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Show 4. Have you ever been to L.A.? Unlike Padre Escalante, I got there easily on a streamliner called the City of San Francisco. With the war on, and gas rationing, there was no traffic, there were flowers and sparkling clear air, there were stars shining every night, the moon rising on palm trees, fresh sea breezes, the sun shining benignly on that garden city. It was sort of a paradise. Then the war ended and half of what was rootless in the U.S. slid west, including every crazy not behind bars; the automobile industry boomed, and L.A. sank beneath the smog. It changed to a place of ... of what? Say you're out there now and you're driving to the beach, you're in the cheerfully murderous traffic of a freeway, you pass one of the Infernal's Outposts of Progress-Hollywood-your eyes burn in the rich smog, the smell suspiciously sulphurous, you recall that morning's headlines, and there seems no doubt where you are. But then you cross the scorched brown hills and the air cools and the Pacific opens before you just as blue as they say it is, the sand fine and hot, and one of those California girls walks by, one of those healthy golden-fleshed ones with an affinity for water which leaves no doubt that fifty thousand pools and the world's largest ocean call to her, softly, insistently. And the naiad in her hears. She comes. She comes dressed, of course, but with all of Eve's wise innocence she comes dressed barely in a bikini which would make old Adam cheer his Fall. And in that suit she will parade down the beach as regal as any ermine-robed queen, heralded by the rolling drum of the sea and the trumpets of the flesh, supported to her throne by the |