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.