For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 5
I didn’t have a lot of extra money then but I tended to visit New York about twice a year, usually once in the summer and once in the winter. I’d come for about a week, stay at my parents’ apartment on the upper east side and call all my friends in advance. It would usually be a weeklong party. I’d talk about moving back to New York if it was really all about going out every night and dancing and staying up late and my friends would remind me that they had to go to work the next day and that it was only me who was going out every night.
Around this time Bella was living in an apartment not too far from my parents’ - a little closer to the east river, a fifth floor walkup. The floor was on a bit of a tilt, too, but it was reasonably spacious for two people. Her roommate worked at the Top of the Sixes with her in Rockefeller Center. She was taking acting classes and auditioning but also doing the waitress routine of working till late at night and then going out and spending tip money on blow and staying up all night.
When I showed up in town she took me to a friend’s brownstone in Harlem and we bought some pot. I bought it, actually, and then we went back to her place and smoked it in her bong. Most girls preferred joints or pipes. Bongs always seemed like a guy thing, a hardcore stoner thing. But Bella always liked bongs. I think one reason why I got along with her so well was that she was a guy-type stoner.
She had never hung around in Doo-dah. The Gomers were basically nerds and she was a pretty girl. Two entirely different crowds. I could move between them but most people lived entirely in one world or another. I didn’t really fit in with the beautiful people but Bella was also a bit of a crossover type and she gave me entré into that world. Still, she did spend a long afternoon or two up in Doo-dah, matching the guys bonghit for bonghit.
Much later I figured we were all self-medicating back then but at the time it seemed like one long party.
When Baxter got off her job at the nonprofit, Bella and I took her out, first for dinner and then dancing downtown. It was late summer and the dance floor was unbearably hot and sweaty but once you were completely drenched it was liberating. We were dancing barefoot and it was still slippery. Baxter smoked like a chimney.
They both complimented me on my longer hair and my generally “mellow” demeanor.
“California’s been good for you,” said Baxter. “You seem much more comfortable with yourself.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
It was hot enough that even at 3 am there were people milling around on the streets. We actually ended up stretching out on a sidewalk, flat on our backs, talking and watching the sky gradually get lighter and lighter till the early morning joggers started showing up, making us feel wickedly decadent and finally tired.
That was when Bella told me that Cecilia, her little sister whom I’d only met that one time at graduation, was thinking of coming out to California.
“College isn’t working out for her,” she told me, “and my parents don’t want her hanging around the house doing nothing.
“Laurie, my older sister, invited her out to their house in Marin to be an au pair when their baby comes.”
“You have an older sister?” Bella had never mentioned her.
“Yeah,” she works in the city and her husband is an engineer. They’ve got a baby coming this fall.”
“Tell her to give me a call when she gets settled in.”
“I’ll do that.”
The call came a few months later, in late September. Just a quick remember me? sure I do kind of thing. The re-formed Pink Floyd without Roger Waters was touring that fall and I had tickets so I asked Cecilia if she’d like to go to the show with me and Seth Savage, who’d also been friends with her older sister at school. She said yes definitely, it sounded great.
When the concert came around, she got someone to drop her off at our apartment. Then we took Muni to Bart and then Bart to the Oakland Coliseum. Our seats were not all together, so we took turns sitting in the better ones. Seth had turned me on to Pink Floyd in college. I knew Dark Side of the Moon, of course, like everyone, but he used to play Meddle a lot and Atom Heart Mother.
There was a whole Pink Floyd vs. Grateful Dead thing among the tripsters at school. Floyd was more precise and the Dead were more spontaneous. Seth and I and most of the Gomers were in the overlapping part of the venn diagram.
Bella was more of a Floyd head. She listened to the Dead when it was on, but she connected more with Pink Floyd. Cecilia tended to follow her older sisters when it came to tastes in pop culture so she was way into Pink Floyd as well. In some ways he was the classic youngest sibling. One reason why she had bummed from school to school was that she had learned from her older sisters how to act cool without ever figuring out the basics. Plus she “only used to get juiced in it.”
At the time I think Seth had his eyes on Cecilia. I was fairly innocent that first night. We hung out and enjoyed each other’s company, but I was recovering from my one cheating incident plus Cecilia was Bella’s younger sister. I felt more protective and older brother-y than predatory. Cecilia liked Seth. She found him funny, but she was not at all attracted to him.
When it was our turn to sit in the better seats together, we made fun of the other plans, many of which looked like they’d have been just as happy listening to a record of Pink Floyd really loud in a roomful of 10,000 other fans. As long as they could wear their rainbow prism t-shirt or sing along with the hits, they were happy.
Then there were the more scary fans, the ones dressed in vaguely paramilitary leather jackets who didn’t seem to understand the irony underlying the fascist lyrics and imagery in the Wall. One of them was giving a headbanger’s equivalent of the Hitler salute over and over during the chorus of “Waiting for the Worms” (at least I think that’s what it’s called - I was never as into the details when it came to Floyd). We laughed at him a lot and imagined him driving home in a volkswagen to an in-law apartment in his mother’s basement.
Afterward I told Cecilia that the show had been good but that she definitely had to catch a Dead show with me in December. She eagerly agreed. I didn’t realized it at the time but at that snapshot in time and from that angle I looked pretty cool to her.