red hair, a cute, freckled face and curves that drove me crazy. We started sharing an apartment just 10 minutes’ walk from campus in the spring semester. The school year ’77-‘78 marked my first year in San José City College studying Studio Arts. The teachers were really cool, we used to smoke grass in class with some of them. We would go out as a class to draw in the forests around Palo Alto or Santa Cruz and some of us would make love in the woods instead of drawing. I was 17 when I entered college. At 16 I was already a rebel without a cause, dealing drugs and skipping school, and lived with legal guardians after having run away, getting caught, and being placed in detention. After a few months living with them they discussed my situation with my parents, and they gave me an ultimatum Get your High School Diploma and you’re free. So, just after my 17th birthday in March ’77 I went straight to the GED Testing Center and took the 5 tests without any preparation, breaking all of the records in Santa Clara County with my scores. My best score was 70/70 (98%) in English Literature, because even though I hadn’t been to school much in the last 2 years before the test, I’ve always loved to read. So, anyway, with my GED in hand I was free at last.

At my guardian’s suggestion I attended The Academy taught by the ICA, the Institute of Cultural Affairs, (for whom both my parents and guardians worked) in Chicago in the spring of ’77, hitchhiking across America from San Jo to the Windy City and back again. It was a short 3-month study, and I didn’t have any tuition to pay…met some nice girls too, even fought over one of them! At the end of The Academy we celebrated with a big dance, and I bought my first 3 piece suit, light blue with bell bottomed pants and big lapels. I looked like John Travolta in Saturday Night Live and felt like him too (even though the movie didn’t come out until 6 months later)! On my return to San Jo I got my 1st job pumping gas, found a cheap room in a men’s boarding house, and enrolled in the San Jose City College. Because of my financial situation I didn’t have any tuition to pay there either. Also, because I was enrolled in college, I started receiving a small monthly stipend of $100 from the ICA, which was deducted from my student fund, money put aside by the ICA for higher education because its members lived on an extremely restricted monthly stipend. This extra money gave me the possibility of renting one of the biggest rooms in the boarding house, with a nice double bed. My first room had been the smallest and cheapest one, with just enough room for a single bed and a small chair and table.

I had an incredibly weird experience one day in the boarding house. My older brother had been deployed first to Caracas, Venezuela, and then across the Atlantic to Lagos Nigeria by the ICA. I have to explain here that the ICA split families up, separating the children from their parents at the age of 12 and sending them to live elsewhere in the world and serve their mission. Every year in August everyone in the ICA was given their assigned deployment for the year (more on this later). Back to my story, he was only gone 2 years, but it seemed like an eternity. There was a pay phone at the bottom of the staircase in the house, and one day I heard it ringing and I knew straightaway that it was him. I rushed down and picked up the receiver and immediately said Jim? You’re back? and it was.

In my first year in college, I took Drawing and Photography, Intro to Art History, Comp. Lit., Creative Writing, and Archery. There were a couple of things I learned from archery that would serve me throughout my life. The first is that your whole body has to be centered, evenly balanced, and in line to succeed, and the second is that the farther the target is, the higher you have to aim.

I needed a camera for photography, and I found an old vintage Asahi Tower screw mount SLR with a leather camera case, telephoto lens, and extension rings for 100 bucks at the photography trade fair. I didn’t know what the extension rings were for, but one of the guys at the boarding house showed me how to use them to do macro photography. I kept it a long time, but later I bought a Pentax K1000 and a bounce zoom flash when I started back to school at the University of Minnesota in the fall of ‘81. Getting back to ’77 and SJCC, when I started school, my vocational counselor told me to forget about studio arts because I wouldn’t be able to make a living as a painter. I ignored his advice because I didn’t care about making money. I had decided that I was never going to fall in love or get married and that I would never have any children. Art was my passion and that’s all I cared about.

I’ll always remember my first class in Creative Writing; the Prof. asked us all a question first thing: Do you think that the ‘original idea’ exists? He then asserted that NO, the original idea does not exist. Then he read us a passage out of Mark Twain’s autobiography that says essentially the same thing. There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. The theory here is that every idea we have comes from our experience and we can safely assume that someone else has already had the same idea, or at least one which is very close to ours, and that every idea our mind conceives has been consciously or unconsciously influenced by other people’s ideas. Even now, many years later, this truth is always in the back of my mind whenever I have any creative idea.

So in July ’78 I headed out hitchhiking across the continent again on my summer break, thinking that I would be returning to my studies and my girl in September. Lizz expected me to come back to her. Just before leaving I bought her a stunning emerald green cotton maxi dress with loose draping sleeves, a v-neckline and a slit going up the front to go with her green eyes, red hair, and womanly curves. To make the gift complete, I also bought her a pair of fake emerald teardrop dangle earrings. When I asked the saleswoman to gift-wrap the earrings, she put them in a small velvet gift box, and when I gave Lizz her gifts, she gasped with pleasure on seeing the gift box…she thought it was an engagement ring…the one thing I strongly believed I would never give to a girl.

After passing through Phoenix to visit my older sister Shirley, I headed to Chicago to see old friends, and then to the Mini Apple, where my older brother lived in a shared rented house. When it came time to head back to San José at the end of August, I was completely broke, so I decided to work a week at Manpower to make a hundred bucks before hitting the road. I worked as a temp warehouseman for the whole week at Venus Waterbeds. On Friday, the warehouse manager walked up to me and said, I like the way you work, do you want a full time job? After discussing it, since the pay was good and the guys were really cool, I decided to give it a try. I wasn’t really attached to Lizz, I just loved her physical beauty, and like I said, I didn’t want to get attached to anyone anyway. The idea of marriage terrified me. Besides, it was nice living with my brother. I put my studies on hold for a while.

At Venus, I moved up the ladder quickly; after 3 months I was named Head Stockman, another 3 months and I moved up again to Assistant Shipping and Receiving Clerk, and 6 months later I became the new Shipping and Receiving Clerk. It was really hard at first, especially when the winter came. I’m no stranger to cold weather, I was born in the Rockies in Montana, and I’ve lived in other cold places, but Minnesota winters are infamous, and rightly so. The warehouse was way out in the burbs, so I took a bus to the end of the line and then hitchhiked the rest of the way in to work. Work started at 8 sharp, with a lineup for inspection at 7:55 that I rarely missed; present and ready to work, my uniform always clean, my black Redwing safety shoes always shined, and always on time. In case of lateness, we were docked 15 minutes pay for 1 minute after every quarter hour, e.g., at 8:01 you get paid starting at 8:15 and at 8:16 you start getting paid at 8:30, etc. Meanwhile, I put everything into my work and always found a solution to every problem. My pay increased quickly, and I got a $300 ready reserve credit line at the bank. I got my own apartment, bought one of the most beautiful oak waterbeds that Venus sold (with a 50% discount), a B&O Beogram 1000 teak turntable with amp and speakers, and last but most importantly a nice used ’78 Oldsmobile Delta 88, with electric windows, air conditioning, central door locking, and cruise control. One of my buddies at Venus installed a car stereo with AM/FM radio and both cassette and 8 track tape players.

In the summer of ’80 my 17-year-old brother Ben came to live with me. I managed to persuade my parents to let me have legal custody over him until he finished his last year of High School. When he arrived, we spent Labor Day Weekend tripping on acid, smoking grass, and drinking a lot. We climbed up on the roof totally nude at midnight screaming au naturelle! at the tops of our lungs. I just happened to break the little pinky toe on my right foot by stubbing it on a rock while we were tripping and playing Frisbee and walked with crutches afterwards for 6 weeks. After that weekend, we were both so wrecked we decided to swear off all drugs and alcohol and get into sports. We started lap swimming every morning, we took yoga, tai-kwon-do, and aikido classes together and sparred against each other twice a week. We started eating healthily too, eventually becoming vegetarian. I would still eat eggs, fish, and seafood, but meat was out. I had already quit smoking earlier that same year. I started at 12, like most of my friends, and by the time I reached 15 I already smoked a pack a day and sold grass at High School to support my cigarette addiction. One day that year while tripping with my brother Jim he said to me You’re gonna kill yourself like that to which I responded, I’ll quit someday, and he came back with When? I said, When I’m an adult. And so, he made be a bet OK, I bet you $1000 that you can’t quit smoking for the rest of your life by the time you’re 20. And we shook on it It’s a bet. In fact, I did quit, in January 1980, 2 months before my 20th birthday (I had a crutch…grass) but as soon as we shook hands on the bet, I realized that I would never be able to collect the $1000. Smart guy my brother Jim…he worded the bet for the rest of your life. Back then, I would still smoke some grass from time to time and enjoyed a good strong beer, a glass of Irish or Scotch whisky, or a glass of warm Cognac, but never too much. Ben totaled my Delta 88 on the night of his graduation party. But I didn’t hold it against him, I was too glad that he wasn’t hurt and took him in my arms. Cars can be replaced, brothers can’t.

During the spring of ’81 I started feeling a compelling urge to go back to school and get back into art. In fact, it wasn’t just the art I missed. I hadn’t gone steady with a girl since I started working at Venus. It so happens that you don’t meet girls in warehouses, you meet them in Universities! As it turned out, Venus gave me my occasion to leave. One day while having lunch in a nearby restaurant I had a beer with my meal. The owner of Venus, who I believed up until then to be a really cool guy (long blond hair, blue jeans, gold handled walking stick…), walked in to eat and saw me having my lunch. As soon as I got back to work, I was summoned to the manager’s office. They gave me three days walk for having drunk a beer during my lunch break. Rules are rules said my boss and drinking is strictly forbidden during working hours. So, I immediately gave my 3 months’ notice to leave. My boss tried to convince me to stay, even proposing a promotion to Assistant Manager, but this didn’t have any effect on my decision to get back into my passion, on pause for 3 years already (and to make a few girlfriends as well). I enrolled in Studio Arts at the U of Minnesota, Minneapolis for the next fall.

At the same time I left my job at Venus, we moved from our apartment to a small house, and Jim moved in with us, all three brothers together. I sold my waterbed and bought a queen-sized