Some how I am thinking of the girl I lost my virginity to…. Let’s call her Ilsa Damenhinder. It was the night of my Junior prom and it was the front seat of the Ford Fairmont station wagon. She was s Wagnerian beauty, with blond braids down to her ass. We reeked of sweat from wild dancing, and Champaigne from reckless drinking. I think she threw up after the deed and the next day informed me that the whole thing felt like rape to her (she was no virgin mind you …she was sort of the opposite, but with serious issues). Well that was a freak out and you must understand I’d been in love with her since about the fifth grade… a real obsession… So maybe I had some anger in me along with the lust. She got my rabbi’s cherry the year after that while I was with Hedda Gabler at the Senior Prom. She was sort of doing community service… and now she is a real opera singer and all grown up…
I wrote a lot of love songs about Ilsa, she was a real muse for me, but this is not one of them. This is a love song for three other muses. One is still living and the other two are dead. Moira is alive, but Linda and Katherine, or Rinny as we called her both died in drug/alcohol related car wrecks.
Rinny and I were Steve Martin friends. We knew every word and would do the routines in the hall and at recess. We loved to laugh and she was a real cut up in a sort Irish Catholic gift of gab way. I bring up Ilsa only because it reminds me of the time I got a call from Ilsa in the sixth grade. My heart beat wildily. Linda got on the phone first and aked me if I liked Ilsa… I said yes and she said…”Well she wants to talk to you.” So we started talking and long and short she managed to ask me out… the trick was that it was actually Katherine and she felt I was now some how trapped into dating her. I was furious and it really fucked up our friendship and soon she was off to Sacred Heart Catholic School and then to Florida where she was side swiped by a drunk driver while riding her bicycle. I’ve felt original sin guilt for not going along with her joke and just dating her… you know before she died. She should have at least had sweetheart to laugh with in her last year on earth.
Marcel Itin circa 1973
I was never in Love with Linda, but I cared for her deeply… probably becase we shared the sadness of Katherine in common. I remember she got involved with drugs and booze way back in Junior Highschool and I was worried about her and knowing that she was trying to hide from Katherine’s death and pretending to be happy … and surrounding herself with people dumb enough to believer her lies. She was a real dark German soul that way.
I recall a conversation we had in Biology class while disecting fetal pigs. I just came out and told her that I was worried about her smoking pot and taking acid and I told her I thought she was too young to get so fucked up. She told me, “Alex, you are a special person… You have a special sort of brain that makes you very weird and funny and you see things in ways that most people can’t. You are like that naturally, but I’m not. Most of us are not. When I smoke pot I see the world like you always do… You can’t deny me the ability to see the world in this strange, beautiful way, just because you see it like that all the time…. can you?”
Maybe she was just blowing smoke up my ass, but it did shut me up and give me pause. Having lived long enough and suffered enough mood swings from manic to depressive…I’ve come to see what she was talking about. But Freshman year Linda joined Katherine. Some how she got drunk and ate a bunch of magic mushrooms and got in a car with someone who did the same, or worse and that person managed to Launch them into a tree on King Street. They were DOA.
This brings us to Moira who is still alive and hopefully well in California. I got to know her in seventh grade… she left Catholic school after Katherine died and we were in the same home room (Mr. Stein). She had a sort of lovely Irish sadness… pale skin, long hair and the body of an elegant weed. I was smitten from the first sight, but we never had a romance…. it was unrequited love, but I think very requited friendship. We had Katherine and then Linda in common… She became very sad and very afraid that she was next on the hit list. I was scared too. She was a real horse person and since I was working with horses as a stable boy, cleaning up shit for rich girls who didn’t want to. She was doing the same at a different stable, so we had the whole stable horse world too.
I was a chubby kid all during puberty and in ninth grade I decided that I would loose that weight. I became a bit of a maniac and started running vast distances and not eating. I would often magically come upon Moira on the back country horse trails… she on steed and me on foot and I’d run along with her and we’d talk. She’d also taken to haunting graveyards and I would find her among the stones and we’d talk about the men in her life and God and Jesus and any and everything. I seem to think we did a lot of that teenage phone call stuff too….for hours. We just loved to talk I guess.
Now when my dad got sick I found her in the halls at Greenwich Hospital. Turned out her dad had the same kind of cancer. He passed a few months before my dad. We spent some weird intense time together – she mourning, me still waiting for morning… After my dad passed I went real bonkers. She was already back in L.A. I think… working with horses and then working For Wes Anderson on Rushmore (I helped location scout private schools on the East Coast when they were planning to go for a more traditional New England prep school look for Rushmore Academy).
Anyway I lost all sense of time and space and time difference in California and I kept calling her at ungodly hours. I was sort of falling to pieces and felt she was probably the only person in the world with the right glue to put my egg head back together again… but she couldn’t and she couldn’t stand the four a.m. phone calls … and maybe she just had too much on her plate and my frantic babbling probably scared her as much as finding her in tears in cemetaries used to scare me way back when… and she flipped out on me and the long and short of it is that I haven’t talked to her in almost seven years. It seems like too long. Anyway she was one of three muses from my youth. Three Tall Women… I like to listen to the whisper of muses still. You have to listen, because sometimes they stop talking… sometimes the gris gris wears off… sometimens young women die, or come to hate you. There comes a time.
