The Phone Call
Lemmy called the next day. My friend Barbara was there when he called. I had just met her recently and she was often at my house. We’d drink tea and talk endlessly, usually about men, reading tarot cards and throwing the I Ching. Now, with excited anticipation, we talked of nothing else but Lemmy since I’d left the message the day before. I told her everything, how much he meant to me, so she knew what a big deal this was for me. When the phone rang and I gave her the nod that it was him, she kept Sylvie occupied while I talked to Lemmy.
Surprisingly, I was not nervous when I spoke with him. I think I had no real expectations at this point. I just wanted to talk to him.
“Hello? Is this Cynthia? You left a message for me to call? I’m not sure I know who you are” he said.
“Lemmy, I can’t believe it’s you! You knew me in 1968. In Earls Court when you lived on Philbeach Gardens. I was at the Royal Ballet School” I said. “Hmm, he paused, I knew a lot of girls who were ballet dancers back then” he said. My heart sank, but I said “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter really…”
“So why did you call?” he asked quickly. He was obviously curious.“I called because I wanted to thank you, I said. “I was so young, and I was crazy in love with you. I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the way you treated me in my innocence. So thank you, for being a gentleman.
What he said in response to that I cannot recall. It was most likely nothing more than the equivalent of a nod over the phone. If he’d said anything of meaning to me I would have remembered. Except that he asked if I’d like to come to see Motorhead. “We’ll be going up to Canada tonight, he said, but we’ll be back in New York in a couple of weeks.” He asked me to hold on while he got the itinerary.
“So it looks like we’ll be in Schenectady next” he said. He gave me the name and address of the venue and the date they would be there. I thanked him for calling and told him I’d try to come see him and we said goodbye.
I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly get to Schenectady to see him, but I was happy. Talking to him again relieved a bittersweet longing I had lived with for 20 years. This was very exciting, but mostly I felt a sense of peace and contentment in finding him again. And who knows? Maybe there would be some way, somehow, to see him again. Barbara and I had a lot to talk about now and Barbara and I did talk endlessly about Lemmy. I wasn’t trying to plan a way to get to Schenectady since I really thought it was impossible.
One afternoon later that week, Barbara and I were sitting at the kitchen table asking questions of the I Ching and Tarot cards when my first husband Bob, and his best friend Richard showed up for a surprise visit. Bob and Richard and I were inseparable in the early 70’s. Richard later married my sister Lauretta, but they were divorced now and I hadn’t seen him in ages.
When Barbara heard me say to him “You won’t believe it Richard, I’ve found Lemmy!!”, she questioned “You mean you’ve been talking about him since then?”
Richard exclaimed “God, she’s been talking about him since I met her…what was it, 1969-70 or so? Look at that Sam Gopal album”… it was right there on top of the turntable. “She must have played it about a million times!”
It was true. The album was painfully scratched, and the cover was falling apart.
“Yes, she’s played it for me”, Barbara said, rolling her eyes. I’d played “Escalator” for Barbara several times as I pointed out the words in “Grass” and how it described that first day with him in Richmond Park, and how “Yesterlove” described how I felt about him leaving my life. She wasn’t really being disparaging of my current obsession with Lemmy, she loved this stuff. We talked about the loves of her life all the time. It was one of our favorite subjects.
“Yeah”, Bob chimed in, narrowing his eyes, ”I’ve been meaning to say, I’ve got a bone to pick with you about that. You were always talking about Lemmy back when we were together. That kinda sucked.”
I sighed and responded. “What can I say, Bob? I’m sorry…”
“Well”, he paused looking down at the floor, “what does Brian think about it?”
“He doesn’t like it either” I had to admit.
When Brian and I got together I tried to put Lemmy in the past because he was so jealous of even my gay friends, or any friend at all,
“Remember the book I made when I was a teenager? I questioned Bob and Richard. It had a photo of Lemmy in it that he gave me. “Remember?” I asked looking back and forth at them. Bob and Richard both nodded. They had seen that portrait of Lemmy, young and smiling.
“One of the few things I regret is that I threw that journal into the incinerator where Brian and I first lived on Mattoon Street.” I paused to reflect on my feelings at that time. I had been trying to, sort of, pledge my devotion to Brian, and put Lemmy firmly in the past by ritually throwing that book into the fire. The whole book was important to me. It was a lovely poetic and romantic expression of who I was in my youth, but in truth, it was the photo of Lemmy that I was thinking of as I destroyed it.
“That was the stupidest thing to do”, I said, shaking my head. “But, Lemmy is always on my mind, always has been. That’s just the way it is.
“So you didn’t just get in touch with him now because you found out about Motorhead?” Barbara asked.
”No, Barbara, I’ve been crazy about him for 20 years, since the moment I laid eyes on him on Earls Court Road”, I said, “I just didn’t find him till now.”
