A Rainy Day

...Back at the house Sarah, Felix, Miriam and I slept together in the same bed for about a week. There was very little fooling around considering we were all in the same bed. One night, still half asleep, I felt Felix reaching over my waist from behind. I came full awake when I heard Miriam sternly insist Sarah take her hand from her breast.

The next day Miriam didn’t show up for one of her shoots and didn’t come back to the house until the afternoon after that. I had taken a job at a car wash on La Brea and thought nothing of her absence until after I got home from work. She came in the door, head hanging, with a gnarly-bearded-tall-longhaired-hippy dude.
“We have to talk,” she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the kitchen.
“Talk about what?” I felt a stabbing pain in my gut, “You with that guy?”
“I can’t hang here…” She started to explain.
“Are you with that guy?” I drilled her.
About then “That Guy” came in the kitchen.
“It’s not what you think, Max?” She began to explain.
“You gotta let go, man…” that Guy piped in.
“Let go of what? And what is it to you” I glared upward at the lanky hippy towering above me.
“We just talked…” the voice of a guilty little girl was so unlike Miriam’s.
“All night?” I was still glaring at the giant in front of him.
“Um… yes.” She offered hesitantly.
“Oh, I see.” I turned and walked out into the rain that was lightly coming down. I felt like going somewhere… anywhere but … I thought of Santa Barbara and how much I’d liked it there. I might head there.

I’d gotten as far on the Pacific Coast Highway as Topanga Canyon Blvd. before it started to get dark and the clouds thickened to let loose with a torrential downpour. I had been standing there with my thumb out for over an hour when a man in full rain-gear walking past me stopped.
“You want to get out of the rain… I have a place down over on the other side of the creek.” He pointed out the direction from where he’d come.
I was so enjoying the Bluesieness of standing in the rain in my sorrow, that I automatically responded with, “No thanks, I’m okay with the rain.”
The Rain Gear man walked to the corner of Topanga to a store and when he came back it was dumping twice as hard.
“Really, it’s okay. I’m not queer.” He stopped and gestured once more in the direction past the creek. “My wife and kid are all warm, dry and cozy with hot soup on the stove… You are welcome to it.” He gave me directions, described the house and slogged on in the rain towards home.
I stood there for another hour as the rain just kept coming. It was completely dark by this time. I stopped thinking for a minute about Miriam and the cold damp place I was standing in. I walked up to the door and knocked.
One of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen opened the door. She stood there angelically with her long ringlets of golden brown hair in a full length plain cotton dress. It was a small one-room cabin with an open loft built above for a bedroom. The daughter was a precocious girl of about four or five who immediately wanted to sit on my lap as soon as I sat down after discarding my drenched coat. I put on a robe offered in place of the soaking clothes that I’d been invited to hang high above a pot-bellied wood-burning stove. A pipe was passed and I was soon after handed a bowl of soup thick enough to be a stew. The rain pounding down above it all and the soft conversation along with the warmth of the stove was comforting.
“Where are you going?” asked the wife.
“I was thinking of Santa Barbara.”
“Are you from there?” Hubby busied himself with his bowl of soup but turned to show a gentle face as he queried.
“Santa Barbara! They have a Zoo!” the girl chimed in.
“No, I’m not from there. I just want to check it out.”
“We went to the Zoo and daddy let me pet some goats.”
“Honey, let Max eat his soup.”
“Oh, I don’t mind… really.” It was so warm and kind and nice in that room I felt as though I’d died and gone to heaven.
“What made you want to leave where you were?”
“Uh, Hollywood?”
“Yeah, if that’s where you were coming from?”
So, it went like that and we talked past the time the girl fell asleep on my lap and we talked about Altamont, Miriam, broken hearts, sorrow, crushed dreams, the military, the Navy, and hope and more smoke… lots of hope for the future and hope for the little girl. I would see some very dark days in the future but I could always point to this interlude on a rainy night in a cabin at the side of the road with a bowl of warm soup…God surely lives in these moments.

I awoke on the couch; my clothes were dry and folded. After dressing I stepped out on the porch as quietly as I could, hoping not to awaken anyone. When I got out to the highway the decision was already made for me which way I was to take. Santa Barbara could wait… I had to go back and find Miriam, but I had no idea why I had to find her any more than I had any idea where I was to end up. After all, Miriam had moved on. There really was nothing in Hollywood for me but I found myself back at Franklin and Taft. At the house, Sarah and Felix didn’t want a single bed partner, so I set up a cozy little den in a closet set under the stairs. I went back to work at the car wash to bring in a few bucks at minimum wage.
The house had become a metaphor for what had happened to the so-called counter-culture of the sixties. What might have started out as a wonderful experiment with communal living turned into little more than a crash-pad for drug users or addicts. The creativity that began the idea had moved on. Most evenings found me in the kitchen with a bottle of wine, disillusioned and waiting for something to happen out of the ordinary… something that might hold some promise for me. Norm convinced me that I could do better panhandling for Green Power or selling the Free Press at stop lights than the minimum wage I was pulling in at the car wash.