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.