Karen being Karen

 

December 8, 1996

 

Pauly likes to play innocent when it comes to Karen

But we all know how he tends to make goddesses of women, and how disappointed he gets when they don’t live up to expectations.

Some women like Jane come the closest – although in some ways Karen was exactly the opposite on his ideal.

She was a vamp, and a troublemaker, and as attracted as he was to her he was always wise enough to know she could never make him happy in the end.

He teased her, a cat and mouse game that went on for years, until she faded out of the rock and roll scene and lost that edge for which she had become famous. She moved to Europe, got married and took up a respectable job.

And yet, in my mind – since she teased me as much as Pauly teased her – she has become the icon of what we all were in those early days of the band, a dynamic force that created the tension and allowed the band to take out their rage in music.

Much of this started in 1970 when I was still on the West Coast and on the run from the police – she worked with Jane at some rich people’s Park Avenue flat, taking care of rich people’s kids, while Pauly and Jack stayed over when the parents were away.

The family valued Karen and Jane enough to put up with Pauly and Jack.

Sleeping arrangements didn’t always coincide with the band’s schedule, and there were times when Pauly and Jack wandered across the Hudson River at very late hours, finding the two aupairs too weary to play, and so often were told they could sleep on the couch.

Pauly was not that kind of house guest. And so when rejected from Jane’s bed, he crawled in the bed Karen usually slept in.

She was not there at the time, but came in a short while later, and demanded to know what Pauly was doing. He told her he was trying to sleep.

She ordered him out. He refused. She then asked where she would sleep, and he told her she could sleep on the couch or crawl in with him. Karen being Karen hopped into the bed with Pauly.

Jack, who technically was dating Karen at the time, happened to come in a little later that night and found his girlfriend sleeping with Pauly – an incident that reverberated in band life for years.

None of us know if anything actually happened between Pauly and Karen – although Pauly claimed innocence.

Karen, also being Karen, refused to say one way or the other, especially to Jack.
And though that might have been the start of things, it was not the last incident, Karen being Karen.