Storms (3 page)

Oh listen, I'd seen beautiful men before. Out here, in Los Angeles, and in the recording industry, they were regular fixtures and fittings. I'd seen hundreds of one-hit wonders, each with a different come-on theme song, different lyrics.

Lindsey Buckingham, 1977.

This one was different. This one was unlike anything or anyone I'd ever seen before. This one had magnetism so intense that I felt a shock go through me the minute I saw him.

But who was Lindsey Buckingham? I had no idea, amazing as that might sound. I scanned the sheaf of papers for clues. Was he an engineer? Was he a technician? Was he just a delivery boy with a tape recorder? Whoever he was, he was scary. Well, he had me scared, at any rate, and despite my small-town background and my waiflike appearance, I didn't scare easily. I'd run my own music business since I was nineteen, and here I was, three years later, just trying to settle into the studio manager job, with a sound engineering internship on the side. I was going places. I needed to. I was in a dead-end relationship with a man who had hardly spoken to me for years and had forced me to part with the only person who ever mattered to me. I had to get out. I wanted independence. I was being smothered alive, and twenty-two was too young to die.

But now I'd just bumped into someone who felt dangerous. And danger wasn't what I was looking for. I told myself that I'd probably never meet him again and I forced my attention back on the scheduling book in front of me. Yes, this was it. Studio B. Richard Dashut and Lindsey Buckingham, it said. Post Production.
Fleetwood Mac/Rumours.
I checked that out again, and for want of anything better to do, with a shaky hand corrected the spelling.
Rumors.

Over the next few days I avoided going into Studio B, just in case. I was trying to be absolutely professional, against my instinctive urge to see and speak to the guy again, if he was still around. For all I knew he could have driven off into the huge metro of L.A. and would have been just one of those random images that haunts your dreams for years.

But he ended up coming to me, just appearing out of nowhere two days later, asking for a coffee, explaining who he was. He said that he and Richard were putting the finishing touches on the
Rumours
album, so he'd be a fixture for a while. The rest of the band, Fleetwood Mac, would be coming in a few days to add extra vocal tracks for dubbing.

Fixture indeed—within minutes of each afternoon arrival he would appear at the doorway of my office and ask for a cup of coffee. I'd point him to the machine and hide my smile as he struggled to make small talk.

“A lot of rain. Don't you think we've had a lot of rain this week?”

“Well, yeah, Lindsey, we really have.”

Both of us felt the fusion every time we came within four feet of each other. Neither of us knew how to handle it. We stammered and fidgeted and smiled at each other to fill in the gaps where words should have been, drank bad coffee, and then one of us would have to leave the unspoken longing hanging in the air and get back to work.

“You know I broke up with my girlfriend?” he asked me one day, when he'd popped in to ask about the next day's schedules.

“Oh yeah?”

“Stevie Nicks. You know?”

“No”, I said. “Really?”

I knew. That first week I'd checked it out. I'd found out exactly who he was. I knew that he was the new guitar player for a band that had been around for over ten years. A band that I'd listened to and admired in high school. A band that just happened to be in my studio putting the finishing touches on their next album.

He didn't seem sad about his lost relationship. If anything, he seemed resigned, even relieved. There was a sense of sweetness and vulnerability about him. When I looked into his eyes I could see a longing that made me want to reach out and touch his face. Each day it got a little bit harder to go home to my boyfriend, John. But then I'd been finding it hard to go back to John for ages. So I'd get in my car, drive out of Producer's Workshop and through the garish decay of Hollywood Boulevard, past the sex shops and the pimps, the slouched addicts, the broken flashing neon signs over the greasy diners, my head still buzzing with whatever it was that was happening to me with this complex and mesmerizing stranger.

I really didn't want to get involved with another dream angel.

John and I had been living together for over four years. He was the cousin of my best friend, Lori Lazenby. Lori and I left Tulsa together three days after high school graduation and drove the legendary Route 66, both of us singing along to the car radio, all the way to the City of Angels.

I met John on my first day in Los Angeles. I was eighteen and a virgin. He was my first angel, or so I thought. Anyway, he was a nice guy, pretty interesting, and within three weeks I slept with him. It just seemed like that's what you did in cities like L.A. The point of getting out there in the first place had been to say, “Look, I'm cool! I'm independent! I'm sophisticated!”

Within five weeks I was pregnant. He asked me to live with him, but didn't ask me to marry him. As the months passed, John would reduce me to hysterical tears as he began to tell me over and over that he didn't want a child after all. When our baby, Claire, was five months old, I realized with horror that he'd never even picked up his own daughter. His disinterest in her was terrifying to me.

I spent sleepless nights agonizing over my daughter's future. I wanted her to have the best that life could offer and I knew that being alone and just a child myself, I couldn't give it to her. I'd grown up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, surrounded by my six sisters in a loving, stable home with
two
parents who loved me. We didn't have a lot of money, but we were secure and I always, always felt safe. I desperately wanted that for Claire. I realized after crying many, many tears that by giving her up for adoption, I could give that to my little girl. I chose an agency and poured out my heart to them.

Because it was a private adoption agency, I was able to choose her new family from among four that were presented to me. I chose a wealthy family who already had two adopted sons. The parents were highly educated and loved books, music, and children. They wrote a letter to me asking me to allow them to raise my daughter. They promised that when she was old enough, they would tell her all about me. They swore that they would tell her that her birth mother loved her enough to give her up so that she would never, ever have to worry or want for anything.

On the day I signed the adoption papers John thanked me and said he wanted to take me out to the movies to a double feature to make me feel better. He took me to see
Kotch
, a movie starring Walter Matthau about an unmarried pregnant teenage girl who struggles to decide whether she should keep her baby or give her up for adoption. The second feature was
The Other
, a bloody horror movie about a child who kills an infant and then puts it in a large jar. I will never forget the shock, pain, and sheer horror I felt on that afternoon as I watched the flickering images in a dark theater as the father of my child sat silently beside me. After that, Claire was something we never talked about. I never discussed her with anyone.

From that moment we lived life on John's terms. And I'd clung to it because I thought that was what love was, and that it was my duty to work in the record business we'd set up as a kind of replacement for what had brought us together. I know that whenever I looked at him a part of me felt
close to my lost daughter, although I never mentioned her again to him. For on the day I signed the adoption papers, a part of me died, and was still dead.

So that's why I knew that hoping for a miracle love affair was as mad as the drug-crazed visions shared by teenage hookers on Hollywood Boulevard. In real life, like in the gritty films shown to battered men in dirty overcoats, there are no angels. Are there?

But if I had some obligations and ties, however frayed at the edges, the man I was trying not to fall in love with was bound in chains. He had family responsibilities on a scale I'd never seen before. His family was Fleetwood Mac, and over the next few days I would be introduced to each larger-than life relative.

The day after Lindsey told me about breaking up with Stevie, I was sitting on the floor in the reception room of Studio B when a tiny hummingbird of a woman brushed past me in a blaze of color, on a cloud of patchouli and ylang-ylang. I stared. I'd never seen anything so bright and dynamic before, so compelling, so intensely certain of the vibe she created.

I watched as she jumped up onto a scuffed, low table in the center of that dingy gray room with its shabby carpets and grubby open shelving, creating a stage, inviting an audience. She moved and spoke at lightning speed, sniffing, pushing stray locks of long, blonde hair out of her eyes, smoothing her peasant blouse, swishing her silken skirts to create a backing track as she started to describe her Acapulco holiday.

“Like … mystical … and the moonlight … and so translucent, and kinda deep dark, dancing under the stars, and the ocean, there, black and pounding—”

Words just poured out of her, words and sniffs, then, after pausing, “It was life changing. Life changing!” She sniffed again.

I'd just met Stevie Nicks. She was without a doubt the most mesmerizing woman I'd ever encountered. I didn't need to be told that she was a star. Her light was blinding. People gathered around. I sat transfixed, still on the floor, looking up at this five-foot-nothing exquisite firebrand.

And then Lindsey came into the room. There was a moment's hesitation, then he barked at her and she bit back, and I knew instantly that the two were familiar old sparring partners, with a history of love and loathing, and a sharp professional jealousy that would spark up and wound for as long as they lived.

“Hey”, Lindsey whispered suddenly, as Stevie's voice sang on in the background. I looked up and he was right next to me, crouched beside me. “See what I have to put up with?” he said.

“We should compare notes”, I replied, sighing as I thought of John and the aching spaces between us.

“Tonight?” he asked.

His breath was warm on my cheek. His eyes were too blue. He was too close. All this was too much.

“I live with this guy—” I started to explain, but I couldn't go on. Not then. This was all too raw and painful.

“OK”, he whispered.

Above us, loudly, Stevie was announcing, “And next year I'm going to Cozumel … Pyramids! You know what they say about pyramids?” Then she laughed. And everyone in the room laughed with her. Except me. I just watched Lindsey as he loped away, and didn't blame him for one minute. I didn't understand the joke about pyramids either, and wouldn't have even if I'd been thinking about it. I was thinking instead about the touch of Lindsey's breath on my cheek. I could still feel it. I couldn't wash it off, not even after getting home later to spend another silent evening with John. It was as if Lindsey had already claimed me, and I'd already cheated. In my mind, I had.

When I arrived at work the next day I found a drawing of a wizened old man's face on my desk calendar with a note that read, “Richard and I are going to see
King Kong
after work. Wanna go?”

Hell, yes, I wanted to go! As excitement turned my cheeks pink, I immediately called John and told him I had to work late. I felt a twinge of guilt about lying, but none at all about going out with Lindsey. I was too excited about seeing Lindsey to even take note of the fact that my lack of guilt spoke volumes about my feelings for John. It was over at last. I couldn't pretend any longer. Funny, isn't it? A night at the movies ended my first love affair. A night at the movies would start the next.

I waited impatiently for 6
P.M.
and saw little of Lindsey during the course of the day. The remaining three members of Fleetwood Mac were due in the studio the next day, so he and Richard were working feverishly to finish the mixes before they arrived.

I kept telling myself there was no harm in going to a movie with Lindsey. Richard was coming with us. Richard was a lady-killer. Standing at five foot nine, he had curly black hair just past his collar and a full mustache that would make a pirate proud. With his handsome face and wit, women loved him. He was also Lindsey's roommate and best friend.

Lindsey had been sensitive and careful over his choice of date and the arrangements he'd made for it. A movie—with a chaperone. I felt respected and as nervous as a high school girl on her first big girl-boy thing. Oh, and there was Uncle Richard, of course, to make sure that the girl-boy thing didn't get out of hand!

Lindsey drove us. Richard sat in the back. I trembled in the front seat, overcome with excitement and apprehension. As he helped me out of the car, Lindsey put one arm protectively around my shoulders.