Shalom
SHALOM
It means piece… pun intended.
—BEANIE ROSEN
1977
“She’s just like Marilyn on The Munsters, ” Beanie told Elise as they watched Rubin from a distance.
“Wait,” Elise said, sounding shocked and somewhat offended. “Does that mean that you think we’re the freaks?”
“Uh, yeah,” Beanie answered, wondering if her friend ever looked in the mirror.
Elise, understandably jealous, was annoyed at Beanie’s singular obsession with this new girl. “What kind of name is ?” she asked rhetorically, knowing exactly what kind of name it was.
“Hebrew,” Beanie answered, adding that she thought it was beautiful and all-encompassing in that this one word meant hello, goodbye, and peace be with you.
“Then ,” Elise said, indicating that her new friend was coming as her old one was leaving.
It was easy for Beanie to get close to .
Getting her to notice Fish was a different story. was dating Leonardo Strickler, a blond, naturally tall (i.e., sans lifts), gorgeous college freshman who was away on a football scholarship to the University of Michigan. , who welcomed Beanie’s friendship, had little interest and less time for a short high school junior with big ideas.
When Beanie dutifully reported her lack of enthusiasm for Fish to Fish, he suggested she bring to The Hideout, his uncle’s club where he played piano every Tuesday.
“Chicks love it when I play. It turns them on,” he said. Most people would have found that comment narcissistic and obnoxious, but Beanie knew it was true. She could watch him sing for hours. And it did turn her on, but she kept that to herself.
The following Tuesday, she and went to The Hideout and watched from a back table as Fish played “The Long and Winding Road.” Beanie thought he looked especially sexy with his long brown suede vest and platform shoes that served the dual purpose of saying I’m cool, and I’m tall. Or at least taller.
thought he was adorable. And perhaps because she had a boyfriend out of state, and everyone else had been too shy to befriend her, the two friends became three, and the three, for a while, were inseparable, tooling around the valley in Beanie’s 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger.
Her father had gifted her his pale yellow two-door with a V8 engine for her sixteenth birthday, which Beanie had promptly, and as one of her skinny stepsisters had reminded her, stupidly decorated with pink bathtub appliques to look like the backdrop on The Dating Game. Thinking the flower power would make her cool, she was dismayed when the petals peeled away, leaving a pink polka-dot behemoth. But she was the only one with wheels, so the dotted Swinger became their chariot.
Their regular haunt was Bob’s Big Boy on Van Nuys and Roscoe, where they’d sit for hours after school sharing a combo and Coke, talking endlessly about what they would do with their lives—or, more specifically, what would do. Fish loved listening to tell about being discovered at Pacific Ocean Park and becoming a model, or how she got cast in the role of Valerie Bertinelli’s friend who died of bone cancer on One Day at a Time.
“You should be an actor,” said to Fish one night at his house.
That’s where they’d end up most weekends, in his converted garage/bedroom with the deep pile shag carpeting, the black lava lamp which cast the room in shades of red, and the macramé plant holder that Beanie had made for the ivy plant she had given him that encircled the room proprietarily, like prehensile fingers threatening to tighten their vines around anyone who came too close. There was an upright piano next to a low platform waterbed where would lie, her body undulating with the rhythm of the mattress.
“I’m serious, Fish,” she said, leaning on her elbow as her body moved hypnotically. “You’ve got a magnetism like Brando.”
“He wants to be a musician,” Beanie told her, upset that was redesigning Fish’s future. That was Beanie’s job, and she didn’t need nor require her suggestions for their lives.
“I can do both,” he said, sitting down and playing a medley of new Billy Joel tunes from The Stranger, an album he knew loved.
When he got to “She’s Always a Woman,” jumped up from the waterbed and danced in the middle of the room with unselfconscious abandon.
Beanie watched Fish watch .
It was a triangle of unrequited love.
Until it was no longer unrequited.
“He’s a great lover,” casually told Beanie in late June 1977. They were in the bathroom during the school’s nutrition break, and she was glossing her already glossed lips in the mirror. “He went down there,” she whispered, screwing the cap back onto her strawberry Bonne Bell stick. “Leo never did,” she confided.
“Never did what?” Beanie said, trying to pretend she didn’t understand; to deny a truth she wasn’t prepared to accept.
pointed to her nether regions and told her that Fish could do it for hours.
“We need to talk,” Beanie said to Fish later in the day. She had been waiting for him outside his classroom.
“I have Spanish,” he said.
“Skip it,” she told him, more of a command than a suggestion.
They walked to a bench nearby. He sat. She didn’t.
“Why didn’t you tell me you and went all the way?” she asked, close to tears.
He just stared at her.
“I mean, I tell you everything,” she said, getting angrier at his silence. “I didn’t even know that and Leonardo had broken up.”
Fish stood up. “They hadn’t,” he told her, clearing up the order of which came first, the fuck or the “Fuck you.”
Beanie was angry beyond words. She felt left out. Worse, she felt cheated on. And that made Fish angry.
“What did you think was going to happen, Beanie?” he argued, which was a fair point. What did she think? That they would all be just friends? Forever? “Grow up,” he said. “This is between me and .”
And just like that, their threesome had become two, leaving Beanie no other choice but to say, “Fuck you.”
Beanie, like her mother, had learned to keep score. And, also like her mother, she felt entitled to her fair share. She wouldn’t return Fish’s or ’s calls. She was too angry. Too hurt. She had gotten Fish what he wanted, and it wasn’t that he’d forgotten to include her—that she could understand, perhaps even forgive. But he’d purposely excluded her, spitting her out, like a fingernail.
After two weeks of unreturned calls, Fish sought out Beanie at her home. They went into her room, where they sat on her bed, where he apologized profusely, and then slowly and seductively gave her a blow-by-blow rundown of what it was like to fuck Rubin.
What he did. What she did. How it felt.
Everything. It was sick and twisted and highly dysfunctional, but in that way Beanie and Fish were able to become sexually involved by proxy. After “the misstep,” as she called it, she and Fish and resumed their relationship. They were inseparable, and when they weren’t, Fish filled in the gaps.
But in the summer of 1977, Leonardo said goodbye to Michigan and put in for transfer to USC. Fish’s converted garage and all it contained was no longer the draw it had once been for Rubin.
And Fish never saw it coming until it went.
.