Same Thing, Different Bottles

I’ve always wanted to be up on stage, being applauded, rather than in the audience, applauding, and have consequently made a great many decisions based on what the heart wanted rather than what the head said was feasible. As a teenager, I didn’t allow my uncle to mentor me, as he’d read that his idol, Thomas Wolfe, had mentored young writers because I was too intent on a career as a professional athlete. Never mind that my adoration of sports never came close to compensating for the fact that I played them dreadfully. Then I saw A Hard Day’s Night and decided I wanted to be the Beatles, even though my musical aptitude at the time was ltitle greater than my athletic aptitude. 

When it became ever more excruciatingly apparent in the late 1970s that.I wasn’t likely to regain my earlier (wholly unwarranted) prominence as a writer, I turned to graphic design, in which I had reason to beileve I had real aptitude. Had I not, as a  17-year-old Santa Monica High School inmate, won a hideous senior sweater that to this day I’ve never worn by designing its logo? In junior high school, I’d been comically, disastrously inept in wood, metal, and auto shops, but had enjoyed every second of print shop. As I saw it, the world was full of horrid graphic design, but I, by gum, would put things right.

I talked the proprietor of one of LA’s leading New Wave boutiques, the Village Mews, to let me design a catalogue for him, and felt for the month and half the job required as though I’d died and gone to Heaven, as I did again a dozen years later when I bought my first Macintosh with Quark XPress desktop publishing software. Purest bliss! That first day with Quark, I literally forgot to eat or drink or pee. I was The Wind in the Willows’ Mr. Toad at the moment he first glimpsed a motorcar. 

My first proper design job was at Destiny Telecomm (I thought the doubled M was a nice touch!), a pyramid scheme in the East (San Francisco) Bay run by a cadre of sanctimonious Christians who’d apparently missed the bit in the Bible about the rich not getting into Heaven. When I signed on, their signature product was phone cards that enabled the bearer to do something or other. Over the course of a week they jettisoned the phone cards, and took to selling skincare products and salad dressings. (One of my colleagues theorised they were the same thing, in different bottles.) 

Mama, can we have some of that delicious Destiny Telecomm ranch dressing on our crudites tonight?

The boss was a hyperneurotic, tennis ball-shaped little gay fellow who played the accordion at the company’s big Xmas party and believed that creating futuristic landscapes in a called KPT Bryce attested. vividly to his creativity. My immediate overseer was a hyperactive Christian who looked exactly like Homer Simpson, and whose saving grace was that you could tease him, except not about abortion, and — can you guess? — tease him I did. He’d forgotten more about Photoshop than I’ve yet to learn, all these years later, and was a talented sketcher, but a horrid designer. There was a luridly (and artificially) blond young female hipster, the poster girl for depression, iirrevocably morose. I actually enjoyed the idea of coming to work and seeing the pair of them. There’s something uniquely gratifying about making someone as staunchly morose as Andrea laugh. In that sense, it was the best job I ever had.

But then lots of new suckers gave the company money, and the over-men’s-fragranced pastor’s son who ran the show encouraged the little fat accordionist to hire lots more designers, only one of them even a little bit talented. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, and not nearly enough work to keep everyone busy. The obvious solution was another hire — a black guy from actual Oakland who had the Christians-in-charge eating out of his hand within about 48 hours. He would invite one of them to come down to the graphics room to confer about something he was working on, and show them how to draw a straight line in Adobe Illustrator.  He would shake his head in awe and say, ‘I think you’ve really got a knack for this stuff.” You should have seen their faces! One morning, I heard one of them proudly confide to another, “Do you know what Dre called me yesterday? ‘Homey’!” It was hilairous, and a little nauseating.

The one guy with real talent was a Motley Crue fan from Taiwan. He was so good that he inspired me to get a lot better, quick. We went to lunch together, and he ordered in Mandarin. 

One afternoon I was openly exasperated with the little know-nothing nincompoop the fat accordionist had appointed Studio Manager. (There wasn’t enough work to keep two designers busy, but we had seven designers and a Studio Manager to oversee ‘em.) I was avidly urged to find employment elsewhere, and began freelancing for Chris Isaak’s girlfriend’s design talent agency. That ended in tears too, but you may like some of the things I’ve designed since this past autumn for Acerbia Designs.

A couple of days after I left, Destiny Telcomm, with two M’s, was busted for being a pyramid scheme. Where your Christ-child now, spawn-of-the-pastor?

Lunch With 'Lor Swift

Taylor Swift and I had been talking about having lunch together for almost a decade before it finally happened last week. In 2012, I wrote her an email complimenting her gracious acquiescence to that ghastly Kanye person at the NAACP Video Awards. A couple of years later (she gets an average of 23,650 emails and text messages every week!) she wrote back to thank me and to ask if I might want to “grab some sushi” the next time she was in Poughkeepsie, though I actually lived in Beacon at the time, and then moved back to London, and then back to Los Angeles, and then back to London again, while she became America’s Sweetheart. 

But as I foreshadowed earlier in this paragraph, the constellations finally aligned this week, and we met  She had only 18 minutes, so a place with table service was out of the question. It would have to be one of the two big sushi chains, Itsu or Wasabi, where one doesn’t have to wait for some bright young thing to come over and gush, “How you guys [London servers are trained to address gender-mixed groups as “guys”] doing today? I’m Tristan, and I’ll be your server.” You just choose a boxed set, if you will, from a big refrigerator and then go up to the till, where a not-so-bright young thing snarls if you ask for an extra eyedropperful of soy sauce. 

We sat down, Taylor in Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses to keep people from recognising her, and began mixing soy sauce and wasabi in little plastic tubs. I asked if I should address her as Tay, She giggled winsomely and confided that her closest friends actually call her ‘Lor, with an apostrophe. I was reminded of my old friend Hugh M. Hefner, with whom I used to play backgammon and kiss absurdly gorgeous young blonde women. Most people seemed to call him Hef, but he told me that those nearest and dearest to him called him Ner, apostrophe optional. I told ‘Lor that I had briefly conspired to call The Romanovs, my 2015 Los Angeles band Sailor Twit. She smirked obilgingly. 

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As seldom-Trumpers, we agreed that the prospect of her old antagonist, recently rebranded as Ye, becoming president and Herschel Walker vice president was thrilling. I admitted to ‘Lor that I find her music pretty insipid, and that, as a lapsed music critic, I recognise many critics having put her recent More Slanders About Past Boyfriends album on their Albums of the Year list not because they liked it, or had even heard it, but because they didn’t want to seem hopelessly out of step with the general public. She wasn’t very pleased, and summoned one of her aides over for a whispered little conference, at the conclusions of which ‘Lor said, “Harsh words coming from someone who’s been writing and recording since 1971, and whose new stuff is lucky to get 20 listeners on Soundcloud.” 

Touché, I said, rakishly, and we moved onto the collapse of the United Kingdom, as most recently evidenced by ambulance drivers and nurses going out on a strike and millions having to skip meals to be able to afford to heat their homes, on which their mortgages have skyrocketed. “I do find the accent adorable, though,” she said. I of course knew, through her confessional/accusatory songs, that she has dated Ralph Fiennes, Sir Ian McKellan, Andrew Lloyd Pierce, Ricky Gervais, Jeremy Corbyn, and, during a brief fling with bisexuality, Home Secretary Cruella Braverman.

“Time’s up!” one of ‘Lor’s aids chirped eagerly, and the next thing I knew I was alone with my thoughts and the nine pieces of sushi Taylor Swift’s fame hadn’t allowed her time to consume.  

 My first few months inside, my OCD served me well. All I would listen to — and, by extension, all I would allow my cellmates to listen to — were Miles, Mingus, Monk, Mahler, and Eminem. My cellmates kept requesting transfers, so I’d have the whole cell to myself for as long as four days at a time. One of my new cellmates, formerly a guitarist in a Brazilian bistro in Bermondsey, suggested we form a yacht rock duo with him playing and me singing. Bossa nova and yacht rock can be nearly indistinguishable in the wrong hands. 

When the warden hosted a big muckety-muck from the Department of Corrections, he would have me and Justin entertain. But then my vocal cords were injured in the big inadequate blankets riot of my second winter inside, and I had to think of another way not to be subjected to erotic indignities in the showers and other areas where there were no, or out-of-service, closed-circuit TV cameras. Noting my lovely mocha skin, soulful brown eyes, and soft, melodic speaking voice, one of the other members of the Floral Arrangement club suggested I apply for the prison sissy position that would open up when RL-6881 got paroled, and I thought to myself, “Why not?” The warden was worryingly enthusiastic about my decision, and supplied me with the Agent Provocateur for Men catalogue from which I ordered my first outfits.   

I was an immediate hit with both fellow inmates and the prison staff. The first week of every month, I would service the warden and the highest-ranking correctional officers. The second would be the Aryan Brotherhood, and the third the Crips, Bloods, and Mexican Mafia. The prisoners of colour were my favourite. Their hygiene was far superior to the others’ and they never showed up empty-handed. Sometimes my cell would become almost impassable with bouquets, making my cellmates openly resentful to the point of threatening me, but I had many protectors among the three groups I serviced —Lt. “Lefty” Latham from the correctional officers, Feekle Inbrede from the Aryans, and LaShu’juandray Cooper from the Blips, as the African-American inmates called themselves after the Bloods and Crips realised they had common oppressors, and merged. 

Everything was fine until the Blips and Mexicans demanded an additional week with me at the end of every month because they outnumbered the guards and Aryans combined by around six to one. In the resulting riot, which made the blankets brouhaha look in comparison like a slapping contest at a parochial girls’ school, one of the prison’s three Sons of Isis, who spent most of their time in solitary confinement, tried to behead me. I survived, obviously, but with an unsightly neck scar that allowed that little tramp Rodolfo Gomez to overtake me as the prison’s No. 1 object of desire. 

In recognition of past services rendered, even if with the utmost reluctance, the warden arranged for me to be paroled prematurely, whereupon I became the social media influencer and composer as which you know me.

[I’ve written a whole novel in this vein. Advise by private message if you’d like to read it.]

A Dweeb No Longer!

 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.)

Biopsychology

Biopsychologists believe the circuitry of a child’s brain is profoundly influenced by the child’s experiences as an infant who senses the primary caregiver’s emotional state at every turn. This could explains a great deal. I think Mama was at least mildly depressed throughout her life, and know for sure that she very timid, very ill at ease in the world. I remember being around four years old and walking from our apartment down to the communal garage. Mama was very disturbed by my singing, and not for the reason those few I am able to strongarm into listening to my music these days are disturbed, but because of her all-purpose dread. When I asked what was wrong,  she hissed, “Someone’s going to hear us!” as though that were a terrifying prospect. I suspect this was a carryover from her own childhood, when her very poor family had to abandon rented premises under cover of darkness to avoid being hassled for overdue rent. Whatever it was, it made a real impression on me, and I went into the world pretty sure that someone or something was intent on doing me harm. 

My being weak and vulnerable worked well for her, as it made me more dependent on, and thus closer to her. Not for a millisecond do I doubt that she adored me, nor do I imagine that it even occurred to her that she was grooming me to be a weakling. I didn’t realise myself until I was two decades and more into adulthood. Pop had a stroke, and Mama. had exiled him (with the tacit complicity that was his iconic trait in their marriage) to a convalescent hospital from which she and I picked him up for a day out one Sunday when I was visiting from northern California. Reaching our destination, I went to get his wheelchair out of the trunk. Mama was aghast. “Get someone to help you with that!” she implored me. I wasn’t a healthy 45-year-old man who worked out on Nautlius machines six days a week, but a helpless little boy, perpetually dependent on the kindness of strangers. 

That long-delayed realisation felt like a hard punch in the face. The floodgates opened as I realised what she’d (unwittingly!) done to me, as it occurred to me that a million humiliations I’d suffered as a reflexively submissive schoolboy were traceable back to her parenting. I began treating her as disdainfully as she’d always treated my dad. To my eternal shame, I did so in front of my little girl. And by reflexively refusing to exercise not only due caution, but also the hypercaution I’d grown up being told were necessary for my survival, I put her, myself, and my little girl in jeopardy on one horrible occasion.

Mama had invited me and my daughter to accompany her Back East to visit my sister, then living in Rhode Island and working in Boston. I did all the driving. One afternoon, determined not to stop and ask for directions, as Mama kept imploring me to do, I had to drive us across tracks in the middle of Boston down which a train was coming. If our rental car had stalled, we and who knows how many train passengers would have been killed or injured horribly. Twenty-five years after the fact, I continue to have nightmares about that. You’re the first person I’ve ever told about it.

Some months later, Mama came up to San Francisco to see me and her granddaughter, and I was late to SFO to pick her up. I can picture Mama, who was intimidated by everyone and everything, being absolutely terrified, imagining we wouldn’t turn up for her. And then what would she do, 400 miles from home, surrounded by complete strangers? (There were no mere strangers in Mama’s world, just as there was no darkness. There were complete strangers and pitch darkness.) I’ve been late around three times in my life. Most psychologists believe that such mistakes are instances of the subconscious grabbing the steering wheel for a minute.

What a perfect little bastard I was.

Of course, I was just warming up at that point. I persuaded Mama to get a computer, thinking she might enjoy looking up old classmates and relatives. She had no aptitude for it, and I made no secret of my exasperation, this in front of my daughter, until Mama insisted on my daughter having it. Shame on me. She would take us to dinner on Friday evenings when I drove up to Santa Rosa to pick my daughter up after school. I was snide at my best and contemptuous at my worst, as far from gracious as Mercury is from Neptune. Shame on me.

After my first marriage disssolved, and I left my wonderful job as a word processor at San Francisco’s biggest ultraconsrvative law firm for fear that either I or one of the self-delighted young dickhead attorneys whose words it was my onus to process would go out a 21st story window some afternoon. Dr. Steven B. Jacobson, who’d treated me at Kaiser when I had medical insurance, kindly consented to keep seeing me in spite of my having ceased to have insurance, and living hand to mouth. He was an adult child of alcoholics, and specialised in the treatment of others like himself. He believed that my childhood would have been distinguishable from his other patients’ only by virtue of Mama and Pop being teetotal. He told me that I wouldn’t begin to truly heal until I had confronted both my parents  and told them how I’d come to realise they’d damaged me.

Years before, when I signed up for free psychotherapy at the university I attended, my dad had been horrified. Men of his generation scorned psychotherapy. And yet when I bared my soul to and raged at him, he apologised immediately, from the heart, not glibly, astonishing me. Mama, who believed psychotherapy to be a great thing, was the one who couldn’t bear to hear what I had to say, and then tried to refute it. How could I have had the tortured childhood I was claiming when I’d always received such good grades at school? I was speechless.

One Friday evening when my daughter and I arrived to pick Mama up at her assisted living residence, at which I never dined with her, even though it would have made her proud (go figure!), she greeted. us in slacks that were, as ever, meticulously pressed, but also noticeably stained. In 49 years, I’d never seen Mama with a hair out of place, let alone stained clothing. That her dementia was accelerating was unmistakable.

Did I turn over a new leaf and replace the snideness and contempt with kindness and patience? Of course, I didn’t. I became more monstrous. “What do you mean?” I would roar at her, “you didn’t take your fucking [oh, yes, that] medication?” Brave Johnny terrorising a cowering 80-year-old woman to get back at her from crimes she didn’t realise she’d committed 55 years before. No statute of limitations for brave Johnny!

My sister acknowledged it was her turn to deal with Mama, who prepared to relocate to the Midwest, where Sis had moved. I drove them to the airport. Mama looked at me with bruised incredulity. Was I going to play the heartless, sneering bastard until her and my sister’s flight was called? You bet I was, being pretty sure if I didn’t, I’d disintegrate. If I started to cry at the prospect of never seeing her again, and in acknowledgment of the monster I’d been, how would I ever manage to stop?

Celia

In the first months of my life, my parents and I lived in DC with Pop’s parents. Mama quickly came to loathe her mother-in-law, a native of Riga, Latvia, who made spaghetti by emptying a bottle of ketchup into a big bowl of what at the time were called noodles, stirring, and serving. At the dinner table of my dad’s early years, anyone who wanted a second helping of something just reached in with the fork he or she had been putting food into his own mouth with. Mama found this disgusting, and during her and Pop’s marriage, she would shrike loudly enough to be heard back in her native Minneapolis when Pop reverted to the ways of his own childhood home and helped himself to more of something with his own fork. I would be forbidden to have any more of whatever it was.

Where Mama’s hypergentility came from was anyone’s guess, in her own childhood, her family had been so poor that they’d had to sneak out of rented premises they couldn’t afford to pay for under cover of darkness, and Mama couldn’t bathe as biology might have preferred. One of the defining moments of her childhood was of being sent home from school for smelling. In adulthood, she would become fascistically fastidious.

Her mother, whom I knew as Gram and the world knew as Celia Kaufman, had grown up in Odessa, Ukraine, which her family had fled for fear of being raped or incinerated in a pogrom. For reasons that I’d love to know, and will never find out, she and her young husband, a fellow refugee from Ukraine, relocated to Minneapolis, where Hubby took to being carried home drunk and bloodied. They had four children — my mother, her sister Doris, her brother Marty, and a little boy whose death at a few months old was another defining moment of Mama’s early years. Gramps — John Ned Kaufman — was apparently an inattentive or even abusive dad, and the three siblings grew up as damaged emotionally as they were gorgeous. My grandparents came out to Los Angeles briefly when the air still smelled of oranges, and opened a cafe in Boyle Heights. It went bust, and they returned to the upper Midwest, where John Ned resumed being carried home half-dead until a year or two after the repeal of Prohibition, when he got rich as a liquor wholesaler. A year or two later, he died at 42 a year or two before my own arrival. Gram returned to Los Angeles, and Mama, having had enough of Riga-born Grandma Rose’s coarseness and ketchup spaghetti, informed Pop they’d be following her.

Her three surviving children remained very, unhealthily, close to Gram all their lives, Doris because she was incapacitated by a disease whose name I never knew, a disease that killed her before she was 35, and Marty because the world terrified him. I saw a great deal of Gram. I would go over to her home either with Mama alone or with both my parents. While Gram listened in silence and I, precocious little sod that I was, read the latest issue of Readers Digest, to which Gram subscribed, Mama would rail at the world and everyone in it, especially those to whom we were related, by blood or marriage, without taking a breath.

Under the influence of powerful, primitive antidepressants, Marty had an automobile accident which left him slightly less gorgeous, and too self-conscious ever to venture into public in daylight again. He persuaded Gram to relocate to Quartz Hill, in the Antelope Valley, where no one was likely to be horrified by his (imagined) ugliness.

For around 36 hours after my almost-unattended bar mitzvah, I aspired to become a rabbi. Everyone was delighted, none more than Gram, who I don’t think was ever glimpsed in a synagogue, but who remembered the pogroms well enough not to be very comfortable around gentiles. Then I resumed planning to play second bass for the Los Angeles Dodgers even though I was an awful baseball (and everything else) player.

Marty and I got close as I entered adolescence. He murdered me at chess and let me marvel at the textbook from the abnormal psychology class at Loyola College he’d been on his way to the afternoon of his accident. He idolized Thomas Wolfe, and, when he learned I’d won the creative writing award at my junior high school, appointed himself my mentor, intending to agonise over every syllable, as he’d read that Wolfe’s mentor had done. I wasn’t having it. He tried to kill himself (in part, I can’t

t help but think, because of my disinclination to be mentored), and failed, and tried again, and succeeded. Having lost two children in three years, Gram and her little dog moved back to West Los Angeles.

She was delighted when, as a university freshman, i took to coming over to her apartment on Sepulveda Blvd. to study. I’ve never completely trusted anyone delighted by my presence. I got older and less dweebish, with a red Porsche and a trophy girlfriend. People perceived me as rockstar-like in both dress and affect. I was too cool to spend much time with Gram, and when I did visit, I would make no secret of my exasperation at, for instance, her having conflated Jane Fonda with Vanessa Redgrave, who’d famously said something or other vaguely antisemitic. Utter asshole though I was, Gram never failed to give me a bagful of spectacularly delicious homemade blintzes and knishes before I left. I will never cease to be ashamed of rarely embracing or kissing her on parting. I was too cool for such behaviour.

She got dementia, and Mama put her in a “convalescent hospital” in Santa Monica where she died at around 84 without my being able to say goodbye, or to thank her for her implacable. kindness and generosity, or to ask her about her childhood in Odessa, and her marriage, and a thousand other thing. But the wonderful news for her is that she’s on my prayer list, one of the half-dozen to whom I apologise every night before drifting away.

 

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. 

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