Monday, June 17, 2013

TWELVE

    Typical of my record stores, Rainy Day Records was small and under financed. It was comparable in size to Jive Records in Oakland, except that I was living in it, and my bed and things took up some of the space. At one point I got rid of the refrigerator and knocked out a small wall to get more space for merchandise. I felt it was cold enough in Florence to do without refrigeration, and worried only once about bacterial contamination, when our natural food buying club held a potluck meeting. I received kudos for my potato salad and no one became ill that I was aware of.

    One of the first friends I made in Ashland was from England originally, and my landlord had hired him to paint the store. We hit it off right away, and based on what he learned about me in our conversation, he told me “You’ll really love my wife”! Within a couple of weeks I did meet his wife; lo and behold we had much in common to talk about. It turned out that they actually weren’t getting along very well, and she was going through a wandering kind of phase. One day, she came to the store and asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. I put up one of my ‘back in so many minutes’ signs and we crossed the street and strolled over to an old lot full of overgrown weeds, bushes and shrubs. ‘Come in here’, she motioned with her finger, and I followed her through some tall growths. I thought, this is my friend’s wife; what could she possibly be up to? Does she want to smoke a joint? Is she coming on to me? If so, should I refuse? After all, that would be the correct thing to do, wouldn’t it? These thoughts raced through my mind in milliseconds. But then she kissed me so tenderly that all other thoughts disappeared.

    Thus began a few months of an intense, exciting, yet scary affair with all the accompanying lying, cheating and guilty feelings. I fell in love with her, wrote several songs for her, and was disappointed when her eye shortly began to wander elsewhere. I was sure they would divorce and we would marry. As her name was Debbie, she would become the new Debbie Goldberg and this time it would work. Although she had a Mensa IQ, I felt we were compatible. We certainly had incredible drug fueled times while it lasted. But then I began dating a shy Catholic woman I’d met in our health food buying club.

    In those days, one needed to travel an hour or so to either Coos Bay or Eugene to do major shopping, anything other than food, fishing supplies and basic necessities. I tried to keep my record, and soon tape, prices competitive but found that my highest (pardon the pun) profit items were the drug paraphernalia. Often a customer would leave me a joint as a tip, or we might even close the store awhile and enjoy it together. I recall a sunny winter day when I was sitting outside the shop on some antique theatre seats my ex-employer had given away, smoking one of those joints, and the police chief drove by and waved at me. Florence was quite the hippie haven then, and pot as well as public alcohol consumption was tolerated, at least in our part of town. I’d forget myself in Eugene on occasion, where people stared at the sight of a hippie smoking dope in the open, but would just brush it off.

    Some people got the idea that I was selling not only the bongs but the drugs to use in them. I guess it makes a kind of sense, and indeed I romanticized the 'noble' act of drug-dealing in my mind. I went as far as to ask a dealer I knew, whether he’d get me started in the business, but he replied ‘no, you’re way too paranoid to sell drugs’, and he was, of course correct. One time a stocky woman came into Rainy Day and became very insistent that I sell some marijuana to her. "Everyone knows you’re a dealer; why won’t you sell to me”, she demanded. I thought she looked like a cop, but no matter, I really wasn’t a dealer, and apologetically informed her as such. 

   

    It was about this time, I think, that an article appeared in Rolling Stone magazine about a young secular American Jew that found G-d in Israel. Visiting the Wailing Wall as a tourist, he (or she?) was invited home by an Orthodox believer, and wound up.....I wouldn’t read any more of it and promptly replaced it on the newsstand at Safeway. I really hoped that Orthodox Judaism would not turn out to be the correct path, and that G-d wasn’t really leading me there!

    Diana, the girl from the drugstore, was fairly recently divorced, having stayed with her husband beyond the call of reason, hoping for reconciliation. Even after their marriage was certainly over, she did not date anyone for a considerable period of time. Now she’d met someone and was shopping for some new music; all she had at home were her old Dave Clark 5 records that reminded her of her ex. She asked for Aerosmith’s first and only record at the time, and upon her return for more music she informed me that it’d been a hit with her new boyfriend. This time I sold her “Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright. I looked forward to her visits, wondering how I could possible endear myself to this beautiful woman.

          She had straight dark hair running a little too far down her back, I thought; and her glasses seemed a couple of sizes too big. Her pants fit her rather snugly, which I appreciated, but her clothing in general made her appear so 'straight'. That term has become so identified with meaning ‘the opposite of gay’, but in the drug subculture it referred to any ‘outsider’; i.e. not a pothead, not a devotee of our g-ds Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Timothy Leary and Jimi Hendrix. Still, she was very pretty and had a perfect figure. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she was also looking me over, and had never seen a creature such as myself in her life. She’d never witnessed that much hair on a man, and such frizzy, unkempt hair. Plus I dressed like a bum. And the language I used, and my east coast accent, what tree had I fallen from? She wondered what I might look like if I shaved my beard off. Debbie, on the other hand, had wanted to break up with me when I shaved off my beard.

I could afford to bide my time with Diana as my romantic fortunes had changed and I actually had a girlfriend at the time, several years older than me, who proceeded to show me a thing. She’d blown into town with her two teenage children, and before I could decide whether to go after her or her cute 15 year old daughter, the former made the decision for me and away we went. My whirlwind affair with Marilyn (not her real name) lasted a good month until another Bay Street neighbor caught her eye. I wanted a serious relationship, however. Of course, to me serious meant someone to live with me and feed me, while I snuck around and did what I wanted. It meant someone I could boss around, while she’d look up to me. Sounds insane to me now; how could it have made sense to me then? Marilyn was her own woman, though, and her lovely daughter learned from her. Together these two beauties would charm many men and break many hearts. 

What had happened was nothing short of a miracle. Diana had actually called me! She’d been extraordinarily shy most of her life, but mustered up an awful lot of courage and phoned to invite me over to the trailer where she lived with her seven year old daughter, to carve their Halloween pumpkin. I had already planned to see Marilyn that night, and so I told Diana I was sorry but it sounded like fun, and let’s get together soon. I hung up the phone and a smile split my face from ear-to-ear. Possibly the woman of my dreams was interested in me, and it hit me, G-d was actually coming through for me. She was line-for-line the woman I asked Him for. This was beyond finding a lost coin or even a needle-in-a-haystack. This could turn out to be nothing less than proof of the existence of G-d! My mind spun at this thought.

On my date with Marilyn, as she told me about another chap she’d met, and the details of the sexual aspect of it, I didn’t mind at all. We were just two kindreds comparing notes. We were over so soon. But I wasn’t sorry that I’d turned Diana down that night. I knew nothing of the 'gentile' act of carving a pumpkin. Halloween only meant dressing up and getting loaded to me. I was unaware as well of its meaning to pagans, to witches or to demons, for that matter. I dressed up as “The Wildman of Borneo”.


But finally the evening of my date with Diana arrived. There was little to do in Florence then. With no other plans, I just visited her at her trailer ostensibly to talk and get to know each other. She had a couple of bottles of a pink colored wine chilling in the fridge, and her daughter was not home. I think that we were both pretty nervous as to how things would work out, but we did kiss goodnight and I was satisfied with that. She was, after all, my gift from G-d.

We were shortly seeing a lot of each other. I was a big city character who’d been all over the country, and Diana had almost never been out of that itsy town. We hit the road to Berkeley, to meet my friends there, and had the time of our lives on that trip. Someone had written “Diana Is A Fox” in the concrete, and I snapped a picture of her standing beside it. On the way back home we stopped at the Italian Swiss Colony and took the tour led by quite a red-nosed fellow. By the time we got home, we were a definite item. Diana severed her relationship with the other guy she’d been dating, and I moved into the trailer with her. Actually I didn't want to rush her and mess things up. But when she started to do my laundry totally without my asking, I surmised that it must be time.



For some reason Debbie, the original, showed up again at this point. I think it had something to do with a court date of some sort in Eugene. Diana and I picked her up at the airport, as I recall, and then Debbie invited me to stay overnight with her in Eugene. I’d always had trouble clearly understanding her intentions, and I was not about to turn away a chance to spend time with the woman I’d spent over a year bawling my eyes out over. But it was only a reunion of old friends and would be the last time I’d see her and her now two year old daughter again. “You found a good thing in Diana”, she said, "don't blow it!" I felt that G-d had indeed spoken to me, confirming that Diana was His choice as well, and I ought not to shed tears over any other.


But when the other Debbie walked in the store (Debbie 2, not counting the ‘angeldust’ Debbie) headed behind the counter and started counting days with her finger on my calendar, I held my breath waiting to hear what she’d say. We hadn’t seen much of each other in months, although in that small of a town everyone saw everyone else, more often than not. Debbie was pregnant, and it was definitely mine, but she and her husband were going to have another go at their relationship and raise the child as their own. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. I thought I ought to at least talk to her and try to find out if she’d rather raise our child with me. Diana and I had made no vows, and the correct course to take began to seem unclear to me. But Debbie was unwilling to even discuss it; she was not interested in snatching me away from Diana. The end of this story is that Debbie 2 wound up marrying a different merchant named Goldberg and became Debbie Goldberg anyway. What a crazy world!


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