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192 pages

English

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All he wanted was another 1920s Hollywood Utopia! The Winds of Malibu is the true story of a boy whose father (a computer engineer with a grudge against Hollywood) has held on to a house in the movie colony of Malibu, California, after a bitter divorce. At the age of eleven, Lucas is fiercely bitten by the Acting Bug and does anything to act. What ensues is a war between him and his controlling father as to his Hollywood aspirations, amid crippling anxiety attacks. The story of an outrageous upbringing, where friends are preferable to parents and Lucas relies on his diary to guide him. Lucas's peers at school will become Hollywood's top actors in the coming decade. The ultra-quirky, stormy, funny account of an extraordinary boy's struggle to hang onto his dream.

Sujets

Historical

Lettres et linguistique

Biography

Autobiography

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Publié par	Outskirts Press
Date de parution	30 septembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781977219091
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Winds of Malibu An Unexplainable Memoir All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2019 Jeff Lucas v11.0
The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.
This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Lucas Bly LTD.
ISBN: 978-1-9772-1909-1
Cover © 2019 Jeff Lucas. All rights reserved - used with permission. Photos © 2019 Jennifer Jacobson. All rights reserved - used with permission.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Dedicated to the Acting Bug
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude is expressed to Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen for including me in their father / son autobiography, Along The Way. Thank you to Roderick Clark, publisher & Managing Editor for Rosebud magazine, who published my stories. Thank you to Brenda Boyd Moorehouse, who first typed up my diary in 1988 and then helped me with the first draft of this book. Thank you to the great Bill Noctor and to Roger Lott. Thank you to my wife Jennifer. Last but not least, thank you to everyone that I was able to contact for allowing me to use their real names.

Jeff and Andrea Allgreen in Malibu. October, 1968. Photo by Helen Allgreen.

Jeff at the Deerhead Road Lucas house. Malibu, 1969. Photo by Reba Dick.

Steve and Jeff Lucas in Playa Del Rey,1972. Jeff is wearing his Viet Nam war POW bracelet on his left wrist. Photo by Reba Dick.

Paul Lucas on his Malibu property in 2003. Photo by Betty Lucas.
T ABLE OF C ONTENTS
1. The Carpenters
2. Trisexual
3. Friends Are Better Than Parents
4. Another Fine Mess
5. That’s What She Said
6. What Hump?
7. The Sugar Blues Kid
8. The Most Refined Asshole
9. Prodigy
10. Centerpiece
11. Bicentennial
12. WANT
13. D
14. "What the hell," said Bix.
15. What the Peeper Saw
16. General Robert E. Lee High
17. August, 1978
18. July, 1979
19. February, 1980
20. March, 1982
21. August, 1983
22. February, 1984
23. May 12th, 1984
24. Epilogue
PREFACE
When I was eleven, I walked on a path through dense trees in Malibu. Underneath a branch, I stopped in front of a caterpillar’s cocoon, a tidy bag, translucent, with a skin membrane-thin. Almost a butterfly, black and yellow and red and blue. So vulnerable. The sun shone through it. I quietly stared.
"Let’s see how tough you are." I rubbed across the top of the branch lightly with my index finger, like brushing away dust.
The cocoon tore off and dropped like an egg without a shell. I heard it land and watched it spread out in a puddle. The weakest form of life I had ever seen was motionless and began to dry up.
One
January, 1973, eleven years old
T HE C ARPENTERS
On the Pacific Coast Highway, three burned-out hippies drove a pickup truck stacked high with baggage. We followed them with a second load in our car. My father was behind the wheel, and behind us was his new woman in her green British sports car. I sat in back with my brother, squeezed between boxes, and stared at the faded paint of the tailgate.
We had lived in Playa Del Rey for two years, and it was back to Malibu for us. The hippies had rented out the house and were three months behind in the rent.
We turned right on Morning View Drive and drove upward amid the stunning scenery. Halfway up the mountain, we pulled into the long straight driveway of 5838 Deerhead Road.
The house was in disrepair and out of place in the panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean and the outline of the distant islands along the horizon, and in back of us a breathtaking sweep of the sharp mountain with green shrubs moving in waves with the breeze.
My father told me it was in 1948 that he creeped along the coast of Malibu in lustrous sunshine, in a sailboat, at the age of twenty, and made it the goal of his life to buy a house and property there.
I walked around my father’s property. A four-foot pile of garbage rotted in a heap outside. Inside it smelled like sour milk and ashes. My father got on the hippies for smoking in the house. I didn’t hear my father’s words, but the hippies looked angry at him. My stepfather Jack told me that my father was one of those people who thought the world was out to screw him all the time, and when you think the world is out to screw you, you will get screwed.
Different parts of the house brought back memories. That first year in Malibu went well, before my father’s anger caught up with him. I remembered the brightly lit, hellish living room at age six in the middle of the night.
"Are you fighting?" My mother hid her face behind the pale curtain and stared out at the black night. She was a beautiful brunette, with an impulsive, insensitive streak. She was Oklahoma, white-bread, a little better off than sharecropper poor, for generations. She was more my friend than my mother, though she was a best friend of mine. I realized by eleven that my mother was just another woman and it was best not to get too attached to her.
"No. Go to bed," she said. I glanced at my father with his massive, hairy fists and biceps as he stood in demanding control of the house.
My brother and I often hid from him under our beds and backed up against the wall as he reached for us and got us. If I have one memory of my pretty grandmother Lucas, when she visited, it is her urgent Czechoslovakian overtures to " Leave them alone ," which sounded like, "La zee min roo."

Jenny was my new stepmother. Her face was not quite pretty, except for her wonderful blue eyes. She had a nose that shot downward, thin lips, and cropped blonde hair. She was an intelligent thirty-two-year-old British woman with a pale complexion. My dad said she looked like Puck. Her mind was black and white. You were in or you were out, and she was good at grudges. She had travelled to Africa and had brought back long, black masks and dark tribal statues that glittered. She placed several all around the Malibu house. They cast a Shamanistic glow across the walls and fireplace.
Two and a half years older than me was my brother Steve, and he helped plenty as we unpacked and cleaned up. Even as a baby, Steve looked like a man. I had always looked like a delicate imp. I felt depressed, mostly just confused. Malibu didn’t look or smell like it did when we had moved away in 1970. The wind, the waves, the sun and haze were the same, but there was a rock-hard loneliness to what I looked at or breathed in. It couldn’t just be the absence of my mother, or one Carpenters song after another on the radio.
"That is one woman’s voice I cannot stand!" my father announced to us.
I stood and watched Jenny place a small glass tube on a shelf in the garage, which looked like it could hold a small flower. The hole at the top was as narrow as a coffee straw.
"What have you got there?"
"It is an opium pipe," she said. I stepped back.
"You’re joshing, right?" She closed her mouth and unpacked the rest of her interesting possessions.
"Jeff! Help us unpack!" yelled my father as he stomped around carrying heavy boxes. I helped out slowly, with no focus. When we had finished unpacking, he stood in the yard and we joined him. He had held on to this prized location after the divorce from Hell. He put his arms around us and we looked out onto the bright sea to Catalina Island and Whale Island and the horizon.
"We made it back," I said.
"Thanks for getting us back to Malibu, Dad," said Steve.
"Yep. You’re welcome. The place reminds me of Tara in Gone With the Wind after it has been through the war." Jenny laughed.
"Well, at least we’re here," I said.
"Just remember, when you return to a place you used to live, it’s usually not quite the same," he told us.
"I’ll keep that in mind," I said. Jenny held him with both arms on his right. Steve hugged him on his left, and I hugged him in front.
As we all sat around the embers in the fireplace that night and watched the wood crack and split, he told us a story.
"About a year ago, I dated a woman who was into voodoo. I am not superstitious, but we conducted a ceremony where I stuck pins into a Voodoo doll and I named the doll Reba, after your mother."
"Do you think she felt the pain?" I asked.
"I hope so," he said.

Jeff believing he is Godzilla. Deerhead Road Lucas property. Malibu 1973. Photo by Steve Lucas.
Two
February, March, 1973, eleven years old
T RISEXUAL
Over the next weeks, months, I played alone, and talked to myself. Malibu was still beautiful, and I knew that I was extremely privileged to live here again, friends or no friends. I missed Scott, from Playa Del Rey. I reminisced how Scott and I used to sing out the first two syllables of the song "America" and not sing the rest of it. Scott had also moved, and I rarely returned the letters he wrote to me from Boston. Since the age of ten, panic attacks seized me as I lay down to bed at night. My imaginary world helped calm me down.
Unlike my father, I enjoyed my own company. He was an engineer. He had a head shaped like a circus clown, minus the make-up, and a body like Max Baer Sr., the heavyweight boxer of the 1930s, his appearance was mismatched. His poppa was Jewish or mostly Jewish. His mom was a Gentile, or mostly a Gentile. He stood solid at six foot three, had an ass like a Clydesdale horse, and a scarred, bulbous, doorknob nose, with wide, hairy nostrils. His nose turned red with acne every time he ate chocolate, and he loved chocolate. He was bald except for the sides, which stuck out like tufts of pubic hair, and he kept the sides of his head trimmed to lessen the clown effect.
When I saw black hairs of his around the house, I couldn’t tell where on his body they had c