Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty (signed)

308 pp. Purple boads & spine with purple metalic imprint. Dust jacket in clean condition. Guy Fontaine's time has passed. His wife is dead, and the small-town Oklahoma newspaper for which he covered sports has forced him into retirement. He sold his home and moved to northern California to live in his daughter's guest cottage. It's all over but the golf.Then, in a heartbeat, Guy's life goes from boredom to nightmare. After he blacks out on the golf course and drives a golf cart down the San Bruno Freeway, the dream of independence through his golden years flies out the window. Guy finds himself an involuntary resident in assisted living at Mission Pescadero, which its administrator, Alexandra Truman, calls "the premier retirement community in Half Moon Bay."Only this is 2022, and the old-timers at Mission Pescadero are nothing like the old-timers in south-central Oklahoma. After surviving fifty years of corporate ladders, carpools, mortgages, and insurance annuities, these senior citizens yearn for a time when life was fun - 1967, the days of sex, drugs, peace, revolution, rock and roll, and more sex. So they transform Mission Pescadero into their own version of it. Even the dining hall is divided into where people were during the Summer of Love: Berkeley, Old Haight, New Haight, Sausalito, New York. The drugs may be different and the sex is driven by girls instead of guys, but for the residents, rock and roll goes on forever.And what a bunch they are. There's Ray John, the cynical writer of letters to the editor, who will never again be in a situation without complaint; Winston, the drug-dealing, womanizing wheelchair mechanic; Sunshines #1 and #2, still fighting over who is the original; Henry, lonely and perpetually cold; and Phaedra, the self-proclaimed creator of feminism, who hates everyone young, straight, healthy, or happy, including her lifelong companion, Suchada.The world would like nothing more than to forget these people past their prime, but they have other ideas. So when Alexandra discovers Henry's cat, Mr. Scratchy, living in a closet and evicts him, the radicals take over, declare themselves the free nation of Pepper Land, and crank up the music. Only The Man, in the person of Lieutenant Cyrus Monk - sworn by his mother to bust all hippies - cannot abide free senior citizens. The conflict mushrooms into an epic battle between authority and anarchy, young and old, intolerance and free love - complete with twenty-four-hour news coverage. Good Condition. Riverhead, 2007. First Edition. Signed. $26.