I'm Afraid Of Water

Not when I see it like this, out the window of my friend's condo in Santa Monica,

but when I see it like this, out the window of hell.

My fear is so irrational that once in Ocean City, Maryland, a "friend" threatened to throw me in the water and I bit his arm so hard it surely had to be amputated. At least I hope it did because that's how much I hated him, especially while I screamed, "Please don't, I'm afraid of water, pleeeeeaaase don't!"

"Jean, did I kill a little boy on a water ride of motorized boats when I was 4 years old?" Jean stuttered a little. (AHA!)
"Uh, no honey, you didn't."
"Are you SURE?"

Jean, a friend of my parents, has known me since I was born. This memory of my murderous past had haunted me for years and I finally got enough courage to ask her about it. Surely there's a statute of limitations on killing someone on a motorized boat when you were a child, isn't there?

Jean was more than sure because she'd taken me to that particular street fair and no one had died. I thought she might have been lying. She probably thought I was insane.

When I was 13, my mother, sister and I took the Queen Elizabeth to Cherbourg, France, on our way to Paris to visit our grandparents, which we did every summer. On this particular voyage we met a man who took us down below, to the loading bay. It was wide open and there was a metal chain stretched across the opening. The Atlantic Ocean rushed past in a blue fury, whitecaps dotting the landscape as far as the eye could travel. The man told us to step back and be very careful.

When, many years later, I asked my mother why she let this stranger take us so close to danger she replied that IT NEVER HAPPENED. I'm pretty sure you can't get Alzheimer's at 13 but maybe I was singled out because of my bad perm and braces. Not to mention because I hated my parents.

The only time I went to sleep away camp I was in a pool that had no shallow end. It was a pool specifically designed to teach kids to swim. Terrified, I clung to the edges. Every time this one counselor walked by she'd step on my hands and make me shove off into the middle of the pool where I sputtered and took in water like the Titanic. I hope she's dead now because if I ever find her I'll make her wish she was.

A lifetime of strange water memories. It didn't appear that some of them were real. Then how did I remember them so vividly and what did they have to do with my fear of water? Like the chicken and the egg, which came first, my fear or those incidents?

I meditate and have for over 25 years. I've studied metaphysics longer. I read Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualizations in the 1980's and got in touch with my Higher Self, sometimes known as a spirit guide. It's the voice in your head that tells you what to do, or what not to do. Mine turned out to be a 7 foot tall man with a flowing white beard. His name was Raji and he WALKED TOWARDS ME ON A BEACH during my first meditation about contacting the Higher Self. A beach is next to water in case the cap locked letters weren't enough of a clue.

I depended on Raji for advice until I moved to California and he disappeared. How does a non-human form disappear? One day while I was out hiking I realized he no longer "talked" to me. The next year I had new guides, 4 or 5, depending on the day. They were very loving and encouraging, like Raji, and there was one in particular, a Scotsman, who kept calling me Laddie. And I would reply that I was a Lassie (not the dog) but he didn't seem to care and continued to call me Laddie. He spoke in a Scottish accent and in my entire acting career the Scottish accent is the one accent I could never replicate.

Everyone has a Higher Self. Everyone. You hear the voice but you may discount it as your own. It's not you. It's the voice that tells you to turn right at the stoplight but you turn left and then realize you were wrong. It's the same power that kept showing me a vision of my new apartment in June of last year. The apartment that I eventually moved into.

I worked a lot as a comic the first 10 years I lived here in L.A. I traveled to clubs all over the U.S., Canada and overseas and went to Hawaii once a year. On one trip I was on the island of Maui,  lying on a towel on the beach in front of my hotel. I went into one of my meditations and silently asked why I was so drawn to Hawaii that I cried whenever I left.

And one of my guides answered: "Because this is where you drowned."

The Apartment I Shared With Mick Jagger

While packing up my current apartment I came across a picture that reminded me of my first apartment.

I was desperate and crashing with my friend Henry, who lived in Berkeley. He woke up one night and found me sitting at a desk naked, playing solitaire. The actual solitaire, with playing cards. I'd forgotten he lived there. So he drove me into San Francisco and I found a place on Ellis Street, below Polk.

The apartment was a furnished studio, on the ground floor. $110. a month. A stone cold drunk lived on one side of me and often knocked on my door in the middle of the night so he could crawl through one of my windows out to the fire escape and into his own apartment. Upstairs were a bunch of transvestites who used to push Seconals under my door so I could sleep at night.

I had this giant poster of Mick Jagger on my wall.  My friend Albert, a guy I went to school with in Paris and also a friend of Henry's, was visiting the States one year and took this picture. I used to keep the photo in a frame and every single person who saw it thought it was really me talking to Mick. The fact that he's on a stage singing and I'm standing in front of hanging beads didn't register with anyone. Also? That whole two dimensional thing.
I remember my shirt. It was black and had tiny red and black sparkles on it. I'm loaded down with all my Indian jewelry and wearing a hand-tooled belt I bought in Corsica.

Now I can't fit into that belt unless I wear it as a thigh tourniquet. Which could totally happen if someone happened to sever my femoral artery by accident and the belt was lying nearby.

This was the apartment I left after I found the heroin addict in bed with my gay hairdresser Eugene.

I abandoned my Calvin Klein sheets and the forest green hanging beads. And Mick Jagger.

The landlord was upset I was leaving. He offered to lower my rent to $100 because he said I was the best tenant he'd ever had.

I'm pretty sure I was, too.

We're With The Band

This is another picture of me and Alain. He had a band with the guy on the left, Jean-Pierre. I made Alain let me and Lindy sing with them because two people in a band is not a band, Alain.

At 15 and 13 Lindy and I owned the same dress. She always wanted to do everything I did and wear everything I wore. She probably begged my mother to buy her the same dress she bought me. And I probably yelled at her and said We're Not Twins You Stupid Moron. Because I have an incredibly sophisticated vocabulary from reading all the thick books in our library.

We entered a Battle of the Bands at the Casino de Royan, the next town over from Meschers on the west coast of France, and came in second. I was devastated but I remembered that it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. I bet I know who coined that phrase. LOSERS. Here we are singing at the Casino de Royan. As you can see, we just had the one performing outfit. We're even wearing matching shoes. Sure it's a horror to look at now but check out Alain's shoes. I hope to God we did not all plan to wear white shoes for the contest because if we did I have to turn in my subscription to Vogue and move to Bulgaria.

Three years later I was in college in Paris and dating a German named Karl, below. Karl devirginized me. I can still see the trauma etched on my face as it finally dawned on me why he kept pushing my head down to his crotch. I probably looked like someone in The Blair Witch Project. I saw Karl only once more, in New York, many, many, years later. His brother took me aside and said "Karl no longer speaks. He got tired of talking."

At dinner I kept up a steady stream of chatter and eventually he answered one of the forty hundred questions I asked him, Why did you give up talking? He said he had talked enough and was going to spend the rest of his life listening. Because I have excellent taste in men.

Why are some of my pictures oddly shaped? Because I used to put my photo albums together like this and yes I have a disease.

The next summer we were in Canet Plage in the south of France and my sister looked like this in a bikini: Horrifying.

She was 14 and had longer hair but I convinced her to let me cut it all off because A. I'm a terrible person and B. Not one boy found me remotely interesting while she wore that fucking bikini. But the only thing shorter hair did was call more attention to her body. She always had spectacular boobage until she lost them in a tragic aerobics accident many years later. No body fat? No boobs. Run and hide, A Cup, run and hide.

Meanwhile I can increase my cup size just by looking at pudding.

I Read This Book Before I Had Sex

We had a library in our home. I spent a lot of time in that library because that's where my father would send me when I was punished. And I was punished a lot. Not my fault I was smarter than him.

My sister Lindy never got in trouble so consequently never spent one minute in that room. I think she didn't learn to read until she was 28. I don't even know for a fact if she can read today because we only talk on the phone. Not my fault I was smarter than her.

I came to know every book in our library because I stopped sticking pins into my Dad's pictures long enough to read all the thick ones because I was sure they were the hardest. Then I would quote really big words at the dinner table. Just to punish him.

Eventually I got around to a thin book. Hardly visible among all the novels and biographies (Eleanor of Aquitaine! The Call of the Wild! Crime and Punishment!) was a pale blue hardcover called This is My Beloved by Walter Benton, first published in 1943. Inside I discovered lusty phrases like Your warm naked thighs and Your breasts are wonderfully alive under my kisses and the very disturbing Your lips cushioned the inherent murder in your teeth.

I was 15.

And had just kissed my first boy, Alain, in a town on the Atlantic coast of France called Meschers.

This is me and Alain, who was 17. Look how relaxed Alain was; look at me clutching my Kodak Brownie Camera as if he was going to steal it. You know the French. If he and I had gotten married we would have given birth not to a child but to one giant nose.

I came back from France that school year and read Walter Benton's incredibly gorgeous book of poetry. I thought I knew everything about love and the fine art of French kissing but as it turned out, apparently there was A LOT more to learn.

When I left Meschers, Alain gave me his little silver medallion from the most famous church in the world, Lourdes. Buying something from Lourdes often implies someone really needs it to keep them healthy. I hope I didn't kill him by accepting it.

But chances are good that I did.

So Happy Valentine's Day to all the boys and girls with "inherent murder in their teeth." It's a miracle I ever kissed anyone again after reading that line.

I still have that little silver medallion.