Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (15 page)

Two weeks
—
Here Nicky is, on my bed, squirming, pink, and innocent, his mouth always open like a little bird’s
—
so sweet and soft
—
with a little weenie! I was so surprised he was a boy! I felt so amazing when he came out
—
so slippery and enormous. After he was born, they handed him to me and I hardly knew what to do with him! What a little bundle, he’s so beautiful. We asked Danny G. to be Nick’s godfather, and he said he would be honored
.

Nineteen days
—
still can’t believe I have this baby. Every day he gets more human and wide-eyed. The exquisite specimen is
so
time-consuming
—
a
twenty-four hour appendage
—
completely dependent little rag. Michael is great with him, but he’s
Mom’s
job. I’m a little more mobile now that we have our Wee Kare car seat and Snuggli carrier
—
it’s a constant thing. I can hardly see, I’m so tired
.

Thirty-one days
—
Almost healed up. Little Nicky getting much more receptive and part of the human race. He drives me mad because he falls asleep at the tit and wants to nurse every half hour! He’s a fusser but never cries unless he’s hungry (which seems 4-ever). Melanie took Nicky and me to her astrologer as a birth-present, and the lady said that Nick had already achieved cosmic consciousness, was here on a specific mission and would one day have followers! I don’t want to think about that right now
.

Seven and a half weeks
—
Little precious human asleep in his cradle
—
he raised his head and shoulders today on his tummy, and such an expression of wonderment at his giant feat. He’s turned into a real smiler, it lights up his whole face
—
he even laughs! He loves his grandma and his daddy, and smiles so much for them
—
love him madly!

Nine and a half weeks
—
I’m like a dead dog most of the time. He’s gotten to the frustrated stage where he cries a lot unless he’s being personally amused
—
bounced and walked around. He’s
so
good-looking, when we take him out, old ladies tell us how gorgeous he is. He’s gone up a diaper size and is growing out of his Casper outfits
—
healthy little angel
.

Three months
—
He’s lying in his cradle now, batting rattles, beside himself with concentration. He’s really figuring out his hands, twining them around and staring so intently! He’s taken a shine to the stuffed Cookie Monster and talks to it twenty minutes in a row like he does to Michael. He’s losing his hair, and the fuzz underneath is
white!
Little platinum-haired boy
.

Fourteen weeks
—
He’s developing a personality and always smiles at strangers, so adorable. Mom got him a jack-in-the-box, and he squeals with delight over it. He’s taken up my whole life and he doesn’t care! What a commitment! A lifetime commitment for Mommy. I just found out Gail is pregnant, and Nick will have a little girlfriend in July!

Fifteen weeks
—
We had our birth-class baby reunion last night
—
it was
so
much fun! Of course, Nicky was the prettiest and brightest; even Judy said so. We lined up all the babies for a photo and they were squirming and flailing, except for Nicky who looked calmly right into the lens. Ha, I wonder if he will ever read this and love his mom for writing it, or will he not be close to me. It’s so incredible to be a mom. He comes before
everything—
not a thing can be considered without first thinking of him
.

Five months, three weeks
—
To think I’d be in bed every night before midnight and always have a little baby in my arms. God, I’m too tired to write
.

The pedantic, gushing, age-old ramblings went on and on like Nicky was the first baby ever to splash in the bath or say “ga-ga.” My entire existence was caught up in Pampers, powder, and nursing pads. It was all Mom’s job, a lifetime commitment for Mommy. Nicky Dean came before everything. But where was Daddy?

I started a pattern in those new-mom days, by getting my bossy, brassy but softy-hearted friend Michele Myer, who had recently become Auntie Shelly, to come over and baby-sit if I had to go out, leaving Michael in the back bedroom to his own devil-may-care devices, every second his own. Why didn’t I say, “Michael, I have to go to the gym, here’s Nicky, take care of him.” Why didn’t
he
say, “Oh, let me spend some time with my kid while you’re gone.” It’s always a fifty-fifty deal, remember, and I could have insisted he take care of his own son when I had important stuff to do, but I didn’t. My mom had been my caretaker 100 percent, even though O.C. was around most of the time. She doled out the punishment and the praise, taking on the entire burden of parenthood. It’s as if she didn’t want to bother him with all the constant, mundane, unglamorous facts of sticky kid life. From very early on I didn’t bother Michael either, and then it became too late.

Nicky helped to bring us closer, although our sex life suffered because I was always desperately scribbling on the sleep paper, adding up the precious hours of shut-eye I managed to get each night. Even when Michael and I tried to grab a few moments of long, hot sin, it often turned out to be brief and lukewarm but still all-important because I needed to feel beloved, cherished, and desirable to him—above all, desirable. My tummy, which had been hereditarily round to start with, had become seriously round, and I scraped together the priceless time three mornings a week to strap myself to a bunch of newfangled machines in order to tighten up the flubby waistline and dingle-dangle thighs.

I had put on thirty-nine pounds altogether and still had ten to lose. Kim Lee, an Oriental browbeating, death-to-blubber exercise master whipped eleven inches off me in three months, and I vowed to speed up the tightening process after I finished nursing and could give up the glory of dairy products. I had sorrowful mixed feelings about ending those serene, rocking-chair moments of connected closeness with Nicky latched onto me like he was still attached to my body, but he had already taken to the bottle, and it was time for me to get
back into shape and back into acting class. I knew my titties would need strapping down tight so the milk would dry up and go away. Right after the last supper I wrapped them round and round with Ace bandages and waited for the pissed-off milk ducts to accept that it was all over. I expected a little pain, but the poor things got so hot and bothered they swelled to a pornographic size and got as hot as a Las Vegas sidewalk on the Fourth of July. It felt like I had sacks of boiling, bubbling lava inside me, and
nothing
made the steaming bulges feel any better. I had to take care of my fidgety newcomer and go on with life like I didn’t have single bleeping care. I finally took some male hormone pills, hoping for relief, but all I got were several mongrel hairs growing out of my chin like stray whiskers. Then, after ten days, my misshapen mammaries got cute again, just like nothing had ever happened.

After a rare exquisite afternoon nap a few days later, I wandered out of the bedroom and heard the whir of Tony’s film projector. Wow! Was Michael watching the birth film? I hadn’t felt quite ready to repeat the torrid experience yet, but maybe now I could relive the sweet memory and cherish it. I peeked in the door just in time to see Nick shooting back into my womb. Out again. Over and over. In and out. Tony, with his droll, brittle sense of humor, was running the film backwards—then forwards—backwards. I gasped for air and had to go lie down again. I haven’t watched the film since.

Eventually working out became a large hunk of my life-style. Way before the fitness craze, I flopped around with saggy ladies at the Beverly Hills Health Club before it was called the Sports Connection, doing old-fashioned lifts and sit-ups, which came to be those “feel the burn” killer ass pinchers and gut-grinding crunches. I also became slightly obsessed with the fine lines appearing all over my face, remembering long, hot, baking days at the beach, my bras stuffed to the brim with created cleavage, coated in ray-grabbing grease, broasting my skin to a ravishing burnt sienna to impress those gangly, zit-ridden junior high school boys. After noticing the faint, solar-created etchings around my eyes, I went to Bullocks with my plastic to purchase every product that promised to “improve the appearance of aging skin”; smearing on blobs every morning and night, making sure they sunk way into my beached-out epidermis. Through the years I must have spent a hundred thousand bucks on creams, gels, and fancy emollients for my crabby complexion. It doesn’t seem fair that I went directly from pimples to wrinkles without any kind of break. Now I coat my entire being in SPF 25 before opening a window.

When Auntie Shelly wasn’t available, I dragged Nicky to the gym with me, where he ventilated indignation from within his expandable play cage. And, of course, we regularly visited my lethally damaged daddy, whose time on the planet seemed to be running out.

February 16
—
My daddy is suffering so, and I pray to the Gods that when his time is up he is taken swiftly and easily. Poor Mama, she’s so strong. She had to go look at coffins today. How I stay so damn sane and happy most of the time is hard to figure out. To think that we all come here and live our silly lives and have to die
—
usually with agony. How can we be spared it? Is it all preordained? It’s such a complicated life. Signed, the Questioning Queen of Housewifery
.

The king of our menage was suffering his own bum trips. Detective finally hung up their badges, and Michael got involved with KISS’s bass player, Gene Simmons, who had high and mighty hopes of becoming a mogul. Despite Gene’s grand intentions, it was one of many liaisons that didn’t work out. Record executives were imperious, meetings got canceled or went nowhere real slow. Always angry because he felt like he was constantly compromising himself for some fathead’s dirty dollar, Michael either seethed or went out and got bombed. He would come home from watching a new band like the Clash and mope around for days, feeling his life slide by without being able to harness his brilliance. He signed another management contract with a bright but coked-up bozo who put on rock concerts, and even though this guy gave us money to live on, Michael called himself “a kept prop star,” emanating sorrow like rays of radiation and had dark, loathsome thoughts about his battered integrity.

Finally, in frustration he decided to get back into acting, the craft of his youth. At eight years old he had been on posters all over England as the Nux Bar Kid, hyping the crunchy chocolate bar on telly and radio. In fact, he had done a bunch of kids’ TV shows before landing the part, at sixteen, as the hip guy wearing sunglasses in the sixties movie classic
To Sir with Love
. The first time he heard Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” he said “Now,
that
sounds like fun,” and was inspired to sing, dropping his acting career in favor of nasty, filthy rock and roll. Now that he lived in the show-biz capital of the universe, why not do both? The problem was, How many parts were there for a pole-thin, British, would-be pop star with very long strawberry blond ringlets? On one of his wild rampages, Michael ran into an old English music mate, Jimmy Henderson, formerly the bass
player in the fabulous’ Tucky Buzzard, and found that his wife, Kathy, was casting a new sitcom,
WKRP in Cincinnati
. She had already given Jimmy the part of a guy in a rock band and was looking for the rest of the group. Michael snatched the coveted role of Dog Boy, and as a last favor to his former band mates, brought the rest of Detective in to play Scum of the Earth, a raving British punk band that wreaks havoc on the radio station. Kathy adored Michael’s wacky portrayal of a barking singer and also cast him as a rock star in
The Rockford Files
, which caught the attention of an agent, and so began his second career in America. He was stuck playing rock guys for way too long, but soon made enough dough for the family to take a trip abroad so his eccentric (to put it gently) parents could meet the royal offspring.

We arrived after an eleven-hour flight with a bundled-up fifteen-month-old baby in freezing England, where Michael’s manager had booked us an ancient but elegant hotel smack in the bygone heart of London. Nicky still mixed up the words “hot” and “cold,” so when we set out on a little jaunt to the King’s Road, he kept shouting, “Hot! Hot!” when snowflakes hit his rosy cheeks and reached out into the ice-cold air like he could break off a piece and hold it in his mitten. My precious little boy mesmerized me. Ooh, Ahh, isn’t he smart, isn’t he special, brilliant, adorable! I marveled at Nicky nonstop, like he was the ninth wonder of the stratosphere.

Due to the time change, Nicky’s sleeping pattern was all mixed up, so when Michael went out on the town, I was stuck in the tiny (but elegant) hotel room, chasing after my rampaging toddler at 3
A.M
. I found myself feeling edgy and impatient, and I actually acknowledged that it was unfair that
I
was the one who had to stay in at night while his nibs had the run of London. I acknowledged it to myself, but not to Michael (as usual) and had to be content to dash out for a Cadbury’s Flake while hungover Daddy stayed with napping Nick during the afternoon. But we did get the chance to meet up with old friends, buy some trendoid punk duds on the King’s Road, and even got to club it up one night while Nick stayed with an old chum, Geraldine, who had a couple babies of her own. We hung out with Pete Townshend at a dive called Dingwalls, and although I was held in his thrall along with several other Who admirers, I was surprised to see how combustible he became as he poured it down, knocked it back, sucked it in. Dry and amusing at first, seemingly in high spirits, he gradually started poking fun at himself, then
took jagged stabs at his own jugular. “I haven’t done anything
important”
he raged blindly, “Nothing of any
consequence
what-so-evah!!” I begged to disagree but remained silent for fear of being slugged. He seemed severely disappointed and disgusted with himself for some ungodly reason. It’s got to be a devilish pain in the ass to be a living legend.