When the sixties ended, the weather changed. Fierce heat began in spring and kept rising. Through August, Santa Ana winds thrashed off the desert, knocking over cars in the mountains. They blew the smog out to sea but left something darker. Old nightmares returned. That summer a close friend overdosed on heroin. A grenade in Vietnam wasted my cousin Ward's leg. And in the hottest winds of August, a gang butchered Sharon Tate and five of her friends. Then a couple named La Bianca lay mutilated in their kitchen, and when the Manson family got exposed, two of them were girls we knew.

Denise wanted out of California. She said the Midwest could be a simpler, safer place. But I played guitar in a rock and blues band. After three years rehearsing in a basement we were finally booking jobs, and now a guy from Zap records had seen us and asked for a tape. So I wouldn't leave. Where Denise used to muse about our future together, now she even talked of moving on her own.

One morning in October, she said we ought to forget our troubles for a day in Disneyland. We took the grocery money and inched north along the freeways in our old Chevy van with bald tires and burnt-out brakelights, hoping the place wouldn't be crowded, since tourists should've fled California, away from the heat and murders, while locals stayed home pointing rifles at the door. Yet they all were there, hordes of them, wiggling, licking ice cream bars as they pressed through the chutes. Perhaps Manson's capture had released them, or maybe Disneyland looked safer than home. Here you could laugh at the witches and ghouls. But I didn't feel very safe. People kept staring at us. Denise appeared