Absorbing Angstroms In the Rain

I don’t know how to break this to Sam the Scam, but sunbathing in the rain is not considered normal. No one I have discussed this with, including two senior lifeguards and my family physician, can think of any therapeutic reason why anyone would want to strip to his shorts and lie on the beach when the sky is overcast and water is falling from the clouds. “The guy,” one lifeguard said, “must be a nut.” Moonbathing, Sam, is also out.

I was in Venice the other day when I spotted Sam lying in the rain near the pier. Sam the Scam is his street name, based upon his proclivity for relieving unsuspecting victims of whatever they have which, at the moment, he happens to want. Cash is part of what he normally seeks, but Sam also is not opposed to talking the shoes right off your feet if, due to a run of bad luck, he is in need of shoes.

Sam is a friend from the days when I was writing about street people, not to be confused with Sammy the Spear, who is a pickpocket. He used to pal around with Michael the Cat, a burglar who operated in Beverly Hills and wore a tuxedo on the job. These are real people, by the way, not creatures of my imagination. No one could invent Sam the Scam.

Anyhow, I recognized Sam and asked him what he was doing lying on the beach in his swim trunks on a day like this.

“Taking the rain,” Sam replied, opening his eyes only long enough to see who I was and then closing them again.

“I’ve heard of taking the sun, but taking the rain?”

He opened his eyes again and looked me over the way he looks over someone he is about to con out of his shorts.

“Nice coat,” he said.

“Forget it, Sam.”

He sat up, shivering a little against the cold. “You don’t know about rainbathing?” he asked.

“Never heard of it.”

“Rain contains valuable minerals which, when mixed with existing ultraviolet rays, produce beneficial effects on your body. They are known, for instance, to increase your sexual capacity. It would be better naked, but that is against the law. You get the coat on Rodeo Drive?”

I told Sam I had never heard of his theory and he replied that there were probably a lot of things I had not heard of.

“It’s in the angstroms,” he said. “That’s why moonbathing also works.” He winked. “Reflected angstroms.”

Sometimes, he explained, he lies on the beach in the moonlight. A quarter moon is best. A patrol found him once and thought he was dead. It took Sam 15 minutes to convince them he was not.

I asked Bob Williams, the county’s chief lifeguard, if he had ever heard of therapeutic rainbathing. I didn’t have the nerve to ask about moonbathing.

“I’ve heard of people swimming in the rain,” he said, “but sunbathing in the rain? Never.”

Then he explained, in the apparent belief that journalists sometimes miss the point, that swimming in the rain was all right, since you were bound to get wet one way or the other anyhow. Ditto surfing in the rain.

“People will sunbathe in the cold,” Williams offered. “Are you sure it was raining?”

“Positive.”

“They’ll come out right after the rain,” he suggested in a tone meant to imply that perhaps I was mistaken about the weather at the moment Sam the Scam was lying on the beach, but I wasn’t mistaken. It was raining on my head.

Another lifeguard listened and then said people who sunbathe in the rain are not normal. The same for people who lie in the moonlight. Then he added, in reference to the latter, “Unless, of course, you’re lying with a friend.” Sam the Scam has no friends. Only victims.

My family physician, who practices (and I mean practices ) on the Westside, thought it was all a big joke. He is not your average MD. He greets me at the door by saying, “Welcome to Lourdes.”

When I insisted that Sam’s theory wasn’t a joke, he wondered if I would like a prescription for Valium. Obviously, he reasoned, I was under career stress.

“The only benefit from lying in the rain,” he said, “accrues to the medical profession, since it will probably make you ill and we will be well compensated for making you whole again.”

When I mentioned moonbathing, he put his stethoscope to my head and listened. “I hear the sound of surf,” he said, “washing on a distant shore.” We let it go at that.

There are hundreds of thousands of ocean freaks living in Southern California. Some of them, Bob Williams informs me, visit the beach every possible day.

They are not all normal people. Among them, no doubt, are sadists and devil worshipers. A few have possibly married their own sisters, and one or two may believe they are sugar plum fairies. But their aberrations do not include rainbathing or moonbathing.

I wish to inform Sam the Scam of this but I have lost track of him once more. Possibly he is ill. Possibly this is all just another con and he is busy establishing the Venice Society of Rain & Moon. If it flies anyplace, it will fly in Venice.

Meanwhile, if you should notice a gaunt, sallow person in trunks lying very still on the beach during a rainstorm or when the moon is in its quarter phase, no need to call the coroner. That would simply be Sam the Scam, soaking in the angstroms.

Tell him I said hello.