One sober date
Now back to Lindy. I waited a few days then called and she invited me over to spend the night, even though she was sick with a mild cold. We had a brief affair which lasted about a month. But in the first days I was truly in love with her, puppy love. To her more practiced eyes I was no more than an interesting, new, boy, good for some fun nights out, a new toy to play with but one that wouldn’t last long. But her kisses and her bed were warm and that was as far as I thought.
In retrospect, I see she was feeling a great deal of inner turmoil at the time, from the desperate way she would fling herself into the night and party with strangers. She had two very different faces. At home, when sober, she was practical, mature, on schedule, a good mother to her three-year-old boy, and even a little cold to me when I happened to be around at such times, as if I were in the way and out of place. Then, in party mode, she was wild-eyed and reckless to a scary degree.
We only spent a few days and nights together in that first mode. I remember the first night I brought over a paperback copy of Baudelaire in English and French and read her some poems, lying in bed with her. She was sweet then and we even made love, despite her mild cold. But most of our hours together were not sober. They were crazy, so much so I kept an exact account of them. Here’s one:
“Thursday Nov. 11th, 1982. Got up after a good sleep, after practising with Mike the night before till midnight. Went to the Café Mediterranean at noon and met Lindy there at one-thirty after talking to Bill B. upstairs about tent construction and design, (he worked at ‘North Face’). I talked with Lindy over a second cappuccino, then as I stepped out with her to get a ride home she suggests doing something like getting a glass of beer. We go to the ‘Bear’s Lair’ and she orders a pitcher (after I suggested a half pitcher). Two and a half hours later, after two and a half pitchers and much talk about Montana, we had to rush to her house to receive a hand delivered package, for her work. We rushed down Telegraph avenue very fast and drunk to her car. We got there just in time for the package, drank the five beers in her refrigerator and she sends me out for beer, vodka and pot.
Very drunk at six p.m. I go get all these things, back by six-thirty. We drink with an older woman friend who puts away (downs) a glass of vodka and water. I, very high, had spilt some O.J. in Lindy’s car and now beer on this very notebook, for I had this and some other books with me, not expecting to enter on such a course of delinquency. I remember I wanted to take the books home when at six I took her car on errands. But she insisted I leave them as ‘collateral’. She used that word. Back at her kitchen table we drank. At eight I’m sent out again in her car even more drunk, for more beer. I could hardly drive, not finding the close liquor store she mentioned, and which I wanted to walk to, but she insisted I drive. I got to the ‘White Horse’ and back.
Dot (her older friend) and a male friend, a cyclist, come over. He leaves in disgust and bad temper after ten minutes of our obnoxious drunkenness. But we feel fine. At first he tried to joke with us in his British accent but then turned on us and left.
At ten we go to the Plough, but not before Lindy invites a total stranger, a black guy over (into her kitchen). He’s pretty strange, in a cowboy hat, but has some pot. We drive to the bar, maniac style. I pay the way in. Lindy talks awhile then disappears, calls me (at home) and has been talking to Paul Bedford at the Plough. I’m very drunk, go for pot, snag her home, play and talk about classical music. We hop in the sack”.
A day in the life of a rake, led by the pretty hand of a serious alcoholic down the road to perdition. What a guy will do to get laid! Note though, after all that drinking, at the end of the day, we are discussing classical music. And I can tell you much of the other talk earlier that day (and which I didn’t record) was intellectual, a strange combination of inebriety and erudition.
