Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (24 page)

My darling mom offered us her one spare room, but since Michael and I had thirty days to somehow find our own pad, we actually prayed together for a miracle. That very same week Donnie went up for a part in a TV pilot about two hip vice cops—one black and one white—to shoot almost immediately in Florida. He had just completed a movie called
Cease Fire
about a damaged Vietnam vet, so he seemed primed as the next member of the Face Pack to “go places.” Donnie was about to go someplace all right, straight to Miami, without looking back, which left enough room at their small house in Santa Monica for the five of us: Michael, Nick, Nellie, Harry, and I to crash until we could get another place of our own. Harry’s mean old mama, Blanche, had disappeared into the wilds of wonderland and was sorely missed. Donnie had gotten the adorable little pad eight years earlier with his best friend, Sean Walsh (remember
Arizonaslim?)
. They had taken it over from a den of angel-dust dealers and had been there ever since.

The house was clogged. Not only was Patti there with Jesse and their Irish setter, Jones, she also had a nanny who resided in Jesse’s room, and the closets were already stuffed to the hinges with all of Donnie’s things. We’d brought only our barest survival items, but they still got underfoot, and Michael withdrew into gloom, spending most of his time away. Nicky felt totally threatened without a space to call his own and treated Jesse—who had an entire room filled with kid-crap, though he was only two years old—with hideous disdain.
After each cantankerous outburst I desperately devised schemes to make Nicky happy—keeping him out of the cramped house, at the local mall or library right up until bedtime—instead of giving him what he needed and cried out for: discipline. I wanted to avoid wreaking hellish havoc on the household, so didn’t punish him, even though Patti encouraged it. The only thing she and I argued about was how to raise a kid. But my codependency was at full throttle: If you kiss everybody’s ass enough, all will be well!

Then a fat bully started to torture Nick at his new school, Roosevelt, yanking him unseen into hallways and threatening him with all sorts of bullshit, sometimes pinching and poking to crank up the fear level. Nick refused to go to school, actually making himself sick to avoid the monster. I saw the principal, had meetings with the teacher, tried to reach the fat kid’s parents, all to no avail. After seeing Nick curled miserably on the couch and listening to me moan, Patti decided to take action. Surprise, surprise. We waited at the school gate one afternoon, followed the kid home, and after a few minutes rang the doorbell. The poor slob lived with his ailing, decrepit grandma who could hardly hear in an overstuffed, hot apartment. The big troubled kid vehemently denied any wrongdoing and got right in Patti’s face, cursing and spitting at her for daring to suggest that he had bullied Nick. I grimaced, waiting. Nobody, not even a blubbery eleven-year-old does that to Patti. She grabbed him by the neck of his shirt, actually lifting him off the ground, and told him to lay off or
else
. And he did. However, the damage had been done to my sensitive child, who seemed to have become even more withdrawn because of the experience, more closed in, closed off, and unhappy, expecting to be bombarded from all sides by ass-wipes who wanted to hurt him. School, which had been uneasily tolerable, had now become the enemy. He even dropped out of the school orchestra, where he was getting past the screech phase on the violin.

Nothing was working for him. He couldn’t understand unfairness; he needed his Libra scales to stay perfectly balanced, or else. We found another soothing therapist, whom Nick wrapped around his pinkie, and the search was on for the perfect private school. After several aggravating gab fests with headmaster/mistress hierarchy, Nick landed up on Mullholland Drive in an elite, expensive yuppified school called Westland. On top of the six-thousand-a-year tuition (which we had to take out a loan for) Michael and I had to lend a hand twice a month helping out in various capacities. My first duty was to trim a mammoth, smelly tree full of contorted pods, despite
the fact that I had never held a pair of clippers in my life. Nick tried tentatively to fit into the school program but battled with his perfectionism, especially in the many adorable group projects, which the concerned, trying-but-not-quite-hip teachers at Westland seemed so fond of.

We were seriously beholden to Patti, but she never, ever rubbed it in. In fact, our crammed-up circumstances strengthened our friendship, as we girl-talked incessantly over mug upon mug of spicy tea loaded with caffeine. While she wailed about cheating rumors that were drifting back from Miami, I confided my discovery of an insidious VD-type infection that had been brewing within me. After my visit to the doctor, I roamed the house with a blustering gray cloud over my head, trying to knock out the adulterous fact that Michael had once again been on the loose with a loose woman. This time it turned out to be a loose girl, but who’s counting? After vehemently denying any philandering until presented with my telltale bottle of medicine, he grudgingly confessed to flinging it up with a seventeen-year-old named Heather in Vermont. Heather. Such a yuppie-puppy name. After long weekends spent in the lush Vermont greenery, he returned with talk about the grandeur of the trees and purple mountains’ majesty, when all the while he had his face buried in a very different kind of bush. It hurt so bad. After I raged, wept, and imploded, he swore to lay off the yuppie pup, but my skin got thicker by the day, like the bark on all those grand trees in the state of Vermont.
Whatever happened to “forsaking all others”?
my inner voice whispered. Any respect Michael might have once had for me had obviously been buried deep like one of Nellie’s bones, and she always forgot where she dug the damn hole.

Speaking of the fabulous Nellie, the first time Donnie came back for a few days off she took a dump right in front of him as he prepared to say grace over Sunday dinner. I cringed and bowed my head even further down while Don pointed his masterful finger and she was relegated to the backyard for the remainder of his visit. Even the poor mutt was feeling the impending magnitude of Sonny Crockett.

Sadly Heather wasn’t Michael’s only conquest. As Patti and I walked home from the market one winter evening, we saw Michael entranced on the phone through the picture window, but when we walked in, he was busily changing the channels on TV. “Who was
that, honey?” I asked sweetly. “Oh, Steve Jones,” he answered nonchalantly. Butter wouldn’t have melted in his pants. Stevie had recently come back into our lives, clean and lean, sober as a judge, apologetic for his stoned-out transgressions, but still, something about the virtuous look on my husband’s face made me look at the clock, remember the date and time, and carve it into my subconscious until the phone bill came. Luckily (or unluckily?), since we were out at the beach almost every call was recorded for posterity. Sure enough, the bill told the truth: Stevie’s number was nowhere to be found. After some Patti-assisted digging, I found he had been chatting intensely with the newly sober wife of an aging British rock hero, a girl whom I’d often blabbed with about babies, the glory of henna, and ways to stay beautiful for our men. I thought we had a certain rapport.

This time I attempted a real confrontation. When I blurted out that I knew it wasn’t Stevie that he’d been talking to, a black cloud formed over Michael’s head. “How
dare
you check up on me!!” he fumed, breathing heavily. “She’s a married woman!!” Not “I’m a married man.” Oh no. He went on to chastise me for infringing on his privacy, which made me feel like a mere blip of humanity. I would up apologizing, beseeching, and begging his forgiveness.

Later, of course, I found out that he had indeed been boffing the wife of the former rock legend. I saw the shameless coquette at a party and burned holes through her head like I was wielding a blowtorch. She couldn’t look at me. She fidgeted, suddenly noticing something in the thin air in front of her and stared at it, fascinated—almost cross-eyed, grabbing ahold of her husband’s hand like it was a protective device. I thought of blabbing it all to that poor sot wearing the wedding band, but what good would it have done? I said this over and over to myself, like a litany, while the hubbub swirled around us—trying not to feel so hard-core ferocious and vindictive. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. Forgive me for seeing blood-red, and let me live in the whitest of light. Please, please, please,
please
, to quote the mighty James Brown.

Eventually I made up with Michael, but acidlike erosion had flattened my heart and made wretched little etchings in it. I know how artistic that must sound, but it was more like when Van Gogh cut off his ear and sent it to Heather—I mean to a hooker. Simon & Schuster turned down my manuscript, Random House did the same. We didn’t even hear from William Morrow. My agent, Ron, had taken quite a beating and even though he believed in the idea had
to move on, telling me he had done all he could and not to lose heart. Since it was flat and covered in acid etchings, I hardly noticed.

It was a truly dismal time for me, and due to a severe lack in my romance reality I fantasized about Bruce Springsteen, rattling on in my diary like I had once done over Dion and Paul McCartney:

After seeing Bruce live, I’ve been in ecstasy. Many years have passed since I felt that high and happy. Nothing exists but Bruce, and you never want it to end. He’s so happy up there, which makes the audience so happy and united! Not to mention the guy’s ass! Many fantasies occurring
—
but he’ll be gone in a few days, and my brain will clear out. I’m finding that FAN part of me never dies
—
my groupie spirit lingers. Very few people bring it out in me anymore, but
what
an exception this is! My palms get itchy and I start imagining getting my sweaty hands on him. I’ll bet my “visualization” helped me get near those rock guys I went nuts for in the old days
.

It was all quite sad really, but I certainly loved the music. It saved my grace. Music still gets right under my skin and becomes one with my bloodstream. If I find myself feeling melancholy, in a tizzy, or hot under the collar, I can snap straight back into my god-self by listening to Dwight Yoakam, Etta James, or Sam Cooke, the Kinks or Merle Haggard, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, Elvis, Prince; reeling in that inspiration, mainlining it like a drug that can never, ever hurt me.

For awhile it seemed that music would save us all. The one ray of glory during this time came from Michael’s difficult writing stint with Holly Knight. A song they wrote called “Obsession” was recorded by a new band, Animotion, and had climbed into the
Billboard
Top Ten. But it took a while for the dollars to trickle down, and, as always, we were pressed for cash. So I got yet another bizarre job with a local screenwriter gal in Brentwood, as her sort of “personal assistant.” Her name was Susan Berman, and her dad had been the head of the Jewish mafia in Las Vegas during the fifties. She wrote a book about her unusual childhood called
Easy Street
, so when she read my two chapters and encouraged me to continue, I got a momentary creative buzz. If she can do it, I can do it! Yeah! Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, I was her dutiful servant, buying all her gifts at Saks
Fifth Avenue, printing out stacks of screen pages, having her cutesie poodle trimmed just so, purchasing its food—the expensive lo-cholesterol kind, of course—picking up fancy-schmancy meals at restaurants that Frank Sinatra had probably haunted in his slay-day and delivering them hot while Susan slaved over the typewriter. She was fascinating and infuriating, with a brain inside her head that oozed out of her skullcap, it was so damn large. I’ve always worried about people with IQs that topple the charts; I consider anything over 120 a tragic badge of honor to be dealt with tiptoe carefully. Handled with care. Fleece-lined kid gloves perhaps?

Susan canned me one day after I inadvertently lost her eccentric fiancé’s very important black leather jacket. I had taken it to a seemingly reputable tailor’s shop in Brentwood to be mended, but when I went to retrieve the wicked heirloom, the Yugoslavian weirdo owner told me that it had already been picked up by someone else and I owed him one hundred and twenty-five American dollars. I sputtered, stammered, and threatened to sue. The enraged Yugoslav cursed loudly and had me forcibly removed from his piddling little shop while overdressed onlookers cluck-clucked at the gall of the deranged chick who refused to pay the bill. I knew what the jacket meant to Susan, so when she bawled and fired me, I wasn’t surprised. She said the jacket had been
priceless
and that the whole thing had been a
plot
, a
scam
, perpetrated by the evil foreigner, who probably sold the biker item for a thousand dollars. Somehow we remained friends, and when her fiancé-turned-husband killed himself a couple years later, I thought about his important black leather treasure that had been such a blatant object of thievery, and felt real, real bad.

After we had lived with Patti in Santa Monica for what seemed like forever, sleeping on a fold-out couch in the living room, with Nick snoozing fitfully on a daybed across from us, Donnie came back into town for a screening of his brand-new Florida pilot,
Miami Vice
. The only people in the screening room at Universal were Don and Patti, me and Michael, Donnie’s agents, and a couple of massive bigwigs waiting for the lights to go down. Don was unusually nerve-racked and edgy, but after two hours of watching all those glinting guns and muted pastels chasing down fleeing dealers in Miami, swallowed whole by a supercool rock-and-roll soundtrack, it was blatantly obvious that we would all be spending a whole lot of time on that
other balmy coast. Michael and I were overwhelmed by how good the show was, Don’s agents had pea-green dollar signs in their eyes, and Patti was wistful and dumbfounded all at once. Everything was about to change.