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10

Chris Aragon

Max met his future friend and criminal partner Chris Aragon in North Beach, San Francisco’s little Italy, where seedy strip clubs and fortune tellers coexist with a row of pleasantly gaudy restaurants serving warm bread and hot pasta to sidewalk diners. The meeting was set for a coffee shop near the City Lights bookstore, cradle of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, and kitty-corner from Vesuvio Café, a saloon announced by colorful wall murals with wine bottles and a peace sign. Down the hill the Transamerica Pyramid stood sentry over the financial district, stabbing the sky.

Norminton introduced Chris to Max over the muted clatter of coffee cups and dishes. The two hit it off immediately. The forty-one-year-old Chris was a student of eastern spirituality, a vegetarian who practiced meditation to center his mind. Max, with his hippie values, seemed a kindred spirit on the road of life. They’d even read some of the same books.

And like Max, Chris had been arrested more than once.

It had all started in Colorado, when Chris was twenty-one years old. He was working as a masseuse at a hot springs resort, earning enough to cover his rent and support a modest cocaine habit, when he hooked up with a troubled veteran named Albert See whom he’d met in the joint while serving a juvenile sentence. See had just escaped from a minimum-security prison camp and needed money to get out of the country.