by Howie Gordon
Among the casualties of Lion’s move to The City, were John O’Keefe and Bob Ernst. They were two high-powered theater people who had come to the Magic from the University of Iowa to stage John’s play, Jimmy Beam. It had been the featured show. Auto-Destruct was the Midnight companion piece, the clear B-side. The two shows had had the same run. When the theater folded, John and Bob took over the Magic’s Berkeley warehouse space and started teaching classes. I spent the next couple of years taking courses from them. Carly took some too. We did a lot of movement work, voice, and focused primarily on experimental theater techniques.
These guys were like the Marines Corps of acting, Navy Seals. They worked hard and they worked their students hard. The time I spent as their student amounted to the only formal training I ever really had as an actor.
It was also during this time that John and Bob joined with their fellow Iowa Theater Lab cofounder David Schein and created the Blake Street Hawkeyes.
Carly and I became Hawkeye groupies and they became family. I did a lot of video work shooting the Hawkeyes. I shot both their group performances and their solo shows. Carly served on their Board of Directors.
In the world of underground theater, the Hawkeyes garnered a large cult following for themselves and became an honored Bay Area institution. A wealth of fine actors and writers came and went with the group that included Cynthia Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, George Coates, Mary Forcade, Deborah Gwynn, Jim Cave, Mark Gordon, Michael O’Brien, Kim Bent, Ellen Sebastion Chang, Jack Carpenter, and Pons Maar.
Chapter Fifty-Six
It was time for me to see if I could earn a living as an actor. I registered with agencies and began going out on auditions.
I landed a part in a supper club in Oakland called 1520 AD. A Brit, who had made his fortune selling washing machines back in merry olde England, was backing the venture. It was cute dinner theater, franchised like a Chucky Cheese. There were already 1520 AD restaurants operating in several American cities.
When you walked in the front door, you entered the great dining hall of King Henry VIII. The show was a Disneyland kind of revue that happened all around you as the actors and waiters performed whilst you were seated and supped upon your choice of a standardized roast beef or a Cornish game hen platter. The food was mediocre, at best, the show was too.
I was cast as the Court Poet. It was my primary job to write and distribute souvenir scrolls for the dinner guests as if they were edicts issued from the King. My history degree stood me in good stead as I was able to ape the flowery language of the day. In addition, I also performed in some of the ensemble routines.
They started me out working for them in Oakland, but within a week, management wanted to promote me to the flagship operation in Hollywood. I got stars in my eyes. I was being discovered. It was all happening pretty fast. I told Carly that I would go down there and get established. And when I had it figured out, she could come on down and move in with me. I made damned sure that she understood that this was not my way of getting rid of her.
I lasted about a week in Hollywood. I couldn’t figure out Hollywood at all. I did not speak the language. It was as different from the Berkeley of that era as a place could be. The “Revolution” had just bypassed Hollywood. My flea market clothes didn’t cut it. In Berkeley, I was cool. In Hollywood, I was a vagrant. My alienation factor was pretty high. Every day, the fever seemed to go up a couple of notches.
The company had put me in a seedy hotel with cracked walls and spider webs. I didn’t know anybody in Southern California and I didn’t have a car. Among the actors and actresses at work, I did not make any friends. It seemed like all we did was compete with each other for more lines and center stage. In fact, all of Hollywood seemed like that to me. It was like one giant competition for a toilet paper commercial. It was all wrong for me, the wrong time, and the wrong place.
Fuck it. After a week, I quit the job and returned to Berkeley with my tail between my legs. I forgot all about a career in acting.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
There was a big, heavy, sliding door to the bedroom I shared with Carly in the Green House in Berkeley. When I slid that big, heavy door open one afternoon, there was Carly standing there in the embrace of a tall, handsome man. He had one of his hands down the front of her pants. Oops!
Oh, I did not want to be seeing that. I slid the door closed and went looking for a safe place to be. There really wasn’t any. That was my room.
Another time, there was this party to which Carly and I had both been invited. I don’t remember what was going on between us, but I somehow had gotten myself into the place where I wanted to try and find some other woman to have sex with me that night, and I told Carly so. Okay, we decided that we’d travel to the party together, but would probably leave with different partners.
We parted ways after arriving and we each went about our own business. Around midway through the evening, Carly found me. She said that her first choice was to go home with me, but if I still wanted to be with someone else, well, she had found a guy and she was ready to leave, now. What did I want to do?
Who knows what I really wanted? I don’t remember, but I told her to go ahead. I’d see her tomorrow. We said our goodnights.
Unfortunately for me, I happened to catch a glimpse of Carly as she was leaving the party with her new lover. He was this big, Black guy. Oh, I did not want to be seeing that.
I had sex with three different women that night, in three different scenes, and I enjoyed absolutely none of it. I could not get the picture of Carly leaving the party with that guy out of my brain. I would have joined the Ku Klux Klan that night, that is, if they were taking any Jews as members.
Why did we do things like that to each other? Why did we do things like that to ourselves?
Looking back, I was usually the one who would shut down the intimacy between us and go out seeking another sex partner. And Carly, my beloved, turned out to be very smart about taking care of herself in such moments. She did not choose to sit home alone in victimness and feel sorry for herself. She would take the opportunity to go find another lover of her own and would then match me tit for tat. And as you may already have gotten the hint, I could get pretty lost in the great maw of jealousy myself.
“So why put myself through it?” you ask and that would be a damn good question.
Well, there was all that talk about being part of the free love generation and all, but, y’know what? That stuff all fell off pretty quickly once the bleeding started.
A truer answer might be that if I wanted to fuck around — and Lord knows I did — then I had to be willing to accept the fact that she could fuck around too. It wasn’t complicated. Fair was fair. It was to be the price tag I paid for all the extra pussy I wanted. If I wanted a Japanese one, a Chinese one, a Black one, or an acrobat, a singer, or a dancer — and I did — I wanted them all, I didn’t want to miss out on anything. If I wanted all the extra cookies in my sex life, then I had to be willing to offer up all the same to her in return. That was the logic and that was the contract, at least in my mind. But me being able to honor it, to live up to it, well, that was proving to be something else entirely. Jealousy was a motherfucker.
All right, I’m not giving away any surprise endings here by telling you that Carly and I are still together. As of this moment, we’re in our sixties, and we have somehow managed to live through all of that shit and more. We’ve been together for forty years. We’ve raised three extraordinary kids. And we’re still trying to figure out exactly what happened and why it all had to unfold the way that it did.
You watch the Discovery Channel. You watch National Geographic. You know that some creatures mate for life, right? Why there’s the shingleback skink and there are the whooping cranes. Female gorillas are always monogamous with the silverback of their troupe, but that’s only until a younger male takes over. I guess all of God’s creatures have to negotiate sometime.
“Don’t drag me into it,” God said. “I’m just
trying to figure out this Facebook thing.”
Grey wolves, termites, coyotes, barn owls, beavers, bald eagles, golden eagles, condors, swans, brolga cranes, French angelfish, sandhill cranes, pigeons, prions (sea birds), red tailed hawks, anglerfish, ospreys, prairie voles, and black vultures have all figured out how to be monogamous. Why couldn’t I?
The great man was Paul Newman, who said of his wife, “When you have steak at home, why would you go out for hamburger?”
But the great man was also Zorba the Greek, who said, “The only sin in life is when a woman calls a man to her bed and he refuses to go.”
I wanted to be both of those guys. I wanted the life of Casanova and the happily-ever-after of married romance at the same time. I tried like Hell to make that work.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Shortly after Carly and I had taken a room together at what remained of the Berkeley commune, my parents came out to California for a visit. The word “commune” had bothered them. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the media seemed to always use it to conjure up images of mass murderer Charles Manson, drug addicts, teen-age runaways, and the darker side of hippie life.
Bless ‘em, my parents had to see for themselves that their youngest son was all right.
I was all right. It was a good visit. They liked Carly. In fact, they loved Carly. That was the best part. And they saw that we were “safe.”
At one point, I got to spend some time alone with my father. I was twenty-four years old. He was fifty-seven.
“Dad,” I told him something like, “I feel like I hardly know you at all. I want to know more about you as a person. I want to know more about your life. I want to know how you and Mom have managed to stay married all these years.” I was so full of shit. I had no idea what I was talking about.
…‘cuz we started talking, my Dad and I, and before long, he was telling me all about this hooker that he and one of my Mom’s older brothers had been seeing together on the side, and my ears stopped working.
It was like his lips were still moving, but I wasn’t hearing him anymore. The part of me that was my mother seemed to just go off. “Why, you son of bitch! You piece of shit! You fucking scumbag! How dare you! Who do you think you are?”
Mercifully, these were all just silent love songs playing in the quiet of my own head and not screaming judgments that I was raining down upon my actual father. Apparently, I was not able to extend to him the great benefits of the sexual revolution that I enjoyed for myself.
“Dad, Dad, ya know what?” I stopped him. “This is all wrong. I can’t do this. Let’s just go back to you’re my Dad and I’ll always love you, all right? Okay? Okay?”
We never spoke of it again.
And before we jump on the obvious and start blaming my poor daddy for having passed on this promiscuous appetite, it should be pointed out that this same man also sired my older brother, who has proven to be about as monogamous as humanly possible.
Whether it’s nature or nurture, the truth seems to be that some men and some women are programmed for monogamy. Carly’s parents certainly were. It’s near impossible to imagine that either of them had ever had another partner. And Carly grew up knowing that one man and one woman could indeed be enough for each other. I’m not sure what I grew up with, but it definitely wasn’t a predilection for monogamy.
I seem to have spent a lifetime wrestling with these issues. I wouldn’t badger you with them if they were not so critical in understanding how a guy like me could end up in the X-rated business. You see, for a while there, me being a porn star actually made it a lot easier for Carly and me to be married, but I get ahead of myself.
I’ve heard two very sane things about jealousy in my life that I think worthy of passing on to you. The first one came from Sherri.
Sherri, along with her husband and kid, all lived with Carly and the others at the Gomez Road Show in Santa Fe. Sherri was gorgeous. To an outsider like me, it seemed like there was always a long line of fellows looking to have a turn with Sherri. Anyway, she did what she did; I didn’t really get too deep into her story. She did, however, make one observation that has stayed with me for a lifetime. Sherri is reported to have once said about conquering jealousy,
“You can get yourself to the point where you don’t care anymore if your lover wants to be with somebody else, but then, you don’t care anymore!”
And the other sane observation about jealousy came from Steve Gaskin, a well-known counterculture figure of the 1960s, who cofounded The Farm, a famous spiritual community in Tennessee.
In the early days of their collective, the group practiced a sexual freedom that included open marriages. After a time, however, they reverted back to more traditional unions.
When asked why, Gaskin answered, “Because it (sexual freedom in marriage) makes us crazy faster than we can get sane.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
You live and you learn. Carly and I made lots of changes over the years in order to traumatize each other less and to help give our love a fighting chance. Mostly, they were like a series of little steps, taken one by one.
For instance, the upshot of that sliding door episode where I had stumbled in upon Carly and that guy making out in our bedroom was that we declared our bedroom to be a mutual safety zone. Henceforth, we would only “be” with each other in that room so that neither of us would ever have to endure being surprised like that again. The safety zone was eventually expanded to become the whole house of wherever we were living. That was a good rule.
And Rebecca taught us that there could be no more love affairs.
I first met Rebecca at the Magic Theatre. She was one of three incredible women starring in John O’Keefe’s play, Jimmy Beam. John O’Keefe is a man of many extraordinary talents, not the least of which is an ability to hook up with amazing women. For a time, he and Rebecca were an item at the theater. When their affair died of its own natural causes, I flirted with the young diva. Surprisingly, she opened the gates for me. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was playing with fire. One thing led to another.
This was not a one-night stand. This was not a casual fling. This was another whole galaxy with another leading lady. It was not the burning bush, but it had a gravitas all its own. I fell in love here.
Carly and I had our cage severely rattled. It was not an easy time. There was a brief period where the only peace of mind I had left was on the Bay Bridge as I traveled between their beds in Berkeley and San Francisco. I thought for a while there that I might have two wives. It got so crazy that Carly said she was willing to give such a thing a try. Rebecca scoffed at the idea.
When the situation finally forced a choice, I chose Carly. At that level, it had been Carly all along.
Carly and I got married on April 9, 1975.
The rule we made was “no more love affairs.” There could be a space made for a one-night stand kind of thing, a night out with the boys or girls, as the case may be, but no more regular lovers, no more second, third, or fourth fucks. The experience with Rebecca had taught us to stay away from those kinds of affairs. If we were going to stay married to each other, then those kinds of relationships weren’t really going to be fair to anybody.
Chapter Sixty
I wanted to make a big gesture to Carly. Our relationship had just been shaken, but we had survived. I wanted her to feel some sense of the commitment I learned I had to her. Besides that, almost everyone I knew had been married and divorced, including Carly. I wanted the chance to have been married in my life too. I wanted to stand before the world and say, “This is the one.” This last love affair had been tough on us. I wanted to relight the candle. When I proposed marriage, Carly accepted.
We were married at dawn on the front lawn of the Berkeley cottage where we lived. We planned an event with a sword dance introduction, followed by a comic monologue, and then a wedding ceremony in three acts.
John O’Keefe was going to do the sword dance, a kind of symbolic slaying of any evil
spirits that happened to be lurking about. I was going to do the comic monologue. I thought it would be a Bob Hope kind of thing for our friends. For the wedding ceremony portion, Act I was culled from Adam & Eve in the garden, we would share an apple. In Act II, we would pay homage to our Jewish ancestors by sharing a glass of wine and then breaking the glass in the Hebrew wedding tradition. And the climactic Act III was to be a great leap into imagination and the grand gesture. We would strip ourselves naked and pour a bucket of hot water over our heads.
How did you guess Act III was my idea?
You see, when I get nervous, I mean, really nervous, I’ve often had this frozen feeling that my energy has somehow left my body and is hovering above my head. I know it sounds whacky, but on the day I was to be married, I knew that I’d be nervous. I wanted some way to feel like I was truly inside of my body. I figured between getting naked in the cold morning, dousing ourselves with hot water, and then with the hug that we’d be giving to each other in such a moment, I was hoping that I would be one hundred percent involved and present in my own body.
Carly didn’t even blink. She was all for it.
We didn’t sleep at all the night before we were married. Somewhere around three o’clock in the morning we were worrying that no one would be showing up at dawn for this wedding. Could we still be married if nobody came? It really just looked like all we legally had to do was fill out the marriage license and mail it in. Bob Ernst was going to be our minister. We just needed our signatures, his, and one witness, I think.
But just to be sure, just in case nobody came, we went outside to our altar in the middle of the night and we married ourselves.
“Do you take — ”
“Yeah. And do you?
“Yeah.
“We now pronounce us, us. We may kiss each other.” And we probably did a lot more than that, but it was okay, we were married.