Back then, I believed I could write anywhere, living with anyone, but was discovering in Vegas the fallacy of that notion. It did matter where I was and who I was with. It's like one absorbs by osmosis something of the person one is cohabiting with, and the ambiance of place where one is living. In Vegas with Odessa, I'd made countless aborted starts on a novel I was trying to write. Frustration.
I called Beverly Mitchell—we'd met previously in New York—and asked if she'd like to do a Vegas vacation. Bev was from Texas. She'd won a scholarship to an expensive Northeastern women's college where she'd majored in journalism and graduated with honors. The previous summer, on a lark, she and I had taken a 32-foot cabin cruiser from New York to Miami. Off the North Carolina coast, as we approached Frying Pan Shoals, we'd encountered huge waves that had been kicked up by a hurricane which had veered out to sea. To avoid capsizing, we had to steer southeast directly into these monsters and make it over the treacherous shoal that extended about 20 miles out from Cape Fear, in a network from 3 to 15 feet deep. In calm seas, whitecaps indicate shallows as you approach the shoals. On this day, we found ourselves facing waves that looked skyscraper high. We then had to turn northwest and surf into the inlet. Humungous waves picked the boat up from behind and rushed us forward, then dumped us into a trough, from which we chug-chugged up the back side of the next wave, to be surfed forward again, hoping we didn't pitch-pole and drown. The interior of the cabin was soon waist-deep in sea water, the galley and table splintered, utensils scattered. Near the inlet, we passed other small craft that had run aground, but there was no way we could help—we were all helpless in the clutches of a murderous storm. For a couple of hours, we were sure we were fish food. While I steered from inside the cabin, Bev kept an eye on waves approaching our stern to make sure we were correctly angled. We finally found the harbor and water calm enough to drop anchor and collapsed into fear-haunted sleep.
Besides having shared this near-death experience, I felt at home with Bev. She was an excellent copy editor, a skill any writer values. With her, my writing output improved and we were soon launched, by tacit agreement, on a trial marriage.
When the Vegas divorce from Millie came through and I was free to leave Nevada, I bought a car and Bev and I packed up and drove to Los Angeles. Should we move there, or back to New York? Strolling Sunset Strip one Saturday night in the mid-sixties, fascinated by the swelling numbers of counterculture people, we stopped at a sidewalk café and found ourselves surrounded by astrologers talking shop. Astrology was a total mystery to me then, although I'd been “educated” to “know” it was a lot of Chinese fortune cookie nonsense. I thought I might explore it as a phenomenon in an article, or maybe use it in a novel, so I asked someone at a nearby table where I could go to learn about it. I was referred to a lady who gave classes in her home three nights a week. Thus began a study that was to last the rest of my life. I had no interest in doing personal charts—what came to fascinate me were correlations between planetary and economic cycles.
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