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.
