Guy Fontaine, a 72-but-looks-62-years-old transplant to California, is playing golf when he feels the ground shift. Only it’s not an earthquake. It’s a mind quake, and in minutes, Guy is happily piloting his 1958 Chevy Bel Air down a familiar Oklahoma road.
But only in his imagination. In reality, the recent widower and former sportswriter is putt-putting along in a golf cart on the Harbor Freeway. Soon he’s got traffic fouled up and a highway patrolman in his face.
And soon after that, Guy finds his bewildered self in Mission Pescadero in Half Moon Bay, an assisted-living facility populated by aging hippies and run by a martinet who makes Cruella DeVille seem like Mother Teresa.
So begins Tim Sandlin’s darkly comic and disturbing novel “Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty,” which is set in the year Hendrix would have hit that milestone, 2022.
The president is Jenna Bush, and the country is awash in elderly baby boomers victimized by indifferent offspring, greedy conservators and facility owners more concerned with making a buck than making a home for their clients.
Guy snaps out of his waving-wheat reveries and scopes out the new home in which his daughter, to whom he naively gave power of attorney, has embedded him.
It’s not a happy place. The residents are patronized, condescended to and, worst of all, “humored.” No one takes them seriously. It is the ultimate insult.
Alexandra Truman, the home’s director, is on a nasty power trip, abetted by the staff doctor, a wimp named Dalton Beaver.
When elderly residents “pass through the tunnel” (not a euphemism like “buy the farm” but a trip to the adjacent nursing care facility one resident calls “a greenhouse for corpses”), busy Dr. Beaver is all too eager to keep them over-sedated and out of his hair.
Residents who so much as speak up about Alexandra’s mean-spirited rules may take an involuntary one-way tunnel trip.
And the residents themselves?
A motley crew who peaked during the Summer of Love, then dropped out of the counterculture in their middle years to raise families and hold jobs and now are living out their Winter of Discontent, arguing about the original members of Blue Cheer and other rock trivia and bickering about the politics of the past.
Along with their rock ‘n’ roll, they still have sex (not that you want to picture it) and drugs (not the kind from Dr. Beaver), but they are treated like recalcitrant kids and react accordingly.
There are two women named Sunshine, a Willow who is anything but willowy, a grumpy old guy who fires off letters to the editor, a man who may be gay but doesn’t acknowledge it, a fellow called Mr. Natural with breath that could stun a goat, and an ancient roue from Australia, who beds any woman who’ll let him and mixes an alarmingly potent “Outback tea.”
Funny as the story is, and it is very amusing, there is plenty of sadness as well, and the ending takes a dark and unexpected turn. You can read this book as a clever farce or as a cautionary tale, because it is both.
Sadly, it shows us that time – the wisdom of Mick Jagger notwithstanding – is not always on our side.
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