Laura Meets Jeffrey (12 page)

18

Autumn almanac

October–November 1980

Our unusual erotic avocation and Laura's vocation of fucking men for money and her nack of dealing just enough to keep us in coke is balanced by measuring out our life in coffee spoons, more often than coke spoons. We spend our days planning dinner, going to movies, reading, cleaning and shopping. Friends visit us in the city. We go to her house in Bucks County when Sandy isn't there and spend time with her New Hope buddies. My friends visit us at my cabin on the river. We take walks with Necort the dog and play with Angel, the cat, and her new kittens.

We are still in our honeymoon period. At my urging Laura finally agrees to rein back on coke to only on weekends and holidays and sometimes when she turns tricks because so many of her tricks did coke. Among a certain class of alpha men in the big cities, fucking hookers and snorting coke competes with baseball as America's Favorite Pastime. This is the period when lots of people—middle class people with kids and good jobs—are becoming cokeheads. In some circles it is as common as alcohol or German cars.

My work takes new directions. I want to learn how to make TV commercials and I can afford to take a part-time job for $75 or $100 a day as a production assistant, a fancy term for grunt and gofer.

I see the back end of film and video. I watch directors coax brilliant performances from union pros and non-union amateurs. I see directors' egos fuck up scenes and drive productions into overtime. I find out what a gaffer is and why there are always gaffer tape (duct tape), gloves, pliers and clothespins hanging from his belt. I watch gaffers light up scenes using these tools. I learn the names of lights, their wattage and how they are used. I find out that a grip carries cameras and camera stuff and that the best boy, who also always wears gaffer tape, gloves, pliers and clothes-pins, works for the gaffer. I learn lighting jargon: Roscoes (color filters), silks (material to either bounce or diffuse light), butterflies (frames that hold silks), cookies (cut-outs that cast shadows), and tweenies, blondes, and redheads (different kinds of lights).

The men's magazine business is still part of my life. I am still on call to answer questions, attend editorial meetings and produce some porn shoots with photographers who prefer working with me. I also continue to be
Puritan's
figurehead spokesman and go to conventions where I am well known. When Laura comes into the picture, she joins me on assignments.

From 1975 until 1978, at the end of my twenties and the beginning of my thirties, I'd been the co-founder of
Puritan
, a pioneering men's magazine and the first to combine literate writing and explicit, beautifully produced hard-core photography. My co-founder was the brilliant and courageous John Krasner, a self-made wealthy Pennsylvania porn store chain owner. I was the mother who gave creative birth and John was the father who put up the money, came up with the name and offered lots of great ideas and let me run the show and have my way.

We both had strong work ethics and both put in sixty-hour weeks, he sometimes more. I made a deal with him whereby he had to tolerate one major dislike and two minor peeves per issue without interfering with my authority. He did get to tell me everything he thought and through the years I don't remember him ever substantially disliking any of the stories or photo shoots we published.

On February 7, 1978, John Krasner age fifty-three, was gunned down during a robbery in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. At first everyone thought it might be organized crime-related but it was a simple robbery. John was tough as nails and I don't think he took kindly to someone rummaging through his car for loose change and then putting a gun in his face. John went for the gun and during the struggle the gun fired, and John was mortally wounded just above the eye and died within a few minutes. The man was captured and sentenced to life without parole.

After John died his kids took over the magazine and in gratitude for a peaceful transition, I was paid a very decent stipend for three years for a part-time job that didn't interfere with my freelance work. John's two sons liked me, which was a blessing because they were two of the physically toughest men I ever met and both were on my Top-Ten List Of Men I Don't Want Mad At Me.

I gave a copy of every
Puritan
issue to my friend Norman Mailer, who was generous in his critiques. He liked some of the photos and said that I elevated the production values of porn while retaining all the heat.

Norman's girlfriend and the mother of their two-year-old son, John Buffalo, is Barbara Jean Norris Church Mailer, a whip-smart gorgeous Wilhelmina model, painter, actress and playwright with a disarming Arkansas accent. Although Norman and Norris know Laura is a hooker, they are well mannered and do not question her about it. Laura and Norris get on well.

The first time we all go out for dinner we meet at P.J. Clarke's on Third Avenue. After drinks at the bar, Norman leads us to the back and into the dining room. Heads turn. Like synchronized swimmers, everybody looks at Norman because they recognize him. They look at the two stunning women, both taller than he, and then they glance at me for about a second and conclude I'm not worth looking at. I'm just some guy. I may be the guy with two hot babes and Norman Mailer but I have little to offer a celeb gawker. I walk the emotional tightrope between pride and humiliation.

At another meal we all share at Elaine's, Norris moves into the category of awesome when she takes a maraschino cherry stem into her mouth, makes more contortions than I ever saw a gorgeous face make and then with her gorgeous face back on, sticks her tongue out and with childlike pride presents us with the stem tied in a knot.

On November 11, 1980, Laura and I are among the few guests at Norman and Norris' impromptu wedding. José Torres, Patricia Kennedy Lawford and Doris Goodwin are there and maybe four more non-Mailers. The invitation is so sudden it's like they eloped except they get married at home. Norris tells us she agreed to marry Norman not just because they have a child together, but because he is such a great lay.

There is a fat cloud of soberness in the room when Norman and Noris repeat their vows in front of a dual ministry of a priest and a rabbi. Norman speaks his vows with great theatrical diction and when he gets to the part about “fidelity” he drops half an octave lower, drawls the word with precision and looks Norris in the eye with conviction bordering on a glare. Not a threatening glare but a drop-dead serious I-swear-to-God, strike-me-dead glare. This is Norman's sixth time at the plate and he has yet to hit a home run. He has seven children with five previous wives so he sure got on base, even got a few extra base hits, but the long ball has eluded him.

Getting this wedding together involved a whirlwind of legal manipulations. Norman wanted his daughter, Maggie to be his full-blooded lawful daughter and since he'd never married her mother, Carol, they quickly married one day and divorced the next. I don't remember exactly how Norman did it but I do remember mayor Ed Koch and the mayor's deputy, Ed Fancher, had something to do with the marital acrobatics because they both crashed Norman and Norris's wedding after the ceremony.

Afterward, the bride and groom flew to London, where Norman had been asked by director Milos Forman to play the part of architect and womanizer Sanford White in the movie,
Ragtime
.Norris sat next to him in a huge fancy dress in the scene where White is assassinated by Harry K. Thaw, the crazed jealous millionaire husband of Evelyn Nesbit. Norman acted with such vigor that he slammed his head on an ice bucket on the way to the floor and hurt himself. When Norman and Norris returned from London I asked Norris what sights she saw in London. “Mostly the ceiling of my hotel room,” she laughed.

Shortly after the Mailers' wedding, my mother calls and urges me to bring my new girlfriend when I come down to Florida to our ancestral condominium for Thanksgiving. Definitely. I know Laura will love my parents and I'm sure they will love her, and when they all meet, they do.

Around my folks Laura is sober, bright and bouncy. Her All-American Gentile Beauty, uncommon not only in my parents' home but also in their gated country club complex and the larger community of Boynton Beach is a special treat for them. She amuses them by knowing the name of every flower in their garden, and by shopping for exotic ingredients to prepare the type of salads they enjoy in restaurants but never make at home.

In the clear light of a drugless day with just a bit of makeup and one of her flowing cotton dresses, Laura is full of poetry and art and possesses one of the finest of Mother Nature's smiles. She is a sweet, very beautiful Flower Child, the kind of girl whose beautiful face you could put on a breakfast cereal box—if the Grateful Dead had their own brand of granola.

Around the Thanksgiving table with my parents, aunts, uncles and my brother The Lawyer we seem like any American family with a moderately successful hippie kid and his fashion model girlfriend. You can't tell anything about our perverted idiosyncrasies after we take a bath—and after Laura's black and blue marks go away.

19

John,
Yoko, and the washing machine repairman

December 8,
1980

It is Monday morning, December 8, 1980, three days after my thirty-fourth birthday, one day after the thirty-ninth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I call my brother The Lawyer in Miami, and mutter the least accurate statement of my life. In my best approximation of FDR, I joke, “Today is December 8th, a day that will
not
live in infamy.”

That evening, Laura and I are in bed in our apartment in New York, watching television, when whatever we are watching is interrupted by a news flash. John Lennon has been shot. A few minutes later it's announced he's dead. I call Allan Steckler, my main man at Apple Records and a good friend of John's. Allan is sleeping and perturbed that I called. I tell him that John Lennon is dead. We spend the next ten minutes wordlessly crying into the phone.

That night into morning, my phone rings a dozen times as friends call and we all cry. Laura and I sit in bed holding each other for hours, crying past the point of tears.

A Beatle is dead. The poet warrior, the man with the biggest set of balls in rock & roll has been slain. It is the end of something, but I don't know exactly what.

The assassinations of JFK and Bobby and Martin Luther King were horrible enough, but John's death cuts deeper. Many of us loved and revered those three political leaders, but we never went around humming their music. What kind of society assassinates artists?

What died that day in the public collective consciousness, and unconsciousness, was the tail end of flower-power innocence. It was quoted repeatedly on TV that night in the man's own words: “The dream is over.”

This loss of idealism was a significant factor in the drift to greed and selfishness, soon to be the fashionable religion for hippie-turned-yuppie Boomers during the remainder of the 1980s. We might have already been heading in that direction, but the Lennon assassination fueled our worst tendencies. That December day a new cynicism was born.

This was the “More popular than Jesus,” “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” “Imagine there's no Heaven” idol smasher, public blasphemer, wit, and hero of the sexual revolution. In some small way Laura and I owed our liberated sexuality to the movement that started with the Beatles. Even the Rolling Stones owed their success, in part, to this man who co-wrote their first chart single, “I Wanna Be Your Man.”

John Lennon was the godfather of hippies and of modern-day long hair, and the mass culture of hipness. The Beatniks were an influence on many people but they didn't have mass appeal like the Beatles. Beatnik music didn't dominate the top ten. Teenyboppers didn't hound Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg when they got off airplanes. The Beatles influenced us in a much larger and more direct way, a real way that changed how we lived, dressed and wore our hair. John was the cultural center of the Beatles and now he wasn't breathing any more.

For those who had never lost an immediate family member or a best friend, it was their first salty taste of real grief, of crying on and off for days till numbness set in. On the streets nearly everybody had red eyes or was walking around crying. Strangers half-nodded with sad smiles. The impact was universal and probably strongest in New York where we all felt grief mixed with shame that it happened here.

The news channels were filled with talking heads who knew Lennon well. Friends called me and asked what Lennon was really like. I was as close as they could get to John. What did I feel? What were my favorite memories of him?

The first time I met John I'd been working with Apple for about a year and only dealing with Apple's creative director Allan Steckler. While I had heard Steckler's end of a phone conversation with John or George or Ringo, or even Paul (who had already split from day-to-day Apple and was being represented by his lawyer father-in-law), which was thrilling enough, I hadn't yet met a Beatle. That was okay; I was thrilled to be making a living just in their periphery.

It was early summer, 1971, business was slow, and I decided to take two weeks off and hitchhike around New England with my then girlfriend, Andrea, to visit family and friends. (In 1971 hitchhiking was still a popular mode of transportation with little risk.)

I asked Steckler's permission and he said okay as long as I left my itinerary with his secretary. Itinerary? No one had ever asked for my itinerary before. I was flattered. I left the phone numbers of my friends and family and approximate dates of arrivals and departures and we took off, by thumb, for Vermont.

A week into our trip while staying at my parent's house in Boston, I get a call from Steckler on a Monday morning. He's in L.A. where it's 7:00 a.m. and he's just gotten an urgent call from John who wants me to help put an ad together immediately to promote his and Yoko's interview in
Crawdaddy
, the rock magazine.

Me? Wow!

Steckler asks me to meet him at the Apple office the next morning and go with him to the Pierre, where John and Yoko are camping out. (This was just before their move to Bank Street and several years before the Dakota.)

The conversation with Steckler:

“I'm hitchhiking.”

“We'll pay for a plane.”

“My girlfriend's with me.”

“We'll pay for her ticket too.”

“I'll be there.”

“Good.”

I make reservations and run to the airport—because John Lennon needs me.

Far fucking out, John Lennon needs me.

The next morning I'm ten minutes early and wired. Steckler arrives and we head to the Pierre. I ask if there are some bowing and scraping and/or always-walk-away-from-them-backwards-with-your-eyes-down protocols to follow and Steck says no, just be normal. Normal?

I'm going to meet John and Yoko and I should just be normal?

At the elegant Pierre we are escorted by security to John and Yoko's suite and are greeted by the ever lovely May Pang, John and Yoko's assistant (who becomes even more prominent in John's life later.) May is a buddy I know from the Apple office. She's twenty-one; smart, slinky, tall and I have a moderate crush on her. She lessens my anxiety a notch with her smile.

Steckler and I walk in and John and Yoko are sitting on the floor with a blank piece of paper the size of a
New York Times
page. I think to myself, “Holy Shit! That's actually John and Yoko!”

A few other people are milling around the suite, which is the most magnificent hotel room I've ever seen. Huge. Really high ceilings. Opulent lighting, opulence everywhere.

John and Yoko are working furiously and never look up to greet us. Steckler motions with his head for me to get involved and I move in closer and concentrate on the design developing on the blank page in front of me as John and Yoko arrange various cut up pieces of type and photos and the
Crawdaddy
cover with them on it. After five minutes John sits back and says, “There! That's right. It's all done.” Steckler pokes me in the ribs. He wants my opinion and without a second thought I spew, “No. You're wrong.”

The room goes silent.

Before I can even contemplate whether one of the huge windows would break and allow me to defenestrate myself, John smiles, looks at me, and says, “Really? Show me.”

Steckler, who I hear snickering jabs me again to keep going. I get down on the floor and rearrange the pieces and cut up bigger pieces of type and in about ten minutes I put together a better, more dynamic design. I hope.

Yoko says nothing, gets up and walks over to talk with Steckler. John is still on the floor next to me, watching. I've suspended breathing. John turns to me and, sounding just like a Beatle from Liverpool, says, “You're right. That's morch betta.”

He then sticks out his hand and with an easy casualness, and just in case I was the one person in the western hemisphere who happened to not know who he was, says, “I'm John, I'm glad to finally meet you. I loved the ads you did for ‘Imagine' and ‘Fly.'” He points and says, “This is my wife Yoko.” We nod at each other.

This is too hallucinogenic for me. It would be more likely for me to awake from this dream sequence than not. This is what pinching yourself was invented for.

I introduce myself and take just a moment too long to stop shaking his hand. John gets up and asks if I want anything to drink; looking up from the floor I ask for a Coke.

Then John Lennon is standing right there next to me as Steckler comes over to chat with him and look at what we've created. John Lennon is standing next to me. John Lennon is wearing moccasins. John Lennon's feet are only inches away from mine. My dormant Beatlemania grabs hold of my central nervous system and it occurs to me—that's a Beatle Foot! And there are two of them. REAL ACTUAL BEATLE FEET!!

May, smiling at me knowing I'd get more of a thrill if John Lennon hands me the Coke than if she does, gives him both cans and he hands me one. I don't know if I should open it or keep it as a souvenir. Thirst rules. I vow to take the empty home, but in the scramble to complete the ad, the can gets left behind.

John Lennon sits down on the floor again right next to me. (“God,” I'm thinking, “I hope I'm not sweating!”) Yoko, who is sweeter than I expect, joins us on the floor. The three of us edit the quotes they want to use from the
Crawdaddy
article, and make a few fine-detail design decisions together. I become self-conscious when I look at John eye-to-eye and make sure to turn away quickly to avoid staring. When we're done, I'm off and running with another handshake with John Lennon—two in one day!—and a quick goodbye.

These were the days before computers and Quark and Illustrator, back when you had cold-type galleys, rubber cement, Photostats and Exacto knives. What would take one person two hours to do on a computer today took six people in three separate businesses at least two days, with lots of drop-offs and deliveries by me or messengers.

But John wants it submitted to the
New York Times
that afternoon. Steckler gives me permission to spend whatever is needed to complete the task. It's amazing what the twin engines of “JOHN-&-YOKO-NEED-IT” and “MONEY-IS-NO-OBJECT” can accomplish. In only five hours I produce finished artwork ready for reproduction. I never stop moving and two messengers don't either. I submit the ad to the
Times
. They want the money up front because, Apple or not, they don't have an account and any new business is COD.

The on-the-spot payment is arranged with Apple's bookkeeping, which means I also get paid my commission that same day. What a package deal!

That evening Andrea and I went to the usual kind of social gathering we attended during the early 1970s—an orgy. The next day when a friend asks how I am doing, I tell him that yesterday was one of the best days of my life. I got to meet and work with John Lennon, I went to a great orgy and I made and collected money. (I made $669, which was 7.5 percent of the cost of the ad, which was $8,920.)

The next time that combination of events came up I just told my friend, “John Lennon/Orgy/Money” and to this day, I still think of truly great days, even those without John Lennon or an orgy, or even money, as John Lennon/Orgy/Money days.

Although I was flattered to be needed so much in the middle of my first vacation while at Apple, it was less exciting being called back the second time; and by the third time my vacation was interrupted, it was a pain in the ass. In the little over three and a half years I serviced Apple, I never had a single uninterrupted vacation.

On the plus side of the balance sheet was Beatle Dope. I never smoked with John, and he never gave me a joint directly but through others who had more intimate contact with him and his stash, I ended up with bits and samples of whatever he was smoking. I had my first ever hair-straightening top-of-your-head-comes-off hash oil, and grass that was the best available in the world at that moment. Who on earth is going to sell or give second-grade weed to a Beatle?

Another plus was that John Lennon was funny. Laugh out loud funny. He did shtick, with lots of voices and accents, especially various American accents including Southerners and middle-aged Jewish women from Queens. And although he had his tantrum moments—one of which I watched but since it wasn't my fuck-up, I wasn't the focus of his bite—he was generally kind and thoughtful and at least he remembered my name.

Unlike Yoko.

Yoko had worked with me maybe four or five times but never remembered my name. These people were my bread and butter but Yoko's forgetfulness annoyed me. I never mentioned it until one day I felt so humiliated that I either had to say something to her or swallow a foul taste so rancid I knew I was one step closer to kissing cancer on the asshole.

The Ono-Lennons were then living on Bank Street in the West Village only a few blocks from where Andrea and I lived on Tenth Street. Walking over to their big basement flat I used to think, “Can you imagine? Having to go to John Lennon's apartment!” Like it's work and I have no choice! I was amused by the irony dealt to me by fate.

One brilliant spring day I was on my way to their flat just dying to run into someone I knew. No such luck.