Friday, December 6, 2024

A date with Carol Burnett

For a few months in 1978, I lived in a studio apartment in Pico Rivera, a suburb of Los Angeles that looks like it sounds. I slept on the couch and my friend Kathy slept on a futon on the floor. We were separated by a small dining room table and two chairs.

Next door was a Rodeway Inn, which had a lounge where bands played songs by Merle Haggard and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I was over there just about every night. Kathy was a tattoo artist who worked during the day and so at night I’d give her the place. Sometimes she came with me to the Rodeway.

That’s where I met a small girl with short hair and a cute face named Carol. I didn’t know her last name for awhile, but after a couple weeks she said she was married to a guy whose last name was Burnett. “Wow, Carol Burnett,” I said and she sighed. But you couldn’t let that one go by.

Carol said her husband left her because he decided he was gay, but she had a one-year-old boy. They shared a room with her uncle, a truck driver who rented by the week. I used to see Carol at the Rodeway every time I went, but sometimes she’d just pop in for a minute, then go back to her kid.

I didn’t see her for about a month so I asked her uncle where she was and he told me that the boy was diagnosed with leukemia and Carol was with him at the hospital. When they came back to the Rodeway, Carol didn’t tell me much and I didn’t really ask. She was scared, though.

One day I was looking through club ads and I saw that there was a show at the Troubadour starring Jackson Browne’s brother Severin Browne on Monday and the cover was only $2. I didn’t have a job and had come to L.A. from Honolulu with about $80 to my name, so the price was right. I asked Carol if she wanted to go see a concert and she said yeah.

We rode the city bus from Pico to West Hollywood- a 90-minute ride- and had cheeseburgers at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Blvd. before the show. We walked by the Tropicana Motel and I showed her where Tom Waits used to live and she nodded.

At the Toubadour, a club I’d heard about for years, we sat in the balcony, right at the rail. I didn’t know any of Severin Browne’s songs, but I remember thinking that some of them were as good as his brother’s. Carol listened really hard to the lyrics, her chin on the rail.

On the bus back to Pico, she nuzzled her head in my shoulder and I put my arm across her back and we didn’t say a word. When we got back to the Rodeway, she said it was the best night she’d had in months. Then there was a long kiss and she headed to her uncle’s room to see her boy.

When I got back to the apartment, Kathy said she had a guy coming over soon. She gave me a blue valium, but I couldn’t go to sleep for a long time.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


*