Spring Break, 1974

“See any bikinis yet?”

That was the first thing Dan said to me when we crossed from Oregon into California in the spring of 1974. It became a refrain. Each time Highway 101 allowed us a glimpse of the ocean, one of us would ask the question.

“See any bikinis yet?”

It was always worth a smile, and after the first few hours, when our excitement turned to impatience and then fatigue, we sorely needed a bit of comic relief.

We spent the night trying to sleep in reclining bucket seats of Dan's Mercury Capri and got on the road again at day break. We didn’t get to my brother’s house in L.A. until late in the evening — and he was surprised to see us that soon.

“I thought we’d never make it,” Dan said.

“And you tried to tell me it would be an eight-hour drive,” I said.

My brother, Rudi, threw back his head and laughed.

“Yeah, well, about halfway down here I asked Al to figure out how many miles we had to go, and he came up with — tell him.”

“About 2,400 miles,” I admitted.

Rudi laughed again.

“I was looking at this chart in the road atlas that gives the distances between cities,” I explained, “and I traced the wrong line.”

“What makes it bad,” Dan said, “was I believed him.”

Dan and I had been best friends in high school and were now (in 1974) freshmen at different colleges. This week, spring break, and this trip, the first to California for either of us, was our chance to catch up and renew our friendship — to re-create the good times we had never wanted to end.

We spent most of the next day, a Monday, at Disneyland, and when the sun went down we went back.

"Listen, if you find someone and I strike out, I’ll meet you in the parking lot at midnight," I said. "You can drop me off at Rudi’s or something."

Dan had always been far more successful at the dating game than I ever was.

"No," he assured me, "either we both make it, or neither one of us does."

We bought a couple of root beers and sat down at what passes for a sidewalk cafe at Disneyland. The bare tables were round and white, and we had a clear view of the Mark Twain, a three-story riverboat that looked twice as tall, its lights reflected in the dark water. Dan sat with his elbows on the table, both hands encircling his drink. His face carried no expression.

“You watch that direction,” he said quietly. “I’ll look for anyone coming my way.”

We sat in silence for a long while, and when I looked at Dan I couldn’t tell if the slightly bored expression on his face was intentional or merely real. We finished our root beers, let the ice melt a bit, and drank that. Then we sucked on the remaining cubes until our mouths were numb.

Finally, we started walking again. A couple of beautiful dark-eyed girls — possibly twins, but certainly sisters — passed in the opposite direction.

“You see those two?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I stopped. “Wanna follow them?”

“Okay.”

He was more subdued than I would have thought. I lost track of the girls and started to hurry.

“Where’d they go?”

“Take it easy,” Dan said. “They’re sitting over here.”

A subtle flick of his head showed me where to look. He kept walking, eyes front; I glanced over my shoulder. They were sitting on a bench by a street lamp.

We stopped by a wrought-iron fence a short distance away and looked out across the water at Tom Sawyer Island. We tried to lean casually on the fence, but it was too low — built with an eight-year-old in mind.

I said, “Well, what do you think?”

Dan didn’t answer; I persisted.

“Looks like a perfect opportunity.”

“We’ve got to think of something to say,” he replied.

It surprised me that he’d have to think about what he would say. I don’t know why. I had no idea what we’d say. I guess I thought this sort of thing came naturally to him.

“How about asking them how to get somewhere?” he said. “Look in our ticket books to see what’s left. Then we can make like we don’t understand their directions and ask them to take us there.”

“Uh-huh. Right. Take me to Fantasyland.”

“Okay, then you think of something.”

The idea I came up with was unbelievably bad. I suggested we pick up some trinket at one of the shops nearby and try to sell it to the girls. “And of course we come with whatever it is we’re selling — like a cash rebate, only better.”

Dan looked at me and almost laughed.

“No, really,” I said.

“You’re serious.”

“It could work.”

I don’t know why I persisted, but I did, and since we didn’t have all night, Dan said, “Okay, see what you can get.”

The girls’ parents came for them while I was gone.

We soon found ourselves in the plaza, where a well-scrubbed rock band was taking the stage. Behind us, off to one side, were two fine-looking blondes — one wearing shorts and a tank top, the other in a denim skirt and white blouse.

We watched the band.

“What about those two?”

“Too tall,” Dan said.

The one in the white blouse must have been nearly six feet (my height); the one in the tank top, about five-nine (a little taller than Dan).

“I’d take the taller one,” I said. “Why don’t we ask them?”

“Wait a minute,” Dan said. “I’m getting my nerve up.”

Again with the nerves. This was not the Dan I knew. More than once I had found myself flirting with an attractive high-school classmate and not asking her out because she would have been yet another girl Dan had already dated.

Just then the California girls of our dreams walked right by us and smiled.

We watched them disappear.

“They were looking right at us the whole time,” Dan said. “Al, we should have asked them. The short one looked me straight in the eye.”

I shook my head. “We blew it.”

“It was my fault,” Dan said.

“I should have stopped them,” I said. “I should have said something.”

We sat on a curb across the lane from the plaza and watched the dancing from a distance. None of this made any sense, unless you knew one thing: Less than a year earlier Dan had been ready to marry Sandy — right up until she called off the wedding.

“They’ll be back,” he assured me. “I got a feeling they’ll come back. They’ve got to. They can’t leave use like this.”

His tone, at first depressed, shifted to a sort of lighthearted mock-desperation on the last sentence. We smiled. Sure, they’d be back looking for us.

We sat on that curb a long time, listening to the band play all the songs we’d heard on the radio during the drive down.

“Won’t be long now,” Dan said.