by Robin Green
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Chapter Thirteen
Ronnie
Our first few nights in LA, we stayed with one of Mitch’s older sisters who was house-sitting a lovely apartment at the edge of Hancock Park, a place with Mies van der Rohe chairs and a mauve velvet couch. The first thing she asked was what kind of car we were driving and when she saw the Chevy, she just shook her head. It was clear she thought we’d be losers here.
We drove around looking for an apartment to rent and quickly found a one-bedroom on West Knoll in West Hollywood—a home run away from Beverly Hills, as Mitch would come to say—one of six units in a white stucco, terra-cotta-tile-roofed Spanish Colonial Revival building set in palm trees, our own little sitting porch crawling with magenta bougainvillea. Inside, we sanded and varnished the blond-wood floors and made couches and chairs from industrial pallets and foam cushions for which I bought fabric and sewed covers. We acquired a gray cat Mitch named Bob.
Our Iowa cohorts would come for Indian feasts and copious amounts of gin and tonic, and we’d sit on the cushions on the floor arranged around a door that served as a banquet table. In this kitchen, I’d lie down by the stove so I could see my parathas puffing up under the broiler. Or we’d go out to Tujunga or Pasadena and laugh and drink into the night with the music blaring.
We’d see John Falsey occasionally—he and I had been in the same writing seminar in Iowa one term and he’d become a basketball buddy of Mitch’s. John had published a short story in the New Yorker that year, a rare feat in those days, that had attracted a Hollywood agent who’d found him TV-writing work on The White Shadow, a show about high-school basketball. John was raking it in. There was no furniture to speak of in his Westwood apartment, but he had a brand-new Alfa Romeo outside. There was a gas crisis that year and he laughed and said the best part of making money was he didn’t even have to think about how much a gallon cost.
John would go on to partner up with Josh Brand, a fellow writer on The White Shadow, and together they would create St. Elsewhere, A Year in the Life, Northern Exposure, I’ll Fly Away, and more. When we’d been in class in Iowa together, our avant-garde seminar leader Rosalyn Drexler didn’t think much of John’s short story, a delicate suburban tale of a family in Darien, Connecticut, an alcoholic mother. “So conventional,” Rosalyn had sniffed. I’d passionately defended it, a good thing as it turned out, because in eight years, John would try me out on one of his and Josh’s shows, the beginning of my twenty-five-year TV-writing career.
But for now, I was broke. Mitch and I were both broke. I’d wanted to start my life over and now I had, and, as with the first time I’d started my life, that meant from scratch. The difference was that the first time, when I packed my suitcase and went to New York on my own, I knew my parents had my back, that if I got in trouble, they’d be there for me, that if all else failed, I could at least go home. Actually, my father had said as much.
“You realize you don’t have to do this,” he told me, “you can stay home and eat bonbons,” implying, it seemed to me, that that was how he thought of my mother, as some useless beauty like Zsa Zsa Gabor who just lounged around all day eating chocolates. Once, when I complained to him about my mother’s lack of purpose and engagement in the world, he said, “What you have to understand about your mother is that she is completely dependent on me.” And yet that was how he—like all of the men in their circle—wanted his wife to be.
Now, however, going home was not an option. I was thirty-three years old, living with this rough young hick from Iowa who, on a visit east, wouldn’t look them in the eye, they said, and they wondered why not. They didn’t understand what I was doing in Los Angeles. They didn’t understand what I was doing with Mitch. And I knew they probably sensed that I didn’t understand entirely either.
Now there was no David Leach’s father’s money coming in or, for that matter, money from the GI Bill. People with money, even a little money, like ten thousand dollars in a bank somewhere that some grandmother had left them, or even five thousand, or three, don’t realize what it is like to have absolutely no money. And no credit card because you have no credit. What if your car breaks down or gets towed? Now you simply have no car and no way to get around or get home.
That first December, we spent the night in Pasadena on a friend’s couch after a Christmas party. They lived in a historic California Craftsman courtyard bordering a ghetto. In the morning when we went to our car, we discovered that someone had helped himself to a Christmas present of the headlights and alternator of our Chevy Impala. The car looked blind, its eyes plucked out. It took all the money we had to fix it.
I probably say all this to try to ameliorate what comes next, which is what happened when my old best friend, Ronnie Barad from Providence, and her boyfriend Richie, from the Massachusetts state mental hospital, showed up in our lives in LA. Maybe I’m hoping that it might help explain why I acted the way I did. We all felt responsible when Ronnie killed herself, but of all of us, I was the last one to see her alive.
Mitch and I were working out of a temp agency, which seemed like a way to make money and at the same time give us access to the inner workings of our new city and even, hopefully, a way inside Hollywood. Mitch was sent to work in the stockroom at A & M Records on La Brea. I was given a job in the office of an independent movie-production company on Sunset. I, who had been a writer of cover stories for Rolling Stone, who had flown around the country first class, who had hobnobbed backstage with Annie Leibovitz and Jerry Garcia, was now the lowest of the low, being instructed by some haughty little pipsqueak ten years younger than me to go out into the glaring noonday LA sun and pick up her lunch. I said sorry, not in my job description. She called the agency and I was gone.
The agency next placed me, chastened, in a job filing and typing and Xeroxing at a bank in Westwood, then at a law firm, then at a small public relations company in Century City, where Mitch soon joined me. It was at that PR firm one afternoon in November 1979 where Ronnie called me.
She was crying. She told me that she was in Los Angeles, that she and her boyfriend Richie had driven cross-country, that their van had broken down. They’d made it to a gas station and she had her father’s credit card so the van would be fixed, but they had two big dogs and the motel wouldn’t take them and she didn’t know what to do. The gas station was on Franklin and Argyle Streets, under a freeway exit to Hollywood and Vine. I told her to hang on, that I’d be there as soon as I could.
I told my boss I had an emergency. She wasn’t happy but she let me go. I told Mitch and then I left work, hurrying out of the building and down to the Santa Monica Boulevard bus stop. To save money on parking, Mitch and I took the bus to work; we were usually the only non-Hispanics on it. The bus stopped a block from West Knoll, and there I picked up the old Chevy with its tiny custom steering wheel and headed for Ronnie.
It had been a long time since I’d seen or spoken to Ronnie. I’d visited her at McLean when she was first there and in Boston proper, where she lived briefly, but there were long stretches when I was waitressing on Martha’s Vineyard or being a secretary in New York or Chicago or someplace when I didn’t see her at all. I’d heard she had gone back to McLean and then to Mass Mental, where Richie was a fellow inpatient.
In musical therapy there, she and Richie and some others formed a band, Richie on bass, Ronnie singing and playing fiddle. They called themselves the M. T. Heads, a play on musical therapy heads and also empty heads. (Em Tee Heads—get it?) Under supervision, they were allowed off the ward to play gigs, driven in a hospital van that backed up to the venue, an old folks’ home or sometimes an actual club, where they’d offload their equipment, set up and play, then be escorted back into the van and to the hospital again.
Ronnie had told me all this on the sunny June day when I did finally see her, at the flat she and Richie had rented in East Boston after their release from the psych ward. The flat was in a part of Boston I didn’t know except to drive past on the way to Log
an Airport, but this time I took the sharp right that led into the working-class neighborhood of two- and three-story tenements and housing projects, looking then in its pregentrification days as it had years before when it was a starting-off point for waves of immigrants—Russian Jews, Italians, and Irish, the early Kennedys among them. The ones who hadn’t made it into the suburbs were left behind.
Ronnie buzzed me in and I climbed the rickety staircase to her top-floor flat.
“Hey, Rah-Bin!” she sang-shouted down into the stairwell in a throaty alto. And then there she was: Ronnie, not the dead-and-empty version I’d seen at McLean, but a beaming and excited Ronnie with her arms out in welcome. A dance-y, manic Ronnie. It occurred to me it made her nervous that I was here.
“This is my apartment,” she said, indicating with a sweep of her arm a long, barren space, equipment for the new band they’d formed piled at one end near the bed/sofa I’d sleep on that night. Ronnie’s artwork was on the walls, and by that I mean on the walls, pastel swirls and flowers and the vague faces of blond girls painted right on the basic tenement white.
“And that’s Richie,” she said of a man in a plaid shirt who sat at the front window looking out. A slope-shouldered, sad sack of a man with a receding hairline and dead-flat affect, Richie turned in slow motion and held up a hand.
“C’mon,” she said and I followed her down a hallway to the back of the house. “This is the kitchen,” she said when the room opened up. Which it was, an old kitchen with a white four-burner stove, a Formica table and chairs, and a door that led to a back porch from which you could see over the tops of the East End projects at Maverick Square clear to the Boston Harbor. Or you could have if there had been a porch. But you had to content yourself with merely getting a glimpse of the view through the window because, as the hand-painted sign on the door read (instead of DANGER, DO NOT OPEN!), PORCH ISN’T THERE.
“It’s not?” I said, loving the words on the sign, knowing that only she could have written it.
Ronnie shrugged and smiled at me with her pale, too-close-together eyes. She knew she had me again. And I realized that maybe I was the one who’d been nervous, and, now that we were back in our old dynamic, I remembered why: I was always wary around Ronnie because I knew she could see through me, was always on the lookout for phoniness or high-handedness, both of which I had plenty of. Of the two of us, she was the more righteous. More alive. And dominant.
When we were little, we had a game we played in her parents’ living room in Providence. Ronnie would sit regally in one of the chintz-upholstered wing chairs, and I, and her little brother when he was old enough, would dance for her or sing a show tune and she would watch us, and then at some inevitable point—and we always knew this was coming but we always danced and sang for her anyway—she would press an imaginary button on the arm of the chair.
“Into the room of shit!” she would declare. And we imagined that the floor beneath us yawned open and dropped us into a shit-filled room below.
Ronnie always sat in the chair. We believed—and she believed it too—that she was the one true artist, the one who felt things most fully, good and bad. When she sang, she sang with such Billie Holiday/Janis Joplin depth of sadness and beauty that people in the audience would be moved to tears, as my parents’ friend Jane Sackett was the night she and her husband and my parents saw Ronnie and her band play in downtown Providence. Jane’s hands were black-and-blue the next day from applauding.
“She defined for me what real music felt like, what real feeling felt like,” her little brother, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, later said. “She showed me heaven and hell and told me I would never have what it took to live in either, that I could only see it, live it through her. I was destined for the vat of shit.”
“You look like Elvis Presley,” Ronnie said to me then, in her kitchen in East Boston. It was Elvis’s fat-cheeked, Vegas phase and she was right, I did, in a way. My flesh was juicy; I was bursting with health, especially compared to her. She seemed slighter than she had been, her skin and hair drier from all the years of hospitalized suffering and psychotropic drugs.
“Hey,” she said, “let’s go get a meatball sandwich.”
“It’s three o’clock in the afternoon!” I said.
“I love you, Robin,” she said with a small note of pity. “Richie!” she called into the living room.
Richie got up and followed us obediently to a dark bar up the street for meatball sandwiches and Cokes. Richie didn’t speak, just watched Ronnie with his mournful eyes, the way my dog watched me, alert for cues. Ronnie talked. She told about the M. T. Heads, about her job go-go-dancing at a bar in the Combat Zone where we’d go that night, about her and Richie’s sometime work with a team of lawn-care specialists in the Boston suburbs.
“Tell her the joke you made up,” Richie finally said.
“Okay. What did the dog with the harelip say to the other dog?” Ronnie asked me, and when I didn’t know she told me. “Bark mulch?” she said.
I laughed and so did Richie, or he tried to. It was more like the sound of a car engine that can’t quite turn over.
“Je m’appelle Hank!” Ronnie called out once when she, my father, and I were downhill-skiing on a day trip to Mount Sunapee.
“Je m’appelle Hank!” we all started declaring every time we passed one another on the slope. We “Je m’appelle Hank”-ed on the two-and-a-half-hour drive back to Providence and then at my house at dinner. My mother didn’t understand why we thought it was funny, and it wasn’t funny, it was stupid, but what is love if not stupid?
We all loved Ronnie, my brother, Ronnie Green, included, and when he was a nerdy sophomore at the University of Rhode Island, he invited her to homecoming weekend. She said she would go out with him only if he smoked cigarettes, so he took it up. At the dance, the Ronnie-who-was-my-brother drank too much, probably trying to keep up with Ronnie, and Al Taubman, her old boyfriend who was still in love with her and who was also there, had his friend Larry Najarian waylay my brother and drive him out to a country road and dump him there, crying and puking. This was the year before my brother, Ronnie Green, who never smoked again, dedicated himself to the study of medicine and met the girl who would be his wife and still is fifty-some years later.
“Good, huh?” Ronnie said of the meatball sandwich. And it was delicious and I realize now that it is one of the very few things I can remember eating in all those long-ago years. Today, food is a major part of my life—my friends are chefs and food writers; I was even a restaurant critic myself for a while—but back then I didn’t think or care much about it at all.
More than anything, food was a window into other cultures, as when David Leach took me to Zum Deutschen Eck in a German neighborhood in Chicago, where I had goose for the first time, with red cabbage in goose fat and boiled potatoes—and I’ve been searching for the crisp skin and juicy dark meat of that goose ever since. Or like my first time at a Middle Eastern restaurant eating pita bread with raw onion and baba ghanoush in Boston. Or like learning to mix bright spices to cook Indian food in Berkeley.
When I was at Rolling Stone, editor Charlie Perry took me out to dinner at the Poodle Dog, then San Francisco’s oldest and fanciest French restaurant. I don’t remember what we ate, I just remember a discordant feeling that going out to dinner in places like this was something my parents and their friends did, which I thought then was an obscene waste of money.
I do remember that in my little backyard cottage in Berkeley, the one I escaped to Iowa from, I picked the last green tomatoes from my garden—the ones that would never ripen—dredged them in a little beaten egg and flour, and fried them, and that was truly delicious. But before that, I remember no food—not on Tamalpais Road or in either converted-garage room.
But I remember that meatball sandwich in that dark bar with Ronnie Barad at three o’clock in the afternoon—too late for lunch and way too early for dinner—as one of the most satisfying meals I’ve ever eaten.
That night in Boston, we went to the bar in the Combat Zone where Ronnie go-go-danced. We watched her on a high platform, first in a blond wig and tiny aqua bikini dancing like a white girl, then becoming black in an afro wig and little silver bikini. She looked like two completely different people. The crowd loved her, just as the locals on the boardwalk at Scarborough Beach had when we were teenagers and she’d danced for them in her pink wool bathing suit.
When her sets were done and she had dressed and come to our table, it was clear that her mood had soured. “I want to go home,” she said to Richie.
“What happened?” I said. She just shook her head.
“It’s no good” was all she would say.
I saw her once more after that in the summer of 1977, when she and Richie came to the beach at Canochet, bringing with them from their neighborhood two stray children who had never had a day at the beach. Ronnie was skinny, strangely wizened from the drugs, and over-cheerful as she horsed around and mugged, manic. And now, in November two years later, I drove Mitch and my Impala into the gas station at Franklin and Argyle, and although I didn’t know it, I was about to see her for the last time.
The van was parked in the gas station, the back doors open, its messy innards emitting the powerful scent of patchouli oil. Richie and Ronnie were across the street with two more strays she’d picked up, dogs this time. They approached across the busy thoroughfare and I got a look at her, and I had to put my sunglasses on so she wouldn’t see the pain and sadness in my eyes at the sight of her.
