Somebody to Love? (32 page)

“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 satisfied 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

P
eople 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 selfish 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.

Today, I'm in love with what I can create outside myself—something that doesn't involve my appearance— like painting, drawing, sketching, sewing, interior design, writing, playing piano for my own amusement, good conversation, philosophy, spirituality, just lying around, thinking. And since professional recording is presently a thing of my past, instead of music, I now use color in the form of pastels to show how I think and feel.

Because I only do a drawing once, each piece is an expression of how I am at that point in time. Kinko's can take care of repetition if it's needed or warranted. Anyway, I consider performing rock and roll to be a young person's game. Old farts leaping around, trying to hang on to their flapping skin, is not an uplifting experience for me, either to watch or perform. There are certain kinds of performances that simply don't lend themselves to wrinkles. Like hard rock.