The Falcon and the Snowman Read Online Free PDF

for the rugs were skyrocketing, and who’d expect a hippie to have a fortune in nineteenth-century carpets?
    Moreover, Robin and his friends weren’t the only ones who returned to the Peninsula with values challenging those imparted by the parents on The Hill.
    College students who had left The Hill for Berkeley, Stanford and elsewhere came home with samples of pot and other drugs—and advice to younger brothers and sisters to turn on. “It’s no worse than alcohol,” they said, usually with a reference to their parents’ nightly cocktail hour. Some of the returning college students and dropouts like Robin discovered that substantial amounts of extra spending money could be generated by the sale of a few marijuana cigarettes to the well-heeled kids on The Hill. This lesson was not lost on some entrepreneurial-minded students at P.V. High, including the eldest son of Dr. Lee.
    At first the flow of illicit drugs into the community was little more than a trickle. But by the end of the sixties, the trickle had become a torrent. Experimentation expanded beyond pot to barbiturates, amphetamines, LSD, hashish, peyote, cocaine and heroin. From the high school, drugs filtered down to the junior high schools of Palos Verdes and even to some of the elementary schools. Not every young person in Palos Verdes used drugs, but the social pressure was such that junior high pupils who didn’t pop pills or blow weed were called “lame” and ostracized by many of their classmates.
    By the mid-seventies, like a wave that had crested, the drug epidemic had peaked. But in the years when Daulton and Chris were passing into manhood, drugs were as much a part of high school in their affluent community as history and biology, pep rallies and football games.
    Inexplicably, a generation of parents did not realize what was happening to their children. Perhaps they didn’t try to know. Lethargy, glazed watery eyes, erratic behavior—somehow, they missed the symptoms, and some didn’t learn that their children were helplessly dependent on drugs until they were dead from an overdose; or, some didn’t know until their children were scratching off their clothes and screaming from the hallucinations of a nightmarish experience with LSD; or they did not know until the children were just gone —runaways swallowed up by the adolescent underground, pursuing the capricious gods that they found in a pill, a snort, a joint or a fix.
    The Palos Verdes schools tried to snuff out the drug epidemic, but they didn’t have much success; when two-way mirrors were installed in the rest rooms for teachers to monitor drug sales and the lunchtime pot smoking, the kids went elsewhere; eventually, the junior highs cancelled most evening social events because it became impossible to have a dance or a class party without a mantle of sweet-smelling marijuana smoke in the air. “You could go to the schools and they were selling drugs on the street corner,” Dr. Lee would recall later of those times.
    It was becoming clear to everybody, Daulton included, that he would not go to Notre Dame, because he wasn’t making the grades that his parents insisted that he must earn to get into a selective university. Virtually the only time Daulton managed to bring home an A or B on his report card other than for Woodshop was when he gave it to himself. He erased a D or F on the report card, substituted a B or A and used a photocopying machine to produce a report card that was welcomed at home.
    When things went poorly at school or he became depressed, Daulton could always find escape with his tools in the family garage. From a shop teacher at P.V. High who had recognized his skills and encouraged him, Daulton learned how to turn raw lumber into spectacular boxes of inlaid walnut, oak, ebony and teak; and as he got better, he crafted delicate bowls and inlaid tables and cabinets inspired by the work of artisans of