Though most of her friends advised her against it, Cathy agreed to give me an interview.
“I’ll do the interview,” she told her friends, “but I’ll never let him know where I live.”
A few weeks went by, and Cathy invited me to her home Sunday morning for pancakes.
“I can’t make it,” I told her.
I was working on my memoir and couldn’t allow myself to leave the house for unnecessary reasons.
It was another six months before I made it to her home — for a Halloween party.
She was at her most beautiful that night, dressed in some stunning slinky black number.
“We’d get married,” I confessed to my closest friend, “if only things had worked out a little differently.”
If only I had emailed her when I first discovered her in Buzz magazine in 1994, shortly after I moved to the city.
“If only you would’ve written to me then,” Cathy once said after dinner.
She remembered the first time I emailed her. It was 2000 and I had just enjoyed one of her weekly columns in MediaWeek.
I mentioned that I had a website — lukeford.com.
She looked at it and was appropriately creeped out.
During my first few drives to her place in late 2002, I’d regularly get lost and end up whining into my cell phone, “Help! I’m stuck in some third-world hell hole.”
Cathy never approved of my racism. She told me it was un-American.
After I blogged about my fears of the black man (his long muscular arm reaching into my van and taking me places the holy Torah forbade me to go), Matt Welch would tell me that Silverlake was a better neighborhood than where I lived in Pico/Robertson.
I often had the fantasy that Cathy, Maia and I would drive up the coast of California and Oregon. The closest we came to this was a Memorial day weekend at Andrew Breitbart’s vacation home in Palm Springs.
As I took control of her Volvo to begin the journey, I promptly knocked into another vehicle (my van has a tiny front end).
Our Palms Springs adventure was filled with children.
“Luke’s good with kids,” Cathy assured the parents present.
I invented a combination baseball/cricket contest, promptly breaking the home’s broom (not quite as embarrasing as the time I broke off the child-protector on Eugene Volokh’s toilet).
We all played in the pool for hours. I’d have to struggle to lift Cathy up in the water. She was at her pinacle of about 150 pounds.
One of the many things that impressed me about Miss Seipp was her ability to get in and out of the loo more quickly than I.
In numerous ways, Cathy was more of a man than me.
I don’t want you to get the idea that I only took in my relationship with Cathy. After an HIV-breakout in one of the San Fernando Valley’s biggest industries in the Spring of 2004, she insisted that I explain to her (on a drive to some lofty meeting of intellectuals) the meaning of “double anal.”
It was a trope in our conversation for days afterward.
One of the reasons Cathy liked me accompanying her to parties was that I made her seem mannered in comparison. I regularly outraged more people than she did, usually with some innocuous inquiry about whether Brokeback Mountain was “a universal love story or just another gay cowboy film.”
(Yes, I steal many of my best lines from Mickey Kaus.)
When I finally saw the film I had long mocked, I loved it (the first half was slow but the ending was devastating).
In the Spring of 2004, Cathy was due to come to work for me. I was the Editor of sex-oriented website and I was employing some of our friends at $100 – $300 per article. Then my boss pulled two of my articles (out of fear of lawsuits) and I quit in a huff (and have struggled financially ever since).
Cathy read my memoir XXX-Communicated. Like every woman who’s read it, she thought I came across badly. She said the only convincing female character in it was Kendra Jade and she “couldn’t understand why I didn’t end up marrying her.”
