Rena on the beach at night – alone

It is 3:00 A.M. in the morning at the pier in Venice Beach California. It’s been twelve hours since she saw her boyfriend being chased down the boardwalk by a half-dozen muscle men that he called a name. She waited hours for him to come back. She saw the muscle men come back, but she dare not ask what became of him. She had no way of knowing he was in the hospital.

If Rena had gone down and sat on the sand, as it began to grow dark, she went up and sat in one of the bars. What money she had, got spent.

She dare not go back to the apartment she and her lover were staying at because the occupants had taken LSD, and were being rude and extremely suggestive. The two men that took her and her boyfriend in, were considering raping Rena, now that he was not there to protect her.

I am sure as Rena sat in the bar nursing a cola, some older guys put the make on her, tried to pick her up. She turned them down. When the bar closed, she took refuge in the recessed doorway. Christine, Michael, and I did not see her on our way to the end of the pier.

Rena dare not make a collect call to her grandmother in Nebraska for she would become extremely alarmed. What could she do at this late hour. Except for these three people, she had not seen anyone for an hour.

Then, she saw me stop about a hundred yards on the pier. She saw the young couple continue walking. She watched me. She studied me as I looked down on the crashing waves. There we were, alone, on the beach, at night. This beautiful young girl was never more afraid, never more convinced she would die.

* * *

When I was sixteen, Marilyn came and found me and had me go with her. She took me down a hall at our high school where they had a display case. There were works of art and some photographs. There was a young man standing on the sand looking out to sea. He was wearing a peacoat.

“Is that you?” Marilyn asked.
I studied it, then recalled a young man who came up to me while I doing my meditation and asked if he could take a photograph. I loved the ocean. I found sanctuary here with Marilyn, and then with Melinda.
“Yes. That’s me.”

I was famous for my seascapes. I could do one in six hours. I never knew what they would look like. After posting Walt Whitman’s poem, it came back to me. It was not Marilyn I was saying goodbye to, but Melinda, my second girlfriend. A week after her father threatened to kill me, we came down to the beach at night. She was very distraught. She could not bear to be in the same house with her father because he had her first lover killed, and had wanted me dead.

I unbuttoned my peacoat and invited her to lie on a wing of it on the sand. I clutched her tightly to me as she sobbed. I felt her warm tears roll down my neck. I had just talked her out of walking north up the beach to her friends she said she had in San Fransisco. They were Beat types, like Sky, who was found dead with his beautiful face erased with a blow-torch. Melinda’s father sent two guys after this Venice Beat who was in love with his sixteen year old daughter.

I applied all my love, all my art, all my poetry, all the beauty I owned, in my search for a solution. I had just turned seventeen. I had no job, no money, no home of my own, and no power.

“What do you want me to do – kill him?”

There was silence but for the crashing waves. Melinda’s sobbing, had stopped.

A week later, Melinda walked away from me. Four months later, she disappeared. She had become Christine’s best friend. It was my sister who answered the firs call from Melinda’s father who told her I was a dead man. According to Melinda, her father and uncle were members of the Purple Gang.

* * *

When I saw Christine and Michael coming back from their walk to the end of the pier, I started walked back to my little sister’s apartment. That’s when Rena sprang out of the door towards me.

“Can I walk with you?”

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/daughter-of-the-purple-gang/