WINE WITH THE FUTURE FAMOUS WRITER

Ok, right off I have to say I don’t remember what year it was, never mind what month.  Sometime in the 70's because this was after Cambridge and Beacon Hill and even Berkeley, which is a whole nother story in itself. This was in a small coastal town called Benson, on a peninsula sticking out into the wide Pacific Ocean, where fog and mist and grayness defined the background for much of the action that filled our lives in those long-ago days. This is about one of them.

Daphne and I had been promising to visit the famous writer for months.  This was before she became a famous writer. She was cute and perky and young. She was clever. Even then, at the age of 23, she intimidated us older writers with her clever scribblings in the local rag, the Benson Bugler, which her friend Amy who ran off with the pharmacist edited. After she ran off with the pharmacist, I edited it, along with the Famous Poet and the astrologer. But that’s another story.

Daphne and I were poets. That’s what you did in the seventies in Benson. You scraped by on what you could get as a cleaning lady (and it wasn’t houses we were cleaning either) or selling organic veggies at the Co-op and you wrote poetry.

And you drank. A lot. You drank cheap white wine with friends in the afternoon on warm days at the beach. And you drank with everyone at night in the Kingfisher Saloon. Poets, fishermen, curmudgeonly old timers, hippies of every description met up at Kingfisher’s  for a game of pool and Bud or something stronger. No one drank wine in bars in those days.  It was sweet drinks like pina coladas or tequila sunrises or cheap beer.

Cocaine was appearing as an exotic new drug, and most nights you couldn’t squeeze in the ladies room at Kingfisher’s they were lined up three deep for the lines laid out on the back of the sink.

On this day, Daphne and I decided we would actually stop by the famous writer’s place and have that literary discussion we’d been avoiding. She was only 23 and she was writing a book. We were 29 and 39 respectively and we weren’t. We called her Randi in those days because that was her name and she wasn’t famous. Later she became Miranda and that’s how you know her.

In those days, people lived in all sorts of haphazard structures. Mine was a converted garage I rented by the month, with a loft and an oil drum wood stove.  Daphne lived down by the creek in one of several buildings owned by a family called Josephson and was known as Josephson’s Farm, but it wasn’t really a farm.  Randi lived in a small rented cabin on a corner of one of the main streets in town, behind a dense cypress hedge.  It was like a hobbit house in a different universe from the outside world of chainsaws, laughing children and barking dogs. Many of our little cobbled together homes had that otherworldy quality to them once you entered them leaving the outside world behind.  Or so it seemed during those unstructured times.

When we got to her cabin at the prearranged time, she was on the phone. Phones still had cords in those days, and hers was a long twisted one, getting more and more twisted as she hauled it around the cabin’s central room. We could tell it was a serious conversation because she wasn’t talking, just pacing and grunting and changing the phone from ear to ear, as she waved us inside.

We held out our bottle of wine and bag of Cheetos we’d picked up at the Liquor store, called Liquor’s (you never knew if it was purposeful, that apostrophe, maybe it used to belong to someone name Mr. Liquor) so we wouldn’t appear to be total freeloaders and she motioned us toward the table that served as dining and writing center. We pushed aside some papers as Randi cupped her hand around the phone and said to us “the corkscrew’s in that drawer. I’ll be right there,” then went back to grunting and pacing.

We opened the wine and found glasses in a cupboard. They didn’t match, but we didn’t care.  We tried to motion to her that maybe it wasn’t such a good time and we’d come back, but she kept shaking her head.  So we poured out three glasses of the cheap white and sat down to wait, looking over the spines on her bookshelf behind us.

We heard her hang up the phone, having never really said more than “uh huh” “Yeah” and “ok,” to whoever was on the other end.

“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” she said, taking a seat and a glass of wine. “Thanks so much. Wow, I really need this.”

“Thanks for having us over, but really if it’s not a good time, we can come back,” said Daphne.

“No no, I’m really glad you’re here. I’m sorry. I’m not being very hospitable. Do you want some cheese or something. Oh Cheetos. Maybe some chips.” She kept half jumping out of her chair, then remembering, “Wait, I don’t have any chips. I don’t think I have much here at all; maybe some old wheat thins.”

“No, that’s ok, have a Cheeto.”

“I’m really sorry guys, I’m sort of distracted. That was my brother on the phone. You know my dad’s been sick.”

I had heard about it. Her father was a famous artist who had run with the Beats, only was more mainstream. He sold fairly well and had respect in bourgeois circles. Now in his late sixties he had been battling cancer for some time.  We nodded.

“Well, it looks like this is it. We have to decide what to do, I mean, whether to pull the plug.  I can’t be there, so my brother is really stuck. And my dad is such a cool guy; he’s just so great, I know he’d want us to do it, but it’s so hard to say go ahead and do it, pull the plug, on someone, your father. You know?”

Of course, we didn’t know. We had unintentionally walked in on a very private moment. We were like ghouls at the bedside.   Should we stay, should we go? Would it be ruder to stay intruding on someone’s tragedy or to leave them alone with their crisis?

Just then the phone rang again.

“Sorry,” said Randi for maybe the fourth time, snatching it up.

Daphne and I were giving each other looks. Once she kicked me under the table and motioned with her head toward the door.  Uh, what’s the right thing to do? Would it more inconsiderate to get up and go or to stay. Inertia won out.

We heard more grunting, then a decisive, “Yes, yes, it’s ok. Let’s just do it. Do I have to sign something?”  Silence, then ,”Ok then, I’m really sorry I can’t be there. I’ll be right here by the phone. Call me; anytime, call me in an hour. Call me in ten minutes. Are you ok? I’m ok, really, I’m fine. You’re doing a really great job, Thanks, thanks so much.”

“OK, well, we did it.” She wiped her fist over her eyes looking much younger than 23, then sighed and took a long drink out of her glass.

“I’m really sorry, you guys. I’m glad you’re here, but now you have to listen to all this stuff.  It’s weird. Thanks so much for coming by.”

“We better go. You probably have things to do. I’m really sorry about your dad,” said Daphne getting up.

“Me too, I’m really sorry, can we um…do anything. Do you need a ride or anything?”

“No no, I have to stay here for my brother’s call. He’s only 18, and he has to be there actually doing it. I mean he doesn’t pull the plug; I don’t even know if there is a plug. I guess there is for the respirator, but the doctor pulls it. He just tells them, and I can’t get there, because I’m here and they’re in Connecticut. So can’t you please stay a little while longer? I’m sorry. I must be the worst hostess ever.”

She dumped the last of the Cheetos out of the bag and stuffed them into her mouth.  Daphne and I poured more wine for all.

“Oh, I don’t even like Cheetos,” she said, around a mouthful. “This is so gross. Do you want a napkin?”

She got up and pulled some paper towels off a roll, tearing them in places other than where the perforations were. She folded them as neatly as torn and mangled paper towels can be folded and put them on the table in the general area where we sat.  We smoothed them out just to have something to do. No one said anything at all for a while.

We spent the next few minutes trying to get orange goo off our hands.  Randi had it all over her white blouse; Daphne got some in her hair.  Randi noticed her struggling with some paper toweling and a strand of hair, looking crosseyed at the hair and pulling at it with the paper towel, now shredded.  She rolled her eyes and all three of us broke out into raucous laughter.  It seemed the right thing to do. We laughed and waved our orange fingers in the air until we were laughed out.  Randi said simply, “Thanks.”

Then the wine was gone and then Randi found some more in the back of the fridge. “Look, it hasn’t even been opened. Oh, it’s that really bad stuff from Liquor’s. I think they make it in the back room.”

Daphne was already pouring. We drank and waited for the phone to ring again.

The Kidnapper - A digression into the past

My mother was obsessed with kidnappers. She warned me about them constantly.  She checked every night that my shades were pulled down tight and window locked to keep them out. Was there something in the news around that time about a sensational kidnapping?  We lived in Michigan, a mid-sized City that became the site of the first outdoor pedestrian mall. That was later, when I was a teenager. The mall was an oasis for kids going from store to store with our friends, usually Anita Grintals, or Nancy Boers.  I had other friends as a teenager, but none who were interested in shopping.

You might say I had an eclectic taste, in friends, and in activities.  I was boy crazy with Nancy and still chased the large grasshoppers, big as locusts who populated our working class and yet very quiet and safe (and white) neighborhood with Anita.

My other friends were Sue Schneeberger, whom I giggled with in Latin class as we made up our own translations to the text, taught by the very thin and even more ancient Miss Mead, whose mantra was "I love Latin," said with a look of pure joy through a tight smile punctuated with pink teeth.

"Marcus look at the Queen; she is puking," we chortled behind our books. Miss Mead was not amused.

Later my friends were the the theater and newspaper crowd, and bookish Sharon Rothrock and Diana Henschel.  None of these people were friends with each other. Anita found Nancy frivolous and Sharon and Diana had no interest in either boys or the theater, certainly not grasshoppers or being irreverent in Latin class.  The theater crowd felt anyone not so inclined irrelevant.   

But this story is before all that, before any friends that I can recall.  Today there was just my mother and me.  And of course the kidnapper.

This happened one day when we lived on West Main Street. I must have been 4 or 5.  My mother and were walking to our favorite restaurant, the SuperBurger. We were not well to do. My father sold cars, flipped burgers and tried to carve out a niche for himself as a private detective.  Later my mother and I would accompany him on his stakeouts, hours in a cold car while he waited for a wayward deadbeat to return home so her could serve a subpoena.  No Dashiell Hammett my dad.  The only reason he kept his private detective gig going was because he kept flunking the test to be a cop.  Something to do with his hands.  He had some kind of a finger fungus, or so I remember it.

At this time, I also had a little brother, Glenn, my best and only friend for those early years before he got sick, and even after, when we moved to the new house on South Westnedge Avenue and made all those long car trips to Ann Arbor for transfusions, to prolong his meager life. What other friend could ever measure up to such a soulmate?

For some reason, it was just my mother and me on our way to the SuperBurger on this fateful day.  The brother, the father, somewhere else, but no doubt together, bonding over big Dad and small son activity at home.

Walking slowly along at first, on a warm spring day. Mom in a flowered dress. Me in braids and short skirt, frilly ankle socks, hand held tight in hers.  Then a tightening of her fingers, a tension communicated from mother to daughter. I turned to look behind me, my short legs working hard to keep up.

"Don't look back," my mother said through clenched teeth.  "Just hang onto my hand and walk fast."  I was already walking as fast as I could.  What could be going on. Was a big animal chasing us?

Faster and faster my mother moved toward our destination.  At some point, she let me know a kidnapper was following us. "But don't look back!" she warned. By this time, I was crying and running as fast as my little feet could go to keep up. A kidnapper had found me at last, despite drawn shades and locked doors and windows! The SuperBurger seemed miles in the distance. And the kidnapper was gaining on us! I could hear his footsteps. I could almost feel his breath on my neck. I held on tight to my mother's sturdy fingers, even though my own were cramped and painful in her steely grip.

We all but flew the last few feet to the door of the SuperBurger and dashed inside. Safe!  Surely he wouldn't follow us in here and kidnap me, with people all around!  Or would he.  My mom moved close to the counter, where she smoothed her skirt and dropped my hand. What if the kidnapper came in and grabbed me without her holding on tight? 

I dared a look behind me, but the glassed in door barely rattled where she had thrown it shut when we entered.  No one lurked on the sidewalk out front.  My mom indicated that I hop up on the stool at the counter, as she said to the man in the white paper hat on the other side, "Two SuperBurgers, please."