by Robin Green
I huffed off to bed and the next morning woke to find him packing. I’d scared him. He thought I was crazy. He was going back to his wife and family. From our second-story window, I watched him and his suitcase go down the front walk and into a waiting cab. I retreated to our bedroom and knelt on the bed, rocking and keening like an Afghan widow. It was the first time I’d felt that kind of pain. The first time anyone I was so physically tied to had left me.
After a while, however, I came to the end of it. I got up and went to the mirror above the dresser to take stock, I suppose, and have a talk with myself. Well, well, I thought. That’s done. And I’m ashamed to say I saw a sly smile cross my face. Because I was actually relieved. I had never really expected—or wanted—to live my life with David Felton. And now I was rid of him. I was free. And without guilt or possible regret because he was the one who had left me.
Then I did what I always did and would do when I was at a loss—I looked for work. Ever since those first successful short stories in college, writing had become a lodestar, the one sustaining constant in my zigzag journey forward. Since it seemed unwise at that point to ask Jann for another assignment, I called up Jon Carroll, whom I knew from San Francisco and who was now here in Chicago editing the new Playboy knockoff, Oui magazine. He said he’d see me that afternoon.
Jon Carroll’s office was downtown in a glass tower that looked west onto a brilliant pollution-red sunset. Jon was his jolly self behind his desk, flush with his big new job, one that came with lots of money for freelance writers. I told him I was basically homeless, that I could go anywhere. He pondered.
“Israel,” he said. “Robin Green in Israel. Write whatever you want.”
I had no idea what he meant, but he was the editor in chief and he was offering me a way out of town and airfare and enough up-front expense money to last a month, the way I lived. So I went. It wasn’t until much later, when I’d returned to Berkeley after the episode in Providence with the broken leg and the crabs and was trying to write the story, that the Yom Kippur War broke out. I called Oui and left a message for the new editor (Jon Carroll having been fired), asking if the war changed anything, if they still wanted the story—and also asking about anything Jon might have said about what the story was about anyhow.
The new editor wrote back. Robin Green in Israel? Yes, they wanted the story. And as for what they were expecting: “Did you get laid over there? If so, how was it?”
Did I get laid? Excuse me? What business…After I got over being indignant, however, I realized that this was, after all, Oui magazine. Why should their interest in sex shock me? And, to be perfectly honest with myself, my relations with men were, in large part, how I experienced the world, and my interactions in Israel—the men I’d met and “getting laid” by some of them—were no exception. I did, in fact, have stories to tell: about the soldier who had lost his leg in the 1967 war, whose stump above the knee I had been curious to see (it looked like a huge innie belly button, the flesh somehow gathered into the center like the fabric at the end of the arm of a couch), whose Israeli macho bravado left no room for consciousness of his country’s dependence on the United States for its very existence and from whom, on that bare mattress on the floor, I’m pretty sure I got the crabs; about the playboy parliamentarian in a pink shirt who gave me a tour of the Knesset and bought me lunch there, a man who I didn’t go to bed with; about the Arab who looked just like my older brother—same face, blue eyes, fair hair—with whom I also didn’t sleep but with whom I walked for hours around Jerusalem while he assured me that the Arabs would see the Israelis gone, if not in his lifetime then eventually, as the Arabs always had, squatting patiently in the sand until the day their enemy disappeared into the sea. “Just look at the name of the cigarettes the Israelis smoke,” he said. “They’re called Time.”
There was also a Canadian waiter at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem where I stayed for a while who said I seemed lonely and took me home to have tea, who wanted not sex but philosophical conversation that veered into a weird religiosity that soon made me realize he was a brainwashing Moonie trying to recruit me into Sun Myung Moon’s South Korean Unification Church and who, when I said I had to go, became very angry and berated me and yelled at me, trying to intimidate me into staying.
And last, a sociology professor visiting from UC Berkeley with whom I traveled for a week to Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the Caesarea ruins, where he bought me a necklace of jade stones, the sight of which infuriated a couple he knew that we had drinks with, as they were friends with the professor’s wife back home.
He and the disapproving couple and a bunch of other people, including Jann Wenner, were part of a party flown to Israel and put up at the King David by Max Palevsky, an LA art collector who early on had made a zillion dollars in computers and who had rescued Rolling Stone from financial ruin in 1970 by buying a substantial share of the stock and who was now a director and board chairman of the magazine. He’d brought everyone there to witness the dedication of a wing of the Jerusalem Museum to his deceased immigrant parents, Izchok and Sarah.
Jann had learned that I was in Israel—“not the best Mediterranean climate,” he called it—when he telephoned me at the American Colony to invite me to join him and a few others at a club that night.
It was there, at a nightclub somewhere in Jerusalem, that the issue of the Kennedy story came to a head. We had gone outside to the patio to get some air and have a smoke (cigarettes). He asked me, after all the time I’d taken, not to mention the expenses I’d racked up, where the hell the story was. I was sorry, I said, but he wasn’t going to get it.
As he absorbed this, he turned away and blew a stream of smoke out of the side of his mouth, then looked at me and shook his head sadly. “You realize,” he said, “if you don’t write it, I’m going to have to take you off the masthead.”
I said that was okay. And, really, it was. I was, in fact and again, relieved. Between my lack of any real commitment to journalism and my misgivings about being some sort of journalistic hitman, with this story in particular, the whole thing had become kind of a drag.
And as time would prove, it was lucky for Jann I didn’t write the article, because when Rolling Stone moved to New York a few years later, would he have enjoyed such a happy relationship with Jackie Onassis, a much-vaunted and valued friend, if, my own questionable behavior aside, I had exposed the dirt about any kids of Ethel’s?
“Okay?” Jann said that night. “You sure?”
I said I was and we hugged and that’s when he asked me to please never write about him.
A young British couple I’d befriended at the American Colony Hotel offered to let me stay in their London apartment for two weeks while they finished their tour of Israel. I’d never been to London, or anywhere in Europe—and what else did I have to do?
They lived in a lovely book-lined flat in Hampstead Village. I walked the wild heath and tried to like the food at a pub in the quaint little town—Scotch eggs, bangers and mash. I went into the city to Harrods, had tea and crumpets in a little shop on a side street, dined on the Strand, stopped outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard. I walked through Hyde Park, where I saw secretaries strip down to their underwear to bask in the first thin sunlight. No one bothered them. No one bothered me. It was all so civilized, especially after Israel, where everybody ogled and catcalled, pushed and cut in line.
It was all so English. It was just like the England in the books I’d read, all cultivated and refined. I told the young couple when they came home that I thought I might stay in London forever. Rolling Stone had an office in the city; I’d pay them a visit. I was sure they’d have a story for me to do or that they’d at least let me use a desk and phone.
The young couple had a friend named Earl, an editor at a publishing house. The garden apartment of his house was vacant; maybe I could live there. Earl turned out to be handsome, erudite, charming. He seemed to like me too—an American girl on assi
gnment, tanned and wearing a jade necklace. He read Rolling Stone, thought he might even have read me.
I went to his house with my suitcase. He had made a picnic for me in the garden—the greenest, neatest lawn and hedges I’d ever seen—and had a blanket spread with sandwiches from the deli, a bottle of wine. We drank to my future in London.
It was my first night in the sparsely furnished garden apartment. It had nothing but a mattress on the floor, but Earl said he’d help me fit it out later. I invited him to stay. Which proved to be a mistake because afterward he couldn’t get away fast enough. In his polished British accent, he politely excused himself (manuscript to read, early appointment the next day), and went out and upstairs to his house, his disappointment and even revulsion palpable.
I lay there feeling I’d ruined everything, that I’d soured London and anything that might have happened between me and Earl. And I soon realized that I had fouled this nest in more ways than emotionally. There was a bad smell, and I realized it was me. The end of my period, maybe. Or maybe I was malodorous from the pubic lice I didn’t yet know I had—though I could have gotten them that very night from Earl or Earl’s mattress.
In the morning, embarrassed and humiliated, I fled. I didn’t want to stay in London anyway. It was too tame. Too confining. I belonged in the wilder, freer, less judgmental California. But first I went home to Providence.
My parents, as always, were glad to see me. And yet. Was it me or was it them? Do parents really want an almost-twenty-eight-year-old daughter showing up in their midst? My mother had told me how wonderful it had been for her and my father to have the house to themselves again after my brother and then I left; “Like velvet,” she’d said. She told me of an evening when she and my father were in the living room and he was watching television (a black-and-white—he wanted to wait until they perfected color to buy a new set) and she was feeling ignored, and, on the couch just out of his line of sight, she stealthily shed every piece of her clothing so the next time he glanced her way, she was stark naked.
“What did he do?” I stupidly asked.
“What do you think?” she said smugly.
Well, now I was home again, plopped down in my old room with no clear plan. A little R & R and pampering, someone to do my laundry and feed me. Daytimes, I rode my old Schwinn around the leafy East Side Providence streets like some big, overgrown child, once pedaling clear out of town into the exurbs, ending up finally at Kirkbrae Country Club, a kind of second-tier club with a mixed membership—Irish, Italian, Jewish—and one my parents went into further debt to afford.
My father loved it there. He’d taken up golf late in life; after suburban shopping malls killed downtown Providence and his job at Mickler’s along with it, he’d found new freedom in outside greeting-card sales, joined the golf club, gotten a hole in one, and was so well liked there, he was elected president, a formal portrait of him mounted on the wall.
He didn’t seem all that glad when I showed up at the club. I sensed I’d invaded his space, so I beat a hasty retreat from this male lair, and it was the next day that the wheel of my bike twisted under me as I slowed to take a corner and I fell, landing on my knee and fracturing the tibia just below it. Now in a cast from hip to toe, I was the Man Who Came to Dinner and I was in bed in my old room when I reached down to scratch a terrible itch in my crotch, and instinct made me examine my fingers; that’s when I saw tiny red crabs scurrying around there, waving their tiny little crab claws.
* * *
Chapter Eleven
Bankruptcy
After London and Providence, I went back to Berkeley and tried to write the article about Israel, or at least tried to think about writing the article about Israel, but I really didn’t want to think about it, about any of it, particularly about the fact that when Jon Carroll said “Robin Green in Israel,” what he meant was “Robin Green and men.” Did I have some sort of reputation? How? David Felton was one thing, but could Jon have heard about Kit Carson or his brother or Jann or any of the others? That one thing with the reporter on that movie junket to New York, maybe. He lived in Chicago…
I never wrote the article, and the new editor who had asked if I’d gotten laid in Israel never called again. I figured they’d blame the failure on Jon Carroll and I turned again to waitressing—not at a low-end-of-the-high-end restaurant like HS Lordships in the Berkeley Marina now but slinging pizza at a Persian joint on Telegraph Avenue, then working the graveyard shift at a Copper Penny on University Avenue.
At the same time that the girls of Rolling Stone were coming into their own, both in their office lives and out, I was becoming increasingly unglued and alienated. Basically homeless now, I lived in one converted garage and then another, one of which happened to be the garage of Timothy Leary’s house in the Berkeley Hills, though the man Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America” wasn’t there, having gone to prison for pot possession, escaped with the help of the Weather Underground, lammed it to Algeria under Eldridge Cleaver’s increasingly oppressive protection, then escaped him and was now in Switzerland or Afghanistan or somewhere fighting extradition to the United States. His kids, Susan (who ultimately committed suicide by hanging) and Jack (who didn’t), needed money. So they refurbed the garage and rented it—to me.
On off-hours, I tried to live the life of someone with inner resources—like the Beat poets I’d read about or as Patti Smith would do in a few years in New York City—and I frequented hip coffeehouses in Berkeley and San Francisco, but I only felt more acutely, self-consciously alone. Although one day at Caffe Trieste in North Beach, Jerry Rubin, who was an original Yippie, founder of the Youth International Party along with Paul Krassner and Abbie Hoffman (and who later became a successful businessman and, still later, in 1994, was hit by a car as he was jaywalking across Wilshire Boulevard and died soon after), recognized me and sat down at my little marble-topped table. He had read my articles in Rolling Stone, couldn’t understand why I wasn’t writing anymore, and for that brief chat, the girl I had been lived, the one who had been on the masthead and written things that people read, the happy girl in the photograph just a few years ago at the beach.
I did finally find a real place to rent in the Berkeley Flats—a little cottage with its own gated yard behind someone’s house on Francisco Street. I would settle down and make a life for myself. It wasn’t just a room of my own; it had a kitchen and a living area where I would set up a desk. I invited friends over for a painting party, among them the heiress friend’s older sister, who had forgiven me, and her little son, as well as David Leach, Andrea, and Mark (Reuben’s original master, who had returned from Mexico, moved into David’s Fox Court studio, divorced his wife, Vicky, and taken up with Andrea, whom he later married and still later divorced).
I planted a garden, my first, growing and harvesting tomatoes and zucchini. Freelance writing work came my way from publications such as City Magazine, the SF Examiner Sunday Magazine, and the Boston Real Paper, whose editor called and asked me to write an article about Inez Garcia, who had become a feminist cause célèbre after killing a man who she said had held her while another raped her. The story was complicated and I told it that way, feminist cause or no. A while after it was published, Gloria Steinem herself called me, wanting my permission to reprint the article as a cover story of Ms.
One afternoon I was surprised to see Kit Carson appear in my yard holding a balloon that turned out to be filled with nitrous oxide—a way to get high that was a new craze in the Bay Area that he thought would make a great article for Rolling Stone, and when I pitched it they agreed. It was funny and smart and five thousand words long. It was also the last article I’d ever write for Rolling Stone.
Because even though I was productive again, I was miserable. You can see it in the photographs David Leach took of me in the backyard of my little cottage on Francisco Street sometime in 1974. I’d put on weight. I looked homely and chastened, like one of the twin girls in that Diane Arbus photograph (a larg
e signed print of which hung on the wall of Harold Hayes’s house in Brentwood), identical twins, dressed alike in little dark dresses with big white collars, except that one little girl is pretty and the other homely, both visages seeming to reflect their inner feelings about themselves.
As Joe Conforte, the crusading pimp in my Rolling Stone article, said of his housekeeper who was serving Annie and me breakfast in his kitchen in Sparks, Nevada, “Look at her. Her nose is so big it would keep a cigarette dry in the rain. But she is beautiful. You know why? Because true beauty comes from inside and she is beautiful inside.”
I wasn’t and hadn’t been beautiful for a while—since London, since Providence, since the morning I found lice in my pubic hair and to deal with the little bastards, had waited for my mother to go out on errands and then called Hall’s Drugs and told the pharmacist that the Rid anti-lice shampoo wasn’t to be delivered until after eleven (when a friend of my mother’s was picking her up to go to the beach).
That day, my plan was to sit and take the stairs down one by one, just as I had come up, backward, the day before, then crutch it to the front door to wait for the delivery. My mother’s friend was, of course, late, and from an upstairs window I saw the pharmacy van pull up. In a panic, I started making my way downstairs on my ass, rounding the corner to see my mother take a small paper bag from the deliveryman. She turned to face me.
“What’s this?” she said, holding up the bag.
“None of your business,” I said.
She smirked at me. “I know what it is,” she said. “It’s cigarettes, isn’t it?”