I recently received an e-mail from my old friend and former musical collaborator Victoria. A few months ago her landlord evicted her and her boyfriend from the house they were renting in Northridge. Victoria had been planning on moving to Minnesota and renting a farm property there, which she had hoped to renovate as a bed-and-breakfast.
Although the eviction came at a bad time, her life in Northridge had been considerably less than idyllic. Her boyfriend drank heavily and had health problems that were directly connected to his drinking. He was emotionally abusive, and on more than one occasion had struck Victoria or had thrown objects at her. He had worked as a mover, but by the time of the eviction, his ailments had worsened, preventing him from holding a steady job, and he was sitting around the house feeling sorry for himself and taking it out on Victoria.
As a musician, Victoria is, or was, incredibly gifted. She composes, plays keyboards, and is an operatically-trained singer. However, she seems to have had a fatal genius for always taking the wrong fork in the road, and as a result, her career -- which could have been brilliant -- has been nonexistent. After attending college, she and her then-husband opened and ran a successful music store in Iowa, but she felt her life was dull and decided to leave him, and financial security, and go to Los Angeles to pursue her musical dreams. That was a major turning point, if only she had known it.
In Los Angeles she hooked up with a producer who appeared to have a promising future; he was producing indie bands and went on to have some success with major-label deals. But all Victoria gained from the relationship was access to drugs, and a lot of mental and physical violence. After several years, she finally managed to cut herself loose. She went through some painful times, attempting to make contacts and move ahead, but her ex had put the word out to everyone he knew in the business that she was a “head case”, and she found doors slamming in her face all over town.
Unable to pursue her music, she began to drift away from the music scene, eventually becoming the mistress of a wealthy Orange County businessman who set her up with a plush apartment on the beach, a sports car, and unlimited charge accounts. However, she was never comfortable with the situation, and so, when one day she met a handsome young man on the beach, she began an affair with him. Sure enough, her sugar daddy caught them in the act and threw her out. She retreated to Hollywood, found a cheap apartment, and began a series of ever-more demeaning jobs.
When I met her, she was working at a Jewish newspaper in a dangerous part of town. She was basically the paper’s bookkeeper, but she was receiving little more than minimum wage. She lived with Ben, nearly 20 years her junior, who had come to Hollywood from Maine to make it in the music business. They had a rock band for awhile, until Ben beat up a Mexican immigrant and got sentenced to a year in county jail. They split up not long after his release; Ben had learned a lot in prison about being a male hustler. Once out, he continued this dubious “vocation,” claiming it was easier making money that way than working at low-pay jobs. For once Victoria did the smart thing, and promptly kicked him out.
By the time Victoria moved in with Steve at his place in Northridge, she was doing housecleaning jobs on a daily basis. The pay was lousy, but at least there were no office politics and the hours were somewhat flexible. It was during this time that she recorded three vocals on my “Reinventing the Wheel” CD. At that point I urged her to find a vocal coach and work on her voice; I was afraid she’d lose it entirely if she kept on the way she was going. Years of cigarette smoking, drugs, and physical hardship had taken their toll on her pipes, especially in her upper range. But she was too busy dealing with Steve and his drinking, and just trying to keep afloat financially, to have time to think about music. When I left L.A. for the East Coast in 2000, I felt very bad for her...I had very little hope for her, musically or otherwise. We begged her to join us in New York, where she could find decent-paying social work (something she had always wanted to pursue) and good musical contacts, but she only visited us once and then our contact became limited to e-mails.
The crisis with the landlord came, as I said, a few months ago, and then my communications from Victoria became elliptical and a bit bizarre. At one point she sent me a long letter about how she was living in a mansion in Los Feliz with an elderly, wealthy man (someone whom I had actually known longer than she had; he had been the boyfriend of an acquaintance of mine). She seemed very proud of her temporary digs, enclosing several Polaroid photos of the house. However, in the same letter she also said she was sleeping in a van parked in an industrial park, because of some difficulties with a bunch of South American immigrants who had also moved into the mansion to take advantage of its owner. Meanwhile, the plan to go to Minnesota and rent the farm property appeared to have disappeared in a welter of disagreements with the farm’s owner. Victoria now claimed she would soon be moving into another large compound her wealthy friend was buying in Agua Dulce, a community in the Antelope Valley. And indeed, a couple of months later she sent me an e-mail from the Agua Dulce place, sounding, I thought, like the cat who got the canary. “I can't wait to get you out here,” she wrote. “It's so private, so peaceful here sitting on top of my very own mountain (foothill, rather).
“The house warming party will be much much later than this summer....most likely fall....will fly you out, luvs,” she added. The bit about flying us out there stuck out like a sore thumb...at whose expense was she proposing to fly us out? She didn’t have a nickel to her name.
I was soon enlightened. She had full access to the checking account of Richard, the wealthy retiree whom I had known for the past ten years or so. “I was afraid I might be sounding snotty, like the rich bitch on the hill, but it's sometimes hard not to when you have access to a lot of money -- you know it, people know it and they look to you for it,” she wrote in her next e-mail.
I probably should have just laughed and left it at that, but something wouldn’t let me. I was all too familiar with Richard, Victoria’s new sugar daddy; he was notorious for using his money to manipulate people. Ironically, he had obtained the bulk of his capital from a previous relationship with a wealthy woman, a Superior Court judge, with whom he lived for a number of years, until she died. She had given him a considerable amount of money which he had then invested in buying slum rental properties, selling them when the price of real estate went up, and continuously “churning” his funds. For many years he had held a position with the city of Los Angeles in an architectural review capacity, which enabled him to get early notification of properties condemned by the city, at which point he’d step in and snatch them up for ten cents on the dollar. In short, he was a reptile. My friend had been involved with him for twenty years, on and off, but she had ultimately given up on him to become “just a friend”, although he continued to try to buy her affections with expensive jewelery and gifts. She had also tried to warn him when Victoria (who had met him while cleaning his house, after my friend got her the work) was after his assets, but he turned a deaf ear, probably being flattered by the attention (after all, Victoria could be his daughter, agewise). I wasn’t sure which of them, Richard or Victoria, was behaving the more reprehensibly, and hell, maybe they deserved each other -- but what I didn’t like was the way Victoria was beginning consciously or unconsciously to ape his manipulative tendencies by dangling tantalizing (she thought) offers in front of Eric and me -- her deadbeat friends who, she figured, didn’t have the wherewithal to visit her out there in Paradise.
So I sent her a couple of e-mails expressing my concern about all of this. We ended up having a major disagreement -- no surprise -- and broke off our correspondence, at least for the time being. Victoria was quite huffy, claiming that she was working hard “physically and psychically”, and stating unequivocally that she was entitled to Richard’s money -- although she didn’t say why or how. I begged her to get out of L.A. and make a fresh start somewhere where reality is more highly esteemed, but she didn’t understand why I was saying that and accused me of being bitter about L.A.
For me, the whole scenario had become so familiar and threadbare that it just made me feel tired. And so I did something drastic which, finally, seemed the only thing left to do. I cut the mental line that linked me to Victoria and to her closed loop of self-abasement, and let her go spinning off into the universe, leaving behind many, many memories, good and bad and everything in between. Against my best judgment, I continue to hope she will find peace, and rest, and fulfillment, but my cynical side just laughs scornfully.
“Not until she wants to,” says that nagging voice in my head. To which I have no reply.
