A Carlin Home Companion (14 page)

It was during this time that Terry was in a car accident with one of his closest friends, Steve. They were going to a party up Laurel Canyon when a drunk driver T-boned them, flipping Steve's Jeep and killing him instantly. We were all confused and traumatized by losing someone our age. For many of us it was our first encounter with death. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for Terry. He survived the crash with only a broken arm, but something inside him had broken, too, and his lashing out at me escalated. It felt as if my attachment to him fed his rage, and he regularly struck out at me verbally—“You disgusting whore!”—and physically—a death grip around my arm or a bite on my face. Confused, I'd walk around with bruises on my body and my soul, and I'd try to use logic to understand the cause:
I must have provoked him by wanting him too much; I must have said or done the wrong thing; if I just don't do that thing again, he'll come back and stay forever
. I could never figure it out exactly. While most girls my age were worrying about what to wear to the prom, I was worrying about whether
what
I was wearing to the prom would cover my bruises. I didn't tell a soul about this behavior of his. I had to tame him. I had to heal him. And I knew that if I could, I'd finally be worth something.

Then all the pain and rage that I could not or would not feel and express toward Terry, my family's chaotic past, and even myself wound itself tight around me, and I couldn't see straight. I began acting out. I stopped taking my birth control pills. Within a month I was pregnant. I told Terry. He was upset and, I think, scared. I told my mom. She was lovely about it, and I was glad I could turn to her. She took me to take care of it. But she didn't do what I really needed her to do, which was to help me get away from my abusive relationship. Of course how
could
she? She didn't know anything about it. I couldn't tell her, and so I carried on as if nothing was wrong, and nine months later, I got pregnant again. My mom took care of me again.

This time Terry wasn't scared; he was infuriated. I came home to a note on my bed reading, “You stupid fucking cunt. This is all your fault.” And it was. I'd played Russian roulette with my birth control pills and lost. I was hoping someone would stop me. I had no idea how. I wouldn't walk away from Terry. I thought if I did my whole life would collapse. It was like the Three Musketeers—all for one, one for all. But instead of my parents being my protectors, it was my friends, and they were too young to protect anyone but themselves.

For most of those days in the eleventh grade, I couldn't tell if I was coming or going. Who am I—the great rebel leader's daughter or the Brentwood disco queen? What is important—finally owning my rage and sorrow or taking another hit off the pipe? Who loves me—my parents who are watching as I sink deeper into fear, or my friends who are the very weight pulling me down? I walked around in a constant state of confusion. There was no sense of self, and what little there was was all in service of keeping this monster, this boy, at bay so that I could have just five more minutes of validating love from him.

I know my mom wanted to do more to rein in my life—give me a curfew, control whom I saw, get me off drugs—but she was determined not to lose me the way her mother had lost her, by pushing her around like a pawn. And my dad was busy, busy, busy, and distracted, distracted, distracted. Not only were the heart attack and his career on his mind, he also had a new challenge—an enormous tax problem. Between his resistance to opening the letters from his accountant, a really bad investment in a movie that never got made, and the fact that—
Surprise
!—as far as the government was concerned, the horse ranch in Malibu was not actually a business investment, my parents owed more than a million dollars to the U.S. government.

Dad and I would pass each other in the hallway and he'd ask, “Are you all right?” not really wanting a real answer. And I'd say, “Fine,” not really wanting to give one. It's not that we didn't care; we just didn't know how to do it any differently. Plus the last thing I wanted to do as a hormonally out-of-control teenager was talk to my dad. Mom hadn't told him about anything that had happened.

And then I got pregnant a third time. This time I even kept it from my mom. I felt like a whore, a loser, an insane person. I knew I had to take care of it myself and figure out my next move. I briefly considered suicide. But in the end I confided in my horse trainer, Jill, who was like a surrogate mother to me. Because she was so worried about me, she immediately told my mother. And that's when the ugly truth about all the abuse came pouring out of me. I couldn't pretend anymore. I didn't care if I never saw Terry again; I just wanted the pain to stop. My mom told my dad about everything. It was over.

A few days later Terry showed up at our house. I'm not sure why he came—to apologize, to charm me again, to tell me I was a whore? My dad saw him outside the gate at the end of our long driveway. He went inside his office and grabbed his baseball bat. As my dad marched down the driveway toward Terry, he said, “You come near my daughter again, I'll bash your fucking skull in.”

It was the proudest day of my life—my father had finally fathered me.

 

CHAPTER
TEN

 … and Rock and Roll

“
H
EY, YOU'RE A REALLY GOOD
dancer. Wanna go out on a date?” Mark asked me. We'd been dancing for a few songs now. “Boogie Nights” had just ended, and we were now in the middle of “Rock Lobster.”

“Uh, sure. That'd be great,” I answered as I made my way slowly to the ground as Fred Schneider, the lead singer of the B-52s sang, “Down … down … down.”

At the beginning of my senior year, I met a new boy. His name was Mark Lennon. I met him at my friend Cheryl's 1960s-themed birthday party. I'd shown up wearing a pink vinyl miniskirt, white go-go boots, and my favorite T-shirt, which said, “Earth is not my planet.” When Mark asked me to dance, I almost died. Not only was he one of the best dancers I'd ever seen, he was also a singer in the band Venice, the very band that I'd been dancing to at Gazzarri's since I was fifteen. And he had long blond hair and blue eyes. I was in heaven.

After we danced to a million songs together, we walked around the party holding hands, kissed at the end of the night, and before I knew it, we were dating. One of the first dates we had was to go up to Ojai to a Lennon family reunion. As we drove up the coast in my Jeep, we listened to the Doobie Brothers'
Minute by Minute
album. Mark knew all the words and sang perfect harmony to all of them. My heart exploded with joy.

When we arrived in Ojai, I thought I had just entered the twilight zone. There were almost a hundred people there. Mark was the youngest of thirteen kids in his family alone. And they all had blond hair and blue eyes. He was part of the famous Lennon family—as in the Lennon Sisters from
The Lawrence Welk Show
. I had no idea how to keep track of all these Lennons before me. But it didn't matter because I'd never met a more lovely and normal family. Everyone sang, danced, and was cheerfully fun. Being an only child, I felt like an alien, but it was also manna for my soul.

At Mark's gigs with Venice he'd sing love songs, all the girls in the crowd would swoon, and then he'd come offstage and walk right over to me, grab my hand, and kiss me. We were a couple, and everyone knew it. He loved and adored me, and I loved and adored him. He was considerate, sweet, and funny. He didn't have a mean bone in his body. I had moved on from Terry.

Even though he was in a rock band, Mark was the most sheltered teenager I had ever met. It must have been the Catholic upbringing and the “Lawrence Welk” in his family. When I met him he was seventeen and didn't drive, smoke cigarettes, or get high. Within six months of knowing me he was smoking cigarettes and weed and had tried magic mushrooms, but he still wasn't driving. Three months after that, we split up. I don't think it was the not driving that split us up. It was that being with him was too easy. There was no drama. Just like he didn't know how to drive, I didn't know how to do normal. I was addicted to chaos. I knew it was over when I found myself making a late-night booty call to Terry. I felt like a total schmuck, and I didn't want to hurt Mark. I knew it was wrong on every level. And so I immediately broke up with Mark. We both cried. I hated hurting him. We genuinely cared for each other, and to this day he and I are still friends.

We still kill it on the dance floor.

*   *   *

In July 1981, I was eighteen and had just graduated from Crossroads. Unlike most of my peers, who were spending their summer preparing for their futures, I spent mine trying to undo my past. I was still extricating myself emotionally and physically from Terry. I would resist him for a while, then fall back into bed with him. The abuse was over, but I was still obsessed with him. But after two years of this back and forth, the part of me that had believed that he was my soul mate now just wanted its soul back. I knew it was time to be done with it all forever. Moving forward, I was going to take care of myself, be more mature, and hang with a fresh group of friends, so I decided one night to hang out with Griffin O'Neal and Leif Garrett.

Griffin, Tatum's brother and Ryan's son, and Leif, the
Tiger Beat
pop star who only a few years earlier had been the heartthrob of every thirteen-year-old girl in America (“I was made for dancing/All, all, all, night long…”), were what I would call part of the Beverly Hills High crowd. They were somewhat outside my incestuous Crossroads group of friends, so to me it was like a new beginning, and a move toward a healthier life.

I have no idea how I first ended up hanging with these two guys by myself, but I'd guess that we had partied together with a bunch of people the night before, and in the morning the three of us had nowhere to go and nothing to do, so we probably decided to keep the party going.

What I do remember about how the day started is being in Leif's 730i Beemer going east on Sunset, following Griffin in his little blue-and-white MINI Cooper. There had been a rare rain shower that morning, and the road was slick with water and oil. At the light at Roscomare at Bel-Air, Griffin rolled down his window and shouted, “Watch this!” The light turned green, and we followed Griffin off the line as we approached the big, wide turn at UCLA. As we made our way around the bank, Griffin, who was about three car lengths ahead of us, pulled his emergency brake and began a slow, balletlike spin around the corner. I watched in horror, disbelief, and awe as he spun around in that little car, somehow not hitting anything, but scaring the shit out of everyone near him. Leif and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. I couldn't help laughing and somewhat admiring Griffin and his insanity. He was poetic chaos in motion.

So much for trying to take care of myself and being more mature.

At least I wasn't in Griffin's car. I had learned enough by this point not to be in the car with the crazy guy. I was safe in Leif's car. Then Leif casually mentioned that a few years before, while high, he had a horrible accident that had left his best friend paralyzed. He told me he'd grown from that experience and that he was much more careful now about driving and getting high. I was relieved to hear this, since just that morning we all had decided to be sensible and not do ludes—just a few bong hits—before hitting the road.

Leif, Griffin, and I ended up at an arcade in Westwood. Day turned to night, and around seven Terry showed up. Griffin and Leif were also friends with Terry, so I figured that one of them must have told him that we were there. They didn't know our secret history. We all hung out playing Asteroids, Missile Command, and Pac-Man. As time passed, I felt that pull between Terry and me awaken. God, it was crazy. It had a mind of its own. It was as powerful as the gravitational pull of the sun. I suddenly found myself needing him, wanting him, and then, thankfully, I remembered the hell that he'd put me through. I knew that I had to figure out a way to cut the cord, finally to sever it once and for all: I had to sleep with Leif Garrett. It had to happen. I was going to break the gravitational pull of Terry by sleeping with Leif.

In that moment it felt like time stood still and the universe aligned itself with me in my overall purpose to break away from Terry and grow up. It was destiny. In that moment I had turned the corner from being a girl who looked for men to define her, to becoming a young woman wanting to put a notch in her bedpost.

Once we got bored with the arcade, Griffin suggested that we go out to his house in Malibu. Read: Ryan and Farrah's house in Malibu. Perfect. Terry said he had to go home. Double perfect!

I made bedroom eyes at Leif and said what a great idea that was. Leif got the message loud and clear—men are so easy. Even better, Terry got the message, too. Griffin, Leif, and I settled into Leif's Beemer for the ride out to Malibu. Griffin suggested we stop at his dealer's house to pick up some blow on the way. There I was, queen of my world. I was riding on a wave of destiny. Thinking,
I am woman, hear me roar
. As we wound our way on Sunset through the Palisades, I popped in the new Steely Dan tape, and the song “Babylon Sisters” became our soundtrack. Donald Fagen sang about driving west on Sunset and how the evening would be no one-night stand but a “real occasion.” I thought,
Yes, Mr. Fagen. You are right. Yes, indeed
.

We eventually made it to “the Boo” (Malibu). Ryan and Farrah were out of town somewhere, so we had full access to everything. I walked in and saw the wall of Farrah I had heard so much about. It was a thirty-foot wall covered with pictures of Farrah in every imaginable size. I was in awe, and I knew that this was indeed a huge moment for me.