The Jazz Singer.
careersinmusic.com
With the mention of her name, I have another brief love affair to relate, brief (three weeks, three dates long) but intense and rich in interesting details, as we were two very different people (as all women and men are). We met by the strangest chance and hit it off with a bang.
Remember that I sometimes mused about finding all my affairs in the ‘Plough’, and that I should swear off this habit, as a bad place to meet a proper, lasting soulmate, judging from numerous previous experiences, some good, like Vicky and Dale, and Tracy, some bad, like Lindy, others indifferent, like Annie, and one incomprehensibly good and then maddeningly bad and dangerous affair, Lindsey (that story soon to begin). Well it happened again with Diane.
When I think of these assessments, I’m a little unfair. They were all ‘good and bad’, as it was with every woman I ever met, including my ex-wife. It’s something in the nature of all love relationships. But in some cases the good lasts longer and predominates and leaves a fine, glowing memory for life. If it’s broken off quickly, easily, as with Vicky and Laurel, it’s just a thread between us. In others the good parts are counterbalanced by the bad, or outweighed by it if we are stupid enough to keep smashing our heads against a brick wall and trying to make the impossible work.
In this case I called it quits after the third date, after two wonderful dates before it. I suppose I was getting smarter. In Lindsey’s case such a complexity of worldly matters and unbelievable partnerships tied us together at such a dizzying pace, I couldn’t leave her when I realized she was crazy and sure trouble. So we lasted on and off a year, like two often fighting animals tied together by a ten foot chain in the arena of partnerships. With Sanita, my ex, it was a far more civil, slow and silent a contest, with truces, smiles unsaid words and ever-growing distance, our connection, our obligation (the Latin word ‘obligo’ means tie up or tie together) being our son, and that chain taking many painful years to sever.
So there I met Diane:
Wednesday Aug 1st, 1984. 2 p.m.: Another strange adventure. I came home from the Med. and Moe’s bookstore with two new paperbacks (john Dryden and Cardinal Newman) worked a little on poetry at my desk getting high, (just starting to do lines after a two day break, purchasing another eight ball with people dropping by) I gave up trying to work at my desk and went to Martin’s at seven for an interesting conversation about computers, whether they were good or bad for our minds in different ways. Back home at eight. Steve and friends drop by for an hour, then talking to Jim across the hall I grow restless. I go down the street and buy two beers, come back, start drinking one at 9:55 but decide to go the Plough at 10 p.m.
At the Plough, the bar is pretty empty. Dan beckons me over. He is next to a blonde, Diane, with whom I soon get into a conversation about music. She is a singer, jazz and rock. She plans doing a few numbers on stage.
Her car had just broken down a block away and she walked into this bar to make a phone call, (like me with Dale she seemed totally unconcerned about her vehicle). She’d never been to this place before. She’d come in, made her call then talked to the band on stage and was invited to sing a few songs. Then I walked in. We dance, then I invite her out to my car to do a few lines. She goes back in and sings two songs. At twelve I drive her to the ‘Bancroft Lounge’ where she was originally headed, to hang out with jazz musicians and sing. She does a few more numbers with them, very nicely. After that we do a few more big lines in our respective bathrooms. We talk more intimately about things, happiness, books, jazz and part at 2 a.m. with plans to get together Sat. evening for music. We exchange numbers. Then she gets a ride home to S.F. with the band.
Home at 2:30. Don calls and comes over for half an hour. I go to Doggie Dinner for a hot dog. I clean up my room a bit, turn off the radio and light in my loft, kick back for some sleep.
4:15 a.m. Diane calls, still high, talks twenty minutes and wants me to come over for more talk and lines. I dress and set out for S.F. making two wrong turns and taking the long way. After an hour I finally get to her house in Noe valley, an area I’ve never been. She has the bottom half of a house, two small rooms in a nice, steep-hilled neighborhood.
I took so long to get there she tells me she’s coming down now and just wants to go to bed. But I convince her to do another line. At first somewhat hyped up after more lines, drinking coffee, pacing and sitting repeatedly we talk about J. Kerouac’s ‘The Subterraneans’ and other works, with jazz playing on a cassette deck and a little about her career and mine. Feeling, (or feigning) tired, we lay down together on her mattress on the floor and have really great sex. After that we just lie there holding each other for an hour, getting a bit of rest, saying nothing.
8. a.m.: We drive about S.F. looking for a bar near Polk street. It doesn’t open till nine, so we walk to a coffee shop feeling good. I have a beer and she has a cappuccino. We sit on a bench, looking out on a mall, comfortable. At first we talk of Europe, her desire to see Paris and mine also. Then we talk about what one can do to help others the most in life. I describe how literature reaches many (as opposed to teaching) and how good authors like Steinbeck and Carson McCullers humanize people. She pays close attention to my reasoning, asks cogent questions and seems to understand me very well. I plot summarize a bit of ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ and then, ’Of Mice and Men’. As we get up to leave, a middle-aged lady sitting nearby and listening to us the whole time stands up and thanks us (while a few other strangers, also listening in, clapped). It was a kind of Erasmian (humanistic) argument unfolded in low, modest tones. I'd never had strangers listening in to a conversation of mine clap before. I had no idea they were even listening. Then again, when I get enthused I don't notice anything, like the passage of time.
To the bar, two bloody Mary’s, feeling even better now we get down to serious talk about good and bad characteristics in people, sitting side by side at a ledge against a window looking out at a busy intersection, watching people go by. We talked about how two people together could face more of life’s troubles than one alone, although this was only a theory of mine, never having tried it. We clinically discuss mankind, the potentials of most people, in a long, lucid conversation. Then to the bathrooms for more lines.
It begins to dawn on me how bright and sharp she is. I tell her this, and my surprise. We talk more of her personal trips, best to pursue, revelling a bit in our gifts. We talk about one’s life as the artistic medium in the widest view, as opposed to the narrow view of talent. Then happiness, its sources. We leave the bar and walk the streets to an old hotel where she says she once lived. She told me of a past suicidal time there. More talk of simple and complex happiness, goals etc. She reasons her way through questions very well, mentioning a psychiatric program she went through and is curious about several odd words I used — ‘dichotomy’, ‘hermaphrodite’.
Then we talk in vague terms, hinting at ourselves, about relationships and whether they can be good, more pleasure than pain. I take no stand but point out Dryden’s lines:
“None would live past years again…”
She likes another quote I make about an artist having “one skin too few”, then a long digression on whether artists can create without pain, drugs and derangement of the senses. I argue mostly ‘No’. Many examples are brought up. She tells me of emotional insecurity, a disastrous love affair and a hermit-like existence, staying in her little room for two months straight, not long ago.
I try to reconcile her with our socializing, noting our present good time and the odd coincidence of our meeting. We get in the car and drive around the wharves and North Beach and stop at the “Trieste” coffee shop at noon. She calls to her childcare job for an extra half-hour. She asks of my family and I hers a little. I drive her to work and we agree to meet again next Saturday.
Diane had a very beautiful, oval face and medium length, light hair. She was perhaps six inches shorter than me, very well proportioned, neither skinny nor overweight but curvaceous, with a beautiful, deep voice. She dressed well and had that air of confidence, knowing she looked great.
In the first coffee shop, as I summarized ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’, refreshing her memory (she seems to have read a great deal), on the part about the tragedy of the twelve year old girl. I glanced at her and she was looking straight ahead with piercing eyes behind tinted sunglasses. I saw her eyes from the profile angle and remember it vividly. Most of the time we were talking away she wasn’t looking at me but staring off into space and I noticed I was doing the same, only looking at her infrequently. This made me think we might be too alike to be compatible. Strange thought.
She told me she was a ninth-grade dropout, smoked pot and did speed at fourteen, lots of speed at sixteen, was a runaway after a very hard childhood and only lately reconciled with her long-hated father.
She also mentioned heroin addiction and rehab. She was about my age, thirty.
In retrospect I am amazed at the myriad of thoughts we touched upon…She almost outdid me in prolonging our metaphysical discussions…
I got ecstatic at one point, in the bar around 10:30, while she was in the bathroom. I stepped out to feed the parking meter and standing beside a strange ‘Taxi driver’ look-alike at the corner, waiting for the light to change, we exchanged glances and recognized the same proud, fierce, dishevelled, pupil-dilated, high in each other in that frantic city. Then, returning to my seat and having a moment alone, it struck me more and more how intelligent Diane was, how unusual and how fine and great our conversation, then simultaneously hearing eight men at the other end of the bar with the bartender loudly and vigorously discussing some restaurant and its four-dollar hamburger, the vast contrast to what we were eagerly discussing, I tried to communicate to her this thrill (all these perceptions) as she sat down again.
This was our first date.
