I loved Leroy’s. Great characters populated the place—hustlers and funny old dudes straight outta Richard Pryor routines, like Redbone, a Jheri-curled Creole brother who couldn’t stop talking about his talent for eating pussy.
Because I was gutting, cutting, and frying fish, I stank to the heavens. Standing over the fryer for hours at a time also caused major pimple breakouts from the oil and grease hitting my face. After work, if Dad wasn’t home, I’d go up to Cloverdale to visit Mom. The first thing she did was make me take a shower with lemons, the only way to get rid of the smell of fish.
By then, I’d moved out of Tracy’s and was living in a Pinto I rented for $4.99 a day. I slept in the reclining front seat, but it was better than sleeping in the park. I also found a second job, as a dishwasher at East West Café, on Melrose Avenue, across from Fairfax High. Mom would come there for lunch, just to make sure I was okay and still in school. I was, but I wasn’t about to tell her I was living in a car. The East West gig had its upside: the kitchen window looked out onto an alleyway where my friends would come to keep me company while I scrubbed pots and pans.
The less gritty jobs were actually tougher on me. My stint at GHQ (Gentlemen’s Headquarters), at the Beverly Center mall in West Hollywood, was a bust. I wasn’t good at sales, and I didn’t like pushing high-priced clothes I wasn’t into myself. I’d rather have fried fish or washed dishes than tell someone he looked good in a silk suit when, in fact, he didn’t.
So I lived out of that car. I lived on the fly. I was a strange combination of high school kid and hustling musician. And for a while an amazing artistic family, the Steinbergs, took me in. That opened still another world to me.
* * *
I’d become friends with Eliza Steinberg in my second year at Beverly, during school orientation. She was a year younger, and I was performing with the school band to inspire freshmen to join the arts programs. There was an immediate attraction and instantaneous bonding. I had two very different kinds of feelings for girls I found attractive. I saw them either as girlfriends or sisters. It’s no surprise that the sister relationships were the ones that lasted longest. It wasn’t that there wasn’t love between me and Eliza—there was deep love—but the kind of enduring love you feel for family.
Eliza’s family embraced me. Their Angelo Drive house off Benedict Canyon was a work of minimalist art, starting with the gray industrial carpet. Eliza’s mother, Lenny, was a gifted decorator and artist who designed her own furniture. Her husband, Bob, was a lawyer. The three Steinberg sisters were dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers: Eliza’s sister Morleigh created a body of work all her own (and wound up marrying The Edge, of U2), and Roxanne conceived a series of pieces with her Japanese husband, Oguri, master of the Butoh school of dance. Eliza was herself a great dancer and loved learning the latest moves from the Black girls at school. She and I would go to parties together in Baldwin Hills and Inglewood and dance the night away.
It was Lenny Steinberg who introduced me to Maxfield, a West Hollywood boutique where I first saw the work of Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto and learned that clothes (like paintings or dance or music) have no creative limits. Already a clotheshorse, I now saw the relationship between high fashion and art.
The Steinbergs became my refuge. Or, as Eliza’s dad said, his daughter brought me home, and I never left. When my cousin Jennifer got married in Nassau, I took Eliza as my date. By then, she was my sister.
It was the Steinbergs who helped me heal my rift at Cloverdale by becoming friends with Mom and Dad. Knowing the friction between me and my father, Lenny and Bob invited my parents and grandparents to their home. It was an especially gracious move. Mom and Lenny Steinberg got along famously, and so did Grandpa Albert and Bob Steinberg. The two bonded over baseball and philosophy. Later, Mom reciprocated by inviting the Steinbergs to Cloverdale. That evening also went great. These social occasions allowed my parents to see that, while I was still living outside their home, good people were looking after me.
Eliza Steinberg and Tracy Oberstone were both in Miss Janet Roston’s famous dance class at Beverly Hills High, where the artistic standards were incredibly exacting. A third member of that class, Jane Greenberg, became my sweetheart and lifelong friend. Like Eliza, Jane had great artistic spirit, a sweet nature, and an appreciation for what I was trying to do musically. The first time I saw her in her Fred Segal skinny jeans and a cashmere sweater, I fell in love. When we got to talking, the chemistry was strong. We both craved emotional intimacy. Jane wasn’t an attention seeker; she was a spiritual seeker, someone I could talk to all night long. The obstacle we faced wasn’t our feelings for each other, but Jane’s parents.
Jane’s folks were liberal Jews. Her dad was an attorney who’d helped launch the LA Opera. Her mom was a member of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Their Beverly Hills home was filled with paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Franz Kline. Jane’s grandparents had an even more expansive art collection, Picassos and Pollocks. Yet, for all their passionate commitment to the arts, it didn’t appear that Jane’s parents wanted their daughter dating a Black boy.
Sometimes, after working at Leroy’s, I’d park the Pinto down the street from the Greenberg home and sleep in the backseat, hoping the cops wouldn’t come banging on the window. I’d wait till morning, when Jane’s folks would leave for the day. Then Jane would let me in to shower. The Greenbergs’ housekeeper, Frances, was like an auntie and always made sure I had something to eat.
Jane and I hung out at the Beverly Hills Public Library, poring over books on art and sculpture. That’s how she got in trouble. One day, while we were walking back from the library holding hands, someone saw us and snitched to Jane’s parents. More fireworks. This stalled us but didn’t stop us. I kept slipping Jane little love notes. We kept meeting on the sly at the Bagel Nosh, where we fantasized about our future: she saw me as a jazz musician living in New York. I saw her by my side, writing poetry and the great American novel on an old Underwood typewriter.
Our amorous adventures continued. During the summer, I drove out to visit Jane at the Idyllwild Arts Academy, in the San Jacinto Mountains, where Bella Lewitsky, the modern dance innovator, led the faculty. The Steinberg sisters were there, too, along with another friend, Julie, daughter of actors Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.
Jane and I spent the night together in her dorm room. Heaven.
Then hell: on another trip, I somehow got Dad to let me borrow his car and totaled it head-on into a tree. I’d been sober but reckless: I was driving too fast on a winding road late at night. I thought Dad would never recover, but this time he was surprisingly understanding. He paid for the towing and didn’t give me shit for destroying his car. He was just grateful I was alive.
Jane understood me and pushed my sense of fashion. Long before Jean-Paul Gaultier, she custom-designed a man’s skirt made of jersey. I decided to wear it on a night that she and I were going dancing with Phineas Newborn and Joey Collins. Before the evening began, we were all up at Cloverdale. Dad was still at the office, so the coast was clear.
When I came out wearing a black-on-black shirt with a subtle floral print, a black tux jacket, and … the black jersey skirt, Phineas and Joey whistled their approval. Jane beamed with pride. Mom stayed silent. Keep in mind, Mom adored Phineas, Joey, and Jane. Still, she was facing her son in a skirt. After my friends’ applause died down, my mother continued staring at me. Straight face. Finally, she spoke: