For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 1
So after about a year in San Francisco I was easing into an oddly domestic scene. I’d finally caught up even in our elaborate communal group ledger for expenses and etc., which we called GLEE for short. I’d essentially been on the communal dole when I first arrived and had to borrow money to do anything. Every time I ate a group meal I was marked down for my share of the groceries. In fact, if you gathered together leftovers from the dinner the night before and wrapped them in a tortilla for lunch the next day, you’d be included in the tally for that dinner. This we called “the burrito trap.” We took turns making dinner and cleaning up, in pairs. The rule was that the same pair who made dinner also cleaned it up - that was there was no incentive to leave a big mess. I couldn’t cook at all, so I would be the one washing the dishes and the pots.
When I started legal summarizing I was still barely getting enough money to break even. Sometimes the three guys who were working as paralegals in the office of an eccentric gay Princeton alumnus would pay for my roundtrip fare on the N-Judah streetcar and buy me lunch downtown so I could make a fourth for bridge. It always tickled my dad that me and my friends were bridge addicts, as he associated that with the preppy (or, as he called them, “tweedy”) kids of his own college days in the ’50s. I had simply discovered that bridge was the perfect form of procrastination. You’d agree to play, “just one more hand,” and miss another class and then another till it was dinner time.
Once I had the full-time job I was able to dig my way out of my glee-hole and could maintain a little balance in my checking account. I found myself even getting a little excited when my bills came. I’d get out my checkbook and pay them immediately, not even waiting for the grace period to pass. I think I was getting over the shock of how low down on the social and financial totem pole I had landed by following the Dead out to California instead of following the other stock broker wannabes to Wall Street. In my own small way I was making it on my own and I was inordinantly proud of the fact.
I recently came across a photo of myself, in my tie and shirtsleeves, with a leather briefcase my sister got me, and in my dorky ’80s style oversized horn rims. It’s obvious now that my hair was receding pretty fast, but it was still shaggy and falling across my eyes at the time. I hadn’t yet started trying to grow it long yet. I was fresh faced and clean shaven, no tattoos or piercings. Piercings weren’t even really in yet except for earrings which had already crossed over the the jock/frat crowd by then. It was a year or so later when the RE/Search “modern primitives” book came out and seem spark the huge outpouring of odd piercings and split tongues and genitals and the total mainstreaming of tattoos.
No, I was just a junior working stiff at that moment, trying to fit in, but I think I was on the verge of freaking myself out with just how settled I’d become. I’d forgotten about rock and roll and art and even writing and I was setting myself up for a major tailspin.
One of the gomers, Bo, was this big ex-football player who had redirected his competitive urges into strategy board games. He used to joke that if he didn’t reinnoculate himself with a bonghit on a regular basis that the demon Cthulhu inside him would emerge. We were all ready to propitiate him and keep the soft-edged fuzzy teddybear around instead of the potentially rage-fileld monter inside him. He had gone back to east for a visit and returned with a new girlfriend in tow, Suzy Schotzkopf.
Somehow Suzy ended up moving in with all of us although no one seemed to like her much, not even Bo. We held one of our interminable consensus-building meetings and the anti-Suzy impulse was just too disorganized to fight the inertia. Instead, in our passive-agressive self-medicating ways, we just none of us helped her move in. She was the type who was constnatly apologizing to everyone, preemptively. She said “sorry” like every other word. I felt a little guilty for not helping her move her furniture in, especially when she was hauling a small couch up our tight little winding staircase by herself. I swear I heard her bump into the wall and say “I’m sorry” reflexively to no one. Suddenly I didn’t feel guilty - just ill.
Suzy offered to drive Simone and me up to Angel’s Camp (near where Twain wrote about the frog contest) for an outdoor concert with Santana and the Dead. This would be Simone’s first Dead show, so I got Friday and Monday off to enable us to make the trip. Santana was the sweetener because who didn’t like Santana? Inevitably, on the way to the show Suzy’s car broke down. We spent hours at some nowhere gas station near a freeway on-ramp with Suzy trying to get something in her transmission fixed and constantly apologizing to both of us. Somehow, I have no idea how, she got the car working again and we made it to the site well after dark. We had to do the dirt-camping thing, sleeping next to the car, and of course we were kept up most of the night by drunken and tripping ‘heads playing battered old guitar and howling at the nonexistent moon.
The shows were on Saturday and Sunday and in some ways the days were perfect. That may have been the high point of my time with Simone. It was a little weird seeing the father with a toddler near us who was unable to leave the show the first afternoon even when his daughter was obviously overwhelmed by the noise and chaos and heat. But most of the people around us were stereotypically kind and thoughful, and Simone was actually surprised at how slick and together the Dead sounded by the late ’80s.
I’m not sure exactly what she was expecting - either heavy metal based on the band’s name or maybe something really sloppy based on the awful bootleg tapes I was still listening to before the Internet and digital changed that whole scene - but she was pleasantly surprised that they didn’t just jam endlessly or acidically. She even gave them the ultimate compliment by her own standards: in concert they sounded a lot like Genesis. I scoffed at that of course. For me the highlight was when Santana sat in with the Dead as they resurrected a long dormant song, Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl and when Carlos and Jerry pushed each other to shreddy extremes on All Along the Watchtower, an obvious tribute to Jimi, one of Santana’s greatest heros (along with Miles).
We didn’t get much sleep again the night between shows and Suzy was really having no fun but she was committed to driving us back so she stuck it out. I paid her for our share of the gas but I think she really just wanted to be treated like a buddy and I wasn’t willing to go that far.
Another cluster of my friends from college had grabbed a house on Parnassus Way in the Berkeley / Oakland hills. They were all grad students at UC, mostly in eastern european languages or politics. They also lived with a couple of undergraduate girls who were both zaftig and whom I both thought were very sexy. Every now and then I’d go to a party at their place on Parnassus and usually end up spending the night. For some reason Simone never seemed to go to those parties. I did a lot of flirting but nothing ever seemed to happen.
The two sexy girls, Ava and Bronwen, one blonde, one dark haired, used to tease me a lot. I guess it was obvious I had a thing for them. They would joke about things like threeways or dressing me up in their lingerie. I was game but it never seemed to go anywhere. Usually we’d all drink a huge amount and pass out. I’d spend the night on a couch in the living room and in the morning we’d all go to the breakfast place atop Walnut Square in Berkeley for eggs and bloody marys. One time Bronwen was away so I crashed in her bed. In the middle of the night I rummaged through her drawers and stole a few pairs of her panties. I was pretty perverted like that back then. She showed up in the morning and was surprised to find me in her bed but I played it cool and smuggled my booty out of the room without her noticing.
For You, the Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 2
I’m not sure why Simone never made it to those parties in Berkeley but it may have been because neither of us had a car. If I wanted to get there I’d have to take the Muni downtown and the Bart across the Bay and then I’d still have to get someone to come down from the hills to pick me up from the downtown Berkeley Bart station.
I also think Simone didn’t like my Berkeley friends. They were kind of pretentious, always talking about art theory and Marx. Simone liked to discuss lit crit and she liked to discuss feminism, but she also liked to be the best-informed, smartest person in a discussion, and the ex-Ivy Leaguer grad students had too many humiliating rhetorical tricks up their sleeves, along the lines of “Well, if you haven’t read Gramsci, then I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation.”
I liked having this other place to go and this other set of friends and I liked being able to flirt fairly freely without any real consequences, knowing I had someone to get back to, at least after sleeping off a hangover.
Simone and I did most of our hanging out in the Haight. At first the place had a sort of magical cachet for my Deadhead friends, but once you had checked out 710 Ashbury and the remaining head shops, you’d notice the hippie-slash-beggars everywhere and that the place was getting kind of yupped out. What the neighborhood did have going for it was a couple of good places to eat.
We especially liked going out for breakfast in the morning. At the Crescent City cafe we could get pseudo-New Orleans food, like omelets with shrimp and hot sauce. Or if we were willing to walk down toward the lower Haight and wait on line for 45 minutes we could get an impossibly huge breakfast / brunch at the Pork Store Cafe.
We went to movies at the Red Vic, lolling on uncomfortable secondhand couches and eating popcorn with brewer’s yeast on it instead of butter and salt. We bought clothes at the thrift shops. Well, mostly I did. Simone didn’t care too much about fashion, favoring a serviceable collegiate, sweater-and-jeans style that suited her pretty well. I was trying to reinvent myself, systematically replacing every preppy scrap of clothing in my closet with something blacker or tighter or made of a less natural fabric. I was still a bit overweight but I wasn’t dressing loose and sloppy to hide my body anymore.
I was also starting to let my hair grow longer. I had finally noticed the sharp angle of my hairline heading toward my temples and it occurred to me that if I ever wanted to wear long hair in my life that the window was in danger of slamming shut. My hair has never grown fast, though, so at first it was just too long in the front, falling in my eyes all the time, and bushy on my neck. Over the next few months I had it almost to pageboy length all around.
Somewhere along the way I also picked up a multicolored guatemalan (yes, I know that’s redundant) shirt that pulled over instead of buttoning up the front. I refused to wear tie-dyed t-shirts all the time like my Gomer buddies. I fancied my self a punker shade of hippie. I liked Black Flag and the Meat Puppets and I went to the I-Beam to see Camper Van Beethoven and later Primus. If I was going to dress colorful it was going to be with a little more panache than your standard preppy Deadhead.
I noticed I was also getting privately more critical of Simone’s appearance. Not the way she dressed. I was fine with that. It was subtle things, like her freckles, which I had really liked at first. Unlike some guys, I find freckles to be sort of cute. But she had freckles up the wazoo (literally). I think less of her skin was unfreckled than freckled. I’d be looking at her in bed and my mind would do a kind of strange figure-ground kind of flip and suddently I’d see her as a ginger-colored person lightly flecked with pale pink skin. Being high may have had something to do with that.
Also, as young as she was, her skin seemed kind of like that of a much older woman. It was very thin, and was already showing wrinkles on her forearms. Her upper lip had those lines you usually see only on women and men in the 60s or 70s. I knew enough not to mention any of this to her, but now that I think about it, I may just have been getting a little tired of her body. I was a young guy who had just discovered that maybe it wasn’t quite as hard to hook up with women as I had previously though and - who knows? - maybe I was laying the groundwork for my escape.
One of the folks I used to see at Parnassus was this very artsy, very pale woman named Dannie. She had pitch black ringlets of hair and she had very pretty blue eyes. In some ways she seemed to have stepped out of a pre-pre-Raphaelite past. She may have known this because she spoke in a fey high-pitched trill. When everyone else wanted to go out for eggs and bacon on Sunday mornings, she would lobby for some cute little bakery she knew where we could get fresh croissants (pronounced the french way, rolling the r and dropping the s). Sometimes she’d convince the gang but usually the hash browns and bloodies place would win out.
She wore her body well. She was fairly large around. Not too tall, but with a rounded belly and arms and legs like a baby. I still found her pretty. I had never had utterly conventional tastes in women, but she was outside of the type I had considered in the past. A few years later I made an unsuccessful pass at a lawyer in her thirties who was a coworker of another one of my roommates, so maybe in general I was intrigued by people outside of “league” in one way or another.
I had the feeling Dannie was flirting with me more than the usual amount that went on with all the drinking up on Parnassus. She’d make eyes at me or make sure she was in my line of site. She’d seek me out for quiet conversation. At one party at another house in Berkeley I didn’t know enough people and I felt sort of mopey and lonely so I went outside to sit on the porch by myself.
I had it in the back of my mind that the lonely poet staring at the sky might be an attractive pose and sure enough Dannie came out to talk to me after a while. She made a point of squeezing next to me in the backseat of car when we all left that party to go to another one and she took my hand in her much bigger hand and squeezed it while everyone was talking all around us.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 3
Meanwhile, I was staying in touch with friends, mostly women, on the east coast, writing letters (remember that? handwritten letters, several pages long, stamped and delivered by the post office?) and sending mix tapes. I pretty much never made mixes for guys. I wasn’t always romantically interested in the women I made mix tapes for but I guess I always had in the back of my mind.
Bella, for example, never made mixes for me but I’d still make them for her, weaving together a sort of subliminal message from the song titles and key lyrics.
Then there was Maura Romas, who’d I chased on and off for my last two years in college. There was some obvious chemistry between us but there must have been some kind of magnetic repulsion as well because whenever we started to get real close she’d flake out and vanish and not answer her phone or return my calls. She’d even turn and walk away when she saw me on campus.
Then inevitably a few months later I’d run into her out at a party and she’d be incredibly apologetic and say she’d been freaking out and under stress and we’d get into long conversations and go for walks and hnag out for hours without really saying much, just listening to music. I was just getting into the Dead then and during one of the phases when she was avoiding me I wrote out the words to Crazy Fingers because for whatever reason I thought they were relevant. Probably the last verse, where it goes
Midnight, on a carousel ride, reaching for the gold ring, down inside
never could reach, it just slips aways, when I try
And then another time I think I wrote out all the words to Helplessly Hoping. How pathetic is that? I was just coming out of the common vocabulary of sappy romantic music of the 70s back then - the James Taylor stuff and Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot - that we used to make out to.
One time when we were on the ins I was playing her one side of American Beauty and I sang her all the words to “Brokedown Palace.” I’ve never had any shame about music, I guess. That did make an impression on her, because she mentioned it later.
She’d been to one of New England prep schools and was sort of Dead-averse. There is a frat-like preppy Deadhead culture at those schools and I even had to overcome my prejudices before I finally went to a show around 1984 and “got it.” Worse, Maura had lived next to two rabid Deadheads one year and they would do things like eat acid and then play “Uncle John’s Band” 99 times in a row. It would be enough to put anyone off Jerry.
Now that I was out in California and Maura was in a grad-school writing program at BU, we had gotten into this intense epistolary thing. I had this big Maura file with her half of our exchange. All the stuff we were never able to say in person came out in the letters. We had a shared ambition to be writers and I was going through a lot of angst, at least in my letters, about not making progress, not finishing stories, not writing novels.
She would tell me that you couldn’t force it. When I was ready to write, I’d write. But that was easy for her to say. She was the one in the program. She was the one immersed in a culture that valued writing and being mentored (and seduced) by her writing teachers.
These days we were quoting R.E.M. lyrics in our letters to each other, things like “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville.” I made a mix tape for her that was fraught with obvious drama. I ended it with “Brokedown Palace.” I found a really good live version of “Uncle John’s” and put that on it, to rehabilitate the song for her. I put “You Are Like a Hurricane” on side two and I got my frustration out by including “Idiot Wind” on side one. She really liked it, even the harsh Dylan stuff (“I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me any better’n that”).
She made mixes for me in return and hers were really good. They always included stuff I’d never have listened to otherwise, probably never have bought, but that sounded great amidst the stuff I knew better. She also was getting a glimpse of some good stuff in the cutout bins in Boston that somehow hadn’t made it to my San Francisco ears yet. One of her mixes has “Bone Machine” on it, which was my first experience of the Pixies and another had a De La Soul tune, that was like a step into another world.
At first the Pixies sounded harsh and unlistenable to me. I’d put her mix on my walkman and listen on Muni on the way to work. But the second or third time through it sounded like the most natural thing in the world, and as classic as a Rolling Stones hit.
Our letters get getting more and more intense and it never occurred to me to mention it to Simone. It wasn’t real. I don’t know if I’d have said any of the things I was writing if I’d been looking at Maura in person. She sometimes talked about dropping out of her grad program at BU and moving out to San Francisco but I didn’t think she’d really go for it. That’s what all the “Rockville” stuff was about - the urge to pick up and move, leaving all her stuff behind.
I think I was keeping her on the backburner.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 4
Things started to unravel. I went to one of those drinkathons up in the hills and Dannie was there and she ended up the evening driving me to her apartment. First place I remember back then where somebody lived by themselves. That was a revelation. The place wasn’t a mess, like mine would have been.
It was a fairly large apartment for just one person. Something about her dad paying for it. She must come from money, I remember telling myself. She was a good kisser. Not too sloppy but succulent. She drew me in.
We undressed each other in her bedroom. I was excited to see the body of a “fat lady.” They’d for sure be the biggest breasts I’d seen or touched yet. I wasn’t sure how I was going to respond to her belly, her arms and legs. Not that I was a swimmer exactly myself.
I put my arms around her and she felt solid. I didn’t have that usual feeling that I’d better go easy or else knock the girl over and trap her arm behind her back or pinch something. There’s nothing that spoils the mood so much as someone crying out suddenly in pain, unless that is the mood.
She wore elastic legging and she was soft and loose when she finally stripped down to her bare skin. She was very pale. Not as soft as I expected. Her hair felt course. I could feel her goose bumps or her legs. The back of her neck was sweaty and thick with her hair. My fingers would get stuck there as I pressed her face against mine. She was strong and she was not above biting my lower lip.
We fell into bed. I always liked making out the best. I was as horny as the next guy, maybe more than most, but there was something about those first experiences, spinning the bottle when I was 12 or so, that made kissing and “feeling up” the most erotic things I could imagine.
Finally I rolled on top of her and found I didn’t have the wherewithal to go through with it. She offered to suck me to get me hard again and I agreed. That worked. I held her breast and stared at the ceiling and her soft warm wet mouth did the trick, but when I climbed between her thighs again I was once again not in the mood.
Her thighs were slick. I was actually fasinated by the concept of a fat pussy. I put my face as close as I could and I started lapping my way in closer. I figure I owed her that much. It was very dark in her bedroom. Total eclipse of the moon.
Eventually she came, kept coming, till she told me to stop. I slid up under her arms and she reached down to hold my cock, which was still soft. We talked about why I was unable to go through with the actual fucking. I think it was my idea to talk about it. I mentioned Simone. She had heard I had a girlfriend across the bay but she didn’t care.
With her arm around me, I felt like she was the man and I was the girl. She was literally bigger than me. Not taller, but more massive. She also had a rough almost stubbly texture under her chin and I remember for a moment wondering if she could possibly be a guy. But that was impossible. It felt oddly plausible though, without making any real sense. Her aggressive energy I guess. I had never been pursued like that before.
She told me it was OK and put her feet up against mine. “You’ve got cold feet,” she said.
In the middle of the night I woke up and started nuzzling the nearest breast. I kissed my way down to her belly as she woke. Now, for whatever reason I was almost painfully hard and suddenly “performing” brought on no anxiety at all. Afterward, as we lay sweating and panting she told me that she always thought of architecture while making love.
“What style did I remind you of?” I asked her.
“Bauhaus.”
“I know what you’re trying to tell me,” I said, thinking that I had perhaps been a bit methodical, rather more utilitarian in the end than decorative.
“No, it’s nothing,” she said. “It’s not a metaphor. I just see buildings.”
I didn’t feel that great the next morning and I felt worse the next day when I saw Simone again. She and I tended to get together about three or four nights a week. We didn’t keep tabs on each other. We did, I should state for the record, have an exclusive relationship. I was still studiously avoiding the L word but she wasn’t and though I managed to put off conversations about “where are we going with this” I had definitely agreed with her that we were, to use the previous generation’s parlance, “going steady.”
There was no ethical loophole that made what I had done with Dannie acceptable. My middle of the night returned to form had scotched any potential “eatin’s not cheatin’” defense and to be honest I wouldn’t have been brazen enough to put it out there. For all of my frankness now, at the time I expressed myself even in the privacy of an intimate relationship, in fairly chaste, gentlemanly terms. It was part of the my charm. The rakish “safe boy” gone a little dangerous. The naughty page boy who still observed the finer points of chivalry.
I confessed everything… to Maura. I told her about the whole episode, the flirtation that led up to it, my self loathing afterward, in my next letter to her. I did it deliberately, knowing it would stir her up. Even here my motives were selfish. I knew that Maura would be envious and at the same time would sense the coming downfall of Simone. This might embolden her or it could resurrect her old disappearing act.
I wanted to get a rise out of her, though, but I poured on the anguish thick in my letter. For one, the feelings were true. For another, I knew Maura would hang on every word. Also, we were on some level writers competing with each other, co-writing a story and trying to outdo each other with each serial update.
I also told Dave. Dave was turning into my confidante. It went both ways. It was almost better that we’d never really gotten to know each other in school. We had a relatively blank slate. After my initial drive to write a few stories I’d gone fallow again, but he was still taking his writing class and we talked about writing theory a lot. Is conflict necessary? How close can you get to reality and still call it fiction? I was writing much but I had all the answers.
I went to Dave with my moral dilemma. I had cheated on Simone. He was a little shocked. It didn’t fit my good-boy image. Also, he had gotten friendly with Simone. Her friend Sharon, from our original double date, had pretty much fallen out of the picture after going out with another one of my roommates, a total waste case named Seth Savage. More on him later.
Dave hadn’t hooked up with anyone yet and he and I and Simone sometimes did things together. She went out on some of our Operation Culture nights, although she said she found the ballet and the opera “pretty boring.”
So I felt doubly bad telling Dave I had cheated on Simone with Dannie. I was kind of putting him in an awkward position although I really had no doubt where his loyalties lay.
“I can’t figure out whether to tell her or not,” I said to Dave. We were sitting in our living room. I was on the rescued couch and he was on the big La-Z-Boy chair.
“Well, you can’t tell her,” he said. “She’ll never forgive you, and you wouldn’t be telling her for her. You’d be telling her to make yourself feel better.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Because I don’t really want to tell her. I’m chicken. Plus it’s not going to happen again.”
My big problem, I told Dave, was that this didn’t fit into my preexisting idea of myself. It was a kind of a mystery. Was a really the sort of guy who cheated on his girlfriend? Apparently I was. Did this mean I was a bad person, or cheating was OK, or something else entirely?
I was fairly attached to the idea of myself as a good guy, so I told myself that this was just a one-time thing - a reaction against all the sameness and routine that had been creeping into my life.
I resolved not to tell Simone and not to let it happen again.
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.