After I quit the copywriter job at the Sears advertising department, my girlfriend Rhonda and I lived in a nudist commune on an island in Lake Orion. She’d been a copywriter at Sears, too, a beautiful recent college graduate with an IQ of 162.

     She and I eloped to California in August 1969 and rented an apartment next to the Disneyland parking lot. I found work as a typesetter/proofreader at a company that produced repair manuals for US Navy aircraft. Rhonda found a job as a bikini waitress at a biker bar and we both wrote for a weekly freebie newspaper, Orange County Nite Life. Our task was to go to bars and find out what bands were scheduled.

     She and I bounced back and forth between Detroit and California three times in the next few years. By 1972 we were in Anaheim again and Rhonda was now a Federal Revenue Agent for the IRS, GS-12. She became irate that my career hadn’t advanced as much as hers.

     My brother Scott graduated from Brooks Institute of Photography around then and I went to Santa Barbara and found some work with him at a toy company writing package text and rule books for board games.

     I didn’t know it at the time but Rhonda was entering a severe bipolar disorder syndrome. While I was away she quit her job to become a bikini parts delivery girl for a Harley dealer in Orange County.

     The Detroit Lions played their final game of the season against the Los Angeles Rams and Rhonda met Eric, a linebacker on the Lions’ taxi squad. She went back to Detroit with Eric in early 1973.

     A few months later I drove back to Detroit myself and I spent the next two years as a barfly along Woodward Avenue, the spine of the city of Detroit. It splits into a divided road in the suburb just north of 8 Mile with a lush green divider up to the Detroit Zoo. The worst years of my life.

     I found a job as a truck driver delivering sheets of Formica and Formica pre-formed countertops to home improvement companies in the greater Detroit area.  

     I renewed friendships with my old pals from the Sears ad department. One of them had a son, Mark, who needed a housemate, so I moved into a bedroom at a house near Woodward in Royal Oak with Mark and his girlfriend and her 200 parakeets and finches. There were two other housemates: Dave, who had a growing cancer on his eyebrow and kept putting off treatment, and Neil, a 40-year-old alky. (The rest of us were mid-20s.)

     It turned out that Mark was a drug dealer and the house had a constant influx of visiting junkies. I myself was submerged in booze and weed but I didn’t do other drugs. One of the regular visitors died of an overdose of heroin and his mother kept calling me occasionally for the next ten years because she didn’t know anybody else who knew what her son was doing in his final days. I didn’t know, either–I didn’t hang out with him. The rumor on the street was that a couple of bitches were pissed off at him and they rigged a hot-shot for him.

     My social life was with the drug dealer’s parents. I caroused with them at bars along the Woodward strip. They had a neighbor, Tom, who needed help moving out of his house and I spent a day carrying his furniture into a rental truck. The neighbor had been promoted to a job in Washington DC. He left behind his 31-year-old girlfriend, Marilyn. I started dating her.

 They were the best-dressed, best-groomed runaways the world has ever seen.

The jet age spelled adventure for elite sisterhood of pretty, bright young women known as stewardesses. They were starlets of the skies with a cachet today’s flight attendants can only imagine

     Suddenly, I had this intense new girlfriend. She’d been a flight stewardess, had traveled all over the world. It turned out that what it meant was that she’d been to every airport hotel in the world. She never had a moment free while she was in Japan or England or Australia or Italy.  

     At the start I confessed to her that I was reticent because I’d had herpes a couple years ago. “Oh that’s nothing,” she said, “everybody’s had herpes.”

     Her hair color revolved somewhere between blonde and streaked and could change suddenly. She was very slender, deliciously slender. She was supple and lithe and her flesh had good tone; she played tennis. She was worried about her stomach stretch marks from birthing her two kids. Her breasts were not large but they were well shaped; she carried them naturally and confidently. She was the only woman I’ve known who never got around to complaining about her tits. She was an incredibly exciting partner in bed.

     One evening we had been smoking some dope and talking on a very close level. I was over-whelmed with my love for her, for her agile mind and sensuous body and I wanted us to become a Colin/Marilyn, a single unit in the battle against the universe. I’d had this feeling with Rhonda. I was overjoyed that now at last I could attain the same level with Marilyn; I felt the ghost of Rhonda would be finally dispersed. I felt I could read Marilyn’s mind sometimes. Alas, I wasn’t reading her mind, just mine.  

      She would go to the bathroom in a pleasant mood and came back indefinably angry. I could tell what was coming; despite any action or word I might take, an argument ensued.

     I read a book about multiple personalities and I realized Marilyn was a multiple personality. It fit the facts. We’d be sitting, talking, touching, and I would feel very very close to her, and she would go to the kitchen for something and when she came back she was another person, a cold and remote one.

     One night after an evening on the town we went back to Marilyn’s place and the door was locked–she’d locked herself out. She wanted to call a locksmith but the lock was a cheap simple thing and I put a shoulder to the door and it popped right open.

     This frightened her. She’d thought the door was secure and then it didn’t stop me for a moment. She didn’t feel safe. She decided to move to the town where her sister lived. I helped Marilyn move from Royal Oak to Hillsdale, Michigan, a 120-mile distance. I recruited three bar buddies and two pickup trucks and we loaded her stuff and drove to Hillsdale and unloaded the trucks.

     I traveled the 120 miles to Marilyn’s new home every weekend for several months. Sometimes I had to hitchhike. Also, a couple times a month my truck-driving job required me to drive to Elkhart, Indiana to pick up pallets of formica to bring back to the warehouse where I worked. I’d stop off at Marilyn’s place for lunch and a nooner.

     But that came to an end when I was cooking dinner on a Friday evening at her place when there was a knock at the door. She answered the door and talked to a young guy who was selling pirate 8-track tapes door to door. And then she was next to me in the kitchen and she’d changed, her eyes were wacky again, and she asked me to leave. “I want to fuck this guy,” she said.

     I got a little bit upset. I remember trying to pull my fist back out through the hole I had punched in an interior door. I was very conscious of how quiet she was as she watched.

She was sorry, she told me, but she had to be honest with me.

She suddenly felt overwhelmingly horny for this kid who had knocked at the door selling 8-track tapes door-to-door. The salesman left swiftly and without incident long before that, of course; I think he was mostly embarrassed.

But I left too.

     Then I got involved with Diane. She was a regular at Hosmer’s Bar and we talked a lot. She liked me because of the way I handled her younger brother who was semi-retarded with a touch of cerebral palsy. I have a brother who is blind and crippled and retarded and I knew how to see through that and treat her brother like a human.

     One night at the bar a song came on the jukebox, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw,” and Diane said, “Let’s do that.” And we did. We had to be careful because she was married, but she hadn’t had sex with her husband in two years.

     The problem with Diane was that she was the daughter of the Chief of Police. She felt immune. One night we left a Woodward bar at closing time. The street was deserted and Diane picked up a brick and threw it through a store’s plate glass window and an alarm began ringing. If we wait for the cops, they’ll let me go, she said. I hurried her away from the scene. Another time we were coming back from downtown Detroit on Woodward and when I stopped at a traffic light in the worst black ghetto section, she leaped out of the car and ran away down a sidestreet. I had to chase her down and coax her back into the car.

     Diane was always jealous of my previous women. Marilyn, especially, because I had been concerned about her. Diane rarely let a day go by without mentioning Marilyn.

     Diane was very good-looking, although overly-concerned about the smallness of her breasts. She was a perfect sex machine, always willing, totally compliant, skilled in all areas. To Diane, sex was a neutral thing that a woman was required to do by the rules of marriage or, in this case, cohabitation. It was the sole glue to a relationship. She kept an eye on the Frequency Meter; it was her only gauge of effectiveness, since the act had no intrinsic value to herself. Since we had very little going for us besides sex, she became alarmed whenever the rate fell below whatever she felt was a critical value. She always puzzled me; one day after a weekend in which we fucked maybe 6 times she started complaining that I obviously didn’t like her any more, since we had screwed 9 times a weekend six months ago.  

     She wanted assurance that she was good at what she did (and I’m here to tell you, she was marvelous), but the only assurance she could hear was repeat performance.

     At some point I heard from Rhonda and she wanted to rekindle our relationship. We had sex once and it was so sad…our special unique intimacy was gone. Now she was just another broad.

     Then one evening I got a phone call from Marilyn: she’d had a bad situation crop up. She’d picked up a hitchhiker who had just been released from Jackson Prison and things proceeded fast and he moved in with her. After a month, he stole her car and her checkbook and fled the state. She was so embarrassed at the prospect of having to testify to all this court that she decided to suicide. She told me she’d taken 50 Seconal pills to kill herself but now she was scared. Her voice became increasingly slurred.

     The suicide attempt fit with the multiple-personality theory, too: it is typical for one personality to swallow a bottle of pills, and then abandon control to another personality, who calls for help. That’s what Marilyn did: took 50 Seconal, then called me.

     She was in a phone booth. I grilled her for the location of the phone booth before she passed out. I called the Hillsdale police and her sister. They managed to save her.

     She was committed to a mental institution for a few months and we corresponded extensively. Her letters were a jumble of vituperation and sensuality, stroking me sometimes, savaging me others. There was no sequence to them—the hate-filled letters alternated with the loving ones. And always the sad lost little girl looking for a way out of life.

     She told me I was an emotionally disturbed wreck who would soon nosedive, yet turned to me again and again for emotional support. When she got out of the psych ward we resumed our relationship for a while.

     Then she called to let me know she was engaged to this guy she met, who turned out to be from her college class and they always liked each other but now it was in full bloom and the guy was going to divorce his wife and move Marilyn and her kids into a mansion in New England.

     Fine, I said. She was ecstatic about this development and only mildly aware of my feelings…since this was for her own good, why wasn’t I more cheerful?

     A few months later on New Years Eve she called and tearfully related the latest news—the guy had dropped her, all her hopes were dashed, could she come and visit?

     I was still enmeshed with Diane but I said yes, and she traveled the 120 miles somehow. When she arrived I put on her favorite album and put on the song Our House, and of course she burst into tears because it was her dream in verse and tune. I always was a nasty sort.

Our house

Is a very very nice house

 With two cats in the yard

Life used to be so hard

Then came you.

     And then I snubbed her when she called again. She sent letters that I never answered.  

     In January 1975 I was at Hosmer’s Bar with Diane on the night of the Super Bowl game. I’d made a big vat of chili and brought it to Hosmer’s Bar to watch the game and I got very drunk. I was in the Super Bowl pool but late in the game I saw that the only chance I had to win was if the Vikings scored a touchdown and then missed the extra point, and their kicker Fred Cox hadn’t missed an extra point in two years.

     I went home and passed out, and woke up with Diane showering kisses on me. “You won, you won,” and the prize was $500, four months rent, wow.

     That was the first night that Diane stayed overnight at my place. In the morning there was a knock at the door and it was her husband.

     “I have  a gun,” I said through the locked door. I had a Colt Navy .36 revolver, a black powder cap & ball weapon.   

     “I just want to talk,” he said, and he and Diane and I agreed to meet at IHOP for breakfast. And then in the surprise of my life, the husband turned out to be my doppelganger, a virtual clone of Colin Campbell, same size, same face. He had a mustache or you couldn’t have told us apart.

     I don’t recall a thing that we talked about. It was the first time the guy saw me, too–who knows if he was taken aback by the resemblance–but the result was that she moved out of ther house and Diane and I moved into an apartment together.

     I moved my stuff into the apartment, it took a couple trips in Diane’s car, and then the last thing left was my file cabinet containing all my life’s work as a writer. We stopped at Hosmer’s Bar for a drink before going to our first night in the apartment, and when we came out of the bar, the file cabinet was gone from the car.

     I couldn’t believe it. I searched all the dumpsters in the alley because I figured they were after the file cabinet, not the stuff in it, and it would be a lot lighter if they dumped out the contents.

     But it was all gone forever.

     I lost my job at the Formica joint. Unemployment was 23% in Detroit. Diane and I both were surviving on unemployment benefits. With no daily job to report to, we fell into a 25-hour day, rising an hour later every day. We got out of synch with the world–we’d wake up at 3am and go to the miniature golf course and play until dawn and then have a nice breakfast at Denny’s.

     I’d fallen out of the habit of writing. I still told people I was a writer and if they wanted proof, I pulled something out of my file cabinet.

     But now it was gone. To prove I was a writer I had to start producing pages again.

     I started writing about the scene I was embroiled in. I wrote descriptions of the bar folks and I began despairing for myself: I was in a terminal decline, and these awful people were all I had for friends.

     Rhonda got into a fight with her linebacker after he gave her the clap. He shoved her and she fell and broke her back. It wasn’t a severe injury but I spent a month going to her place to cook and clean for her.

     I started having fights with Diane and I moved out of our apartment. After that if she saw me on the street she tried to run me over.

     I was still going to Hosmer’s Bar every night. One night Rhonda showed up with her new boyfriend, an aeronautical engineer who had been best friends with the linebacker. I told him it was against doctor’s orders, she shouldn’t be on the back of a Harley for another couple months. He was 6’2″, 240 pounds, but I lectured him and called him names and told him he was pussywhipped for acceding to her request to come to the bar. MY bar.

     On Labor Day 1975 I got a phone call from Marilyn. She asked wistfully if she could see me. I was polite, but refused. She said all kinds of sweet things about me, how she was now realizing what a fine guy I was, and by the way she’d been in a drunken car wreck and was now a paraplegic and she wanted me to help her. She’d spent a lot of time lying in the hospital thinking about things, Mostly about me, she said, and how much her thinking had changed…

     I hung up. Maybe I was being extra nasty, but I sure didn’t want to

get locked in by chains of guilt with this crazy lady. I ignored all further rings. I went to the bar and got drunk. My friends kept telling me I owed it to Marilyn to devote the rest of my life to catering to her wheelchair needs.

     I don’t know why my friends thought it was my fault, that it was my duty to stand by Marilyn. I had nothing to do with her accident. I’d been intentionally cruel to her in our final breakup because I wanted revenge for the way she kept breaking up with me. That time it was me being the jerk.

     I didn’t know any way to handle the situation. I solved it by running away and slamming the door on those people, that life. My brother Scott had told me he’d started working at Santa Barbara Magazine and they could use my help.

     It took me six weeks to save the necessary money out of my Unemployment checks, and then I took my one duffel bag of possessions and my typewriter and just got on the bus, Gus, a Greyhound to Santa Barbara. My brother had assured people at the magazine that I was a genius and they believed him and accepted me onto the staff as Associate Editor.  

     This was the maelstrom that I escaped from.

     Here’s me a few days after I finally arrived in Santa Barbara after the long bus ride: