Skin Deep

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In that crowd, Mr. Beautiful and the Korean girl shimmered like millionaires in disguise, minor gods slumming incognito.

By seven-thirty, the crowd in question had jammed itself noisily into McGinty's of Malibu, which, all gussied up for the Fourth of July, was even more of a slag heap than usual. Red, white, and blue crepe paper sagged despondently from the rafters. Red, white, and blue beach balls had been tossed into the ropy fishnet that hung from the ceiling. They nestled among seashells, starfish, old floats, weights, and other nautical bric-a-brac to create a landscape that looked like the place where drowned children go to play.

The bunch jostling merrily beneath this doleful composition in primary colors was a cross-section of virtually every objectionable white urban minority. There were guys who called each other "Dude." There were cowboys and cowgals wearing western hats with those infuriating feather sunbursts on them. There were people wearing both sunglasses and earphones. There were yuppies, puppies (yuppies who had tied their dogs outside), and suppies-garden-variety suckers, but with aspirations to urban chic. Members of the last-named club had thoughtfully identified themselves by ordering McGinty's "John Philip Sousa," a tall-glassed, red-white-and-blue error in judgment that, drunk on an empty stomach, was guaranteed to plant the happy patriot several feet beneath the Ould Sod. We had Topanga Canyon creek rats, out from their caves to blow a week's worth of recycled aluminum cans on a red, white, and blue drunk, and we had a patriotic trio of amphetamine burnouts, skeletal, wild-eyed, hoisting imaginary drinks and nattering together in a far corner. We had people who still hadn't run out of patchouli.

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