A little late and clueless but still…

I know, I know, I know. I’m a week late for Valentine’s Day content. But my timing has always sucked. Just ask my wife.

That is not an exaggeration. Example: We had been dating for a few months. She already “knew.” I, on the other hand, am clueless. She had been leaving circulars for jewelry stores laying around my house with certain styles of engagement rings circled for a few weeks. I still didn’t take the hint. We were laying around delighted on a Sunday afternoon and, out of nowhere, she told me that some doctor at the hospital where she worked had asked her out and asked the fatal, “where is this relationship going?” question. I guess I finally got it and responded by asking her to marry me.

Terrible timing. But, luckily for me, she said yes.

So, how did we get to that point? I have written in the past about how I do not plan. I tend to go with the flow and all of the best things in my life have happened by accident. And, after accidentally figuring out that taking a journalism class would give me needed English credits and making my way from that Journalism 101 class to the staff of the college newspaper, I was made the arts and entertainment editor immediately, probably because I was a musician.

The next semester, after the summer break, I interviewed for and got the gig as editor-in-chief. I have written a little about this situation before so, short version, a few weeks before school started, the four faculty advisors sat me down and told me that there would be a spy among the raft of cub reporters coming onto the staff. It was about a really dumb feud about grading within the department and ended up having hugely negative consequences for the department head (who was also the lead advisor to the paper). But at that point, all I knew was that this girl named Linda was, to quote the department head, “the enemy.”

And I treated her as such. I had to give her assignments, so I made sure to give her the worst stories on the budget for that week. The one she has still never forgiven me for was a story about the remodeling of a bathroom in the administrative building. In my defense, those are the kinds of stories that often go to cub reporters. And if they do a good job on those really boring and seemingly inconsequential stories, then they get moved up the ladder and get better stories.

But, Linda was never allowed to move more than a rung up the ladder.

But because she was stubborn and tenacious and a little vindictive (which will be important later), she kept at it through a series of crappy assignments. And I got to know her beyond the faculty warnings, through two avenues. Friday afternoons at the local burger place called Weber’s that would not look askance when one of us who was of age bought ridiculous amounts of beer and brought it to a table full of friends, most of whom were obviously underage. (It was the mid-1980s, a very different time.) And at a series of ridiculously debauched parties. Dina was a stupidly talented photographer who is still a shooter of much note in the L.A. area and started shooting punk rock shows when she was maybe 16. She was one of the youngest ones on staff at, I think, 18 but somehow had her own apartment near the campus that hosted pretty much weekly parties where I first learned how to drink. Poorly. My future in the rooms of AA was probably obvious to anyone at those parties.

Me and a few others on staff put together a terrible little band and played at one of those parties and I had no idea that Linda had a thing for musicians. Lucky me. After that, she made it pretty obvious that she was interested. Or at least obvious to anyone who was not as clueless as I am.

I had a photo class final assignment for something artsy in black and white and I had an idea for a kind of abstract image of my Mazda RX-7 with a pair of female legs and high heels sticking out of the driver’s side window. And Linda had amazing legs. I asked her to be my model and she agreed.

I remember my mom saying after that she seemed nice and me responding with some flip line about her wanting to have my children. Which probably came close to stopping her heart. I was such a bad “player” with zero game and had only had one kinda-sorta girlfriend at age 25 and my parents were both afraid I was gay. (Again, mid-80’s. Working-class parents being accepting of this was not really a thing yet.)

Anyway… At this point it gets weird.

Linda moved on from our community college (back then still called junior college) and started taking classes at Cal State Northridge and I had not seen her in probably a year. That terrible party band had grown into the first version of Rev. Bill and the Soul Believers and we had a regular gig at a place called Something’s Fishy, a sushi place in Woodland Hills, right around the corner from the college.

It was December 2, 1986, which was Linda’s 24th birthday. She was supposed to go out with her boyfriend but, when she went to his apartment to meet up, she found him asleep… in bed with another girl.

Remember the vindictive from earlier? So, she took his credit card out of his wallet and left after calling her best friend and telling her what had happened and that they were going out for sushi on his card. See where this is going?

They walked in, she saw the band and tried to get her friend to leave because she didn’t want to see me. But she hung out. I chatted her up between sets and got her phone number. And then, when we were done playing and packing up, she decided to make out with the bass player on the sidewalk. And for some reason, I still was intent on asking her out.

I had tickets to see Toto a couple of weeks later. I called. Her mom answered and I left a message. She didn’t call back. I tried again and mom answered again and I left a message again and she did not call again. I thought I would try one more time and then give up because it appeared she was not interested. On call number three, she answered.

It turns out that mom, who really wanted Linda dating the son of her best friend, had never given her the messages. I asked her out. She said yes.

So the Valentine’s angle. About two months after that first date, we had our first V-Day. I cooked for her (at my parents’ house) and then had a gig playing for a college party at the old Bonaventure Hotel. I dedicated “When a Man Loves a Woman” to her and, only found out much later, that she ended up in the restroom crying when a group of girls came in from the party chattering (so she tells me) about the “cute” guy singing. One of them—coincidentally a girl five or six years my junior who grew up on the same street I did —looked at her and said, “You must be Linda.”

At that point, she later told me, she knew and started pushing me. Which I am thankful for every day. Again. Clueless.

Last week, we went to the still-new-to-us (because we had never been there) Durango Station and had Ai Pono Hawaiian street food. Chicken teriyaki bowl for her and loco moco for me and then got frozen custard to go and took it home and watched “The Traitors”. It was our 38th Valentine’s Day. And it was perfect.