by Tamra Lucid.
When Ronnie felt I was going to stay he began taking me to his secret places. Places until then he had only gone to alone. The first was Dino’s Lodge on Sunset Boulevard, somehow elegant and seedy at the same time; masculine to be sure, but in a subdued way. Back in the day it had been glamorous. The stars went there to impress their nightly conquests. The view of Los Angeles stunned. Huge windows and very low light made it seem as though the few tables were perched in the air. A dreamy blanket of lights across the black of after-midnight on a Wednesday. Only a few years from closure, staffed by old surly waiters who had once been handsome and urbane, when serving Liz Taylor and Sinatra, the place already felt haunted.
I had begun wearing Ronnie’s clothes so we were both dressed all in black. I sat on his lap while we waited for our drinks and our food. The waiter seemed to know him and had no reaction to our public affection. At first, I felt awkward, because my mom, having been a waitress in a diner, well, gals didn’t sit in guy’s laps at her tables, nope. She was from Indiana, Church of Christ, that’s just not done. But Ronnie was so casual about it.
Somewhere up in Lodi my mom must have been tossing in her sleep thinking, “Nobody’s going to marry that slut. What will the people at the church say? I’ve got a queer son and a whore daughter, and those two are the good ones.”
I was curious if Ronnie brought other girls to Dino’s so I asked him do you come here often? He explained that he always dined at Dino’s alone. If he felt a cold coming on his remedy was steak and straight Scotch at Dino’s. He’d been going there since he was nineteen but had never been carded. He had become legal just a about a month before we met. I thought he was so sophisticated.
Ronnie has a sense for finding archetypal empty spots in iconic public places, Dino’s was the first he took me to. When he allowed me into his world his conversation turned deep. But at the same time he was guarded, and checking me. He was very serious as he analyzed my responses. Apparently I was giving him the right answers because with each one the pheromones flew. He talked about avant-garde music, German Expressionist cinema, Toulouse Lautrec. I didn’t know about any of them.
My fear was that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. My family and my relationships had taught me I was stupid. People had been relating to me as a dumb blonde since I was an infant towhead. When Ronnie asked me “what do you think?” I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. But I was flattered that he wanted to know my thoughts. My opinions had not been very welcome before. When I admitted I had never heard of Rimbaud he told me stories about him that made me realize there were other ways to live life. All his stories made me feel that way. The stories of those lives made you want to live a life.
Ronnie told me an elaborate and completely false history of his family, skirting reality but making an impressive facade. Instead of his parents being Holocaust survivors they were aristocrats who left Europe before the war. He knew bits of French, Russian, German, Polish, and Van Nuys. His example of how to judge the music of a language was how “I love you” sounds in it. “In French it’s Je taime” he purred. Then he barked, “In German it’s Ich liebe dich.” I was his Gomez. He was my Morticia. Every time he spoke French I lost my mind. Despite my Capricorn sensibilities I wanted to ravish him right there.
I had been hanging around with dope smokers. Ronnie was impressive. He made history foreplay. I remember sitting on his half sofa in his bachelor on Larabee just north of Sunset Boulevard hearing for the first time the story of Alexander the Great.
- That Ronnie knew the story of Alexander the Great.
- The story of Bucephalus, the greatest horse in history. Don’t believe me? Name another horse with a city named after him.
- The way he told the story I could see it.
- That he would tell me at all, that he would educate me, while turning me on.
At the same time aloof enough to make me feel uneasy, but I was going to enjoy this as long as possible, before he decided I couldn’t keep up.
Our breath intermingled as we sat together. We breathed the same air. We thought the same thoughts. I was always a stranger in this world. I had finally met someone else who saw the world as I did and who felt life as deeply as me. There we sat at Dino’s, reunited twins looking at the view we would later be looking at every day just up the hill in our home. We were looking at our future, as we watched the lights of the city we were born in, while we talked about the past. But that night I didn’t know if it was going to last. I wanted it to. My sense of destiny said I belonged here with this boy. He could lie like Odysseus and I felt like Athena as that bird flying giddily in the rafters of Penelope’s house. It’s a good thing they didn’t check my ID because I wasn’t old enough to legally drink the sherry in my glass.
I realized the world I was living in, the world I was raised in, was only a half life. Ronnie brought with him the calling of an artist. Sitting next to him I forgot about the demands that had been plaguing me because I was going through the motions of what other people thought my life should be. Returning to my world it felt like an empty shell of an existence. My job cleaning apartments with my loud mouth brother. The boyfriend that was never a friend. Through Ronnie loving me I felt like myself, something I had never felt before. It began the day we met when he insisted on calling me Tamra, not Tammy. Even though Ronnie was seducing and bullshitting me, his bullshit was more real than the bullshit I was living doing the right thing. If loving him was wrong I didn’t want to be right.
At first Dean Martin owned the place with his face on the sign. But not for long. He wound up suing the new owners. He wanted them to remove his name and likeness from the restaurant he no longer had anything to do with. Meanwhile, the late 1950s early 60s hit TV show 77 Sunset Strip featured the parking lot of Dino’s Lodge every episode. Dean Martin’s family later remembered that he would watch with a grimace. His face remained on the sign until the place was demolished. They replaced it with another anonymous office building.
Ronnie and I didn’t know then that when Dean Martin ran Dino’s lounge singers entertained the diners. Dean had one rule: female singers only. A day would come when Ronnie and I would be touring, playing seven riot grrrl shows one summer. At several of those shows controversy broke out because Ronnie, being the wrong gender, had the unmitigated gall to sing a song with his own band. But we were equalists, not feminists. Feathers were ruffled. Opinions were sealed. A faction remained angry because he should not have been allowed to break the female only rule. That romantic night at Dino’s foreshadowed the life we would live together. A secret message that we could only decipher after search engines were invented. Only then would we find out that we bonded in a club where only females were allowed to perform, foreshadowing our days in riot grrrl.
The after sex ritual: long drives after midnight in Ronnie’s purple and black 280Z, on the backstreets and the freeways of L.A., ending in Chinatown, for abalone soup at an all night restaurant with high ceilings, no decor, and interrogational lighting. Nobody needs to see abalone soup so well at 2 A.M. Outside of the restaurant it felt magical, being there at night, when all the shops were closed, darkness all around, except flickering neon signs, and traffic lights mechanically changing without a car in sight. Haunted Chinatown, walking with our arms around each other, by the display windows of lanterns and Buddhist figurines, past the silent wishing well where goldfish slept.
