How the blues saved Dr Gone once

By John Orr

Our most intimate sexual moment was one time when I took the very tip of her left nipple, covered by a dark T-shirt that said something about a cafe, delicately but firmly between my lips. ``Stop that,'' she said, and I did.

I was in love.

It'd started after she and her husband had broken up. For weeks I'd counseled couseling.

``Go with him, see a shrink, save your marriage.'' Months later they were even further apart and I finally thought, ``Well. She is the single most fun adult human being I've ever known in my entire life. She is charming, beautiful, intelligent, warm, loving and just about everything else that could possibly be wonderful in a human being. She says her marriage is permanently over. She needs a man. She needs me, because I love her and she loves me. She is coming over for dinner tonight. Go for it.''

I opened my door, and there she was, in a sporty red kind of deal. Culottes, maybe.

``Jim and I are getting back together,'' was the first thing she said, before she crossed the sill.

So began the terror.

How long did it last? Maybe two, three years. She never really got back together with Jim, but spent many hours with me, telling me about how she drove by his apartment to feed him dinner when he was depressed, and threw five pounds of casserole at the apartment gate when she found he was already being comforted by another woman. I have a couple of hours of her phone messages on tape. Crying about being alone, and Jim was gone, and John, where are you when I need you? Why aren't you home at 11 p.m. so you can drive 23 miles to see me for 10 minutes and rub my back before I go to sleep, and then go home without me?

I have permanent sensory memories of the way she'd snuggle under my arm at a movie, laughing. ``Little Shop of Horrors,'' for me, is a complicated romantic memory. We learned all the words to `Feed Me, Seymour' and sang them on Southern California freeways late at night. She was a monumentally bad singer, but she was enthusiastic.

``I can't love you THAT way, John'' may have been the words. I don't remember that. I do remember feeling that I had to be her friend, and not push my desires on her, not even the night she cooked for me, then snuggled up in my arms and told me she'd never been happier. Still, I went home by myself that night, with only the driest, deadest memory of the smallest possible kiss her magnificent lips could produce.

Finally, it came clear that Jim was never going to reconnect with her, and she started dating other guys. I did not take this well. It was one thing to comfort the woman I loved as she mourned her lost love, but when she started looking for new love, and didn't look to me ... Maybe it was the time I held a party. Big party, lots of friends, and she snubbed me. I'm the host, she snubs me. Maybe it was some other little charged ball of static electricity, produced by rubbing each other's fur the wrong way at the wrong time of year.

The wrong time of life.

It became necessary for me to get away.

Not as far as Doc, in ``Cannery Row,'' who went for a walk to get away from a broken heart. For a year. But I went as far as Hollywood, where my friend Yvgeny was living, come from Leningrad to be a movie maker. I was numb, so the sleeping bag was soft enough on his thin carpet. My eyes were open, and the room got dark. The next day my eyes were still open, so I got up and went for a drive.

In Hollywood it is too sad. Too many open wounds, walking around. So, I thought I'd drive to Westwood, where there are hopeful college students, business people, movie makers, the rich and the healthy, and movie houses. I could look at some beautiful women in nice clothes, and maybe see a movie. But I hadn't gotten that far yet. I was on Sunset Boulevard somewhere. The radio wasn't on, but a song came into my head. Jimi Hendrix' ``Red House.''

Wait a minute, something's wrong here, Jimi sings in the second verse, obviously shocked.

This key won't unlock this door! I got a bad, bad feeling my baby don't love me no more.

Just a glimmer of light starts to happen in the vicinity of my eyes.

That's all right, Jimi sings, I still got my guitar.

That's when something almost like a smile started on my face, as I thought about my own guitar, and how it felt to play it. The rest of the day, driving through Hollywood, West L.A. and Westwood, my head was filled with electric blues guitar riffs. Not Jimi, not the radio, not on a guitar, but beautiful, drawn-out blues tunes I can play in my head, which knows more music than do my stumbly fingers.

When I got home there was another message on my machine from her, crying about someone, maybe, and wanting my shoulder. I didn't call her, but picked up my guitar, and while my fingers couldn't make the music my brain could hear, still I was comforted. That's all right. I've still got my guitar.