Stories I've Been Meaning to Tell You

© Andy Romanoff 2023

ISBN 979-8-35-090726-1

Contents

Who Is Not In This Book

Finding Your Way Through What Comes Next - an introduction by Josh Mohr

How This Book Came To Be

The Little Girl from Stawiski

They Say My Father’s Name

Ghost Chicago — looking for things no longer here

The Alley Pirate

My First Stolen Car

I Have Always Loved Motorcycles

Stupid People I’ve Been Along the Way.

Once Upon a Time, I Was a Mechanic

Round Man Motors and the Drive to the Atomic Junk Yard

A Few Nights in Jail at The Heartbreak Hotel

Dear Mom, Hitchhiking to NY

California Stories — The First Place I ever Lived in LA

California Stories — San Francisco in the Sixties — Jack Kerouac and Me

California Stories — The Only Way I Know to Beat the Rush Hour in L.A.

How the Movie Business Rescued Me

Blood Feast

Topless go-go Dancers, a Gun in my Face and a Motorcycle I didn’t Steal

Bobby and Joan – An Elegy

Blind Desire, Part One

Blind Desire, Part Two

So Then I Joined the Hog Farm

The Roads You Take, The Ones You Leave Behind

Captain Gas

Driving up to Kesey’s Farm

Saying Goodbye to Ira Miller — An Elegy

Paradise Lost

Nick Ray at the Chateau Marmont – An Elegy

Lost Along the Way — An Elegy

Teenage Fantasies — An Evening’s Adventure in the Porn Trade

Living It Up at the Hotel California

Who is Ready When? — A Love Story

The Last Time I Got Loaded

My Father the Wild Man, Larger Than Life

Greenblatts is Closed

How the Louma changed my life

Stan Goldstein and Me – An Elegy

Sometimes It’s Just Business

For the Love of Fast Cars

A Turning Point

Ten Years the Short Version

I’ve Always Beaten the Odds

Who Is Not In This Book

Some of the people I most dearly love for a start, and a few I truly detested. The ones I love are woven into the fabric of my life, the rhythm of my being, and daily existence. They nurture me and fill me with gratitude for their presence. First among them is my brother Larry, fellow traveler for all life’s twisting and turnings. Then Bob Harvey, my compadre at Panavision and on the road; Bob Beitcher, lifelong friend from the day we met; Steven Poster, A.S.C. who offered me work when few else did and Mario DiLeo, friend and mentor for sixty years. All of them play a part in these stories but need more than these few words. Michael Miller, who read me early; David Lebrun, deeply serious; Rosey Guthrie, partner in business, friend forever; Shelly Shacket, boyhood friend still; and JC, my friend so private I only write his initials. For all of them, and others left unnamed here, my feelings run far beyond the capacities of my words. When I become a better writer, I’ll tell their stories too.

Then there’s Amy Bookman. Amy’s not in the book, but her fingerprints are all over it. For her patient reordering of individual stories into a coherent tale, for the thousand punctuations she insisted were part of the English language, and for the occasional delicious story she told me of her days as CAA’s first female agent, my grateful thanks and friendship forever.

And finally, there are two more that rise above them all: my children, Zan and Jordan, the ones who carry bits of me into the future. I hope the day will come when wanting to tell someone of my strengths or my silliness they will say, Well, if you really want to know, he wrote a book about his life, do you want to read it? That would please me greatly.

Finding Your Way Through What Comes Next — an introduction by Josh Mohr

This book is like day-drinking with an old friend.

From where I’m from, that’s a compliment.

But let me start over—

The best memoirists and essayists never sound fancy or highfalutin. The yarns that stay with us long after we’ve closed the back cover are the ones that sound like the writer is sitting on a barstool, and we just so happen to be on the one next to him or her.

The work has to sound conversational. And we have to be so close to the auteur that we can smell their armpits, what they had for lunch. That’s where intimacy lives, after all, and that’s what storytelling is all about.

It’s the two of you.

Reader and author.

Co-conspirators. Friends.

Let’s say this scene plays out in a dive bar. Tom Waits sings from a cranky jukebox with a half-blown speaker, and the bartender looks like a version of Patty Smith who has been to rehab nine times.

That kind of downhome intimacy is the way we invite our readers as close to the action as we can.

And Andy has had a wild, wonderful life. His background in photography and celluloid are, in a way, a kind of apprenticeship for scribbling a book. He thinks about the scene. The frame. The mood. The energy. The blocking, the props, the characters. Setting.

And that’s exactly what memoirists do, except we are secret cinematographers, bringing the movies of our memories to live in the reader’s mind’s eye. It’s a kind of magic, transporting people through silly symbols on a page, and if we assemble them in the right order, we make them FEEL.

To feel!

Andy has constructed this book to be a bare knuckle, tell-it-like-it-is, muddy moral stew. We’re popping all over the place in time. We follow this riff that way, and it doubles back and leads us to another arcane maze. His writing makes me laugh, makes me sad, makes me feel less alone—and in a world that drips and heaves with human suffering, I’ll take all the open-hearted storytelling I can greedily inhale.

So I hope you can see Andy sitting at this imaginary bar. Patty Smith is back there pouring a pint. Yes, I’m plopped next to Andy, but the barstool on the other side of him is free.

I’m hoping that you’ll want to join us.

I’m hoping you want to hear his successes, his foibles, his joys, his devastations, his passions, his regrets, his love—

and his life and his life and his life…

So go ahead.

Hop on up on the empty stool.

Andy has some stories he wants to tell you.

How This Book Came to Be

I love a project that opens out before me slowly, not revealing too much right away. I like a road that seems headed one way but turns another, revealing unexpected beauty in a new direction.

When I first started writing about my life in early 2013 I had no thought or desire to write a book. I knew better, in part from watching my wife and daughter labor over theirs. The only reason I’d started writing at all was a desire to have my pictures in a French publication called Le Journal de la Photographie. It was not at all my intention to write stories, only to photograph gallery openings and have the pictures appear in public, but when I approached Jean-Jacques, the editor of Le Journal with a proposal, he said, Yes, a good idea, but of course, you must write something to go with the pictures. Seeing that was the way forward, with trepidation I agreed.

Jean-Jacques Naudet - photo by Gilles Decamps

The first story I did was an interview. That was because I had no idea of what to write, but I knew that if I asked questions I could get someone else to talk and I could use their words to fill a page. It worked, and I began to do more stories for Le Journal. The words I wrote were mainly about the openings themselves: the galleries and the people, because whatever I was, I knew I was not a critic.

In 2015, I started telling stories about the pictures on my photography website. I discovered I liked writing about the pictures as much as I liked making them. Hungry for an audience, I cast about for a good place to post and discovered a writing platform called Medium, and writing on Medium changed things. This wasn’t a place where I could write a few words and let the pictures lead. This was a place where the words were as important as the pictures, maybe more so.

Slowly I began to weave my personal stories into the photographic ones. I went to Poland and visited the birthplace of my mother — an emotional experience, and a story about Stawiski emerged from it. Now I was telling stories conjured from memory and imagination, along with the images I was making. But still no book in mind. I’m good for a few thousand words max; I leave the long-form stuff to my family.

Until I woke up one morning having turned 79 and found this thought in my head: It’s time to make a book — and get it done for my 80th birthday! Suddenly, it was time to gather all the stories together, write some new ones to fill in the gaps, and make a book.

Writing a book raised questions that writing the stories never did. When I started down the path it was to tell you about my life before it became this life. The first stories I wrote were filled with carousing and troublemaking, emptiness and searching. For the first few years, that was all I wrote about. I was long past those days but that’s what I wanted to talk about: the hell-raiser-Andy days, not the success stories that came later.

I found it difficult to talk about accomplishments and family. It was easier to chalk that up to fate and luck, write it off and tell you another story of fuck-up and narrow escape. I liked seeing myself as a young rowdy, not the serious hardworking person I had become. The truth was I could tell the stories of that earlier persona with conviction because I had been there, but I was someone else now and that person was less visible to me. And when I started looking at him I was a little ashamed to admit I had become … a square. Oh Jesus, WTF is this? What a boring end to a great beginning. I was still living larger than life in my mind, an outcast with stories worth telling. Now I was a fucking father, a businessman, an insider, a guy who went to Shul on Friday nights; who gave a shit about all of that?

Me, it turned out. I had long ago turned in that direction, and now it was time to let that success take its place in the story of my life, to cop to the truth of all the work I had put in, and to accept the person I had become. Writing this book has been the process of doing that. I had been honest about the fun stuff, and now I had to be honest about what I had become, even though in my mind there was nothing more boring than a success story. Oh dear, here I was at almost 80, happy and fulfilled but still learning to be comfortable with what had become of me.

Over my lifetime I have made hundreds of thousands of pictures. First I did it from curiosity, then from desire for mastery, then to make a living and to have standing in the community, and now because it scratches an itch that nothing else scratches in the same way. But along the path, I found it harder and harder to invest time showing and selling the work. So then why bother doing it? a younger me might say, and the answer is I have an intense desire to reveal what I see. Because in doing so, I tell the story to myself; it is my way to discover the hidden parts of my mind. And adding words to the pictures has made this process immeasurably stronger.

Writing stories and making pictures to illustrate them causes things and people, and experiences to emerge from the mist of my inattention. First, they tell me what I’ve seen — but then, having revealed themselves, they seem like lovely things on their own. So, like a child running to show a flower to someone loved, I am running to show my flower to you.

The Little Girl from Stawiski

She had no great love for Stawiski…and why should she? My mother was just a little girl stuck in a small town that suffered between the Germans and the Russians. She waited for the day when she could leave.

Her father, Chaim, was gone already, emigrated to America in hopes of securing their future. She, her sisters, and her mother were all stuck behind, trapped by the first World War. The family lived with her grandparents while they waited for the time when they could leave. She was six years old.

Her father too, had little love for Stawiski, or maybe he just wanted more. Either way, he left, making his way to Chicago, where he worked as a carpenter while he waited for the war to end so he could reclaim his wife and children.

A story my mother