THE OBLIGATORY ROBIN AND THIS DOWNWARD-FACING DOG

Sometimes I think of Robin, one of the best actresses I have ever seen, starring as "Stella" in Tennessee Williams' "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", raunchily blowing Johnny Reno's saxophone onstage, outrageously beautiful and kindhearted, and feel that old sadness that was striking me so hard in 1988 I'd become suicidal.

None of that emotional drama of mine had anything at all to do with Robin, yet she tried valiantly to save me from what many around me simply did not understand.  One buddy, now a current "king" of the local jazz scene, called me up in 1988 to say he was abandoning me because he did not want to be around if I committed suicide.  Indeed, the pain Bipolar was wreaking on me had its social consequences even after several years in a therapist's office working to untangle the family dysfunctions that had surrounded me as a child, the eventual "super-rejection" of my father's suicide when I was 16 and many more, even deeper, difficulties I had to face.  By 1988, I was beginning to realize that something was seriously wrong with me, the evidence being these repeated "fits" I had that often scared friends and worried family.  Was this my heavy drinking?  Was it the dope?

Seriously, I did not know.

I met Robin just as I was entering Hades.  Friends and I attended a birthday party of a longstanding friend of ours, and besides me running back and forth along a fence and barking back at the barking dog on the other side, something my doped-up buddies found hilarious, all sat amazed as we sat in the dark--where I found Robin, so drunk herself she reached-out and hugged me, a perfect stranger, hugged me so hard I could barely breathe.  Robin also had an alcohol problem.  But I was worse.  Sitting close to her in the darkened den, I unbuttoned her jeans, feeling her up as we kissed.  She had an orgasm and vomited at precisely the same time.  Such was my friendship with Robin. 

That incident became comedy gold among some of my more irreverent friends.  "Gordon can't even grope a girl without her throwing up".  I laughed too.  It was funny in a saddening kind of way.

In 1988, I was so drunk so often that often I did not remember people.  I didn't remember Robin as the woman I'd felt-up at that party the night I "met her" again.  We were at a birthday party on King Street off Maple Avenue when I spotted a real beauty across the room.  The beauty and I locked eyes.  The Jacob's Ladder of electricity mounted between us.  So I thought, "I'm making a move", and stepped forward into the bedroom, sat down halfway to the beauty on a dresser.  The beauty then moved forward and sat next to me.  I noticed her hand between our thighs, and I carefully placed mine over hers. 

Suddenly, the beauty's hand clamped around mine and she threw our locked hands into the air while shouting, "LOOK WHAT I JUST CAUGHT!" 

Yeah, that was Robin.  Same woman, different blackout. 

Problem was, Robin was "attached"--to some Brazilian guy who had that typical Latin dominance thing going.  Robin was "his property", never better expressed than the night she called me to ask me out to see the silent version of "Metropolis", backed by a popular band at that time, B. L. Lacerta, playing behind the screen.  She rode into the parking lot of my complex beside her man in a Jeep convertible, and all the way to Club Dada, he refused to acknowledge my presence or even speak to Robin at all. 

Inside the club, I sat on the floor a couple of paces ahead of the couple to give them some space, but the two had a whisper-fight the entire performance.  Robin hung her head, mortified, the entire drive homewards.

One Sunday, she called and asked me if I wanted to go to Tennyson Park.  She was going to jog.  I eagerly agreed, and sped up to the Safeway, where I bought crumpets, strawberries and some whipped cream for a picnic.  We laughed all the way to Tennyson about the crumpets.  She jogged, I walked. When she completed her run, I led her to a rose bed and plucked a plump, pink rose and gave it to her.  Robin cried.

So, yeah.  We were falling in love a little.

Being a gentleman and showing her respect, I didn't violate her relationship.  She had to make that choice herself.  One night, the longing and ache became too much.  I'd been writing late on Saturday night, drinking a bottle of Absolute Citron, until I was so drunk, that bottoming-out crossed-up with the depression I was in, and I called her.  Message machine.  I told the machine I wanted to die, then passed-out on the couch. 

I awakened Sunday morning, the door wide-open, a note from Robin in my lap.  She'd called 911, and once they realized I was breathing, not dead, she and the paramedics left me to sleep it off.

Exactly.  That's where I was in 1988.  Everyone was talking: I was going to off myself.

My last memory of Robin is a sober one:  Robin and I reading one another passages from "Romeo and Juliet" on my couch as she prepared for her role in the play at Shakespeare In The Park, Robin pointing her toes like a ballerina as we spoke in rhyme.  Never has a woman made me laugh like Robin.  She was a bodacious woman, an MFA in theater arts from SMU.  She had participated in a Metallica video as one of the vampire women bullying a scared blonde. 

She told the blonde after the shoot: "My hair used to be blonde too--until I lost my virginity." 

Robin rocked.  Then I isolated, left everyone behind and began a long road to discover what was wrong with me. I got much, much worse before I got better.