Cheyenne, is currently in an Earth Mother phase. She has a fourteen grain bread cooking in the oven and a stew comprised of an untold number of vegetables on the stove. When we met three years earlier, her name was Sheryl, but that changed after some stoned freak, seeing a photo of her Nevada goat farmer grandfather, insisted he had the face of a plains Indian warrior. Cheyenne is a painter—a Surrealist one month, an Expressionist the next, a Minimalist the third. Not that the art world cares. She hasn’t had a solo exhibition in a decade because when only three of forty paintings sold at her first opening, she stormed into the gallery the next day, pulled her works off the wall, and took them home. Since then no one will exhibit her works, but this hasn’t stopped Cheyenne. Every few months she finishes a series of new paintings, carts the canvases to the parking lot at the nearby Ralph’s market, puts up a sign that says free works of art, and spends the next two days interrogating anyone who shows an interest. Those which don’t find suitable owners are stuffed into the dumpster behind the market. Then she comes home, goes to bed, and refuses to speak for a week or two.
I check about dinner.
Ask him over, she says. He can use a home cooked meal.
An hour later TJ is lounging on my couch. He is much bigger than I imagined, inches over six feet and with such a large and startlingly handsome face that it’s difficult to look directly at him.
Let’s trade fuck stories. Those are his first words. Who did the Lincolns fuck? In Madrid, in Tarazona, in Jarama? Did you interview any Spanish girls who slept with Americans? One thing I know for sure: these guys didn’t just poke it up each other’s ass.
I confess: it never occurred to me to look for girls who knew the Lincolns. They wouldn’t have still been girls.
Fuck no, he says, they’re women. Women never forget their lovers. I went up to Palo Alto to interview Robert Merriman’s wife. In her memoir she claims she was raped by an officer at brigade headquarters. But c’mon, don’t they always say that? I took her to dinner, poured her a lot of wine, moved close, put my arm around her. She’s almost eighty now, but shit, she’s still a woman. She likes being close to a man. So eventually I get around to asking was it really rape? Didn’t she consent? Her husband had been away at the front for months. Wasn’t she horny? And what happened after he disappeared and she stayed on alone? No Spanish lovers? Remember, she was pretty damn wild in college, and soon she was crying softly and half admitting it. Didn’t deny it anyway. Fuck, these guys were heroes but they weren’t exactly priests.
Probably you remember Merriman from the film. The first commander of the Lincoln Battalion. A tall, handsome, all-American type. Football star at the University of Nevada, lumberjack during summer vacations, grad student in economics at Berkeley, organizer for the longshoreman during the San Francisco general strike of 1934. Twice he was wounded while leading his men and both times he returned to action. He’s a genuine hero, the guy who has the girl but loses his life. Without a character like Merriman there couldn’t have been a film. Even then I suspected that TJ would play him like Gary Cooper, shrug his shoulders, set his jaw, mumble his lines. Some critics thought his performance more a parody than an homage. TJ was furious he didn’t get the award for Best Actor. Best Director wasn’t good enough for him.
At the first use of the word fuck, Cheyenne charges in from the kitchen, and soon we are treated to plenty more along with a few sucks as she recounts her own adventures. This is standard behavior. My old lady is ready to brag to anyone—people at the next machine in a Laundromat, at jazz clubs like the Parisian Room, even at departmental parties—that she has slept with over two hundred men. Give her half a chance and she is likely to go on to age, profession, race, height, weight, shape, and personal proclivities. Over the thick stew, a salad overloaded with jicama and carrots, and the home baked bread, TJ urges her on to details about size, texture, smell, taste and feel. She is happy to comply. By the time we are on the apple pie, a certain glaze in his eyes suggests our guest has begun to wonder how much is truth and how much fiction. Even Cheyenne doesn’t know. When we first were together, she decided in a kind of offbeat homage to my profession to set the historical record straight by providing specific data. For an entire afternoon she paced up and down her studio, sitting occasionally to scrawl names of lovers. The final list totaled fifty-seven. Thirteen were no more than X’s.
Black Muslims? I ask.
Cheyenne is embarrassed. The total is way too low. She makes excuses. She used to drink a lot, do some drugs. She has forgotten many one night stands. Give her time and she swears that number will rise above two hundred. And though she never does another accounting, she continues to use the same number when anyone asks—and often when they don’t.
Before the evening ends we get to enough historical stuff for TJ to say that when the film goes into production he wants me on the payroll. Until that time, we should meet regularly as part of pre production to talk about the Lincolns. For the next three nights he and I dine at the Aware Inn on the Sunset Strip. Long before cell phones took over our lives the restaurant had special lines at the tables for important people. Our attempts at conversation are regularly interrupted by TJ making or taking phone calls, by autograph seekers, well wishers, and old friends like Elaine May, Robert De Niro, Goldie Hawn who stop by to say hello. To each I am introduced as The Professor. When on the second night I am brave enough to complain that I’m not just a title, I’ve got a name, TJ says Shit. We’ve all got names but we don’t all got titles. What other Hollywood project has a PhD attached? Enjoy the status while you can. We ill educated types can use someone to admire.
Our meetings don’t go on for just three days or three months, but for years, seven years of me playing the role of teacher, librarian, and consultant, spilling out endless details about the backgrounds, personalities, beliefs, motivations, situations, quirks, fears, and heroics of these volunteers for liberty, as the Communist Party liked to call them. A good deal of the time I am no more than an ear for TJ’s monologues. He loves to ramble, to regurgitate stuff from my book and make it sound as if he were its author and I a rather slow student who is being introduced to a difficult subject. Often enough TJ is—how can I put it delicately?—full of shit, enormously stubborn about what he doesn’t know. When on occasion I become tired and fed up enough to criticize his pseudo facts, ill informed opinions, or bizarre interpretations, he pouts, then when others are present, gets back at me.
The professor, TJ says. Oh, never argue with the professor. He has a PhD. He knows everything about everything.
The years take us from the Aware Inn to his messy bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel to the enormous but empty living room of the mansion he buys on Mulholland Drive. Sometimes he phones me at home or at the university for a talk which is inevitably interrupted by another call. Sometimes he reaches me in unlikely places at unlikely hours, places where I am teaching or doing research or on vacation. The term I have a chair at the Europe University Institute in Florence, he catches me after a dinner in the Tuscan hilltop town of Montalcino. After a bottle of Brunello, I am drunk enough to suggest he come over and we have our talk while dipping in the old Roman hot springs at Bagno Vignoni. Never do I believe a film on the Lincolns will actually be made. Who in the world of film would, after all, be crazy enough to finance an epic about a bunch of American Communists?
Flash forward almost a decade and I am in Madrid, enjoying the perks of Hollywood which begin the morning of the day I meet Aisha, begin right past immigration at Barajas Airport where a uniformed driver takes my suitcase and my laptop, leads me outside, and holds open the door of a black Mercedes. Through tinted windows I watch a red dawn stain the sky behind the huge billboards and the rows of office buildings and apartment houses that line the expressway. The porters at the Palace Hotel are dressed like admirals, the clerks at Reception like the directors of funeral homes. A bellhop leads me into a sixth floor room with flowery period furniture. Don’t ask me what period. If it’s not Bauhaus, I won’t recognize it, and the curving legs and bronze fittings of the table in the corner of the room are definitely not Bauhaus. Neither is
