—
ENCOURAGED, I continue making my sales calls. Over the next month I have a “date” with a different writer at a bar or coffee shop or hiking trail, two or three times a week.
L.A. seems to be brimming with bright, creative people, drawn here, no doubt, by “the biz.” Bonus factor: half a million of my fellow Angelenos are Jews—a bigger population of Chosen People than any other American city except my hometown, New York. Once again I’m living in a city whose worst pastrami sandwich is better than the best pastrami sandwich pretty much anywhere else. Once again I’m surrounded by loud, aggressive, impatient, intrusive, arrogant, sarcastic, nosy, hilarious, uninhibited, curly-haired people—my people. I figure that ups my odds of understanding and being understood by the strangers I’m hoping to turn into friends.
Sure enough, I’m amazed by the instant intimacy I share with the women I meet on my friendship dates, the quick bonds we build. Most of them are keepers: smart, funny, stylish, open, interesting, kind. Maybe it’s the Jew factor, the DNA-level recognition that we were once cousins in Kiev. Or maybe my usual defenses, judgments, and desperation have fallen through the cracks in my broken-open heart.
—
A COUPLE OF MONTHS IN, I get a Facebook message from Lorelei Steele. I recognize the name. I used to read about Lorelei in the gossip column when the San Francisco Chronicle was my newspaper, and she was an elderly (which now means “ten years older than I am”) San Francisco socialite.
Lorelei messages that she’s a longtime fan of my writing. She, too, relocated to L.A., a couple of years ago. She invites me to lunch at her place in Beverly Hills. Yes is what I say to every invitation, these days, and yes is what I say to her.
Even taking into account Lorelei’s social status, I’m stunned, pulling into her circular gravel driveway and parking in front of the three-car garage. The house is long and low, with tall white columns flanking massive, intricately carved wooden front doors. Before I can knock, the doors glide open, dwarfing the small woman who stands in the archway, her uniform stiff and white.
“I’m Carmen. Ms. Steele is waiting for you,” she greets me. I follow her through rooms of floor-to-ceiling antique mirrors, burgundy velvet drapes with braided gold tiebacks, plump snow-white sofas and easy chairs scattered with pillows in contrasting floral patterns and skins. Ornate chandeliers hang from the ceilings; thick wool rugs pad the gleaming wide-boarded floors. One room is painted blood red; the next, pale yellow; the next, Wedgwood blue. All these colors and patterns in one house should be nauseating. Somehow they’re magnificent instead.
Carmen leads me through Lorelei’s boudoir, a fluffy palace of fainting couches and hat stands dripping with veils and gauze and life-sized oil portraits in baroque gold frames. The king-sized bed is an island of down duvets and silk-covered pillows and glossy percale shams, the feathered inner sanctum of a queen. Carmen opens a narrow French door and we’re outside, breathing rose-scented air.
“There you are.” Lorelei waves gaily from her seat at a small round table in the center of a lush garden in full, riotous bloom. In her straw hat, platinum pageboy, and floral linen dress, Lorelei herself is a bouquet. Even my untrained eye can see that her nips and tucks, her Bettie Page hairdo, and her makeup have been executed by the best in the biz.
Lorelei stands and pulls me into her distinctly maternal embrace. How sweet it is to be hugged by someone who’s older than I am.
“Carmen, we’ll have our lunch now, please.”
“Yes, Miss Lorelei.” Carmen ducks her head and disappears.
“Sit, darling,” Lorelei instructs me. The table is covered with a charming mélange of multi-patterned place mats and mismatched floral china teacups and saucers and plates. In the near distance, a canopied white daybed scattered with cabbage rose pillows invites a tryst or a nap or, I fantasize, a day of writing, its linen curtains drawn against the desert sun.
“Tell me everything,” Lorelei says, as if this were our hundredth lunch, not our first. So I do.
Lorelei and I are leaning into each other, our faces inches apart, when Carmen returns with a rolling glass cart laden with mango chicken salad and sourdough rolls and butter balls and tall glasses of mint iced tea.
“The same thing happened to me,” Lorelei is saying. “Except I was seventy when my third husband broke my heart. He was the only one I truly loved. I’d been in San Francisco my whole adult life. I was the laughingstock of the town.
“I had friends on the board of every hospital and charity, a wardrobe full of designer clothes, a stunning home overlooking the Bay. I let go of all of it. I got in my car and I told my driver, ‘Take me to Los Angeles.’ I never looked back, and I’ve never regretted it.”
Lorelei reaches over the plate of pastel petits fours embellished with fondant roses and takes my big hands in her velvety little paws. Her grip is bony but firm. “You’re young and smart and pretty,” she says. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Don’t worry, darling. You’ll be fine.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Smart, yes,” I say. “For all the good it did me. But young and pretty . . .”
Lorelei frowns. “You might never be happy again exactly as you were. But you will know joy again. Maybe in ways you can’t even imagine now. Trust me. You’ll see.”
Two hours later Lorelei and I are standing in her foyer, a huge gold-plated statue of Buddha looming over us as we hug good-bye. “Come back soon,” she says. “Come write in the garden anytime.” I drive east from Beverly Hills feeling as if I just had a rose-scented dream. Me, the lifelong activist, lunching with a socialite? Who’da thunk it? This new life could hardly be more different from the old.
—
AFTER MY KIDS’ FATHER and I divorced in 1984, I moved us to North Oakland because I could (and did) buy a cottage there for $180,000, and because I wanted our family to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. To me, this meant giving my kids a less segregated, less homogeneous, more socially engaged childhood than the one I’d had. I didn’t want token diversity for my kids; I wanted theirs to be the generation that began to Eracism.
So my sons grew up riding their bikes behind mine like ducklings to San Francisco Mime Troupe agitprop plays at UC Berkeley, and taking BART with me to demonstrations for workers’ rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and immigrants’ rights, and against war and inequity and police brutality. The friends they made in their public schools—and their friends’ moms and dads, who became my parenting village and my close companions—were African American, Latino, Asian, biracial, and white, with all kinds of family structures and jobs and languages and religions and cuisines and takes on life. This wasn’t some liberal experiment, a white-guilt masquerade ball, a sacrifice. This was life as we knew it, and it was good and rich and real.
Then crack cocaine came to Oakland, and blood ran in the streets. Suddenly the darkness was pelted by gunfire; overhead, helicopters chopped the days into bits. One night the OPD chased a fleeing suspect in a Mazda RX7 through our front gate and across our front lawn; luckily, the car came to a stop two inches from our front door. One afternoon a man and a woman, arguing as they walked by our house, started screaming and hitting each other until the woman fell to the ground and fractured her skull on the cement. As the population of crack addicts in our neighborhood multiplied, kids my sons’ ages started standing guard on street corners, lookouts for the dealers who lured them out of school with crisp fifty-dollar bills.
In the fall of 2011, Occupy Wall Street sprang to life across the country, and after two years of marital war my wife and I sprang into Occupy Oakland together. Our private hostilities fell away and we fell into the movement together as comrades, lifted up out of our petty bickering, absorbed by the joyful, determined spirit of the most exciting social change crusade either of us had ever joined.
For forty-five years I’d been an activist in various movements, most
of them predominantly white and middle-class despite our best, most inclusive intentions. I was stunned by Occupy’s popularity and diversity, especially given its simple, radical premise: that America’s wealth should serve the vast majority, not just the tiny elite.
During that brief détente, my wife and I began many of our days at the ragtag Occupy encampment in downtown Oakland, shoulder to shoulder, serving donated bagels and coffee, tidying the Occupy library, picking up trash. When demonstrations were announced on Twitter or the local Pacifica radio station, we’d race downtown to fall into line with a throng of thousands, marching up Telegraph Avenue to join the students at Occupy UC Berkeley, or through residential Oaktown neighborhoods, where people poured out of decrepit apartment buildings and into our parade. On the day of the Oakland general strike, my wife and I marched with 25,000 to 100,000 (media/police count versus Occupy’s) union members and anarchists and homeless people and reactivated sixties people and schoolteachers to the Port of Oakland and we shut it down.
In cities and towns across the country, police were raiding and dismantling Occupy encampments, tossing sleeping bags and tents and makeshift outdoor furniture and books. When Occupy Oakland fell, the renewed love between my wife and me died with it. Five months later I was on the road to L.A., and all I wanted was beauty and quiet and ease.
How strange that L.A., of all places, is giving me those things. Even “with traffic,” in twenty minutes I can hike to a hawk’s-eye view of the Pacific. Graffiti artists turn freeway underpasses into Kahlo-esque murals.
Best of all, contrary to popular belief, L.A. is proving to be a great place to make friends. The classic stereotypes—angry Angelenos stranded on gridlocked freeways; wasteland miles of strip-mall sprawl; leggy blondes teetering out of auditions in stilettos; muscle-bound surfer boys living only to paddle out and rip back in—are all true. But the opposite also seems to be true. For smart, caring, authentic Angelenos like Donna and Nichole, and Charlotte, and yes, my new socialite friend Lorelei, making connections with kindred spirits is the stuff of social survival.
—
A NOVELIST NAMED HANNAH invites me to dinner at her house in Santa Monica. I’m not the #rookiemove driver I used to be. I tell her that I commute to the Westside on weekends only, and only during daylight hours. Hannah laughs, commenting, “You learn fast,” and we make a date to meet for a hike on Saturday morning at a trailhead near Malibu.
Hannah and I were introduced via e-mail by Todd, our mutual book editor. “You’ll love Hannah,” Todd told me. “She’s brilliant. Jewish. Your age. Real.”
“Real” is evident in the car Hannah emerges from, and the dog she emerges with. Although she created a prime-time TV series and worked in “the biz” for decades, she’s a novelist now. She drives an unstylish Chrysler SUV. Her dog is a mutt, not a designer “oodle.” And somehow she’s managed to make it in this town with a double-digit-sized body, zero makeup, messy (but not stylist-tousled) hair, in workout gear from REI instead of regulation Lululemon.
“Thanks for coming to the Westside,” Hannah says. She taps the head of her white-muzzled dog. “This is Mabel. She’s our age in dog years.”
I bend to pet Mabel, hoping our geriatric hike won’t be slowed down too much by Hannah’s geriatric dog.
I follow Hannah up the steep, winding trail. As we walk and talk, fanned by the occasional cool ocean breeze, Hannah tells me about her abusive first marriage, which coincided with the years she spent in an industry she despised.
“I had to pretend to care about things that didn’t matter to me at all,” she says. “When I turned sixty I quit so I could pay attention to the things that do.” She talks about her adored husband and two grown children with passionate affection, the same way she talks about the characters in her new novel.
“Todd said you moved here because your life fell apart,” Hannah says, squinting into the too-bright light glinting off the too-blue ocean below. The trail narrows suddenly, and the mountain falls away on both sides. Hannah, her dog, and I are balanced on a precipice overlooking the endless ocean, the mansions of Malibu, the Ferris wheel revolving lazily on Santa Monica Pier. Even Mabel seems intimidated, curling herself around Hannah’s scuffed, dusty boots. “Do you feel like telling me what happened?” Hannah asks.
Starting over with all new people gives me the option of crafting myself as a new character in a new story, of trying on a new persona every night of the week if I want to, just to see what fits. Lately when I’m asked a standard-life question, I pause before I spit out my old answer. If no one in L.A. knows that my decor style runs to Craftsman cottages and overstuffed couches, could I now be a person who favors midcentury-modern houses and chrome-and-leather chairs? My old friends knew better than to try to drag me to gray, frigid Northern California beaches, but maybe with my new friends I’ll be a beach person who frolics in the warm Southern California waves. Why would I say that my favorite flavor of cupcake is chocolate, when the pink box in the office kitchen offers maple-bacon and salted caramel and lavender-thyme?
I give Hannah the abbreviated version, including the nightmares I’ve been having nearly every night since I left Oakland. “I’ve been a glass-half-empty person all my life. I’m trying to change that,” I tell her. “But it seems like all the grief I swallow during the day, trying to focus on happier things, comes out when I sleep at night.”
Hannah looks thoughtful. “You’re trying to recover from PTSD and change your perspective on life,” she says. “That’s a lot to do at once. You have to trust that it’s all proceeding at a pace your psyche can handle.”
“I’m not sure I have enough time left to change. I’m a pretty fucked-up person.”
Hannah stops, turns, peers at me through smudged aviator shades. “What’s so bad about you?” she asks.
The question stops me for a moment. And then I tell her what I’ve been told; what, in the absence of a better story, I’ve come to believe. “I do what I want to do, without considering other people. I get what I want at other people’s expense.”
“Hmmm.” Hannah gazes at me with brown eyes that look familiar somehow. “I get that you’re a person who goes for what she wants,” she says slowly. “But I also get that you’re really open to what other people say.”
Hannah shakes out a pair of retractable walking sticks and we start back down the mountain. Her sticks click against the rocky trail in syncopated time.
“Maybe you’ve been hanging around with the wrong people,” she says. “Maybe you just need to be with people who know how to say what they want.”
A band of whooping teenage boys comes thundering down the trail from behind us. Hannah presses herself against the hillside, pulling Mabel close.
“When we were making plans for today,” Hannah says, “you said you wanted to spend the whole day hiking. I said I only had two hours. You accepted that. You made it really easy for me to say no.”
That’s because I’m on my best behavior, I tell Hannah silently, because I’m desperate for you to like me. Wait till you get to know me. You’ll see what’s wrong with me.
SEVEN
After three months, although the L.A. body is not yet mine, the L.A. workout way is becoming my way. On Workout Wednesdays, lately, I’ve been forcing myself to focus on my own body instead of the bodies and outfits around me, which has transformed those sessions from ego-bashings to a net boost. There’s more push in my push-ups, and each week I continue running a bit farther before devolving into a walk. I do fewer “wimp modifications,” as Joanne calls them, and more of the full-on exercises the others do. At that blessed moment each week when Joanne packs up her TRX straps and the Bellas jostle into line for the shower, I notice an uptick in my energy and my mood.
In my Bellissima employee handbook, I uncover benefits yet unmentioned. For the first time in decades, I have dental insurance, plus coverage most of my coworkers won’t be taking advantag
e of anytime soon: free eye exams and a free pair of glasses each year. If I should give birth to or coparent a baby, I’ll get six months’ paid leave. Also included at no cost to me: a membership to Silverado Gym.
Office buzz describes Silverado’s Hollywood gym as Boogie Nights on steroids, the workout venue of choice for gay men who work the suburban stage sets of the San Fernando Valley, where 90 percent of American porn was produced before our laptops started streaming our own.
On the off chance that every study ever conducted and my own experience are correct, and exercise improves mental health, I sign up for a series of classes at Silverado: Bionic Booty on Saturday mornings, BodyPump and Power Abs after work. Seeing those entries on my iCal makes me appear to be having a life.
Saturday morning finds me in a humid, slightly stinky studio, awaiting my first class. Most of my fellow students are hot young gay men. The other two women in the room are in possession of the L.A. body. Then there’s me.
“Morning, everyone! I’m Geoffrey. G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y. I’ll be your Bionic Booty instructor today.” A human Hummer with visible nipple piercings bounces in place on bubblegum-pink Nikes.
Geoffrey squints across the dimly lit workout studio at the clock on the back wall. “We have four minutes till class starts. So! Who’s got gossip? Anyone book anything this week? Got gay-married? Got an STD?”
None of his students respond. They’re all squatting on their exercise mats, bent over smartphones, frantically texting as the moment of disconnect looms.
Geoffrey stretches his massive muscled arms above his head. “C’mon, people,” he exhorts us. “Anyone got industry dirt? Celeb sightings? Rumors? Good news to share?”
If there are any celebs in the room, I wouldn’t know it. Gay male porn happens to be the only variety that does nothing for me. You could knock me over the head with Jeff Stryker’s mythic member and I wouldn’t know whose it was, or maybe even what it was.
The New Old Me Page 7
