"Raining On My Pillow"

A song demo from 1998

One winter evening, while I was still living in Southern California without a car (unthinkable!), I took two buses to a music club on 14th Street in Santa Monica to meet with some friends. At the end of the night, none of them was interested in giving me a ride home after the show ("too far out of the way"). So, I walked 16 blocks to the bus station near Wilshire Boulevard on Ocean Avenue. Standing there after midnight, alone, I felt a couple of rain drops and I knew this was not going to a fun night. El Niño 1997-1998 — the worst of all El Niños on record — had begun.

El Niño looked like this.

As rain fell from the sky like buckets full of water being successively poured through a giant sieve, I struggled to read the bus schedule: It showed that one more bus would be coming shortly. I waited, and waited, and waited. I was shivering intensely, and trying to breathe was almost like being under water. After nearly two hours, during which time there had only been one bus the entire time — going in the opposite direction I needed — a taxi drove by and I literally jumped out into the flooded street to wave it down. The driver stopped. He rolled down the window and asked where I was going. "Venice," I shouted over the din of torrential rain, "but I only have seven dollars." He was gracious and urgently motioned to me: “Get in! The rain is pouring into my car!”

A normally 10-minute drive at that time of night took half an hour due to the incomprehensible amount of unrelenting, unrepentant rain creating streets that were like miniatures of the Colorado River, famous for its white-water rafting adventures.

He stopped on the street outside my guest house, which was behind a gated solid wood fence. I told him that I had more money inside and I would gather whatever I found and bring it to him. Shaking from being cold and wet, I scrounged another seven bucks plus change from my secret place (and yes, Mark Bisone, I was willing to sacrifice my *two* gifted $2 bills as part of that stash). But when I went back out to the street, the driver had left. Perhaps he went to rescue another damsel in distress.

Once I was locked safely inside my teeny-tiny guest house, I cranked up the heat and took a very long, very hot shower. I poured myself a glass of red wine, and snuggled with my Persian cat, Jazz. He had always been quite sensitive with regard to my overall state of being, and that night, he did his fuzzy best to keep me warm and feeling loved.

Jazz, “The Worlds’ Most Perfect Cat,” in a typical, intentional, sexy pose. (Rest in peace, Bubba.)

But the shivering — like the rain — did not stop.

Within two days, I became very sick. Both breathing and moving were extremely painful. I couldn't work. I couldn't exercise or make music. I had no appetite. To make matters worse, the constant rain eventually made its way through holes in the old roof, was leaking in three places into my little home. And this wasn’t a slow drip, drip, drip: It was more like a faucet running uninterrupted on the lowest pressure setting. One leak was above my bed, so I had to place a pan on top of the mattress to catch the water — and I needed to empty the pan about every hour. So, for fear of overturning the water pan on the corner of the mattress and unleashing the insane wetness into my every realm, I was getting even less sleep than in my then-normal (abnormal) state of sickness — despite being in bed almost constantly, under like 12 blankets. Okay, five blankets. And a big Persian cat.

Then, at long last, I fell into a very deep sleep, with Jazz curled next to my tummy as I lay perfectly still (so as not to disturb the rain-catch pan) under five or twelve heavy blankets. In the dark of night — as if in some kind of film noire — loud thunder crashed and lightning flashed, as if the sky itself had finally cracked open. The sound of the rain hitting my tiny roof was unbelievably loud, like death metal drumming. I was wide awake from my sickened stuporous slumber, wondering if my little house would slip off its foundation and go floating down to the Mighty Pacific Ocean.

Eventually (was it an hour or much longer? I don’t recall), the deafening noise subsided and “normal” El Niño rain continued. I heard a strange, surreal sound in the living room, like soft mallets hitting tiny timpani. I carefully moved Jazz off the bed and slowly emerged from my delicate “don’t move the water pan” cocoon. I shuffled into the next room and saw the visual horror begetting that bizarre tone:

It was the oddly melodic, metallic yet deeply wooden sound of raindrops falling onto the strings of my only guitar as it rested in its stand.

I found this image in a search for “rain falling on a guitar.” The only attribution I saw was “dvcreator.” I enhanced the original image, using ON1 Effects, to make it feel more appropriate for my unique circumstances.

Then, as if even more water was called for — and as if I actually had my own water to waste — I cried, and cried, and cried.

At some point following the weak weeping, I found a dry towel (where in heaven I got the energy and the thought to even do so is a flipping miracle). I wiped down my beloved guitar, and stored it in a then-dry place in the living room. I went to the kitchen for yet another repurposed pan and I set it in the previously *perfectly feng shui place* of my guitar. I drank a glass full of water because I knew that I must, and that made me angry: “More water? Really?” Jazz and I returned to the cocoon; it was still warm and dry there . . . as long as we didn’t move abruptly. That wasn’t really an issue, especially since I had expended about all of my “excess” energy for the day.

And it was only 4:00AM.

My condition worsened. I resigned to the fact that I was going to die. I called my former boyfriend (who soon after became my boyfriend again, and who is now my husband) and I croaked out my story. I told him that I was worried about Jazz in case I lost consciousness. He drove through rush-hour traffic — in the pouring rain — to check in on me and Jazz. Or maybe that didn’t happen; I was a delirious mess. Could it have been a dream? If so, it was entirely realistic.

Whether real or imagined, the genuine caring efforts of my former boyfriend inspired in me a reason to go on living.

It took me three weeks to recover fully on the physical level. On the spiritual front, my appreciation for Life as a creator being deepened immensely. Despite El Niño going on for several more months, I jogged nearly every day, cut out a few unhealthy foods from my diet (not the wine, haha), and crafted several new songs on my ruined guitar. Not unsurprisingly, a lot of them were about rain and/or reverence for Life: "Raining on My Pillow," "Black Cloud," "Second Chance," and "Medicate My Soul."

Eventually, I got a new guitar. It’s a long story, but the the landlord’s nieces, who lived in Minnesota, helped me to pay for it by reducing my rent over two months. Actually, I bought two guitars: One acoustic and one electric, but the trustees only credited me for the damaged guitar which I said was fairly valued at $200. I also acquired a stand-alone Yamaha digital recording device.

This is just one of the demos I recorded in the Venice guest house:

I sang and played everything, including the twinky piano part, done on my cheap 66-key Casio keyboard.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

There is definitely something deep in our DNA about floods and other such Ragnarök events that trigger unhealed memories. I think that my “El Niño tried to kill me” experience was a period in which I had the opportunity to either heal that ancestral trauma . . . or die. And here I am to say that El Niño lost the challenge.

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Note to my readers: This post was inspired by the stories and deep writings of Mark Bisone at his Substack blog:

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Thanks everyone for reading and listening. Feel free to comment in a well-thought manner! I’ll share something else from my repertoire in the coming week or two.

Sharine.

P.S. I was just about to post this article, and I thought, maybe I should write a song called “Raining on My Guitar”!