I had to go. I was trying to save my life. I left Vacaville in a Volkswagen bus that I’d
bought from good friends but never completely paid for. I was glad to be headed
out of that town where cocaine and cocaine whores had become the regular fare.
After a while I began to see that there were very few people beside Ralph and
me that smoked pot at all. Staying up all night, doing lines until all of it
was gone, was what most of the women I’d met were doing. Art was usually what
saved my soul in hard times but cocaine and Jack Daniels had taken its place. I
no longer cared about art and only dreamed about getting my beloved Muse back.
The Muse was a goddess so real to me that she was once a vivid companion. She
just went away from me along with Celeste, Ariel, and the two dogs and I
couldn’t, for all my efforts, get her back. Evidently, I had packed her up and
sent her away without being aware of what the fuck I’d done.
Santa Monica was where most of my old art
contacts from the prison job lived and worked. I went there knowing I no longer
had anything going for me in Santa Barbara but had to get away from the
spiritual morass of Vacaville. All of my old friends in Santa Barbara were
Celeste’s friends and I could see, after a few awkward visits with them, that
they were more her friends than mine. I’d vague hopes of re-igniting the fires
of creation in Santa Monica and my relationship with a curator, Myra, provided
an apartment to sub-let while she went on a curator’s tour of the galleries and
museums of Europe. Myra was the only affair I had before my marriage
disintegrated. I’d met Myra at a conference for the California Arts in
Corrections that she had helped organize. She was connected to arts groups in
Santa Monica and I hoped that she would be helpful in sparking the muse…
getting me going again.
Myra was a curator of souls and a social
dynamo. She’d gathered about herself an eclectic assortment of friends that met
every Saturday between Labor Day and Memorial Day on the beach at David and
Michael’s beach blanket. It was too crowded on the sand during the summer
months, so, during that season, the beach was ceded to the tourists.
David and Michael were the central figures of
what we dubbed, The Beach Committee. The Beach Committee was Myra’s masterpiece
into which she drew in and welcomed a select group of iconoclasts. David
supplied the wry wit and easy laughs along with a host of stories that painted
a picture of Hollywood and Santa Monica from the fifties and sixties. Michael
had a knack for making sure everyone was attended to and comfortable. He worked
well with David as a co-host of this casual assortment of friends ranging as
much in age as in interests, political opinions, and occupations. Their beach
blanket, umbrella, and canvas windbreaker signaled that the meetings could
commence regularly every Saturday morning around ten am. There, we would sit in
the sun and sand with Scrabble, and perhaps, hidden away from the beach
patrols, some wine with pot as one after another friend dropped by. After a day
at the beach several of us would either go to the Fish Enterprise to eat
oysters, or, a few would retire to David and Michael’s place up high in the
Santa Monica Shores rent-controlled apartments situated right there on the
beach. This was the real treat of the day because David and Michael knew how to
whip together a feast in the most casual but fantastic manner. There was no
fuss about it and it was obvious that the meal was prepared the way it was
because they loved so much the whole process.
Any topic could be breached in the open agenda
of these gatherings. Very rarely were there any arguments, even though at times
our disagreements were around politics; local and national. The easy-going
accord of this odd fellowship had nothing to do with whether or not we agreed
at all times. It was more important that we respected each other. This group
could boast of having among us a Log Cabin Young Republican gay intern from the
Getty Museum in Malibu, an ex-Maoist, and everything between those extremes.
Most were at that age where careers were getting started or actively working on
doing so: graduate students; interns in some arts or arts related field, and so
on. Myra was actively working as a curator for a variety of arts groups. David
and Michael were like the mom and dad of the group as they already were
established in their careers. Michael did some commercial photography and David
was an interior designer. Laura was a transvestite black jack dealer from
Vegas. Annabella was a sculptress who played around with Kirilian photography
(you put your hand on an electrified copper plate and, voila! a print comes out
of it showing the hand’s aura). Tony was Annabella’s boyfriend, an ex-Detroit
Lions linebacker, who now drove cab. Susan, David’s secretary, also did some
hand modeling and whose claim to fame (though she never mentioned it) was a
part in a hippy-cult-movie.
Santa Monica was full of the energy of promise
at first. I moved into Myra’s apartment on Ashland between 2nd and 3rd Streets.
The Circle Bar was down on Main Street a block or two away. I had filed for
unemployment before leaving Vacaville so I wasn’t completely destitute.
Compared to Vacaville, Santa Monica was sexy, alive and vibrant. The people I
met were all doing something creative and actively opening-up their dreams. I
felt that I would explode with energy once I got settled in… found a studio and
so on. I put all of my stuff from the VW in storage knowing in my heart that
this was the place I belonged and that it was really going to happen for me
there. However, when Myra came back from Europe, she would have nothing of
having a housemate and I had to start living in the VW van. I hadn’t used the
opportunity of having her place while she was gone, so that was that. She did
allow me to use her shower and share her bed on occasion but that wasn’t going
to last.
The estrangement from Ariel and Celeste’s
persistent denial and obstruction of any kind of visitation, was a constant
obsession when I first arrived in Santa Monica. People compassionately listened
but eventually, when it became all I talked about, as Celeste continued to
become more rigidly opposed to my efforts, people began telling me out-front
that they tired of hearing about it. Annabella would say each time I brought up
the subject in her presence, “Be careful what you think, Max, thoughts have
density. Be careful what you say, words also have density.” So, I tucked it in
and stopped talking about it but the inner dialogue still festered.
I usually brought along a Tarot Deck and did
readings for everyone. Only a few were actually “New-Agers”, so prevalent in
Santa Monica/Venice. Many of the folks I’d met there were open-mindedly
skeptical but it was hard to be in that beach culture without becoming
acquainted with someone actively participating in one or all of these: regular
psychic readings; some past-life regression therapy; consulting someone for
color, crystal or aura, appraisal; a session of acupuncture/pressure;
conversant on topics related to astrology-numerology-palmistry; sleeping with
mood appropriate crystals on their bed stands; spending some time as a Rajneesh
groupie, or having a few years of Nicherin Buddhist chanting under their belt.
Shirley MacLaine’s autobiography, Out On A Limb, was damned near required
reading in some circles. Scientology and T.M. still had a few advocates but it
was somewhat passé and not so widely accepted as the potpourri of spiritual
toys available to the ever so fickle and gullible on the boardwalk of Venice.
Not surprisingly, because of the epileptic
experience, I bought into some of the Ooogah-Boogah of it out of desperation to
find some kind of order in my life… to make sense out of the enforced
estrangement from Ariel. But, if I would have been truthful, it was mostly a
ploy to work the crowd. Even so, I didn’t do a heavy hustle on these people. I
flat-out warned them that I didn’t use the cards to predict their future or
anything like that. I supposedly used the cards as a random tool for
introspection and meditation. It was uncanny how hard it was to get this point
across. People still read into anything I might have said, as I flipped the
cards, to be somehow predictive and accredited me with the outcome. The only
one out of that crowd that didn’t buy into it was Susan. It was impossible to
do a reading for her because she interrupted the flow with her questions before
I could snap-to with the answers.
Myra saw me going nowhere and arranged one last
night to part in harmony and to terminate our affair with one of those now familiar,
we have to talk, pronouncements.
New Year’s Eve of 1984 Myra and I lounged on a
bed in the living room of David and Michael’s apartment on the tenth floor
where we were served caviar and champagne by our generous hosts into the wee
hours. We had a good last night together. I still clung to the belief that
creatively my life might be turned around. The year to come would be a creative
year but not one I would have expected or even imagined.
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