It could have been the beginning of the perfect late-‘60s romance. I knew Annie in the sense of our recognizing each from living in the same student dormitory, but met her for keeps at one of those noontime rallies at which furious fellow students in proletarian clothing and glasses held together precariously by Scotch® tape (I guess they all patronised the same optician) would seethe about something, and then recite 10 non-negotiable demands, accession to which might calm them down. She’d had a boyfriend in the dorm, and was too pretty for the likes of me, but I was giddy from the latest recitation of demands, or something, and somehow ignited a conversation. The next thing I knew, we were up in the research library, all over each other like cheap suits in what had moments before been a corner occupied only by serious scholars, at least a couple of us urged us to shut the fuck up.
I was just beginning to freelance for the Los Angeles Times, and took her to several concerts. She always wore the same leather miniskirt, with which I’d no beef whatever, and always remarked on the instrumental soloists and singer either being on the same page, or not being on it. It was she who inspired me, in my review of the first Joe Cocker album for Rolling Stone, to note that the solo Jimmy Page played on one track seemed emotionally discordant with both the song and Joe’s singing. I was advised that producer Denny Cordell was very unhappy about that, as it might make Jimmy hesitant to play on future Cocker sessions. “Probably too much to hope for,” I quipped. BAM!
Annie had been living down in Venice, but I don’t think she liked her roommates any more than I liked Jimmy Page’s guitar solo. She accepted my invitation to move in with me on ugly, soulless Federal Avenue. She made dinner, and I was ecstatic to be able to think of her as my old lady, as heterosexual male hipsters did in those days. At night, she was a server at the Oar House on Main Street in southernmost Santa Monica, later all chic and gentrified, but at the time a favourite place for local alcoholics to catch a few winks in their own puke.
The night I woke up at around two to find myself alone in bed was one of the most horrible of my first 22 years. There were no cell phones then, so I couldn’t contact her. No one answered at the Oar House.
She finally called late the following afternoon to say she needed to get her head together— a lot of that was going around at the time — and would be over in an hour to pick up the few things she’d brought to Federal Avenue in preparation for returning to her native Marin County. The harder I tried to change her mind, the more intent she got on leaving.
Glimpse the one known photograph of the two of us, and cease to wonder why she fled. Could I have been more of an embarrassment? The wire-rim glasses! The pathetic attempt at a mustache! The white undershirt peeking out from beneath the shitkicker shirt the country rock scare had inspired me to buy! The extremely heavy buckskin fringe jacket! The humanity! I was the son of a mother who’d been the reigning fashionista of North High School (in Minneapolis). I’d had a knack for matters of the cuff. What had become of me?
I was so distraught by Annie’s defection that I fumbled the ball the universe had given me. While other recent graduates were delivering pizza and wondering when Uncle Sam would advise them he needed their help in the jungles of southeast Asia, I, from the first Monday after my last Friday of formal education, had a glamorous, well-paying job in the music business, Warner Bros. having hired me as a writer on noting how enthusiastically I’d reviewed the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society in the campus newspaper. I lasted two months before they got fed up with my moping and invited me to spare myself the daily drive from Venice (where I’d rented a place of my own) to Burbank.
I wrote Annie letters imploring her to reconsider. In the one she deigned to answer, she informed me that she was no longer Annie, but Anne. I was presumably to see this as evidence of her having gotten her head together. All that she felt was guilt. At least I was able to work that into my song Brokenhearted Reggae, a few years later.
She says it's too hard. She’d rather discard
everything that we’ve built.
When I feel the same, how can she claim
all that she feels is guilt?
By and by, I recovered. Warner Bros. had wanted me out of their sight, but kept paying me a weekly retainer, and I spent a lot of it on the sort of clothing my favourite British pop stars were wearing, and on a $15 dollar haircut. (We’re talking 1971 dollars. That haircut today would cost around $120, before tip.) Two gorgeous tellers in false eyelashes (in an era when they represented extraordinary effort) and pushup bras at the Security First bank in the 8000 Sunset building jostled each other for the privilege of serving me. A dweeb no longer, Johnny!
Six years after Annie broke my heart, I went up to Marin on a record company’s dime to interview someone or other, and decided to pop into the little bistro in Fairfax I’d heard Annie had worked at not long after she returned to Marin. It turned out she worked there still. Her jaw dropped in the most gratifying way when she realised I was the new improved version of the dweeb she’d left behind, and we made plans to convene in my hotel room in San Francisco’s Japantown for heterosexual hi-jinx that night. Oh, was I pleased with myself! But when she asked me to sit at the bar while she attended to her diners, the former Mr. Zimmerman’s Positively Fourth Street began to play. “When I was down, you just stood there grinnin’.: Our sex back in the day hadn’t been terrific — her fault, I think, and I’m not one to say it hasn’t been my fault in several cases — and it occurred to me that it would be more fun to do her as she’d done me those six years before than to have her over. I winked at her mysteriously and left the place. She called after me, in vain. Payback’s a bitch.
I cut off my nose. My face felt spited. (That too would wind up in a song.)
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