The Quick contingent swung hip. They dug the Peace Corps, cool jazz, and Mort Sahl. The Dead contingent swung limp--as in elderly and sincere and content to rest on J.B.'s hot rep. The Deads were a needle stuck in the groove of a looooong-play record. The Quicks faced a Camelotian dilemma: whether to toil for chump change in the L.A. school system or strike out and try to make it in the real world.

J.B. kids were cla.s.sifiable and divisible by two. Call them the Naked and the Dead.

The Dead contingent swung square--as in no spiel, spritz, shtick, or performance capability and no s.e.xy angst. The Deads did not know from discourse. The Deads accepted J.B.'s social stratification--regardless of their status. The Naked contingent swung hungry--as in voluble, argumentative, hormonally unhinged, and hip to the fact that the world rocked to a Rat Pack beat and lots of people got f.u.c.ked in the a.s.s. The Nakeds faced a Camelotian dilemma: whether to accede to the realities of social stratification and capitulate to appearances as eveiything and deny your own hunger and seek contentment in conformity and tone down your spiel, spritz, shtick, and performance capability and rework it to suit a mainstream audience-or go iconoclastic all the way and f.u.c.k this overweening adolescent urge to BELONG.

The Nakeds formed the bulk of the J.B. student body. I was an uber-Naked. I was genetically programmed for self-destructive kid iconoclasm. I expressed it in a buffoonish manner that marked me as harmless. My antics amused on occasion. My antics reminded the rank and file that they weren't as whacked-out as I was. I made them feel secure. They rewarded me with tolerance and a few pats on the back. I listened to their spiels, spritzes, and shticks. I performed impromptu or on command. My three-year J.B. discourse was rarely interactive.

I went for my own jugular. I trashed liberal pieties and ragged JFK. I trashed Jewish pieties and yelled, "Free Adolf Eichmann!" I listened to sincerely fevered cla.s.sroom debates, measured their value, and voiced ridiculously reasoned opinions calculated to agitate and sp.a.w.n belly laughs. I inspired a few sad-a.s.sed guys with no riffs of their own. We became friends. We dissected the J.B. boys and stalked theJ.B. girls that we craved.

I bopped around the lunch court with my stooge, Jack Lift. We lurked, loitered, listened, and leched.

There's David Friedman. He pulled in a bundle for his bar mitzvah and laid it down on blue-chip stocks. There's Bad John and his fat sidekick, "Hefty." The word: they pour glue and gla.s.s shards on cats and blow them up with cherry bombs. There's Tony Blankley--a weird kid with a British accent. He's some kind of child actor--catch him in that Bogart flick, The Harder They Fall. There's Jamie Osborne. Check his British accent. He says he's James Mason's nephew.

There's Leona Walters. She's a tall Negro girl. I danced with her at "Co-Ed": the mandatory gym cla.s.s hoedown held on Friday mornings. Negro kids are accepted magnanimously. They rate high on the Coolometer. Teachers and kids dig their victim status and try not to act condescending. I told my father that I danced with Leona and blushed the whole time. He said, "Once you've had black, you can't go back."

Howard Swancy is the alpha dog in J.B.'s black litter. He's abrupt and outspoken and a great athlete. He's always scoping out weakness in white kids. He's a dancing motherf.u.c.ker. He did the Twist with Miss Byers--this redheaded English teacher with wheels like Cyd Charisse. The other twisters froze and watched. The boys' gym dance was never the same.

Steve Price is a little Lenny Bruce manque. He's the spritz personified. He's always trawling for straight men. He knows how to mine current events for big yocks.

Jay Jaffe is any doppelganger. He's a popular kid with edgy nerves and some kind of wild hunger. He's socially deft and a great baseball player. He's got the stuff to get by on laced in with some crazy s.h.i.t. I observe him obsessively. If I could bite his neck and mix his DNA with mine, I could remake myself and not cede my own essence.

Lizz Gill is a pixielike Hanc.o.c.k Park girl. She works for wholesome laughs. She knows the BigJ.B. Kid Truth: s.e.x is the ridiculous, consuming thing that life is all about. There's something subversive in her pedigree. She probably wouldn't judge me for the dog s.h.i.t on my living-room floor.

Richard Berkowitz refers to himself in the third-person. He says, "I, the Great Berko have decreed" and "The Exalted Berko welcomes you" routinely. He doesn't talk much beyond that. He's a restrained shtickmeister in a frenetic crowd. His stated ambition: to serve as the towel boy in the girls' gym forever.

The girls' gym adjoined the boys' gym. There were no secret pa.s.sageways between them. They were separate outposts of Camelot. The boys' gym was a comedy club. Monomania reigned. The one joke was s.e.x and the breathlessly close proximity of the girls' gym. One shtick lasted three whole years. Boys fluffed out their pubic hair and crooned, "Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb!"

The standard J.B. romantic form was the serial crush. Love affairs came and went sans physical contact or mutual acknowledgment. Crush objects rarely knew that they were crushed on. It was all decorous and voyeuristic and abetted by intermediaries.

Crushers crushed on crushees and detailed their l.u.s.t to their crush confidantes. I cranked my crushes and confidant duty up to sustained surveillance.

There's Leslie Jacobson. She's willowy. Her black bouffant bounces and shines. My stooge, Dave, loves her. He tracks her across the lunch court. I run point and linger near her in food lines. She's the quintessential Teen Fox. Dave can't get it up to address her. We discuss her and beat every aspect of her into the ground. Dave's crush fizzles out and reignites on a new girl. He carves her initials on his right arm and gets up the guts to show her. She flees in horror.

I torched my way through Camelot. I burned flames for Jill Warner, Cynthia Gardner, Donna Weiss, and Kathy Montgomery.

Jill's an in-your-face little blonde. She'll talk a blue streak to anyone. Her accessibility marks her as fatally flawed and thus a kindred spirit. She's hard to stalk. She keeps spotting me. She starts intimidating conversations and forces me to respond. Jill rates high on s.p.u.n.k and low on hauteur. I crave mystery and elusiveness in my women. It flips my fantasy switch and gives me groovy s.h.i.t to talk about with my stalking buddies.

Cynthia, Donna, and Kathy radiated wholesome beauty and hinted at stern character. I stalked them inside and outside of school and across a big patch of L.A.

Jack Lift backstopped my surveillance. He lived across the street from Cynthia's pad at 6th and Crescent Heights. We shined shoes around the corner at the Royal Market and used it as our stakeout point. We tailed Cynthia around on our bikes the whole Summer of '61.

I knew my love was doomed. I knew the Berlin Wall thing would escalate to World War III at any moment. L.A. was scared. J.B. kids stocked up on goods at the Royal Market. We discussed the crisis and concluded that our time was running out. I told the kids that I was hot for Armageddon. They said I was nuts. Jack and I f.u.c.ked up their shoes under the guise of free shines.

The world survived. My crush on Cynthia Gardner didn't. I entered crush monogamy with Donna and Kathy and torched my J.B. days down to an ember.

Donna had big eyes and a pageboy hairdo. She lived at Beverly and Gardner--the heart of Kosher Canyon. I set up a voyeur spot by the Pan Pacific Theater and surveilled her after school and on weekends.

I watched her front door. I watched people enter the synagogues on Beverly. Jack said they were war refugees. I perched by the Pan Pacific and watched the parade go by. I time-tripped back to World War II. I saved the people with the funny beanies and top hats. Donna loved me for it--until I left her for Kathy.

I traded up to a freckled brunette and a big house at 2nd and Plymouth. I boosted some Ivy League clothes to look more Hanc.o.c.k Park. The makeover thrilled me. JFK never looked so good. I hit a growth spurt, popped over six feet, and rendered my new threads obsolete. My pincord pants bottomed out at my ankies and drew jeers at 2nd and Plymouth. I never got up the stones to playJack to Kathy's Jackie.

I was starting to get the picture: Camelot was a private club and an inside joke--and I didn't know the pa.s.sword or the punchline.

I went to the J.B. graduation dance on 6/14/62. I wore my father's 1940-vintage gray flannel suit and drank some T-Bird with a neighbor kid en route.

I sweltered in gray flannel. I squeaked across the dance floor in brown canvas shoes. I asked Cynthia Gardner to dance. She accepted in the manner of nice girls worldwide. I sweated all over her and breathed Thunderbird wine in her face.

The cla.s.s of Summer '62 pa.s.sed into history. The 4oo-odd members dispersed to three local high schools. My season of craaazy discourse ended.

I didn't know what I walked away from. I left J.B. with no fanfare and no friendships intact. I didn't know what I'd learned about myself or other people. I didn't know that the inexorably destructive course of my life had been diverted and subsumed by a magical time and place. I didn't know that the seeds of a gift were nourished then and there or that the raucous spirit I carried away would influence my ultimate survival.

My life went waaay bad. I gave up fifteen years to booze, dope, petty crime, and insanity. I rarely thought about John Burroughs Junior High School. I stumbled past it and never acknowledged it with affection. I never thought about my stooges or Jay Jaffe and the Great Berko. I carried snapshots of the girls in my head and loved them in place of real women.

I almost died in '75 and cleaned up in '77. The act was reflexive and instinctive and tweaked by ambiguous forces that I didn't comprehend in the moment. It was a blessed non sequitur. I didn't dissect the act or question its componentry. I didn't want to look back. I wanted to write books and look forward.

I did it. I moved east to expedite my forward momentum. I shut my unacknowledged Camelot in a time-locked vault and forgot the combination.

A series of external events clicked into place and inspired me to reinvestigate my mother's 1958 murder. I spent fifteen months in L.A. and wrote a book about the investigation. It forced me to walk backward in time and linger in Camelot.

My time lock blew. All the old players flew out of the vault.

There's Howard Swancy. There's Berko and Jaffe. There's the girls I stalked and all the Naked and the Dead in a jumble of faces and voices.

My memoir was published in November '96. I spent ten days in L.A. on the publicity tour. Kosher Canyon and Hanc.o.c.k Park took on a wild new sheen. I drove byJ.B. every chance I got. I sent up prayers for the faces and voices every time.

I designated J.B. as a formal phenomenon. I developed narrative lines on the players and began to view them as kids and middleaged men and women. They wore interchangeable masks. They moved between then and now in unpredictable ways. I fashioned their masks from memory and flattered them with their presentday faces. I did not know what they looked like now. I granted them beauty as a way to say, Thanks for the ride.

A year pa.s.sed. My memoir was published in paperback. A tollfree number and e-mail address were listed at the back of the text. They were there to solicit leads on my mother's murder.

An old J.B. cla.s.smate read the book and contacted me. His name was Steve Horvitz. I didn't recall him. He remembered me vividly. He ran down a list of my antics and detailed his own life then to now.

His parents were L.A. kids. His old man came out of Boyle Heights, and his old lady went to Le Conte and Hollywood High. They broke up in '55--the same year my folks split the sheets. Steve lived at Olympic and Cochran. He hung out with Ron Stillman, Ron Papell, and JayJaffe--all lawyers now. Jaffe moonlighted as a TV pundit. He worked the Oj. Simpson trial for KCBS.

Steve went to San Francisco State. He stalked Jill Warner in Frisco--more successfully than I stalked her in L.A. He graduated and sold insurance. He went into his old man's wholesale candy and tobacco biz. He made a mint off high-interest CDs in the gogo years and bought a car wash and a marketing business. He did custom framing for model homes and design work for restaurants and coffee shops. He went into the sports lithograph field and lost a mint in the Bush recession. He was working on Mint #2 now. Credit card processing was hot, hot, hot. He had two sons--one from Wife #1 and one from Wife #2. Wife #2 had a son from Husband #1. Wives, kids, mints--life could be worse.

Steve and I became friends. We shared a similar take on Camelot and rehashed the time and place in two-hour phone talks. We debated John Hunt as s.a.d.i.s.t or man-on-moral-mission. We dissected "Kampus King" Tony Shultz and Tony Blanldey--now a big cheese with Newt Gingrich. Steve stayed in L.A. He didn't lockJ.B. in a time-vault. He retained a few friendships and had a handhold on the slenderJ.B. grapevine. He provided rumors and facts and a necrology.

Howard Swancy--allegedly a cop. Jamie Osborne--dead in Vietnam. Mark Schwartz--dead--possibly a dope-related homicide. Eric Hendrickson--murdered in Frisco. Laurie Maullin-- dead of cancer. Steve Schwartz--heroin O.D. Steve Siegel and Ken Greene--dead.

Lots of attorneys--the law attracted bright kids who didn't know what else to do with their lives. Josh Trabulus--doctor. Lizz Gill--TV writer. The Great Berko--Berko'd out somewhere unknown. Cynthia Gardner--last seen as a Mormon housewife. Leslie Jacobson--allegedly a shrink.

Steve lent me his "Burr" yearbooks. The photos served as synaptic triggers. My backlog of faces and events expanded fiftyfold.

Howard Swancy almost trades blows with Big Guy Huber. LeslieJacobson twirls to the "Peppermint Twist." JayJaffe wins a penny stomp that leaves a half-dozen kids b.l.o.o.d.y. Herb Steiner rags the folk song craze at the Burr Frolics. I disrupt a cla.s.sroom postmortem on the Bay of Pigs invasion. I contend that JFK should A-bomb Havana. Kids bomb me with wadded-up paper. I dig the attention and launch a counterattack. The teacher laughs. The same teacher laughed when Caryl Chessman got fried.

Steve and I deconstructed Camelot. We conceded the predictable nature of fifty-year-olds looking back. We traced the known arc ofJ.B. lives and the ma.s.s reconstellation at Berkeley in the late '6o's. We tagged it as predictably emblematic and explored it as a cliche and an issue of enduring ideals. We questioned J.B. as a substantive endeavor or a freeze-frame from some ditzy teen flick. I categorized it as an auspicious L.A. lounge act.

We opened strong. The curtain went down before we had to take it any further.

Steve said, "Let's get some motherf.u.c.kers together."

I said, "I'll fly out."

The Pacific Dining Car defines my L.A. continuum.

It's a sw.a.n.k steak house west of the downtown freeway loop. It's been there since 1921. It's open twenty-four hours, every day of the year. It's dark, cavelike, and lushly contained in the middle of a poverty zone. I was born in the hospital half a block south. I met my wife at the Dining Car and married her there.

Steve found most of the people. A private eye found the rest. The RSVP list tallied in at 99%. One dinner turned into three.

Steve and I attended them all. The Dining Car fed groups of thirteen, twelve, and nine. We convened at the same long table in the same dark room. I can't break down the specific guest lists. The whirl of laughter and reminiscence ran seamless over three nights.

Camelot redux.

There's Berko and Jaffe. There's Donna Weiss in a new pageboy. Howard Swancy--a preacher instead of a cop. Helen Katzoff, Lorraine Biller, Joanne Brossman--bright faces out of a big crowd thirty-six years back. Lizz Gill and Penny Hunt from Hanc.o.c.k Park. A big Kosher Kanyon kontingent that I knew by name and yearbook photo only. Josh Trabulus--a small boy, a tall man. More lawyers than an ABA convention. Jill Warner, in your face a la 1960. Steve Price with the same f.u.c.king grin. Tony Shultz in saddle shoes. Leslie Jacobson sans bouffant and the Peppermint Twist.

We toasted the dead and the missing. Wallet photos went around. n.o.body asked the childless people why they didn't breed. We all agreed that J.B. was a blast. Anecdotes pa.s.sed as insight into why. We decided to throw a ma.s.s reunion early next year and elected a steering committee.

One person in ten remembered me. I recalled every name and face and could have picked half the people out of a thousand slot lineup. It told me how hungry and lonely I was then. It confirmed everything I'd come to believe about my cut-rate Camelot.

We agreed that we were all observers. We all superimposed our shaky psyches against the boss bods we wanted and wished we had and came up way short. We punted then. We conformed or got raucous to cut the edge off the pain.

Everyone came off prosperous and well cared for. We looked like a prophecy of affluence fulfilled. I didn't detect much smugness. The braggarts boasted too hard and vibed Naked more than middle-aged Dead. I picked out two functioning drunks. I judged as I laughed and observed. It didn't mar my enjoyment or subvert my affection one bit.

I listened more than I talked. I table-hopped and found the people I carried around in my head. They told me their stories and filled in that big gap in time.

Jay Jaffe played baseball at USC and went to the College World Series. He batted .306 and had a three-night tryout with the San Diego Padres. They expressed interest and never called him back. He went to law school and gravitated to the criminal defense field. He liked the combat and the mix of people in trouble. He liked to explore motive and mitigation. He'd handled some big cases. He won the celebrated "Burrito Murder Case." The LAPD tried to shaft an innocent Mexican kid. Jay got him off.

He was still hungry. He loved his work the way he loved baseball.

Lizz Gill wrote TV movies. She fell into it. People told her she was funny and urged her to get her s.h.i.t down on paper. She had a bad run with booze and cleaned up in '75.

She knew the Big Joke then. She still knew it. Other people sensed her gift and pointed her on her way.

Berko Berkowitz went to Vietnam. He defecated in his pants quite a few times. He returned to the States and got strung out on booze and dope. He ran a string of businesses into the ground and cleaned up twelve years ago. He made a big wad in real estate and watched it grow. He works as a homeless advocate and digs on his wife and two kids.

Jill Warner was a teacher up in Oakland. She had a daughter with her ex-husband. I told her I used to stalk her. She applauded my good taste and asked me if I defaced her house in 1963. I said, No. Jill laughed and got up in my face like she did atJ.B.

Howard Swancy played all-city sports at L.A. High School. He tried to get on the LAPD and Sheriff's Department and flunked the screening process. He sold TV ad time for seventeen years and became a minister. He had a congregation in Carson.

Howard looked hungry. He still had alpha dog eyes. He liked to run the show. The raw language at the table torqued him the wrong way.

I spent some time with Donna Weiss. I described the Big Stakeout of 1961 and the unrequited crush that inspired it. Donna praised my stalking prowess. She never spotted me--a 6-foot, 13year-old boy-on a candy-apple bike.

I was invisible then. The world was out to ignore me.

Donna spent time in Spain and studied at the University of Madrid. She learned the language and came back to L.A. She taught in the city school system and spent three years down in South Central. Some Chicano kids were stranded in an all-black school with no English language skills. Donna got the little f.u.c.kers fluent.

She quit teaching and went into real estate. She's been at it twenty years. Her husband's a voice coach and the locally lauded "Cantor to the Stars."

My crush burned out thirty-seven years ago. Donna's presence did not resurrect it. I was irrevocably in love with my wife.

Tony Shultz starred in the first New York stage run of Grease. He worked as an actor for twenty-plus years and burned out behind the inherent frustrations. He sold real estate now. His turf bordered Donna's.

Leslie Jacobson went to Berkeley and lived two blocks down from Tony. She became an antiwar activist and street agitator. She got a teaching credential.

She married Husband #1. She entered the mental-health field. A colleague got raped. Leslie viewed the brutal aftermath and took it as a signal. She studied rape and post-rape trauma. She ran a rape crisis hotline and an innovative antirape program. She went out on rape calls with the Huntington Park PD and trained cops in rape awareness. She ditched Husband #1 and married Husband #2. He was a doctor.

Leslie became a psychotherapist. She built up a practice. She studied breast cancer and its ramifications and counseled afflicted women. She and her husband collaborate and stage breast-cancer seminars.

I listened to my old cla.s.smates. I felt the restrained warmth that you feel for decent people you shared a past with and don't really know. I observed thirty-four individuals over three nights. I detected one significant difference between them and me.

They came to reconnect with specific people and dig on a collective nostalgia. I came to honor them and acknowledge their part in my debt.

The debt was large. J.B. was my first testing ground. I learned to compete there. I nurtured a perverse self-sufficiency. My warped little world meshed with the real world--for "one brief shining moment."

L.A. was hot and smoggy. I was wiped out behind all my time travel and the clash of old/new people. I took a ride with Tony Shultz.

It felt like my seven-millionth hot L.A. day. Tony was digging it. He ran a riff on the NEW L.A.--immigrant cultures and wild cuisines and big rejuvenation.

We drove down to Howard Swancy's church. We made the noon service ten minutes early. The joint was jumping jubilantly high.

A six-piece combo backed up the choir. Sixty loud voices praised G.o.d. They soared over loud air-conditioner blasts and woke me up like six cups of coffee.

The church was SRO. Howard saved two pew slots near the altar. The congregation was 99.9 percent Black. The people were snazzily dressed and ran toward the plump side.

I hit the Pause b.u.t.ton on my life. Fast-Forward and Rewind clicked off. I got choked up behind a big blast of grat.i.tude.

The service commenced. I sang hymns for the first time since First Dutch Lutheran and shared smiles with Tony. I felt intractably Protestant and una.s.sailably un-Christian. I grooved on John Osborne's Luther. He slayed the Papist beast because he was constipated and wanted to get laid.

The collection plate went around. Tony and I fed the kitty. Howard hit the altar and introduced us. We stood up and waved to the people. They waved back.

Howard launched into his sermon. He was main-room talent in a southside carpet joint.

He strutted. He stalked. He banged the pulpit and shouted over a four-octave range. The crowd went nuts.

He sustained a half-hour roar. He sweated up his vestments and blew out his lungs with the word on salvation.

Go, Howard, go!

It was a New Testament Greatest Hits medley. It was a deftly etched exposition of your alternatives: embrace Jesus or fry in h.e.l.l forever. It proclaimed the restrictive housing law in Heaven.

I wouldn't want to buy a tract in that development. They wouldn't sell to pork dodgers or skeptics or that Moslem guy at my favorite falafel stand. They'd exclude the bulk oftheJ.B. cla.s.s of 1962.

Howard cranked it out. My mind wandered. I dipped thirty-six years back and thirty-six years into the future. I wondered how many bonds would rekindle and flourish in the wake of three effusive evenings. I thought about a survivors' bash in 2034. A collective senescence might color the proceedings and distort recollections for better or worse.

Let's Twist again, like we did that summer.

It's a teen dance party at the Mount Sinai Nursing Home. A boss combo rules the bandstand. It features all my old heartthrobs on skin-flute.