A Memory of my Time in California
Kimberly: A great, strange woman
It is time for me to begin composing my memoir. As I have no intention of making this a chronological account, I will start in California. Up until I write these stories down, they are just oral history. Some of the tales are lost to my failing memory, some are embellished. Some I could swear happened, but didn’t.
But its not so long ago that I went to California. I moved out there toward the end of my 26th year. I had lived in California before, but it had always been in Southern California, either in Boot Camp at San Diego, or in the High Desert east of Palm Springs, but always as a member of the military. But this time it was different.
In May of 2003, after concluding business in Spearfish, I hit the road to Sebastopol, CA, which is a little idyllic spot just outside of the Bohemian Grove of Redwoods in Sonoma County. I landed in Sebastopol sometime around the 15th or so of May, proceeded to meet up with my old friend, Dan who had moved out there the fall before, and then hung out. I crashed out on the couch at his place, which was actually owned by a lady named Mary who was out of town. I bummed around for a couple days, we played Go in the Apple orchard across the driveway, and I got to know the area.
Soon, Mary returned home, and when she saw the homeless dude crashing out on her couch on her porch, she put the kibosh to it. Apparently, the extra room in her house that I had believed I would be renting was to go to her daughter, a girl who drove a french fry oil VW (there are such things… they are called bio-diesel. This was, of course the first time I had ever heard of one of those, but they got them in Cali.) I was to move out immediately… Mary didn’t know me- you can’t really blame her for her reaction… but when I asked if I could camp out on her lawn, she told me I could for one night then I had to hit the road. So I borrowed Dan’s tent and pitched it in the yard.
Our friend Mike was also in town for a while. I suppose he was wandering then too… We met up, and stayed on Mary’s property one night, and then moved on to a state camp nearby where we camped, illegally for a night or two, before Mike headed out. I decided that I wouldn’t be camping illegally at the State Park anymore- Apparently, raccoons liked to get into my food, and I wasn’t exactly sitting on a pile of money to get more. All I really had left food wise was some junk food anyway. So here I was, with a little money, a car filled with all my belongings in the world, a borrowed tent, and some junk food. Also- since I had only been in California for less than a week, I had no job.
We asked some friends if they had any crash space- for one reason or another they all said no, they didn’t. So I went over to Santa Rosa, the main city in the area, about 10 miles east, and looked up the homeless shelter. At least I wouldn’t be sleeping on the street… I went in and asked about the place, and they told me, “Well, you have to come back after 5. We don’t open until then. We’ll give you a meal, and you can stay in for the service, and then we close up at 11, and you have to be inside by then or you can’t come in…” And I thought- Jesus… so this is what homeless folks put up with every day… It was quite patronizing, really.
I drove back over to Sebastopol, planning to burn a few hours. I met up with Dan, explained what I was looking at, and talked about work. Eventually, I would hear through the grapevine that this one kid was quitting his job at the gas station and moving on. When I found out that the gas station he worked at was like a block away, I skedaddled over there and informed the manager that their guy had quit and I wanted his job. They basically confirmed with the dude that he quit, and I was hired on the spot. I would work at the gas station for all of two and a half weeks before getting a better job, but meanwhile, it was money.
I think this happened the same day, but I might have gotten the job the next day. At any rate, this day that I was burning daylight waiting for the shelter to open, I was talking to Dan about my situation. He was sympathetic. And so he said, “Man, why don’t you just camp in the Redwoods?” And I, being me, must have mentioned that I was worried about trespassing and such. But one of the benefits of knowing Dan is that he knows people. While Dan had lived in California, he had developed a number of friendships and associations with the people of the town. Dan either knew everyone, or he knew people who would eventually know just about everyone in the town. So he said to me: “Look, man, I got this friend. Kim. She’s good people. She has pink hair. Let’s go talk to her.”
We walked down the street, and went into this art shop, right next to a cookie store (Sebastopol had a pretty funky downtown area… it was very hippieish…) He introduced me to Kim, and sure enough, Kim had this wild, curly bright pink hair. Dan said, “Kim, this is my friend Doc, Doc, this is my friend Kim…” He must have mentioned that Kim had a place up in the forest, and I must have asked her if she would mind too much if I camped on her property somewhere. I probably promised her I would stay out of her way, and she wouldn’t even know I was there, but I just needed a place to camp out where I wouldn’t be bothering anyone and where I wouldn’t get into any trouble.
Kimberly was a remarkable woman. She is a mystical kind of person- she is into a lot of really bizarre things. She maintained that her daughter was a fairy. She had two dogs, Arwyn and Frodo. She grew up in a cult in Indiana, she taught me to appreciate the tarot, and when she wasn’t working at the art store, she occasionally danced in a cage. She is awesome, and while she does some things which I don’t fully understand, I still have this amazement when I think of Kim. She really is one of a kind.
Kim took one look at me and did me one better than my rather simple request. Under the guise of “Any friend of Dan’s is a friend of mine,” but I think more like because she is a good and generous person, Kim let me camp out right across the road from her house (so the dogs wouldn’t mess with me and my stuff, in a place which was right next to wild berry bushes which I gleaned daily). But she also gave me a key to her house, and told me I could use her kitchen every night, and her shower as often as I needed it. She didn’t charge me anything at all. She just let me live there. I wouldn’t have to stay at the shelter that night. And Kim earned my never ending gratitude for taking me in.
The house in the picture at the top of this post was Kim’s house in the forest. She painted the entire inside to look like it was covered in vines. The house itself was as verdant on the inside as the forest paradise around it outside. Kim’s house was fairly small- It was one bedroom which she and her daughter shared, plus a kitchen, this awesome living room and a bathroom.
Kim was such a fantastic host! Occasionally, she let me cook for her. And we watched movies together from time to time (I never seen Benny and Joon before, for example.) We conversed about music (She hated Oasis? But liked the Cocteau Twins) I told her why I cared about socialism, and she told me why I should care about Willie Brown’s role in 9–11 (Look it up…) Kim had parakeets and a talking parrot that used to yell at her, and she would yell back… It was a hoot!
In my borrowed tent, I had a great setup. It was supposedly a 2 person tent, but I am a big guy, so I had my bed roll in there with enough room to keep a light for reading at night. I used an overhead zipper to hold onto a little mini transistor radio that I listened to overnight, when it was peaceful in the forest, and you only heard the wind blowing through the trees. It got very dark out there at night, but Kim lived at the end of a road, so there were never cars through there at all. If I needed to take a leak at night, I just hopped out of the tent and went off into the woods a bit… If it rained, the canopy above kept the tent from getting anything but a fine mist and a couple drops, which were more soothing than bothersome. And just about every morning, as my alarm was going off at about 6:30, the radio was faithfully playing “Band on the Run” by Wings… I must have heard that song more than a dozen times in the two months I stayed out in that beautiful garden.
Well- as happens, all nice things have got to come to an end… My time in Kim’s yard lasted until the beginning of July. In late June, Kim started seeing The Magician, Ron, who actually was a magician who wandered around Sebastopol performing street magic for the various denizens of the town and anyone else who happened to wander into his path. Ron was a middle aged guy who, at the very least, dyed his hair black, and maybe even straightened it. He LOVED to blast Neil Diamond out of Kim’s house while she was away, especially when he knew I was outside in the tent, annoyed by his petty prickishness. I had a distinct sensation that the Magician did not like the fact that I was staying in Kim’s yard.
As for me, I was making a little more money now, having left the Gas Station two weeks after starting there, and getting one of my favorite jobs of all time- moving books between the book warehouse at Copperfield’s Book Store in Sebastopol and the various stores in the system. I drove three hundred miles a week, and really got strong. I loved that work, but decided that I should move to a house where I could use my computer at night, instead of using the one at the library. I eventually moved to Santa Rosa and bid farewell to Kim’s house, the tent and my time in the Bohemian Grove.
One of the last times I stopped up, probably to return Kim’s key to her, I found her on the phone. Apparently the power company had cut off her power. She had been on a cost reduction program of some sort, and got power at her place for a significantly reduced price. But the power company had taken her off the program and didn’t tell her. And the power company then shut off her power for not paying the full amount. She was heated, that they had cut her power off, that they had not told her that she had been taken off the program, that she owed them so much money and didn’t even know that.
She laid into the power company people, demanding to talk to supervisor after supervisor, and not being satisfied. She said to one person “You probably voted for George Bush, I bet” and then, apparently, it was revealed that the lady on the other end of that insult actually admitted to it, to Kim, over the phone, which just pissed her off even more.
When the power company finally hung up on Kim (!), and she was super anrgy, I, who had witnessed this entire event, asked her what I could do for her. She told me, “nothing-” the power company just wanted something like 220 dollars from her and she didn’t have anything like that, and they weren’t going to turn her power back on until she paid that, and all her food was going to spoil, and how was she supposed to feed her daughter, and all of this. Kim was in tears. So I told her that I could help her now that I was making some money, and drove into town and got the money for her power, to get it turned back on. I just counted it as rent she never would have even considered collecting from me.
To this day, I would give Kimberly ten times that, if I have it. Without even thinking about it. I still appreciate her that much, and will count Kim as my sister for the rest of my life.
PS: This was, and will forever be, my morning song.
