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26 Bed of metamorphosis. Our bed was once Joel’s, purchased with Gale at a big indoor flea market on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, just a few blocks from where Richard lived. It was a water bed, and on one of the pieces of plywood that formed the foundation for the mattress was written in red marker Natural enviorments only—a sign of passion in manufacture and of confusion in spelling. The plywood was supported by four lengths of pressboard, each notched in the middle so that two pieces, laid on edge, slid into one another to form an X. Four longer pieces of pressboard, painted black, made the outer base, and then on top was set a heavy frame of thick, rough-hewn pine, darkly stained, with a Spanish tile inlaid on the headboard and another on the footboard. It all came apart and went back together again. Joel and Gale hauled the bed up to Santa Barbara, where they were students at the university and later joint dropouts from it. It was their bed, and they lay down in it together in the small house at 1635 San Andres Street. “We’ve finally got our waterbed inflated and slept-upon,” Joel wrote with a tone of domestic pleasure.8 But their residence in the house together was brief. When Joel and Gale faltered, she left the bed behind, and she was 8 Letter, August 28, 1973. 27 uninvolved in its disposition. Stained with dark loss, it became anathema to Joel. He did not want to be reminded of aborted love, and he pushed the bed out the door and onto another sea. It passed to Richard and traveled back to Sherman Oaks. Joel, for the rest of his days, slept on a fold-up couch. Richard took the bed with him from home to home, California and Northwest, Appalachia and Midwest. It was still our bed during Joel’s last visit, when he helped move it back into the bedroom after new carpet was installed. ...

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