Between the Bylines Page 10

  And, at twenty-nine, time still was her ally. At fifty-two, it wasn’t mine, and I had a standard explanation to those wondering the reason for my preference for younger women. “I don’t want to date anyone who looks like me,” I would say.

  I also, finally, had become totally worn out by the single scene with its bright moments of jollity that too often were overshadowed by its gnawing moments of loneliness and sorrow. I had been seeing a couple of nice ladies, but I quickly realized neither measured up to Gillian. I also realized the calendar was closing in on my late-blooming desire to become a father.

  Still, I knew there was a barrier I might not be able to surmount. I was born on August 12, 1943. She was born on July 25, 1966. That’s a twenty-three-year gap in age, and I was certain that wouldn’t exactly inspire hosannas from her parents, as well as her brother, sister and friends and maybe even Gillian herself.

  I already had experienced a couple of recent disappointments from my having come into this world in the middle of World War II.

  On a Friday night a few months earlier, I had met for the first time a Press Telegram sales lady named Violet at a downtown Long Beach restaurant called Mum’s, and it turned out that she was a loyal reader of my column. We had a few drinks, exchanged phone numbers and were having a blissful time until, that is, she suddenly asked me in what year I was born.

  “Nineteen forty-three,” I said honestly.

  “Lemme see, 1953 makes you thirteen years older than me,” she said. “I was born in 1966.”

  “No,” I corrected, above the din of the tavern. “I was born in 1943.”

  “Nineteen forty-three!” she said incredulously.

  She was momentarily speechless, and when she finally resumed speaking, she informed me her father was born that year. The evening took a severe downturn after that. It was as though a light switch had been turned off in her personality. From warmth and radiance, she became subdued and cold. We never went out, and I threw away her number later that night.

  A different occurrence, but with a similarly negative outcome, had happened a year earlier. I once again had been gallivanting around Europe with Mike “The Hammer” DiMarzo, and we were on a train going from Munich to Dachau when we met a young lady named Katharine—she was twenty-six—who lived in an apartment overlooking the site of the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Dachau.

  She was a friendly sort with clear blue eyes who worked at an accounting firm in Munich, and Mike and I took her and her girlfriend to dinner that evening at a German restaurant in Dachau. There was much merriment, and I later wound up staying in Dachau with Katharine for a week after DiMarzo had returned to LA.

  I got along well with Katharine, who let me use her car on the days she was at work in Munich. I spent that time driving around the many villages in the Dachau area. I’d get out and walk around in each one and couldn’t help but notice that the cemeteries at the Catholic churches had dozens of crosses above the graves of men born between 1916 and 1924 and perished in the early 1940s. I asked Katharine about it, and she said, “Thousands of young soldiers from this area died during World War II on the Russian front. We lost more than a million soldiers in Hitler’s stupid campaign to conquer Russia. I still don’t understand how our country ever allowed that madman to take control of it and allowed the slaughter of the Jewish people. What an embarrassing part of our national history.”

  Katharine’s father owned a large textile firm in Kassel, and she promised to visit me in Long Beach during her upcoming Canadian vacation with her family. “I’ll fly to Los Angeles for a couple of days,” she promised.

  A week before she departed for Canada, we spoke on the phone, and she said, quite bluntly, “Sorry, I can’t come and see you. My dad says you’re too old for me, and so I guess I can’t see you anymore.”

  That was the last contact I had with Katharine, but that recollection and the recent one with the sales lady from my newspaper had me wary that evening in Cannes during supper at Vesuvio when Gillian suddenly brought up the subject I knew was inevitable.

  Doug with Katharine in Munich.

  “Douglas, I don’t even know how old you are,” she said.

  I remember thinking to myself, “Should I lop a few years off my age, or should I simply tell her the awful truth?”

  The latter is the daring course I decided to take, and I chuckled nervously when I said, “I’m fifty-two.”

  I tried to detect a change in Gillian’s expression, but she remained remarkably impassive.

  “Oh,” she said simply.

  “Does that bother you?” I wondered, displaying my insecurity.

  “Why would it bother me?” she replied. “Age is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. What is relevant to me is if a person is decent and honest. What also is relevant is if I like the person. And I like you, Douglas. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. I always liked you, Douglas, from the very first day I met you.”

  It was the first time she had ever made such a revelation, and she did it with a warmth and sincerity that moved me.

  “I like you, too,” I said, and leaned across the small table and kissed her fervently.

  Chapter 16

  We returned to the hotel after dinner, and our emotions for each other were strongly magnetic, drawing us together in an ethereal tableau of sexual ecstasy. Although both of us had had an exhausting day, neither of us could sleep during the intervals as we laid there in the dark affectionately entwined, alternating between periods of silence and periods of talking.

  And it was I who did most of the talking that glorious night, as I let loose the reins and opened up to Gillian about myself like I had done with no other woman—the tender and warm feelings I was experiencing seem to have had a metamorphosing effect on me.

  It was as though I were releasing pent-up memories I had long buried to a person I knew would listen with an understanding interest. I suddenly had total trust in this young lady from Britain and no longer was fearful that she would chafe from my talking about myself.

  I revealed to her my addictive inclinations and how they had been a part of me going back to my youth, when I had my heart set on becoming a Major League Baseball player, and how I played out such a delusion with lengthy daily pickup games with neighborhood kids in the sweltering heat of the San Joaquin Valley summers.

  “A bunch of us would play for seven, even eight hours a day—we’d start at 7:00 a.m.—in temperatures that sometimes reached 110 degrees,” I said. “We were all crazy about baseball. And during the cold Fresno winters, I’d spend hours in my backyard almost every day practicing my fielding by throwing a baseball against the garage door. One of our next-door neighbors complained about the noise, but I continued to do it.”

  I was in an expansive mood and began telling Gillian about an activity that had radically changed the contours of my anatomy and even for a time changed the way I deported myself.

  “Gillian, you wouldn’t believe how much weightlifting once dominated my life,” I said. “And what an impact it has had on it, probably even being responsible for keeping me out of the Vietnam War. I started dabbling in it a little bit in high school, but once I got out, it took over my life. It commanded more of my attention in college than sorority girls and classroom studies. I weighed 145 pounds when I entered Fresno State, and within three years I was up to 215 pounds. I put on 70 pounds during that time, and my workouts lasted between three and four hours. I’d go to the gym at least five days a week. I was totally obsessed with the weights and drove my mother nuts. She was a nurse and kept saying it wasn’t good what I was doing to my body. She’d cringe when I’d take my shirt off and see how excessively large my arms, shoulders and biceps had become.”

  “How did you put on so much weight?” asked Gillian.

  “The easiest way to put on weight so fast was to supplement your diet with steroids, but I never used any drugs like Dianabol, which all the weightlifters were then using,” I answered. “But what I did do was become a raven
ous eater. I lived at the Theta Chi Fraternity house for a couple of those years, and the cook would routinely serve me a breakfast consisting of twelve scrambled eggs and a pound of bacon. I’d also eat at least ten pieces of toast. But that paled in comparison to the seventeen pieces of chicken and fifteen tacos I often consumed when I had dinner at Sir George’s Smorgasbord. I’d also often down a loaf of bread before sleep.

  “Naturally, I became very strong, as I could bench press 375 pounds and could do seven repetitions with 135-pound dumbbells on the incline bench. I became this bulging, macho person—I wore tight shirts that accentuated my physique and strutted around like a tough guy, which I certainly wasn’t.”

  Gillian then asked me a question that I never had before answered honestly.

  Indeed, when I had previously been asked about what inspired my becoming a serious weightlifter, I always said it was just a case of my wanting to put on a few needed pounds on a skinny frame that badly needed strengthening.

  That was true to a certain extent, but what I told Gillian that night was the real reason for my weightlifting fanaticism.

  “No doubt its genesis can be traced to my freshman year at Fowler High when I was bullied by a couple of long-haired Mexican guys—we referred to them as pachucos in those long-ago times—who would thumb my ears during my wood shop class,” I began.

  “Gillian, you wouldn’t believe how terrified I was of those fellows who were a lot bigger—I was a scrawny 115 pounds on a five-foot-nine frame—and tougher than I was. I took my fear home with me and became quiet and solemn around the house, spending a lot of time in bed reading books and watching TV. One of the antagonists, in particular—his surname was Leyva—took special delight in harassing me, since I visibly cowered in his presence.

  “My father grew up in Fresno early in the twentieth century when there was widespread prejudice against Armenians—and had countless fights as a youngster with those who taunted his heritage. He wasn’t a man who retreated meekly when his hand was called, and he chided me when he found out my sudden despondency was caused by the harassment I was enduring at school.

  “I told him about how this Leyva guy scared me to death, and he said sternly to me, ‘Either you turn around and smack the guy as hard as you can in his nose, or I’m going to smack you.’ His admonishment came on a Sunday.

  “And late the next morning during wood class, Leyva, as usual, moved behind me and started thumbing my ears as the instructor demonstrated how to use an electric saw. But this time I had worked myself into a rage, and with my father’s words echoing in my head, I whirled quickly around and fired a right hand as hard as my flimsy body could propel it, and it struck squarely on Levya’s rather large proboscis.

  “Blood spurted everywhere, and I landed a few more punches on the face of the dazed fellow before the instructor intervened. I was screaming as loudly as I could, although I don’t remember doing so. I guess I momentarily had lost total control of myself. My Mexican pals I had grown up with in Fowler—Leyva was from a poverty-stricken Mexican hamlet five miles away called Malaga—later told me the pachucos said I was loco en la cabeza, which in Spanish means that I was crazy in the head.

  “The pachucos never tormented me again in high school, but I still think that bullying episode had a huge impact on my life. I’m not sure I ever would have become so obsessive about building up my body and becoming so extraordinarily strong had I not gone through such a frightening experience.”

  I had never told that story before out of embarrassment, and Gillian could feel my reluctance.

  “That bullying must have been difficult,” she said softly.

  “It was,” I agreed. “Just look at the effect it had on my life. I have painfully arthritic shoulders now because of the thousands of hours I spent lifting weights. I now wish I had spent all those hours I wasted in gyms reading books and working on my writing skills.”

  “But lifting weights couldn’t have been all bad for you since you said it kept you out of the Vietnam War,” said Gillian. “Can you tell me the story of that?”

  I had been prattling on for several minutes and figured Gillian had heard enough of my life story for one night.

  “That’s for another time,” I said. “Aren’t you about ready for sleep?”

  “I’m wide awake and want to hear how your weightlifting might have gotten you out of that awful Vietnam War,” she replied. “Please, Douglas, you know I always love listening to you talk.”

  And so I blithely went on talking and related an episode from my life that I seldom discussed, not so much out of shame—thousands of men got out of serving in the military during the Vietnam War for less valid reasons than I did—but out of a respectful regard for those who did serve in one of this country’s most unpopular conflicts.

  “After I obtained my degree in journalism at Fresno State in June 1966, I was persuaded by an army recruiter in Fresno to sign up for the army’s Officer Candidate School,” I began. “It would have been a four-year commitment, but I was young and dumb and had a lot of machismo and actually had these fanciful visions of becoming a war hero.

  “I took the physical but, to my disappointment, flunked it because of high blood pressure, which I didn’t even know I had. I went to see my family doctor about it, and he told me there was nothing wrong with me and that such a condition was due to my heavy weightlifting.

  “I mistakenly thought I was out of the service and went down to Southern California and got my first full-time newspaper job at the Pacific Palisadian Post. But in the middle of September, I got a call one evening from my mother informing me that I had received a draft notice in the mail. I figured the Selective Service Board had made a mistake, since I thought I already had been rejected for military service.

  “But I was wrong. I called the Selective Service Board, and a representative told me it didn’t recognize the Officer Candidate School physical. I was then residing in a studio apartment in Santa Monica, which was near Pacific Palisades, and was working out daily at the Muscle Beach Gym. It was known as ‘The Dungeon’ because it was dark and dank and downstairs and located in downtown Santa Monica, a few blocks from my residence. One of the guys who I trained with there on occasion was Dave Draper, who that year was Mr. Universe.

  “Even though I was experiencing periods of loneliness, I already had grown to like Southern California and its mild climate, major-league sports teams and many entertaining diversions. I suddenly no longer was as gung ho about becoming a soldier as I had been a few months earlier. I wasn’t the only prospective draftee not anxious to participate in the Vietnam War in those days.

  “And so this time I was determined not to go into the service. On the evening before I took my second military physical, I strenuously lifted weights for four hours at a friend’s gym in Fresno, smoked a pack of cigarettes, drank several cups of coffee and never went to sleep.

  “We recruits were stripped to our shorts in the lengthy medical examination queue at the Fresno Induction Center that next morning, and I stood out because of my bulging, well-muscled body at a time when few individuals engaged in serious weightlifting. The attending physician shook his head upon taking my blood pressure. ‘Two twenty over 110,’ he said. ‘It’s too high. Too bad. You’d have made a fine soldier.’ I was ‘1Y’ and was never contacted again by the Selective Service Board.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t get involved in that awful, wasteful war,” said Gillian. “Who knows what might have happened had you gone to Vietnam. I’m just glad you didn’t and that you’re here with me.”

  “So am I,” I said, and we soon lapsed into sleep.

  Chapter 17

  We rose early the next morning on the final day of the year and went on another lengthy run. We decided to spend the afternoon visiting a few cultural outposts about twenty miles away in the hills above Cagnes-sur-Mer. As we drove up to the fortified medieval village of Vence to see the historic Matisse Chapel created by the accomplished twentieth-century artist Henr
i Matisse, Gillian was in an unusually talkative mood, as she related to me her rebelliousness as a teenager and her indifference to school.

  “I ran away from home once with one of my girlfriends, but only for a couple of days,” she said. “We stayed in a hostel in Newcastle, and when I got home my parents were really upset with me. I was pretty out of control for a time, although I didn’t do anything bad. I didn’t drink or was into drugs. Just rebellious.”

  “What changed?” I wondered.

  “Well, when I was fifteen, one of my teachers told me I’d never amount to anything because of my poor grades,” she related. “I was embarrassed by her comment because she said it in front of other students. From that moment on, I took school seriously. I was determined to show that teacher that she was mistaken, and I did. I began studying very hard and began getting such excellent grades that I qualified to attend the University of Newcastle. That teacher’s negative comment changed the direction of my life.”

  I listened attentively, and then she asked me about a comment I had made the previous evening when we walked past the casino at the Noga Hilton.

  “I’m curious, Douglas, you said last night you hadn’t made a bet since January 1, 1991, and that you never will make another one,” she said. “Were you once a gambler?”

  I chuckled to myself and thought back to those eight harrowing years when I engaged in such a dangerous pursuit in which the pleasure of winning bets never quite exceeded the agony of losing them.

  Oh, what I could tell Gillian about that particular addiction—I had my share—that well might have had the greatest hold on me, with my degeneracy reaching its crest in 1985 when my wagers easily exceeded more than $1 million and when nary a day would pass without my calling in bets to any of the six bookmakers I had at my disposal in those pre-Internet times.