Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (40 page)

James’s birthday, March 12, was coming up fast, and I wanted to surprise him with a big, hush-hush vacation, where James would have no idea where we were going. By that point, in spite of traveling to Japan, I had become something of an agoraphobe. Having never been the type to travel far from the mother ship, and the safety of my books and my medicine cabinet, sometimes I could barely summon up the nerve to go to a new restaurant. For our destination, I finally chose Bermuda, which is only a two-and-a-half-hour flight from New York, and reserved us a kingly suite at the Pink Beach Club, where my mother had stayed with Ronny and Peter once after Daddy died.

One day, James overheard me talking on the phone to Andy Newmark, my friend and drummer, and an irresistibly quirky fellow, who owned a house in Bermuda, asking for advice on restaurants and beaches. It was enough of a clue for him to make a fairly good guess as to where we were headed. I deflected him with a howling burst of laughter, confessing that I really, really hated to spoil the surprise, but Bermuda? Sorry, no, we were heading instead to a tennis camp in Cleveland. No sun. No sand. No crashing waves. No underwater lovemaking. But we’d come back home with vastly improved forehands, backhands, and serves. James and I had recently been discussing the possibility of taking tennis lessons in New York. Tennis was a good, healthy exercise and if we grew to love the sport, we might even consider building our own court someday.

When James was finally convinced we weren’t going to Bermuda for his birthday, and that I was, in fact, taking him to a Cleveland tennis camp instead, he was visibly disappointed. Still, I managed to ramp up his excitement level by buying him not one but two new pairs of tennis shoes, and for both of us, top-of-the-line Wilson tennis racquets.

By then, James had been on methadone for a year, and he packed enough doses to last him a week. We packed innocently and strategically for cool midwestern weather, considering we’d be playing tennis indoors. Then I got sneaky: I called the American Airlines ticket counter and asked the employee who answered the phone if she would change the name of the destination on our plane tickets to Cleveland, Ohio, which she agreed to do. (Never underestimate the power of fame.) “Just go to the first-class counter,” she said, “and I’ll brief Rosemary there to keep your secret.” At the airport, Rosemary, as promised, was a model of discretion. James and I boarded the plane, stashed our bags, tennis racquets, and big leather hats in the overhead compartment, stored our new, customized Whitebook guitars with the stewardess up front, and took our seats in the third row. Thank God, not a single pair of shorts, sandals, or white pants gave any clue to our actual destination. But once we were in the air, the secret was blown when the captain announced over the loudspeaker, “Good morning … our flying time to Bermuda today will be two hours and fifteen minutes…”

James gave a single “Gracious me,” followed by a soft, pleased laugh. At which point the stewardess, who was in on the secret, handed us two glasses of champagne in honor of James’s birthday, and we toasted to “Surprises, instead of tennis camp.”

The flight was smooth and as we lined up to disembark, I put on my hippie-of-many-colors cape and James his corduroy jacket. When the stewardess handed us our guitars, we really must have looked like “rock stars.” Why not? Long hair, guitar cases, floppy leather hats. Which is probably why the airport officials in Bermuda, a British colony, began asking us questions.

They put on a good show of being non-adversarial, but at the same time they asked to see each one of us separately in one of the little cubicles set aside for long-haired, guitar-toting, leather-hat-wearing rock stars. Fortunately, the cubicles were separated by the thinnest of walls, which allowed me to overhear the conversation between James and a young customs official.

In a fluid West Indian accent, he asked James to unzip his bag, and after inspecting the contents, noted that James must be visiting Bermuda to partake of the island’s many tennis facilities. Then came this: “I see that you have a paper bag there. Would you mind letting me see what’s inside? Oh, yes, and what exactly is inside those little bottles? Do all seven contain the same liquid? Methadone, yes. And what exactly is that for?”

James had a letter of permission from his New York doctor explaining the reason for the week’s supply, which the official scanned, confirming with James that the medication was for a “mental situation.” In the next cubicle over, I was eavesdropping on this entire conversation, while partially undressing in front of a second customs official, this one an attractive, middle-aged, no-nonsense woman whose nametag read
CHLOE
.

She opened my cosmetics case, which I hadn’t unpacked since returning from Japan, and had, in fact, barely touched. It suddenly hit me: in that case were the four dark-green caplets of mescaline that had been given to us. I might have told James about them, or alluded to them, but neither of us had touched them. The four pills were balled up in a handkerchief that, in turn, was stuffed inside a plastic travel-soap container. As Chloe opened out the handkerchief, the quartet of caplets went spilling onto the floor.

Chloe picked them up: Would I be so kind as to tell her what, exactly, these pills were?

“Those,” I replied, “are a special processed Vitamin B
12
, which I was prescribed for my heliospondic knee.” I made up
heliospondic
; boy did it hurt!

“I see. Well—we’ll just take these, shall we? And let the medical corporal-in-arms take a look?” When I nodded, Chloe pocketed them in her smock. She excused herself, shutting the door behind her, and went directly into the cubicle next door, where poor James was sitting captive. Now I heard her tell James that she’d found four green caplets inside his wife’s cosmetics bag: Did he know what they were for? “Have you ever seen them?” added the man who’d been interrogating James.

“Oh,” replied my wonderful junkie husband. “I think those are vitamins she takes.”

“For her knee?” Chloe pressed. Not a well-honed detective!

Yes, James replied, and if memory serves, he added, “Can’t be sure, but that sounds right. For her heliospondic knee.”

A few moments later, Chloe returned. She apologetically explained that she was sorry to inconvenience me, but she had to take the four pills with her for additional testing. She thanked me for cooperating. “The Bermudan government has to take every precaution to keep our little island in the sun safe,” she added. “It’s for your benefit, as much as it is for mine.”

Oh shit.
What had she picked up from James’s childlike, birthday-boy eyes? My heart started beating fast. James’s and my celebratory vacation was over. We would be locked up. No doubt Chloe’s “little island safe in the sun” speech was one she’d delivered regularly to any number of miscreants attempting to start a new life here. James and I were goners, and on his birthday, no less. At this point, compared to whatever else lay in store for us, deportation would be the best news we could receive.

The upshot: James and I were free to go, but our pills would have to stay. We could go to our hotel, and customs would contact us once they’d finished their investigation.

Slightly under a cloud, we took a cab to the Pink Beach Club in Tucker’s Town. It was midafternoon. Once we settled into our room, we changed into our tennis clothes (white pants and white shirts—de rigueur for the Cleveland Professional School of Tennis) and headed for the courts. James was being a good sport for my sake, but that night I felt jittery as the two of us ate dinner in our room.

The phone rang first thing the next morning. James got out of bed and answered it just in time. It was the customs official who’d interviewed James in the airport cubicle. Further studies showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the four pills confiscated from my cosmetics case were … nothing.

“Nothing?” James repeated.

No, the pills turned out to be nothing more than “just an ’armless ’erb,” the man said, adding, “Would you like to come down to the police station in Hamilton and pick them up?”

“That’s all right.” I could hear the relief in James’s voice. “You can just throw them out. Thank you so much. Have a nice day.”

James laughed his way back to our bedroom and repeated the entire conversation to me, his favorite words being
an ’armless ’erb.

I was still lying in bed. “So what did he do with them?”

“I told him to throw them away.” A long pause. “Wait a minute—why did I do that? Shit! I have to call him right back!”

A few moments later, James was on the phone, explaining that he’d made a mistake, and his wife still needed her pills. In response, the officer told him which buzzer to ring at the station, and he would come down and deliver the
’erb
in person.

Like most Bermudan days, it was sunny and in the mid-seventies, and after getting directions to Hamilton, James mounted a bike and an hour later was back at the Pink Beach Club armed with four pills of pure
mescalito
. He gulped one of them down with his morning orange juice, and though I didn’t take one myself, I was happy to go along for the ride. James and I spent the rest of the day walking along the beach, lying in the sun, and staring intently at individual grains of white sand. I’d very much wanted to take half a pill, but again, with my temperament, I didn’t know if I’d be able to distinguish a good or even a bad trip from genuine, wall-dissolving madness. Regardless, it turned out to be one of the nicest days I can remember. That night, James and I played cards before he tuned up his Whitebook guitar and started a little island music going.

I was reminded of some of the ukulele rhythms that Uncle Peter played for me when I was very young, which is why I started dancing. “Do you remember the day your uncle taught us his dance?” James asked.

He goaded me to show him the dance again. “Come on, sweetheart, you can do it.” He amped up the volume on his guitar, his playing getting wilder, which in turn loosened me up. How gorgeous and complete an experience it had been for me to see my uncle Peter simultaneously singing and dancing, moving the lower half of his body like a motor gone crazy, his movements and motions belonging to a dance as yet uninvented, from a country on no world map whatsoever, his hands jabbing at his upper torso and face like some beatifically smiling Indian princess as his legs performed what I can only describe as the Monty Python version of an African boot dance. Just recalling Uncle Peter’s dance, James and I laughed so hard that my face hurt. That night, we skipped dinner, but celebrated James’s birthday in the bathtub, surrounded by candles, toasting Uncle Peter with flutes of champagne.

Well done, Simon Sister!

*   *   *

At the end of May 1973, upon my return home from the most recent James tour, I found out that I was pregnant. I’d accompanied James, along with his flagship band—Russ Kunkel, Lee Sklar, Danny Kortchmar, and Clarence McDonald—and when we returned to New York, I remember keeping the news to myself until I was positively sure nothing bad would happen. The first few months of my pregnancy, I did the usual sleeping around the clock, and James and I spent those sleepy months on the Vineyard, building the new “wing,” its forty-five-foot-high tower the crown of the neighborhood. The wing had a new living room area, with a real (though very tiny) kitchen, attached to a central room, with a brick fireplace, and a dining room table with extra leaves for when we had people over. And there were never
not
people over. In the times between sleeping and carpenters sanding the floors, surrounded by dusty people, many holding guitars, most smoking pot, all of them wearing bathing suits, I remember cooking massive amounts of Trudy’s clam chowder for the assembled hordes. My own marijuana days had ended a few months earlier when a hash brownie nearly had its way with me. (In those days, there were no specific warnings about pot smoking while pregnant, though caution, I seem to recall, was the prevailing mood.) The only thing I took occasionally, for sleep, or seasickness, or airsickness, was Dramamine.

June 18th, 1973:

We’re off to New York in a couple of minutes. The day is cold and depressing. I’m not lightening it any. Last night James got drunk again. The problem is grave. He doesn’t know why he needs to get drunk, but says that he needs to at least four times a day. I don’t seem to satisfy much in him. I don’t understand him when he says he needs me. He’s so down on himself that he relies not at all on himself but on chemicals for happiness. He only seeks me out for affection when he fears its loss. I’m so sad.

He is more physical toward me in the presence of other folk than when we are alone. He thinks when I say “I love you,” that I am asking a question, that I need something in return. Patience, I guess.

*   *   *

James was just off a two-week detox when he and I traveled to Europe in July to visit two of our best friends, Ellen and Vieri Salvadori. I’d been friends with Ellen since the seventh grade, and Vieri was my first partner in ballroom dancing class. In Rome, we were met by a record-company executive, who drove us to Siena, where Ellen and Vieri had a madly beautiful house overlooking what looked like a painting: Tuscan olive groves amid a landscape of charming, choppy, impossibly green hills. It was an extremely romantic setting, except for the fact that James was almost untouchable, suffering as he was from skin-hypersensitivity whenever my leg so much as grazed his, and declining all efforts at closeness or intimacy. “James just doesn’t seem to want me,” I wrote in my diary. “Bastard, I hate him. Why do I love him so? Why don’t I love a Giver? I suppose I need enough elusiveness to keep me feeling as unworthy as I believe myself to be. Perhaps James has given his heart away. To opium. No—it’s me being over-needy.”

A week or so later, the four of us drove north to Switzerland and Austria, where my sister, Joey, was performing at the Spoleto Festival. It was always shocking to see my sister in the environment where she thrived, to hear her sing in that big, trained voice, the mezzo richness of it all making me wish I had studied singing and could do more with my phrasing. Joey was stunning, and I hoped I showed her how proud of her I was. The next day, we took a night train to Paris, stopping at an inn along the way, ultimately deciding to rent a car and drive the last fifty miles to Paris through scenic woodlands.