Dreams of the Beach

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Mother gave me oil pastels. This was my first attempt at color. The beach with a fog bank hanging just off shore. 1977.

Himself: Feeling and acting much more positive now that a month’s worth of back Un checks arrived. Reading all the articles he can on how to find a job in this new electronic age. Herself: Still coughing. Much more energy tho before I worked yesterday. I was totally knocked out by something in the back room, Febreze I think. Hit one estate sale and got some exceptional cookbooks. Nightmares today at dawn about the way last week’s house owner died. So very frightening…exactly how G’s mother died. Reading: Here a bit of HP, there a bit of HP. Cookbooks here and cookbooks there. Balance: The ability to put some of those cookbooks back when I realized the total was way out of my range.

I wrote over and over in my journals that I was naive. I had truly thought a move to the beach would be good for all of us.

This move the beach found me ending one journal volume, and I bought a bigger sketchbook for the following nine months or so. It was kind of a scary thought to face all that open white paper, and perhaps that’s why I wrote and drew with a faded blue ink.

One day when a group of us was sitting on the lawn, a friend of a friend stopped by to chat. He was looking for a property manager, and I was thinking I was healthy enough to get a job again. Our roommate liked that idea because it freed him up to move north to San Francisco to live with friends.

My journals record that this man just walked up and asked me, and I just said yes.

But yes too, I was still doing drugs on occasion. I was drinking more and more. I was eating more too. If I could find drugs, Lessa could also find drugs.

We moved closer to the beach, and I got reduced rent plus a small pittance for managing the Purple Palace plus collecting rents on all his beach properties.

Here in this old Victorian hotel now painted purple, I had two big rooms. The closets were where the Murphy beds used to be. I had a real bathroom, and a kitchen with a most amazing 1920’s three burner stove in what used to be a tiny closet. Lessa had one of the rooms to herself, and I began a many year journey of sleeping on the sofa so the kids could have a room.

For slowly, after a season or two of just stopping to visiting us, Lenora decided she wanted to go to school after all. We three were together again.

I’d drink and hold court just like in the old days. Now many of my friends had changed. They were all drinkers too. Neighbors. So were my bosses, Han’s and Ron. Grandmamma moved from downtown to just up the block, and we all partied. Not just gatherings every night, but Hans had massive parties like his traditional Christmas In July bash crowded with hundreds of friends in every corner of his over decorated, giant home.

Everyone drank. There was an actual folk bar half a block away that has live music every night. The owners were very nice. There was a little beer and wine bar in the same block that had the best chili. I’d set the kids up with their homework, and I would go out for a glass or two of wine. Of course, the kids didn’t stay doing homework, but how could I know.

Everyone smoked dope or did speed so they could drink more. I was such a failure at smoking dope because one hit would put me to sleep. I couldn’t always get speed any more, but I could still drink.

Many days that I didn’t work or finished early, I would wander down to the beach. For me the beach was a healthy clean place. The river sloughs near the apartment now were channeled, crowded with partiers, vehicles, and fires every night throughout the week. During most of the year, they offered me endless freedoms of sky and air. Sometimes I tried to draw it all, but I was always afraid of failure.

Lenora began elementary school, mid semester, three years behind her classmates. She caught up in under a year. I was inordinately proud of her, yet I couldn't see her clearly. I could only read what she showed me on the surface. Then again, Lessa began to take up all of my time.

Lessa began doing drugs and living life her way at thirteen. The insanity of a runaway teen, insane teen, sleeping around teen, screaming teen, dirty never-clean-her-room-till the smell drove us all mad teen, madness beyond all of my imagining teen, drove me to seek help at last. I put her into therapy. I put myself into therapy. Nothing I could do changed her course. I could begin to see my own insanity, the drugs stopped working, and my drug use tapered off at last. I took my journals to my therapist. I was very proud of them thinking they were artistic. Unfortunately, they were a window into my life and that of my kids.


The river flood control channel in 1977 with it’s weed choked jetty top scattered with holes from erosion.

Bathtubs

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Doesn’t everyone do mandala’s of bathtubs? Purple Palace tub. Volume 2.

Himself: A far, far, better day with four weeks of unemployment money arriving at last. He spent part of the day renewing the old white bookcase. Sanding, filling, getting it ready for primer and paint. Many generations haven’t been kind to it. Herself: The best I’ve felt so far. I read a conglomerate of #1 to the group, and told them what I was attempting to do here. Now more autobiography than discourse on journals. Workshop, shop to mark, home briefly, back to help set up for the Holiday Bazaar. G helped schlep boxes. I hadn’t known it was a pot luck. I wasn’t alone in not knowing. Embarrassed. I’ll know next year. Reading: Still HP 1. Balance: Feeling vastly better at last.

Before the kids came back, for a while between the Front and Fir house and the rest of my life, I was homeless.

I was clean tho.

One caring friend would let me sleep in her tub. I stayed up sometimes for seven days in a row. Sometimes I partied every day all day driving from club to club finally putting myself to sleep with another hand full of speed. The drugs were winning. I believed glass was coming out of every pore. Lack of sleep will do that to you; it did to me. Every chance I had I would move into my friend’s tub from my two-seater sports car.

I wasn’t a nice bather. I’d pick at myself, doze until the water froze, drain it, and add hot water, and repeat.

She threw me out. I deserved it.

Our beach house had two tubs….one of which was a darkroom. The Garrison House and the Front and Fir houses had showers. Oh misery. The studio had a tub, but I had put plywood on top to give Lessa a place of privacy in the chaos of my world. We weren’t there long. The one bedroom apartment had a tub, but frankly I don’t remember it. We weren’t there long either before we moved to the Purple Palace one block from the beach. It had a nice but short, claw foot tub as did the Lotus street cottage.

Perhaps I remember my life tub to tub.

The water lessened the effects of the street drugs I was consuming that kept me awake days at a time, it mellowed out the hangovers, and unbeknownst to me, it washed away my allergies…temporarily.

Here in OB, my blue cardboard sketchbook journals turned into 8x10 black bound acid free sketchbooks. They were very expensive for someone like me. I was always afraid that I couldn’t afford the next one, but I always found the money somewhere. The books felt good under my hands. I loved the time I spent writing in them….early in the morning till ten. Late at night too, on the edge of the bathtubs.


The bathtub in the old Lotus and Abbot officers quarters. Pink tile with maroon trim. Little Mexican scenes here and there on the tiles. 1979.

Volume One

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Beach glimpse. I discovered fountain pens, and that I could take the cartridge out and paint with it.

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Himself: A week of few jobs listed online. No response to from anyone. He relisted the bike on Craig’s List. No response to it last week. One email today. We will take it. He’s angry and arguing with me often now. Herself: Still coughing. Won’t put up with arguing. Went to Store today to mark last of the holiday stuff. Tomorrow first more marking, then class, and finally at 4pm, we set up the holiday boutique. G’s coming to lift boxes. Reading: For some reason, I find I’m so busy that I get little time to read. Balance: The fogs.

Changes kept happening.

There we were at the beach. Summer arrived, and Lessa was out of school for the duration. Lenora arrived to spend a few days with us, and I mourned her leaving again even as we spent time together. Lessa and Lenora continually argued unless Lessa needed defending then Lenora was right there on her side.

Her father’s truck broke down, and I celebrated the fact I would have more time with Lenora before she left.

And all of us were living in a small one bedroom beach apartment. My old friend Rob came to be a roommate…in the living room, I had the bedroom, and for privacy Lessa had the walk in closet as her room. The sunny kitchen and tiny bath were shared.

Rob gently called me on my drinking.

I recorded every party, every friend who came to visit, and often I began writing when drunk filling the pages of my book with drivel into the dark hours of the night. I’d wake up in the morning and tape those pages shut. Many of my long term friends couldn’t stand my drinking and drug use any longer and began fading out of my life. They thought I was going to die. I recorded it all fulsomely. Weeping at my aloneness.


Lenora watching TV at F’s house…Grandmama we called him. 1975.