Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz Page 0,64

Greenberg were back east, calling and writing about how they loved their schools. I had to see for myself.

It was the mid-eighties. Jane was at Bennington, in Vermont. The whole setting appealed to me: the kicked-back campus, the leafy trees, the coeds in tie-dyed skirts, the professors in tweedy sport coats. It was great being back with Jane. It was also great jamming with the local musicians. It was at Bennington where I met Bret Easton Ellis, whose novel Less Than Zero was all about the drug-crazed children of the idle rich. A few months later, I was at Bret’s publication party in Manhattan, where I met, for the one and only time, Andy Warhol. The pop art painter made a grand appearance with two statuesque African models. Blond-wigged Andy was the king, and they were his queens. I secretly wished that one day I’d be featured in Andy’s Interview magazine, but it never happened. I saw Andy as a rebel who’d defied tradition. Jane said that he actually had a degree in fine arts from Carnegie Tech. Andy Warhol had gone to college.

Deep down, I had some feelings about not having gone to college. After all, my folks were college graduates. Walking around Bennington, seeing the kids with their backpacks stuffed with books, I knew I was missing something. I knew there was something invaluable about a formal education. By skipping college, I wondered if I was shortchanging myself. At the same time, I knew I could never focus on academics. I couldn’t sit still long enough to get even a semester under my belt. I was too restless, too eager to make it as a musician.

I loved Bard as much as Bennington. Bard was where Eliza was studying—and also where Donald Fagen had met Walter Becker and eventually formed Steely Dan. Eliza let me sit in on her classes, took me to parties, and introduced me to her beautiful friend Ming See Lau, nicknamed Mitzi.

Mitzi spoke with a soft, enchanting Chinese British accent. She was worldly, sensuous, smart, and deep into music and fashion. Though she was the daughter of a wealthy businessman, she wasn’t spoiled or pretentious. Her charm was as natural as her love for the arts. From that first night we met at Bard, we couldn’t see enough of each other. We fell into a whirlwind romance. And it all started at college.

Soon, our lives became intertwined. When she wasn’t at school, she stayed at her apartment, in a doorman building at 200 East Fifty-Seventh Street, off Third Avenue. She invited me to move in, and suddenly I was back in the vicinity of my early childhood, affluent Manhattan.

Mitzi took me to a boutique that carried clothes by cutting-edge designers: Charivari, on West Fifty-Seventh. Given that I didn’t have much of a wardrobe, she sweetly clothed me in the latest fashions. We were young and genuinely in love, but Mitzi became somewhat of a benefactor. I had mixed feelings about that. Part of me would rather have paid my own bills, but another part liked having a girlfriend who was happy making me happy. Mitzi had no qualms about helping me pursue my musical dreams.

Mitzi and I flew to L.A., where she leased us a loft downtown that appealed to the New Yorker in me. This was way before the area got hip. In a refurbished warehouse on the corner of Seventh and Alameda, the loft looked down on the Greyhound bus station where the homeless camped out in a dingy waiting room.

A young architect and graphic designer, Michael Czysz, lived in the same building, in a loft with concrete floors. Those floors inspired me to do the same. In one of my first design projects, I laid chicken wire over my wooden floors and poured the concrete myself. The result was unsafe, rough but right.

Our loft was big enough to house a small studio I’d built with the brand-new Akai 12-track board. It was all open space: kitchen, bedroom, and living room. I was constantly in the studio, still looking for the sound that kept eluding me. After hours of making music or late nights with Mitzi, we’d go to Gorky’s, a cafeteria specializing in Russian omelets.

* * *

The life of the Gemini went on: a week in seedy downtown L.A. buying fifty-cent burritos from a food truck, followed by a week in Manhattan dining at Le Cirque on the Upper East Side.

My essential nature, living high while living low, hadn’t changed. What had