High On Arrival (7 page)
Authors: Mackenzie Phillips
I was a recognizable face, out on the town, out of control, too close to danger. I was living an unprotected life, and now there was evidence, beyond a doubt, that I wasn’t safe. But nothing could stand in the way of Dad’s unabashed hedonism. He was driven to pursue pleasure—sex, drugs, cars, rock ’n’ roll— and from the moment the Mamas & the Papas had made him a rich man he’d been hell-bent on living as high and fast as a man could live. He was a world-class partier.
The Mamas & the Papas had broken up after four short years, and Dad was ostensibly working on a play called
Space Cowboy.
Now I see it as a belabored project that was constantly delayed by Dad’s chemical distractions and/or producers who lost interest when they saw how out there he was. But at the time I didn’t concern myself with my father’s productivity. I’d go hang out with the handsome young actors in the play, and when I say handsome, I mean Don Johnson. Literally. It was an older crowd, but those guys thought of me as my dad’s little girl. The Kid. None of them touched me—until they did.
In 1974 Dad hosted a party to welcome home the returning veterans of the Vietnam War, although I’m not sure any of the “boys” were actually in attendance to be welcomed home. Like all of Dad’s parties, this one took place in the courtyard of the pink palace and swept down the majestic stairway that led to the pool area. The weather had a magical quality that Dad seemed to order up for his parties—a temperature that matches your skin so exactly that you feel like you are floating. And most of the guests were, on the free-flowing booze or the trays of joints that were passed like hors d’oeuvres, or the audacious mountains of cocaine that were kept inside only to shelter them from the occasional, potentially disastrous breath of wind. There were musicians, artists, industry people, hippies in chamois and rhinestone belts, hippies in caftans with long hair, a Rolling Stone or two in tailored suits, scruffians—everyone from star-fuckers and hangers-on to rock ’n’ roll royalty.
For this particular party, Dad strapped an ashtray to the head of a dwarf friend of his and called him the Human Ashtray, which is only slightly less offensive when you know that the dwarf called himself Sugar Bear.
Even when Dad wasn’t having a party, 414 St. Pierre Road was a crazy place to be, especially on acid. The dark, empty pool. The ballroom. The waterfall. The poolside arcade. The tropical gardens. The Hollywood Man looming large in the living room. I’d been tripping at home for years, but with my cousins Patty and Nancy, I rediscovered the house’s secrets and surprises. We walked around saying “Oh my!” in amazement.
This decadent hipster nirvana was my world, and I assumed it would go on like that forever. Then one Thursday my dad, Genevieve, and their two-year-old son, Tam, took a trip to New York for the weekend, leaving me and Jeffrey in the care of their friends Marsia and Yipi. They were supposed to be back the following Tuesday. But Tuesday rolled around without any sign of them. A few more days passed. Then a week. Then another week. About a month later Dad bothered to call and let us know that he and Genevieve were in New York trying to make his play
Space Cowboy
happen. Marsia and Yipi didn’t last long. Jeffrey and I were staying out till all hours of the morning, drinking bad wine and taking Tuinals, then calling Marsia to ask her to pick us up. Marsia would trudge out to the driveway only to discover that we’d taken her car. She’d called Dad to complain, and his path-of-least-resistance response was to send tickets to fly her and Yipi to New York.
And so it was that Aunt Rosie—Dad’s sister—moved into the house in Bel Air. From the get-go Aunt Rosie was very strict compared to Dad. She made rules and expected us to stick to them, and at first we did. Kind of. I mean, when we took downers or acid and stumbled all around that amazing house, we weren’t technically breaking our curfew. Though we hid our drug use from Aunt Rosie, we never really thought of drugs as illicit—we just thought Aunt Rosie wasn’t cool or enlightened. My dad’s friends were glamorous, they had money, they did drugs. Everything they did was worth imitating.
Aunt Rosie called Dad and Gen with increasingly aggravated reports: Jeffrey stole the car or broke something yet again. At some point Genevieve said, “Make him a milkshake and put ground glass in it.” Aunt Rosie, who never got Genevieve’s bizarre sense of humor, hung up the phone, stunned. “What is wrong with that woman?” she wailed.
The next time Dad checked in, Aunt Rosie informed him that the landlords were asking about the rent. The tug of obligation must not have appealed to Dad, because after that he stopped calling or even returning calls. As Dad would one day admit, he “sort of forgot about California and the two kids [he] had out there.” Dad, Genevieve, and Tam never came home.
They never came back.
It’s true that as the head of the household, my father didn’t exactly run a tight ship. Bills went unpaid, kids went unfed. But he was still unquestionably the man of the house; he was the center of our family;
he was the center of my world.
He went away for the weekend and then never came back. He stopped communicating. He stopped paying bills. He stopped paying rent on the house. I don’t know how to explain it. Dad had a remarkable lack of responsibility. Michelle would later say that when Dad wasn’t using heavy drugs, he felt duty toward us and enjoyed being with us, but that when he got into heavy drugs everything else became secondary. I’m sure she’s right and it is that simple. If Dad’s behavior was because of the drugs, well, it’s hard to say, since I never knew him free of that influence. Blame drugs or blame Dad—it makes no difference, since as far back as I can remember, drugs shared his body and soul.
When the rent checks stopped coming, the owners of the house were justifiably furious. After some months of nonpayment, they showed up at the house with a report documenting thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the house and its contents. Everything that could be torn, stained, cracked, broken, or hurled in a drug-addled fit across a room, had been. Hoping to recoup some of the back rent and damages, they confiscated most of our stuff, holding hostage in storage many precious and sentimental items, including my diaries and Aunt Rosie’s slides of the family dating back to the mid-1950s. Aunt Rosie didn’t want me to watch the scene when the owners came to go through the house making their claims, so she sent me to my grandma Dini’s house. I came home from school to find the house half empty and in shambles. There followed a period of stress and tension at 414 St. Pierre. The great house had been filled with people and music and bustle and life. Now it was cavernous and scary. It felt like a ghost town.
My father was incommunicado, and without him we couldn’t remotely afford the three-thousand-dollar monthly rent. Finally, after phone calls and demands on the part of the landlords, pleading and postponing on Rosie’s part, and radio silence from my father, they kicked us out.
My father had lived in that house for almost two years. Before that he’d lived at 783 Bel Air Road for six years. He had always been a person who had a home. From that point on Dad was ephemeral. He developed a taste for transience, moving from rented penthouse to hotel to mansion without giving notice, without paying bills, without telling anyone his new number. He’d say, “Pay my bill, pack my shit, and meet me there.” Pay, pack, and follow was what he called it, and that is what he named his final album, recorded with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the seventies, but released after his death. My pay-pack-and-follow father left debt, belongings, family, lovers, and, eventually, thousands of used syringes in his wake.
For Dad the house may have felt like a burden, but Jeffrey and I lived there. For us 414 St. Pierre Road was home, and home was pulled out from under us.
Our whole lives we had known our father as a man who was always late coming and early going. It was in his nature, so his disappearance probably shouldn’t have been the shock that it was. He hadn’t really changed. But his absence also brought to light that in the time since I’d left her, my mother
had
changed. She was no longer the traditional mother who expected her children to be groomed and polite. Nor was she the warm, energetic person to whom I had been close all my life. Feeling trapped in a very difficult marriage, she had worn to a scared, vulnerable thread, doing all she could to hold the patches of her life together.
Maybe her own life was too overwhelming; maybe she felt dethroned by Rosie; maybe she was drinking too much; whatever the reasons, my mother, like my father, also abdicated— though it was against her nature. I had left her house, but now she had disappeared from my life. I missed her, and I resented her dismissal of me, but I boxed that up for later. She wasn’t going to die tomorrow. The world wasn’t going to end. My mother was still right there, a phone call away. I was fourteen. Not speaking to my mother didn’t feel like a big deal. Besides, Rosie fed me, tried to discipline me, wanted to protect me. She attempted to do and be all that my mother had lost and given up.
Thank God for Rosie. Without hesitation my aunt stepped into a parental role that was otherwise empty at that point in my life. Our palace was gone, my parents were MIA, but my home was with my aunt and my cousins. After
American Graffiti
I had started making enough money through acting gigs that I could now afford to rent a place for myself, Aunt Rosie, Nancy, and Patty. We went from a mansion in Bel Air to a funky, modest two-bedroom apartment in the Hollywood Hills that could have fit into my bathroom at 414 St. Pierre. Jeffrey moved back in with my mother and Lenny. The owners of 414 kept our belongings in storage, where they remain to this day, but we moved on. The new place was a relief after the trauma at 414. It felt like we were on an adventure.
Patty, Nancy, and I were the Three Musketeers, devoted to one another. We got our hair cut together—the same long shags for all of us. We dressed in the same clothes—our uniform was denim asymmetrical miniskirts with rhinestone stars or lightning bolts on them from Grills & Yang, halter tops, and platform heels. We all wore the same eye shadow, dramatic swipes of pink, then blue, then more pink. We helped one another apply it, declaring that it looked “like a cloud in the sky!”
I hate to unravel those moments, those amazing times with the cousins I loved dearly and still do. I’d like to leave them as they are in my head, young and blithe. To describe our early days together is to face that they were the beginning of something darker. The shadow of drugs was already over us, even seeping into us, forever changing who we were and what we could be, though we didn’t see it or feel it. Drugs were a friend who would betray us, but hadn’t yet. We loved life. Oh, Patty. She was beautiful, outgoing, and goofy. I loved her dearly.
At night we’d get all dressed up, practicing dance moves, trading clothes, and drinking wine. It took us hours to get ready. We’d wait for Rosie to go to bed, then around ten o’clock we’d creep down the stairs, right past Rosie’s bedroom, and pile into the front seat of a tacky ’57 white pickup truck that belonged to Nancy and Patty’s older brother, my cousin Peter, and hit the clubs.
We’d spill out of the truck on Sunset Boulevard at the Roxy or the Rainbow. Sometimes by the time we arrived we were already fucked up and falling over and they wouldn’t let us in, so we’d cheerfully pile back into the truck and head to another club.
Nancy, Patty, and I attracted a lot of attention. If we were sober enough, the clubs always found a table for the three of us (though the VIP sections weren’t the velvet-rope enclaves they are today). I was still the Kid—men knew I was too young to hit on. But my older cousins were strikingly beautiful. We smoked and chatted and flirted. We choreographed elaborate pantomimes of Chicago songs like “Just You ’N’ Me” and belted them out as we went through our routines. Patty was a brilliant singer, a karaoke star before her time. We were happy and fun, a sparkling trio.
After the clubs closed at two in the morning, everyone hung out in the parking lot to find a party. We became friends with a group of men who lived up on Mulholland Drive in great big houses. We’d leave Over the Rainbow and drive up Mulholland to Rico and Freddy’s house. We called it “Freako and Reddies,” and it was a real scene—pure seventies decadence.
Freddy and Rico were at least fifteen years older than I was—in their thirties. There was always a crowd of people at their pad, and vast quantities of drugs. Patty and I took tons of pills and did lots of coke. I smoked angel dust, the devil’s drug, at that house and could not move for hours. We never had to pay for drugs; we weren’t expected to have sex with the guys.
Our escapades made Aunt Rosie batty. She’d call up wherever I was and say, “Put her in a cab home this minute or I’m sending the police over to have you arrested for statutory rape.” She’d scream on the phone, at her wits’ end. But, for a while anyway, she had less to fear than she realized. Everywhere I went I was the Kid, the mascot, untouchable. It was the crumb of protection that Dad had tossed behind him before he disappeared: he put the word out that if anyone touched me he’d kill them, so nobody made a move on me.
