Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz Page 0,46
and pepper, fried ’em up, and threw ’em in a basket with a side of potato salad, macaroni salad, and two slices of white bread. Don’t forget the ketchup and hot sauce.
Catfish was especially nasty to prepare. I had to cut open the fresh fish and remove its reproductive system, a whole apparatus of chambers and ducts and eggs covered in blood. Then I diligently scraped the fish till it was clean. Tom Bradley, L.A.’s first and only Black mayor, never failed to show up at Leroy’s for his Friday night fish fix before being driven off to his Hancock Park mansion.
I loved Leroy’s. Great characters populated the place—hustlers and funny old dudes straight outta Richard Pryor routines, like Redbone, a Jheri-curled Creole brother who couldn’t stop talking about his talent for eating pussy.
Because I was gutting, cutting, and frying fish, I stank to the heavens. Standing over the fryer for hours at a time also caused major pimple breakouts from the oil and grease hitting my face. After work, if Dad wasn’t home, I’d go up to Cloverdale to visit Mom. The first thing she did was make me take a shower with lemons, the only way to get rid of the smell of fish.
By then, I’d moved out of Tracy’s and was living in a Pinto I rented for $4.99 a day. I slept in the reclining front seat, but it was better than sleeping in the park. I also found a second job, as a dishwasher at East West Café, on Melrose Avenue, across from Fairfax High. Mom would come there for lunch, just to make sure I was okay and still in school. I was, but I wasn’t about to tell her I was living in a car. The East West gig had its upside: the kitchen window looked out onto an alleyway where my friends would come to keep me company while I scrubbed pots and pans.
The less gritty jobs were actually tougher on me. My stint at GHQ (Gentlemen’s Headquarters), at the Beverly Center mall in West Hollywood, was a bust. I wasn’t good at sales, and I didn’t like pushing high-priced clothes I wasn’t into myself. I’d rather have fried fish or washed dishes than tell someone he looked good in a silk suit when, in fact, he didn’t.
So I lived out of that car. I lived on the fly. I was a strange combination of high school kid and hustling musician. And for a while an amazing artistic family, the Steinbergs, took me in. That opened still another world to me.
* * *
I’d become friends with Eliza Steinberg in my second year at Beverly, during school orientation. She was a year younger, and I was performing with the school band to inspire freshmen to join the arts programs. There was an immediate attraction and instantaneous bonding. I had two very different kinds of feelings for girls I found attractive. I saw them either as girlfriends or sisters. It’s no surprise that the sister relationships were the ones that lasted longest. It wasn’t that there wasn’t love between me and Eliza—there was deep love—but the kind of enduring love you feel for family.
Eliza’s family embraced me. Their Angelo Drive house off Benedict Canyon was a work of minimalist art, starting with the gray industrial carpet. Eliza’s mother, Lenny, was a gifted decorator and artist who designed her own furniture. Her husband, Bob, was a lawyer. The three Steinberg sisters were dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers: Eliza’s sister Morleigh created a body of work all her own (and wound up marrying The Edge, of U2), and Roxanne conceived a series of pieces with her Japanese husband, Oguri, master of the Butoh school of dance. Eliza was herself a great dancer and loved learning the latest moves from the Black girls at school. She and I would go to parties together in Baldwin Hills and Inglewood and dance the night away.
It was Lenny Steinberg who introduced me to Maxfield, a West Hollywood boutique where I first saw the work of Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto and learned that clothes (like paintings or dance or music) have no creative limits. Already a clotheshorse, I now saw the relationship between high fashion and art.
The Steinbergs became my refuge. Or, as Eliza’s dad said, his daughter brought me home, and I never left. When my cousin Jennifer got married in Nassau, I took Eliza as my date. By then, she was my sister.
It was the Steinbergs who helped me