3 April 2007 |
My image to think of, Pt. II - Patti

In my very early 20s, after two decades of feeling as though there were something terribly wrong with me, my writing about rock for Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times suddenly made me quite the celebrity. I thought the world was playing yet another cruel practical joke; couldn’t people see that, consecutively, I couldn’t write at all, was only imitating Nik Cohn, and had no idea what I was talking about? Terrified that at any moment I might be exposed and exiled back to where I’d come from, I treated the whole world as my mother treated my dad, with ferocious disdain. When people were actually intimidated (if more usually repulsed), the practical joke feeling grew ever stronger.

Only three women have ever made my jaw plummet in wonder at their beauty. PLW, a universal object of desire in the Hollywood of the early 70s, was one of them. And as of April 1971, she was sharing my bed every night – the bed of monkey-faced little Johnny Mendelsohn, who’d been too shy even to ask a girl out until age 17, who’d been chosen second-to-last for every team.  But if somebody was putting her up to it, I couldn’t for the life of me divine who it might be, and I have always been pretty bright, even when I haven’t been a lot of other things I’d rather have been, like brave, or well-coordinated, or handy, or self-confident.

The first time we made love, I hurt and frightened her. It was my impression that Real Men were rough, and I was certainly intent on impressing her as a real man. Thirty-six years later, the memory makes me want to break my own nose. Asshole.

She wasn’t entirely undamaged herself. She wouldn’t really talk about it, but her dad had deserted her and her mom and sister when she was around 10. She found it hard to trust men.

I gave her plenty of reason not to trust me, a Grade A sleazeball at the time, dashing off to cavort with others — others who hardly seemed of the same species, let alone comparably gorgeous — at the drop of a hat.

She believed in her own beauty no more than I believed in my own brilliance as a writer, the difference being that she really was gorgeous. When she thought she was going to look something other than her best (for want of something heretofore unseen and suitably fabulous to wear, for instance), she literally panicked, wailed, smashed things. She was terribly self-conscious about her small breasts, which was like someone who’d just designed the most fantastic car in automotive history feeling a failure because the glove box might have been a couple of centimetres deeper.

I was even more desperately fragile in those days than now, His Majesty the Baby incarnate. She’d apparently willed herself into being quite an adept 12-string guitarist during the pre-Beatles folk scare, but could hardly be persuaded even to touch a guitar during our time together. Maybe she saw how very, very, very defensive I was about my own musical aspirations, about the group with which I was pursuing a record deal. She told people with a straight face that I was a genius even though she’d seen us live.
The Bowies took us to dinner when I took her to London in the fall of 1972. Angela was unashamedly smitten.

I showed off. She was a record company publicist, and had to attend the Grammys, which I have always wanted to spell Grammies. I made a big show of my reluctance to accompany her. When we went to rent me a tuxedo, I asked the handsome young man who took my measurements if he might like to take her in my place. She was mortified with embarrassment, as she had been when, while working for Elton John’s original American publicist, he’d introduce her as neutered, as which she’d described herself to try to keep his slimy mitts off her. The handsome young man nearly swallowed himself in his haste to agree to the deal, whereupon I yanked the rug out from under him. Thinking about the look of betrayal and humiliation on her astonishing face, I want to break my own nose again.

She was jaw-droppingly glamorous, but secretly as down-to-earth as they come. She loved bowling, and we invested in our own balls and even shoes. She loved going to see the Dodgers play. She loved throwing a Frisbee around, and miniature golf, and table tennis. I don’t think she ever loved me more than when, at her truckdriver brother-in-law’s company 4th of July party, I said she and I would take on a pair of male truckers at over-the-line.

My group failed, and I repaired to the study of our rented house high atop Laurel Canyon, where I’d spend the day alone making demos of my new songs, trying in vain to write antic fiction, and taking a fair amount of Dexedrine. She’d come home from an exhausting day of being drooled at by record biz slimeballs and get a faceful of my fierce neediness as she walked in the front door. Tell me I’m a genius some more.

On Friday, 23 August 1974, she came home from work and said that while she still loved me, she was no longer in love with me. The only other time in my life that words hurt me physically as much was when my mother phoned tell me my dad had died. I was beside myself, and remained so for around 10 months, yearing daily for four o’clock so I could drink myself comatose. (Waiting until an appointed time felt like retaining a modicum of self-control.) I had what felt like day-long panic attacks. I tried in vain to find solace in the arms (and, let's face it, vaginas) of a succession of part-time groupies who reckoned I must be a rock star since I looked so much the part. Ten months in hell, and I see now I deserved every bit of it.

I gave up trying to change her mind, and rented an apartment on Sunset Blvd, in what later became quite a chic hotel, but which at the time was Scumbag Central, full of nickel-and-dume hustlers of various kinds and hookers with thick legs and bad skin. After I managed not to call her for a couple of months, she called me, and then came over, apparently with the intention of seeing if she felt anything for me. She seemed to realise she didn’t. She never looked more ravishing than as the elevator doors closed on her after she’d told me goodbye. I have never hurt worse than at that moment, and I deserved every bit of it.

A year and more after I’d started another relationship, I still ached for her. Every morning when I went to Fairfax High School to run, I told myself I’d get her back if I could do my mile in under six minutes. (It doesn’t sound like much, but I’d been a smoker only months before.) I made it in 5:45 one time, but it didn’t get her back.

She turned 60 a few months ago, the day before Bowie did. For a few years there, back in the 80s, I phoned her every year on her birthday. She didn’t sound pleased. I would love to be able to phone her now and apologise for a million things, but she has a common name, and I’ve been unable to ascertain her whereabouts.

In the years of her greatest beauty, she loved me.

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