Black Swans, page 16
The last time I saw Coco alive, when she wore that crisp white outfit at the West Beach, ordering bourbon for lunch with her smudged hazel eyes and her large plum lips, her “problems,” she insisted, had nothing to do with chemicals but instead were the fault of her mother, her ex-husbands, and, though unspoken, my own boring and lackluster ordinariness.
Coco used to tell me, in her Jell-O-mold moods, that her ambition was to grow old and turn into one of those Jewish ladies who hang out on the Venice Boardwalk playing cards, eating pickles, and wearing ugly sandals with socks. I was looking forward to doing this with her even though I myself, when she first told me this plan, didn’t think I’d live past twenty-five and, in fact, I’m now very surprised to see I’ve a good chance of making fifty. In the back of my mind, there’s always plan B too. It is the lining of the fabric of my life, this idea that if things get bad, I can retire from the loop.
The trick, I suppose, is to keep the wolves from the door so if you want to hang out on the boardwalk and feed the pigeons, you won’t trip on your way down.
Black Swans
Maybe I thought black swans were like negatives, two would make a positive—or that Walter and I together could somehow beat the odds of us apart. Our histories of abandoned relationships, chaos, and broken glasses and broken dreams. And I do mean broken.
But only dreams and glasses—no matter how many we wrecked, we knew we could always get more.
We were sitting at the 72 Market Street Restaurant, ordering the vegetarian plate, Walter’s eyes so blue women to my right were becoming unglued—either that or they recognized him, he being a kind of celebrity in what he calls the writing trade.
“After we broke up,” he said, “when people asked me why I was never going west of the Rockies again, I said . . .”
“Because I got that piece published,” I cried. “You were so mad!”
“Aha,” he said, “I see you’re casting this in a literary mold.”
“Oh, come on, Walter,” I said. “Everything with us is always in a literary mold.”
“But that wasn’t it,” he said. “It was that summer, the heat, the Bel Aire Hotel when you took acid and didn’t tell me.”
“Oh, Walter,” I scoffed, though I had to admit, telling this story was not bad all these years later if he were writing it.
Not that it matters anymore.
“Remember those black swans?” he recalled. “I wonder whatever happened to them.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I heard the witches took them. I’ve never been back, I hate that place. Maybe they’re still there.”
RECENTLY SOMEONE ASKED me when was the last time I was in a serious relationship, when I thought I might get married, and I said, “Oh, 1971. Before I got published and knew I was home free.”
I met Wally in 1971—the year I realized that if I kept on being a free-lance artist doing album covers, I was going to either starve or, worse yet, have to get married. (Getting a job didn’t occur to me.) I loved doing art, but everyone who knew me said, “You should be a writer.”
I took this as an insult to my art and not at all practical advice. I didn’t want to be a writer; it would scare men. I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew. Or else like the women from New York I’d seen who were writers and looked to me as though they had to do this because otherwise they’d be total wallflowers—they were so infuriatingly dowdy when all around them were in the shortest skirts and knew how to put on at least mascara. Joan Didion, who knew how to wear clothes, was too brilliant and great for anyone to write like and too skinny and sultry to look like. I thought if I couldn’t be Joan, then I’d have to be dowdy and/or crazy, like Virginia Woolf. Of course, there was always Colette, but then she was French—not living in L.A.—and even she scared men. My only hope was M. F. K. Fisher, who was from Southern California and did write like a dream and had had a life and was beautiful, but she seemed to me to know everything, all I knew was what I learned at Hollywood High and the Sunset Strip and not stuff that built character such as she had. No, I was going to have to get married, and I told my friend Larry Madden that’s what I was going to do.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “I’m starting a magazine, write a piece for it.”
I didn’t want to write a piece for a literary magazine.
But I wrote a piece, showed it to Larry, and he rejected it.
“It’s too L.A.,” he said. He was from Chicago and thought everything should be morose. What Larry wanted me to do wasn’t to write for his literary magazine but type other people’s (his) short stories. It was a situation out of Barbara Pym—men wanting women to type. Except the women in her books could type, whereas whenever I tried to type anything, people got mad. I was fast, but that wasn’t enough; they wanted things spelled. It became Larry’s plight.
“Hey,” a woman I knew said, “there’s someone from New York who’s coming out, he’s written this book—it’s really funny, maybe he can help you.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
I called Wally at the Chateâu Marmont and went to meet him at a nearby restaurant, the Frascati, in the bar. He said, “I have blue eyes and sort of curly brown hair.”
I was glad we were meeting in a bar, because in those days all I did, when I wasn’t taking pills (speed, Ritalin especially) all day, was drink all night. I was twenty-seven and had plunged into the sixties with total abandon. All the drugs I could get were none too many for me, I usually thought, until I’d see the drugs some rock-star friends of mine like Gram Parsons had, huge mason-jar half gallons of downers, and then I’d think, Maybe there is such a thing as going overboard. With most rock stars, when I was doing album covers, I felt I was in the wrong place with the wrong people—I hadn’t really felt at home since I had left the art world, which I did when I became a groupie after the Beatles changed It All. Aside from comedy writers for TV shows, with whom I could actually talk for entire evenings and not feel completely at a loss, by the time I saw Walter standing in that bar with his blue eyes and brown curly hair, it had been a long time since anyone had made me laugh for real.
In photographs of myself in those days I look older than I do now. But then, I wanted to have a Jeanne Moreau-y ennui—be disillusioned and world-weary; I cultivated having plight.
Which is not to say I wasn’t a lot more than poor Walter was expecting. I mean, my skirt was short.
“My God.” He smiled sweetly when he saw me. “I thought when Lina said we should meet, you’d be some . . . I don’t know, someone like her.”
Lina was one of the women I meant by “writer”; she was hopelessly and aggressively dowdy; her hair was mousy; her skin was never tan; she wore awful sandals and terrible longish mouse-colored skirts. Then she wore Navajo jewelry as though trying to make it up to you. But in my opinion, turquoise is no excuse for no mascara.
We stayed at the bar for a long time, and before I knew it, we were at my apartment and he read my piece, and when he was through, he looked up and said, “The only thing I would change would be the first paragraph. I’d put the second paragraph first and the one you’ve got there right after it.”
I looked at it. It was a slightly more-so opening than the one I had, but he didn’t violate my artistic principles, and suddenly I felt I could relax, that Walter was not that bad even if he was a friend of Lina’s, and when I asked him how he met her, he said, “Well, friends of mine in New York who knew her in Berkeley told me to look her up. I did, but I didn’t feel we had anything . . . in common.”
But then, Wally always put things nicely. “Nothing in common” is a lot nicer than “She’s a big dork.”
In fact, if I ever decided to go for understatement, I might use “nothing in common” myself.
By this time I was looking at him more closely and saw that his hair was indeed brown and curly, his smile was very darling, and his eyes were so blue they looked like innocence regained—especially when he looked at me, he seemed very innocent, but then he was. His body was a cowboy’s, long and lean, complete with boots, and, in fact, he was exactly what I needed and was becoming what I wanted very quickly. (Usually the two are so far apart.)
I stretched out against the back of my low couch, crossed my legs so they’d look even longer, and said, “Tell me? . . .”
“Tell you what?” he asked, his eyes not on anything but me.
“Tell me everything,” I said.
He told me how writing the book had nearly killed him; he wound up in the hospital, in fact, his second ex-wife leaving him halfway through without a word of good-bye. His friends took him in, and when the book was done, and turned out suddenly to be this kind of cult best-seller and then optioned by a producer for $150,000, then more for writing the first draft, it was the first time in all his thirty-five years that he wasn’t living with wolves at the door.
“It’s so nice to meet someone who looks like a cowboy and isn’t a rock star,” I told him.
“Is this all you have here, wine?” he wondered, having finished my only bottle.
“Yes,” I said.
“Let’s go back to the Château,” he said. “I’ve got brandy there.”
So we got into my old station wagon and drove back to the Château Marmont, which wasn’t that far, since in those days I lived in West Hollywood in a bungalow, and there he told me about all the serious political-type articles he’d written for magazines (which had appeared in serious East Coast publications), and he told me about his friends, who were all either writers or else very bizarre characters with harebrained theories, which he told me about to make me laugh. Which I did.
He smelled like brandy and cigars and Mennen after-shave, and we made love (which he did brilliantly, unlike rock stars), and then he passed out. I stayed up all night, reading his book till dawn, which I couldn’t put down because it was so marvelous and exciting, even though all it was about was growing up in the Midwest.
The more I read, in fact, the happier I was to be in bed beside him.
By the time dawn came and I was nearly finished with his book, I was in love with him. And I was in love with his book, which I felt I could have written myself. Which is one of the troubles with writing; people who love your writing already think they’re you. They think if they sat down and wrote, it would be your book. Exactly what I thought about Walter.
By the time poor Walter woke up, I was already so sure I was him and that he would naturally be in love with me, that none of my usual plights pertained about why nothing I ever did romantically would work—I saw us as two strangers out on the same limb with only each other for all eternity. Floating into the horizon like two swans.
All the pitfalls of a relationship, which had before made me forget the whole thing—a weekend in San Francisco when I slipped in the bathtub at the Miyako Hotel and got blood all over everything and a scar I still have, and Walter kept watching a football game, which I would have considered inexcusable in life heretofore—didn’t matter, because I was suddenly from his book and used to things being strange. And so after a month, an unprecedented amount of time for any romantic adventure, I began to feel as though this was it and he was The One.
In May of 1971, on my birthday, he got me a huge scrap-book someone in the twenties had obsessively made on gigantic pasteboard pages, all of Rudolph Valentino, my favorite sadly departed star (a book I still have, with a yellow rose Walter gave me, by July pressed dry in it), and in July, when Jim Morrison died, I felt a lot less bereft having him there, because I’d introduced them in the liquor store once and he’d laughed on our way out, saying, “Wasn’t that the lizard king?”
“Yes,” I said, “he looks awful, doesn’t he? You’re so much cuter.”
“I am?”
“I’m so glad I’m not in rock and roll anymore,” I gloated, although I didn’t tell Walter that if he hadn’t been there, I would probably have done something to wind up with Jim as I so often had in the past. Until I fell in love. And then, by July, which was still cool and overcast, when Jim died, I really felt like my days as a juvenile delinquent were over. So many people I loved had died from overboogie, though, and we were still asking each other questions back then as to why someone we knew OD’d. Going over their last days looking for something “deeper” than that they had enough drugs to do it and were too fucked up to stop. I didn’t connect my few prescriptions from pill doctors to someone OD’ing in Paris, since I never lowered myself to take heroin. But in the back of my mind, I was saving heroin for my old age.
All I took was speed, painkillers like Percodan and Demerol for fun, and painkillers like codeine and Fioranol for cramps. And I never took downers, except if anyone happened to have any Quaaludes or Mogodons. Oh, and LSD or mushrooms or mescaline if it was a nice day. As far as I was concerned, since I didn’t smoke cigarettes, this made me a fine human being. I had quit smoking when I was twenty-six, and although it made me get drunk a lot faster, I figured it was worth it, even though I liked to get drunk slowly so I could drink more and not have to take as much speed all night. Whatever my personality might be, I had no idea, and as far as I was concerned, if I wasn’t on Ritalin at least, my reply to the world was “no one is home.” Ritalin was my personality.
Mixing speed and alcohol has never been known as a stabilizer. I’d go from “This is great, I love everyone,” to “You’re all awful” in two minutes.
But Wally didn’t mind, because he had a way of downing a fifth of Courvoisier in an afternoon that to me seemed a little on the excessive side. Except that he was a writer, and it was common knowledge that writers “drank.” That was because once you were a writer and you’d written for the day, what else was there for you to do? Garden? No writers I knew in those days gardened. They all lived in apartments and left gardening to the landlord.
“But do you have to drink Courvoisier?” I asked. “It’s so strong and you turn red and crazy.”
“Maybe I could drink tequila,” he agreed, so we bought a bottle of new rock-and-roll tequila, Sanza Commerativa, in a brown bottle, instead of the regular old tequila in a clear glass bottle, and though I couldn’t keep up with him, at least we got to have lemons—which had vitamin C—logic in those days being what it was.
By August of that summer of 1971, the greatest heat scourge of all time happened. Los Angeles festered with mad heat. Not only was it hotter and hotter, it was muggy. Wally began saying things like “Maybe we should go to New York. First that earthquake, and then this!”
(That was the year of that huge earthquake.)
“New York!” I cried. I mean I loved New York in my imagination because I’d read things he’d written about it and thought I was him, but I couldn’t leave L.A. just because of mere heat prostration and death by earthquake.
“Well,” he said, sweating on my bed, looking anxious like this might never go away and he’d just melt. He was having to drink Tom Collins, it was so hot, and gin didn’t agree with him. “We have to go somewhere. Why don’t we go back to San Francisco?”
“Not the Miyako,” I said, my scar still fresh. “I don’t think we could make it to the airport to get to San Francisco—we’d have to drive through Burbank! Oh, God.”
Burbank was fifteen degrees hotter.
It was 10:00 a.m., 104 degrees outside, and building. It wasn’t just hot-hot, which I loved, when you can float on angel’s wings, but like Calcutta laced with nasty damp. And smoggy. By the end of the first week, it was 114 outside by noon. Paralyzing was the word for it. It paralyzed your brain, your soul, and your sex drive.
“We should go to a motel,” he said, “with air-conditioning.”
“A motel,” I said, “with air-conditioning. We could take champagne. There’s that motel on the corner. The Sunset Palms.”
“But it’s full of hookers,” he moaned. “They’ll probably moan all night. We should go to a good place. We should go to the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
(The Château Marmont, where he still had a room, had no air-conditioning in those days.)
“We should go to the Beverly Hills,” I said. “We could sit in the lobby and see Dr. Joyce Brothers and celebrities.”
The real flaw in my reasoning was that I didn’t want Walter to think there was a place better than L.A. because in those days, before all the “improvements” we now have, I used to think L.A. was the greatest place on earth (now I think Miami is), and to be loyal, I stayed put even when it had to be crazy to do so—plus, it wouldn’t have hurt to have air-conditioning, but I never minded what other people called “too hot,” I just minded this.
“Oh, I love the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Walter sighed. He may have been from the horrible Midwest, but he knew banana-leaf wallpaper when he saw it.
The Beverly Hills was full, as was the Beverly Wilshire, but then I remembered the Bel Aire Hotel. It was a constant battle to keep Walter from getting too depressed about being in L.A. I loved him so much, I wanted him to always be with me, but I didn’t love him enough to go to the dread East Coast. I hoped that once he saw the Bel Aire Hotel, he’d realize L.A. was much too beautiful to leave. I called the Bel Aire and they had only one room left, which they insisted wasn’t good enough because it didn’t overlook the garden or the pool. We were overjoyed just for air-conditioning, and though the room wouldn’t be free until evening, we had something to look forward to. I always think something to look forward to is usually better than the thing itself. At least looking forward to something gives you the will to live.
“Call Dalia,” Walter said, as he left to go work on his screenplay back at the Château, “get anything she has.”
Dalia was our dealer who worked for a record company and therefore always had great drugs. She was not the kind of person you would know other than for drugs, but I wanted cocaine, and back then, not everybody had it. “I’ve got coke,” she said, “and hash, and some great acid, but only enough for one hit.”
