Going into the city, p.26
Going Into the City, page 26
I should specify that this was Carola’s radical feminist period, sexual research period, and hippie chick period all at once. She ate all those scallops because she got hungry living on fifty dollars a week—her share of the government check that only she received at Children’s Welcome because only she had the required BA. But it was some BA—Radcliffe magna in English, ’66—and she’d learned how to live poor by putting her husband through film school as a London preschool teacher. Amir was a Pakistani who had picked her up on the tube a few weeks into the European adventure she’d financed with eight months of typing and acting classy at Harper & Row. Carola had had a number of smart boyfriends and been engaged once. But Amir, who loved B movies as much as he hated the British empire, was sharper and more original than anyone she’d dated at Harvard. He was kind and he was funny. But although Carola believes the marriage would have run out of steam anyway, he was also pathologically jealous for no reason whatsoever except that he was in over his head.
Tipped off by Dominic Sicilia, I’d been wowed by the stylistic eclecticism and boffo laugh lines of my favorite new artist at the Bitter End, and Ms. Clawdy was similarly wowed. But such was the nature of my relationship with Ellin that when I was invited to Bette Midler’s Carnegie Hall debut June 23, she did the been-there-done-that and gave me leave to invite Carola, who as it happened had roomed with one of Ellin’s movement allies at Radcliffe. In Carola’s mind I was still her male friend. But such was the nature of my relationship with Ellin that I had other thoughts, as with Carola I so often did.
This was a fraught time for her. She’d recently been tossed out of Children’s Welcome in a feminist scourging typical of the time, and was staying with her roadmate Tina on Thompson Street because her own place was occupied by her brother Adam, who at that moment was a murder suspect. It’s certain now that he was innocent, and firmly believed that the murderer was an even crazier relative of someone else in the homey old Village co-op where she’d grown up. But she didn’t know that, and that co-op is where the murder—of a renowned children’s book author named Irma Black—had gone down five days before. This all spilled out in ten anxious minutes, and somehow I gave off the right signals—concerned, supportive, unfreaked, and well aware that Adam was trouble. It was such a disorienting moment for her that she was freed up to look at me in a different way, as someone who got her. And I did. I got her. At last.
We smoked some, used my press plates to park at Seventh and 55th, bought cherries, and strolled into Carnegie Hall. Carola had never heard of Bette Midler. I told her she’d get the picture, and before Bette even came onstage—Miss M was, yes, fabulous that night—the mix of gay peacocks and suburban couples had won Carola’s sizable heart. There was quite a second act, too: a Smokey Robinson & the Miracles farewell at Madison Square Garden. Between sets we walked around the Garden’s perimeter conversing, and when I proffered my hand she took it, almost ceremonially. We didn’t sleep together that Friday night—just kissed amorously by the car after I’d treated half a dozen hippies to dinner at Bobo’s on my Newsday expense account. Briefly cupping one of her small, hard breasts, I felt hairs between them. Next day I thought about those hairs a lot. I also thought about how much fun we’d had. So when she called Sunday morning the first thing I said was, “I was just thinking about you.”
She asked me out Tuesday with the proviso that we’d share the date with Tina, who’d won a raffle to tour New York Harbor on the Pete Seeger sloop Clearwater. But we met at my place, and were well past kissing when we were interrupted by a surprise visit from my Cal Arts students Sean and Kevin. Oh well—no hurry. I hate boats, and although Carola comes from a sailing family it was so cold out there that visions of rum toddies danced in her head. The symbolism of sexual love running parallel to feminist sisterhood being heavy, Tina came back for the toddies. But she was discreet enough to keep it short, whereupon Carola and I finally made love. It was good, warm, surprisingly comfortable, but not spectacular. Ditto for the morning. She walked me to the Stuyvesant Station PO and we said good-bye with a warm, juicy kiss. In the ensuing weeks, she thought about that kiss a lot.
Three days later Carola departed for a yoga ashram in Pennsylvania having fucked three men in a week in a slam-bang farewell to the fleshpots. Hey, at least I was last. I knew this was her way, and accepted it—in fact, valued it, because I’d developed the theory that monogamy would come more naturally to those sexually well-traveled enough not to moon about craving “experience.” But I really didn’t know what would happen. Ellin Hirst, officially my girlfriend, kept her distance. Ellen Willis, negotiating a rough spot with Steve that included a spouse-swap gone awry, kept her hand in. I was theorizing marriage through a post-Beatles prism and my dream girl was the most sexually proactive, pragmatic, and promiscuous woman I’d ever cared for. I was militantly secular and my dream girl was seeking monastic enlightenment in the Poconos. Nor did the wicked case of poison ivy that coincided with my first big Stones piece, to which Ellin contributed generously, calm my mind. But as July zigzagged on there was a moment. I was spending some of my Newsday windfall on Larry Dietz’s old shrink, and although Leah wasn’t always on my wavelength, she cut through this mess with a single question. If I were to describe my best outcome, however unlikely, what would it be? After not much thought, I knew: “A monogamous relationship with Carola.”
I’d mailed an Exile on Main Street postcard that closed with “Say hello to Mr. Berra for me” and two checkable boxes marked “Love” and “Your friend,” and she’d mailed a letter about self-purification and the lugs at a rock festival, and “old Mr. Immanent” mailed a letter that closed, “So, impurely, but with high-positive-energy and some high-negative-energy, and assuring you that you have not been living in any sewer I know about, and that you are as different from the folks at the Poconos Rock Festival as I am, which is plenty, though I’m sure not in the same way, I remain, your loving friend, Bob.” Then there was nothing and my expectations zagged down. And then, chronology unclear but say Thursday, July 20, with Carola having fled self-abnegation on July 14 and then fled Manhattan to recuperate in a summer house where she’d once au paired, she phoned and conveyed that after meditating through a three-day silence imposed on her big mouth by her historically Jewish swami, she’d decided that she’d take a chance, just to see how happy life would be, with only her and me. Say I began my Dead column and got stuck and drove out to Newsday and did laps to the finish and drove east some more, reaching the Shelter Island ferry around dawn. Found the house. Got into bed with my sleepyhead. Fucked her nervously because so much was at stake. Oh well—no hurry.
We had a lovely two days. Marriage wasn’t mentioned, kids were. What each of us remembers most vividly is wading into Shelter Island Sound until we were up over our waists so Carola could carry me through the water like I was a baby, or a bride at the threshold.
9
LIKE A HORSE AND CARRIAGE
“Go together like a horse and carriage,” did he say? Like a lot of pop songs, “Love and Marriage” isn’t as simple as you think. Of course you can have a horse without a carriage, although a carriage without a horse is a clumsier proposition, which is why they invented the horseless carriage. Also, who’s the horse and who’s the carriage? When Carola held me in her arms in Shelter Island Sound, was she the horse or the carriage? Carry me, Carola. Sister, carry. And she has, many times.
So much happened so fast that we can’t quite remember what came when, although first up for sure was Ellin Hirst, who took the news so badly I had to tell her twice, in Vermont and then California. In Vermont we had sex I watched from the ceiling, after which I snuck off to call Carola and say what had been left unsaid, that I really really wanted to be monogamous—which she’d assumed and had so advised my chief rival, an aspiring dental student from Queens, while he took a bath at 308. In California I wrote a Newsday column before flying to St. Louis, where Carola, as part of our fifty-fifty wheel-time program, had driven the Toyota to meet Georgia and her cartoonist boyfriend Wes. From there began a road trip that included Rendezvous ribs in Memphis, a night in a by-the-hour motel in the Delta, Bang the Drum Slowly starring Michael Moriarty in Knoxville, and two days in Georgialina with a music-loving pothead couple she knew from the Newsweek letters department. Driving up through Virginia we had our first fight, which involved the nutritional properties of almond protein, her belief that driving in lane on an empty highway was for squares, and my inability to resist her nipples. There would be many others. Carola was both a hippie and the nicest person in the world, but she had grown up the youngest of four kids around an unemployed lawyer with a temper. So she’d learned to stand up for herself.
We met each other’s families quick. She charmed and was charmed by Georgia, who had bloomed after escaping college, and my parents knew good news when they saw it. That spring my dad, sleeping on my couch after a professional meeting to simplify his commute to the tragicomic job he’d finally landed counseling if not guiding teenagers of color at Seward Park High School, could only grin and bear it when Ellin Hirst passed him on her way to pee. And my mom, who had subjected me to a once-in-a-lifetime tongue-lashing the day she learned Georgia and Wes were living together, was seeing her outsider cohort at First Pres go through far worse with their kids. So at a Vermont lake house belonging to Doug’s in-laws, my mother and my beloved enjoyed each other’s ongoing goodwill as my father signed off on Carola’s shoulders in five forthright Ridgewood-accented words: “She looks like a swimmuh.”
The Dibbells were less of a challenge, but more complicated. At the long trestle table in the basement of 26 Jones Street, her moody, scrupulously democratic Yale ’28 dad, Charlie Dibbell, ribbed me clumsily about Dartmouth, and her infinitely subtle genteel-eccentric Barnard ’28 mom, Helen Hope Dibbell, hoped kindly that I too was kind. Soon we’d weekended with the 30 Jones contingent, her sister Joy Harvey and Joy’s husband, Larry, and their two little girls and, well, the unmarried teenage couple they were putting up. For this was an unusually tolerant and unusually charitable family, or so I gather as far as the unusual part is concerned. True, First Pres was dominated by WASPs. But beyond Shoss and Kit and I suppose Bob Stanley, I’ve been close to very few of them, even at Dartmouth, where prime candidate Bruce Ennis insisted he was Scotch-Irish. The Dibbells—and for that matter the Harveys, public-spirited rehab architect Larry being a second cousin of some kind—were WASP to the core. Yet when my polymath pal Marshall Berman exclaimed “I’ve never met gentry before” upon entering the Dibbells’ Clinton, Connecticut, manse, a circa-1860 painted-brick structure with faux-Attic columns on the heavily trafficked Post Road some twenty miles east of New Haven, it just went to show that polymaths don’t know everything. The Dibbells were not gentry.
There is a Captain Dibbell House in Clinton, and Dibbells from the 1600s are buried there, but the Dibbells got by as farmers and bookkeepers and small businessmen who Charlie liked to say “never amounted to anything.” Charlie attended Yale on scholarship, a well-built local boy who worked summers as a laborer. He amounted to something until 1953, when he was forced out of a white-shoe Wall Street firm where he’d never been comfortable helping the rich avoid their taxes. He then lived off his savings and an inheritance that had just come to his wife, whose grandfather had immigrated from England later than the Christgaus had immigrated from Germany in a futile quest for North Carolina gold—and whose father had worked his way up from fourteen-year-old brokerage clerk to president of the New York Stock Exchange. Frank Hope married Blanche Lovett, a Boston University alumna from a family of revivalist do-gooders, who in Tarrytown and then Darien oversaw mansions she transformed into boardinghouses, mostly for less fortunate Lovetts. Frank left Blanche twice while siring five children, the second of them Helen, who like many cool Barnard girls of her era went by her surname and was called Hope. With Charlie out of work, the Dibbells lived frugally until the money was gone, which came naturally to both parents anyway. Then Charlie secured a job in a classmate’s law firm and commuted daily to New Haven well into his seventies.
Unfortunately, Charlie didn’t just have a temper—he had a screw loose. Without ever getting physical, he was so scary so often the only word is “abusive.” But while his son had a handful of nuts loose, none of his three girls was seriously damaged, and he was also a good and interesting man. It was New England Republican Charlie, for instance, who figured out in the ’30s that the row houses they and their neighbors rented on the same Greenwich Village block where the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was shot could be transformed into a nonprofit co-op under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the best thing about Charlie was Hope, who gave up graduate work in psychology after a blind date with Charlie in 1931 bowled her over—there was a visible sexual bond between them that prevailed over rather than fed off Charlie’s rage. And for half a century Hope focused her high IQ and born-and-bred charity on Greenwich Village as a site of domestic life—especially on its children. Her used toys, tasty snacks, stealth humor, extreme tolerance, and radiant kindness made the triple backyard behind 26-30 Jones a kid magnet almost as powerful as the Greenwich House settlement, whose thrift shop Hope ran for a time. Carola was one of many girls and several boys who learned to act and sing and do eurhythmics at Greenwich House in a theater program run by a redoubtable probable lesbian named Helen Murphy, half freethinker and half apostle of respectable noblesse oblige.
Greenwich House attracted neighborhood bohemians up to and including poet Anne Waldman and neighborhood Italians up to and including singer Maria d’Amato, Maria Muldaur to you; the future Jenny Gardner was there for a while. No slouch in that company, Carola then followed her sister Joy into all-girl Hunter College High School, the best public school in the city as well as her version of the wonderful world of Jews. There she was a star like none at Flushing—seventh in her class, editor of a literary magazine featuring several future professional writers, co-author of a scandalous senior show called The Unteachables, good at everything but her SATs. Something about SAT gamesmanship rubbed her the wrong way, for Carola is a person who both hates losing and doesn’t relish winning. For a while I inveigled her into playing a card game called Mille Bornes. It was ninety percent luck, but she lost disproportionately. One evening she announced that if she didn’t win she’d never play again, and the cards went so totally my way that I couldn’t have taken a dive if I’d wanted to. Good-bye, Mille Bornes.
I connected less comfortably with Carola’s friends than with her family, although I swear I tried—didn’t meet any I grokked until a November visit to Boston, where one from Hunter and one from Radcliffe had settled. But she made it a mission to get with three different-but-equal couples I loved: Tom and Laura settled one-on-one in post-collective Astoria, Bruce and Nancy Lee with Nan a public defender, and the now-married Bob and Marylin with her two kids racing around their Crosby Street loft on foot and various wheeled conveyances—a chessboard-and-Ping-Pong-equipped art-world salon where we spent several evenings a week with others famous and obscure. All these friends understood that we were serious, and not just because I was crowing about it. Carola treated me differently—she was visibly committed, tender and proprietary.
This was what she understood to be our deal, but also how she approached whatever world she chose to explore—on its own terms. Where as a hippie feminist she’d gone all raised-consciousness and heart-to-heart with her NYU girlfriends, not one her intellectual equal but all with lessons to impart, now she plunged into rock and roll like no woman I’d been with except Ms. Clawdy, Ellen and Dominique included—it was my life, she liked that it was my life, and she also liked my need to share it, with her and with everybody. A longtime but sporadic fan who’d returned to the States in 1969 knowing more about Alla Rakha than Eric Clapton, she never made me turn off the record player (back then, anyway). So we shared our second week together with new albums from Rod Stewart and Van Morrison, permanently imprinting “You Wear It Well” and the heavenly “Jackie Wilson Said” on how we know each other. And soon I was hitting her with proven reliables like Dusty in Memphis, The Marvelettes’ Greatest Hits, and Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky as well as 1972 stuff: Paul Simon sans Garfunkel, Crazy Horse, Nilsson Schmilsson, the Christgau cult classic Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Kink Kronikles—how she loved “Waterloo Sunset.” Young, Gifted and Black and Spirit in the Dark and the “You Send Me” on Aretha Now. Coming up on the outside Bonnie Raitt’s Give It Up pointing back at Chris Smither’s Don’t It Drag On and across at the boogieing first side of Marc Benno’s Ambush. In November Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses and Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill. Al Green, Al Green, Al Green. And in the car, AM radio nonstop except for baseball: the Chi-Lites and her beloved Stylistics and she swears the Detroit Emeralds too; “Coconut” and—two years late—“Layla”; “Freddie’s Dead” and “Back Stabbers” and “I Can See Clearly Now” and you bet “Use Me” only not the “use me up” part; Alice Cooper’s impossible “School’s Out”; the horrible “Taxi” which she kind of liked anyhow, by Villager Harry Chapin, whose famous grandfather’s painting of Hope in a T-shirt hung at 26 Jones. And although she skipped some Nassau shows, more often she would work on her fiction at a Newsday typewriter while I wrote my review. Her appetite for live music meshed undetectably with our appetite for each other’s company, and for the sandwiches she devised by the bagful for the two-day Festival of Hope at Roosevelt Raceway and a Kinks-Beach Boys bill with Tom and Laura in the South Jersey wilds. For Al Green at the Copa, we dressed to our version of the nines at a table with Vince Aletti, Lenny Kaye, Richard and Lisa Robinson, Vernon Gibbs, and Aaron Fuchs. We have the house photo to prove it. Vince sports a mustache.
