Second Wife

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. 

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.  

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.  

Benjamin

At the end of 1974 Cathy was a fulltime student a Cal State LA.  Sean was in kindergarten at Glenfilez Boulevard Elementary School and Ted was enrolled at the pre-school at Cal State LA.  I was working in the Urban Affairs Department at Bank of America.   Cathy and I had had a rough time in  our marriage.  We had gotten through England OK, even with a bad start, but when we got home, the tensions began to increase.  Cathy seemed to be angry and jealous of my going to school and then off to work.  I wasn’t committed to Cathy and things were rough between us.  I think we had married very young and it didn’t feel very comfortable to either one of us as we began to grow up.

Then we went to Marriage Encounter.  It was in the early days of Marriage Encounter and Chuck Gallagher, a Jesuit priest, was leading most of the weekends.  Chuck and a small circle of couples had adapted encounter groups to married couples and devised this weekend without much sleep.  The honest sharing of encounter was between the couple who attended it.  We were encouraged to tell each other our innermost feelings and to share them in a loving way.  For Cathy and me it came just in time to save our marriage.  It worked and that was a good thing.  

There were cultish aspects of Marriage Encounter.  They intimidated the participants into giving a lot of money and attending information meetings and other events over getting sleep and other obligations.  They proselytized with a heavy hand and we were expected to bring everybody we knew to Marriage Encounter.  We were encouraged to go to weekends as often as we could and outside the weekends we formed groups that met in homes and we got to know other couples.  Marriage Encounter was very Catholic and we began attending church.  Marriage Encounter created community in a way that wasn’t usually seen in Catholic parishes.    

It was a very good thing for us.  Cathy and I became respectful of each other and much more loving.  It helped us to develop and nurture the love we had for each other. 

These weekends conducted at local hotels, started Friday night and couples would share intimate aspects of their relationship.  After a sharing by a couple on a subject, we would go back to our rooms and write to each other about the topic.  The communication on difficult subjects made it a very intimate weekend with breakthroughs in our relationship that continued on.  We learned like other couples to bring a jug of wine on these weekends.  Alcoholism was never one of those subjects discussed.  The Catholic Church we threw ourselves into, was very Irish and alcohol was a common social lubricant.  I never heard it discouraged by anyone.  I think among Catholics alcoholism was the elephant in the living room. 

In February, 1975 Cathy told me she was pregnant.  We were Catholic but we still practiced birth control.  Early on Cathy had used the pill.  She had tried an IUD but didn’t do well with it and in 1974 and 1975 we were using a spermicidal gel.  It was inconvenient but easier healthwise and apparently not all that effective.  At the time, I thought Cathy’s pregnancy was convenient for her.  She was doing well in school, had gotten a job with the day care center as a clerical person and things were going well, but my thinking at the time was that she was frightened of success and the pregnancy let her off from that.  I had felt railroaded when pretty much on her own she decided to have a second child just before we got out of the service.  I think my role at the time was very passive and I resented that she seemed to take advantage of that. 

I think it’s important that pregnancies and birth be viewed in the most positive aspect and so I did when Cathy announced she was pregnant.  I don’t know how Catholic we are but I think children born should always be greeted as gifts from God.  We were in a good place and it was a good thing.  I was doing well at Bank of America and at Cathy’s insistence we began house hunting.  Before the baby was born we found a house in Glassell Park and bought it.  The house a little way up the hill from Eagle Rock Boulevard cost us $33,000 dollars and we used the GI Bill to make that purchase.  It stretched us financially; the payments were $333 a month.  I was making $12,000 a year and taking home about $700. 

Benjamin was born October 14, 1975, two weeks after we moved in.  Our friends from Marriage Encounter helped us with the move and we were welcomed into the new parish, St. Bernard’s, by couples we already knew.  Benjamin was born at Kaiser Hospital on Sunset, our first American born child.  As I had with Ted, I got to attend the birth.  Shortly after Benjamin was born we got a dog and became the classic family, three boys and a dog.. 

Life was good, little league, involvement in our local parish, community.  We went on vacations to Uncle Warren’s farm.  Warren and Frannie were Cathy’s aunt and uncle in Bellingham, Washington.  Benjamin himself was quite a character.  I think he had to be tougher than the other boys just to survive.  Early on he began wearing a red fireman’s hat, something he was never without from the time he was less than two years old for the next two years.  He was well known wherever we went.   He liked action figures and sports.  He seemed to have an easy going character and he was cute as the dickens.

It turned out Benjamin was great in sports.  He was a star in t-ball, one of the kids who could actually catch the ball. He went on to be an outstanding little leaguer and an incredible flag football quarterback.  He was an interesting young man.  He seemed to me to be quiet and able to take care of himself.  I think he had a hard time with two older brothers and they kept him in his place and while he was a sweet kid, he was a tough kid too, able to roll with the punches.   

Benjamin turned eight when Cathy and I separated.  I remember on his birthday, I picked him up and took him to the Grinder, a coffee shop in Glendale.  We were both enjoying our time out together.  I told the waitress that it was his birthday and he was surprised and delighted when the waitresses came with a birthday cake and candles burning.  He couldn’t believe they knew it was his birthday.  I remember also at that dinner, I drank numerous glasses of white wine.  Not unusually I was probably a little sloshed.  That is, thank god, the last time I remember drinking with any of my children around me.  I got sober two months later.

When we separated Benjamin had just turned 8, Ted was 12 and Sean was 14.  Benjamin seemed to do OK.  He was deeply involved in sports and sought after by coaches in baseball and football.  Ted was involved in swimming and went to long practices every afternoon and meets on the weekends.  Sean began acting out right away.  He was expelled from Loyola High School for having marijuana at a football game.  After that he went to Providence and after that Eagle Rock High School.  He dropped out of school when he was 16.  Neither Cathy nor I seemed to be able to get him to settle down and we had less and less control over him as time passed.

From then until Ben graduated from high school I tried to live as nearby to where they lived with their mother as I could.  I drove Ted and then Benjamin to school every morning at Loyola near downtown LA.  I stayed involved with them and while the divorce wasn't easy on anyone I think we survived it.  Cathy or I never did manage to regain control over Sean, still true today, but he managed to turn out very well himself.     .