Damien Edgar Hosanna Starchild was born into a traveling hippie commune during the late 1960s, a lanky street urchin with shaggy dark hair, known at various times for riding his bike up and down the strand in Santa Monica, selling frisbees down at Laguna Beach and Newport, skateboarding at Cow-Cow Corners in Corona Del Mar, playing volleyball at Seal Beach, napping on nearby golf courses, loitering in smoothie bars and yes, taught from an early age to play bongo drums and strum ramshackle acoustic guitars while sitting on orange crates, camping out near where the tourists spend their money, earning his keep via make-shift performances with minimal rehearsal time, subsisting on so-called veggie burgers (stuffed with real meat) and egg burritos, scarfing down ramen noodles with M&Ms for lunch or breakfast, a brooding iconoclast drawn to bright colors and supple textures (an OCD issue, ditto to hoarding tendencies), preoccupied with all manner of pill bugs, butterflies, logos, buttons, bottle caps, marbles, seashells, flower petals, box tops, and given over to stuffing his random "street findings" into a bright red-rainbow backpack, having forsworn all manner of illicit drugs, having rebelled against the dominant paradigm of free love, disco dancing and souvenir-vending - educated by the wind and the streets with help from his part-time protective mother-mentor, Martha Belle-Agnes-Louise ("spiritus liberatus") who signed him up for all manner of tennis lessons and poetry seminars sponsored by the local park and recreation department. Having endured for years on end the deprivations that all-day frisbee tournaments and raucous hippie craft fairs can induce, Starchild grew into a brooding adolescent; lacking a definite career path, and having few good options to choose from, he settled upon the metier of a make-shift performance artist, causing a scene among his fellow non-conformists with a nod to the obvious and the predictable, and so, after watching multiple re-runs of The Brady Brunch and The Partridge Family, decided to jettison his long curly hair, using a cereal bowl and his own pair of left-handed scissors (how they teased him about that!); he took to wearing muted tie-dye shirts with matching dark socks. His plan worked to the extent that people took notice and could not help but gawk and gasp at his egregious fashion choices; he became a creature out of no-man's-land, secretly proud of his "mismatched threads" and his outlandish blend of faded neon and neutral colors, which his fellow hippies deemed as "drab" - "square" - "reactionary" and "tasteless". D.S. reveled in these epithets. And, wanting to push the envelope even farther, he taught himself how to be austere and serious, how to saunter around like a fop, how to tilt his head skyward like a snob, how to wear dark sunglasses, exhaling slowly, how not to smile his goofy smile in the midst of the typical "peace and love" greetings that he was so tired of receiving from every Biff and Buffy and MoonUnit that he came across. Oh, he was quite the confused sad-brooding sack, alright, but in California it takes decades (sheer decades) to mature, as they say...And so, he became, like many another ex-hippie, runaway Amish child or disgruntled Scientologist, intense but not scary-looking, always staring, dazed, preoccupied with the tiny little details of life in the glamour-ville, Lotus-land demi-monde of the oh-so beautiful people. (Perhaps the real issue was simply that he had become near-sighted and needed glasses.) He would often walk backward or sideways just to be contrarian; he collected campaign buttons from the 1950s, bounced around the Sports Arena before Springsteen shows, became a devotee of dime-store comic books, old Life magazines and obscure Rosicrucian philosophies.This same Starchild, as you have also heard, was witness to a terrible crime many many years ago, on a day where something went terribly wrong out of the blue, without warning, one of those otherwise perfect days on which Damien saw something transpire on the idyllic side streets of a residential neighborhood near Santa Monica which changed his life forever. Leaving work early with a mega-large smoothie in his hand, he found himself counting flower beds and sidewalk cracks until he stumbled upon a weird scene: two men in the midst of a fierce argument in a driveway: two guys, one waving his arms saying 'What about the shipment???", the other, holding his head with both hands, wailing, "It got lost, man, I told you fool - it's overdue..." Something about "shipment" and "stash" and "Manny don't play that way!" then a car speeding by and noises like firecrackers and then the two men lying prone on the ground - with Starchild smiling his goofy smile, not realizing what had happened. And then, in shock over the sudden chaos, the carnage. a few neighbors peeping their heads out of windows, with no one emerging (everyone knowing more than they would later admit) and Starchild making his way over toward the crime scene...It became an instant blur; he seemed to walk in slow motion. A dog was barking behind a fence. A woman motioned to him, shaking her head. No. No. Don't go any further. And then, suddenly, without warning, the figure emerging from a side-gate at the house next door, an elderly man with a gray mustache, using a cane, his strange, foreign-sounding elocution or enunciation (whatever that's called): slowly repeating, almost hypnotically: It's time for you to leave, my friend. It's time for you to go. I don't like what I see, mi amigo. And I don't want you talking to no cops. And then, having mentioned the police, the man let forth a stream of crude expletives not worth repeating, pausing only to cough up a long rattle of phlegm. Damien noticed a steel-eyed glare behind the fake smile. You have seen too much - eh mijo? Now is NOT a good time for you to be here. In fact, I don't EVER want to see you around here, my friend. In this area. In this city. On this street. What-ev-er you think this is, what-ev-er you think you saw... NEVER HAPPENED! Can you dig it - little hippie boy? Damien had enough street sense to realize, even during such an incredibly awkward moment (and there were many more to follow), that his only option was to run like he had never run before - which he proceeded to do - through side yards and over fences, through garages and sewer pipes, heading eastward across the overpass until he could see the campus of UCLA hailing him in the distance. In the span of a few hours, he had became a marked man. There's a lanky little frightened hippie boy...yeah, man... just "some weird dude with a tie-dye shirt, dark socks and a rainbow visor - and a nervous goofy look on his face" hiding in the bushes somewhere, wishing that cell phones had been invented. It was not so much a matter of placing a call, you see, as it was a matter of finding safety on one's home turf. But that sense of safety had now been shattered, and Damien found himself shivering in the 85 degree heat. When the squad car eventually pulled up beside him, he was climbing over some ivy bushes trying to find his way to the 17th green on that favorite golf course of his in the town of D_______ (which shall remain nameless)...That had always been his sanctuary...But the cops had need of some "eyes and ears" and Damien was their man. He soon found himself in drab, austere, uninviting, nondescript, icy-cold interrogation room - ostensibly a basement warehouse of sorts - being mulled over and prodded by two ever-so-calm-and-patient detectives, who sat there sipping their coffee, grilling him for hours on end about "what he knew and when he came to know it..." Fortunately, for the cops, Damien was an easy-sell, as long as they brought in junk food contraband such as Dorrito chips, bubble gum and Mountain Dew. He had nothing to hide. He just sat there wondering: when are these grey suits going to let me get back to my "restless, peripatetic, itinerant routine...?" as he called it. But that hoped-for return to the beach, the strand and the comic book stores was, alas, not in the cards for poor Damien. He realized the awful truth at the moment when Detective Zygote asked him if he had ever visited the "snow belt." Snow belt (?) - as in where those people on television in places like Buffalo, New York and Duluth, Minnesota spend all of January, February, March and sometimes April digging out from an onslaught of white, fluffy powder droppings from the sky? Yep. That's what we're talking about... "Hey kid, you interested in seeing what a long winter is like - heh, heh, heh? Would you like to make a little foray to Blizzard Springs, North Dakota - heh, heh, heh?" Damien brought out a note from his doctor that he always kept in his organic wallet, a withered parchment palimpsest with faded scribble markings all over it advising against exposure to "inclement weather" and "oppressive climates," and signed by Dr. Quag. Zygote took one look at this obvious forgery and cackled: "Inclement weather...that's a good one. Look my man, let's get real for a moment, shall we? Are you trying to tell us that you've never dealt with cold weather before!?!" "Well actually sir," Damien began, using his best sotto voce young-hippie-lost-in-a-basement routine, "I'm not supposed to live more than 20 miles inland of any coastal region on account of A.) my allergies B.) certain metabolic irregularities involving digestion and respiration C.) my vertigo and related balance issues operative at altitudes exceeding 500 feet above sea level and D.) a hunch I have that hippies or the offspring of hippies are not so entirely welcome in the heartland of the Midwest portion of these United States." Zygote put a stale cigar in his mouth (yes, there was a time when stale cigars were still used as props) while his partner, Detective Benza, a man known for his sharp bristly crew cut, five o'clock shadow and bulging neck, started scribbling his own set of copious notes on a legal pad (breaking four pencils in quick succession) before looking up and glaring at Damien very abruptly and very intently, exhaling stale coffee breath into the young urchin's face followed by a stream of carefully chosen words. "Now look," he began, "we need you to start dealing with this very real situation - Mr...ah...Mr. Starchild, is it? What we're alluding to in these proceedings is not simply a change of venue, if you will, i.e. of make-shift domiciles in various undisclosed locations. What we're talking about here is a change of identity - for your own protection - y'understand. You're going to require is a new name and perhaps a new direction in your life - if you can handle such a thing? Are you up for the challenge?" Damien stuttered a cough along with a shrill wheezing noise such as he was used to making when overwhelmed by stress, fatigue and general despair. "May I please call my lawyer, Phil" - he begged. "He'll know what to do."
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