I liked to sleep with the window open and you keep the window closed. You’re Kind Paul Simon
A friend of mine invited me to San Francisco to meet an interesting woman who might be interested in me. She said, “By the way, she’s the daughter” and she named a well known political leader in LA. Suzanne and I met for dinner at Kathy and David’s a few weeks later. Suzanne was interesting, charming, a good dinner guest. We were both on our best behavior and it went well, we liked each other. We agreed to meet again for a date after she returned from a vacation in the Caribbean.
And so we did. She flew down to LA and I planned a date that started with tea at the Biltmore. I didn’t know Suzanne had spent a half year in England on a fellowship and had a taste for tea and things English. I think we went to dinner after that and finished up at the dancing fountain at the new Water Plaza on Bunker Hill. It was as I had planned it a romantic evening. A week or two later I flew up to San Francisco. From the Oakland Airport we went to lunch at an Italian Cafe Deli Market in the Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland, my first experience of the wonderful neighborhoods in the East Bay. And then we went to her house in Mill Valley.
The romance began on our second date and after that we became distance lovers, exchanging hot and heavy letters. I think we were still using the post office. It seemed more appropriate than emails. The letters were passionate, though in person we were stiff and out of synch.
I think we were both ready for a longtime relationship even marriage. Suzanne was a manager at the Phone Company and like me active with community groups and causes. She was 36. I was 47. At the phone company her cause was disabilities. She had an older brother who was developmentally challenged. At one time she had worked for Willy Brown and had been very active in the early response to the AIDS epidemic. She had a network of gay friends. Suzanne fancied herself a libertine, but like me at her core I think she really was a prude.
We fit in many ways. She was a successful middle manager and community leader. I respected that instead of staying in LA in her mother’s shadow, she had gone up to the Bay Area and made a life for herself. She had graduated from Cal and gone into politics working for Ron Dellums and then Willy Brown. She might have had better contacts than most people but she wasn’t capitalizing on her mother’s name. She was committed to equity and working for a better community that included everyone. She was also a longtime member of the Sokka Gakai, formerly the Nicherin Shoshu of America, NSA, the people who chanted “nam-myoho-ringe-kyo” and in chanting sutra discovered a new life. When I was in college in the 70s they, like the hare krishnas, actively proselytized everywhere particularly on college campuses.
She wanted me to join the fellowship and I was happy to go to meetings with her and chant but not to dedicate my life to chanting for long periods in Japanese and follow the teachings of their sainted leader. I was an active member of AA and got the results of surrendering myself to powers that be and the contradictory empowerment I found in doing that.
Suzanne had a similar middle class background mine. The Givens had a house in a middle class area of Los Angeles. Walt Givens had been a designer and aircraft worker like my father, but as an African American he was the last hired, and the first fired and he had tried his hand at various ways of making a living. Her mother had been activist in the school district on behalf of her special son, and then ran for elected office and had a successful career as an elected official and leader in education and civil rights.
Suzanne's parents divorced when she was a teenager. Her brother’s health and special needs had been at the center of their family dynamics. She had a great need to be recognized and acknowledged, not to be overlooked.
Her way of living was to create challenges and to struggle for status, income, and respectability. For her success was a beautiful home in a tony neighborhood of Marin, corporate success, recognition and a good salary. Suzanne also had an interest in theater. She traveled to New York when she could and attended shows and was a board member of an experimental theater in San Francisco. She also was a key person in putting on Soka Gakkai public events that highlighted their involvement with world leaders and peace.
Suzanne worked hard with great intensity at everything she did. She could be abrasive and demanding but she was respected and appreciated. She had street cred. We seemed compatible. I had a good education, a responsible corporate position, served on a number of non-profit boards. While she was driven and always pushing; I was more self effacing and downplayed status in a perverse sort of way.
We went forward more a willful choice on both our parts than a giving into passion. I moved up to the Bay Area and we shared Suzanne’s house in Mill Valley in February 1995. I had been working for California Commerce Bank a year and had helped solve their regulatory problems by then. My boss said, “you can’t quit, so work up there, go into the San Jose office, do whatever, but stay.” That summer Suzanne and I went on vacation to the Caribbean and stayed in a luxury time share she had bought the year before and went on a short sailing ship cruise. Our differences, her demanding the best and luxury and my trying to blend in, go below the glitz, conflicted. We are both strong willed and as much as Suzanne tried to dominate I clung to my independence and my way of doing things. We got through it but there had been some bad moments.
Nonetheless I proposed either before or after that vacation together. Suzanne planned a big wedding and I went along with it, so in April, 1996 we got married before hundreds of people. My professional friends in LA were impressed that I was marrying into power. I was impressed by the easy way Suzanne traveled in the world of community, state and even national leaders.
One time a young African American working with Suzanne in San Francisco learned who her mother was and said, “Oh my god, you’re LA royalty.” And that’s what she was, LA royalty, a princess living anonymously in the Bay Area. My LA friends were quite aware I had married into royalty, particularly my African American friends. I think that was an attraction for me.
We did well together at first. I think we were both people of good will. Each of us had married for our own reasons and maybe it didn't run as deep as it should have. My attitude was this could work, we’re compatible and for me it was a new life, Northern California, the Bay Area, Suzanne traveled easily in the world of foundations, community activists and political power.
Over time our differences grew. I am maniacally punctual. Suzanne was notoriously late. She was a take charge, always in control person. Her drive to be successful came out in being decisive and aggressive. I like to just go along and get along. For me when it doesn't go my way I detach. And I can be very independent or stubbornly perverse. Some people called that passive-aggressive. Our qualities or flaws didn’t mix well. Our relationship devolved into a contest more than a partnership.
Long before we actually divorced I knew I didn’t like being married to Suzanne. About the time I was done Suzanne got a job in Southern California. I was working at San Francisco Juvenile Hall and establishing myself in San Francisco. We decided to get an apartment in Los Angeles and a small apartment for me in the Bay Area. And that worked well for almost three years. When I was getting the job at San Francisco Juvenile Hall I started on-call as a substitute. I was stuck in the hiring process, Juvy had terrible personnel department and things could go on forever without resolution. Suzanne offered to call her friend the Mayor, Willie Brown. I let my boss know she might do that and the next week four of us in the limbo of on-call, were hired full time. They were always short handed and they paid comp time for overtime. I worked a few double shifts every month and took a week off to stay in LA. With distance and long breaks Suzanne and I were OK.
I’ve always loved women and enjoy women friends. Sometimes as someone described it, there were inappropriate female friends. I am too much of a prude to really have affairs, but I enjoy flirting and lunches or getting together with a friend where there’s attraction and a little tension. A few years before I had made an inappropriate friendship with a young woman I worked with at Consumer Credit Counselors. It was fun, a little strange, we didn’t touch or hold hands, but the tension was there.
Suzanne changed jobs and moved back to the Bay Area. By that time I had a Ranger’s House in the State Park. They’re not all that great, the maintenance isn’t good and the landlord is your boss. I was new at Mt. Diablo State Park and not doing all that well with my boss. Suzanne in her take charge way, demanded repairs and improvements to the house and then we had to have an antenna for her internet that violated park rules. She was making my job difficult and not willing to go along with things. That wasn’t her way.
My inappropriate friend seemed all that more attractive and her situation was changing and she was more available. I realized I was risking “my marriage” but I went ahead. At that point I was getting ready to quit the marriage anyhow. Living with Suzanne seemed impossible and just a constant struggle.
So my friend and I began holding hands. I informed Suzanne we were done. She accused me of having another woman and I denied it since that wasn’t really the reason and it got worse from there. Suzanne was very angry. I didn't do it well but I think in the end I certainly didn’t regret our breakup. I didn’t want to live with her any longer. Life with Suzanne had been like a battle not just between us, but Parks, and airlines, and restaurants, and contractors, and doctors and nearly everyone else.
And so we went our separate ways. I lived in Parks and flew as low under the radar as I could, but punctually, and Suzanne went back to her home in Mill Valley which she had been renting out for three years and started another remodel project.
