Shark!

When Pam and I split it would be several years before we would see each other again. I found out later we were still kind of keeping track of each other through friends.

Both of our dads died during this time.

One night I got a call from her that caught me off guard. She was coming to visit.

Pam had become a Playboy Bunny at the club in Chicago. She brought keys to the club for all the guys in my band. She dropped the names of rock stars she’d been partying with and had recently broken up with the bass player from Cheap Trick.

I tried to impress her with films and music I’d been working on. The visit went better than we’d expected and we ended up getting pretty intimate. She’d later tell me she could tell I’d slept with someone earlier that day. I felt like an ass because I had. When she left I figured she was out of my life again.

Several weeks later I got another unexpected call from her in the middle of the night. “Come get me,” she said. I drove to Chicago the next day.

She lived in a third floor apartment on Lincoln Avenue. I think she was living with 2 gay actors and her best friend GiGi. They all loved her.

My favorite music venue was Park West and it just happened to be across the street from the Playboy Club. She knew the owner and we could get in free. She asked me if I’d ever heard of the woman that was playing that night. Her name was Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson had just released the 12” single “O Superman”. The National Endowment for the Arts put up the money for it. I was already a big fan and it was a great show. David Van Tieghem was Laurie Anderson’s percussionist and years later Pam would marry him. I don't think she even remembers she'd seen him back then. She would tell me about the time she got in a fight with a friend of ours on the way to a Laurie Anderson show in St. Louis. She decided not to go. She would say she missed seeing him that first time.

I brought Pam back to St. Louis and we lived with Danny and his girl friend Josie. It got a little stressful between the girls sometimes. Danny and I could only laugh.

Pam and I moved into the apartment on Pershing with Kent and his girl friend Sherry. This was the place that had the big police raid I mentioned earlier.

Occasionally we’d go back to the apartment in Chicago. One New Year’s we took my friend Bill and he and GiGi hit it off immediately.

The first floor was a store front with a pet shop. Some drunken New Year’s reveler crashed into it shattering a giant aquarium. We found a shark wriggling on the sidewalk. Somehow we wrestled it up to the third floor and threw it into the bath tub. Someone yelled it was a salt water fish. Damned if someone didn’t start pouring salt into the tub.

Somehow the poor shark survived.

I have too many stories about my experiences with Pam. I’ll have to break them up.