The Joy of Uber Driving Read online

  I guess “What happens in San Francisco, stays in San Francisco” except when people like me write a book about it (smile). My apologies if you are married to a guy who frequents out of town conventions, for injecting possible suspicions about his behavior on such occasions.

  When I was fifteen, Dad got me a job as a nurse’s aide at the Presbyterian Hospital in Whittier. I felt a discernable resentment coming from the other nurse’s aides, who regarded their job as a career, not a temporary job handed to them by an influential father. Still, I had some very memorable experiences there. One time, I was chased around the room by a guy I had just finished bed bathing. Turns out he was only there for tests and wasn’t sick at all. Another time, I was looking after a woman named Rosemary, who was a habitual and unsuccessful suicide patient. She came in twice during my tenure there: once for jumping in an empty pool and once for slashing her wrists. She even had previous scars on her wrists. Every time she was wheeled into the hospital, there would be a palpable sigh among the staff. “Here comes Rosemary again!” This was her home away from home. I liked her and enjoyed visiting with her. She was glamorous and sophisticated. (How interesting that I was drawn to this ultimate victim, which I would later become, almost to the point of suicide myself).

  She’d taken a liking to me after I had confided in her about my singing and handed her a 45-rpm demo record. I was excited when she decided to promote me to her contacts in the music business. Nothing much came of them, as they were local and relatively insignificant and were really interested in only one thing, which, thankfully, they never got. Luckily for me, one had a recording studio, which afforded me a few more single demo records for my collection and a lot of practice time with a mic.

  When I was sixteen, Dad again took on a new passion: buying newer and bigger boats every year. His need to impress was insatiable, and he soon acquired a mooring in Long Beach and one in Avalon, along with an apartment in Avalon. He eventually became the commodore of the Catalina Yacht Club, and I began to enjoy becoming an island fixture every summer. I strutted around in my newly formed voluptuous body with my cocoa-buttered tan and my sexy (1957-style) one-piece bathing suit. I also enjoyed singing from time to time at various clubs in Avalon. For seven years, we took our newest “stink-pot” (motor boat) to Avalon and lived in our apartment there every summer.

  At seventeen, I boasted about having three dates a night in Avalon, even though I was still a virgin. My Jezebel was in full bloom. I was not going to let any guy be with me long enough to become his victim like my mother, who suffered so much being married to my dad.

  As more threads unravel and dots are connected, I’m now aware that my “Jezebel” trait first revealed itself when I was in eighth grade. I had two girlfriends, Suzanne and Janet, who walked home from school with me every day, along with a boy named John. One day, John informed us that he was going to ask one of us to go steady. He would pick one girl every day to finish the walk with. On the second or third time he picked me, he blurted out that he had something he wanted to ask me. I knew immediately what he was going to say, and I picked up speed and then ran away from him as fast as I could. He yelled, “Wait! I want to ask you to go steady with me!” I turned and stuck my tongue out at him and continued running home to plop on my bed and cry into my pillow.

  In high school, I lucked out and went with the dreamiest guy on the football team, Ronnie, who had wavy blond hair and sexy brown eyes. Things were going along great until one day; I heard that someone caught him in the boys’ locker room posing in front of a mirror, flexing his muscles. Ah-hah! Now I had him. I couldn’t wait to exercise my feminine power and demean him by saying, “Hi, muscle man!” Things never were so great after that: I was thrown over by a cute blond, brown-eyed cheerleader (whom he later married).

  Later, I dated Bill, another guy on the football team. I enjoyed being his girlfriend and hanging with the “in” crowd, but when he asked me to go steady and gave me his letterman’s sweater and class ring to wear around my neck, I was not thrilled. I wore them for about a week, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer and gave him back his sweater and ring. I felt like I had released a heavy ball and chain from around my neck. Everyone sided with Bill, the football hero, which took me down a few notches in popularity. I did essentially the same thing to my boyfriend Pete at Cal Berkeley when he wanted to pin me. But this time, instead of giving in to him for a minute, I ran out of his frat house late at night and bolted home before he could finish his sentence. That was the end of Pete and me. And so it went ad infinitum until I was twenty-two. If I didn’t run, I would find a way to insult them so they would run from me if they got too close.

  PING! A rider called Fred stood waiting for me on the corner of Union and Divisadero as I was on my way home to Novato in Marin. He was also headed in that direction. He was a portly seventy-year-old man who had a hangdog expression of perpetual sadness. With feigned joviality, he announced, “Hi, I’m Fred, but you can call me Freddy!” I told him he reminded me of my old college boyfriend Pete at UC Cal. That seemed to please him, and then he added, “I used to know a guy name Pete at Cal. What year were you there?” (Before you jump to conclusions, it was not the same year, so it was not the same Pete.) We continued our conversation about our university days. He said he was in a thirty-five-year marriage and had three grown children. But his most poignant admission was regarding what he believed to be the love of his life at Cal. He recalled how they used to drive to the hills above the campus and lie on the grass looking up at the stars, talking about the future. But on the day he proposed to her, she mysteriously turned cold and walked away. She never answered any of his calls and avoided him on campus whenever their paths crossed. He never knew why she did that. He said it took him twelve years to get over his grief before he met his present wife. With a hint of sadness, he said he would never forget her. I couldn’t breathe. I remained silent the rest of the trip.

  I fell into what I would call the “dishonorable tradition” of rushing sororities and became a ZTA at Cal. Although all the more “classy” sororities had rejected me, I found that my sisters at ZTA were a lot like me. We were a rebellious group of “unclassy” (not from established old money) women with diverse talents and backgrounds. However, the next semester I discovered that a particular diversity was definitely not encouraged when I was on the other side of the rush culture. To prepare for the upcoming rush week, our house mother admonished us against accepting anyone of color, Asian, Latino, or Jewish heritage. I was inherently repulsed by this but brushed it aside and went along for the ride. I am ashamed when I remember this incident, but it seems we now belong to a culture that does exactly the same thing: brush our morals aside when it’s expedient to do so. This may have played a part in blocking my path to self-love. It is now my firm belief that personal integrity is one of the major keys to self-love. How many times have I gone along with the crowd, muzzling that quiet, still voice inside my head?

  THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC

  Blinds Me with Love

  When I turned twenty-two, there was one guy who managed to penetrate my Jezebel firewall—my Catalina Island lover. He was the most astonishingly handsome and intriguing man I’d ever met. His irresistible charm held me captive. Maybe it was his light green eyes that seemed to cross ever so slightly when looking deeply into mine, or his wide, welcoming smile suggesting a promise of something exciting later. Richard Gere in Pretty Woman comes to mind as a fairly accurate example of how I remembered him looking and being.

  Or perhaps it just had to do with the fact that it was a summer romance on an island. By its very nature, it was inherently noncommittal and temporary. Perfect! But I was too smug. I was not prepared for what was about to unfold.

  As a teenager, with television being in its black-and-white infancy and with only a weekly segment of Hopalong Cassidy to look forward to, I was addicted to reading the daily comics, especially the Sunday edition in full color. One in particular: Brenda Starr was about a glamorous
redheaded newspaper reporter. The love of her life was a handsome mystery man called Basil St. John, who grew black orchids and who always appeared and then disappeared mysteriously. I will call my island lover Basil St. John, because he turned out to be both the love of my life and my mystery man, and instead of black orchids, he wove swirls of black magic around me like a spider web.

  We began our affair on this island paradise where Basil was captain of his catamaran and a bartender at a restaurant called The Galleon. I first met him while sitting on the “pickup” wall that separated the beach from the main street. As I sat there demurely, watching all the cute guys pass by, he came right up to me with his melting vanilla ice cream cone, which, of course, dripped on my knee. Seizing the opportunity, he gave me a seductive look and asked, “May I?” Not waiting for an answer, he bent down to lick it off. Sometime during that summer, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, my life as a virgin came to a screeching halt.

  It happened one night on Dad’s boat. We had been salsa dancing at one of the island’s backstreet nightclubs and ended up taking a shore boat to our boat. It was unoccupied and welcoming, since Dad was up at our apartment on the hill. Basil and I sat out on the back deck talking and making out until the wee hours. I had a sudden realization that everything was quiet, which meant that all the shore boats were probably done for the night. I frantically yelled, “Shore boat, shore boat!” while he remained quietly composed, waiting for me to calm down and relax into the inevitable.

  Others had tried, but he alone succeeded on that starry night inside a boat that rocked gently with every wave we made. His kisses were so tender and passionate; I couldn’t resist his wandering hands on my body. I groaned in ecstasy as I felt the sharp pain of my very first penetration. Holding me in his arms and kissing my forehead as he smoothed the hair back from my eyes, he asked, “Now that I have your body, how do I get inside your mind?”

  PING! It was 5:30 p.m., and I had to shake off my agitated state of mind after having been delayed an hour due to a misdirected pickup for my supplements before I startedy Uber run for the day. I then repeated my mantra and told God that I trusted it was all perfect. My Uber app directed me to a marina in San Rafael where a man named Mark requested a ride.

  A ruggedly handsome, swashbuckling man approached my car and greeted me with bright enthusiasm, which did not match my mood. He asked how I was, and I replied, “A little short of fantastic, but there’s hope.”

  Smiling, he said, “Hope is the most important thing there is. Without it there’s nothing. But it’s best not to have expectations.”

  I surmised, “You sound like a philosopher.” There was an immediate connection between us, and we began a conversation that exploded with energy and excitement.

  I looked through the rearview mirror at his face while he talked and was intrigued by his expressive eyebrows and sparkling blue eyes. He was so good looking, I wondered if he was in the movie business. It turned out he was a computer tech for most of the big movie studios in Hollywood.

  When I asked him where he lived, he told me he had many houses in the US and in Costa Rica. He lived on his 48’ Chris Craft boat whenever he stayed in Marin. He was a young-looking fifty with two kids, a three-year-old and a five-year-old. His girlfriend lived in Marin. He admitted he was basically a wanderer. I wondered how many hearts he had broken in his wanderlust life.

  On top of everything else, he owned thirty-five different vehicles, including antique cars, motorcycles, jeeps, luxury cars, and a couple of yachts. I said that he sounded like a mini Jay Leno, and he responded by telling me that they were actually good friends. I thought to myself, OMG, this man is the ultimate catch! (If he were indeed “catchable.”) But he really capped it off when he told me he had studied and read the whole A Course in Miracles twice with his mother. Despite his many personal modes of transportation, he mentioned he was a chronic user of Ubers wherever he went, often using them five or six times a day for various odd jobs.

  I said, “Well, you are the perfect advertisement for Uber.” He agreed. We ended the trip with a warm handshake and an eye-to-eye acknowledgment. As I drove off, I thanked God for having made me late so I could experience meeting this truly amazing man. Like so many men I have fallen for in the past, he was a gentle reminder that such men very seldom choose to commit to a long-term relationship.

  Thus began my fifteen-year obsession of unrequited love with my mystery man. That summer, I spent many evenings sitting at The Galleon bar flirting with him and playing the role of a femme fatale. After two or more Vodka Collins, I sang Black Magic to him and later recorded it for him to keep. I transferred to UCLA partly because of him and partly for the great art and theater courses that were offered there.

  He lived in a big house right on the beach in Venice with a group of his wild, openly sexual friends. They were all older and far more sophisticated than I. We reenacted our Catalina tryst many times upstairs in his spacious bedroom. He gave me a gold bracelet with my initials engraved on a perfume container charm and said he wouldn’t mind if that was all I wore for the rest of the day. He thought I looked better naked than clothed. Once we took a small outboard motor boat to Catalina, just the two of us facing twenty-two miles of ocean alone together in what was little more than a dinghy. I had no fear because I was with HIM. I savored each moment, submerged in the thrill of my desire for him, which was embellished by the salty smell of the sea and the wind whipping through my clothes and ruffling my hair.

  I loved the feel of his warm, smooth skin and strong muscles and his light green eyes that penetrated my soul. He often teased me by sucking my lips between his teeth, and then he’d suddenly let go as if to say he had to stop himself before he swallowed me whole.

  We often finished each other’s sentences, but he never said, “I love you.” He only managed to say, “Lose ten pounds and I might fall in love with you.” My lover, my abuser—and now I know what it’s like to be under that spell.

  Later, when I heard the news from a friend of his that he’d married someone in the family way, I took off my bracelet and threw it in the ocean. My spirit was broken. I no longer had the desire to continue my studies at UCLA, so I quit in my senior year. I brought down the curtain on Catalina and Basil St. John and walked barefoot into my next scenery change—Hollywood.

  LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU

  Pleeeze?!

  Having Basil still on my mind led me to desperate acts of defiance, and what better place than Hollywood to do the deed? Looking hot in my sixties mini dresses with my knee-high boots, I sought my revenge through fame and fortune. I sashayed in and out of agents’ and directors’ offices with backroom couches that promised stardom. But stardom never came. You can imagine what “came” instead. Being raised by an openly lascivious father, I was never surprised or insulted by the animal nature of men in power. And I was equally complicit with my agenda to become a star by any means necessary. Funny how the “whatever means possible” never panned out.

  One of the things that came instead was Basil St. John, not yet divorced but in and out of my life like a rented car. I couldn’t resist. My justifiable anger was reduced to pitiful slave-like acquiescence. He’d show up in the middle of the night wherever I happened to be living. We’d spend one or two days of nonstop bliss (or was it agony?) together, and then he would disappear for another six to twelve months. I was hypnotized by this wild, unpredictable man and never stopped thinking about him. He certainly knew how to play the game to keep me permanently obsessed. Just like Brenda Starr, I was single and in love with a man who would never commit his love to me and who would always exit stage right . . . or was it left? I guess whichever way was quicker and more accessible.

  In between sudden Basil St. John appearances, I turned my focus onto becoming a singing and acting star. I rented an apartment with my old college roommate Judee, who had graduated while I dropped out in my senior year. We lived down the street from the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Blvd. I watched her star rise and sh
ine as she gained regular TV appearances on My Three Sons, Dr. Kildare, and Bonanza. Meanwhile, I worked in an aluminum extrusion company taking orders. But stardom was always just a breath away. Trouble was, I could never quite catch my breath while jumping in and out of one bed of promises after another. Judee never had to stoop so low. She had some sort of magic gismo, (called self-love) which I frantically tried to find but never could. I did manage to have professional pictures taken for my nonexistent resume, which boosted my ego if nothing else.

  Not to be outdone, I discovered my own magic formula that brought me another kind of ego gratification. It was a bit of a distraction, but I didn’t lack for attention and fun when I became friends with a group of prominent European men, a couple of whom lived temporarily in our apartment complex. One was Francois, a very sweet, soft-spoken Frenchman and a foreign car salesman, who looked a little like Charlie Chaplin. There was Vittorio, or “Vitto,” a tall, young, muscular Italian ballet dancer in Vegas, somewhat like Rudolph Nureyev; Gregorio, a slightly bald Italian and an importer of Italian knits; Serge, an Armenian architect with curly gray hair and a superbly tanned face, looking like “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” He designed famous nightclubs and restaurants in Hollywood. Giorgio, with his boyish good looks, was an Italian Blue Angel pilot, and Raoul, a tall, bald, portly Frenchman, was the owner of an art gallery on Sunset Strip.