Chapter 44. To Santa Barbara

The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole world…

Old SB Rescue Mission at State and Yananoli

I made the usual rounds to keep my belly full. The free-lunch at the Lutheran Church was one stop I made to start the day. There was a Fish n’ Chips place on Telegraph that had a wire mesh waste basket on a light pole out front where folks threw their left-overs. I was always able to find some good bits in that basket, if I got hungry later. The International Pancake House on Telegraph had a Tuesday Night special: All You Can Eat stacks of pancakes for seventy-five cents. It didn’t take long to panhandle that much for a few hours of gorging myself once a week. This was getting old and I had a yearning to go somewhere else... anywhere else.

Bob-O talked of Santa Barbara, promising, “There are plenty of places to eat there. They have a Rescue Mission and it serves three meals a day. They got a Salvation Army too. It ain’t as good as the Mish but it serves a couple of meals. ‘Sides, there are a few churches that serve up ‘em up too.”

By this time, I was completely burned out. I had no idea what to do or where to go next. I was cold. I was damp, and my belly was never full of anything but white port. I came to a place where despair was worse than hunger. Besides, as hungry as I was, I could always pan-handle enough change for a pint and I had been drunk for several days in a row by then. I was crossing the corner of Channing Way and Dana Street… I’d thrown away my shirt because it stank, and I was barefoot because my feet needed air… I’d discarded my socks and boots out of disgust for the hygiene. As I crossed the Street, I held up my arms and cried, “Come on, Big Guy! What gives? I need help. I’ll do anything! Anything you say... just say something! God Damn it! Anything!”

I let my arms down and lamented, “Nothing, that’s what I thought… nothing.”

I walked on down to the stairs of the Free Clinic. I turned instead and entered the church building upstairs. I sat in a pew for a spell. I wasn’t praying but it was more like I was just sitting there waiting. I saw a Bible in the hymnal pockets on the back of the pew and randomly opened it to a page in one of the Chronicles: For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him…  I took the Bible with me back downstairs and sat down reading it on one of the stuffed chairs across from the painting of the Hot-Air Balloon. One of the volunteers from the clinic saw me, “I remember you from the Drop-in Center. I do a gig here too.”

I was halfway expecting for him to read me the universal rule; no shirt, no shoes, no service.

I nodded, “Uh, hi.”

“You don’t look so good. Are you okay?”

I was going to brush him off  but I heard a smattering of compassion in this guy’s tone. “No, I think I’m checking out.” I just felt like being honest.

“Checking out, you mean? Sounds like a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

“Naw, not that.” I was afraid to admit it ‘cause I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a funny farm, “I meant leaving town.”

“Say, before you do check out, uh, leave town, the clinic was given a bag of clothes… some shoes and socks. It looks like you could use some clothes, man.”

I looked at this character with suspicion. The thought crossed my mind, Was he queer? but I understood in that moment that it didn’t matter. I looked down at my pants, they were greasy and worn.

“Look, I know you need a shower and a clean set of clothes. I’m at the Baptist Seminary Dorms by Peoples Park. You can get a shower there and crash on one of the couches for the night.”

I thought of that prayer I had spewed at Channing and Dana… What? … a coincidence? … a Baptist Seminary? What did it mean… perfect toward him?

“Why are you doing this for me?”

“You look like you’re ready.”

I spent that night at the seminary, but it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. The guy’s name was Theo and he was kind enough. I was introduced to a few of the seminary students hanging around the lounge. I had my shower and put on the clean clothes. I might as well have been one of the seminary students myself now that I was scrubbed up a bit. Everyone back then had long hair and beards… at least in Berkeley, so my appearance wasn’t all that far removed from those reading and studying. However, I found that there seemed to be a barrier to discussing religion. I tried to strike up conversation about what was happening to me, but no one seemed the slightest bit interested in the subject. I figured it probably had something to do with the fact that they were studying religion. Studies were serious business and not for casual conversation. It was easy to get someone involved with social justice or Liberation Theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez in Central America, but I was there looking for some answers on a personal level.

It was a bright, sunshiny, day that next morning. I found Bob-O at the Cody Bookstore. We hitched a ride out of town as planned. I’d also acquired a day-pack for a few extra shirts, socks, jeans and a place to tote my Bible. I was road-ready once more and optimistic. I felt that, for the first time in months, I was going somewhere.

Bob-O and I hitched a ride straight from the University Avenue onramp from a young Sociology student going to UCSB. She was a tough looking and street wise and smoked and talked all the way, almost non-stop, though I remember very little of what we talked about because I slept most of the way.

I heard her ask Bob-O, “You want me to drop you at State street? It’s the next exit.”

“Yeah, State Street. That’s it.”

I wasn’t paying attention, but I remember the freeway ending and there were stop lights, “This don’t look like it.”

Bob-O assured us, “Yes, this is it. That’s what the sign says. I think they built a freeway since I was here last.”

Our driver didn’t know. She’d been at UCSB for two and a half quarters but had never been downtown. Like many students of the era, there was no reason to leave Isla Vista for Santa Barbara.

We walked away from the off-ramp. RR tracks crossed the street but went over it on an old trestle. There was no sign of a fig tree, or anything else that looked like anything from my memory, “What happened to the stop lights, Bob-O? That trestle doesn’t look new.”

I vaguely remembered the Rescue Mission from when Norm, Mary, and I, had passed through town. It seemed like ages and eons ago. This didn’t look like any part of town that a Rescue Mission would be in. We walked past La Cumbre Plaza and the Peppertree Motel. Bob-O was confused, and I saw no evidence of tracks crossing the street. There wasn’t anything like a Rescue Mission in sight either, so we began hiking. Bob-O kept assured me that the Rescue Mission and the tracks couldn’t be far… maybe around the bend up ahead.

Another hitch-hiker approached us as we walked. I asked, “Hey man, do you know how to get to the Rescue Mission?”

“The mission? He pointed west, “In the hills that way.”

“That don’t make no sense,” Bob-O looked confused.

“Oh, you mean the Mission. You mean where that big-assed fig tree is? You go that way three, maybe four, miles.”

Bob-O wasn’t shaken by the bad news, “We’ll miss lunch, but we got plenty of time before they serve dinner.”

“Yeah, there’s a big fig tree near-by…” I remembered, “…and the highway has grass and stop lights, right?”

The guy scratched his beard, “Yeah. That’s the Mish.”

“Shit, Bob-O, we have a long, hard, hike ahead of us if we’re going to make dinner at the Mission by six.”

And hike we did, with our thumbs out, taking a break but a few times. It was a couple hour trek and no one gave us a lift. We arrived just in time. A line of winos was cued up and waiting for a mission-stiff to open the door. We got in line. Mysteriously, one of the winos sitting on the curb handed me his bottle. I thought of it as merely a friendly gesture. I was not one to turn down a friendly gesture. I had no desire for a drink and I hadn’t since crossing the street at Dana and Channing Way. But I had no intention to quit drinking entirely since I threw up that prayer…. I lifted the bottle to my lips. But, it wasn’t a friendly gesture, he just needed to get rid of his bottle before the door opened. I tried to return the bottle but the man just shrugged, and gave me his back I put it in my coat pocket.

The door swung opened and, the regulars began filing in the door. As Bob-O went in, the Mission Stiff stopped me, “I saw you hittin’ on a bottle.”

“Sure," I admitted, "but it was just a toke.”

The winos from the curb passed by me and entered the door.

The Stiff puffed up his chest, “You ain’t getting’ in today, buddy.” He was proud to have caught a miscreant.

“Awe man, you gotta give me a break. It was only a toke… it was offered to me… I was just being polite. Isn’t there someone I can talk to?”

“You’ll have to come back tomorrow…”

Just about then a white haired, slightly balding man in a suit, came up from behind the Stiff, “What is your name son?”

 “Max, sir: I was in line,” I took the near empty bottle out of my pocket, “and, honest to God, one of the guys handed me this bottle. I don’t even drink… but I was only trying to be polite.”

“You haven’t been drinking?”

“No sir,” I paused while the kindly man peered into my eyes, “we just hiked a couple of miles to get here in time for dinner...”

He let me in the chapel with everyone else. I sat in the back row with a couple other old-timers. One of them queried, “You know who that feller is?”

“No, he the manager or something?”

“That guy’s Chuck Pope. He is the founder of this place. You’re lucky he was here, kid, ‘cause them Stiffs don’t give nobody a break.”

The service before dinner at the Mission was tolerable. The hymnal was memorized by all the winos. They called out the numbers instead of the names of the hymns between each set. After a half-dozen songs were sung, a guy with a thick accent in a suit, who called himself Brother something-or-other, preached. Rather, he told the story of his conversion. He was a tailor from Austria and he painted a vivid picture of his playboy life before his conversion. Standing at the dais before a stained-glass window in yellows and greens of a praying Jesus, his story was one that I’d heard before. He started out dry and slow but it reached a crescendo then, with a highly emotional pitch, it ended with Mary Pope on the organ, for an ‘altar-call’.

The altar-call is a low-rent Evangelical ritual in which the lost are called to come forward and be saved. Being saved was a simple enough affair. All the prodigal son has to do is admit out loud that he’s a sinner, and that he believes a two-thousand-year-old story about a man that was executed, knocked out for three days, and rose again. All you gotta do is believe that horseshit and all your sins are forgiven. No matter what you did, confesses that and you are saved. It’s a simple, but evidently not at all that short of an affair because it was long enough to start me wondering when, or whether, we would ever get to dinner. Then, just when we were all getting ready for the closing hymn to stand in cue, Bob-O stood and went forward. The good Tailor laid a hand on Bob-O’s head and asked; “Do you want to be saved?

“Yes,” Bob-O answered.

The wino, the one that had passed me his bottle earlier, shouted from the back pew, “Then say it, brother.”

“Yes, I want to be saved.”

Then he disappeared into a prayer closet with Chuck Pope. I had no idea what was going on in there. A Mission Stiff opened a door to the dining hall after one more from the hymnal; The Old Rugged Cross, and after that, everyone stood as if on cue and lined up for dinner.

As we sat at the tables I asked Bob-O, “So, what happened in there,” referring to the closet, “anything?”

Bob-O answered, “I was saved.”

“What do you mean, saved?”

“Just like the man said, I confessed and believe… so I’m saved.”

“Have you done this before?”

“Yeah… sure.”

“Do you feel any different?”

“Naw.” He dug into his bowl of beans, rice and wieners cut-up with a few carrots and added, “The food is better here than at the Sally.”

We were staying the night, so we were directed to the entrance where, from behind a half-door, a Mission Stiff took our old clothes, packed them in a bag, and issued a clean set of hospital pajamas, soap and towels. We all filed upstairs to the showers and after that to the beds. The mission beds, and the way we were filed from one place to another, reminded me of boot camp and I did not take to it very well. All of my valuables; my pack with my clothes, and my bible were locked up downstairs. There was no way of leaving without leaving my stuff. I settled in at lights out and slept the sound sleep of a weary man.

The staff woke us, our clothes and belongings were issued back, to get to the chapel by 5:30. Breakfast was served at six a.m., oatmeal and toast… all we could eat until they ran out. We were able, if we so wished and if there was a size that fit, to have a clean set of second-hand donated clothes. I finished my fourth bowl and hurried down to Sterns Warf hoping to see the sun rise over the ocean.

However, the sun was rising towards what looked to me like the south on the coast and not, as I expected, the ocean. I still stood in awe at the beauty of it all. Bob-O was standing next to me. We just soaked it all in then walked up to lower State Street where the first signs of life appeared. People had begun moving on to their jobs or dropping in at Esau’s greasy spoon on the first block past the highway from the beach. At one point, near the Barbara Hotel at State and Cota, I thought I heard Aaron’s words come back to me, “I hope you find it, Max.”

I stopped to look around… almost expecting to see him standing there in his yarmulke, I answered, “I believe there’s something about this place…”

“What?” Bob-O never got used to me mumbling stuff out loud.

“I feel this place has something for me.”

“Like?”

“Like, I belong here.”

“Oh.”

At once, upon saying it, I felt a peace and assurance that I was going to be okay no matter what might come down the pike. Some of this Jesus stuff might have some weight to it, I was thinking. Like, believe in it, say it out loud to someone, and it happens. I believe I belong here. I tell Bob-O I do, and, here I am.