Meeting Karen

A Favor Owed

Milt and I were sitting at the table in an alcove off the living room of my apartment on the 19th floor of an apartment building overlooking Rittenhouse Square. We were drinking Jack Daniels, smoking (store bought and hand rolled), listening to Roberta Flack and having a very mellow conversation. What we were supposed to be doing was meeting my friend Stan at a club called Just Jazz to see a show starring Stan Getz. Not that we didn’t want to see Stan Getz; or my friend Stan. But we had made a successful early start and had reached a point where we were satisfied with being fairly immobile.

Milt was a friend, colleague – okay, my boss- and mentor. Stan, that is to say, my best friend Stan, kept calling from the Grog Shop, which is where we were supposed to have met. He was not nearly as far gone as Milt and I were and he was with his finance, Jane, and her best friend, Karen.

According to Stan, I had to meet this Karen person, he was making his point by calling me repeatedly after his fiancée, and her friend had shown up. He had gradually shifted from the original plan, for us three guys to go to the Club, and switched to suggesting losing Milt and meeting up with him, his finance and Karen. I finally told him that Milt and I weren’t going anywhere and he should take the girls and use our reservations to see the show.

That should have been the end of it but several more calls from the club itself proved otherwise and, in the end, Milt and I gave up and agreed to go. We sort of floated our way up the few blocks from my place and when we arrived, we found a very long line of people out front. We just ignored that and headed into the front door where we were promptly stopped. I surrendered my name and claimed my reservations.
“Those were already claimed.” “Hey, not my problem, they were in my name; care to see some ID and hey, there’s two seats right there; we’ll take those!”

As it happens, the open seats were very near where Stan and the girls were situated and with a few changes and a cooperative customer or three, we were altogether at last and I met Karen. It was play at first sight. I really do not know what happened but I became another person behaving well outside of my usual comfort zone. That is to say, we were almost thrown out of the place at least twice for flagrant displays of affection during the course of the show. Then again, she shouldn’t have been in there in the first place since she was only nineteen at the time (I was 28).

That evening set the tone for the next several months of what became almost serious dating. We’d go to the shore; do some clubbing; sleep in the car – all sorts of things that were outside of my ordinary activities. Up to that point in my life, I had been successfully fast tracking through several companies and had once been described by a hippie neighbor as” the straightest person” she had ever met!
All in all, I would have to say that I was a more than fairly serious person about just about everything and put in many hours in my suit and tie doing “important” work and didn’t date a lot although there had been a few adventures. Nevertheless, essentially, I was that serious guy who didn’t laugh a lot.

Now I seemed to have become someone else; defined by the circumstances and conditions under which Karen and I had met and I felt it was necessary to live up to her expectations for that “other me” when we met in the future. Like a chameleon, I would stay disguised as that hipper, cooler person who had made such a dramatic appearance at Just Jazz. At least that is who I would be whenever Karen and I were together.

She was the exception to all that normality in my life and she would have a profound effect on the direction that life would be taking into the future. On the other hand, she was perceptive enough, and that whole chameleon thing was new enough, that she knew we were not compatible and our relationship turned out to be short-lived.
It was several years before I heard from her again; she was in some difficulty. Seems that she had joined the Navy but all that structure in her life did not really work for her and that career was about as short-lived as the “relationship” we had shared. She had stayed on in Chicago for a while but was returning to Philly and needed a place to stay. Her mother had made it clear that she was not welcome at that house; or so I was told.

However short our relationship had been, there had been many improvements in my personal life since last we had met and I gave her a lot of credit for igniting that renovation. An example of one important change was that I had adapted that chameleon concept on a more conscious level and found it increasingly natural to assume different roles that reflected the expectations of the different women I would meet in a variety of circumstances. (Some people might shorten that to just say I had “become better at being a phony”; they are entitled to their opinion and are not required to think it through.)

Whatever the cause, I was dating much more regularly and avoiding getting too involved with any one person; which is to say, I was enjoying life as a bachelor. One thing was very clear to me and I also made it clear to Karen - I was not looking for a roommate. Nevertheless - a favor was owed!

Moreover, I did have access to an empty apartment! My father had joined the Peace Corps, was in Thailand at the time, and had asked me to take care of his place.
I told Karen she could stay there for a while.

That arrangement did not last long; a little more than a month later, the property owner threw her – and my absent father out. I was able to make arrangements to store his stuff with one relative or another but that still left a problem - Karen. She had told me that the owner was just looking for a chance to break the lease so he could increase the rent. Dad had made a number of improvements to the place, out of his own pocket, so that story made some sense. (Eventually I would hear another side to the story, involving frequent loud and long parties; but by then more than a few years had passed and it no longer mattered.)

Anyway, I still was not looking for a roommate and while not succumbing to another visitation of full-scale Pygmalion mode, I still found myself taking responsibility for getting Karen settled. I did find her an apartment (which, in hindsight, might have been just a little too close to my place) bought some basic furniture and wished her well.

She found a job; so far so good. It turned out that she was good at finding jobs. Being very tall, thin, and attractive - with a great sense of humor, helped. She was not so good at keeping them – could never be anywhere on time, especially something as unimportant as a job. Now there was a new job and as the weeks went by, I noticed that timeliness didn’t seem to be a problem for her latest employer. Even more curious, after only the first few weeks, Karen was allowed to use one of the company cars as though it were her own!

Of course I would have to confront her about all that. So I stopped by her place on my way home from attending the wedding of a friend. I was standing there in my tux and hearing about how this company was nothing more than a “front”. They were supposed to be a cleaning company for both homes and businesses but the real money was in robbing homes and businesses or arranging insurance frauds. Karen had been hired as the bookkeeper and while she was working for the legit side of the business, she was learning that she would be expected to do the real books.
These guys had checked her out; knew her weaknesses; knew her father was a bookie in South Philly; knew about me and may even have had her place bugged. As this out-flowing of information was ending; and I was explaining how she had to get out of the situation, there was a knock on the door. I had been standing right there so I opened it. There were two very large guys in suits on the other side and one of them was in the process of stepping inside when I put my hand on his chest to encourage him to backup; told them Karen was busy and shut the door.

And no one (and by “no one”, I mean me) got shot or attacked in any way!
I did convince her to quit although I was running out of the resources to either keep paying her rent or move her somewhere else.

As it happens, I was less than thrilled with my job at the time and had been in contact with the owner of a small company out in L.A. who had recently offered me a new job. It seemed like it would be a good time to take the offer.

So I quit my job; put most of our stuff in storage, had the Fiat Spyder tuned up, packed it with what would fit of Karen’s and my stuff and off we went. We both had sisters living in the LA area and the plan was that I would stay with my sister in Beverly Hills and she with her sister in the Hollywood Hills. This “favor” business was becoming very complicated.

The trip out wasn’t very exciting. There was that relatively minor problem in Oklahoma when the Spyder decided to take a rest but we were only on the side of the road for a few minutes. Karen stepped up and out of the car in her short-shorts, all of close to six feet of mostly legs and the first pickup truck past couldn’t back up fast enough to offer assistance. Which is when I got out of the car; but the cowboy recovered nicely and was able to get us running well enough to make it into Oklahoma City to get another tune-up. (The first mechanic had neglected to grease the points which had then burned up; the cowboy used the stricker on a pack of matches to clean them up enough to make that fairly short ride into town.)

We were taking turns driving and after a few days of non-stop driving we decided to stay overnight in Vegas but avoided gambling for the most part; note: you could have a great, inexpensive, time in that town – if you skipped the gambling part. Oh right, we also took a tourist flight through the Grand Canyon during which I got airsick but still enjoyed the experience.

As we prepared to cross the state line into California, I tried to set an upbeat tone by timing the entry for sunrise with the top down and the theme music from the (then) recent mini-series “Roots” playing loudly while silently promising myself that, this time, my California experience would be different. Oh well; one can always hope.

Somewhere during all of this, I had reflected on whatever it was that was going on between Karen and me. From the time she had returned from Chicago, I had verbally maintained, to Karen as well as myself, that all I was trying to do was re-pay a friend a favor owed for the great times and “lessons” learned from those earlier years. After more than a little reflection, I decided that I would also have to take responsibility for the non-verbal messages s that were being sent; the seemingly endless “help” which could be interpreted as contradicting that verbal message.
However one tries to “interpret” all that was happening, when we arrived in L.A., both Karen and I ended up staying at my sister’s and just visiting with her sister every now and then. I had a roommate.

It was about this time that I began to learn about Karen’s extreme jealousy. This was something that would be impossible for me to live with. My job out there involved documenting a new software product and developing a national marketing campaign for it. This was not something I had ever done before and it involved many hours at the office and doing on-site research at one place or another.

The jealousy issue is something she came by “honestly”, I suppose. The several marriages of her mother were all accompanied by the same problem – actually, to hear Karen tell it, with even more extreme issues. For example, when a step-father would get a new job, on the first day, Karen’s mother would go there with him to check out what the women there looked like. If the potential competition was too much, he would have to pass on taking the job! And not only was Playboy magazine banned from the house but depending on Ed Sullivan’s guests, it might be necessary to turn off the TV.

Karen would just call me a lot, follow me around or just make endless (baseless but loud) accusations. I tried to understand the insecurities at the root of all that nonsense but found it just about impossible to live with.

After about six months in California, it had become very apparent that a borderline con artist ran the company where I was working. The marketing campaign was getting good results but mostly from east of the Mississippi and those companies expected to see a sales rep in person to close the deal. There was no money to pay for all that travel or the other bills (including my pay!). I was getting more than a tad worried. Karen was working; think she was on her third of forth job by then; meaning there was nothing there that was dependable.

In the course of that marketing effort, I had met a publisher who was a competitor with the company I had been writing for back East and he offered me an opportunity to develop a new monthly essay along with a series of seminars. This was the equivalent of a part-time job but about that same time I had a call from another company back in NJ. It seems they had a very large and very troubled production facility they had recently acquired and several independent sources had suggested to them that I would be the right person to make it all better.

I accepted both of those opportunities and in getting ready to drive East, I had only packed my stuff into the car. Karen and I had discussed the problems we were having with that whole jealousy issue and had, I thought, agreed that it would be best if she stayed in California.

At the last minute, she hit me with the: “you brought me out here; you have to take me back”.

And so I did. And rented a nice house near a private lake but that was also not far from the ocean - for us to try again. And went to work.

Of course the jealousy and fights continued. We would break up and Karen would move back to Philly – her mother had relented, for a while. But we would eventually try dating and before you knew it, we were once again living together. It was an addiction.

There came a point when we recognized that there would have to be more distance between us; a lot more distance. So I paid her way back to California where she moved back in with my sister and all seemed well - for a while.

Remember that seminar series I had agreed to develop? The debut was scheduled for LA. My arrangement with the publisher was a 50/50 split of revenue less expenses so it was in my best interest to keep those expenses low. This meant I would be staying with my sister – and Karen.

However, that was okay; it was only a week! And at the end of the week, I would return to Jersey and Karen would stay in California. An excellent plan; I was completely at ease all that week and for several weeks afterwards in New Jersey.
Right up to the phone call from Karen to inform me that she was pregnant!
So sorry, I said; get an abortion, I’ll send whatever money you need, I said. She just said “No”. We went back and forth on that for a while without resolution.
And then came a night when a friend of mine and I had been out bar-hopping along the shore. Stan (yes, that Stan) had been at me for hours trying to convince me that I couldn’t keep pushing for an abortion. Stan considered himself as more than simply a good Catholic, he was a “miracle” brought back from the dead, after a near fatal car accident, for a purpose. Finally I said, “Okay, Stan, its 3:00 o’clock in the morning here; midnight in L.A. We’ll go back to my place and I’ll call her. If she’s home, I’ll ask her to marry me. What the hell, I can always get a divorce.”

A few weeks later, with Stan and one of Karen’s sisters as witnesses, Karen and I were married in front of a Justice of the Peace in Forked River, NJ on August 22 (Karen’s birthday).

A Favor paid.