Chapter 13 Kibitz Kismet
THIRTEEN
KIBITZ KISMET
WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN, I took a short trip to Amsterdam when I was in the UK for Married… with Children. I was absolutely floored by the place and its people. The city was beautiful with its winding canals and cobblestone streets.
I wished then, and still wish, that I’d been born Dutch. One of the stereotypes about Dutch people is that they’re plain-speaking, and because they “drink a lot of milk, they are therefore tall,” as a Dutch man once said to me.
In the end, not being actually Dutch, I did the next best thing: I married a Dutchman. But it took a long time to come to fruition. Our journey has been long and cosmic and spans a couple of lifetimes. I always refer to it as Kibitz kismet.
This is why.
In the first lifetime, I met Martyn LeNoble in Los Angeles in 1994 when I was twenty-two years old.
I had long realized that Duran Duran’s John Taylor was not, after all, going to be my husband, but I still wondered if one day I’d marry a rock god.
My first husband would turn out to not be a rock god, which was perhaps one of the many reasons that relationship didn’t work out.
Still, in my mind, I had the vision of a scruffy punk rock guy.
He would always show up when I was meditating, an idle but persistent reverie I could never quite escape.
Then, in 1994, a scruffy punk rock guy appeared for real.
I was at the Kibitz Room on Fairfax. My friends and I would often head to Kibitz after going to the clubs.
As I was innocently chomping away on French fries in my booth, a guy came around the corner, and there he was, bleached blond hair, missing teeth, a brown button-down shirt over a T-shirt.
My breath was taken away. This is him, I thought.
This is my punk rock god, my punk rock fantasy.
He was the epitome of a real kind of cool back then.
If you think you’re cool, you’re most likely not.
Martyn LeNoble actually deserved the word.
Here’s this dude who has lost his teeth but doesn’t even remember how he lost them.
(Cool.) He started playing bass in a band when he was fourteen and ended up in Los Angeles playing with two of the great underground punk bands—Thelonious Monster and Too Free Stooges—and eventually cofounded the band Porno for Pyros. (Very cool.)
Our friendship began that kismet night, and he would sometimes show up at the parties I threw. At one of them, his sister noticed that she’d been ditched by her brother while he and I decamped downstairs. We spent three hours talking. We got each other. We were immediate friends.
The same night, some dude from a boy band arrived, uninvited.
I remember thinking, I’m sure you’re great, but I would never invite you to one of my parties.
My friends tended to be out-of-work musicians, people who, unlike the boy in the band, know how to play music.
I had Jim Morrison’s piano, and bongos and conga drums and guitars, and everyone was just jamming and hootenannying.
There he stood, Boy Band Boy, in his Adidas tracksuit.
He turned to his two huge security guys and said, “This is what white people do.”
Dude was white, too.
About a year after I first met him, Martyn fell into a dark place.
One day I got a strange phone call from him and his friend, asking me to come see them.
I went over to their house, and I knew immediately that something was wrong.
I had to get Martyn out of there. I forced him to come with me, out to my car, and I made him sit with me and breathe.
We listened to some music from the Agape church.
“Just listen,” I said. “Just sit and listen.”
“Get me out of here,” Martyn said, referring to the house we’d just left, and the life into which he had sadly fallen.
I took him to my house to look after him.
I would lie in bed with him when he was at his worst. As he tells it, by then he was in love with me.
For me, it was a platonic but deeply meaningful friendship.
I knew I had to do anything I could to keep him from going back to that house.
I was so desperate that once in a while I’d say, “If you stay here, you can touch my boob.” In my head I was thinking, What am I doing?
But I wanted him to live—he was already so important to me.
Martyn has since claimed that we kissed and that I was in love with him, too.
I don’t remember it like that, but okay, I’m sure it was the case.
After a week or two of this, I called his parents, whom I’d never met, and told them that I was going to fly them from Amsterdam to Los Angeles.
Martyn wasn’t okay, and I thought he might need them.
After his parents had been in L.A. for a few days, his father took me to one side and said, “You guys fight like you’re married.
” Later, his dad would say that in those moments, he knew we loved each other.
I still didn’t know it, not truly, or at least I wouldn’t admit it.
Eventually, Martyn’s parents returned to the Netherlands, and Martyn felt well enough to leave. I found him back at that house. As much as I’d tried, I couldn’t help him.
Our friendship, for the time being, was over.
Years later, I was shopping at Fred Segal, the now defunct but then legendary clothing store in West Hollywood, when I saw a family walking toward me. It was a tall, beautiful man and a beautiful woman, with a beautiful little girl at their heels.
It was Martyn, his then wife, and their child.
“Oh my god!” I said. “Martyn! You’re alive! You look amazing. We all thought you’d be dead by now.”
A day or two after the Fred Segal run-in, Martyn called me.
“I can never talk to you again,” he said. “My wife said that there’s too much there.”
For the longest time I kept a shrine in my house, with things that I prayed for and meditated on. And part of that shrine featured a photograph of Martyn, as well as an album by Porno for Pyros. I would pray for him every day, along with all the other people I cared about.
“Okay,” I said, “I understand.”
It was enough that he was well and happy, or so I thought. Clearly, I was swimming up a big river in Egypt.
In the middle of 2005, my first husband and I separated. He filed for divorce at the end of that year, and soon after, I fell for a guy named Lee Grivas.
Lee was an Alaskan deep-sea fisherman, of all things—think Deadliest Catch—and as different from the people I usually dated as you could imagine.
He was ten years younger than me and living in New York with a friend of mine when I met him.
Almost instantly, he filled my life with enormous fun.
He was an escape for me, especially after the end of my marriage.
At times being with Lee was like being with a toddler, right down to the making of forts in my living room (yes, we actually did that).
He was an awkward guy, but he was hot and had a killer job.
I loved that he didn’t have anything to do with the entertainment industry.
He eventually made my house in Los Angeles his home base.
Every now and then he’d have to leave for a month at a time, heading off to the Bering Sea to risk his life for king cod.
When he’d get back, he’d tell me all about his adventures, and the fun would return.
But Lee also had the addiction gene. He had been a heroin addict.
He was off the junk when I met him, but shortly after we started dating, he picked up a pill habit, and then after a couple of years, the pills led him back to heroin.
I put him in a rehab and then he went into a halfway house, but three years into our relationship, I sadly found needles in my house.
My cat had tunneled into the bag and was batting at them. I just couldn’t have that.
The relationship had been so fun until it wasn’t. Lee was never mean. He was just young and stupid and an addict.
“You’ve been to enough rehabs,” I told him. “I can’t anymore. You have to go.”
I didn’t feel a thing. My wounds had scarred over, and scar tissue is stronger than any other tissue. It gives you the ability to not feel.
I moved Lee out of my house and into an apartment on St. Andrews in downtown Los Angeles.
St. Andrews is famously name-checked in the Jane’s Addiction song “Jane Says.” Jane Bainter, the now former addict who lent her name and attendant affliction to the band, walks along the street in the song, an eerie harbinger.
We weren’t talking much because it was too hard for me. I had given all of myself to try to help him, and nothing had worked. I had even talked to his mom about his problems to see if she knew something I was missing.
“I’ve done everything I can, too,” she said. She had been through it too many times to count. “At some point you just have to let go,” she said, “and you have to say, ‘I can’t help you anymore.’ ”
In late June 2008, I headed once again to Hawaii to get some relief. This time I took Martyn.
A month earlier I had walked into the children’s hospital in Los Angeles, where I was volunteering to do art with the kids, and there, holding the elevator door for me, was this tanned and toned guy, smiling that toothless smile.
It had been ten years since I’d seen him last.
Martyn was at the hospital to play music for the children, and as we rode the elevator, we realized we were both wearing Converse sneakers. It felt like a Thing, more kismet. When we reached my floor I thought I’d walk away from him forever.
“Well, it was really good to see you. I’m so happy you’re okay. I’m so happy.”
But Martyn kept leaving me messages after that, or calling my close friend Rachel, insisting he had to talk to me.
“Rachel,” I’d say, “I don’t want to talk to him. I’m fine with not talking to him.”
“Christina, he really needs to talk to you,” she’d say.