FIXATIONS : Once Inside Clemens Home, You’re Not in O.C. Anymore
There’s a jar of Best Foods mayonnaise in the fridge, but otherwise it’s hard to find an object in the Clemens household that corresponds with what you see in most homes.
Their chairs tend to be ornately carved things with high backs, peaked by animal horns and crystal balls. Gremlins and gargoyles perch on nearly every surface. A stuffed vulture has its black wings spread above the bed in the master bedroom, flanked by the snarling heads of a baboon and hyena. A wizened Chinese Tong master, formerly a resident of a San Francisco wax museum, sits in a corner of the bedroom. A 1930s gynecologist’s exam table resides by the house’s front door, topped with a bear rug replete with head. Eleven-year-old daughter Amber has a pet scorpion that glows lime-green under a black light. And outside, their front door is guarded by an 18-foot-tall snow-white unicorn rearing up on his hind legs.
“We have friends who call us a ‘90s Addams family,” says Robin Clemens, handing me a snort of Southern Comfort in a goat’s hoof shot glass, making it hard to disagree.
He and wife Rowan married 14 years ago, three months after they first met, when an Indian medicine man had sent Rowan to the metaphysical supplies store at San Pedro’s Ports O’ Call, where Robin was working.
Since then the pair have tried to create their own personal antidote to “the mundane world”--in a style they’ve dubbed “Gucci Transylvanian”--that reflects their interests in medieval fantasy and the nature-revering “old religion” of ancient England.
Early in the conversation Robin, a hirsute 43, stressed that their interests in things metaphysical run strictly to the white side of magic. In the metaphysical shop the pair once owned on Huntington Beach’s Main Street they posted signs stressing that folks seeking satanic toys had best look elsewhere.
With a military father, Robin spent much of his childhood in England, where he picked up his present interests. Thirty-two year old Rowan, meanwhile, had a Catholic school upbringing, during which time she began searching through other beliefs, including Mormonism and Christian Science, before moving on to the couple’s present one, which Robin likens to the Earth-conscious religions of American Indians.
“And we’re into the fantasy,” Robin said, “into the old medieval aspects of England, Arthurian times and Camelot, into the renaissance.”
Rowan added, “I guess we look at it romantically, without really thinking about things like the Black Plague.”
The family has twice uprooted to England, with the intent of buying a Gothic church and converting it into a recording studio and artists space. “Our friends always said we should be in a castle or old church, and we found one,” Rowan said. The deal never worked out, though they claim it wasn’t out of reach. The initial asking price for the five-story antiquity, complete with pipe organ and oak pews was a mere $115,000.
On their first trip there they did wind up living in a 15th-Century thatched-roof cottage in the Cotswolds. It wasn’t until several weeks after they’d bought it that they learned it had once belonged to “Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien. “And I’m just a little bit into Tolkien,” Robin said, pulling up his tank top to reveal “HOBBIT” tattooed on his stomach in old English type.
Until they moved into their suburban home a couple of months ago, most of their possessions had been in storage while they lived in an apartment and considered a move to the English countryside again. “That’s really where we feel we belong,” Robin said, “but it wouldn’t be fair to Amber. She’s real grounded in her school here.” Indeed, their sprightly, be-braced daughter spends much of her time practicing cheerleading routines.
In the meantime they are content with the world behind their front door, defined by a sign hanging near it: “Reality is for those who lack imagination.”
From the brown cave bat in a crystal ball to the hand-carved 17th-Century German sofa, everything suggests the family shops at Merlin’s instead of Mervyn’s.
Robin said: “That’s our whole thing here. It’s a sensory overdose. You’re not supposed to be able to look anywhere here and see anything that you’re used to. When we lived in an apartment complex we used to trip out at how during these summertime pool parties you’d often see people walk into the wrong apartment, get a beer out of the refrigerator and not even notice they were in the wrong one. You couldn’t do that here.”
Some of their more arcane items came from antique shops and swap meets, others from friends and connections who know they’re always looking for the unusual. The unicorn, Robin said, first arrived in a dream.
“I saw this big white unicorn rearing up on its hind legs, and when I woke up I’d joked to Rowan that we needed one. Then we went up to the Bodhi Tree bookstore in Hollywood, and coming back I saw this giant bumblebee outside this place, and go ‘Whoop! U-turn!’ Any place with a giant bumblebee we have to check out. And there at this antique shop was the unicorn.”
About $2,000 later they had the fun of transporting the cumbersome fiberglass sculpture home on a rented stake-bed truck, “freaking out all these surfers” on PCH.
A friend turned the Clemens on to the San Francisco Chinatown Wax Museum that was going out of business. To get the wispy-bearded Tong master home, Robin had to haul him around town by taxi and then buy him a seat on the plane. “They had him down as Grandpa X on the ticket, and on the flight we had a bag of those peanuts in his hand and a glass by his side.”
The stuffed vulture was a wedding anniversary gift from a pawn shop owner, who had dubbed it “the pawnbroker’s parakeet.” Along with the ferocious baboon and hyena heads, the room also hosts a disquieting sculpture of an emaciated man, used as a mascot for the Live Aid concert. Now he wears a badge that reads “Orange County Juror.”
Around the house they have wizard totem poles, vampire holograms, a stuffed albino peacock, a 600-year-old Tibetan thigh bone trumpet, Hobbit paintings, a bull pizzle walking stick, optical illusions, ornate grandfather clocks, an ancient oak baptismal, ram’s horn candleholders and a free-standing psychedelic lamp of branches and multicolored resin that they claim was made in the ‘70s by a kid while listening to Hendrix and frying on acid. Their really strange stuff, though, stays in a room Robin calls Pandora’s Box that they don’t often show to people.
Robin said, “Have you seen that movie ‘The Burbs’ (the Tom Hanks film where a macabre, menacing family moves into the neighborhood)? I’m kind of wondering if the neighbors aren’t thinking that way about us.”
That said, he tapped a quartz “singing bowl” and began running a rubber mallet around its rim, creating an ominous “ommmmmmmmmmm” that kept redoubling in volume until the room hummed with it.
Though they’ve owned their own business most of the time, Rowan works in an administration job for a nurses agency. Robin, who says he’s a grand-nephew of Mark Twain, is completing a fantasy book and works on music he describes as “Gregorian blues.”
Rowan said her parents initially weren’t too keen on their household setup, but they can’t argue with 14 years of successful marriage. Daughter Amber wouldn’t change a thing, except for the outside world.
“Most kids have relationships that are like parent-kid. Mine are my friends,” she said. They sing and write together all the time. She plans to sing for a living, and actually has a great voice for a preteen. If she gets rich she wants to buy land for all the impounded animals and homeless folks to live on.
Living in a family that’s a tad different has given her a strong perspective on the conformist tendencies of the sixth grade.
“A lot of the kids at school are robots, they’re like all the same. They’re scared to say anything and they never really open up and talk. They all wear like the same shoes, the same this and that. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be different, in a good way, but a lot of them can’t accept that. So I can be a loner at school. But the friends I have are always good, good friends. When they come over here they think it’s like Disneyland,” Amber said.
Are you fixated? If so, please let us know by writing to: Fixations, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Please include your phone number.
