In a Mexican standoff, both parties narrow their eyes and glare but nobody throws a punch. Naturally, they're carrying every piece of garbage imaginable: the folding aluminum chairs, the newspapers, the lending-library book with the clear plastic wrapper on it, the sunglasses, the sun ointment, about a vat of goo- It is a Mexican standoff. God, they must be practically 50 years old. "The black panther." "Pan-thuh." "Poon-thuh." "Mee-dah." Nobody says it to the two old crocks directly. They even drive in cars all full of thermos bottles and mayonnaisey sandwiches and some kind of latticework wooden-back support for the old crock who drives and Venetian blinds on the back window. All these hincty, crumbling black feet come to La Jolla-by-the-sea from the adobe towns for the weekend. Obviously, these people come from Tucson or Albuquerque or one of those hincty adobe towns. Man, they look like orthopedic sandals, if one can imagine that. She is standing with her old work-a-hubby, who has on sandals: you know, a pair of navy-blue anklet socks and these sandals with big, wide, new-smelling tan straps going this way and that, for keeps. "The pan-thuh." "The poon-thuh." All these kids, seventeen of them, members of the Pump House crowd, are lollygagging around the stairs down to Windansea Beach, La Jolla, California, about 11 a.m., and they all look at the black feet, which are a woman's pair of black street shoes, out of which stick a pair of old veiny white ankles, which lead up like a senile cone to a fudge of tallowy, edematous flesh, her thighs, squeezing out of her bathing suit, with old faded yellow bruises on them, which she probably got from running eight feet to catch a bus or something. This happens to be the cry of a, well, underground society known as the Mac Meda Destruction Company. So she says it out loud, "The black panther." Somebody farther down the stairs, one of the boys with the major hair and khaki shorts, says, "The black feet of the black panther." "Mee-dah," says another kid. Pam Stacy, 16 years old, a cute girl here in La Jolla, California, with a pair of orange bell-bottom hip-huggers on, sits on a step about four steps down the stairway to the beach and she can see a pair of revolting black feet without lifting her head. Black feet on the crumbling black panther. The Pump House Gang Our boys never hair out.
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