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—thinkDeadliest 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 aswe 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, hereallyneeds to talk to you,” she’d say.
Of course I relented, and Martyn came over to my house. He wanted to make amends and say he was sorry for everything. He was sober and doing well. He was no longer with his wife.
I had a friend there that night. When he left the room, she said, “Fuck! Martyn’s hot.”
“Dude, go for it,” I said.
“I can’t,” she said. “He keeps looking atyou.”
Something clicked in that moment, and I invited Martyn to come with me to the Big Island.
I hadn’t officially said “Please leave me alone forever” to Lee, and he was still calling. I told a mutual friend to ask him to stop. Lee mostly left me incoherent messages.
There was one I could decipher that he left while I was in Hawaii: “Don’t give up on me, Scooter.” That had always been Lee’s nickname for me.
It was a Sunday evening. I listened to the message, and then I put my phone down and looked out over the ocean from my hotel room. Martyn sat next to me, watching the same sunset.
I thought of Lee in that dingy apartment on St. Andrews, one of the worst places he could be. I felt guilty, and sick, in that beautifulhotel on that gorgeous island, watching the purest sun imaginable sink into the Pacific with a man I was beginning to fall in love with.
I thought too about how Lee had always said that he wasn’t going to make it to his twenty-seventh birthday.
“Yes, you are!” I’d say. “You’ll hold on and beat Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and all the rest of them.”
