High On Arrival (21 page)

23

The Mamas & the Papas had several gigs in Hawaii, and Dad and I had adjoining rooms, but I don’t think I went to my own room the whole time. Dad had brought tons of pills and I found us some coke. We were lying in bed, in a stupor, when Dad said, “We could just run away to a country where no one would look down on us. There are countries where this is an accepted practice. Maybe Fiji.” Then he said, “We can take Bijou and Tam and Shane and raise them as our children.” My father was completely delusional. He was fantasizing about living with me, as husband and wife, and raising my siblings, his children, and my son, his grandchild, as our children.

The moment he tried to make it romantic, I had a visceral reaction.
No,
I thought,
we’re going to hell for this.
What had I wrought? Suddenly I was scared. I wanted to escape. I had to get out. I had a lot longer to be on this planet—I hoped—and finally, in that moment, I saw with certainty that my life was going really, really wrong. But how could I extract myself? He was my boss, my father, my drug supplier, my lifeline, and he was out of his mind. No part of me wanted that husband-wife life with my father, but neither did I have an alternate plan for our relationship or my future. I just played along with it as I went along with everything else.

God, this doesn’t feel like my story. It seems so distant, as if it happened to another person in another life. I haven’t broken from reality, but it’s almost impossible to reconcile the person I was with the person I am. Sometimes I think that having lived the life I lived, I should be in paper slippers and a johnny coat, shuffling around a psych ward. I understand why my siblings have turned to humor, meditation, family, and recovery, why my son never thought of John as his grandfather. We all look for ways to survive. At one point Bijou, who like her parents is a singer, thought of calling her first album “Raised by Wolves.” And she was right. It was like being reared by a beast. A gorilla. A narcissist, a Svengali, a megalomaniac. A charming, endearing rogue.

In 1990, soon after the Hawaii gig, Mick joined a band based in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and he, Shane, and I moved to a beautiful old house with a hundred-year-old attached barn. With a little financial assistance from my parents, I was able to get all of my furniture and clothing out of storage in L.A. and ship it east. Here, after four years, were the boxes from the decrepit Crescent Heights apartment—the boxes that Mick had packed up for me when I fled to Albany as a six-months-pregnant cokehead. I spent days going through box after box of smelly, gross old stuff. All my vases and dishes were covered in grime. It took days to get everything clean.

After we’d been in our new home for a while, I came up pregnant.

This couldn’t be happening. It shouldn’t be happening.
Oh God, how could this be?

I called Mick from a pay phone at the mall, where I was shopping. There wasn’t much else to do in the mountains. I told Mick that I was pregnant, leaving him to assume it was his. But things between Mick and me weren’t great, given my ongoing addiction. We barely saw each other, and our focus had become caring for our son. Mick said, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?”

I said, “We can’t have another baby.”

He said, “I agree.” So I called Sue Blue, who was now Dad’s girlfriend. When I told her that I was pregnant, she understood immediately what had to be done. Sue Blue made arrangements for an abortion. She met me at the Champ—our name for a pied-à-terre Dad kept in midtown New York. We went to the doctor and I had the procedure.

I loved Shane with all my heart. I simultaneously mourned the life that could have been and felt certain that it should never be. I was confident in the decision, but also tortured by the outcome, as I still am.

The abortion marked the end of the incest, and afterward the Mamas & the Papas began to unravel, mostly because of how far down Dad and I had slid. We continued to travel worldwide—to Brazil, England, Hong Kong, and so on—but Dad was drinking a lot and getting really fucked up. I’d wash his hair, iron his clothes, and put his makeup on for him. When it was time for the show I’d find him passed out and have to wake him up, drag him to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, and make him pull it together to go onstage. I have no idea how I was able to help him, given my own sorry state.

Living on the road

Gave me a great excuse

For hiding out in hotel rooms

Seclusions self-induced

Forget about the outside world

Just sing and smile and dance

They won’t know that you’re half dead

Or bored and in a trance.

What for me had been the wonder and thrill of performing with the Mamas & the Papas was gone. I was a drugging, singing automaton. As the end neared, the road memories began to blend into a litany—a sordid list of times I used people to get what I wanted, times I tested people’s patience and tolerance, times that were even more painful and humiliating to me than they look on paper. When you’re bottoming out, there is no progression of thoughtfulness and realization. I didn’t think about what I was doing, how it made me feel, or how it affected the people I cared about most. I was doing my best not to feel, not to see the damage, not to live. There is just more and more of the same, until it gives. This is how it gave.

New York. When traveling long distances it became my ritual to go into New York the night before the flight and stay at my dad’s apartment. I’d always score and stay up all night till flight time.

Portugal. I went with the band to Portugal and again had sex with my dad. I only knew because he told me.

Vegas. It was a two-week gig at the Dunes Hotel. I looked up my old drug friends and found out that one of them was using needles. I got him to bring some over to me. During those two weeks I lost about twenty pounds. I hadn’t been that small since before I was pregnant. I was so pleased to be thin again.

Puerto Rico. We finished a gig in San Juan, but instead of going home I stayed with a couple I’d met. The man was a jazz musician. I missed several planes, and the man raped me while his wife slept. When I finally got to the airport with no ticket, I told the check-in employee that my son had suffered a head injury and I had to be on that plane.

Miami. There was a show in Miami where I was too high to get to the venue. I spent days in an apartment with people I didn’t really know.

Atlanta. I never thought I had blackouts during shows until I realized I couldn’t remember the shows we played in Atlanta. We had a show at Chastain Park. Peter Allen,
who wrote “Don’t Cry Out Loud” and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” was opening for us, which was an odd lineup. Chastain Park was always a fun gig—backstage there was limitless wine and vodka, anything you might want. But Dad and I got so drunk and high that people booed us and asked for their money back. After the gig people wrote letters to the promoter, saying it was shameful and horrifying to see a father-daughter act where they were too wasted to talk or perform. It was an embarrassment to Chastain Park. We knew we would never be welcome there again.

Austria. I’ve always had this party trick—I have good leg extension and can kick really high, so I’d kick at people and come just short of their faces. Dad and I were in the hotel bar. I was very drunk, downing grappa and slamming the glass down on the table. I was wearing skinny jeans, a red sweater, and red lizard cowboy boots. I showed my high kick to a German guy at the bar and he said, “I have never seen such a dangerous girl.”

Aunt Rosie’s funeral. Rosie had been diabetic, with Bell’s palsy, for years. She suffered a heart attack. Dad and Bijou were visiting us in Pennsylvania when we heard that Rosie was near death. I hadn’t spoken to her in a while and hadn’t seen her in even longer. We tried to fly to L.A. before she passed away, but for anyone who is that deeply into needles and drugs, getting in a car to go to the airport, in time to make a flight, is a difficult undertaking. Many a time I missed three flights in a row. By the time we made it to L.A., it was too late. Rosie was gone. At first Dad, Bijou, and I were staying together in a two-bedroom suite. Then Genevieve arrived and I moved into a hotel room of my own. I met up with Sugar Bear, our old family friend, who hooked
me up with coke. Then I was back and forth from Hollywood, getting high and making connections.

At the funeral, I looked into the open casket and saw Aunt Rosie, with her midthigh-long hair up in its familiar bun, her blue and white bandana keeping it out of her face. But she had shaken off her mortal coil. That wasn’t Rosie. She was gone, and with her went the glue that held the family together. Rosie had been there when Jeffrey and I were parentless and rootless. She was there for me every day on the set of
One Day at a Time.
She was strong when Patty died. In her later years, Rosie had moved to Venice Beach. Her small apartment on Pacific became a haven for local neglected kids. Every day she made big pots of soup or stew and the ten- and eleven-year-olds whose parents were beach bums or Venice crazies would come to eat and to feel Rosie’s force of love. She did her best to save them—and me.

Rosie’s death, every loss hit me so hard. I couldn’t handle grief. I went on a binge that began with shooting up in the bathroom at the funeral home. My brother Tam, now twenty years old, climbed through the bathroom window to get me out. He’d seen far worse.

Greece. Rosie died in October 1991. I went to Greece with the Mamas & the Papas to play a New Year’s Eve concert. It was a lost week for me. I ended up with a weird Greek flight attendant guy and other strange people, trying to find drugs.

Home to Pennsylvania. On the road my empty, shattered life was hidden behind the structure and habit of the tour. But when I came home with syringes in my purse, it was clear what had become of me. Mick was on tour, and it was my turn to care for Shane. I’d come
to the point in my addiction where at night I’d make a breakfast tray for Shane with juice, cereal, and a pitcher of milk. I’d cover it with Saran Wrap and put it at the foot of his bed so in the morning I wouldn’t have to get up and take care of my kid.

New York. Then I ran dry. I couldn’t get needles so I was smoking base. I sat on the bedroom floor, scraping my pipes, hoping to collect residue, but when I gave up on that, the next logical move was to go to the city to score. Shane was at school and Mick was on the road. I called the babysitter and arranged for her to pick up Shane at school. I told her I’d be gone for a couple hours at most. I left all the paraphernalia out on the floor and took a limo to a druggie hangout in New York. I fully intended to be back home in several hours, but I stayed in New York all night smoking coke like a crazed fool. I didn’t go home and didn’t pick up the phone. When I finally called home the next afternoon, Mick answered. The sitter had tracked him down wherever he was on tour and he had rushed home to relieve her. Nobody had any idea where I was. Mick was understandably panicked and furious. I’d really done it this time.

Home again. Mick said that if I was to come home at all, I would have to live by his rules, and that meant no drugs. He said those words, and I spun back in time. I was Julie Cooper again, telling her mother she would only come home if she could live on her own terms. I was Rosie’s niece Laura, promising to make curfew but going out again night after night. I was Laura, the twelve-year-old whose father told her to be sure to sleep at home at least once a week. Mick had the wrong girl. I was not somebody who lived by anyone else’s rules. I never had, and I didn’t see why I should. I called my father, the only person whom I knew would back me up. I told him Mick was trying to control me, that he wouldn’t let me get high. The solution Dad proposed was exactly what he would have done. In fact, he had done it years earlier with Tam. He said, “Take Shane and get out of there.”

I didn’t always jump off the buildings Dad presented. Instead, I took a bus home. I hadn’t agreed to Mick’s edict, but there was no way he was going to keep me away from my kid. Mick and Shane came to the bus station to pick me up. Just before they arrived, I was in the port-a-san doing a hit of base. I got in the car and Mick just glared at me. When we got home I took the car out and drove around for a couple of hours so I could keep smoking. When I got home Mick was driving up in a friend’s truck. He’d been out looking for me.

A huge fight ensued. Mick told me I was nothing but a disgusting drug addict. He said, “You’re just like your father. Your son shouldn’t be put through this. It’s not fair to him and it’s not fair to me.” Mick, the most patient man alive, was like a lion protecting his cub. He was very, very angry and he said some really hurtful things. True or not, they hurt like crap.

I was on defense, saying, “You’re so high and mighty. You’re not perfect either. A couple years ago you were doing the same thing.” But he hadn’t been. Not on the same scale.

I’m sure Mick also said, “You need help; you can’t keep living like this; you’re going to die.” He was scared. He loved me. Shane was our child. They needed me. He said all that stuff, the stuff that addicts learn to ignore.