by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak
In honor of Becky Thatcher, Mark Twain’s literary prototype for the American girl and the first in a long line of Rebeccas, Beckys, and Beccas to figure out how to get under the skin of American boys. And of migrants everywhere. A special tip of the Chevalier’s Basque beret to Jacques for forwarding Christine Taubira’s Facebook post.
“To a place in the past we’ve been passed out of
Oh oh oh oh oh
Now we’re back in the fight.”
— The Pretenders, “Back on the Chain Gang”
“France now has the shield it needs.”
— French president Emmanuel Macron, celebrating France’s latest immigration law, passed in December by the French assembly with the unanimous support of the xenophobic National Front party legislators.
“They have fear in their guts.”
— Christine Taubira, former French justice minister, upon passage of the new immigration law
“Listening to the cries of joy which rose from the city, Rieux reminded himself that this insouciance was still at risk. Because he knew something this happy crowd did not, and that one could read in books: that the plague bacillus never completely dies nor goes away, that it can lay dormant for decades in the furniture and the sheets, that it waits patiently in the bedrooms, the basements, the trunks, the handkerchiefs and the file cabinets and that, maybe, the day would come when, for the misfortune and the edification of Mankind, the plague would wake up its rats and send them to die in the city on the hill.”
— Albert Camus, “The Plague” (La Peste)
The first Becky in my life, Becky Rothman (not her real last name), was more important for her father Bill, who saved my younger brother’s life, than for any adventure we had together; this is how the Rothmans came into our lives.
We were living not far from Liberty Street, where my guardian angel lived at the time. She was not a Becky, she was a Mimi (or so I remember her; my mother would later tell me that her name was actually Mia), who turned over in her crib one day and died at the age of three-and-a-half; I still remember Mimi dancing on the waxed wood floor of the Kitigawas’ living room, swirling in a dark green dress with tiny pink flowers, her long straight black hair intersected by a bow. The Kitagawas were friends with the Rothmans, who lived in a hippified dark blue and green Edwardian or Victorian on Castro near Liberty. Bill was a dentist so when my brother began choking on a piece of meat, Niki or Miki Kitagawa ran and fetched Bill, who reached into his throat and extracted the morsel, saving his life. Bill would later become our dentist, using laughing gas in lieu of novacaine to put us under while he pulled our teeth out. Becky’s brother Saul, who was my age — we were born just a few days apart, in May 1961 — had a particularly distinguished schnozzola, so my brother and I, in excursions to Agate beach in Bolinas (the town where they have a road sign steering would-be visitors in the opposite direction, and where Richard Brautigan would later kill himself with a rifle pilfered from a peeper in Babylon), would call out, “Hey Saul!” making a nose jutting out gesture with our hands (with accompanying sound that’s hard to reproduce in print) as soon as he turned around, and dash towards the glittering surf — from the agates — with Saul nipping at our heels. The aggravated nature of our relations never really changed, if anything degenerated. When I ran into Saul at the Rooftop reunion in 1994 — for the alternative San Francisco public elementary school which my brother, Becky, Saul and I had been among 150 privileged kids to inaugurate in 1972 (along with Gio Coppola, the director’s son, who would later be accidentally killed while sailing with the son of Ryan O’Neal, who recently died; I’d go on to interview Gio’s mother Eleanor when she made “The making of Apocalypse Now” and brother Roman when he produced “The Spirit of ’76,” a science fiction ’70s spoof featuring David Cassidy), which reunion I was DJing in my African dashiki (which if I were still a kid and going to school in France today might get me turned away at the door as a threat to lay values under a new law which interdicts smatas with alleged religious content) purchased in a Jamaican record shop across the street from the Church of John Coltrane on Divisadero, our daily bus route from Noe Valley to Rooftop in Pacific Heights, killing my fellow Rooftopians softly with my song (DJing the 1994 reunion), Saul, being Saul, got annoyed; “Can you turn the music down?” I ran into him again in New York, where I was journalising and he was photographing, in 1995 and again in 2011, when we were both turning 50. Saul still being a poop, when I responded to his sharing with me his photography site by sharing with him our Dance Insider site, https://danceinsiderblog.wordpress.com/, he sniffed, “I don’t read online” and I told him what I thought of that. In retrospect, I probably should have said “No problem,” invited Saul for a beer and dog at Rudy’s in Hell’s Kitchen, and then, just when he opened his mouth to say “I don’t eat hot dogs,” shouted — for all to hear — “Hey Saul!,” accompanied by the nose prolonguing gesture and sound and then leaving him to chase me down Ninth Avenue.
I was about gonna say that my relations with Becky Rothman were not so tempestuous as they were with Saul, but then I realized that, as the first obviously Jewish girl I knew, she became a kind of prototype (for non-Jews who would caricature us, the name itself is a kind of stereotypical catch-all; witness “Rebeccas all over the place in the Marais,” the 4th arrondissement installment of Leo Malet’s “New Mysteries of Paris,” a series of crime novels published in the late ’40s and 1950s updating Eugene Sue’s 19th-century newspaper serial “The Mysteries of Paris,” with each intrigue set in a different arrondissement. In the Marais adventure, French literature’s prototypal gumshoe Nestor Burma follows a trail of dead Jewesses from an artist’s studio on the Ile St. Louis to the rue des Rosiers and a Jew who collaborated with the Nazi occupants by turning in other Members of the Tribe, adding quisling to our other sundry nefarious traits, with the dubious redemption that it’s ultimately an Israeli commando squad in Paris which avenges the betrayals and redeems Jewish pride, in which department today’s Israeli army is kind of running it out, don’tchya think?); if I never had a thing for Becky, in later years I would have things for women whose initial appeal was that they reminded me of Becky, starting with a girl whose name I can’t remember, who after we’d been hanging out for a while replied to my avowal that I liked her with, “I’m gay; aren’t you?” When I said I was not, she insisted, “My gay-dar is never wrong.” It is this time, baby! “I mean, you do like wearing bandanas after all.” After this I considered getting a tee-shirt made with “Girl Toy” written on it just so women would know I was available. (When I was 14, two girls, neither of whom was named Becky — in fact there wasn’t a Becky in sight, at least that I can remember, in all my years of junior high school, except for Becky Rothman, who was still hovering on the periphery, at James Lick Junior High — Linda Mull and Felicia French, gave me a baby blue tee-shirt on which they’d had inscribed “Monster Boy”; they even made up a song, sung to the tune of “Soldier Boy,” into which they would spontaneously break out in the halls of the same junior high school where Carlos Santana had strummed his baby chords a few years earlier. I really missed my chance with Felicia ((I can’t tell you why I believe this without violating the confidence of a personal dream Felicia shared with me during one of our three-hour phone conversations, made even more intimate by my listening to her from the dark small closet under the indoor stairs of our 25th Street Edwardian)), who was the first girl I fell head over heels for as a pre-teen when I met her a year before “Monster Boy” at a Glen Park ping-pong tournament ((I made the all-city finals for my age category, before getting trounced by a 9-year-old Chinese kid whose spins I couldn’t touch)) but who I was sure was out of my league. At Lick, we acted together in Tennessee Williams’s “This Property is Condemned,” the school’s entry in the all-city junior high drama contest, which had earlier been expanded into a film starring Nathalie Wood and Robert Redford; Felicia, who shared Nathalie’s big-eyed beauty, played Nathalie’s little sister talking about how Nathalie, or Alma, was now in “The Bone Orchard,” prompting my big line as “Boy”: “The BONE ORCHARD!?”, for which I won the best supporting actor award in the 1976 San Francisco Junior High School Theater Festival, my only competition being Chip Williams, my best friend the year before at Corbett Community School, who was supposed to die of a brain tumor by the time he was 20. Two years later, studying under Lewis Campbell at the Center for Theatre Training ((Center)) I would direct the play, with another heart-throb since I was 11 years old who I considered untouchable, Stacey J., succeeding Felicia.)
Except that Becky — I started out this story intending to talk about Beckys, after I counted them up and realized that quite a few have marked important passages in my life — except that Becky hung out with the prissy crowd at Rooftop, I can’t say that our relations were as acrimonious as those between me and Saul. But even that reference allows me to introduce Kathy D., another member of the prissy crowd (“prissy” through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy who didn’t have a lot of confidence around girls, so much so that he convinced his parents to have his doctor attempt to drill away a birthmark in the middle of his upper lip, as he clutched the Rooftop yearbook for courage), who I remember in her white skirt and red sweater and long straight blonde hair held in a beret as we teased each other on the way to Jackson Park on Rooftop’s lunch breaks; Brooks Solon was another of that crew, Brooks who wrote in the 1973 Rooftop yearbook in the Sixth-Grade Wills section that “I leave my stinky sox to Becky,” or maybe it was me. While I have not seen Brooks since Rooftop or at least Lick, I did hook up with Kathy again in the early ’80s, when we were both about 20 or 21; by then she had cut her hair and I got an androgynous vibe from her (or maybe she just wasn’t interested in me in that way). We hung out a bit; I remember going to see “Atlantic City” with Kathy, and a distinguished looking, mustachio’d Burt Lancaster from his window watching Susan Sarandon from behind hers wiping down her naked arms with lemons. I next saw Kathy, absolutely luminous and in long hair again, at the memorial for her brother Mark, who had committed suicide, at the Swedenborgian Church on Washington or Sacramento Street. Later I heard that she was working as a personal assistant for Agnes DeMille, unfortunately before I got into dance and moved to New York in 1995, living right down the street from Agnes (she was at 11th and Fifth, Fifth Avenue where I once stalked William Dafoe from 59th Street to Washington Square, deviously smirking like William Dafoe would, especially when he was stopped by a lady fan) on W. 8th Street between Fifth and the Avenue of the Americas next to Electric Lady, where Jimi Hendrix and, more significant for me, Carly Simon had recorded. (“You’re so Vain,” which at the time I heard as “You’re so Vague,” had been along with “Killing Me Softly,” “Dancing in the Moonlight,” “Could it be I’m falling in love?,” “Daniel,” “Crocodile Rock,” and of course “Seasons in the Sun” my Rooftop theme song.)
Before I moved to New York, I moved to Princeton, its proximity to NY being one of the main attractions, the others including F. Scott Fitzgerald — whose Princeton paene “This Side of Paradise” is required reading for all freshmen — and Joyce Carol Oates, who taught creative writing (and would later overrule another creative writing teacher, Reginald Gibbons, who tried to head off my incipient writing career by blocking me from advancing to the next level, after I turned in a story cut into one-inch wide strips with one word on every line, channelling Apollinaire long before I’d heard of him). I could talk more about her but we’re trying to stick to our theme here, which is putatively Beckys (Balzac and French president Emmanuel Macron’s new bogeymen come later), and I realize I forgot the one who came between Becky Rothman and Becky H. at Princeton, Becky N., who showed up at Center, my FAME-like high school theater conservatory in San Francisco, in time to be the best singer (not too hard; we were more Stanislavski than Sondheim) in our production of “Godspell” — she got “Day by Day” — and be my girlfriend for about a week, starting at the cast party at the house of who I’ve forgotten except that it was in the East Bay near the water, which meant we all had to stay overnight and there was lots of spontaneous pairing up, me with Becky (in a very G-rated way). Our first and last date (no bitter break-up; it just didn’t stick), it seems, was a ferry ride to Sausalito. Like Becky Rothman Becky N. was very Jewish-looking with the frizzy hair (if Balzac, in his last, aborted novel, can describe a Jewish doctor in Montparnasse as having a typically protuberant Jewish nose after assigning him a stereotypically Jewish avariciousness ahead of dropping ‘Doctor’ and henceforth referring to him as “the Jew” — and yes this, and not criticizing Israel for setting loose the Monsters of its Id to bomb a civilian population whose well-being is its responsibility to smithereens while killing 23,000 of them, is what real anti-Semitism looks like — then a Jewish guy should be able to describe a girl as being Jewish-looking). That our pairing was not so odd as all that was indicated when Lewis later cast her as Emily in “Our Town”; I’d been dreaming of playing George since reading Wilder’s play in sophomore year, though preferably paired with Karen Sullivan, my dream girl (she grew up to be a lawyer but as I have nothing controversial to say about her — we’d hook up, probably in the late ’80s, to go out dancing at Bajones — I think it’s safe to give her last name), but had to choose between helping to save the school district — by that time I was the first year-term student delegate on the San Francisco Board of Education, just in time to help lead the fight against Proposition 13 (a state measure which had reduced property taxes and thus school funding) cut-backs — and “Our Town” callbacks for the part of George. George lost.
And now I recall there was yet another Becky on the scene around this time; I was already out of Center and into student government (serving as the appointed student body president of Mission High School), which is where I met a robust blonde girl named Becky whose last name I can’t remember, but I do remember the party she had, in the inner Mission and where, being me — thinking that to win a girl I needed an angle, or handicap — I profited from a dispute between a sophomore in Center, who we’ll call Anna Kabata, and her boyfriend that sent the boyfriend storming away and Anna sobbing gently on the front steps, where I joined her and faster than you can say I’ll-take-a-tongue-burrito-with-lots-of-salsa had insinuated my hand onto her tight-jean covered lap, where it joined hers and we were soon French kissing. (Anna was a student at the Immaculate Conception Academy and no I didn’t make that school’s name up.) I didn’t exactly scorn Anna later; rather just didn’t pursue it or responded lukewarmly to her pursuing it, or perhaps did not return her calls, which probably got deformed, either by Anna or the boyfriend, because after a Center performance — which might well have been of “Our Town,” starring Becky N. — the boyfriend, apparently back with Anna, came after me on the Mission High front steps, pushing me and shouting, “You leave Annie alone!” with fortunately Brad K. (Chip was also there) intervening to calm him down. (Brad was the older brother of Biff K., an elementary school buddy who resembled the middle son on the Brady Bunch, and who — Brad — at that time had a thing for younger women, including Felicia. When a “Lucie K.” showed up recently on my “You might know” Facebook friends list, looking kind of like a female version of Biff ((whose name like his brother’s I made up)) 50 years later, I wondered if she was he.)
So now we’re a year after Anna and back to Becky H. and freshman year at Princeton. Becky, a skinny girl from Florida with a button nose and a kind of chipmunk face (in the cute sense, not the buck teeth sense; if she had pimples, they added to her girlish appeal) with a birthmark on her dimpled cheeks, and glasses, like me had never seen snow before, so when the first one came to Princeton that fall we both went scurrying out of the Princeton Inn College dining room overlooking the golf course (where Amaury Blaine, Fitzgeral’s stand-in in ‘Paradise,’ had also roamed, so we were now officially in the Princeton movie), ignoring the haughty East Coast kids’ pooh-poohing that “that’s not snow, it’s sleet,” to make snow angels in the sandpit. It must have been a subsequent golf course excursion — because what I’m about to describe took place scrambling around in the sandpit and was more hot than cold — where Becky and I had an intense make-out session. I can still remember her pressing up against me in her crinkly silk blouse. Becky soon dumped me — we had the Talk, in the dormitory room that I shared with Brian Fontleroy Jones (not his real name and sorry Becky, I can’t change yours in a memoir that is putatively devoted to the Beckys who have graced my life, including you), an ROTC student who’d alarmed me when I’d showed up for school after he’d already deposited his things, among them a copy of “Mein Kampf” — explaining that she was getting back together with Bruce, her childhood sweetheart and a sophomore at Princeton; I can’t remember if our make-out session just happened in an interval in their relationship or was intended to make Bruce jealous and get back together with Becky. (I guess it’s a good idea I left out her last name; according to the Tigernet web site, Becky also became a lawyer.)
Becky H. and I would actually remain friends. The golf course skirmish was in the fall of 1979, and we were still pals in the Summer of 1984. I had left Princeton (the school) in a ruckus in January (responding to a dean’s threat to expel me if I didn’t withdraw voluntarily by telling him to “Go ahead, make my day” ((when a Princeton professor, Victor Bromberg I think, told us in a lecture for his course on the Modern European Novel that the hero of Sartre’s “Nausea” sees himself as if he’s in a movie “and of course, no normal person would think that way,” I’d known I was in trouble)), words which would come back to haunt me 35 years later when, after telling me I was eligible for re-admission, a new translation program having sparked my interest, and setting my re-application guns blazing — I’d even sent a re-application letter accompanied by a movie poster image of James Stewart Class of ’33 in “Destry Rides Again” — one of the presumably by then retired dean’s successors reversed herself and said “Whoops, we found a note from Dean… saying to never let you back in again.”) and spent the Spring semester of 1984 writing full-time as a freelancer for the New York Times, covering Princeton even if Princeton was no longer covering me. Pissed when they finally declined to hire me as a staff writer (“The fuckers,” reacted my editor at the Times’s Sunday insert the New Jersey Weekly, Richard Roberts, when I told him), I’d decided to try my luck in Austin, which I’d heard good things about from my long-time (since before Rooftop days) best friend Adam Friedman (he’d played Jesus in “Godspell,” though not under that fabricated moniker, and continues to be my own personal Jesus, resurrected in my dreams long after our friendship dissolved, as recently as one last night in which I didn’t seem to have enough time to get the caca off, and shuffled from toilet to toilet in the Friedman home as Adam prepared to go out with someone else; absent a successor with legs, the part of the best friend, dream-wise, will forever be played by Adam), who’d spent a magical year there earlier and been in a relationship with a sweet curly blonde-haired suntanned slightly older woman we’ll call Janna. Adam was gone but Janna was still there in Austin in the Spring of 1984 and so was my Princeton best friend who we’ll call Scott (also grew up to become a lawyer), who really deserves to be worked in here alongside all the Beckys. Scott was the first Republican my age I ever met — waiting in line for dinner at PIC — and yet we became political allies, at Princeton at that time Scott’s student government faction being more ethical in my view than the presumedly liberal side. (For the Nassau Weekly, the new alternative student mag of which I’d become the founding managing editor by the Spring, 1980, of freshman year, I’d write, with the guidance of editor Don Hawthorne and a brilliant already professional writer for Sports Illustrated, Alexander Wolff, “Machine Politics comes to Princeton,” after editors at the daily rag, the Princetonian, including Elena Kagan ((yes, that Elena Kagan)), endorsed, for the first time in 147 years, a candidate for student government chairman to succeed Eliot Spitzer ((yes, that Eliot Spitzer, the one who went on to become and resign as governor of New York)); many of them belonged to the same eating club.)
By the time I’d returned to Princeton after a nearly two-year break (in January 1982), Scott, wearing his red hair longish and sporting a paunch, had had it with politics and switched to geology. By junior year he was holeing up in the “Rock Mag Lab,” an isolated, semi-underground building where I’d get his attention by stomping on the roof. One evening, fueled by a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies, we rambled over to the cemetary in the Black section of town and had a moral knock-down drag-out, with the ghosts of Grover Cleveland, Jonathan Edwards, Aaron Burr (the vice president who challenged and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, for which, his descendent Samuel Burr would tell me later when I interviewed him for the New Brunswick Home News while I was still a student, Burr had gotten a bum rap; “It was all rumours spread by the Hamilton crowd!”), and Paul Tulane (his statue, so legend had it, turned away from the university by his instructions after Princeton refused to rename itself Tulane when he made a donation) looking on. Scott was upset because I didn’t have a five-year plan. I can’t remember my retort to this, but I do remember that after we parted, when I returned to my single room in Lourie-Love, I found a paper plate under my door on which was written in pencil:
“Who is John Gault? Your friend, Scott.” (Perhaps accompanied outside the door by a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”)
We must have worked it out, at least for a time, because Scott was one of the reasons, or anyway my welcome wagon, when I had had enough with Princeton in May 1984 and decided to try out Austin, where Scott, now graduated, had set up shop as a baker with Scott’s Sister’s Scones. They were just as scrumptious. I’m not sure why or how Scott had gone from pre-law to pre-rock to gourmet goodies, but it seemed to fit him (Scott: This is not meant as an insult.); indeed it enabled him to encounter his wife. (The Texas girl angle reminds me that I left out Scott’s instrumental role in my losing my virginity. This happened at Princeton but Princeton being Princeton, I had to import a girl, and Paul always doing things the hard way, or the roundabout way — sometimes you have to take the long way around to get back home ((Albee in “The Zoo Story,” which I still haven’t acted in but which has not stopped acting on me)) — instead of finding my quarry in Sweetbriar like any normal Princeton boy ((“Princeton boys do it with their socks on” — Rosanna Arquette, in “Sweet 16,” filmed in Princeton when I was there, and yes, I met her too, DJing the San Francisco wedding of another high school theater chum in 1992, where I struck out with l’Arquette while waiting behind her in the strudel line)), instead I went to ((I mean looked in; I didn’t actually go there)) Dallas, where I’d struck up a correspondence with a girl I’ll re-name Christina who I’d met when we were both part of a national, State Department sponsored student delegation to Israel in high school ((where, besieged by several comely Israeli girls, none of whom fortunately for you were named Becky, I swallowed the Kool-Aid and didn’t regurgitate it until 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon the first time)). I’d employed a reluctant Scott to personally deliver a bunch of roses to Christina after I’d done or said something that hurt her. It must have worked because Christina responded by sending me a life-sized cut-out Ziggy doll on whom she’d written “You make my loins ache.” Christina would finally come to Princeton during Spring break of 1983 — we met in Penn Station, where I was coming back from visiting Adam’s sister Marjorie with him on the coast in Kittery, Maine. She may not have been named Becky, but I remember how warm I felt sitting next to Christina ’round midnight on the bus — I’m not sure why it was a bus in lieu of the Dinky, the two-car train that normally ferried us from Princeton Junction to the Wa-Wa market on the edge of campus — from New York as we passed the tennis court on the way to chez moi in Lourie-Love. I remember I took a shower down the hall and then sat next to Christina on the narrow army-cot width bed, in my long-johns and a bathrobe, Christina leafing through my “History of the Cinema” book on my bed until we started up. We must have stayed in bed — oh: Christina was about 20, I not yet 22 and yes, I lost my virginity at nearly 22 ((I’ve just remembered another, earlier Princeton golf course excursion, also with a girl from Center,”Tush,”, by then, 1979/80, studying acting at NYU and visiting me in Princeton and her responding to my determination to wait until marriage to sleep with someone with “You’re going to make a lot of women unhappy”; later Tush — who at Center had played my mom in “The Diary of Anne Frank,” in which of course I played Anne’s boyfriend — declared that she was ending our friendship because (((this is a paraphrase; it’s been more than 40 years))) “You’re too boring.”)) — we must have stayed in bed all of Saturday, my finally acquiescing to Christina’s gentle request that we do something else besides… by taking her to Philadelphia on Sunday. When Spring break was over and Christina left to return to Dallas and I told a Princeton friend from California, Laurel or Lauren, who asked how my week had been ((actually I think I asked her how her week had been to get her to ask how mine had been)), “It was the best week in my life,” Laurel or Lauren replied haughtily, “I don’t have best weeks.”
I don’t remember why I broke it off with Christina, but I do remember her in her tight black leather jacket in tears as we were saying goodbye on the lawn in front of the bronze Tigers guarding Nassau Hall, where the Constitution had been written ((wrote about that for the Times too)) 200 years earlier. And going to Robert Fagles’s Tragedy seminar that week, where we were reading “Romeo and Juliet” or more likely “Hamlet” given the parallel with his treatment of Ophelia, making a reference to my romantic turpitudes to draw a parallel with the play and Robert Fagles, the most preeminent translator of the Greeks of the epoch, not disdaining the plebiean reference but treating it as completely pertinent.)
But let’s get back to Becky H. (If I haven’t already lost you by being too Balzacian; I’m wading through “The Human Comedy” now, after scoring a complete mint condition 24-volume guilded set from 1959 at a brocante or antique fair here in my village in the Dordogne in the Southwest of France for 20 Euros, determined to find one novel among the trove where the sexism — bref, according to Balzac the dream of girls is to fulfill the dream of boys even if they have to die doing so — or the abundance of counts and countesses and vicomptes before all of whom Balzac genuflects doesn’t put me off. I thought I’d found my candidate in “Splendors and Miseries of the Courtesans,” but then made the mistake of reading the preface, where I was told, “You can’t understand ‘The Splendors and Miseries of the Courtesans’ if you haven’t read at least 10 of the other books, especially ‘A Shadowy Affair,'” which turns out to be not just a shadowy affair, but yet another affair involving the various complicated alliances in Revolutionary-Napoleonic-Restoration France ((I recently added it up and realized that France may well have had its revolution in 1789, but since then and not counting President Macron with all his article 49s which effectively cut off legislative debate whenever he thinks he’s about to lose a vote, since 1789 France has spent something like 74 years under some form of Revolutionary, Napoleonic, Royalist, or Vichyist autocracy or at least benevolent monarchy, albeit often with a legislature)) and right when you think the action is about to start — various personnages having convened in the salon of an ancient chateau in the Lorraine ((as in quiche)), where over a hearth in the castle the good guys — here in Balzac’s view the Royalists, whose kids are plotting to overthrow Napoleon — are sitting around playing a parlor game called “Boston,” the Tea Party version of Monopoly which was apparently the rage among French Royalists of the time, and every time you think that the counter-counter-revolutionaries and the gendarmes are about to storm the castle, a new character enters the room, and Balzac has to tell you his life story. Plumbing through “A Shadowy Affair” nonetheless — the intrigue, ultimately involving a Napoleonic agent framing the Royalist twins for assassinating a Napoleonic senator because the agent has not forgiven the twins’ cousin/fiancé, another countess, for spitting on him, is actually compelling — and landing in yet another Balzacian discourse on the intricacies of French law during the transition from Revolutionary to Napoleonic law ((the famous Code)), I abandoned all hope of finding some secourse for my own worries for France when Balzac explained how at the time, around 1814, the notion of “crime” had been eliminated from the law-books, replaced by that of “delit,” which thanks to President Macron’s new immigration law, stoked by the bogeyman of an immigrant invasion invented by the extreme right and right-wing parties ((not M. Macron, who should know better)), abbetted by an irresponsible mainstream media, that is completely fabricated ((if you don’t believe me, check out François Heran’s courses at the College de France, the latest of which addresses the links between colonialization and migration, https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/cours/colonisation-et-migration/le-legs-colonial-en-question)) is what migrants in “irregular situations” are now liable to be charged with, in other words if we were back in 1814 undocumented immigrants would be considered in the same penal category ((classification of infraction-wise)) as Royalists ((who, indeed, were sometimes referred to as immigrants for leaving France after the Revolution dispossed them)) suspected of assassinating senators.)
… Alors, before that Proustian parenthesis about my Balzacian tendencies and impending embastillement, we were talking about Becky H., the golf course make-out to break-up Becky, and how nearly five years after that golf course idyll, in the Summer of 1984, we were still friends. I’d just returned to Princeton (the town, or rather the borough, then presided over by Barbara Boggs Sigmund, a real character who I also wrote about for the Times, daughter to Congresspeople Hale and Lindy Boggs and sister to Cokie Roberts, and known for her irrascably irreverent style and multi-color eye-patches — she lost one to cancer), Austin having not worked out, but not before an aborted affair with Janna that ended with Adam, on a fly-by in Austin looking for consolation from Janna, who he’d broken up with a year before and who, still smarting from that hurt, had been crying on my shoulder with the expected results (me falling in love with my best friend’s former girl), with Adam, then, looking for consolation from Janna after being kicked out of the North Carolina School of the Arts (or rather not passed on to the next year). Unbeknownst to Adam I’d switched sides (et oui, le Benedict Arnold de l’amour, c’est moi).
Things finally boiled over while we were driving home in Janna’s truck after a bug-infested meal in a restaurant overlooking Barrow Dam, and I, a bit drunk, said, meaning it as an homage to Janna, that she reminded me of Sonia in “Crime in Punishment.” “You know, the prosititute.” I’d meant this just to identify the character, the association being not with her trade but with Sonia’s having sacrificed herself for Raskolnikov’s redemption (as Adam in my emotionally jaundiced view now seemed to be asking Janna to sacrifice her emotional well-being to comfort him). This presumed that Janna and Adam had read the book, which they or at least she apparently had not, so Janna thought I was calling her a whore, and Adam sided with her. Things must have calmed down enough for me to make my play after Adam left and I tried to, on a couch in my $215 flat (prices have gone up in Austin since), just before I left Austin, but Janna demurred, for, she said, that reason. (I lost Janna a second time when, after a reunion which started promisingly in 1987 when Janna moved to San Francisco and we broke in my first apartment in my home-town (($450/month and two blocks from Golden Gate Park)) with a Thanksgiving dinner which involved racing in Janna’s truck over the hill to the Friedmans in Eureka Valley to cook the turkey and the pecan pie as my oven wasn’t yet hooked up, we somehow accidentally ended up having the same therapist, with catastrophic consequences for our friendship.)
… So we’re back, after Austin, with Becky H. in Princeton in the Summer of 1984, also after a debacle which we won’t get into in New Brunswick (where I did get to write another story for Richard Roberts and the Times, about a week-end conference at Rutgers about women’s rights where I interviewed a fetching feminist, embarassed that, the Times being the Times, I had to ask her, “Is it ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’?”), and I’m hanging out with Becky, who’s just graduated and is living with another girl, Anyta, who had been my neighbor at Princeton Inn College when I returned to Princeton in 1982, and one evening we get into one of those uncontrollable laughing spells, the kind where just when you think you’ve recovered someone makes another joke and you’re off again — where it’s actually starting to hurt — probably fueled by the bottomless blender pina colatas Anyta’s been mixing up. (This is happening at Spellman, a dreary grey concrete dormitory of apartments named after a minor Rockefeller relative and reserved for seniors because they all have kitchens, located at the end of campus near the Dinky station separated from PIC only by the Wah-Wah market, and also where I had gotten really plastered for only the second time in my life two years earlier; Don Hawthorne — the Nassau editor — had asked me to edit his senior thesis. Because it was on Hemingway, I’d decided it would help my editorial authenticity to get into the spirit of things by profiting from Don’s vast bookshelf full of spirits, unfortunately forgetting another Albee maxim, “Never mix, Never Worry” ((“Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”)))
So now we’re still, a couple of excruciating Balzac flashbacks and one political harangue later, in Spellman in the Summer of 1984, on a communal laughing so uncontrollably it’s starting to hurt fit with Becky and Anyta, when someone reads — perhaps on the label of a dish cleanser — something in the ingredients about “feminine hygiene” (now I remember, the laughing was hurting because I had strep throat and we were looking for an appropriate remedy, the candidate we found including the label warning “not to be used for feminine hygiene”) and every time we think we’ve recovered from the laughing bouts, one of us exclaims “Feminine Hygiene!” and we’re back on the merry go round.
But let’s stick to me and Beckys.
Our relationship — our friendship and Becky H’s importance as a marker, as a signifyer for me, here in inspiring the first occasion I had to manifest a moral value that would henceforth become essential if not requisite to me, personal loyalty — assumed another dimension (for some reason I associate this one with a conversation at a Princeton restaurant called “The Alchemist” which I’d not thought about for 40 years, once again putting the lie to something Joyce Carol Oates said more recently on French public radio ((American authors often say things on French public radio they would never say on American public radio because they can’t imagine that any Americans — let alone one of their former students now living as a recluse on the Street of the Cemetery in a semi-rural Cro-mignon village in SW France — is listening, as when the recently late Russell Banks, another of my ex-Princeton profs, interviewed right after the terrorist massacres in Paris of January and November 2015, told French State-run radio that the nihilists who perpetrated them were no different than the abolitionist John Brown, who I know something about, having played the heroes of both the North and South in Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown’s Body” at Center)) about how, according to Joyce, what we think are memories are actually just memories of memories, i.e. events that have been in regular rotation in our memory mix since the moment they actually happened — but I swear I haven’t thought about “The Alchemist” in 40 years.). Anyway, my relationship with Becky mid-wifed a new important signifier — a signifier of who I am and the values I prize — earlier in 1984 when Bruce, Becky’s childhood sweetheart with whom she’d gotten back together after or perhaps with the help of our freshman year golf course adventure in 1979, and who with Scott was one of my best friends at Princeton, he was a handsome sweety, Bruce had acceeded to the demands of a new girlfriend to cut Becky out of his life — to stop being friends with her. An upset Becky must have told me, because I told Bruce that if he did this to Becky our friendship was also over. He did and it was… (which perhaps explains why he’s not responded to my Facebook friend request).
The next to last time I saw Becky H. — it seems she visited me several years later in San Francisco — was the following year, the Spring of 1985. After returning to San Francisco at the end of the Summer of 1984 and working for a semester and a half as an after-school teacher at Live Oak School (where at least three other relationships that would become important later in my life were also seeded, but we’ll stick to Beckys for once), I’d returned to Central Jersey as a reporter for the Home News and was living in a new housing complex in Plainsboro (nearby and in the same prized zip code as Princeton, which had made it a hub for out of control development), which I was also covering, called “Fox Run Drive”; Becky and Anyta, about to or just graduated, were living next door in another, “Pheasant Hollow” (of course no pheasants or foxes were to be seen for miles around). I remember we watched Live Aid together in a pizza joint across the street from Fox Run owned by a cool Puerto Rican dude (Anyta was Puerto Rican). And now I remember where the Alchemist comes in; this Princeton restaurant is where I sold my first car — which I had needed to get from Fox Run to the paper’s office in New Brunswick and to tool around my territory, Plainsboro, Princeton Township, and Montgomery Township — a ’69 Cadillac Seville, complete with tail fins, in other words the Batmobile, which I’d bought used from my mom’s first boyfriend after the divorce’s Princeton pal’s father in Chester, Pennsylvania, for $300 — to Becky, for $25, after I left the paper; she later sold it for scrap metal. If I lost the caddy, before I left Jersey again I gleaned a mantra for life. Covering a college graduation in Montgomery Township — all the grads had donned Tom Cruise “Risky Business” shades and tossed them in the air upon matriculation — in June 1985, when I would have graduated from Princeton, I was able to benefit from the advice of the speaker, a successful female business executive, who transmitted this counsel from her father: When you’re confronted with an obstacle, ask yourself: “Where’s the opportunity here?”
My last Becky — who was actually part of a concurrent triumvirate (dare I say bevy?) of Beckys, who because they all danced in the same company, Pilobolus, went by, respectively, Becca, Rebecca, and Becky so the directors could tell them apart and who were all important to me in different ways — Becky J, who I was in a relationship with, I’ve already written a long piece about, after learning in 2014 about her death in 2013 (by accident, for which I upbraided Becca and Rebecca.), at the age of 49, from cancer. Rebecca Stenn, who I met shortly after I moved to New York in June 1995 to take an editing job at Dance magazine, becoming its news editor when my boss, Joe Mazo, died of a heart attack (I saw, if not exactly discovered, the body, frozen inside the entry to his Upper West Side digs in the position of trying to tie a second shoe-lace, the head grotesquely bloated and looking more like a monster’s than a man’s, and which had stayed at home to rot for more than 24 hours before anyone thought to check on Joe, remaining in the room with the corpse and my editor for two hours as we tried to coax two very freaked out felines out from under a decrepit bed frame), wrote for me (Rebecca Stenn did) at DM and thus, after I was fired by DM the day before Thanksgiving two and a half years later, in 1997, became the prototype for the Dance Insider artist-writer (she was/is also a talented choreographer in her own right) when the magazine was founded in June 1998 by a group of professional journalists and dance artists. We were close as friends but I am not yet ready to talk about that one as not enough time has elapsed since we last fell apart as friends. (Except to note this serendipitous irony: Rebecca held her wedding — at which I also DJ’d, natch, in May 2000 just before moving to France — at the Clemente Orosco Cultural Center in a former synagogue on the Lower East Side… named after a legendary New Yorican poet… who was Anyta’s grandfather.) Becca, who I also had a sort of Becky-related ricochet crush on for a time, was the Dance Insider’s first cover girl, captured by Jamie Phillips in all her bare-breasted beauty (I highlight this because it immediately set the DI apart from everyone else and pointed up that I could now do what neither the Times nor Dance Magazine would ever let me do, portray real dancers’ bodies and tell dancers’ true stories; if you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own. For our last print issue, our bare-breasted back cover girl was Martha Graham, photographed by Imogen Cunningham, whose grandson provided us with the silver albumen prints, a scoop).
As for Becky J., the one with whom I had a real romantic relationship (I remember roaming through Central Park after we’d hit a difficult pass, standing in front of the Lewis Carroll tribute statue of Alice feeding animals at her feet, and visualizing me and Becky bringing our children there), it feels like cheating to simply paste my previous story, my memorial to Becky, into this piece, as that story was not generated by the same vibe as this one, but perhaps it’s appropriate (spirit of this piece-wise) to share a Becky episode not included in that memorial (with the promise of no more extended detours into extra-Becky territory):
After we broke up the first time (Becky had given me the Talk, looking so good in a short black dress as I cried in my pie on a Chelsea terrace it was borderline cruel), and then briefly got back together, Becky was on the road performing with Pilobolus in Canada (this all happened in Spring/Summer 1997). I asked a Canuck pal from my days working for Reuters in San Francisco (from 1987 through 1995) — he’s the guy who taught me what a micro-chip was, about an hour before I went to cover a trial in San Jose over whether Intel or AMD owned the copyright to a specific microchip the ruling on which could move markets — Russell Blinch, who by then had returned to Canada, to surprise Becky with a bunch of Gladiolas after a performance in Ottawa… which was also a way to get two people who had been important to me at different epochs in my life to meet. Becky called me — or maybe I called her — after the show, so it was late, and we must have talked until four in the morning, she in her Canadian hotel and me in my W. 8th Street Village digs next to Electric Lady, where Jimi had recorded “Roomful of Mirrors” and Carly “Anticipation” (and “You’re so Vague”), not to mention “It was So Easy Then,” “Safe and Sound” (“If, through all this madness, we can stick together, we’re safe… and sound. The world’s just inside out and upside down”) and “Grown-Up” (“And I’ve just gotten older. I’ve just gotten older. And the little ones call me… a grown-up.”). We missed each other. I could tell it was hard for Becky. Finally I — turning for once from the cared for to the caring for — gently suggested that we hang up now so Becky could get some sleep.
“Last night at a friend’s house a little girl was there
She stood in the doorway playing with her hair
She looked up at me
as if I could do no wrong
As I got up to sing my song
I sang it with a shiver
in my throat and in my knees
Feeling just as small as….
a thistle in the breeze
But the child’s imagination
carried me along
And saw me through my song
Now I’ve just gotten older
I’ve just gotten older
And the little ones call me
a grownup.”
— Carly Simon, “Grown-Up.”
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