Somebody to Love?

by Grace Slick

  Fortunately, as devastated as I felt, I was also immediately convinced of the accuracy and timing of the universal process. No matter how it seemed on the surface, I knew the event was somehow providential.

  The house was almost totally gutted, so where were my two cats? Someone had seen them take off into the forest area behind the house. Good. The raccoons never showed up till after dark, so they were all right, too. I had a sense of relief, however small, that no beings were hurt. Now I had to move on to the depressing business of sorting through the ashes for leftovers.

  I got a hotel room at Howard Johnson's in Sausalito and sat there, watching my house burn on the evening news while I tried to find Skip. Apparently, he'd left the hotel in Maui where he'd been staying, bound for an unknown destination. I called Los Angeles, trying to get hold of China, but she'd already gotten the news and was on her way to the airport to come see me. Someone finally reached Skip—I don't know who—but by the time he arrived, six or seven hours later, I was full of red wine and mad as hell at him for always being away. I blamed the dark side of my own isolation on him, when in fact, I'd done it to myself.

  China and a couple of her friends eventually arrived at the hotel to be with me, whatever condition I was in, and they watched me convert my sense of loss to anger and direct it at Skip. He'd seen it before—Grace's misdirected fury posing as righteous indignation. The next morning I apologized, but if Skip was already gone in spirit, I'd certainly done a good job of driving the rest of him away.

  The insurance company showed us several temporary homes we could use during the time that it took to either rebuild the old house or buy a new one. The short-term dwelling we selected was a beauty, but because our marriage was reaching its end point and our home had been trashed, it was hard to enjoy the new, albeit temporary, Tiburon house that was perched on top of Raccoon Straits overlooking the entire Bay Area.

  Ironically, we later learned that the Escalon fire had been started by careless county welders who were putting up a sign that read danger/fire area. Somehow, they'd forgotten to watch where the sparks were flying. Eventually, Skip and I received enough money to allow us to purchase homes in Pennsylvania and L.A., respectively.

  While all this was playing out, into an already confused atmosphere came the explosive element, passion, in the form of Len Calder, an old friend I'd met in San Francisco when I was about eighteen years old. Len was living in South America and we'd been corresponding sporadically over the years. Sporadic became frequent as his relationship with his common-law wife of twenty years disinte-grated and my own marriage did the same. Both of us were greatly in need of comfort, and we toyed with the illusion that we could help each other.

  It all came to a head when Len found herpes cream in his wife's medicine chest. Since he didn't have the virus, where did she pick it up? Incited to finally take action, he boarded a plane with nothing but a checkbook and a passport. Within twenty-four hours, he'd made it to San Francisco, and the game was on.

  By the time Len arrived, Skip and I had officially separated; I was staying in the house on Raccoon Straits and Skip had moved into a small apartment in Mill Valley. There was no chance of rebuilding either the house or the marriage—not at that point anyway—so I was glad Len had come. But the fact that he'd arrived with more problems than just an unfaithful wife was something I wouldn't figure out for several months.

  In the meantime, I took him around to visit his old haunts—UC Berkeley, where he'd gone to school, a rose garden that he loved in the East Bay, some restaurants he remembered from when he'd lived in San Francisco before, and a pier on Fisherman's Wharf where we'd ripped off our clothes and partied till dawn when we were in our early twenties. Len said he felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up after a long sleep, and it was good to see an old friend experiencing the delight of being “home” again.

  Whether we were driving up the coast, shopping in Monterey, or walking through Muir Woods, I never saw anyone exhibit such enthusiasm for anything and everything. I bought him a computer, hooked it up to an electric piano, and he sat for hours every day, creating some of the best instrumental music I'd ever heard. And that mind of his—the information, the comic slant on the news, the ability to comprehend everything but his own debilitating problem.

  Early in 1994, we took an afternoon walk on the beach and climbed around like children on a huge construction machine that was parked near the shoreline. That night, after having dinner and lots of drinks, and chatting with “Bear,” a wonderful bartender at the Cliff House, we came back to Tiburon and decided to do some target practice on empty bottles we'd lined up in the backyard. After a while, I decided to stop shooting because I was afraid the neighbors would call the cops about the noise. Len didn't want to stop, though. He was annoyed with me and started in with, “You just do whatever pleases you at the time, you don't care what someone else wants to do. You think because you're famous, you can just drop everything and ignore people.”

  We started arguing and he lost it. He began shoving me around, breaking handles off the screen doors, knocking lamps off tables, and yelling about what a brat I was. He finally gave up when I wouldn't react, and he went to the back of the house. To sulk? To go to sleep? I didn't know what he was doing back there and I was afraid to find out.

  At 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., the doorbell rang. Len went down the hall to answer it, while I headed for the bedroom in search of the shotgun. I'd been robbed three times in Mill Valley, so I thought that this might be another shitty late-night episode of some sort. But what idiot thief rings the doorbell? By the time I'd arrived at the front door, shotgun in hand, there were four cops standing around Len, who was on his knees, handcuffed and yelling “Shoot me!” at the top of his lungs.

  “Jesus, what's going on here?” It was my turn to ask that insidious question. What I didn't know was that when he'd been in the back room, Len had called the cops, telling them I was crazy and he needed a ride out of Tiburon. But apparently, he'd made some other remarks that made the police think he was disoriented, so ironically, they'd come to protect me.

  When they saw me standing there holding a gun, they said, “Put the shotgun down, Grace.”

  “Not until you tell me what's going on here,” I repeated.

  They weren't forthcoming and I wasn't giving in. Finally, in a fabulous move (for which he later received an award), one of the Marin County blues did a football block from the side, knocking me down, ending the standoff. On went the handcuffs. They took Len to the local psych ward and me to the drunk tank. When they let me out the next day, I got Len out, too.

  We arrived home before the media trucks showed up. But show up they did. There they were, guys waiting, ringing the doorbell, walking around the house, calling on the phone—the usual. We closed the blinds and responded to no one for about forty-eight hours, until my lawyer made his appearance. I thought that when I eventually ventured out to the grocery store or the gas station, just running my daily errands, people who'd heard about my middle-of-the-night altercation with Marin County's Finest would see me and quietly turn away or be rude about the matter. But when I showed my face, the response was shocking. Guys with thumbs up said, “Right on!” And women were saying things like, “If the cops showed up at my house with no search warrant, I hope I'd have the guts to tell 'em off, too.”

  I couldn't believe it. These polite Marin County types, apparently “normal” people, were harboring the Don't-fuck-with-me, old-Western-movie attitudes I thought were uniquely mine. But the gun-totin' image of Granny Yoakum from Li'l Abner comics is usually only entertaining when it's not a member of your family. Skip and China weren't the least bit amused.

  In retrospect, when I checked Len out of the local nut ward of Marin General Hospital, I should have driven him straight to the San Francisco airport and put him on a plane back to South America, but I thought the alcohol was to blame; he was the worst drinker I ever saw besides myself. He promised never to use alcohol again while he was with me. I was sat
isfied that that would solve the “loony” problem.

  The joke (?) was on me.

  Since China was living in L.A. and I was no longer the proper Marin matron, I decided to get a house in Laurel Canyon. This was a place where I knew the screwballs of the rock industry were at least accepted, if not welcomed. Old Psycho, my affectionate but all too accurate nickname for Len, came with me and started a series of episodes that helped him live up to his name. His “disease” was beginning to define itself.

  We were at a supermarket, about to pull into an empty parking space, when a woman yelled, “You took my spot!” I pointed out that she was entering where the street arrows pointed exit, but she kept on screaming and began throwing banana peels at my car. After I walked over to her and told her to “shut the fuck up,” and then walked back to my car, she launched some kind of fluid at us and Len lost it again. But this time he was sober. He went over to her car and started wildly and methodically opening and closing her driver's side door while she yelled and cringed from his peculiar assault. Three supermarket security guys had to tackle him to make him stop the odd display of anger.

  Okay, so Len's problem wasn't alcohol. I was still charmed by his intellect, though, so I made up excuses about his weird antics. He was just hot-tempered, I reasoned, and since he was six feet, two hundred pounds, I figured I'd better watch my sarcastic tongue. I just didn't want to admit to myself that the guy needed more help than I could offer.

  A short time later, on the way back from a trip to Death Valley, Len pissed in my car, angry that I wouldn't spend the next year or so crawling around in 120-degree weather looking for his lost wallet in the sand dunes. “I'm not getting out of the car, you'd take off without me,” was his reason for using the front seat as a toilet. When we got back to Laurel Canyon and called the hotel where we'd stayed in Death Valley, the wallet was right there where he'd left it.

  The next episode took the form of a sudden bolt from the house during the O.J. double-murder trial. After denouncing lawyer Robert Shapiro in an extremely personal way and flying out the door with no further explanation, Len returned eight hours later, out of breath and red-faced from walking up the long grade from Sunset. He lurched through the front door, saying, “Where are they? Who's here? Somebody is here.”

  “No, there's nobody here,” I told him.

  Except maybe his nine other personalities.

  The last straw came when I'd gone to bed after an argument to let him cool off with the computer. In the darkness of the bedroom, I heard his footsteps entering. Pretending to be asleep, I was curled up facing the wall and couldn't see what he was doing, but I heard a crackling noise like someone bunching up paper. After a minute or so of the strange sounds, he said, “Well, look what we have here.”

  I turned over to face his self-satisfied grin. The other side of the bed was on fire and I rushed out to get a bucket of water while he just stood there. After I'd doused the psycho bonfire, I walked back into the kitchen, put away the bucket, and called 911. When the cops arrived, they asked me if I'd accidentally left a cigarette burning in the ashtray.

  “No, I've never burned anything with a cigarette,” I told them, “and why the hell would I call 911 for that?” They asked me if I wanted to press charges. It was a tempting idea, but Len swiftly reminded me that since I was still on probation for the shotgun incident, it probably wouldn't be a wise idea to get my name on the books and in the paper again.

  Clever.

  Then I remembered a day, sometime before, when he'd said, “I don't know, I think I might be manic-depressive.” I hadn't paid much attention to him at the time, but now I decided I should check it out. Since I didn't know what being manic-depressive actually involved, I went out and bought a book on the subject. Yup, the extreme highs and hideous lows were there, the highs being so high that taking medicine to flatten the mood swings was something many manic-depressive people tried to avoid. I called Len's common-law wife south of the border, and speaking through a phone translator, she told me her therapist thought Len was not only manic-depressive but psychotic as well.

  Oh, great, just what I needed: to be audience of one while Len offered his personal rendition of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

  Nice as I could be, using a soft voice so as not to disturb my housemate's errant synapses, I said to him, “Maybe we aren't right together. Your daughter needs you, and your wife is lonely. It would probably be best if you went back to Rio.”

  As soon as you can get your fractured brain out of here.

  I loved the man dearly, but I also knew from my own experience that when you have a condition or personality trait that continuously drops tacks in everybody's path, you have to at least consider other options.

  Len was the last live-in relationship I've had to date. Now I live alone, I'm unintentionally celibate, and I'm also a fag hag. I love male energy, but I don't want the melodrama that goes with the male-female hetero dance. My buddies, Vinnie Marino, Ron Neiman, and Justin Davis, have kept me out of trouble and made me laugh until my face hurts. Next to musicians and comedians, I think gay men have the best sense of humor of any group of individuals I've met. And they're also more understanding of fringe behavior than most of the “straight” people I know.

  By the way, celibacy doesn't necessarily suck. If the mind-numbing illusion of falling in love comes around again, I'll probably drift into its short-term cloud, but right now, I'm enjoying the solo existence that is allowing me to do whatever I want, whenever I want to do it. Turning all the lights on at 3:00 A.M., coming home at any hour, blasting music at any time of night or day—it can be fun.

  Looking like a slob puts a damper on the sexual fires, though, so if I ever decide to redo the romance dance, my wardrobe of sweatpants will have to be discarded in favor of fancier duds. If I pair up, there'll also be morning breath to contend with (my own and his), deciding who takes out the garbage, and such questions as, “What time will you be home?” … “Why won't he talk to me?” … “Why won't she let me hang out with the guys?” … ad nauseam. Is it worth the trouble? I say no right now, but I'll probably change my mind and pile back into the nesting frazzle whenever it seems like life would be better as a shared experience.

  But I do have a lot of reservations, and often is a pivotal word in my book.

  How often can I offer my understanding to someone who's demonstrating his confusion by being a total shit? Once a week? Once a month? Never? I can do anything for a while, but those whiles add up and then I'm dealing with too often. The statistics speak for themselves. If fifty-two percent of marriages collapse, maybe that means we're not arranging our time in the optimum manner for our particular species. Constant togetherness might just turn out to be too often. Would inserting some specific time/space restrictions into the conjugal format ease the friction? Or is it inevitable that other people's imperfections will just drive us nuts after a period of time, and we're doomed to repeat the same illusory pattern over and over again?

  None of these questions I have seem to lend themselves to pat answers. But if you have a lock on how to realistically and permanently socialize human couples, Rick Horgan, my esteemed editor, would be more than delighted to hear from you. Just send it to that address again, the same one for sending information on the whereabouts of the plaster dicks.

  52

  Rock and Roll and Aging

  People sometimes ask me, “How come you don't sing anymore?” Huh? I sing all the time. At the moment, it's just not an organized effort. I sang for my parents. I sing for myself. I'll sing to the kitchen sink, the rabbits, my car, the bedroom walls. It doesn't matter. It's sort of like intermittent breathing; I sing because I'm alive. I just don't feel like repeating myself anymore by doing the same material every night onstage. Performing again wouldn't be fair to an audience, because most of them want to hear the old favorites, which I don't want to sing, and I'd be saying, “I don't do any of that stuff, you only get new material.”

  Oh really, you selfi
sh ASSHOLE.

  When they decided to repeat Woodstock a few years ago, I was asked to participate. I refused, because I believe some things, although they may have worked beautifully the first time, simply can't and shouldn't be redone. As far as I'm concerned, that was the trouble with Altamont, but I didn't watch the latest Woodstock, so I can't venture an opinion about whether or not it was any good. I just know that even in your prime, when you go onstage every night to perform, you have to repeat yourself, anyway. After twenty-five years of performing, the idea of not only singing the same old songs, but actually trying to do that in the context of the same concert, is not all that appealing. But that doesn't mean my love of music has changed.

  Cher on tile. (Justin Davis)

  My adhesion to music goes from a Band-Aid all the way through the complete body cast—from the scrape or gash that propels the shout, to the iodine and sutures of putting it down on paper, to the physical therapy of getting the kinks out onstage. And somewhere in there is my favorite part of the artistic healing process: the recording studio. This is the place where I get to build the idea and the sound, using the machinery to balance the original expression.

  Even without the reward of distribution, just making a song is something I've always loved. And in the studio, I cherished the luxury of being able to keep doing it until it was right. The input of musicians, producers, and engineers was like having professional ears attached to personal friends who knew how to translate my sometimes sketchy ideas. I'd walk in with a piece of paper that had some words and chord changes written on it, and a few or several hours later, I'd emerge with a full cast of musical characters who'd come together in the desire to “say” something aural and let it be heard by millions (hopefully) of people.