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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