Chapter 47. Unborn Again

Bethel Church of God in Christ, on the 

corner of Cota and Garden, is now a Hispanic 

Congregation, but, from the 40's to 80's,

 the neighborhood was an Afro-American, 

old-school-Mississippi-style-you-

could-hear it-Rockin'-three-blocks -away-

three times every Sunday Morning from 

8 AM to 8 PM, Pentecostal Church. 

The next day I thanked Pam for all she’d done and went down to the lights at Highway 101 where I had decided to hitch a ride out of town. I had no idea where I was going to go but I was going somewhere and held a sign that read, “SOMEWHERE, ANYWHERE.” As I stood waiting for a ride, I caught a glimpse of a hat in the bushes. It was an Australian digger’s hat. The kind with one side of the brim snapped up. It fit perfectly. I checked inside the hat and found a five-dollar bill folded up in the lining. After finding the fiver I decided to go across the highway to the Sambo’s for a hamburger before hitting the road. I took a booth where I could write all the past week’s wonders in my journal and read my Bible. I had begun on a hamburger and opened the Bible when I saw that a man at the counter had been watching me. I tipped my hat and nodded a hello, thinking, perhaps the hat had caught the man’s attention. Maybe he’s the one that lost it.

The man got up from the counter, “You look like you might be a Vet.”

I hadn’t given it much thought the past year, at least since Miami, “Yeh… sure, I guess so… eh?”

“My name’s Glen, I’m a Vet. Well, sort of… Coast Guard.”

“Okay, I did four years in the Navy. Got out in ’69.” I liked the guy right away.

“I was let out two years ago… did time in the brig and Leavenworth. But that’s not why I noticed you.”

“The hat?”

“Naw, I thought you might be lookin’ for work.”

“I wouldn’t mind a regular job… with a paycheck and all.”

“Good. Is that a Bible?”

“Yeh.” I had sewn a denim cover on the Bible I’d taken from the church in Berkeley, so it wouldn’t be all that noticeable.

Glen pulled out a pen and wrote down an address on my journal.

“Show up before eight tomorrow morning and I’ll put you to work. Just ask for Glen. I’m the foreman.”

Once more, that feeling that I was right where I belonged surged through my being after the man left.

I walked to the address on Quarantina Street where a large shed with a high ceiling housed a fiber-glass laminating operation. A carpenter shop to the side was smaller but the doors were open, so I approached the one man there that early. He directed me to an office where I filled out and application while the other workers gradually filed in to their various stations. When Glen arrived, he introduced me to a few of the people and showed me where I would be working.

The place made bonded bronze panels and doors. The bronze was in powder form. It was mixed with a polymer resin and poured into a mold. These panels were attached to doors, and sent for polishing and a patina, where I would be working. Glen was hardly any kind a foreman, but he was in charge of the polishing department. The Polishing Department consisted of only one other man, Skip, before I got there. Glen, Skip, and I went to work with steel wool on the doors and then buffed them off with a pneumatic buffer afterwards. Glen applied a mixture that reacted to the bronze for the final patina and we buffed out highlights. It was the kind of work that I hadn’t done since I was on-board the ship in the Navy. Actually, it was a lot harder, but the mindless physical labor agreed with me.

Skip was the most energetic and hardest to keep up with, but we tried. He tackled each door as though he were going for the Gold in an Olympic competition. He was a stocky, blond, block of a man and, all the while he buffed away or scrubbed with the steel wool, he sang gospel songs. The man had streams of sweat pouring off his brow as he humped away on those doors. I figured the guy was possessed.

“Hey Max,” he’d say as he pushed the steel wool … “Do you know Jesus?”

It put me off at first, but I went along with him because, I had to admit, it was fun. “Yes, I know Jesus.”

“If you know Jesus like I know Jesus you’ll sing along with me!” At this juncture he would break into song, “I’ve got a mansion… up over the hillside…” as he worked away. It was infectious and made the work go by.

When the gee-dunk wagon pulled up we took our morning break. We pulled up chairs to one of the doors on horses and put our feet up on it. Skip asked, “Where are you staying?”

“I was on a boat in the harbor a few nights, but I stayed at the Mission last night.”

“Do you plan on stickin’ around?”

“Sure,” I wanted to tell Skip about the feeling I had for Santa Barbara but held off on it. “I’ve been on the Street for over a year now and would like to… well, you know.”

Almost as soon as I finished saying that, he offered, “You can use the couch at my place ‘til we get paid. Then try the Barbara Hotel or the Virginia... you can get a room at one of those.”

“Thanks, I appreciate…” I lit up a cigarette.

“Oh yeah, you can’t smoke or drink at our place… my wife won’t put up with smokin’.”

 “I’m wantin’ to quit smoking anyway…”

Glen laughed, “No, you aren’t.”

I was taken aback and a bit pissed, “What?”

Glen spoke from behind his newspaper, “If you really wanted to quit, you would have.”

"I quit a few times," I tried to explain. “But I always pick it up after a month or two.”

“Then you didn’t quit.” Glen put his head back behind the front page.

“Well, do you know any ju-jitsu that works on smoking?”

“What do you think Skip?” Glen put the paper down on his lap.

“Ask God to do it and,” Skip bit into an apple, and chewing as he spoke, he added, “… and act like He did.”

I was beginning to regret coming to work at this damned place… with these nut cases… but I wasn’t about to let them out-saint me. “Okay, later.”

“Ain’t no better time than now, brother,” Skip insisted.

“Unless that Bible you tote around is just a prop, I believe you can do it, Max.” Glen tried to be encouraging but he came off as just one more self-righteous turd who didn’t understand.

Work went well enough after that. I was grateful to have a job but resented being leaned on about smoking the first day. I just buried my head in the work and went home with Skip (only a few blocks away) where I had use of the couch. Skip’s wife, Linda, was a waifish looking girl about six months along. She didn’t look all that pleased at what Skip had dragged home. They had some sort of argument in the bedroom. The first evening I could hear a word or two through the walls, “… enough for ourselves…” and “You could’ve let me know…” and so on. I was just about ready to put my stuff back in my bag and head out the door when they came out of the bedroom.

Linda offered graciously, “Forgive me, you must want to wash-up: there’s an extra towel on the sink for you. If you want to use the shower you’ll have to wait ‘til after dinner and let the water heater do its thing,” She showed no sign of dissatisfaction with Skip.

They prayed before dinner. It reminded me of the Mormons at Altamont. I recalled well how much warmth and comfort it added to an otherwise awkward situation. Skip leaned into prayer much like he leaned into his work. I half expected him to break out in a sweat while praying an improvised medley of thanksgiving ending up with the Lord’s Prayer.

That night I lay on the couch hearing the speakers to the Jack ‘n the Box across the street screeching out greetings and taking orders at the drive-through thinking it would be nice to have a faithful wife and family… a modest living and a modest place to put one’s head. Glen and Skip were about the same age as me but seemed so much more… more grown-up. Glen was a year older and Skip was two years younger.

I also wondered about this Jesus business. Why did God have to have a name? Why did these guys insist that Jesus was the only way to God? I read the Bible and tried to decipher it like it was written in an obscure code. Jesus talked about God being his father but also called God, “Our Father". It seemed strange to me that this slipped through the censorship of church doctrine jumping through hoops to explain how three manifestations of God were one big daddy monotheistic one and all those changes over the almost seventeen hundred years since Constantine. Granted, some of the stuff seemed like it was dealing with doctrinal matters and, frankly, a long way from the spirit of other statements in the Sermon on the Mount. Christ spoke more of the spirit of the law, rather than the letter of the law, when he insisted before the Pharisees, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of man is lord, even of the Sabbath.”

Truthfully, all I really knew of this stuff was what I’d experienced so far. I’d needed help back on the beach in Waikiki. I got that help and forgot about it after Altamont. I found a connection in New Mexico again and forgot about it after Jamaica. I had thrown up my arms on Channing Way and Dana in Berkeley, and something happened on the beach in Santa Barbara. I could not deny this experience. How then could I hold on to this wonder… this apocalypse of my own?

The answer seemed quite simple to me at the time. Skip and Glen went to church. They went to church three times every Sundays. They went to church on Wednesdays, they went to church on Friday night, Saturday night and even choir practice on Mondays. Thursday night was left empty but Skip held prayer meetings at his place on Thursday evenings. The prayer meetings were phenomena of their own… not like anything I’d ever seen in church. We were all young men and women of mixed race… some from the church and others from the streets. We stood in a circle and held hands; then one after another started praying in tongues around the circle.  As the praying reached a crescendo people would break into what they called “dancing in the Spirit”. It was a spontaneous affair that was barely ritualistic.

Speaking in tongues was interesting. They all swore it was the spirit speaking through them. I was to notice after I'd been around a variety of congregations, the each had its own style... meaning they picked it up from each other and that was the spirit to me. The spirit of the circle... the church. Black churches had shouts and exclamations of, “Shee-ky-nah!” etc. White churches... well... you know… it was a homogenized, “la-la-la.” Saccharin ad nauseum.

The prayer group mostly came from the Bethel Church of God in Christ at the corner of Cota and Haley. The minister there was a West Texas black man named Jesse Cordova. He preached poetry from the pulpit, splicing together scripture and metaphor with the ease of a figure skater. The choir, led by Norton, rocked to his bidding as Willy (Norton’s gay lover) played a piano that was nothing less than inspired. The church was incredibly small, but it took on the dimensions of the Notre Dame… tambourines accompanying shouts of ecstatic glee echoing from the pews the fervor of the pulpit. Old women and old men… lifted up… up out of their seats and jumped… jumped for joy! It was a Holy Rollin’, tongues speakin’, Holy Ghost revival of the Spirit that was downright healing.

I could see the history of centuries of oppression… horrible oppression lifted… and all by these immigrants of the thirties to fifties Deep South lynching and murderous prejudice from places like Mississippi and Alabama. The old folks there welcomed us; young, tweaked-out, white kids, like we were their own children lost to the ravages of drugs and alcohol. I had never seen anything like it… not before or since then. I can attest to the spirit of Black Pentecostal churches… nothing seemed choreographed like the white congregations. The preaching built up to a crescendo of ecstatic syncopated African driving tambourine rhythms with or without drums and electronic amps… the rejuvenating spirit that came from the hearts of all who could let go of themselves and the spirit in the little congregation, though we too were a mixed bag of races and social class, wasn't at all like the cultish fever of "Father's” in Ukiah, where the minister was worshiped as God’s prophet in his own right. Although the Reverend Cordova was highly respected and honored, his anointing came as he preached, and otherwise, he was just another man of God and he was free to admit it... no better or worse than any other.

The mainstream churches around Santa Barbara leaned towards traditional religion defined by whatever denomination they belonged to. A new movement, however, that was sweeping through Southern California, were non-denominational congregations. It was the charismatic movement that had finally risen from the realm of snake charmers, or Oral Roberts type faith healing, to the disenfranchised middle-class. It had taken off from the poor white trash and black sectarian Pentecostal Churches of the Deep South and made inroads into white suburbia… or, in this case, sophisticated Santa Barbara.

One such congregation held its meetings at a large venue on Victoria and Chapala. I observed, “This is a Pat Boone, double-knit polyester, Charismatic Christianity, compared to the Little Richards style Rock n’ Roll Charisma of the Church of God in Christ. Folks even spoke in tongues whitely-politely. There’s no Dancing in the Spirit… at least not like the folks at the store-front churches of South-Central LA.

What they did, resembled a kind of group hypnotism… holding the hands up and waving them in unison… with perfect blow-dry hair and make-up speaking in tongues in four-part harmony. Oh… and the preaching… the choir… perfectly homogenized… saccharine buttery-speech flowed from the preacher’s lips with honey dipped sincerity… and, of course, the preacher was called Doctor and held a Doctor of Divinity from a mail-order ministry of some sort.

I took a room at the Traveler’s Hotel next to the Virginia on Haley Street. I went to work, went to church, and even sang in the choir. On my time off, I went with the others to share the message of redemption at the honor farm at the jail and Los Prietos Juvenile facility. We went down to the stop-lights on the highway on Saturday mornings, where I had found my hat with its five-dollar redemption, and we hauled hapless hitch-hiking hippie-burn-outs to a pancake breakfast hosted by the church.

Reverend Cordova decided to start a Christian drug rehab like another that had been established a year before up on Arrellaga Street, the Drug Abuse and Prevention Center. His was an old Victorian house at the corner of Haley and Chapala. He called it Casa De Vida: The House of Life. Once that was set-up everyone pitched in together to make it work. While we worked together the boys got closer to the girls and that chemistry worked its magic. During this period Skip and Linda were the only ones actually married even though they were younger than the others by a year or two. Skip was even made an Elder of the Church. The dynamic of young people pairing-off infused an energy into the enterprise that would not have been there otherwise. One by one all the available young women and men paired-off, got married and started setting up households for themselves.

I was not to be numbered among these even though I tried hard to play the role of a good Christian. I cut my hair, shaved my beard, and wore double-knit polyester suits to church. I even quit smoking. I quit because of a bad cold and cough and couldn’t smoke, more than for any other reason. After a week of that I figured I might as well white-knuckle it and quit altogether. I then went through a period of fasting and praying, hoping God would be impressed.

Giving up on impressing God, I turned my attention to finding a woman. Marriage too would mean something… progress in real terms, normalcy of some sort… but my prayers were to no avail. I knew the truth that a rapist wasn’t much of a catch. I kept that fact a secret to myself and halfway forgot about it. I began thinking God barred me from any intimacy with a woman. Beside, I didn’t know how to dress or act as a normal Christian and went overboard with it. Even in my polyester suit my appearance was more like that of an escapee from a funny farm than anything any woman would want to marry. Unlike Skip, no one was going to trust me with a position of authority in the church and I was, after all, only another flipped-out ex-acid-head laborer.

Rehab houses for burnt-out hippies were a rare item in the early seventies. The alternatives to the Salvation Army and the Rescue Mission were places run by cults such as; The People's Temple in San Francisco and Ukiah, Tony and Sue Alamos Ranches in Southern California, the Brotherhood of the Sun in the hills above Santa Barbara, the Children of God communes… and a little later, the Moonies. A plethora of pay-as-you-go programs were gradually replacing the old models of rehab. The old-models, like the Mish and the Sally, were the sing-for-your-supper missions. Their whole focus was primarily street-level wet-brain winos. Once government regulations required insurance companies to treat alcoholism and drug addiction as a disease, the pay-as-you-go rehabs became profitable. To his credit, Reverend Cordova was spiritually-evolved and wasn’t inclined to take advantage of his position and make a cult out of Casa De Vida.

 Still, all of this church business and rehab put me in line for expanding my horizons and, while at work one day, I broached the subject of education with Glen. Glen responded more enthusiastically than I had thought he would when I commented during our morning break, “I’d like to go to City College… Take some courses, you know, but I’m not sure how to go about it."

 “City College is cheap: Two bucks a semester and you’ve got G.I. Bill coming, don’t you?”

“I guess so.” I had thought of going to school, but I had no idea what it was that I wanted to study.

“Look,” Glen offered, “You don’t have to declare a major right away.”

“Well, I’d like to study something. But I can’t see how that would help me make a living.”

“You ought to do it before you find a woman to settle down with anyway,” Glen raised an eyebrow, “You haven’t been doing so well in that category, at any rate, have you?”