LONG FALL TO THE SIDEWALK CAFE- CHAPTER I.

Friends told me a thousand times -- I had the perfect marriage. I heard it at class reunions. I heard it from my daughter, Candice, who knew her father best and still didn't have a clue. How can you have the perfect marriage when you don't have a human husband? Bill was, on the outside, this Norman Rockwell father, warm, crinkly blue eyes. He just didn't have the crinkly heart that went with it. He was well named. He could BILL people. Billed multiple millions a month.

We have a faux Tudor home set in ten verdant acres high in the hills, well away from the smoggy canyon bottom. In L.A., all our canyon bottoms had boulevards that crossed the seven miles from the high rent city to the low rent valley behind it. I'm not usually a fussbudget but seeing lines of SUV's cross the canyons worries me. I had the air quality on our hilltop measured and it matched the purity of Idaho, the tech told me. Fine I said and I stayed up on my mountaintop in it as many hours a day as life allowed.

L.A. was getting dark and polluted but I rarely went into the city anymore. I gardened. My favorite plant was the tuberose. I got bulbs from a Cuernevaca nursery which had them hand-carried across the border by coyotes then UP'd to my door to avoid having the bulbs confiscated by the USDA which opens mail and checks for microbes. The only place this bulb will grow happily outdoors is in Cuernevaca Morelos, Mexico at l8 North. LA's 34 North was not a particular problem when you could glass them. I had a special  greenhouse built and with growlights, obtained air temps in the 70's, even at night and could actually force a few hundred bulbs to bloom every thirty days, year around. This is a major gardening feat but my husband, though he'd heard me mention it en passant, ignored the feat. No praise, no admiration. Bill Wendell couldn't even be near a fragrant flower. He went into allergic fits, entirely psychosomatic as half the flowers in existence have no pollen.

To enjoy my flowers' intense, better-than-gardenia fragrance, I had to go outside and stand in the greenhouse sniffing like a closet smoker but one makes do. Bill Wendell was in charge. There was no way I was going to spend calories fighting him on anything. He ruled at work. He ruled at home. Bill Wendell was listened to by the crowned heads of two coasts. L.A. and New York. Well, actually the truth was, in NEW YORK, he listened to the Kings of Wall Street and was told what to do. In California, he got his big chance. He told the Kings of Sunset Boulevard (film stars, etc,) what to invest in and how they'd be allowed to participate in Wall Street big game investments and corporate takeovers and his clients tiptoed out backward saying thank you. Well sure. Bill had more money than Spielberg did because he had ten percent of Spielberg's money. And not just one but a hundred other Spielbergs.

Bill had started out as one of the really big business managers. He managed the fortunes of show folk, the people who mattered in this company town. Those days, we had a cute little house in the flats of Beverly Hills, where the little two million dollar cottages stand but one day he was invited to a Wall Street Christmas party where he ate his first lobster canape among the real Big Billion dollar east coast Money Managers. He told me he'd never known what good burgundy was until he'd had a glass of vintage Chateau Neuf Pape. The two top Money managers Caldwell Ashton, Gaines and Young, instantly realized they had a vintage wine fan, instant convert with ties to celebrity billions, ready to sign any Faustian bargain for another cup of that stuff.

To his face they told him he was a hot discovery, but behind his back they called him the Delivery Boy, he was only the boy d'jour. Every New York money manager courted him but C.A.G.Y. Caldwell sent him cases of red wine as courtship tokens and they signed him up. Caldwell et cie owned him. They ran 'funds,' trusts, foundations and collateral investments involving billions, did takeovers, acquired undervalued corporations one day, Renaissance art the next. They created tax dodges, capital gains tax loopholes, moving pea under shell game bilions around on the table so fast and with so much creative bookkeeping that the IRS couldn't keep up. They were just nobodies with math degrees, commissioned agents but nick the coffers of a hundred Pharoahs, your pyramid ends up bigger than that of the Giza royals.

CAGY partners were multi millionaires but oddly enough, they weren't the top of the money tree. They were only the middle management gofers for the truly illustrious ones, the Merchant Princes who had the ripe fragrant, apple-scented air at the top. And who had the billions …the PRINCES with the PRINCIPLE.

These Merchant princes lived in a really rarified atmosphere that involved Loire Valley chateaus and Caribbean islands. They were too relaxed, dizzy, lazy or distracted to know what to do with their family's PRINCIPAL. So they hired men with no principles who decided for them: the Wall Street Money manager gofers who had shrewd, cunning, mathematical minds, sharks with big teeth, master number crunchers. They understood leveraged acquisitions and moving shark-fast on viable companies that were drowning with undervalued stock. They knew how to pull multiple small time investors in, (you know, a lotta smalltime rubes each with fifty million in their pocket, that kind of participation,) and get enough of them to make a nick in a corporate price tag. And they knew how to find up and coming merchant princelings, blow smoke up their asses, take them public and then blow smoke up everybody's ass about IPO value.

Bill was dumb as mud about IPOs and leveraged buyouts but he was good at ordinary numbers, had a Wasp Marine warmth that went over real big in Hollywood and good sense about stock investments and with these limited tools, had of course, gained the key to multiple Hollywood Honey pots. The Wall Street Sharks quickly realized that all those dumb as ditch carp film producers, comedians, and actors and creative people with sitcom syndication billions rotting in banks yielding 5% interest would be glad to enter into the East Coast main game, and profit from investments on some 20% per annum Olympian level. Bill became the conduit. The delivery boy. That's what they called him.

You don't dig deep money wells in L.A. and not get noticed. With Bill on board, there was a virtual pipeline of raw, green dollars running from LA across the ROCKIES to NYC. That made Bill Wendell matter. Sure, you and I know he was halfway between a pimp and a pump. He served up celebrities to sharks but as soon as the flow was up and running, the Sharks purred and patted our heads. They moved us to the mountain tops of Beverly Hills into a ten million dollar home where we had to look Olympian 24/7.

I was expected to entertain actors, writers and producers so I was taken by a stylist to buy dresses, cocktail party taffeta and silk and dinner suits and hostess outfits and the jewelry that went with them, to sell the point that we were rich, reputable insiders.

I was expected to serve up Lucullan feasts. As I can make quiche but not Lobster canapes, my home was regularly invaded by teams of caterers, and design crews with lobster platters and shrimp christmas trees.

It was like being in a theatre. At dawn, the A team arrived, a group that did sets. At lunchtime, the B TEAM, they did China and props. And at night, the actors came downstairs, Bill and me. The play's plot was, we were rich and happy and understood Wall Street. Easy enough to act out. We ate, drank, told New York insider jokes and our guests laughed on cue. They tanked up on booze, ate their sides out went home to write out checks for millions.

The teams carried off sets and props and my house was as quiet as a dark theatre, Bill was snoring out cold and I was alone sipping the last bits of wine and seeing what Bill saw, that there were reds that were sublimely different from what we'd drank all our lives.

I had Monday morning seven days a week. Bill was always tired and cranky because he lived on the red eye, the cross continental flight. He got briefed in New York, and a day later, returned to Beverly Hills like Moses given the Stone tablets by God. You never read in the Bible of a Mrs Moses did you? No. She was dwarfed by the whole process.

Because of what happened later, I am truly glad that this glamorous life didn't catch my ego; it didn't even really entertain me. There were a few advance screenings of hot movies which I did enjoy though home screening rooms are NOT what they're cracked up to be and at times I'd go to New York and you'd have been awestruck at these palaces. Entire five story buildings that had once been town houses in the Fin' D Sicle, then turned into posh schools, and then back into fifty thousand square foot homes during the last twenty years, the Fin'D Sicle Deux.

The New York uberwealthy design most rooms in patrician tones of beige but invariably there's one room, (usually the 'library,') where they've covered the walls with red suede, furniture is gold ormulu and their true soul manifests.

Yet Wall Street squaws all wear black uniforms. The better to set off their diamonds. At parties, they would approach me, make chit chat, hear my limited conversational repertoire, realize that I was married to that California business manager fellow (I actually once heard one comment as she walked away, 'it's the delivery boy's wife. ) I don't blame them for seeing that I was of no use to them. They were just perfectly nice Wall Street wives. They'd pat my arm sympathetically saying 'where are you staying? We must do lunch,' before they'd move off. I learned not to shout Plaza Athenee after them. Because, after the first few times, I realized they didn't care.

Nothing about ME fit into the life of anyone Bill and I ever met. In L.A. our Hollywood friends would come to our home, see the twin Bentleys parked in the circular drive beneath the most beautiful, frondy palm trees this side of Monaco and think 'Palm trees don't belong on a driveway going up to a Tudor house.' (That's how Beverly Hills people think and if you commit a faux pas like that, they don't want to know you. They all have Frank Gehry for an architect.) And I do know that palms don't go with Tudor but I couldn't bear to cut them down once I found out how many dear sweet little rodent families were living inside their fronds.

You know that scene in the David Lynch film "Blue Velvet" where as the camera descends to microscopic levels, on closer examination, the emerald lawn has giant bugs chewing at each other fiendishly at an eardrum banging Lynch scream? The dark side of perfection? In our gorgeous palmtrees, rats nested. I could hear them. I could stand with Bill by my side as we were getting into our lovely his-and-hers Bentleys and the rat noises would be like a Lynch scream to me. Bill couldn't even hear it. He'd think it was the wind, little squeaks and frond rustling. My cats Ginger and Monkeyface were too well fed on raw capons and chuck steak to bother catching rats but felines just the same, they'd sit looking up. Bill didn't notice that either.

He was always in transit, moving fast, brisk kisses on cheek fast. If Bill had known actual rats had tenements on our fifty million-dollar property, he'd have had exterminators poison them all and then cut the trees down post haste. Now, I knew without a predator species on our ten acres, the rats would soon take over, maybe chew their way into our house, gnaw out the pantry doors, and munch on our chips but weren't there temples in India where rats were allowed to live and be fed and humans walked barefoot among them? I thought I could do that for my rats as they had life happening, breeding cycles going on, nursing mothers, squeaky little infants and loving families. I needed that. So I fed my secret boarders every bit of house garbage I could scrimmage, carrying it out to the drive, picking the palmtrees with the most squeaking for little dumpyards of post feast lobster and steak, toasted Nancy Silverton brioche and overripe fruit. Bill caught me once making a neat little pile under the tree. He thought it was a Hindu prayer ritual. Breaking into a liar's sweat, I told him I was composting.

Yogi Bujani told me feeding wild life was a beneficial practice, -- that I was repairing my karma doing that. Now I know in this lifetime, I didn't ever commit one crime against anyone. I have to be l00% totally karma free But I knew there was a reason I had such endless sorrow in my heart. It was the most horrific, infinite sorrow, so acute at times that I'd cry at AT&T commercials, break into massive sobs at HELP THE CHILDREN infomercials. My free-floating perpetual grief was so intense and intolerable that I had many times wanted to start on happy pills.

I'd been tested by my doctor's chemistry lab. It turned out my depression was not organic. My doctor thank God, refused to let me start pills and recommended a shrink, which is why I saw Irwin Jakobs twice a week. All his Freudian, Adlerian prodding turned up nothing. Midwestern family, Lutheran background, spotless Sunday School attendee. Straight A's in college. My only sin was succumbing to and marrying Bill Wendell so I suspected my sorrow was from something deeper, something hidden. Which is why, against Jakobs' wishes, I went to that vegan hypnotist.

That was where a real can of worms got opened. I found out what the most infinite grief on the planet was. It was mommy baby separation. You'd thinking staying alive when a baby died was bad. Nah. People who lose babies are still alive. They heal. They may heal into walking dead but they heal. My pain was unremitting like a sore tooth and it was sorrow from last lifetime mommy baby separation. It turned out that I had died in childbirth and left 7 babies, most of them infants or toddlers. Can you imagine having a toothache you can never get rid of on the level of death and mommy baby separation? That was in the mid 14th century, I had spent six hundred years in heaven yet I get back to the flesh and blood dimension and it's start from scratch with six hundred year old grief's. I, to this day, cannot watch any film that touches on that baby-momma separation theme. Bambi and Dumbo sent me into uncontrollable sobs. "Our Town" the same. The first time I cracked in Candice's presence we were watching Disney videos and she was six. She just stared at me in cold hatred.

Yogi Bujani says all grief can be repaired; that it is obviously my karma to find a way to breech the baby-momma separation trauma. That I should learn to regard this gaping wound as a gift and wait for God to show me where I will apply the final fix. Until then, I must do yoga, try to be vegan and at least not eat babies who suffered for lost mothers, like veal and lamb. Both are separated from their mother at birth, caged, fattened, then slaughtered screaming.

Now I'll tell you something, when I quit those two meats, previously the mainstay of my diet, I did notice my depression disappeared by half. Maybe more. Bujani says pray and wait for the other half to leave, for God to show me what the ultimate fix was.

I cannot discuss my depression with anyone as all my Beverly Hills girlfriends say, 'shut up you ungrateful girl, you have the best life, the best husband, the best marriage.' Well, happily enough Bill doesn't make me suffer really. He presents inconveniences but no biggie. In this lifetime I am aware of one sorrow. My daughter Candice. By earthly terms she's perfect. To me she seems a walking zombie. She'll tear you apart with her teeth if you reveal a chink. My astrologer says it's having Capricorn rising. Her, not me. I'm Moonchild rising. The opposite polarity.

Yogi Bujani says the first born daughter is always like the father's side of the family. Everything skips a generation he says, so she's just like Bill Wendell's dad, a Marine Sergeant, who survived Merrill's Mauraders as he so got off on tommy guns he was able to raze entire nests of Japs and thrive.

Candice could have eaten Dick Cheney for breakfast. If she cared about the public and had gone into public service, she'd have been a tiger for any organization or political party smart enough to hire her. She is Capricorn rising, Saturn ruled, even in Vedic charts. THAT IS A SATURN person! She is quick to damn, has acute eyesight, can nail you on any weakness, and will scorn you to the depths of her socks. She'd have made a hell of a homocide cop. She’s intolerant of frailty, unforgiving of excuses, cuts no slack, takes no prisioners and adores authority figures and hierarchies like the G.O.P, Right wing Conservatives, Cheney and her father.

Oh don't get me wrong, I ONCE loved her father TOO! Slim hipped, wide shoulders, Norman Rockwell pink skin, cute little crew cut, Lincolnesque creases in his gaunt woodsman Sterling Hayden face, smile lines around crinkly blue eyes although he'd never smiled anymore. He smiled  when he courted me and won me after six months of soda dates. Anyway, what I learned is -- looks are highly overrated as indicators of character, what we think we need isn't what we really need. And the worst demons do the best seductions.

Why he'd wanted me, I don't know. I am ordinary in every way. My hair is nondescript, my features ordinary, my skin is good, my teeth too. Midwestern health. Those mothers breast fed and the kids have bones and teeth made of Wisconsin hard wood. You transplant it to California it roots and blooms lilacs, (my second favorite flower but it cannot be made to bloom in So Cal. Not cold enough)

So at nearly fifty I'm a transplanted midwesterner, thriving in California, thin and firm from a childhood digging snow, now I'm digging million dollar compost with shovels, so I'm wrinkle free. No laugh lines because when  you're walking around with seven children missing, living with a strange family you don't feel comfortable around and your heart breaking  you don't laugh a lot.

The one thing I enjoy in my life is digging in the garden beds then looking up at the little rat families in my palm trees. I wish I could get up there with a ladder and peek in at their family life, watch the rat mothers nursing their little pink mice babies. I vaguely remember from this other lifetime having infants in my arms. Their disappearance is a wound that doesn't close.

Dr. Jakobs says the hypnosis theory of loss of children in an earlier life is a fantasy, a delusion and the hypnotist simply keyed into my need to believe some airy fairy story and supplied it to me, but the fact is, I heard the recording made while I was under. I was dying in childbirth and leaving seven kids. Nobody made that up. I was doing the actual screaming as I died. Jakobs says I made it up to supply myself with an imaginary family, which shows bottom line that I'm emotionally healthy.

So good karma, emotionally healthy and walking around in a depression the size of Texas. Jakobs asked me to make a list of things that kick the depression up a notch. President Mugambe was at the top of my list. He burnt the slums so that a hundred thousand people froze and starved. Then George Bush. Then Cheney. Then Senior Bush. At that point I ran out of politicians and switched to people I know. Candice and Bill.

I took that list into Jakobs. He was not happy. So I'm still working on that list. That's my homework. I can barely function yet I'm trying to make my shrink happy. Go figure.

<-------- CONTINUE TO CHAPTER II.