Monday, November 14, 2005
Ms. KAR (Pt.4)
At the point where I met my friend Ms. KAR, my sexual ties to women had occurred in clusters over the years. Nearly all of them began as friendships. Somewhere along the line, we spilled over into new things. Most of these occurred as a one-time thing. You know, we got drunk one night, we were feeling horny or ornery, or both, there were no men around at that particular moment. So....off we went. The next day we segued just as easily back into the friendship. A lot of people came and went in my life that way.
Ms. KAR stayed the longest, in part because we had a common thread that united us, our directing workshop. Then there was her work doing acting, commercials, modelling, and the ubiquitous thing called "runway work." I was involved in cranking out scripts, pitching projects, scoping out agents.
She and I ran around L.A., doing our respective things, meeting up for a coffee or lunch or dinner and trading war stories. I took her to see movies that I felt she should see, because of the acting or the directing or the movie itself. Ms. KAR got dragged to Anna Magnani movies, I introduced her to Glenda Jackson.
Bad illegal substances also brought us together. Beyond the usual pot that K and I always seemed to enjoy. One night, a Saturday night, I went over to M's agency office, located on the Sunset Strip right where it curves, and across the street from Wolfgang Puck's Spago restaurant.
M was having a private party, with K, and another black friend, C. C had brought along some stuff I had never tried before. But when I took my first puff from the pipe offered to me, and I saw the smoke curling up the glass bowl and into my lungs, I knew this was some amazing stuff. I had to go sit down. Suddenly, it seemed like all the curtains in my head had dropped away, and everything felt intensely open and brand-new. Freebasing rock cocaine does that to a person, I discovered.
It was an incredible high. It also became an incredibly risky thing to partake of on any sort of regular basis. C, the black friend of M's, became a good friend of mine. But he loved this stuff too much. He and I started smoking on our own, without other people. We would hang out and talk our way around the universe. His views were always interesting to me, and we discovered we travelled well together.
But C got to dropping in on me at home every two weeks or so, then every ten days. Not only was this new habit becoming expensive, it was getting to BE a habit, and that concerned me.
M was also starting to enjoy himself a little too much with the stuff, and Ms. KAR and I did our own little intervention. We distanced ourselves gradually from both men. Other people came into K's life. She got proposals of marriage from a number of men, none of them were really in the running though until G came along. He was a young, confident rock video director with a zany sense of humor and a love of surfing. After a few months of dating, Ms. KAR said yes.
Something came back to me from a conversation we had way back somewhere. K said she knew a number of other models who basically said "yes" to marriage in large part because they were tired of all the hassles. Tired of fending off single guys, tired of dealing with tycoons like J who were great at making money, but little else. She met a guy who really did love her and would work like a dog to take good care of her. Personally I thought the move was a bit too early, but it seemed to work out.
I lost track of K in the late 90s. She and I oddly enough both went through our periods of health crises, she with Hodgkin's disease that was not diagnosed properly, at first; me with a ruptured aortic aneurysm. We had been out of touch for a while, and when we got back together we discovered we had endured our life-threatening issues at exactly the same time. I remember her telling me how great the Screen Actors Guild had been during her illness.
They even paid for a wig to cover her head during the chemotherapy. Actors can be called flaky, I suppose. But you can't say they don't look after their own.
TO BE CONTINUED
Ms. KAR stayed the longest, in part because we had a common thread that united us, our directing workshop. Then there was her work doing acting, commercials, modelling, and the ubiquitous thing called "runway work." I was involved in cranking out scripts, pitching projects, scoping out agents.
She and I ran around L.A., doing our respective things, meeting up for a coffee or lunch or dinner and trading war stories. I took her to see movies that I felt she should see, because of the acting or the directing or the movie itself. Ms. KAR got dragged to Anna Magnani movies, I introduced her to Glenda Jackson.
Bad illegal substances also brought us together. Beyond the usual pot that K and I always seemed to enjoy. One night, a Saturday night, I went over to M's agency office, located on the Sunset Strip right where it curves, and across the street from Wolfgang Puck's Spago restaurant.
M was having a private party, with K, and another black friend, C. C had brought along some stuff I had never tried before. But when I took my first puff from the pipe offered to me, and I saw the smoke curling up the glass bowl and into my lungs, I knew this was some amazing stuff. I had to go sit down. Suddenly, it seemed like all the curtains in my head had dropped away, and everything felt intensely open and brand-new. Freebasing rock cocaine does that to a person, I discovered.
It was an incredible high. It also became an incredibly risky thing to partake of on any sort of regular basis. C, the black friend of M's, became a good friend of mine. But he loved this stuff too much. He and I started smoking on our own, without other people. We would hang out and talk our way around the universe. His views were always interesting to me, and we discovered we travelled well together.
But C got to dropping in on me at home every two weeks or so, then every ten days. Not only was this new habit becoming expensive, it was getting to BE a habit, and that concerned me.
M was also starting to enjoy himself a little too much with the stuff, and Ms. KAR and I did our own little intervention. We distanced ourselves gradually from both men. Other people came into K's life. She got proposals of marriage from a number of men, none of them were really in the running though until G came along. He was a young, confident rock video director with a zany sense of humor and a love of surfing. After a few months of dating, Ms. KAR said yes.
Something came back to me from a conversation we had way back somewhere. K said she knew a number of other models who basically said "yes" to marriage in large part because they were tired of all the hassles. Tired of fending off single guys, tired of dealing with tycoons like J who were great at making money, but little else. She met a guy who really did love her and would work like a dog to take good care of her. Personally I thought the move was a bit too early, but it seemed to work out.
I lost track of K in the late 90s. She and I oddly enough both went through our periods of health crises, she with Hodgkin's disease that was not diagnosed properly, at first; me with a ruptured aortic aneurysm. We had been out of touch for a while, and when we got back together we discovered we had endured our life-threatening issues at exactly the same time. I remember her telling me how great the Screen Actors Guild had been during her illness.
They even paid for a wig to cover her head during the chemotherapy. Actors can be called flaky, I suppose. But you can't say they don't look after their own.
TO BE CONTINUED
