Even Bob Greenfield's best friends never tried to defend him on the grounds that he wasn't a madman—he had wild, electric-blue eyes, a satyr's visage, a habit at parties of going up to women and asking them "Let's fuck."
And yet, desperate as he was for the company of women, he had little luck—he was too needy and intense. He'd gone years without sexual intercourse. He didn't understand the ordinary social conventions. He hit on women in front of their boyfriends. He dashed off erotic poems and handed them to strangers. Once in a restaurant, he saw two waitresses being hugged and patted on their backsides by old friends and then couldn't understand why they took such offense when he tried to pat their backsides too.
In defense of Greenfield, his friends rather tried to emphasize his positive side—his quick wit, gentle nature and quite considerable gifts as a poet. In the early '70s, before his romantic aspirations got so out of hand, he appeared regularly in local literary magazines and gave well- received readings at the Fig Tree Cafe and Beyond Baroque. Impressively well-read, he once taught remedial writing to deficient graduate students at Long Beach State. As a poet, he was friendly with some of Venice's best known writers and it was his offhand remark about mythology and drugs which suggested to Kate Braverman the title for her book—Lithium For Medea. At the Venice Poetry Workshop (which he attended mainly to try to pick up women), he was well-regarded as a critic, with a sound sense of the authentic and a sharp ear for cant.
In fact, it was just this element of authenticity that made Greenfield such an original friend. In an era of Jordached dilettantes and intellectual impostors, he was the genuine article, a tormented artist, a passionate even obsessive man, heroically faithful to his own different drummer and pathetically vulnerable to every tremor in the psychic air. A desperately lonely man, he was so starved for affection that, as he would later write from Module 4400 of the LA County Jail, his days ran together with a "groaning melancholy."
By Greenfield's own account, he first began to act on his sometimes erroneous perceptions as far back as the late '60s. He smoked so much grass it made him paranoid. He damned LA Police Chief Ed Davis and ranted over Richard Nixon. During one period when he didn't have any other place to say, he slept in a lounge at UCLA (he had once been a doctoral candidate in English there). But he was arrested and sent to Camarillo after a vague attempt to kiss a married woman student in an English Department classroom. In a second, more bizarre incident, he was found naked in the Theater Arts Department restroom ("I thought someone was trying to shoot me from Ralph Bunche Hall," he would later explain. "And also I was horny.")
Greenfield's friends never really knew the source of his obsession, variously attributing it to his strict Calvinist upbringing on a small Wisconsin farm, a sense of unfulfilled potential, a latent homosexuality, a failed love affair, alienation, over-stimulation, an unresolved Oedipal complex and a deficiency of Vitamin B-1.
Certainly the problem was well underway by what Greenfield now describes from his cell in County Jail as "the thrilling autumn of 1975." In those days, Greenfield, then 37, was good friends with a painter named Michael Tracy, who lived at the St. Charles Hotel on Windward Avenue a quarter-block from Venice Beach. Rents at the St. Charles were very cheap then ($85 for a room without an ocean view). The landlord went out of his way to rent to poets, writers and artists of all descriptions. Despite the broken wine bottles and belligerent drunks that lined the curb outside, inside the St. Charles the atmosphere was friendly and communal. The residents painted the hallways, decorated their doors. One room served as a recycling depot. The manager of the St. Charles, Wendy Reeves, would later observe that she never even had to buy a Sunday paper. In fact, she rarely had to buy anything, practically furnishing her entire apartment with castaways—a blender, dishes, dulcimer, ashtrays, plants and jeans.
In the fall of 1975, when Greenfield first came by the St. Charles to apply for a vacancy, he felt himself to be under such pressure that he was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, and consuming vast quantities of beer, wine and vodka. Wendy Reeves happened not to be on duty at the time and her assistant gave him the tour. Greenfield was shocked. The other women residents didn't so much introduce themselves to him as "present their bodies." Greenfield went away believing that the St. Charles was a Mafia-run brothel. Not that the assistant manager had said as much, but for someone of Greenfield's sensitivities, it was simple enough to read between the lines.
Reeves knew none of this when Bob Greenfield came to see her in her office to ask about a room. He'd been highly recommended by Michael Tracy, who said he was a good poet, a good friend and a potential asset to the building. Reeves let him fill out an application and told him that she was moving him up to "sixth on my list."
For Reeves, the meeting with Greenfield was a minor matter, but for Greenfield it was the "palpitating introduction" to the greatest adventure of his entire life. As he would later "rhapsodize" over Reeves in a thousand- monotonous conversations with his friends, her "body was a perfect grammar." She had "soft ears," a "fragile chin," "honey dark eyes," "cherry black eyes," "radiant unsullied eyes," "surprising, almost stunning eyes," and a "beauty so archaic that I was surprised to find her contemporary." Greenfield hated so much to leave her office, he says, that he returned a second time just to listen to her voice, which, to him, was deeply "provocative" and "deliciously tender." Despite her intellectual superiority, God had blessed her with the "gift" of not knowing it. He drank in her words like a man dying of thirst. He loved her from the second they met. This was the woman with whom he'd spend the rest of his life. She alone understood the secret of his soul.
At first Greenfield's friends were amused by such hyperbolic praise. It wasn't that they didn't consider Reeves nice or even pretty. But Greenfield saw her as some sort of white-limbed virgin temptress reclining on a velvet sofa, while to them she was simply the hard-working and conscientious building manager who left them polite but firm notes reminding them of overdue rents or stopped them in the halls to chat about insulation.
Greenfield stumbled down the stairs after the first meeting with Wendy with, as he says, a "terrific song in my heart." Just before he walked out the door, Reeves had said to him, "Don't give up," meaning that if he'd just be a little patient he'd certainly get a room.
Not that giving up had ever entered Greenfield's mind. He'd just met the most "stunningly beautiful woman" who had ever walked the planet. The only dark cloud, as he replayed the scene in his mind, had been his inability to confess the magnetic attraction he'd felt in his loins. Over the next weeks and months, Greenfield returned repeatedly to her office, asking her to dinner and, on one occasion, trying unsuccessfully to kiss her. One time, says Greenfield, he thought it was going to happen—"our lips were moving together"—but to Greenfield's chagrin, Reeves walked right past him, leaving Greenfield banging his head on the hallway wall.
On another occasion, Greenfield found her sitting in her office talking on the telephone. But when he tried to put his arms around her, she jumped out of her chair and, to his shock and horror, ordered him from the room. Such incidents frightened and confused Greenfield. As he saw it, she was giving him "unmistakable love looks—deep and affectionate." And once, he says, she was moved to observe that perhaps they'd met in "a previous lifetime." But still, as he could not help but notice, she never once invited him to her room and despite what Greenfield felt was their "excellent rapport," she had the distressing habit of "walking away if I met her unexpectedly in the street."
Reeves, for her part, was at first annoyed by Greenfield and later alarmed. It wasn't that she was unreasonably timid. She was a tall woman, commandingly articulate and formidably self-assured. But Greenfield's attentions, she would later say, were "an obscene phone call that never stopped." In addition, other women residents had begun to complain about Greenfield to her, saying he was a "pervert" and a psychopath and if she rented him a room, they were moving out.
Over the winter of 1976, Greenfield became increasingly persistent, calling on the telephone, buzzing on the intercom, waiting in the street until someone came out the front door and then before the door closed, dashing up to her office, her room, lurking in the hallways, standing outside her door. He began to send her love letters, even a Valentine.
Four days after Valentine's Day, Greenfield, in the company of two other women, ran into Reeves sitting alone in a booth at the Meatless Marathon Restaurant. Greenfield forgot about the other women he was with and ran up to Reeves. "I've been thinking about you day and night," he told her. "Did you get my Valentine?" Yes, said Reeves. Had it made her happy? No. Greenfield thought perhaps she was being "ironic," though when he tried to talk with her she gave him no "encouragement." What he really wanted, he says, was to take her to her room and make love but he was to shy to push it. After all, it was her room and she should be the one, he thought, to make an invitation to him. Reeves was angry when she left the restaurant, slamming the door on Greenfield's two women companions and saying "Goodbye!" to him.
Greenfield walked home in a cold blue funk. "When," he thought, "is this torture going to end?" Reeves, for her part, couldn't believe this was happening to her. To her mind, she'd never given Greenfield the slightest encouragement beyond ordinary good manners (and sometimes not even that). But the way Greenfield acted, you'd think they had a mutual understanding.
Years later, Reeves would write a copyrighted article for the "Venice Beachhead" (a small monthly paper put out by a local collective) discussing in part these early days (the spring and summer of 1976) and describing how Greenfield repeatedly called her office, speaking in a low urgent voice half-choked with lust, emotion, it wasn't clear what. Once, he bluffed his way into the building, saying he was Wendy's friend, took a seat in her office and refused her requests to leave. He had a "defiant" manner and a "belligerent" tone. He gave the impression of "terrific energy barely under control." In "bullying tones," he repeated his one and only theme: he loved her, he wanted to sleep with her, her eyes told him she wasn't happy, her current boyfriend wasn't "right."
Reeves tried to explain, she wrote, that it was impossible for him to love her, seeing as how he didn't even know her, but Greenfield merely got more "aggressive and insistent." Reeves lost her temper. They started to shout. And she ordered him to leave. Greenfield's face was red and sweaty. "You can't cut me off like this. You can't deny this feeling. You can't . . . "
It was now plain to Reeves that something was seriously amiss. Greenfield wasn't so much courting her as "stalking" her. He begged for dates on the telephone, the intercom; he banged on her door and went into his spiel—"I love you, Wendy. Let's spend the night together." Once he showed up wearing a suit, carrying a flower bouquet and gazing longingly at the door. Reeve's boyfriend had promised to give Greenfield a "good dose of pain," she says, the next time he showed up. But Greenfield looked so pathetic he didn't have the heart.
Reeves had asked the police to arrest Greenfield, but to her shock she found that such behavior was not then a crime and unless he violently attacked her in the presence of witnesses, the most they could do was briefly detain him for trespassing or disturbing the peace and only then if they caught him in the act. "Our hands are tied," the police said. Instead, she says, they told her to have her boyfriend "punch him out."
In August of 1976, Reeves obtained a civil injunction against Greenfield, enjoining and restraining him "from engaging in, committing or performing, directly or indirectly, or by any means whatsoever, any of the following acts: "Threatening, harassing, contacting, telephoning and annoying the Plaintiff herein in any manner at any time whatsoever." The day of the hearing, Greenfield went to the wrong courtroom and Reeves won by default.
This presented Reeves with a dilemma. She didn't want to see Greenfield in jail, especially since he might not even realize that his neck was on the block. The next time he called, therefore, she spent 40 minutes on the phone with him, explaining as clearly as she could the consequences of his interminable attempts to see her. "Listen to me, Bob." His attentions were driving her crazy. She couldn't walk out the door for fear he might be there. Her inability to concentrate was interfering with her college degree. He obviously had a lot of energy, and people had told her he had talent. Why didn't he just concentrate on his poetry and leave her alone? His hopes were totally unrealistic. She already had a boyfriend. Didn't he realize what could happen? Did he want to go to jail?
Greenfield was deeply appreciative. He drank it all in. He made Reeves feel as if she were really getting through. "Oh, thank you so much," he told her. "I never understood your point of view. If you'd only talk to me once in a while like this, I'm sure I could get over it." "Okay," said Reeves. "If you don't come to my room or office, don't bother me in any way, you can call me in a week." Reeves went to bed that night thinking she'd made a terrific deal, a blessed week of peace in exchange for a single call. But early the next morning her phone rang again. "Let's fuck," said Greenfield in a lewd, sleazy tone. Reeves would later remember that 40-minute conversation as the worst mistake she'd ever made—five years later, Greenfield was still referring back to that call as the time Reeves "encouraged him," gave him "permission" to call and promised him that "together" they'd work his problems out.
Greenfield had equally strong feelings about that phone conversation, though his account of it only tangentially resembled hers. As he fondly remembers the day, Wendy was her feminine "voluble" Gemini self. She said she was glad he called. She stressed how much she wanted his attention. She mentioned that she had finally had a chance (in court) to read all the notes and letters he'd sent her, and she was pleasantly surprised to find, says Greenfield, that he was a "better writer than Henry Miller." For the first time, says Greenfield, she said she felt she could "trust him." If he wanted, she make Xerox copies of his letters and send them back to him.
Greenfield was so stunned and overwhelmed by his total and unexpected success he was almost afraid to say anything for fear she might hang up. He couldn't believe how friendly she'd become. She invited him to write her whenever he wanted. And if he couldn't come by in person, to phone her every week. But it was the end of the conversation that fired Greenfield's passion to a white-hot pitch. The last thing he'd heard before the line went dead was an "ooh" or an "aaah," a melancholy sign of pain, anguish and yearning, as if she too wanted "Greenie" as much as he wanted her, but she was too shy- -couldn't he see?—and trapped by dark and terrible forces he couldn't comprehend.
Greenfield spent a sleepless, feverish night, drinking beer and pining in his heart for Reeves. Then at first light, knowing how anxious she must also be, he called to reassure her of his eternal devotion and love. But he was too nervous and too overwrought and what he had intended to be a tender expression of his deepest yearnings came out as a crude, cracked call to sex.
Reeves never did succeed in keeping Greenfield out of the St. Charles Hotel. Between Reeves's boyfriend, various hotel residents and even Greenfield's own (increasingly exasperated) friends, he was over the next five years throttled, drenched, derided, decked and threatened with a two by four. Still he returned, standing outside her door, running through what was becoming an increasingly explicit litany—he loved Wendy, he wanted to "go down on her," he wanted to "feel her teeth on his cock," he wanted to press his lips into the crevices of her cunt."
Reeves had by now learned that although the cops wouldn't come out on a civil injunction (which rendered her court order meaningless), they would be happy to assist her if she made a citizen's arrest on her own. Over the next few years, Reeves made so many arrests she developed a capsule history to rattle off to the cops: "This guy is a certified crazy. He lives on mental disability insurance. He has a past record of institutionalization. I never went out with him, not so much as for a cup of coffee. I've had my own boyfriend throw him out any number of times."
The irksome thing to her, says Reeves, was that the cops still tended to act dubious until she got to the part about her own boyfriend throwing him out. That was what gave her credibility, she discovered—the fact that she had a man of her own and therefore couldn't be dismissed as another crazy female venting her own sexual frustrations on the first poor dodo who came schlepping down the street.
Between 1976 and 1981, Greenfield was arrested more than a dozen times for trespassing, disturbing the peace, and repeatedly violating the orders of various municipal and superior court judges to leave Reeves alone. Not that these had any great deterrent effect on Greenfield. Greenfield would plead guilty to the charge, beg the judge's forgiveness, say he never meant to frighten Wendy, he hadn't realized how upsetting it was and he'd never do it again. The judge would set the bail at a low $100 or so (later it went higher) and Greenfield, who had been receiving disability assistance ever since those UCLA incidents in the early seventies, would post bond out of own pocket and an hour later, says Reeves, there he was again, muttering through her door—"I love you. I want to eat you."
Several of Greenfield's friends from Beyond Baroque or the poetry workshop used to take Greenfield aside, reasoning with him walking up and down the beach for hours, explaining over and over again that the Mafia had nothing to do with Wendy, the St. Charles was not a brothel, Wendy didn't love him and unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life in jail, he better leave her alone.
Eventually concluding that Greenfield's obsession was impervious to ordinary reason, Michael Tracy and his brother Scott in November 1977 devised a plan to put Greenfield on a plane to Chicago (where Greenfield's brother lived) just before an upcoming court appearance, reasoning that if he missed the hearing the judge would issue a felony warrant and Greenfield could never come back to California without risking prison. Instead, Greenfield spent the entire trip writing passionate letters to Reeves and then borrowed airfare to fly back in time for the court date. (How could he miss it? Wendy would be there.)
On another occasion, Michael Tracy decided it might take Greenfield's mind off Reeves if he could just get him properly laid. Through a friend of a friend, Tracy linked him up with a long-haired, baby-faced hooker (she had once done a spread for Penthouse, says Tracy) who would accommodate Greenfield for the discount rate of $75. Greenfield was all for it until he heard the price. In those days, Greenfield was heavily into numerology and seven, he felt, was a bad number. Hey, no problem, said Tracy, they'd pay her $100 instead. But the damage was already done and Greenfield turned it down. It wasn't only numbers that had a special meaning for Greenfield. If he saw a Safeway truck in the street, says friend and fellow poet Jim Krusoe, it was a sign that he'd been too timid with Wendy, always taking "the safe way." A Tip Top Bread sign, on the other hand, meant it was an unusually opportune time to phone her, a "tip top" time in fact.
There was one occasion when Greenfield was talking to Krusoe on the telephone when Reeves walked by. Thereafter, Greenfield repeatedly called Krusoe, not because he wanted to talk to him, but rather in the hopes that Reeves would reappear.
For some time Greenfield had a sense that there was more going on around him than he readily perceived. For some reason, he thought that he controlled newspaper headlines and television news. Strangers in the street, he felt, were sending him messages. He tried his best not to think lustful thoughts about women other than Reeves for fear it would cause her to get pregnant or, even worse, be raped. For the longest time, he labored under the delusion that Reeves had been forced to have a baby against her will.
As for Reeves, she had given up any effort to reason with Greenfield a long time before. No matter what she said or did, he could always twist it around to prove when all was said and done that Wendy really loved him as much as he did her. Once Reeves unexpectedly met him on the stairs and called him a "worm." He really didn't blame her. She'd been dying for a kiss from him and he'd just stood there like a telephone booth.
In another instance (this was shortly after they first met), she told him to stay away from the other women in the St. Charles. Reeves had only meant that he should stop bothering them, but what Greenfield rather heard was "stay away from other women because you belong to me." Greenfield had always thought that Reeves had always wanted him to be more manly, more aggressive, more willing to take risks and openly declare his love.
There was one occasion in the fall of 1977 when she walked out of her room carrying a guitar and tape recorder on her way to a music lesson. Waiting silently in the hall was Greenfield, who seized her in his arms and tried to give her a kiss. When she resisted, they fell together on the floor, breaking the guitar and bruising her shins. Reeves tried to nail him for attempted rape after that attack but, as the police pointed out, because he hadn't tried to take off either her clothes or his, all they could really charge him with was misdemeanor battery. Greenfield was indignant that anyone would think that he wanted to rape Wendy. He was trying to kiss her so she'd sleep with him and, if she slept with him, she'd love him and then, once she loved him, he'd be happy the rest of his life.
Greenfield tried everything he could think of to get Reeves to sleep with him. He offered $100 to anyone who could get him into her room. He mailed her a blank check and an invitation to make love. (The Mafia, he thought, would never let her turn the money down). He sent her perhaps 500 letters and poems, all dealing with his love for her ("beautiful tender vulnerable sensuous screams from the heart," he called them). Some were tediously repetitive. (In Patton they medicated him with Thorazine and his protestations of love took on a flat mechanical tone.) But others (Reeves reprinted a few in her 1979 Beachhead article) were vividly specific: What I want is a mistress to keep her hands on my throttle. Who shines my spear, uses her teeth to rub rust off my engine. Maybe a bitch sometimes who throws kerosene on the ebbing flames late at night when it's dark and shivering. I want a large red house with an egg-shaped room. A virgin whore who talks bawdy, says fuck me in the cunt, you wild red fucker."
Between 1976 and 1981, Greenfield had so many encounters with the judicial system that they now seemed like a thick album of "traumatic scenes." He was first arrested (for trespassing) in September 1976 for telling Reeves through her door that he wanted to "go down" on her. In December of that year, Greenfield was arrested again, he says, "for trying to embrace Wendy outside the St. Charles Hotel." Reeves ended up bumping her head on the plate glass window and Greenfield was given three weeks in Brotman Memorial Hospital.
Most of 1977 remains an indefinite blur to Greenfield. He was arrested "seven or eight" times, he says, and sent to jail and/or Camarillo perhaps three times. In February, 1978, he appeared in court to answer charges resulting from the broken guitar-misdemeanor incident of the previous November (as well as another abortive, confused embrace when Reeves was practicing Tai Chi on the lawn). Courtrooms always left Greenfield frightened and overwrought. And when he saw Reeves, he blurted out: "I love you. Take me to your loft." The deputies dragged Greenfield from the courtroom and when the court resumed, the judge sentenced him to two consecutive six-month sentences in jail and Patton Psychiatric Hospital. With one-third time off for good behavior, Greenfield was released the following September.
Jail was a powerful deterrent to Greenfield. After that he stayed away from Reeves for nearly five months. But then slowly, inexorably, he found himself drawn back to her door. On one occasion, Greenfield showed up just after Reeves finished a meditation course in Zen Karate. At the time, Reeves says, she was feeling unusually "centered" and "unattached" and she spoke to Greenfield through the door. "Bob, nobody is interested in this anymore. You're boring. Nobody cares. I don't care. Scott doesn't care. You're just ruining your life for no reason. Go away. Just go away." And to her surprise, Greenfield went away. "Gawd," she said to herself. "Is that all there is? Just speak to him with no fear and show him that I don't care."
On this occasion, Greenfield was even farther out on the edge than usual. His father had just died and rather than go to his funeral he'd gone over to Wendy's room to tell her about it first. Instead, as he sobbed to his friend, Scott Tracy, Wendy had told him through the door that she'd never loved him. "I said, 'I think about you every day,'" explained Greenfield. Scott Tracy had spent so much time with Greenfield he had virtually become a lay therapist. "What did she say?" he asked. "She seemed to think it was ridiculous." She used other words too— tedious, boring and to top it off she laughed at him.
"What are you going to do?" asked Tracy.
Greenfield adopted an air of mock bravado. "Get laid."
"That's good."
Greenfield seemed hurt that Tracy would take such a statement at face value, that after all this he would just go out and get himself laid? "Why not?" asked Tracy. "Because I don't want to." "What do you want to do?" "I want to go to bed with Wendy."
In February, 1979, Greenfield was arrested outside Reeves's door again and given 90 days. In October, he was given 30 days for propositioning her through the door. In December, 1979, he was arrested outside the home of Reeves's parents and was given 30 days. By the end of of 1979, Reeves felt she couldn't take it anymore. She'd already been in therapy once, she says, in large part due to Greenfield's attentions. She'd had to change her phone number and get an answering service to screen her calls. Greenfield had driven her out of two consecutive jobs with his attentions—manager of the St. Charles (and several other buildings as well) and copy editor of an equal opportunity journal. The one thing Greenfield had always wanted more than any other was to make himself the center of her life. And in a sense he had succeeded—she couldn't have spent more time thinking about him than if they'd actually been lovers. For four long years, she and Greenfield had been engaged in a contest of wills and now, she had to admit, his was frankly stronger.
The only solution was to leave Venice, move to another town and hope that Greenfield would never find her. Still, it irked her that Greenfield could force her to leave her friends, her job, her "rent controlled apartment" with "cathedral windows" and an "ocean view."
The last thing she did was write a long bitter article (and series of subsequent letters) for the "Venice Beachhead" describing the previous four years, describing her unwanted relationship with Greenfield, the deficiencies of the legal system for dealing with such behavior, and the thorny problem of sexual harassment in general. She offered to sell the rights to her story for a future docu-drama. And she invited other women with similar problems to join her in a campaign for effective anti-harassment legislation.
Reaction to her story was both far better than she expected, and worse. Many people offered their support and sympathy and even sent money. Several other harassment victims came forth. Greenfield was banned from two local restaurants—the Meatless Marathon and the Lafayette Cafe. A television producer optioned her story for $1,000 (the movie fell through). And she appeared at a press conference to talk about sexual harassment with Congressman Mel Levine.
At the same time, there were other people who thought she was making a federal case out of matters that never should have gotten into the court system in the first place. Venice had a long tolerant history for eccentric behavior. Greenfield, they said, had never been a violent person. He was bright, intense and, at least before his obsession started, one of the better local poets. ("Of course, he's intense," Wendy would later snap. "He's a psychotic.")
Wendy was especially irked by the claim that Greenfield was not a violent person. It may have been true that around men he tended to crumple to the ground at the slightest show of force (Wendy called this his "hurt dog" routine), but around her he was amazingly strong and quick. More than once, he'd pinioned her arms against her side, bumped her head or knocked her down. (She tried to spray Mace on him once and the wind blew it back on her). Just because she hadn't yet been hurt didn't prove anything. Psychotics, she argued, were not predictable people. She'd heard about one case where a man, after following a woman for many years, suddenly turned on her one day and blinded her with acid. Or what about John Hinkley? He'd gone up to Yale to see Jodie Foster and, then when nothing came of it, he shot Ronald Reagan.
Greenfield saw Wendy's article while waiting for his breakfast in a Venice cafe. He was so shocked he left his meal untouched, stumbled outside and bought himself a quart of Miller High Life. He searched frantically for a rationalization, variously telling friends that she'd done it to publicize his poetry or document how much he truly cared. But in his heart he was "crushed" by her apparent desire to see him in jail. ("It was his sanity or mine," Reeves would later say, "and his was already lost.")
Despite the article, Greenfield couldn't stop wanting to see her. He stood outside the St. Charles and called up to Room 24, even though she didn't live there anymore. He paid $10 for information on her whereabouts (it was false). He went back to her old high school, looked up her yearbook and was touched to discover that she'd been voted the "Most Artistic Woman" in her class. He paid $145 for a key to the St. Charles Hotel, though when he tried to use it, he says, "a crude looking philistine" took it away.
Greenfield spent the first six months of 1980 in jail and Camarillo for probation violations. (Under a new state law, Reeves had obtained an anti- harassment injunction the previous June forbidding him to contact her in any way, approach within 15 yards of her or come within one block of the St. Charles.) While he was in jail, Greenfield wrote Reeves what he estimates were 70 poems and letters, expressing his love, his passion and asking for her assistance in getting out of jail. Reeves took eight of these to the city attorney and, after a three-day trial in June 1980, Greenfield was sentenced to an additional 18 months in jail on seven counts of contempt of court. (One letter was thrown out for having an illegible postmark.)
Greenfield was shocked by the sentence ("a titanic misunderstanding," he called it), but the "real heartsmasher," he says was the fact that Wendy "lied" during the trial and denied that she had ever given Greenfield permission to write or phone her. After the trial, says Greenfield, he stood in a corner of the holding tank and sobbed at the distasteful way Wendy had handled his letters in court.
In Reeves opinion, Greenfield's court appointed lawyer was out to make a name for himself. First he set Reeves up by asking if she had read any of Greenfield's letters. Reeves hated to give Greenfield the "satisfaction" of knowing that she'd read his letters, and she answered that she'd only read a few of them. Well then, asked Greenfield's attorney, how did Reeves considered herself "harassed" by letters she hadn't even read?
Greenfield's attorney won that round, but on the key point of whether or not she had ever given Greenfield permission to contact her, he made a devastating but unconscious mistake, confusing the anti-harassment injunction of the previous June with the civil injunction of 1976. "He phrased it wrong," says Reeves. He asked if it was not true that she had given Greenfield permission to contact her after she obtained the anti-harassment injunction. "Actually," says Reeves, "it was after I got the civil injunction years before." And therefore, Reeves was able to truthfully answer the lawyer's question by saying it was "not true, absolutely not true."
Greenfield never showed up for his sentencing that June. He'd been released on bail and rather than face another long jail term he went into hiding. Up to this time, Greenfield had always had a place to live. They weren't much, bare stark rooms, linoleum floors, a single table (with his beloved Hermes Rocket typewriter) and a mattress on the floor covered with a satin sheet (in case Wendy ever accepted one of his dinner invitations and actually came by). But having been in and out of jail so many times, he lost his apartment, his typewriter and all the poems he'd written to Wendy. Instead, he started sleeping in "wino tunnel," a culvert under South Venice Boulevard where it crosses the Grand Canal.
In October, Greenfield was captured while yelling up to what was formerly Wendy's room in the St. Charles Hotel. He was sent to Camarillo to begin serving his 18 month sentence, but after two months he walked away and took a bus back to Venice. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, he lived as a fugitive, sleeping under the Santa Monica pier. Then that January, he sent yet another letter to Reeves, inviting her to have dinner with him and giving his address at a local motel. The sheriff picked him up instead and carted him off to the County Jail, where he has remained ever since.
Few County Jail inmates, perhaps, have ever been so eloquent as Greenfield on their hatred of jail and the criminal justice system. He has served nearly three of the last six years in either mental hospitals or jail, a situation which he calls a "traumatic nightmare" resulting from a "bloodthirsty vindictive judgment." Most days he spends up to 22 hours in a six-by-eight-foot cell with three other men. There's no natural light. The air, he says, is "half CO2." Since January, he's had a total of six visitors and a mere handful of letters.
Jail seems to have had a dimming effect on Greenfield's once bright eyes and formerly intense tone. Now, when visitors come, he frequently holds his forehead between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. He jogs in place two hours every day and spends five or more hours writing letters. (He's written 600, he estimates in the last nine months, though none of them to Reeves.) The rest of the time he sleeps or reads, having worked his way though such books as The Life of Henry James, Bullfinch's Mythology, Ezra Pound's The River Merchant's Wife, Edna St. Vincent Millay's Dirge Without Music and Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister. On weekends, he reads "all 548 pages" of the Sunday "Los Angeles Times".
Greenfield has little in common with the other inmates, who he says, talk mainly about "perverted sex and money." And the kinds of things the other inmates laugh at, he says, are enough to turn his guts. Because Greenfield is not a big man, he also lives in a constant state of tension and fear. He's been slugged three times (once in a candy robbery and twice for refusing to give blow jobs). He yearns, he says, "from the tips of his toes to the outer edges of his brain" to see a play, have dinner in a Westwood restaurant, or just plain walk the streets of Los Angeles ("this great dazzling summer city I love more than any other").
Greenfield is perhaps most eloquent on the unjustness of his "maniacal" sentence, complaining that his three cellmates are in for "murder," while he's in jail "for writing love letters." He has a breathtaking contempt for his attorneys, whom he calls "shabby, stuttering lawyers" whose alleged defense of his constitutional rights was "the sorriest job of attorneyship I've ever been a party to." His lawyers put his "cock on the block" and it was cut off by a "murky city attorney" and a "finicky pinky-fingered judge." Greenfield is also more than a little tired, he says, of all the people who so blithely called him "obsessed" over the last six years—"Greenie is obsessed with Wendy Reeves." In his opinion, such people are constitutionally "incapable of feeling the intensity of passion and devotion for one woman that I am capable of and hence they must make up for their tepidity of heart by inventing a disease for my capacity to love."
As for Reeves, Greenfield's feelings are still rather mixed. Her conduct over the last four years, he says, has at best been "mediocre." She wrote a "meretricious" article about him for the "Venice Beachhead." She "lied" about him in court. She hasn't made any effort whatsoever to interrupt this "judicial travesty." And after nine months, she hasn't come forth with a "single word of sympathy."
And yet, despite the mountain of evidence that she doesn't love him, has never loved him and would dearly love never to have to think of him again, he still wakes up with "Wendy on my mind." Something still hungers for a "sudden unexpected outpouring of love from her." He felt this way six years ago, and he feels the same way now—"I still want to make love to Wendy in Room 24 of the St. Charles Hotel."
And yet, desperate as he was for the company of women, he had little luck—he was too needy and intense. He'd gone years without sexual intercourse. He didn't understand the ordinary social conventions. He hit on women in front of their boyfriends. He dashed off erotic poems and handed them to strangers. Once in a restaurant, he saw two waitresses being hugged and patted on their backsides by old friends and then couldn't understand why they took such offense when he tried to pat their backsides too.
In defense of Greenfield, his friends rather tried to emphasize his positive side—his quick wit, gentle nature and quite considerable gifts as a poet. In the early '70s, before his romantic aspirations got so out of hand, he appeared regularly in local literary magazines and gave well- received readings at the Fig Tree Cafe and Beyond Baroque. Impressively well-read, he once taught remedial writing to deficient graduate students at Long Beach State. As a poet, he was friendly with some of Venice's best known writers and it was his offhand remark about mythology and drugs which suggested to Kate Braverman the title for her book—Lithium For Medea. At the Venice Poetry Workshop (which he attended mainly to try to pick up women), he was well-regarded as a critic, with a sound sense of the authentic and a sharp ear for cant.
In fact, it was just this element of authenticity that made Greenfield such an original friend. In an era of Jordached dilettantes and intellectual impostors, he was the genuine article, a tormented artist, a passionate even obsessive man, heroically faithful to his own different drummer and pathetically vulnerable to every tremor in the psychic air. A desperately lonely man, he was so starved for affection that, as he would later write from Module 4400 of the LA County Jail, his days ran together with a "groaning melancholy."
By Greenfield's own account, he first began to act on his sometimes erroneous perceptions as far back as the late '60s. He smoked so much grass it made him paranoid. He damned LA Police Chief Ed Davis and ranted over Richard Nixon. During one period when he didn't have any other place to say, he slept in a lounge at UCLA (he had once been a doctoral candidate in English there). But he was arrested and sent to Camarillo after a vague attempt to kiss a married woman student in an English Department classroom. In a second, more bizarre incident, he was found naked in the Theater Arts Department restroom ("I thought someone was trying to shoot me from Ralph Bunche Hall," he would later explain. "And also I was horny.")
Greenfield's friends never really knew the source of his obsession, variously attributing it to his strict Calvinist upbringing on a small Wisconsin farm, a sense of unfulfilled potential, a latent homosexuality, a failed love affair, alienation, over-stimulation, an unresolved Oedipal complex and a deficiency of Vitamin B-1.
Certainly the problem was well underway by what Greenfield now describes from his cell in County Jail as "the thrilling autumn of 1975." In those days, Greenfield, then 37, was good friends with a painter named Michael Tracy, who lived at the St. Charles Hotel on Windward Avenue a quarter-block from Venice Beach. Rents at the St. Charles were very cheap then ($85 for a room without an ocean view). The landlord went out of his way to rent to poets, writers and artists of all descriptions. Despite the broken wine bottles and belligerent drunks that lined the curb outside, inside the St. Charles the atmosphere was friendly and communal. The residents painted the hallways, decorated their doors. One room served as a recycling depot. The manager of the St. Charles, Wendy Reeves, would later observe that she never even had to buy a Sunday paper. In fact, she rarely had to buy anything, practically furnishing her entire apartment with castaways—a blender, dishes, dulcimer, ashtrays, plants and jeans.
In the fall of 1975, when Greenfield first came by the St. Charles to apply for a vacancy, he felt himself to be under such pressure that he was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, and consuming vast quantities of beer, wine and vodka. Wendy Reeves happened not to be on duty at the time and her assistant gave him the tour. Greenfield was shocked. The other women residents didn't so much introduce themselves to him as "present their bodies." Greenfield went away believing that the St. Charles was a Mafia-run brothel. Not that the assistant manager had said as much, but for someone of Greenfield's sensitivities, it was simple enough to read between the lines.
Reeves knew none of this when Bob Greenfield came to see her in her office to ask about a room. He'd been highly recommended by Michael Tracy, who said he was a good poet, a good friend and a potential asset to the building. Reeves let him fill out an application and told him that she was moving him up to "sixth on my list."
For Reeves, the meeting with Greenfield was a minor matter, but for Greenfield it was the "palpitating introduction" to the greatest adventure of his entire life. As he would later "rhapsodize" over Reeves in a thousand- monotonous conversations with his friends, her "body was a perfect grammar." She had "soft ears," a "fragile chin," "honey dark eyes," "cherry black eyes," "radiant unsullied eyes," "surprising, almost stunning eyes," and a "beauty so archaic that I was surprised to find her contemporary." Greenfield hated so much to leave her office, he says, that he returned a second time just to listen to her voice, which, to him, was deeply "provocative" and "deliciously tender." Despite her intellectual superiority, God had blessed her with the "gift" of not knowing it. He drank in her words like a man dying of thirst. He loved her from the second they met. This was the woman with whom he'd spend the rest of his life. She alone understood the secret of his soul.
At first Greenfield's friends were amused by such hyperbolic praise. It wasn't that they didn't consider Reeves nice or even pretty. But Greenfield saw her as some sort of white-limbed virgin temptress reclining on a velvet sofa, while to them she was simply the hard-working and conscientious building manager who left them polite but firm notes reminding them of overdue rents or stopped them in the halls to chat about insulation.
Greenfield stumbled down the stairs after the first meeting with Wendy with, as he says, a "terrific song in my heart." Just before he walked out the door, Reeves had said to him, "Don't give up," meaning that if he'd just be a little patient he'd certainly get a room.
Not that giving up had ever entered Greenfield's mind. He'd just met the most "stunningly beautiful woman" who had ever walked the planet. The only dark cloud, as he replayed the scene in his mind, had been his inability to confess the magnetic attraction he'd felt in his loins. Over the next weeks and months, Greenfield returned repeatedly to her office, asking her to dinner and, on one occasion, trying unsuccessfully to kiss her. One time, says Greenfield, he thought it was going to happen—"our lips were moving together"—but to Greenfield's chagrin, Reeves walked right past him, leaving Greenfield banging his head on the hallway wall.
On another occasion, Greenfield found her sitting in her office talking on the telephone. But when he tried to put his arms around her, she jumped out of her chair and, to his shock and horror, ordered him from the room. Such incidents frightened and confused Greenfield. As he saw it, she was giving him "unmistakable love looks—deep and affectionate." And once, he says, she was moved to observe that perhaps they'd met in "a previous lifetime." But still, as he could not help but notice, she never once invited him to her room and despite what Greenfield felt was their "excellent rapport," she had the distressing habit of "walking away if I met her unexpectedly in the street."
Reeves, for her part, was at first annoyed by Greenfield and later alarmed. It wasn't that she was unreasonably timid. She was a tall woman, commandingly articulate and formidably self-assured. But Greenfield's attentions, she would later say, were "an obscene phone call that never stopped." In addition, other women residents had begun to complain about Greenfield to her, saying he was a "pervert" and a psychopath and if she rented him a room, they were moving out.
Over the winter of 1976, Greenfield became increasingly persistent, calling on the telephone, buzzing on the intercom, waiting in the street until someone came out the front door and then before the door closed, dashing up to her office, her room, lurking in the hallways, standing outside her door. He began to send her love letters, even a Valentine.
Four days after Valentine's Day, Greenfield, in the company of two other women, ran into Reeves sitting alone in a booth at the Meatless Marathon Restaurant. Greenfield forgot about the other women he was with and ran up to Reeves. "I've been thinking about you day and night," he told her. "Did you get my Valentine?" Yes, said Reeves. Had it made her happy? No. Greenfield thought perhaps she was being "ironic," though when he tried to talk with her she gave him no "encouragement." What he really wanted, he says, was to take her to her room and make love but he was to shy to push it. After all, it was her room and she should be the one, he thought, to make an invitation to him. Reeves was angry when she left the restaurant, slamming the door on Greenfield's two women companions and saying "Goodbye!" to him.
Greenfield walked home in a cold blue funk. "When," he thought, "is this torture going to end?" Reeves, for her part, couldn't believe this was happening to her. To her mind, she'd never given Greenfield the slightest encouragement beyond ordinary good manners (and sometimes not even that). But the way Greenfield acted, you'd think they had a mutual understanding.
Years later, Reeves would write a copyrighted article for the "Venice Beachhead" (a small monthly paper put out by a local collective) discussing in part these early days (the spring and summer of 1976) and describing how Greenfield repeatedly called her office, speaking in a low urgent voice half-choked with lust, emotion, it wasn't clear what. Once, he bluffed his way into the building, saying he was Wendy's friend, took a seat in her office and refused her requests to leave. He had a "defiant" manner and a "belligerent" tone. He gave the impression of "terrific energy barely under control." In "bullying tones," he repeated his one and only theme: he loved her, he wanted to sleep with her, her eyes told him she wasn't happy, her current boyfriend wasn't "right."
Reeves tried to explain, she wrote, that it was impossible for him to love her, seeing as how he didn't even know her, but Greenfield merely got more "aggressive and insistent." Reeves lost her temper. They started to shout. And she ordered him to leave. Greenfield's face was red and sweaty. "You can't cut me off like this. You can't deny this feeling. You can't . . . "
It was now plain to Reeves that something was seriously amiss. Greenfield wasn't so much courting her as "stalking" her. He begged for dates on the telephone, the intercom; he banged on her door and went into his spiel—"I love you, Wendy. Let's spend the night together." Once he showed up wearing a suit, carrying a flower bouquet and gazing longingly at the door. Reeve's boyfriend had promised to give Greenfield a "good dose of pain," she says, the next time he showed up. But Greenfield looked so pathetic he didn't have the heart.
Reeves had asked the police to arrest Greenfield, but to her shock she found that such behavior was not then a crime and unless he violently attacked her in the presence of witnesses, the most they could do was briefly detain him for trespassing or disturbing the peace and only then if they caught him in the act. "Our hands are tied," the police said. Instead, she says, they told her to have her boyfriend "punch him out."
In August of 1976, Reeves obtained a civil injunction against Greenfield, enjoining and restraining him "from engaging in, committing or performing, directly or indirectly, or by any means whatsoever, any of the following acts: "Threatening, harassing, contacting, telephoning and annoying the Plaintiff herein in any manner at any time whatsoever." The day of the hearing, Greenfield went to the wrong courtroom and Reeves won by default.
This presented Reeves with a dilemma. She didn't want to see Greenfield in jail, especially since he might not even realize that his neck was on the block. The next time he called, therefore, she spent 40 minutes on the phone with him, explaining as clearly as she could the consequences of his interminable attempts to see her. "Listen to me, Bob." His attentions were driving her crazy. She couldn't walk out the door for fear he might be there. Her inability to concentrate was interfering with her college degree. He obviously had a lot of energy, and people had told her he had talent. Why didn't he just concentrate on his poetry and leave her alone? His hopes were totally unrealistic. She already had a boyfriend. Didn't he realize what could happen? Did he want to go to jail?
Greenfield was deeply appreciative. He drank it all in. He made Reeves feel as if she were really getting through. "Oh, thank you so much," he told her. "I never understood your point of view. If you'd only talk to me once in a while like this, I'm sure I could get over it." "Okay," said Reeves. "If you don't come to my room or office, don't bother me in any way, you can call me in a week." Reeves went to bed that night thinking she'd made a terrific deal, a blessed week of peace in exchange for a single call. But early the next morning her phone rang again. "Let's fuck," said Greenfield in a lewd, sleazy tone. Reeves would later remember that 40-minute conversation as the worst mistake she'd ever made—five years later, Greenfield was still referring back to that call as the time Reeves "encouraged him," gave him "permission" to call and promised him that "together" they'd work his problems out.
Greenfield had equally strong feelings about that phone conversation, though his account of it only tangentially resembled hers. As he fondly remembers the day, Wendy was her feminine "voluble" Gemini self. She said she was glad he called. She stressed how much she wanted his attention. She mentioned that she had finally had a chance (in court) to read all the notes and letters he'd sent her, and she was pleasantly surprised to find, says Greenfield, that he was a "better writer than Henry Miller." For the first time, says Greenfield, she said she felt she could "trust him." If he wanted, she make Xerox copies of his letters and send them back to him.
Greenfield was so stunned and overwhelmed by his total and unexpected success he was almost afraid to say anything for fear she might hang up. He couldn't believe how friendly she'd become. She invited him to write her whenever he wanted. And if he couldn't come by in person, to phone her every week. But it was the end of the conversation that fired Greenfield's passion to a white-hot pitch. The last thing he'd heard before the line went dead was an "ooh" or an "aaah," a melancholy sign of pain, anguish and yearning, as if she too wanted "Greenie" as much as he wanted her, but she was too shy- -couldn't he see?—and trapped by dark and terrible forces he couldn't comprehend.
Greenfield spent a sleepless, feverish night, drinking beer and pining in his heart for Reeves. Then at first light, knowing how anxious she must also be, he called to reassure her of his eternal devotion and love. But he was too nervous and too overwrought and what he had intended to be a tender expression of his deepest yearnings came out as a crude, cracked call to sex.
Reeves never did succeed in keeping Greenfield out of the St. Charles Hotel. Between Reeves's boyfriend, various hotel residents and even Greenfield's own (increasingly exasperated) friends, he was over the next five years throttled, drenched, derided, decked and threatened with a two by four. Still he returned, standing outside her door, running through what was becoming an increasingly explicit litany—he loved Wendy, he wanted to "go down on her," he wanted to "feel her teeth on his cock," he wanted to press his lips into the crevices of her cunt."
Reeves had by now learned that although the cops wouldn't come out on a civil injunction (which rendered her court order meaningless), they would be happy to assist her if she made a citizen's arrest on her own. Over the next few years, Reeves made so many arrests she developed a capsule history to rattle off to the cops: "This guy is a certified crazy. He lives on mental disability insurance. He has a past record of institutionalization. I never went out with him, not so much as for a cup of coffee. I've had my own boyfriend throw him out any number of times."
The irksome thing to her, says Reeves, was that the cops still tended to act dubious until she got to the part about her own boyfriend throwing him out. That was what gave her credibility, she discovered—the fact that she had a man of her own and therefore couldn't be dismissed as another crazy female venting her own sexual frustrations on the first poor dodo who came schlepping down the street.
Between 1976 and 1981, Greenfield was arrested more than a dozen times for trespassing, disturbing the peace, and repeatedly violating the orders of various municipal and superior court judges to leave Reeves alone. Not that these had any great deterrent effect on Greenfield. Greenfield would plead guilty to the charge, beg the judge's forgiveness, say he never meant to frighten Wendy, he hadn't realized how upsetting it was and he'd never do it again. The judge would set the bail at a low $100 or so (later it went higher) and Greenfield, who had been receiving disability assistance ever since those UCLA incidents in the early seventies, would post bond out of own pocket and an hour later, says Reeves, there he was again, muttering through her door—"I love you. I want to eat you."
Several of Greenfield's friends from Beyond Baroque or the poetry workshop used to take Greenfield aside, reasoning with him walking up and down the beach for hours, explaining over and over again that the Mafia had nothing to do with Wendy, the St. Charles was not a brothel, Wendy didn't love him and unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life in jail, he better leave her alone.
Eventually concluding that Greenfield's obsession was impervious to ordinary reason, Michael Tracy and his brother Scott in November 1977 devised a plan to put Greenfield on a plane to Chicago (where Greenfield's brother lived) just before an upcoming court appearance, reasoning that if he missed the hearing the judge would issue a felony warrant and Greenfield could never come back to California without risking prison. Instead, Greenfield spent the entire trip writing passionate letters to Reeves and then borrowed airfare to fly back in time for the court date. (How could he miss it? Wendy would be there.)
On another occasion, Michael Tracy decided it might take Greenfield's mind off Reeves if he could just get him properly laid. Through a friend of a friend, Tracy linked him up with a long-haired, baby-faced hooker (she had once done a spread for Penthouse, says Tracy) who would accommodate Greenfield for the discount rate of $75. Greenfield was all for it until he heard the price. In those days, Greenfield was heavily into numerology and seven, he felt, was a bad number. Hey, no problem, said Tracy, they'd pay her $100 instead. But the damage was already done and Greenfield turned it down. It wasn't only numbers that had a special meaning for Greenfield. If he saw a Safeway truck in the street, says friend and fellow poet Jim Krusoe, it was a sign that he'd been too timid with Wendy, always taking "the safe way." A Tip Top Bread sign, on the other hand, meant it was an unusually opportune time to phone her, a "tip top" time in fact.
There was one occasion when Greenfield was talking to Krusoe on the telephone when Reeves walked by. Thereafter, Greenfield repeatedly called Krusoe, not because he wanted to talk to him, but rather in the hopes that Reeves would reappear.
For some time Greenfield had a sense that there was more going on around him than he readily perceived. For some reason, he thought that he controlled newspaper headlines and television news. Strangers in the street, he felt, were sending him messages. He tried his best not to think lustful thoughts about women other than Reeves for fear it would cause her to get pregnant or, even worse, be raped. For the longest time, he labored under the delusion that Reeves had been forced to have a baby against her will.
As for Reeves, she had given up any effort to reason with Greenfield a long time before. No matter what she said or did, he could always twist it around to prove when all was said and done that Wendy really loved him as much as he did her. Once Reeves unexpectedly met him on the stairs and called him a "worm." He really didn't blame her. She'd been dying for a kiss from him and he'd just stood there like a telephone booth.
In another instance (this was shortly after they first met), she told him to stay away from the other women in the St. Charles. Reeves had only meant that he should stop bothering them, but what Greenfield rather heard was "stay away from other women because you belong to me." Greenfield had always thought that Reeves had always wanted him to be more manly, more aggressive, more willing to take risks and openly declare his love.
There was one occasion in the fall of 1977 when she walked out of her room carrying a guitar and tape recorder on her way to a music lesson. Waiting silently in the hall was Greenfield, who seized her in his arms and tried to give her a kiss. When she resisted, they fell together on the floor, breaking the guitar and bruising her shins. Reeves tried to nail him for attempted rape after that attack but, as the police pointed out, because he hadn't tried to take off either her clothes or his, all they could really charge him with was misdemeanor battery. Greenfield was indignant that anyone would think that he wanted to rape Wendy. He was trying to kiss her so she'd sleep with him and, if she slept with him, she'd love him and then, once she loved him, he'd be happy the rest of his life.
Greenfield tried everything he could think of to get Reeves to sleep with him. He offered $100 to anyone who could get him into her room. He mailed her a blank check and an invitation to make love. (The Mafia, he thought, would never let her turn the money down). He sent her perhaps 500 letters and poems, all dealing with his love for her ("beautiful tender vulnerable sensuous screams from the heart," he called them). Some were tediously repetitive. (In Patton they medicated him with Thorazine and his protestations of love took on a flat mechanical tone.) But others (Reeves reprinted a few in her 1979 Beachhead article) were vividly specific: What I want is a mistress to keep her hands on my throttle. Who shines my spear, uses her teeth to rub rust off my engine. Maybe a bitch sometimes who throws kerosene on the ebbing flames late at night when it's dark and shivering. I want a large red house with an egg-shaped room. A virgin whore who talks bawdy, says fuck me in the cunt, you wild red fucker."
Between 1976 and 1981, Greenfield had so many encounters with the judicial system that they now seemed like a thick album of "traumatic scenes." He was first arrested (for trespassing) in September 1976 for telling Reeves through her door that he wanted to "go down" on her. In December of that year, Greenfield was arrested again, he says, "for trying to embrace Wendy outside the St. Charles Hotel." Reeves ended up bumping her head on the plate glass window and Greenfield was given three weeks in Brotman Memorial Hospital.
Most of 1977 remains an indefinite blur to Greenfield. He was arrested "seven or eight" times, he says, and sent to jail and/or Camarillo perhaps three times. In February, 1978, he appeared in court to answer charges resulting from the broken guitar-misdemeanor incident of the previous November (as well as another abortive, confused embrace when Reeves was practicing Tai Chi on the lawn). Courtrooms always left Greenfield frightened and overwrought. And when he saw Reeves, he blurted out: "I love you. Take me to your loft." The deputies dragged Greenfield from the courtroom and when the court resumed, the judge sentenced him to two consecutive six-month sentences in jail and Patton Psychiatric Hospital. With one-third time off for good behavior, Greenfield was released the following September.
Jail was a powerful deterrent to Greenfield. After that he stayed away from Reeves for nearly five months. But then slowly, inexorably, he found himself drawn back to her door. On one occasion, Greenfield showed up just after Reeves finished a meditation course in Zen Karate. At the time, Reeves says, she was feeling unusually "centered" and "unattached" and she spoke to Greenfield through the door. "Bob, nobody is interested in this anymore. You're boring. Nobody cares. I don't care. Scott doesn't care. You're just ruining your life for no reason. Go away. Just go away." And to her surprise, Greenfield went away. "Gawd," she said to herself. "Is that all there is? Just speak to him with no fear and show him that I don't care."
On this occasion, Greenfield was even farther out on the edge than usual. His father had just died and rather than go to his funeral he'd gone over to Wendy's room to tell her about it first. Instead, as he sobbed to his friend, Scott Tracy, Wendy had told him through the door that she'd never loved him. "I said, 'I think about you every day,'" explained Greenfield. Scott Tracy had spent so much time with Greenfield he had virtually become a lay therapist. "What did she say?" he asked. "She seemed to think it was ridiculous." She used other words too— tedious, boring and to top it off she laughed at him.
"What are you going to do?" asked Tracy.
Greenfield adopted an air of mock bravado. "Get laid."
"That's good."
Greenfield seemed hurt that Tracy would take such a statement at face value, that after all this he would just go out and get himself laid? "Why not?" asked Tracy. "Because I don't want to." "What do you want to do?" "I want to go to bed with Wendy."
In February, 1979, Greenfield was arrested outside Reeves's door again and given 90 days. In October, he was given 30 days for propositioning her through the door. In December, 1979, he was arrested outside the home of Reeves's parents and was given 30 days. By the end of of 1979, Reeves felt she couldn't take it anymore. She'd already been in therapy once, she says, in large part due to Greenfield's attentions. She'd had to change her phone number and get an answering service to screen her calls. Greenfield had driven her out of two consecutive jobs with his attentions—manager of the St. Charles (and several other buildings as well) and copy editor of an equal opportunity journal. The one thing Greenfield had always wanted more than any other was to make himself the center of her life. And in a sense he had succeeded—she couldn't have spent more time thinking about him than if they'd actually been lovers. For four long years, she and Greenfield had been engaged in a contest of wills and now, she had to admit, his was frankly stronger.
The only solution was to leave Venice, move to another town and hope that Greenfield would never find her. Still, it irked her that Greenfield could force her to leave her friends, her job, her "rent controlled apartment" with "cathedral windows" and an "ocean view."
The last thing she did was write a long bitter article (and series of subsequent letters) for the "Venice Beachhead" describing the previous four years, describing her unwanted relationship with Greenfield, the deficiencies of the legal system for dealing with such behavior, and the thorny problem of sexual harassment in general. She offered to sell the rights to her story for a future docu-drama. And she invited other women with similar problems to join her in a campaign for effective anti-harassment legislation.
Reaction to her story was both far better than she expected, and worse. Many people offered their support and sympathy and even sent money. Several other harassment victims came forth. Greenfield was banned from two local restaurants—the Meatless Marathon and the Lafayette Cafe. A television producer optioned her story for $1,000 (the movie fell through). And she appeared at a press conference to talk about sexual harassment with Congressman Mel Levine.
At the same time, there were other people who thought she was making a federal case out of matters that never should have gotten into the court system in the first place. Venice had a long tolerant history for eccentric behavior. Greenfield, they said, had never been a violent person. He was bright, intense and, at least before his obsession started, one of the better local poets. ("Of course, he's intense," Wendy would later snap. "He's a psychotic.")
Wendy was especially irked by the claim that Greenfield was not a violent person. It may have been true that around men he tended to crumple to the ground at the slightest show of force (Wendy called this his "hurt dog" routine), but around her he was amazingly strong and quick. More than once, he'd pinioned her arms against her side, bumped her head or knocked her down. (She tried to spray Mace on him once and the wind blew it back on her). Just because she hadn't yet been hurt didn't prove anything. Psychotics, she argued, were not predictable people. She'd heard about one case where a man, after following a woman for many years, suddenly turned on her one day and blinded her with acid. Or what about John Hinkley? He'd gone up to Yale to see Jodie Foster and, then when nothing came of it, he shot Ronald Reagan.
Greenfield saw Wendy's article while waiting for his breakfast in a Venice cafe. He was so shocked he left his meal untouched, stumbled outside and bought himself a quart of Miller High Life. He searched frantically for a rationalization, variously telling friends that she'd done it to publicize his poetry or document how much he truly cared. But in his heart he was "crushed" by her apparent desire to see him in jail. ("It was his sanity or mine," Reeves would later say, "and his was already lost.")
Despite the article, Greenfield couldn't stop wanting to see her. He stood outside the St. Charles and called up to Room 24, even though she didn't live there anymore. He paid $10 for information on her whereabouts (it was false). He went back to her old high school, looked up her yearbook and was touched to discover that she'd been voted the "Most Artistic Woman" in her class. He paid $145 for a key to the St. Charles Hotel, though when he tried to use it, he says, "a crude looking philistine" took it away.
Greenfield spent the first six months of 1980 in jail and Camarillo for probation violations. (Under a new state law, Reeves had obtained an anti- harassment injunction the previous June forbidding him to contact her in any way, approach within 15 yards of her or come within one block of the St. Charles.) While he was in jail, Greenfield wrote Reeves what he estimates were 70 poems and letters, expressing his love, his passion and asking for her assistance in getting out of jail. Reeves took eight of these to the city attorney and, after a three-day trial in June 1980, Greenfield was sentenced to an additional 18 months in jail on seven counts of contempt of court. (One letter was thrown out for having an illegible postmark.)
Greenfield was shocked by the sentence ("a titanic misunderstanding," he called it), but the "real heartsmasher," he says was the fact that Wendy "lied" during the trial and denied that she had ever given Greenfield permission to write or phone her. After the trial, says Greenfield, he stood in a corner of the holding tank and sobbed at the distasteful way Wendy had handled his letters in court.
In Reeves opinion, Greenfield's court appointed lawyer was out to make a name for himself. First he set Reeves up by asking if she had read any of Greenfield's letters. Reeves hated to give Greenfield the "satisfaction" of knowing that she'd read his letters, and she answered that she'd only read a few of them. Well then, asked Greenfield's attorney, how did Reeves considered herself "harassed" by letters she hadn't even read?
Greenfield's attorney won that round, but on the key point of whether or not she had ever given Greenfield permission to contact her, he made a devastating but unconscious mistake, confusing the anti-harassment injunction of the previous June with the civil injunction of 1976. "He phrased it wrong," says Reeves. He asked if it was not true that she had given Greenfield permission to contact her after she obtained the anti-harassment injunction. "Actually," says Reeves, "it was after I got the civil injunction years before." And therefore, Reeves was able to truthfully answer the lawyer's question by saying it was "not true, absolutely not true."
Greenfield never showed up for his sentencing that June. He'd been released on bail and rather than face another long jail term he went into hiding. Up to this time, Greenfield had always had a place to live. They weren't much, bare stark rooms, linoleum floors, a single table (with his beloved Hermes Rocket typewriter) and a mattress on the floor covered with a satin sheet (in case Wendy ever accepted one of his dinner invitations and actually came by). But having been in and out of jail so many times, he lost his apartment, his typewriter and all the poems he'd written to Wendy. Instead, he started sleeping in "wino tunnel," a culvert under South Venice Boulevard where it crosses the Grand Canal.
In October, Greenfield was captured while yelling up to what was formerly Wendy's room in the St. Charles Hotel. He was sent to Camarillo to begin serving his 18 month sentence, but after two months he walked away and took a bus back to Venice. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, he lived as a fugitive, sleeping under the Santa Monica pier. Then that January, he sent yet another letter to Reeves, inviting her to have dinner with him and giving his address at a local motel. The sheriff picked him up instead and carted him off to the County Jail, where he has remained ever since.
Few County Jail inmates, perhaps, have ever been so eloquent as Greenfield on their hatred of jail and the criminal justice system. He has served nearly three of the last six years in either mental hospitals or jail, a situation which he calls a "traumatic nightmare" resulting from a "bloodthirsty vindictive judgment." Most days he spends up to 22 hours in a six-by-eight-foot cell with three other men. There's no natural light. The air, he says, is "half CO2." Since January, he's had a total of six visitors and a mere handful of letters.
Jail seems to have had a dimming effect on Greenfield's once bright eyes and formerly intense tone. Now, when visitors come, he frequently holds his forehead between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. He jogs in place two hours every day and spends five or more hours writing letters. (He's written 600, he estimates in the last nine months, though none of them to Reeves.) The rest of the time he sleeps or reads, having worked his way though such books as The Life of Henry James, Bullfinch's Mythology, Ezra Pound's The River Merchant's Wife, Edna St. Vincent Millay's Dirge Without Music and Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister. On weekends, he reads "all 548 pages" of the Sunday "Los Angeles Times".
Greenfield has little in common with the other inmates, who he says, talk mainly about "perverted sex and money." And the kinds of things the other inmates laugh at, he says, are enough to turn his guts. Because Greenfield is not a big man, he also lives in a constant state of tension and fear. He's been slugged three times (once in a candy robbery and twice for refusing to give blow jobs). He yearns, he says, "from the tips of his toes to the outer edges of his brain" to see a play, have dinner in a Westwood restaurant, or just plain walk the streets of Los Angeles ("this great dazzling summer city I love more than any other").
Greenfield is perhaps most eloquent on the unjustness of his "maniacal" sentence, complaining that his three cellmates are in for "murder," while he's in jail "for writing love letters." He has a breathtaking contempt for his attorneys, whom he calls "shabby, stuttering lawyers" whose alleged defense of his constitutional rights was "the sorriest job of attorneyship I've ever been a party to." His lawyers put his "cock on the block" and it was cut off by a "murky city attorney" and a "finicky pinky-fingered judge." Greenfield is also more than a little tired, he says, of all the people who so blithely called him "obsessed" over the last six years—"Greenie is obsessed with Wendy Reeves." In his opinion, such people are constitutionally "incapable of feeling the intensity of passion and devotion for one woman that I am capable of and hence they must make up for their tepidity of heart by inventing a disease for my capacity to love."
As for Reeves, Greenfield's feelings are still rather mixed. Her conduct over the last four years, he says, has at best been "mediocre." She wrote a "meretricious" article about him for the "Venice Beachhead." She "lied" about him in court. She hasn't made any effort whatsoever to interrupt this "judicial travesty." And after nine months, she hasn't come forth with a "single word of sympathy."
And yet, despite the mountain of evidence that she doesn't love him, has never loved him and would dearly love never to have to think of him again, he still wakes up with "Wendy on my mind." Something still hungers for a "sudden unexpected outpouring of love from her." He felt this way six years ago, and he feels the same way now—"I still want to make love to Wendy in Room 24 of the St. Charles Hotel."
