July 2012
Sometimes I have trouble remembering the names of my four wives. I can always call them up but they are not on the tip of my tongue. I wonder if that is odd?
Recently some business transactions were to require an upper level background check on myself and others to proceed. I just laughed at them. As if profit would motivate me to open my family to those very old and deep wounds.
My daughter and her sons know nothing of the problems I faced as a young man, and I will do everything on earth to prevent that from happening.
She was raised away from the insanity that her mother and I lived in during the 60s and early 70s, went to the Air Force and is a software executive. My grandsons play college ball and live a remarkably normal life. It is the greatest blessing of my troubled life.
Until recently I had a firewall between the trauma of those days and my present incarnation. Two lives never to be connected.
But this thing with time is bothering me. How is it all these vignettes are penetrating that fire wall and playing in my mind’s theater over and over.
It is now leaking into my dreams as well.
bump
1979/1980
New York City
Hell’s Kitchen
It is always strange when events put into clear perspective your limitations. And this was just such a night.
We had been living together for a few months now and while I understood that she owned a booking agency for cabaret acts, the nuts and bolts of such an operation were a bit foreign to me.
However, when she explained that Rock Hudson was appearing at one of her Venues as her guest - that got my attention.
It appears that Rock was a friend because her father had directed Rock in a Broadway production in the Catskills when she was in High School and spending the summer with the production.
OK, cool.
The performer at her cabaret booking was an old friend of Rock’s from a TV series and he was dropping by to support his friend.
What I did not know was that Rock would be attending the opening with his “constant companion” Tom.
Before we separated a year later, I had visited their home on Christmas with my lady friend to deliver some kind of candy that was a tradition with them. I was surprised to see they lived on the bad end of Central Park. Not an area I would have chosen.
Anyway - Here I was, fresh off the express turnip truck, with Rock Hudson hugging my girlfriend and the paparazzi crowding the sidewalk.
Not your normal night.
So it went. Her father being a Broadway producer had an eclectic group of friends and, to his credit; he often included me in his travels.
Her folks lived on the Upper East Side near the river. One Saturday morning I found myself drinking beer with her father and his lifelong friend who worked now as a New York Supreme Court Judge. Her father was the typical older Jewish man with a barrel chest and a scar from top to bottom from his open heart surgery – not exactly the health nut. While the Judge was his same age but fit as a fiddle and an avid tennis player. We sat at the kitchen table and swapped stories about gambling and their experiences in WWII.
One morning we were shocked to hear that our friend the Judge dropped dead on the Tennis court – there is no understanding the workings of fate.
But to travel in that circle with such friends and companions was to change my life in profound ways.
Years later on a trip to Austin Texas a group of my old college friends and I partied until about 1:00 in the morning and headed to get some chow. I love an early morning pastrami sandwich piled high with meat and good mustard, and nice sour pickle and a cold beer.
The beer was easy but at the few places that were open - a pastrami sandwich was not only unavailable but viewed as a ridiculous request. Chicken fried steak yes, but alas very little else.
I sat and thought of the hundreds of places in Gotham that were open and the huge number of choices available in both food and entertainment at all hours, and a little switch inside my mind flipped over.
From that time on I understood that I enjoyed the full palette of life and would never settle for anything less.
I never went back.