BREAKFAST WITH LEONARD COHEN

It was everything I could have expected from breakfast with Leonard Cohen. First of all I was already a fan, I had been listening to him ever since i first heard "Suzanne" and I was learning to play the guitar so I learned to play chords from the Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen songbooks.

My parents were both actors and I grew up in the middle of show business. I was used to movie stars so celebrity by and for itself neither impressed nor intimidated me. I had lots of friends who knew Leonard personally and when I was living with David Carradine and Barbara Hershey in the early 1970s I had taken Barbara with me to see Leonard at the Troubadour which was a very small club so we were seated no more than fifteen feet from Leonard. Barbara was smitten (nothing is sexier than talent, baby).

A few months later I was sitting at Schwab's drug store one morning having breakfast with David Blue (nee David Cohen, no direct relation to Leonard they knew of but probably still related since they were both members of the Cohanim, the hereditary patrialinial priesthood in Judaism, not Rabbis or even personally religious necessarily, just a matter of the Y chromosome they inherited). David and I lived in the same building just a few blocks from Schwab's. Well Leonard came in and sat down next to David, across the table from me. We were introduced and then Leonard proceeded to tell us about the encounter he'd had the previous evening with a Sunset Boulevard prostitute. He left out no detail, no matter how minor, and told the whole story as only someone like Leonard could have told it - a poet to the core with a teenager's libido but ultimately a man who simply adored and admired women.

Keep in mind this was a unique time in history, during that period which lasted only a few decades between the discovery of antibiotics and the discovery of HIV, when one couldn't die from having sex. I will always consider myself blessed to have been in my twenties during that time in history.

That was all the time I ever spent with him personally but I followed his creative output for the rest of his life and when I heard that he died, I cried for probably half an hour, to my own great surprise. But I guess that was the result of the depths to which his music had touched me, much more deeply than I had thought at the time. I really only understood it when I heard that he was gone.