Hanging Around Howard Johnson's

You know the show you're in sucks when you have to be drunk to get through the performance. Running away to La La Land solves nothing. Not when the Reaper tags along.

After my six-hour session with the astrologer, I'm completely convinced I've got to change my whole life. I must find love or I will never be famous. My friend Pam wants to change her life too, so we set out trying to do it together. But before we can really implement our makeover, Pam's mom gets really sick with leukemia. This puts a crimp in our plans to love and be loved.

Everything happens to me.

While Pam goes to Philadelphia to be with her mother, I go on tour with the ghastliest musical revue in the history of musical revues. In a red velvet jacket, singing in Italian, Polish, Yiddish, and even ocassionally, English, in places like the Jerry Lewis Room at the Brown's Hotel. Our boss is a bombastically mean, fat, smelly man who has been staging the same show since 1950 or something. We are all ill-prepared, unrehearsed, and miserable about it. During the day the elderly Jewish clientele at the "resorts" where we play buy us endless drinks. We usually perform bombed out of our minds. It makes the time go by quicker.

I stage a labor walkout. Half of us quit the show over our treatment and unpaid wages, and we catch a bus in the early hours before anyone can stop us. Like we're escaping from prison, which we are.

Pam calls when I get back to New York. Things in Philadelphia are bad. Her mom is dying. My worst, most secret fear in my own life is that my mother will die, and I'm willingly drawn into Pam's drama, heart and soul. I go to Philly.

Her mom's apartment is like a warehouse. Through ugly divorce proceedings with Pam's father, still ongoing, the mother manages to filch as much art and furniture as she can get her hands on, all of it forming a maze in her apartment you have to stumble through to get anywhere. Pam and I sit down to eat. Over the dining room table is an enormous oil painting of a cemetery, with agonized wraiths rising from the graves, their mouths contorted by screaming. I make Pam cover it with a blanket.

Pam's mom dies a couple of weeks later and I am there for Pam as best as I can. There are endless issues to resolve with the estate and ongoing fights between Pam and her father. She is sometimes irrational; as if he is touching her again, like when she was a kid, loving her in all the wrong ways. Depression hits fast and hard. I glom on to her depression, letting it give substance and ballast to my own misery, fear, and lack of direction. I still don't know how to love or be loved and my career doesn't exist.

I decide to move to Los Angeles. I need a change. I need to be someone else. Pam doesn't want me to leave. I go anyway. I love L.A., spending the first month going to the beach every day and eating the same lunch at the same restaurant, charging it to my American Express card. I charge a month of car rental to it too. And new clothes. I have no job or income. Meanwhile, Pam's spirits are dropping. She decides to see a shrink who prescribes Nardil, the first time I learn the name of an actual antidepressant. I'll know all the names later.

Palm trees vs. the onset of winter in New York; I persuade Pam to come out to L.A., just to visit, maybe she will like it here, maybe she can move too, and she says yes. I am ashamed to admit that I make her suffer through a ridiculous charade when I introduce her to my cousins who live in the Valley. I say we are engaged. That Pam and I will soon be married. Though I am totally out to friends, acquaintances, and the people I have sex with, I still haven't gotten around to having that conversation yet with family. I don't know why not. But saying we're engaged embarrasses the hell out of Pam - not because she minds people thinking we love one another, since we do, but because I am twenty and she is thirty, and she has been married once briefly before. She thinks my cousins will think her a cradle robber. Probably they do not; too busy laughing at the idea that I will marry a woman to worry over the age difference.

Pam and I have no real plans and she keeps extending her visit, staying on at a hotel where I often spend the night with her. We still tell each other our worst childhood stories ever. We eat in coffee shops. We pretend one day we will have everything we want, everything we think we need. She is still depressed. So am I. She hangs herself at the Beverly Garland Howard Johnson's in Studio City, which is now a Holiday Inn. The shower rod is broken. Pam is crumpled in the bathtub. The maid screams in Spanish and her supervisor comes in. "That girl's dead," the supervisor says over and over. "She's just dead."
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