The Jonathan Club is an exclusive beach club in Santa Monica, remembered by Bret as a longstanding family refuge and, in October 1981, the setting for a decisive rupture. Its private beach, old-fashioned architecture, and rituals of effortless privilege make it seem insulated from consequence; then an eerily deserted visit and a warning left in its men’s locker room turn that familiar setting into an omen. The afternoon brings the group closer to the danger surrounding them while exposing how little their shared world can protect them.

Setting and Social World

Built in 1927, the Jonathan Club had retained its original architecture, which Bret recalls as grand and almost rococo. His father joined in the mid-1970s, and Bret spent summer weekends there as a child. The club’s private beach was served by young male staff, who arranged fold-out chairs, oversized towels, and large teal umbrellas. Parents read on the sand while children moved among the Olympic-sized indoor pool, tennis courts, Ping-Pong tables, and the Pacific. Food from the cafeteria could simply be signed for; the scene Bret remembers is one of ease, abundance, and leisure.

That ease had a boundary. Membership was by invitation, women could not be members, and the club had repeatedly faced complaints of racial and religious discrimination. The teenagers knew that Terry Schaffer was excluded and that the club was understood to discriminate against Black and Jewish people, but Bret says they did not attach serious meaning to it. Their attention was elsewhere, on sex, music, movies, celebrity, and their own sense of neutral innocence. The Jonathan Club thus represents not only the group’s privileged setting but the numbness that permits them to treat its exclusions as abstract.

The October 1981 Visit

The October afternoon at the club is the moment Bret identifies as the beginning of the end of something. The group had decided to take Robert there before school let out on Thursday, the day before Thom left to look at colleges back east. After Robert’s breakdown at Susan’s party, the witnesses had kept silent; by Monday he was again greeting classmates, and the episode had not become school gossip. Robert himself remembered little of the party’s later events. The visit therefore takes place under a fragile agreement to keep the past unspoken, even as Bret understands the secret story about Matt as the trauma that has changed his life.

The students left Buckley during lunch and drove through the Sepulveda Pass toward the coast. Susan and Thom took the Corvette; Debbie collected Bret from the House on Mulholland in her BMW, with Robert following in a Porsche. The club was roughly a mile from the point where the Santa Monica Freeway became the Pacific Coast Highway. Unlike the usual busy summer scene, the parking lot was almost empty. A valet opened the car doors without recording their makes or license plates, a small departure from normal procedure that Bret later connects to the lack of other cars.

A lifeguard explained that the Riders of the Afterlife had broken into the club two nights earlier, vandalized something, taken food from the cafeteria, and continued to harass people near the parking lot and approach from the beach. He added that there had been break-ins, vandalism, and missing pets around Santa Monica and Venice. Bret alone seemed aware of the cult at first. When he reminded Debbie of an earlier attack at the space on Melrose, she dismissed the concern as insignificant. Susan signed the group in under her father Donald’s account, and the valet did not check whether their surnames matched the membership roster.

As the five went toward the locker rooms, a cold gust moved the American flag above the entrance. The deserted club seemed to Bret like a warning, and the group fell silent. He noticed a new distance between Susan and Thom, visible in their body language and lack of acknowledgment; something appeared to have happened between them on the drive. Robert followed Debbie, while Bret lagged behind and watched him look across the empty tennis courts. The courts, usually occupied and difficult to reserve, were vacant too.

The Locker-Room Tableau

In the men’s locker room, Thom and Bret changed from their Buckley uniforms into bathing suits, with Robert following and carrying a large black duffel bag. Robert praised the club and thanked the others for bringing him. Thom, meanwhile, complained about the cold and said he would confront any cult members who approached them. The adjoining lockers placed the three boys in close proximity, but the easy conversation did not dispel the unease established outside.

Later, after Robert said he was heading back to Century City, Bret watched Thom walk with him to the boundary between sand and pavement. They exchanged a brief, friendly embrace before Robert went into the locker-room entrance and Thom returned to the others. Susan was subdued. Thom picked up a copy of Sports Illustrated, and no one spoke for about ten minutes. Susan eventually suggested leaving because it was cold and she was tired; Thom answered sharply that he was already packed for his trip. Bret read the exchange as confirmation that their relationship was over, though the precise cause of the change is left unstated.

Bret went back inside intending to warm up with a shower, but the manager had left and the vast locker room was almost entirely empty. The dripping showers and repeated toilet flushes seemed to come from no visible person. Robert’s locker stood open and empty. Moving through the dim space toward the toilet stalls, Bret found a candle set on the closed lid of a toilet. Above it, a red pentagram appeared to have been painted in blood. In the corner lay a dead seagull, and the blood appeared to have come from the bird. A werewolf mask, lightly spattered with blood, had been placed beneath the toilet. Bret understood the arrangement as a deliberate warning, though he could not determine its full meaning or who had left it; he wondered whether Robert was responsible.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The discovery changes the club from an emblem of protected leisure into a place the group cannot assume is secure. The familiar signs of order—the attendant, the membership account, the locker-room desk—remain, but they do not prevent an intrusion. The candle, pentagram, bird, and mask convert an ordinary space into a message addressed to whoever finds it. The evidence establishes that someone associated with the cult had entered while the group was there, but it does not establish the perpetrator’s identity or settle Bret’s suspicion of Robert.

Outside, the group told the attendant what they had found. He responded without much alarm, confirming that animal sacrifices had occurred and saying he would see whether security could come in. As he went to retrieve Debbie’s car, Susan finally removed her sunglasses and asked Thom and Bret whether they were okay. Her concern seemed numbed and ineffectual to Bret. Thom stared at her, then replaced the confrontation with a reassuring smile and a gentle touch to her face. That performance of reassurance echoed the group’s earlier silence about Robert’s breakdown: distress is witnessed, but not made public or fully addressed.

Bret later frames the beach afternoon as the point when the narrative accelerated and the likely outcome began to come into focus. He connects it to the secret surrounding Matt, which he describes as the loss of innocence and his first encounter with adulthood and death. The Jonathan Club’s history of privilege and exclusion, the group’s reluctance to face danger, the cult’s intrusion, and the fracture between Susan and Thom converge in one place. The club remains outwardly the same, but for Bret its emptied courts and violated locker room signal that the world he knew has already begun to fall away.