Somebody to Love? (20 page)
Youthful optimism and determination.
Riding high, sometimes literally, I was living a sixties romance novel. Paul and Grace, the unmarried romantic harbingers of “the Dawning Age of Aquarius,” were touring, saying it like it is, and waiting for a child to arrive. Some people probably thought that touring while I was pregnant was a foolish idea, but I thought it was fine. In fact, I couldn't imagine
not
doing it.
Since performing was such a huge part of who I was, I saw no reason to stop. I wore those big Middle Eastern caftans to free up the expanding gut, I ate for two, I flaunted my radical unmarried status, and accepted all the “May I carry that for you?” assistance I could get. People become very pleasant and helpful around pregnant women. Open the doors, fire up the torpedoes, let's cover the planet with the greediest species on earth.
At about 10:00
p.m
. on January 24, 1971, while Paul and I were entertaining a coke dealer and his wife at our home (no, I didn't do cocaine while pregnant), I said, “Paul, saddle up the mare, we're going to Jerusalem.” It was time. We drove forty-five minutes from Bolinas to French Hospital in San Francisco, where they took me to a cell with a gurney in it. When they offered me a three-milligram Valium, I almost laughed out loud. For a person like me who'd literally wallowed in a pharmacopoeia, three milligrams of
anything
was not about to do the job. And incidentally, that was the last drug of the evening, not by any choice of mine.
I'd previously told my doctor that when I was ready to give birth, I wanted an anesthetist to administer copious amounts of whatever they had in stock to kill the pain. But the anesthetist never showed up. In the spaces between the contractions that were turning me into a rictus-faced gargoyle, I inquired as to the whereabouts of the missing drug dispenser.
“Oh, he isn't here yet,” the various nurses informed me, something they continued to say all night long. I hadn't taken any La Maze or La Modge or whatever-it-is classes, because no matter what kind of cute tiny breaths you practice, I figured that in the final analysis, you've got a mass the size of a cantaloupe coming out of a hole the size of a fifty-cent piece.
That simple bit of physics means PAIN.
I told myself that women had been doing this thing called childbirth forever. Don't worry about it, I kept thinking. Remember that it's only a few hours of hideous groaning and then you have a whole new person to love. So I had my daughter by natural childbirth, an accidental route I'd definitely not chosen.
I'd been warned that newborns do not look like the Gerber baby. They said “it” would probably be a blood-covered, squalling, blue-faced, wrinkled mess, so I was ready for a remnant of some atomic mishap. But she was a lovely, smooth-skinned, pink-and-white being, content to just lie there and be cuddled and admired by her mother.
On January 25, as I held my newborn baby in my arms, a Spanish nurse came into my hospital room to attend to antiseptics and linens. She was holding a framed certificate that looked like a high school diploma, and she said, “We give these to all the new mothers. You see, it says where she was born, what time, and the name of the baby goes here.” She pointed to an empty line in the document. “What is your baby's name?” she asked.
I noticed a crucifix around her neck and spontaneously said, “god. We spell it with a small
g
because we want her to be humble.”
It was only a few hours after my baby had arrived, I was holding the miracle of birth in my arms, and I was already messing with somebody's head. The nurse asked me to repeat what I'd said. I obliged her. After hearing it a second time, deciding that the blasphemy was real, she haltingly entered “god” on the parchment, probably expecting to go through her life repeating novenas for her participation in this profanity. When she was through filling in the irreverent name, she ran to the telephone to call Herb Caen, the same beloved
San Francisco Chronicle
newspaper columnist who'd inspired me to leave Florida many years prior. He published the information about the birth and the supposed appellation Paul and I had chosen, which would, by virtue of the deity's extensive popularity, make it impossible for my daughter to live up to her presumed given name.
Her real name is China. San Francisco has a large Asian community, and Paul and I had observed that the Chinese follow spiritual practices that seem to offer more equanimity than the fear- and guilt-ridden dogmas of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Thousands of years before the Western Bible was written and rewritten and burned, and rewritten again during the Inquisition, the Oriental people had realized that the yin/yang or 50/50 take on human existence produces more acceptance and self-control. To Paul and me, this seemed a better alternative to the “damned if you do, damned if you don't” ethic that permeates Western civilization. And aside from the fancy polemics, China is the name of a delicate and feminine form of artistic expression in clay, as well as useful eating utensils.
Seemed like a good combo.
Since I never paid much attention to the couplings of other celebrities, I didn't know that Michelle Phillips, another rock-and-roll mom, had named her child Chynna. In fact, I didn't know that Michelle even
had
a child. Several years after the birth of my daughter, when someone asked me if I'd made the spelling different from the name of Michelle's daughter on purpose, the answer was no. In fact, I was so intent on being original with my daughter's name, if I'd known Michelle's kid was named Chynna, I probably would have called mine Xlopdy. Circumstances were such that two of the very limited number of couples in the sixties rock world who played together and loved together just happened to give approximately the same name to their firstborn girl.
A million to one.
The Chrome Nun
T
here was yet another reason Paul and I developed respect for the Eastern way of life. We'd seen the movie
Enter the Dragon
, and both of us were completely taken by the ease of movement and calm self-assurance that Bruce Lee displayed through the use of kung fu. A powerful but graceful form of martial arts, kung fu uses
all
of the body/mind systems, rather than just the upper-body jabbing of Western boxing. Again, because of adherence to the whole, a Chinese fighter must also learn to heal.
Balance.
The students of White Crane kung fu, the form that Paul and I studied briefly, were taught
both
the fighting
and
the healing arts. Yin and yang. Black and white in one circle. Unfortunately, being on the road most of the time made it extremely difficult to maintain the rigorous “workouts” that produce a martial arts adept. The practice has to become a way of life, and I'm afraid I didn't have the discipline to make it a top priority. I think I preferred
watching
the hard work of physical and mental training rather than actually doing it.
Ron Dong, who was both a friend and a teacher of ours, occasionally came on the road with us to perform an intricate grouping of moves using large swords slicing through the air at lightning speeds. He also attended to everybody's medical needs, taking out his acupuncture needles and “magically” erasing problems that could not be fixed by Western medicine. Acupuncture is now becoming recognized as a formidable medical practice, but when we were going to Master Long's studio in San Francisco in the seventies, Westerners still considered it some goofy offshoot of all the other alternative methods.
Byong Yu, another Eastern master, taught us a martial arts form called tae kwan do, a more direct and leg-focused form of karate. There's a line in one of Paul's songs, “Ride the Tiger,” that synthesizes a conversation we had at dinner one evening, when Mr. Yu was discussing the differences between East and West:
It's like a tear in the hands of a Western man,
He'll tell you about salt, carbon, and water,
But a tear, to an Oriental man,
He'll tell you about sadness and sorrow or the love of a man and a woman
I don't think Byong Yu was accusing all Westerners of being coldhearted chemical engineers, but the heavy emphasis we place on technology in this country clearly bothered him. Of course, Korean and Chinese politics didn't seem to reflect the Asian spiritual ethic. Maybe that's why Master Long, Ron Dong, and Byong Yu were
here
—they were hoping the best of both cultures would somehow join, allowing each continent to benefit from the union.
Looking back on it, I find it interesting that while many of our contemporaries were studying at the feet of seated Eastern gurus, Paul and I gravitated to a more aggressive physical practice. All forms were headed in the same direction, though. For everyone, the goal was balance.
Sunfighter: China and me in 1971. (AP/Wide World Photos)
In my personal life, the balancing act of being a new mother and making records was made easier by the fact that for the first six months after China was born, we didn't tour. While Paul and I made a “duo” album titled
Sun-fighter,
which featured fat baby China's picture on the cover, I cared for my daughter during the day and Pat, her nanny, took the nights.
Rolling ocean, small town, new baby, visits with Grandmother, new record, no drugs, and no pressure.
This too shall pass. When I stopped breast-feeding, the liquor crawled slowly back into my bloodstream. Having help both with the baby and the paperwork at the office, I was able to juggle the remainder of my time in the best rock-and-roll tradition. (“Rock-and-roll tradition” could be an oxymoron, but, God knows, there are plenty of traditional morons in rock and roll.) By the time Paul's and my second duo effort,
Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun
, was being recorded, I was back in full swing and displaying a certain sangfroid.
The title of the album was taken from David Crosby's nicknames for the two of us. “Baron Von Tollbooth” was a reference to Paul's facetious pride in his German ancestry, while “the Chrome Nun” evoked my tendency to engage in armored dogma. We constantly proved David's nicknames true, so we mounted no resistance to them.
David had a beautiful “wooden ship” called the
Mayan
, which he had anchored in a remote, pristine lagoonlike pool of tropical heaven about thirty miles off the Florida coast. After Airplane played Miami, Paul and I took a seaplane out to where David and several of his tanned, blonde, voluptuous nymphs were practicing the art of nautical Shangri-la. The guitars, the plates of fresh food, the marijuana, the nudity—I liked everything about it except that last part. Damned if I was going to be the only dark-haired, flat-chested, skinny white geek to throw myself up for the brutal physical comparison. For the remainder of the visit, the Chrome Nun was the only one wearing clothes—a conspicuous cover-up.
I'm still that way. Ninety-five degrees in L.A., and I'll be the only one not wearing shorts. If you want to let
your
fifty-year-old cellulite flap around, that's
your
problem. I find it offensive. I don't want to look at yours and I don't want you looking at mine.
Keep your city beautiful—wear slacks.
Archetypal twentieth-century blonde and, coincidentally, my cowriter, Andrea Cagan. (Juliet Green)
But I must say, I'm getting better at dealing with the blonde mythology that seemed to show up in my life at every turn, and which still does. When I look at a photograph of Andrea Cagan, this book's coauthor, she seems like a composite of every blonde nymph who crossed my consciousness over a period of fifty-eight years. Ironically, these impossible role models with their unattainable beauty have consistently turned out to be among my best and brightest friends.
And sometimes much
more
than friends.
Leave it to the Cosmic Master Painter to give me a blonde child, who went through puberty without turning brunette like me.
What's a mother to do?
Fanatics and Fans
E
ven when China was a child, I didn't have bodyguards. What for? On tour, I was always surrounded by men, and when I was home, the people in San Francisco were friendly, but not invasive. The exceptions to the rule were strange indeed.