For Love or Money

I’ve been in therapy as far back as I can remember. I want to say that none of these mental health professionals ever really helped me, but that’s just unfair. What if I hadn’t seen them? What would my life have looked like? Could I have been a suicide? Isn’t drinking a quart of vodka each day a kind of slow suicide? Of course, it doesn’t feel like that. You do it seeking some kind of relief. Ultimately it provides none, but you continue on, thinking maybe the next martini will do the trick. 

My favorite of all the therapists was Ann Levine. I saw her in my mid-twenties when life had become particularly difficult. I was living with my boyfriend who’d moved out here from New York to be with me. I knew right away it was a big mistake. When you come right down to the nuts and bolts of the thing, the problem was he simply wouldn’t pay for anything….ever. He was an artist, a conceptual artist, which meant he slept late, took a run on the beach, then went to the library, out to lunch with friends, and by the time I came home from my hated job he wanted to go out to art openings and shmooze. His true talent was the shmooze, and it’s paid off well for him. He just had a one-man show at a major West Coast Museum. I attended the opening reception and it was a bright shiny slice of L.A. intelligentsia...as hidously uncomfortable for me as it always was. The relationship took about a year to unravel, during which time that therapist was able to walk me through some very tough issues where I had to look at my own relationship to my artwork and how on earth to make a buck. The two often don’t intersect.

One afternoon she said ‘Well, Maud, what do you like to do?’ I didn’t mention my love of drinking, but I narrowed it down to painting and cooking. She came up with a brilliant idea. “what about catering? I bet there is a lot of turnover in that field!” So, I found myself a job, almost immediately, cooking for a local caterer who fed people on commercial shoots. I must mention also that the owner of the business was tall and handsome and drove a little sports car. “Gay” I figured. I probably should mention my deep and abiding love of gay men. I’m most definitely a girl who loves boys who love boys. This is surely what allowed me to flirt outrageously with my boss, and work all those long hours...I just adored him! Every now and then he’d get an actual party to cater rather than his usual lunches on location for film shoots. This was another level of labor, with complex planning, bartending, and staffing for the event. We had to make platters of Hors d’Oeuvres since it was a pool party. Imagine making tiny little shapes of edible stuff for 60 people. I think about it now and my eyes cross. He had a collection of finger food ideas mostly stolen from Martha Stewart’s compendium, “Entertaining”, which is a book I always found to be ridiculously fussy. She has a habit of taking the tiniest bits of food, say, a leaf of endive, and stuffing it with goat cheese...but not plain goat cheese...goat cheese mixed with fresh dill and capers so it would take an extra 2 hours to prepare. We showed up at 9am on the day of the party and got to work stuffing tiny shapes with goopy stuff, arranging everything in large plastic boxes to bring to the event which started at 5pm. The servers showed up at the kitchen at 3 looking clean and shiny, and I washed my face and threw on some lipstick. My boss did the same… only chapstick. 

The party was up in the Malibu hills at the home of a famous director. Their kitchen was enormous, though rarely used...kind of like a prop kitchen you’d see in one of his films...all quarry tiles and stainless steel. We set up the bar out by the pool and unloaded our big platters to begin piling up these finger foods in an artful arrangement. I never did go out and meet any of the guests since I was stuck right there in the kitchen, but I could peek out the window and see the action. People were drinking, snorting cocaine, smoking pot, laughing like hyenas. By the way, it was the mid 80’s and a very different climate from what it’s like today. Drugs were everywhere, as was sex, and lots of big money was flying around. Nobody thought anything of it. You probably know that cocaine kills the appetite, as booze will also if you drink enough of it, and those platters of lovely appetizers were being carried around poolside with no takers...none. The servers brought back the trays untouched. All that food lay intact. We should have made plaster replicas. I watched a couple of the prettier staff girls being picked up and thrown into the pool. It was that kind of party. Nobody ate. By midnight the crowd started thinning and it was our job to clean up. I was still left in the kitchen, which was fine with me. I had to decide what needed to be tossed out, and what we might give away to our local homeless shelter, or maybe even take home. My boss was out there bussing tables and cleaning up broken glass by the pool. I watched him take a full tray of hollowed-out cherry tomatoes that he’d filled with guacamole and put one right on the end of his nose as he continued to run around. He finally came back into the kitchen, tomato still attached, and managed to blow the thing off the tip of his nose as he aimed in my direction. Perfect shot. The thing hit me right in the chest, just at heart-level. I was IN LOVE! Gay or not, this was the man of my dreams. Clearly he liked me too...why else aim at me? I made it my business to find out everything I could about my beloved. He’d been married twice, to WOMEN! I gathered my friends about me to convince me that ‘Three is a charm.’ 

Sometimes with love there’s a catch. You don’t see it coming. You’d never guess it. In this case it took years to fathom. I married for money and martinis. It was that simple. The problem was though, drink enough martinis for enough years and the money will evaporate. The marriage will evaporate. It was just like ‘Days of Wine and Roses’. What seemed like romance turned grey, then black, colored by morning hangovers and unpaid bills. I was lucky enough to quit drinking. He was lucky enough to find another wife, making her number four. I just don’t get this love business. The price is way too high.