Thursday, January 31, 2013

Cathy


She calls herself Kate now.  When I first met her she was Cathy, Cathy Bruemmer.  I thought it was Brenner, an Irish girl, and quickly learned it was Bruemmer and she was German.  The e is an anglicized addition, an attempt to get Americans to pronounce Brümmer with an umlaut over the u.  Or maybe it was just how an Ellis Island Immigration official, probably Irish, spells an umlaut u when he first hears it. 

Her parents were Midwestern Germans, her father Catholic from Illinois and her mother a convert from Nebraska, solid hard working people, though her father had a subtle and delightful silly streak.  He didn’t work that hard when he was being paid but he liked his own projects.  He built an airplane once and flew it until he crashed it.  He enjoyed life in a German way.  Her mother, the stiffer spine in the family softened with a little Thunderbird wine in the evening, was a ranch raised girl who had come to the big city during World War II.  Wilbert was 4F and stayed home which gave him a great advantage with beautiful women, an advantage I don't think he usually had.  Minnie was not only strong willed and hard working; she was good looking too.   

Cathy Bruemmer was one of a kind.  Her parents lived in a cracker box house facing the quiet streets of El Segundo, but the back wall thinly divided their home from Imperial Highway and the runways of LAX.  Cathy was a free spirit.  When I first met her, she was wearing one of her long dresses that she made for herself, I think it was green with a garish print.  We had just come out of the 50’s, her father drove a Ford Falcon station wagon,but she was well into the 60’s, ahead of the rest of us.  She was attending Mount Saint Mary’s College on a scholarship and worked in the fabric department at Penny’s where her mother also worked. 

She did all the cooking for her family.  Her father didn’t like onions or spicy food of any kind as he defined it.  It was after we were married that she bought her first garlic.  But within the confines of her family, she cooked and baked wonderfully, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and German chocolate cakes.  After we were married and her imagination was free to concoct anything she wanted including onions, garlic and even occasionally olive oil, she was a great cook, though her food, Italian, Russian, Chinese or French always had a faintly Midwestern German subtext.   

She was excited about movies, literature, and art.  She was a free spirit.  She was in trouble with the administrators at Mount Saint Mary’s; they knew the long dresses were a sign of rebellion.  Essentially she was a good kid.  She had been 5’7” in the third grade and all of 80 pounds and it was only now in her freshman year of college that she was growing into her own height with hips and small sexy breasts.  She was really quite pretty but she didn’t know it.  I don’t think she’d ever really been kissed yet, never had a boyfriend, and didn’t do drugs. 

Many years later she liked to drink white wine with ice cubes and to smoke pot before she had sex though she could do just as well on a couple of margaritas.  She was still outspoken and still a little naïve.  She was working as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Santa Fe Springs.  A co-worker had been disciplined unjustly and in the lunchroom one day Cathy said, loud enough to be heard, “That’s why we should have a union.”  She was fired the next day. 

I fell in love and in lust with her at first sight.  A week later when we got together we made out until our brains nearly fell out and groped each other virginally.  We were Catholic and had grown up that way.  We were well suited to each other.  We were excited about each other but we didn’t know what to do with it and in fact didn’t make love until our wedding night, which we did wonderfully, after two years of Catholic foreplay. 

I think I was the first man, very young man, to appreciate her and she was beautiful, beautiful long legs and a lithesome body.  She was always envious of women who were fuller in the chest, but I thought she was wonderfully shaped.  She looked like a girl to me.  She had an inept grace about her.  She reminded me of a young and clumsy gazelle, who could jump beautifully into the air and stumble a moment later on her long legs. 

We were inseparable from shortly after we met.  Her family welcomed me and we did our college friends together.  I had become part of the literary and artistic circle at Loyola and I think Cathy found my friends very exciting.  We did her large circle of family friends together.  She was exciting intellectually, a voracious reader like myself, and though her family were working class Republicans, she was becoming a liberal Democrat. 

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964.  It authorized President Johnson to execute the Vietnam War but it really didn’t become an overriding consideration for college students until 1966 when Cathy and I met.  I received a IA draft status.  IA, one 'A' as we said it, meant you go next.  A grammar school friend of mine was killed in the DMZ in May, 1967, and I decided for Cathy and me that I would join the Air Force and hope I could avoid the fate of a draftee in the jungles of Vietnam. 

In the summer of 1967 I went off to Basic Training and then technical training at Keesler AFB in Mississippi.  In April the following year at the end of training I received orders along with the rest of my class to go to England.  I had been an English major.  Cathy was a history major.  I went home and we got married.  I was home a couple of weeks before the wedding could be put together and finally we enjoyed on our wedding night what we had put off so long and a honeymoon drive to San Francisco. 

At Christmas time in Mississippi I had been invited to bed by a young woman named Charlene and being a virgin I didn’t know how to say no.  For a couple of weeks Charlene and I made the beast with two backs badly and then life went on.  Stupidly in a very drunken moment, I chose to tell Cathy about this liaison the night before I left for England. 

I know it was devastating, but she struggled through it and joined me in England a month later.  We didn’t talk about it and never worked through it.  I think it was always a smoldering resentment that Cathy had against me for the rest of our marriage.  We conceived Sean during our first summer.  We both loved England and we did OK together.  There were resentments and struggles but nothing terrible. 

We lived offbase in the town of Bedford.  After a couple of years, a gypsy came to the door one day and Cathy invited her in.  Cathy told me about it when I got home.  The Gypsy predicted my promotion to Staff Sergeant and something about us which Cathy wouldn’t reveal.  I always had the feeling that the Gypsy predicted we wouldn’t last as a couple and that Cathy believed her.  It seemed after the Gypsy that as hard as we might try our marriage was always doomed. 

We had a hard time while I went to UCLA and she stayed at home with our two sons.  We struggled in our rented house when I got a job at Bank of America.  I think I have a normal libido and like most men I would love to enjoy most of the attractive women I see.  I am also a bit of puritan and even today I don’t have the energy or flexible conscious enough to cheat, not that it doesn’t seem attractive sometimes, but just that it’s too much trouble.    

Having gotten married at 21 with very little experience prior to that, I did wonder what it was like on the other side of the fence and as Jimmy Carter would say, I wasn’t faithful in my thoughts, but for the most part I acted faithfully. 

Cathy had her faults.  She was a terrible spendthrift, she was always buying something that saved us hundred of dollars that we didn’t have the money to afford.  She could be obnoxious and abrasive.  And together we probably drank too much.  But overall we did as well as most couples do and potentially probably could have stayed married for a lifetime. 

Unfortunately our minds didn’t go that way.  By the 1980s we seemed to hate each other.  Whatever either one of us did seemed to be against the other.  We came from an old view of relationships, husband working, wife at home, and that didn’t work well post-feminism.  I thought Cathy took advantage of me and I was stuck on a treadmill and I’m sure she found me limiting and critical of the new life she was trying to lead, a new life she had always been trying to lead.  And what I thought of as the curse of the gypsy hung over us.  My marriage in tatters, frustrated I looked elsewhere and found one woman who would sleep with me once and others who might.  I was no longer even trying to be faithful. 

Cathy graduated from Cal State LA and I think she felt empowered and limited in the roles we set for each other.  Finally in 1983 we separated and in the following year divorced. 

I’ve never regretted divorcing Cathy, now Kate.  She’s a good person and tries hard but even today 30 years later we only accommodate each other as friends.  I find her naturally abrasive.  I love her and I care about her, she’s the mother of my three sons, and today she is like a sister that I’m not really that close to.  Without our history we might not be friends at all. 

It makes me feel bad.  She was so beautiful and so exciting when she was 18, I wonder what happened to the girl I loved and regret my part in making her at all bitter.  Alcohol played a large part in it.  I’m of the school that accounts the downward spiral of alcoholism almost inevitable until one is given the grace to leave it. 

It is a sad thing.  I wish I had been able to give my boys a stable home life until they were 18.  I wish that I myself had been able to have a stable middle class existence, enjoying the warmth of a home and roots, instead of the searching rootlessness that was my 40’s and even 50’s.  

But life goes on and I’m here and I’m not there, and I prefer it this way.  

Thursday, January 24, 2013

After the Divorce


Cathy and I separated in November, 1983.  I went off to live with my parents and she stayed in the house we had bought three years earlier.  Shortly after I left home Loyola High School decided to expel Sean, our eldest son.  Sean had been caught with marijuana at a football game.  Loyola had zero tolerance for drugs supposedly.  It was a hard time for all of us.  As soon as they started the process we did everything we could to fight it.  I moved back into the house and spent all of my free time getting letters of recommendation together for Sean.  It didn’t make any difference.  Sean in his first three weeks of Loyola with a full scholarship was thrown out.  It was devastating for all of us. 

When it was over I returned to living with my parents in Burbank and Cathy got Sean enrolled at Providence High School in Burbank.  Cathy and I were angry at each other.  Sean took everything on himself and struggled at Providence.  He was exceptionally bright and he did his best to shock and dismay his teachers.  An English teacher gave a lecture on writing to get the attention of the reader.  Sean wrote a suicide note.  He said it got her attention.  Ted had started swimming the year before and his days consisted of going to school and then swimming practice for hours.  His weekends he spent at swim meets.  He spent more time with his team and his coach than he did anywhere else. 

Benjamin the athlete spent more time at his baseball coach’s house than he did at home.  The baseball coach had a son about Ben’s age and Ben found a safe haven there.  Cathy and I seemed to be buried in our own pain and I don’t think either one of us was there for the kids at the beginning of our separation and then divorce. 

In December I stopped drinking and began attending AA meetings.  In January I began a writing class at UCLA Extension.  Separating from Cathy after having been married since I was 21, I began my long postponed bachelorhood.  I was desperate for companionship but not very good at it.  In the new year Cathy met someone and I took care of the kids.  Many weekends I just moved into the house and stayed with them.  Ben, Ted and I began to establish our relationship now that I wasn’t living with them.  Sean was out on his own, as wild as he could be with a wild set of friends.  I barely ever saw him.  Sean was obviously very angry at me.  The other boys seem to adjust to the new reality. 

Cathy and I did the lawyer thing.  I had my good friend Hu Sommers take care of me.  Hu made sure Cathy and I both got a fair deal.  He front end loaded my obligations and when I asked him why I had no money, he asked me what was I going to spend it on? 

I continued working at City National Bank and Cathy was teaching at Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood.

 It took me until May to establish a real relationship with someone.  Not to my surprise, but it was ironic, Cindy was much like Cathy.  She was president of the local parish mother’s club, a legal secretary at a small firm; she had an 11 year old son and lived in a home she rented in the neighborhood she had grown up in in West LA. 

I dated Cindy for about eight months and then went on to another girlfriend, which became my pattern for the next 10 years or more.  I wasn’t ready to get married to a woman very similar to my ex-wife within just a year of separating, but of all the women I dated Cindy was probably the one I should have married.      

In August of 1984 I moved out of my parents and into the back house of a friend a few blocks away from where the boys and Cathy lived.  I left City National Bank and began working for Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank.  

Cathy and I had worked out our bitterness using lawyers for awhile but that played out and we settled into a relationship where I paid child support, alimony and car payments.  I was broke but as Hu said, it didn’t do me any harm.  We never formalized visitation rights over the boys thank god.  I saw them when I wanted to, took them places, attended Ted’s swim meets and stayed with them when she was away.  After the initial accusations of being a poor husband and a poor father, Cathy didn’t stand in the way of my seeing my sons at all and until Benjamin graduated from high school I lived nearby and actively participated in their lives. 

It took me awhile to get started in AA.  At first I attended meetings once a week and I stayed pretty much on my own, but I was lucky to find a good sponsor and after the first three months got more involved in AA and even found a home meeting in South Pasadena.  A home meeting in AA is a meeting that one goes to regularly.  I showed up and I began participating, pouring coffee, cleaning up, getting to know people.  We met in the South Pasadena Women’s Club. 

I participated actively in that group and attended other meetings in the Pasadena area.  I got to know people and to be known.  I celebrated my first year of sobriety at the South Pasadena Women’s Club and many birthdays thereafter.  Eventually I became the secretary of the first meeting, the pre-meeting and then the second meeting.  The secretary isn’t really the person in charge.  They help to find the speakers and they lead the meeting.  The South Pasadena Women’s Club meeting had a small informal steering committee, all men, who met for breakfast on Thursday mornings at the Green Street Café.  I became a member of that group.  The AA group had an official name besides The Women’s Club, but most of us didn’t know what it was.  We just called it The Women’s Club.    

Making things equal the Crown City Meeting on Friday nights had an informal group of women who ran that meeting.  Somewhere along the way I became secretary of that meeting for a while too. 

At work I used to laugh to myself that these Japanese bankers, American businessmen and lawyers that I was often stuck in meetings with had no idea that I was the head drunk for San Marino/South Pasadena for awhile.  Of course, I knew leadership in AA wasn’t like other places, much more amorphous and all about service, not prestige, but it was fun to think about. 

At the bank in 1987 I was promoted to vice president.  In 1984 I started driving Ted to Loyola High School every morning and did until he graduated in 1989 when I started driving Ben to Loyola every morning. 

Sean was asked not to come back to Providence after his first year.  He started Eagle Rock High School.  At Eagle Rock he was more a truant than a student.  He’d bought a car on his own before he was 16 and hid it in the neighborhood which I found out about.  He was a punker and ran with a crowd that was as lost as he was.  At one point he moved in with me, but then he started stealing from me.  Since then Sean has proved himself to be scrupulously honest.  I suspect at the time he thought of it as borrowing from me.  If he did, he owes me $10.  I was probably too scrupulous and intolerant at the time and I dropped him off in Glendale to fend for himself, which he did. 

I began doing well at work.  I figured out how to be single and have a social life.  As Spalding Gray said, being a straight single man in my late 30s with a job, it wasn’t that hard.  I dated women in AA and women I met at work or in classes.

In 1986 I met Lisa Levine.  She was a beautiful woman and very smart.  She had two daughters, a girl 11 and another three years old.  It was a stormy relationship for the next three years.  Sara, the youngest daughter made my life impossible around Lisa.  Lisa herself had some strange traits, but we tried to make it work.  We broke up and then got back together.  In 1988 we bought a house together and I thought if I just settle down this will work.  After a year together I realized I didn’t want to marry someone with whom I was just going to be unhappy in the end and we broke up.  She moved out and I kept the house. 

A couple of years later I found myself deeply involved with Judith Barnes, a strikingly beautiful woman and again extraordinarily bright, but also very neurotic.  She was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and was recovering but life was not easy for her.  I was very attracted to her and loved her, but life with her wasn’t easy and it didn’t look like we would ever have a normal life together.  In 1992 in one of my rare manic episodes I broke up with her, which probably was for the best. 

During this period Benjamin started to Loyola High School.  He started as an athlete but didn’t like his baseball coach and dropped out.  Later he became an adequate swimmer on the water polo team, but his athleticism didn’t go very far in high school.    He was his own character.  I learned later he had been the LSD and marijuana dealer for his classmates in his final year or two.  His mother found marijuana in his drawer one time and I went through a charade of being shocked with her.  I did want him to know that being a pothead wasn’t a good way to go through life.  He was very active in Alateens. 

In this same period, Benjamin began to develop a reputation as being a very original character and someone with a lot of talent.  He won a full scholarship dedicated to a young man, an original, who had died in an auto accident.  In his last year in high school he took a photography class.  He made a short film that was remarkable for its tone and lighting.  These were the first signs of Benjamin’s talent as a first class photographer and an artist, a skill he has developed.   

It was ironic that Benjamin also became an alcoholic and addict.  Ted stopped drinking at 15.  Sean stopped at 28 or so and Benjamin kept going until he was 35. 

Ted finished high school and went on to UC Santa Cruz.  It seemed an odd choice for Ted who by the time he finished high school was an outstanding athlete in water polo, buttoned down, very conservative appearance, though gratefully not in his politics, and very sober.  He struggled for three years at Santa Cruz, loved it, dropped out after his third year and returned to school to graduate in 1994.  He taught high school and then went through a personal crisis and left for Japan to teach English.  After two years in Nagoya, he went to Saudi Arabia for a year and then returned home.  He paid off his student loans.    

He met a girl in Santa Cruz, married her and started graduate school.  Seven years later he earned his PhD in political science from the University of Oregon.  Somewhere between struggling with everything in his undergrad days at Santa Cruz and graduating from Oregon he became an academic.  He was always a scholar but it took him a long time to focus it and to learn to work it, but he is an outstanding scholar.

Ted and I never really got along very well.  That’s even been true sometimes until recently.  Ted and I, I think are too much alike.  We had terrible arguments when he was in high school and seemed to hurt each other’s feelings easily, something I was more responsible for than him but something it didn’t seem I could prevent.  He was an incredible youngster, very intense, very interesting.  We weren’t really very good friends when he went to college, but over the years, as with my other sons, we have built a very warm and enjoyable relationship. 

Sean was the wild child.  He was on his own from 15 on.  He lived on the street, then with a group of friends.  He was a character.  There was an article about him in my UCLA alumni magazine, a child of the 90s written by a sociology professor.  At that time Sean at 19 was the night manager of Del Monico’s pizza parlor in Hollywood, drove a 1959 Ford Fairlane and the night he spent with the young professor, the car only ran in reverse, and with that he gave the professor a tour of Hollywood after midnight.  Sean was involved in the punk scene and by extension in fashion, music, art, and clothes.  Sean has incredible charisma and he was always a remarkable participant in whatever he did. 

Shortly after he was 18 I went to see him.  We planned to have lunch.  I think he invited me.  We had not been able to talk at all through his teen years but something happened in that visit and we became friends, a friendship that has continued and developed for over twenty years now.  He started modeling in LA and then got on a plane and went to Paris.  He stayed there three years and did very well.  His drinking and whatever else he did didn’t help but he was a wild child within bounds. 

He came home and started working in the movie business, a gopher, then a grunt and eventually learning most of the trades.  Sean is a good carpenter, a good mechanic and can figure almost anything out.  My three sons have extraordinary minds.  Ben is an artist of the first rank coming very much into his own now.  Ted is an extraordinary scholar and thinker.

I am fortunate that all my sons are admirable in their own particular ways.

I went to visit Sean when he was in Paris.  Sean walked down the streets and people knew him, French, British and Americans.  He cut a unique figure even in Paris.  He did well as a model but burned out toward the end.  When I visited him he had been in France for a couple of years and spoke French easily.      

I had this great stay with Sean and his girlfriend Lindsay in a fifth floor walkup apartment in Le Marais, the third arrondisement in Paris, right in the heart of Paris.  I brought a bicycle from home and Sean let me ride his Yamaha 175.  I got around Paris and began my day with café au lait and croissant in La Pierre du Marais.  I read my International Herald Tribune and enjoyed the best coffee in the world. 

I met Sean’s friends, he had many, and we went to lunch and dinner in incredible places.  I learned about Paris.  I became very jealous of Sean’s ability to speak French which he did with ease.  Sean who was 24 at the time and full of advice and worldly wisdom, told me if I wanted to speak Spanish, I should go home and speak Spanish to everyone who could. 

After my two weeks, I went home and took Sean’s advice.  I bought tapes for my car and began speaking Spanish to everyone I thought might respond.  It was great.  I began learning to speak Spanish.  I started going to Tijuana once a month to practice and rented a hotel room west of downtown.  I quickly learned that Tijuana is a wonderful town with museums and coffee shops where the people are very friendly and it was at that time a very relaxed and comfortable atmosphere.  I got my tongue working.  I would sweat but I could communicate with people.  I learned how the jitneys worked.  I visited el museo de California.  I had a favorite coffee shop. 

In September I went to Cuernavaca Mexico for a two week immersion course.  The school I had signed up for was nearly out of business; Eduardo had broken his partnership with another school and had no facilities.  So I lived with Eduardo, his wife Lourdes, Maria Lourdes or Mary Lou and their small child.  They were wonderful people and during the day we studied Spanish at Eduardo’s mother’s house, a beautiful Mexican home that opened on to a garden.  I really began to learn Spanish.  A couple of weeks after I got home I got a call from an attorney who needed advice on my expertise, CRA, for his client a bank with a large CRA problem.  He didn’t say it, but I knew it was California Commerce Bank, a subsidiary of Banamex in Los Angeles.  I was tired of Dai-Ichi Kangyo and recommended myself as the CRA officer to help the other bank solve its problem. 

I went to work for California Commerce and they had a wonderful bilingual staff with loan officers from Mexico.  As soon as I let people know I wanted to learn Spanish I had plenty of people helping me.  It was a good bank and a wonderful environment to learn Spanish. 

Spanish became my obsession and within two or three years, my Spanish was very passable for a gringo who had never lived in a Spanish speaking country, not counting Los Angeles. 

It is one of the great accomplishments of my life.  Until then I had never met a person who learned a foreign language on their own, without living in the country, with the exception of my father.  When I began speaking Spanish, my father wouldn’t speak it with me, though he understood easily.  I began to realize my father never spoke Spanish or even French when there were people around who spoke the language.  For awhile Ted had a girlfriend who spoke French and Pop would never converse with her, he’d always put her off. 

I began to think about it.  My father barely spoke English to anyone or any other language.  He always claimed he spoke French and Spanish and while he studied French and Spanish all the time, he never spoke them to anyone.  It was all in his head.  He could get by in a foreign country but to be a tourist only requires rudimentary speaking skills.  He certainly wasn’t conversational in Spanish and I doubt that he retained enough French after World War II to be conversational in that language.  But he and Sean were my inspiration to learn Spanish. 

These were good times for me.  I was living a sober life and doing what I wanted to do.  I began working in a very foreign and interesting environment with the Japanese which wasn’t always very satisfying but it was challenging.  I was promoted to Vice President at the bank.  I was a leader in my AA community and I was becoming a leader in economic development in banking. 

Dating became easier, though falling in love, getting bored or tied down and ready to move on and then single and looking for another girlfriend wasn’t always comfortable, I dated interesting and beautiful women.  I dated a librarian, a professor, an agoraphobic Beverly Hills princess, a Jewish Chinese woman from England and many other people.  It was an adventure, not always comfortable but always interesting. 

I learned to speak Spanish, I travelled.  I went to Paris, to Toronto, to Mexico.  I bought a house in La Crescenta with a woman I thought I wanted to settle down with.  That didn’t work but I kept the house and lived there from 1988 to 1995. 

Then in 1994 I met a woman in San Francisco.  In 1995 I moved to the Bay Area to be with her.  A year later we were married.