by Robin Green
In that anxious, uncertain, and vaguely dissatisfied state, I took that trip uptown, for weeks and weeks and months, to Marvel Comics. The job was okay. It was fine. The people were nice, but there was no one I saw outside of work, and no men there for me, certainly. I’d fight my way home at evening rush hour and feed the pretty black-and-white cat I’d acquired and kill some cockroaches with my shoe and make a sandwich and read and sleep to wake up and do it all over again—until the summer Friday afternoon when my old boyfriend David Leach, who blew through town occasionally, pulled up to my apartment on Bleecker Street in his shiny new blue-green Firebird convertible, top down, to take me to Montreal for the weekend.
What fun it was—the funky room with the sink in the corner, the exotic food—my first time in a foreign country, even if it was only a few hours’ drive from my brother’s house in Vermont. And then inevitably came Sunday afternoon. We drove to the airport in silence. I’d be flying back to New York and he’d be driving to Chicago, ostensibly to begin graduate school. (Ostensibly because he was only pretending to go. He’d needed the tuition check from Dad to pay the lawyer who’d gotten his pot-possession charge dismissed in New York that past spring.)
Except that when we got to the airline counter to buy my ticket home, the woman at the desk wouldn’t take a personal check, not mine, not David’s.
“Sorry,” she said. “No can do.”
David didn’t want to use his credit card—his father paid the bill, and he’d blow his stack. Neither of us had enough cash and there were no ATMs then. We were stymied. Until David shrugged philosophically.
“Maybe you should come with me,” he said. And I went.
I called my parents the next day and told them I had gone to Chicago with David, that I wasn’t going back to New York City, and that I needed them to drive down and get my few things out of my apartment. Oh, and also go to a friend’s place and pick up my cat.
They tried to reason with me—What about my job? Were we getting married? What would my mother tell her friends?—but I’d made up my mind. It was a measure of their past experience with my hardheadedness and their love and tolerance for and maybe even confidence in me (after all, I’d gone to college, surpassed them, so how could they tell me what to do?) that they borrowed a friend’s station wagon big enough to accommodate my trundle bed and suitcase and box of stuff—and cat—and did exactly what I’d asked.
Then I called Stan to tell him I wouldn’t be back.
“You’re saying you won’t be back at all?” Stan said. For the first time in seven or so months, I wasn’t hearing any exclamation points.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I got hung up.”
“Hung up?” he said, truly mystified.
I didn’t know what more to say.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
And that was that. Until I cropped back up again two years later with an assignment to write about Marvel for Rolling Stone.
“Wow, that’s great! Good for you!” Stan said when I called to tell him. The exclamation points were back! “Congratulations! I’ll let everybody know you’re coming!”
That first article about Marvel turned out to be a love letter of sorts, showing little of the arch and ironic tone that would become my stock-in-trade. Now that I didn’t work there I could see the place for what it was—nerdy and square, sure, but also a charmed fantasy factory full of sweet, self-described developmentally arrested adolescents.
Legs (that was my nickname there, because of my miniskirts and, yes, my long and shapely legs) was back, and no one seemed to hold it against me that I’d run out on them, no two-week notice, no any kind of notice. Herb Trimpe, who drew Marvel’s Hulk comic books (and would draw a big green Hulk for the cover of Rolling Stone that my article would appear in and also the inside spread page. “Face Front!” it read in giant comic-book letters. “You’re on the Winning Team with Stan!”), told me he was really envious, that he should get the hell out of there, that he should have a long time ago. But this was Marvel-hero talk, something Spider-Man might say or any of the all-too-human, at times neurotic superheroes Stan had invented.
Back home at David’s and my crash pad in Berkeley, there was obviously no place for me to work, but a friend’s sister—the older sister of the girl who’d lent me the jeans jacket with the patch—said I could use her place, that she was going east with her little boy to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer to see her folks, leaving her husband behind to write his second novel. From where I sat at her desk in the upstairs bedroom of their shingled house on Channing Way, I could see her husband at his typewriter in the converted garage below.
The sisters were East Coast heiresses, this one with Mao posters on her walls who’d met her husband in college, dropped out with him, and been arrested, but not convicted, for selling pot through the mail. His first novel had been brilliant, but now the pressure was on and he seemed miserable, blocked, chafing at his wife’s goodness, her expectations, and her financial support.
It wasn’t long before I repaid my friend’s sister’s generosity by seducing her moody husband, who, furious with himself, furious with me, wanted nothing to do with me after that. It wasn’t long after she returned to Berkeley that they divorced and she came out as gay and he stopped pretending to write his book and became an auto repairman for many years before he started writing again.
As for me, I had my own “marital” problems with David. “Marital” in quotes because, of course, we weren’t married. He’d made it clear that he thought marriage was a meaningless institution (although he married someone ten years later), nothing more than a piece of paper, and I’d always accepted his opinions as wiser and deeper than mine, if I had any opinions at all. I was in that respect very much the silent 1950s girl Anatole Broyard describes in his Greenwich Village memoir of that time, Kafka Was the Rage.
“The saddest part of sex in those days was the silence,” he wrote. “Men and women hadn’t yet learned to talk to one another in a natural way. Girls were trained to listen. They were waiting for history to give them permission to speak.…There were all kind of silences: timid silences, dogged silences, discreet, sullen, watchful, despairing silences, hopeful silences, interrogative silences.”
Sign me up then for the “timid, sullen, watchful, despairing” varieties of silence with David Leach. Take, for example, when he once remarked that all I ever seemed to need was a toothbrush and a pair of underpants (pretty much all I’d gone to Chicago with); David had his pipes and pipe tobacco, exotic teas, camera equipment, shaving gear, and pot paraphernalia. Did he admire this trait or did he think I was some kind of feckless girl hobo? Or was that what I thought? Should I have been pleased or stung?
He made the remark when we were on a train from Nogales, Arizona, to Mexico City, where we would board a bus full of Mexicans and chickens and a goat and ride over mountains to Acapulco. There we would be met by the friends who had left the dog Reuben with us and who would then drive us ten miles north to a house they’d rented with another couple. It was on a sandbar, the wild hippie beach where I thought that pretty photo of me might have been taken.
For now, though, we were still on the train somewhere north of Guadalajara, stretched out on the slept-in sheets of the bed in our sleeping compartment, watching Mexico lumber by, nothing to see really but dirt and cactus and the occasional beat-up town. Every time the train stopped, sometimes in the collection of dusty sheds that constituted a town, sometimes in the middle of absolute nowhere, weathered men in serapes and sombreros would materialize at our window with tacos and warm beer and bottles of unlabeled liquor that tasted like burning tires smell.
David had been telling me about a friend of his who had married a girl who would never go on a trip like this, a Jewish princess so uptight it was all about the hotel reservation and a decent bathroom, whereas I was ready to go at a moment’s notice, needing nothing but a toothbrush and a change of underwear.
His friend’s wife sounded li
ke most of the girls I grew up with on the East Side of Providence, all of them respectable and conventional girls (except of course for Ronnie) who didn’t shack up, who got married, and who expected—demanded—real toilets from life. Not like the crude wooden job in our compartment, where you could see the earth moving below when you lifted the lid to shit, which, though I tried mightily not to, I desperately had to because of the tacos, mescal, and beer, praying David wouldn’t come back from wherever he was before I’d finished and the smell was gone.
I told David none of this, that I hated shitting in that toilet, that I wasn’t cool at all, wouldn’t even fart in front of him, that I wanted to get married, or at least wanted him to want to. Really, I don’t remember telling him much of anything in those days and years we spent together, nothing, anyway, that I thought might give him a reason to disapprove of me, because I had a nagging suspicion that I had nothing and needed nothing because I was nothing.
But the real problem showed itself in sex. When I was seventeen and he was eighteen, I loved making out with David. Just the scent of his Aqua Velva made me wet. I even bought myself a bottle so I could feel that delicious desire when I took a whiff. For his part, he said that when he went home at night, he’d sniff the fingers he’d had inside me to be turned on by my smell. He had such a big, delicious mouth. When we made out, he would sometimes come. But he wouldn’t go all the way with me because I was a virgin and he said it would be too much responsibility.
So, one day on my miles-long walk home from Classical High in my flats, my light blue Dacron shirtdress with madras cummerbund, my French, Latin, and biology schoolbooks clasped to my small chest, I let Ernie, a Beatnik who hung out on Benefit Street near RISD and who I sometimes stopped to talk to, take me inside to his room. (He might have looked bohemian but, as he’d told me, he was an ex-con version, on parole from a stretch in prison for armed robbery of a grocery store.)
In no time, he was on top of me, roughly pulling at my cotton underpants, and I became terrified. I managed to tell him I’d never done this before and I was scared. Ernie reached down and felt around and then I felt a sharp pain. Noticing that my terror only grew, possibly not wanting to imperil his parole, Ernie climbed disgustedly off me and zipped up as I quickly gathered my books and shoulder bag and was out of there.
When I got home, I locked the bathroom door and saw the traces of blood on my underpants. I smiled to myself. Done. Soon David would be home on school break.
We had sexual intercourse on a daybed in his parents’ sunroom while they were asleep (I hoped) upstairs. I didn’t know anything about sex except what I’d read in Marjorie Morningstar. I thought I should be crying out. Thrashing around. Something. (Marjorie had accidentally broken a water glass on the nightstand with her flailing, for God’s sake.) In truth, I felt nothing except glad when it was over—but also glad that I’d made him glad. I faked orgasm, mimicking his sounds as he came, faking it as I was to fake it every time he put it to me, which was at least once a night in the times we were together in the coming years.
I knew in my bones he deserved better, that I was a liar and a fake, but I also intuited that sex was part of the price of a ticket to go places with David—to the Newport Jazz Festival when we were kids, where we sat in the first row, so close we could see Thelonious Monk’s pinkie ring. To see Janis Joplin in New York at the Fillmore East. To Chicago, the Jemez Mountains, Mexico, and finally Berkeley.
In the end, my body outed me before I could—at the point in Berkeley when I was writing the Marvel article and fucked my friend’s sister’s husband, I’d gone so dry to David’s attempts at entry that even faking it was an impossibility.
My Marvel story was finally finished and once again David lent me his Firebird to drive to Rolling Stone, where I left a manila envelope containing my article at the front desk for Jann. There were thirty pages inside. Ten thousand and a few words. I knew because I counted every one, including every a and the, and always would from then on when I finished a story. It was one of the most gratifying parts of the job.
I drove home to my untenable life. Steve and Chris had moved on, and Andrea, yet another friend of David’s from Chicago, was in residence, a nervous, hypertalkative, chain-smoking would-be painter. What was she doing there? How long would she stay? The answer turned out to be years, but it wouldn’t matter to me—I’d be long gone.
Sick to my stomach with anxiety, sick at heart, sick of Andrea, I waited to hear from Rolling Stone. And thanks be to God I didn’t have long to wait because the news from Jann came right away, the next day, and the news was good. Good news seems to come fast—it would prove to be that way in television too. Much easier and more fun for an editor/producer/studio to call and say, “We love it!” than for someone to bum a writer out with bad news.
And it is a mark of Jann as an editor that he’d read the piece right away and also that he sounded genuinely happy that he liked what I wrote, that he’d discovered a writer he could use. The story would be published in Rolling Stone. I would be paid. Ten thousand words at five cents a word—that would mean five hundred dollars, more money than I had ever had at once. And more than that, it meant I would have the possibility of a future as a writer for the magazine.
Once again I drove to San Francisco, but this time it was to pick up my five-hundred-dollar paycheck, with which I immediately bought a used car. Then I packed my few things and moved to a sixty-dollar-a-month rented room in a house in the Berkeley Hills.
* * *
Chapter Three
Good Vibes All-a Time
I found the sign for the room to rent on the bulletin board of the Berkeley Co-Op, a hippie market on Shattuck Avenue across the street from where Chez Panisse would open that very year and around the corner from the Berkeley Cheese Board and the first Peet’s Coffee shop, a neighborhood that would spawn a revolution in American cuisine. But that would be some other countercultural Baby Boomer’s story and this is mine.
Good Vibes All-a Time, the handwritten sign for the room read. I found a pay phone and called the number. Someone named Dennis said, “Groovy, c’mon up.” The address on Tamalpais Road brought me onto verdant, winding streets in the hills north of the UC Berkeley campus, what I imagined were professors’ homes, obscured by rampant ivy, cedar, and live oak trees. When I came to where the house should be, though, there was no house, only bushes and, hidden among them, a dirt path that I followed up and around through dense undergrowth, past reaching branches of live oak, into a shadowy forest of eucalyptus and California pine by which ran, I’m not kidding, a gurgling stream.
And there among the bushes and brush and trees was the house—a monster of a jerry-rigged thing, its weathered wood and batten siding engirded by metal belts, the switchback path leading up to it defined by a snaking banister like the entrance to some crazy Disneyland ride. I called hello and a forest troll poked his head out the front door and I climbed the steps to meet Dennis, a graying hippie with a trim beard and a freckled face, a constant smile plastered there. He was tightly wound, so his vibes really weren’t all-a that good, but they weren’t creepy or dangerous either.
He showed me through the cavernous living room, dark because of the trees and dominated by a giant’s stone fireplace and hearth. From there I followed him up a few stairs, down a narrow hall, through a cramped little eat-in kitchen with cabinets painted white many times over, then up a back staircase to what would be my room if I liked it.
If I liked it? Are you fucking kidding me? It was perfect! True, it was painted an oppressive hunter green, but it was full of dappled sunlight and felt like a treehouse, a bright little aerie, especially later, after I painted the whole thing white, the bookshelves, the walls, the sleeping nook, and the desk where my Smith Corona portable electric sat once I’d retrieved it from my parents’ house in Providence, a desk from which I one day looked out the window and saw, perched on a high branch of a tree like a sign of grace or a gift from God, a rare giant great horned owl staring
right at me as I typed.
When I moved in, I didn’t baptize the room with tears. Not this room. This would be the base from which I’d travel on assignment, where I’d transcribe my taped interviews and write story after story. This would be where I’d lure my editor to my alcove bed and learn to love sex, where I’d sleep with a housemate’s famous professor father, with my and Joan Didion’s semi-glamorous mutual friend (the one she’d prompted to call me to say she’d liked my Hopper story), and with a famous photographer who crashed at the house one night. Actually, that deed took place in the living room downstairs in front of the fire, but you get the idea.
There was one more tenant in the house and Dennis led me down a maze of hallways to meet a tall Ichabod Crane of a fellow, a graduate student in landscape architecture at UC Berkeley whose vibes weren’t all that great either—he was rather quiet and dour and withdrawn—but, like Dennis’s, not dangerous or even weird.
A Berkeley commune this was not. There would be no shared meals, no bonhomie, minimal chitchat. We three would simply coexist, which was fine with me. My real life would be west across the bay with Rolling Stone magazine.
Jann had told me that he wouldn’t be my editor on the Marvel article—he’d be handing me over to one of his staff. I drove my newly acquired Nancy Drew of a car, a two-toned gray and blue 1947 Chevy coupe, through Berkeley, hippies on the sidewalk scowling at the noxious cloud of black smoke expelled from its exhaust by shot rings, and across the San Francisco Bay to my first meeting with my editor.
Jann’s secretary escorted me to the office of the man who was to be my editor—it was one of a row of windowless, ceilingless cubicles with high walls and a door—and introduced me to him. David Felton rose from his chair and welcomed me with genuine warmth. Later in my life, when I was a magazine editor myself, and still later, when I was a TV writer/producer, I would come to know how he felt. Editors and show-runners are glad when they find an able writer. In fact, it’s one of the best things that can happen. Finding fresh talent makes your job rewarding and exciting, not to mention easier.