I'm Here for You, Mr. President (in-Exile)

 

Ernie K. Doe, If You See What I Mean

My first de facto mother-in-law was a sweet person I didn’t know how to address (Betty seemed disrespectful, and Mrs. W— a little stiff) but she didn’t grouse when I went with stiff. I didn’t know quite how to act around her, in large part because I was supposed to pretend that her daughter and I weren’t living together. At one point, in 1973, she put a lot of time and effort into making the sequined outfit I wore on stage at Christopher Milk’s last performances. In approximately 2018, it occurred to me that I should have bought her a thank-you gift. That’s the kind of guy I am! Just give me a few decades, and I’ll either do the right thing, or realise I failed to yet again.

When her daughter Patti left me, I started seeing a lot of Betty, which involved driving all the way out to Orange County. She was sympathetic, and very kind, especially in view of my being an entitled little dickhead who hadn’t thought to give her a thank-you gift. It was her impression that Patti had left me not because I was an insufferable dickhead, but because I’d declined to have a child with her (she’d been envious of her best pal bearing the son Stephen Stills refused to acknowledge as his), and not having asked her to marry me. This seemed highly unlikely, but I had no trace of pride left, and was grasping frantically at every straw, and hightailed it back to Hollywood to pop the question. To which Patti replied, approximately, “Well, uh, no.”

First Wife’s parents were like my own in that Mom’s dominance over Pop, who was painfully shy, and giggled nervously a lot, was total. Mom seemed to tell him when and how deeply he could breathe, and it occurred to me that if he had a crest designed for himself, what it should say at the bottom in Latin was “Yes, dear.” Early in our marriage, when I’d tried to instill the idea that punctuality was a nice way to show respect and consideration for The Other, she’d snapped, “I’ve already got a father.” Not once did I yield to the temptation to ask, “Why haven’t I met him?” Boy, did he and I not bond! But better him than Mom! She and I detested each other from Moment 1. When she and Mr. Giggles arrived (from Miami) to meet their newborn granddaughter in 1984. I took NBG out to meet them. The first words out of Mom’s mouth were, “Give me my baby!” 

I won’t for a millisecond deny that they were generous with me. They’d taken both First Wife and me to Spain some months before, and then offered to guy an investment property in northern California, to which I’d come to long to relocate, in which First Wife and daughter and I could live, and in which they could stay when they came out to visit. No one said their visits would last six months at a time. In their presence, First Wife ceased to be my life partner, and instead reverted to being their spoiled teen daughter. I would drag myself home at almost 7 p.m. after having spent four hours commuting back and forth to the soul-destroying word processing job I’d taken in San Francisco to Support My Family and find her in their suite draining a bottle of Freixenent and smoking cigarettes. I’d gently ask if she’d given any thought to dinner. Mom would glare at me, Pop would giggle nervously, and First Wife would marvel, “God, you’re so controlling!” 

I’m of course ashamed (my default mode!) of how I behaved with the family of Koala Gal, with whom I lived for 10 years after recovering from the breakup of First Marriage. I was reminded of the scene in Annie Hall in which Annie’s family’s wholesomeness makes Woody Allen feel as though in danger of hyperventilating. Mom was sweet, wise, and tolerant, and Older Brother one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Older Sister and I weren’t allergic to each other. But Younger Brother was a witless loudmouth, and Older Sister’s and Older Brother’s wife’s detesting each other, though they kept up appearances, made me jumpy. 

The family was big on propriety. Mom was a well-bred New Englander, so no one was allowed to so much touch as touch their fork until she’d picked up her own. Koala Gal, who fancied herself quite the rebel (and expressed her rebelliousness by being even less punctual than First Wife had been) became a zealous enforcer of such nonsense when around them.

A little side road. Koala Gal’s fucking pathological need to demonstrate herself an indefatigable feminist, or something, by never, ever being on time for anything inspired one of my moments of greatest comedic inventiveness. We were going to a matinee of Dances With Wolves on Polk Street. The screening began at 2. It would take us around half an hour to drive there from the foggy Sunset and park. At around 1:15, I began saying, “We’d better go now, hon,” every 90 seconds. We finally left at around 1:43. As we encountered a traffic snarl at the Panhandle, I shrieked, “What did you think, that it was getting earlier?” We both had a good laugh at that. And missed the first 15 minutes of the movie.

But back to the leadup to my apology to my de facto in-laws. Such was my disgruntlement with the Swedish delicacies (like head cheese — yum!) they had to honour of Mom’s being a Swedish-American, that I began making a lasagna to bring to their annual Xmas dinner. The smiles on the faces of those who managed a smile looked pretty strained. At non-holiday get-togethers at Younger Brother’s home, I would excuse myself to play his upright piano with relish and no discernible ability while he told us (even the two of us who’d been there and done that) with his trademark loud boorishness about diaper-changing, for instance. I wrote a satirical poem about Younger Brother’s marriage in which I mentioned no names, but which inspired Older Brother to drive down to San Francisco (from Marin) to ask, with his characteristic gentleness, and in different words, how I could be such an asshole. Later, after Koala Gal and I had split up, he and I actually became friends, though his wife forbade him to invite me over. 

My bad, Koala Gal’s family. 

Europa '87

To ask either of my parents to spend money on their own pleasure would have been like asking them to walk fly-like upside down on the ceiling, inconceivable. Having retired, my dad seemed intent on dying of boredom. He enjoyed pottery, but refused to get himself a potter’s wheel. His huge-hearted son vaguely conspired to get him one, but Mama of course had a whole litany of reasons why I should not, just as, during my childhood, she’d eloquently argued against my having a dog, or the family having a Christmas tree. (Her objection wasn’t based on our being zealously non-observant Jews, but on the likelihood of the tree losing some of its needles, in so doing compromising our happy home’s fascistic tidiness.)

I gave up on the pottery idea, and urged them implacably to go see a bit of the world. Because Pop was sure to have a medical emergency in a country whose principal language she didn’t speak, Mama would consider a trip to Europe only if I came along. My marriage had just disintegrated, I loathed my job (word processing at a huge, ultraconservative San Francisco law firm), and the only reservation I had was that I wouldn’t see my three-year-old daughter for 10 days. I went.

I had a complicated relationship with my folks. That they both loved me hadn’t been in question for a millisecond, but there were some major things about them I couldn’t stand. Mama, having not been valued in her own girlhood, and frantically insecure as a result, had been telling me since I began to understand speech that Pop wasn’t very interested in me, and he’d given me scant reason to doubt her. I hated how she made no secret of her contempt for him, as I hated his abiding it. Mama was always delighted by my expressions of love for her, but similar expressions discombobulated and embarrassed Pop, he of a generation of men who thought it unmanly to express themselves emotionally.

(We swing briefly onto a side road here, as we think about my dad’s discomfort with expressions of affection. My sister’s first two marriages took place at my parents’ house. At the second one, that at which she married a Lebanese mama’s-boy in a fashionably baggy suit, I went downstairs into the garage for some reason, and found my dad weeping, I guess because he and my sister had been much closer than he and I had ever been, and she would live with her new husband on Long Island. A better man that I would have taken Dad in his arms, and comforted him. The man that I was was embarrassed and disapproving. 

A side road off the side road. That wasn’t the first time I impersonated the sort of taciturn hardass I loathe. In the spring of 1964, my uncle’s second suicide attempt proved more successful than its antecedent. (Maybe my flippancy is born of the shame I feel for not having been nearly as good a friend to him as he’d been to me.) My sister, then seven, greeted me at the front door as I arrived home from school. “Marty died,” she said. “Yeah?” her 16-year-old tough guy brother replied. “So?”) 

But back to 1986, and the Mendels(s)ohn”s European tour. My parents drove up from Los Angeles to pick me up at the huge, ultraconservative San Francisco law firm at the end of a workday during which I’d been advised that our flight had been put forward 24 hours, so we had to head for the airport as soon as I’d dashed into Ross Dress for Less and bought a change of underwear and a toothbrush. 

Inexperienced — no, novice! — travellers as they were, they’d prepared for our trip as compulsively as13-year-olds preparing for their first day of middle school. They’d put all their documents in special plastic folios they’d bought for the occasion, and apparently checked  a thousand times to ensure that they had everything they needed. When I asked if they had their passports, they both eagerly reached for their folios, and produced ‘em. They were adorably proud of themselves, like a pair of little kids, and I nearly burst into tears of love. But no, we couldn’t have that, so I hid my adoration behind a mask of snideness and condescension that I didn’t take off the whole trip. 

In London, I’d managed to book us into a bed-’n’-breakfast that provided a stack of gay porn mags with stuck-together pages in every room. They didn’t give me a hard time about it, bless them. When I bought myself a pair of (engagingly) ludicrous Stop-Making-Sense suits in lurid colours in Oxford Street, they pretended not to be aghast, and in fact professed amused delight. In Jersey, which a neighbour had encouraged them to visit, we had an alfresco lunch at a place that Mama just loved. It wasn’t like her to (dare to) express great enthusiasm. I found her joyfulness disorienting and snarled softly at her. Shame on me. It turned out that I’d screwed up our hotel reservation in Barcelona (I made all the reservations), and my parents (who didn’t once let me reach for my waller) were charged for a night we weren’t there. Shame on me. I apologised effusively, but they, who had agonised over every dime spent since I’d met them, told me — superhumanly lovingly —not to give it a second thought. And the sweeter they were to me, the surlier and more snide I became. Arriving in new places, I would point them in one direction, and hurry off in the opposite one. 

Shame on me. 

I intended throughout to stop being a complete fucking asshole at some point, and to tell them how much I loved them, and how much I appreciated their taking me to Europe. That I never quite got around to it will still pain me as I take my last breath.

The First Time I Saw Patti

The first time I saw Patti, in the audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, my mouth dropped open. Such was her beauty that she seemed to glow. It was lust at first sight, and I thought I had about as much chance with her as with Raquel Welch, for whom all heterosexual American men were contractually compelled at that time to yearn. 

She took a job working for an old school showbiz publicist who would later become famous for having himself surgically attached to Elton John, or at least for bouncing around Elton’s famous Troubadour debut shouting, “Far out” into the face of every journalist on the premises. My dear friend and mentor Lewis S— got a job working for the guy, and I had an excuse to drop by and marvel at Big Patti. The first time I did so, Hot pants had just become fashionable, and I am able to promise you that no one on earth was wearing better than she was wearing her purple ones, with purple boots. OMG. I became Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners(, incapable of intelligible speech. Homina homina homina!

The day after the record company I was working dispatched me to NYC to make Procol Harum feel loved on their behalf, Lewis S— related that Patti had lost her shared house in Laurel Canyon, and was driving back and forth every evening to Mama’s place in very distant Buena Park. I graciously (you bet!) asked him to ask Patti if she might like to stay at my apartment just down the hill from Chateau Marmont (around 200 yards from Old School Publicist’s office) in my absence. She would.

She picked me up at LAX on my return home, in different hot pants. Humina humina humina. By the time we ‘d reached West Hollywood, I had regained my power of speech and was able to suggest she stay the night rather than drive all the way to Orange County. She agreed. I felt as though dreaming. We made love, during which I thought to myself, “No one will ever be able to take this away from me.” I’d won the lottery. 

I’d won a dozen lotteries. At last, I was demonstrably someone to be reckoned with— one at whom the world looked and thought, “Well, he must have something major going for him.”

For one who grows up loathing himself as fervently as I did, such ecstasy is short-lived. It was remarkable how quickly I first began taking Patti’s love— she was the one who said, “I love you,” first — for granted, and then, I’ve come to realise in the intervening decades, actually coming to disdain her. Must there not have been something…missing in anyone who’d want to be my life partner? Could she not see who I was? What was wrong with her?

Having been raised in a joyless household — Mama loathed Papa with all her might I couldn’t reasonably have been expected to be happy being happy. I was surly and brutish and selfish and demanding with this remarkable woman, whose kindness and patience and generosity were a match for her outward beauty. I cheated on her with groupies not fit to fold her laundry, and lied to her about doing so.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet. When, after three and a half years, she’d had enough and informed me that she wasn’t in love with me anymore, I actually managed to feel wronged. How could she!

For about six months, I could barely catch my breath, as I couldn’t imagine getting through the next 10 minutes. In my agony, I irrevocably fumbled a major career opportunity. Every day I felt as though pulling myself across a parking lot covered with broken glass to endure the pain of my life until four o’clock, when I could self-medicate with Cutty Sark. 

Lewis S— got me through it, he and Mama, who, in her finest hour, seemed to revel in being my most reliable source of reassurance. And then, after five months, Patti phoned. She wanted to come over. 

The sun came out. I was still beside myself, but now with elation. I tidied up my apartment, full of the hideous furniture we’d had to grab when the showroom owner whose place from whom Patti had ordered some much nicer stuff lost everything in Las Vegas. I blowdried my hair with especial care. I put on the tight patchwork jeans she’d told me she thought I looked sexy in. (“My beautiful man,” she’d marveled, nearly making me faint!) Whatever happened, I would be calm and charming, unrecognisable from the emotionally 14 asshole she’d ceased to be in love with.

It didn’t work. Having apparently verified that she could no longer love me as she had, she made up an excuse to leave after maybe 20 minutes. And now, my own finest hour, as I somehow didn’t lose my temper, and in fact remained my most charming as I walked her to the elevator. 

As the doors of which closed, she was three times as gorgeous as the night she glowed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, more beautiful than any woman I’d ever laid eyes on. And done with me. I’m not sure how I lived through it. 

She managed the publicity for Monty Python’s Hollywood Bowl show, and then disappeared. But then, 10 years ago, someone who’d known her from the record biz somehow secured her email address. She’d married a guy with whom she operates a sport fishing business in Marina del Rey. She informed a mutual acquaintance that she had desire to hear from me. I wrote her a letter — by hand, to demonstrate my sincerity — assuring her I hadn’t the slightest intention of trying to disrupt her marriage and wanted only to be a good and loyal friend to her in our last years to make up for the person I’d been when we were as one. 

No reply.

Kim Paternoster

Second Girlfriend

At the time I felt mightily aggrieved, but over the many, many years since, I have come to redognise, with almost unendurable shame, that I richly deserved my first major live-togehter girlfriend’s leaving me. I hadn’t been a teenaged horror story, but God knows I was an early and mid-20s one — duplicitous, demanding, volatile, intolerant, utterly insufferable.

But anyway. I found being alone in the house we’d shared way up in Laurel Canyon excruciating, and got away from it all. My Porsche was in disrepair (after a couple of years of neglect and mistreatment), so I borrowed Mama’s car to drive up to San Francisco to visit Second Girlfriend, who’d broken my heart seven years before, with far less cause. I’d become considerably less dweebish in those seven years, to the point of strangers routinely stopping me to ask, “You are somebody, aincha?” Second Girlfriend commended me on my hugely improved lovemaking (I’d had no way to go but up!), and I was briefly able to pretend I wasn’t in severe emotional disarray. But then she decided that maybe she wouldn’t leave her boyfriend for me after all, and suggested I not stay with her on her little apartment at the foot of Pacific Heights after Boyfriend got home from his business trip. I could stay a couple of nights at her sister’s up in Novato. 

I repaired to Woey Loy Goey, in Chinatown, which I’d discovered as a university student years before, and liked so much that I’d taken David Bowie to it during his pre-Hunky Dory first visit to San Francisco three years before. An attractive young brunette came in, and I was able, as I was so infrequently, to suppress my paralyzing shyness, and to ask if she might wish to dine with me. I was at the time someone strangers routinely imagined must…be someone, and she agreed. 

I’m good with names.Hers was Kim Paternoster. 

Within a couple of hours, we were up in Novato, discovering that we were remarkably in tune sexually. I thought she might take my mind off my Pattilessness, and asked her to come live with me in Laurel Canyon. She accepted, and we headed south. Stopping for gas in San Jose, she incredulously declined my offer of a cold canned soft drink. “You actually drink that stuff?” she marveled, censoriously. That and the sex are the two things I remember best about her. 

No, that’s not true. I remember the look of irate incredulity on her face when, a couple of miles north of Santa Cruz, I decided that, instead of taking her home with me, I’d continue to hope that I could change Patti’s mind.

Understandably disgusted with me, Kim didn’t ask me to drive her back to San Francisco, and I, a black hole gallantry-wise, didn’t insist on doing so. That was the last I ever saw or spoke to her.

Sorry, Kim. 

I couldn’t change Patti's mind.

The Girl in the Fred Slatten Shoes

I was in Halfnelson with a pair of brothers I knew from university until they suggested I join a band other than theirs either because I was an awful drummer or because I was vocal about my distaste for their cuteness, as exemplified by the singer’s mock-operatic falsetto and their intention to perform little skits between songs, or even during them. I formed my own band. We and Halfnelson attended each other’s ultra-sporadic gigs, and were sometimes each other’s whole audiences. Their changing their name to Sparks (because they reminded their manager, Albert Grossman, of the Marx brothers!) hadn’t made them much more popular.

Four years after they banished me from their band, the brothers relocated to England and became the flavour of the month. Their breakthrough UK hit, featuring the singer’s frantic falsetto, got lots of airplay on the West Coast. The new, improved, 60-percent British Sparks was booked to headline at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, at which I’d dreamed of playing since the summer of 1966, when the Inrhodes, composed in significant part of former members of my own first band, opened shows for the Yardbirds and other notables. I wasn’t pleased that the brothers had beaten me to it, and as headliners, and hoped to hate their performance. 

I didn’t. They were terrific.

I was standing in the Civic’s entrance, gnashing my teeth, grumbling, trying to decide whether or not to subject myself to the humiliation of their after-party at — cuteness alert! — Marie Callender Pies up on the Miracle Mile, when a tall (very) young woman introduced herself as Olivia R— and made clear that she might be interested in a private guitar lesson. I don’t actually play the guitar, and her height owed to her remarkable Fred Slatten shoes, platform skyscrapers of the sort favoured by the jailbaitettes of Rodney’s English Disco. Saved by the belle, whose name was Olivia R—!

I drove us back to my apartment on actual Sunset Blvd. Waiting for the elevator on my building’s garage level, Olivia removed her shoes. I encouraged her to put them back on. I’ve always found high heels arousing. I had faint (these were very different times) misgivings about her age, but then learned that she’d been seeing a lot of a celebrated Hollywood photographer a lot older than I. How could I be reasonably accused of depriving her of her innocence? Did I note that these were very different times?

I didn’t see her as a replacement for She Who’d Broken My Heart six months before, but was pretty sure I’d made the right choice in not attending the Sparks after-party. We made plans for her to visit again, and to be sure to wear her Fred Slattens and hold-up (by garters!) stockings. 

In the meantime, I discovered that a woman with a remarkable honey-coloured Afro I’d lusted after at work reciprocated my interest. I encountered her upstairs at the famous Rainbow Bar and Grill, and danced with her to Sparks’ breakthrough hit. Lust can inspire great feats of graciousness. She left her husband and effectively moved in with me almost immediately.

Such was my delight that I’d forgotten my and Olivia’s plans to reconvene. A few days after The Nib, she of the remarkable hair, had brought her toothbrush over,  Olivia phoned to say she was in the lobby, in the attire I’’d requested, and I had to tell her my heart had been claimed by another. Having come all the way from some godforsaken corner of the San Fernando Valley, Olivia wasn’t delighted with me.

I have owed her an apology for 47 years. 

Here it is.