Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (23 page)

Mercy had always been intrigued by Mr. Berry, so when he rolled down the road at Disneyland, she was ready for him. "This Cadillac comes creeping along and Chuck gets out and I say, `Oh, man, I've been waiting for you all my life,' and he says, `Well, come on!' So we go into his trailer and I have two things going in my brain at the same time: I really want to go home with Chuck because I want to see what his life's all about, and the second thing is I'm gonna try to make Shuggie Jealous. I had this dueling banjo in my head, and like I said, I was so loaded that I cannot remember what took place in that trailer. I think I went to bed with Chuck because his wife showed up, mad. And he had this fascination with people going number two, so he had me go to the bathroom in this bucket-I do remember that-and he took a photo of me and said, `I have a collection of everybody that I have sex with.' There's a knock at the door and someone says, `You're on, Chuck.' So I get up and I walk out of the trailer with him, and he lets me carry his guitar. I'm thinking, `Oh, man, this is it. This is really it; I am gonna make Shuggie so jealous!' But I look around and there's nobody backstage to witness this."

In spite of the pie-eyed chaos and constant tribulation, months later, when Mercy got pregnant, the only recourse was for her and nineteen-year-old Shuggie to tie the knot. "I'm sorry, but I don't really remember my pregnancy. Here I am, getting fat again, after I got skinny-but I thought I was happy at that point."

During her pregnancy, Mercy's father finally managed to kill himself-sitting at a table in her mother's apartment, dressed up in a suit and tie. Always a fan of celebrities (he kept a snapshot of himself posing with Ann-Margret in his wallet), he addressed his suicide note to a couple of stars of current TV commercials: "I've had a good life here, don't be sad. I want to say goodbye to Rodney Allen Rippey and Morris the Cat."

Mercy did stop taking speed while she was pregnant, and I remember visiting her in the hospital. Originally she was going to call her baby boy "Jinx," but thought better of it and finally settled on "Lucky." But even the precious bundle couldn't change the misery around him. Once Mercy came home to find that Lucky's daddy had hacked off all his divine blond ringlets. "Shuggie had a violent, violent, violent, violent, violent temper. They were giving him antidepressants-he was chemically imbalanced. One time he tried to choke me and his dad came in and hit him. He said, `I've never hit you before in your life, but you cannot choke your wife.'" The raucous marriage lasted three years.

Mercy took Lucky and moved in with her mother in Santa Monica where she continued self-medicating with a vengeance. "It's in my blood, from my father," she sighs. Arriving back in town, Mercy discovered a raw new sound shattering the bighaired complacency. "Anywhere something starts rumbling, I'm there," she insists. "From the hippies on, every decade, I've been there. I started getting into the punk scene. You could feel the energy of something erupting."

Mercy became an integral part of the punk world, went to beautician's school on Hollywood Boulevard, and soon had her bejeweled fingers in ducktails and beehives all over town. "I don't know how I got into hairstyling. I could just take somebody and alter their looks and I loved that." Her specialty was "extreme rockabilly," and she created radical looks for the Rockats and Rockabilly Rebels, and even got her hands in Darby Crash's bristly locks. She got romantically involved with Brendan Mullen, the astute entrepreneur who opened the infamous Masque nightclub in Hollywood. "He invented punk," she spits. "OK?"

It was about this time, when Mercy was skinny, spiky, and punked out that she ran into a certain well-muscled up-andcomer on a neighborhood street near the beach. "This guy picked me up by the belt loops and asked me to come visit him. I only recognized him because he was all over the TV-his first movie had just come out." Mercy turned up at the stranger's home and smoked pot with him and his bodybuilder buddies. "He was telling me all the things he was going to do, how famous he was going to be. He probably even told me he was going to be governor and was already plotting that." After some small talk, Arnold Schwarzenegger grabbed Mercy by the arms. "He pinned me up against the wall and said, `I'd like to know what it's like to go to bed with you.' And I said, `You'll never know.' He was scary to me, even though he's much smaller in person than you think he is."

When her mother got breast cancer and passed away, Mercy's life became even more rough and tumble, and Lucky went to live with her former in-laws, Johnny and Phyllis Otis.

Through her old GTO partner Miss Lucy, Mercy slammed into Love's wild man Arthur Lee, who was trying to help Lucy get into an AIDS clinic. He was in between jail stints and Mercy soon found herself in grubby porno hotels with another of her favorite musicians. "Well, he watched porno. I didn't," she says firmly. "But I've always idolized him. He's such a genius in the studio." They had a brief, crazy affair until they met up with the cops late one night. "Art and I stopped seeing each other when we got pulled over by the police. They almost took him away, until I said, `Do you know who this guy is?' I started singing `My Little Red Book,' and they cut him loose. He took me to Jack in the Box and said, `You know, we've gotta split up,' so we did."

I had been concerned about Mercy's death-defying habits for a long time, but even at her lowest point, she still retained her acerbic good humor, firebrand quotability, and gaudy elan. Somehow her total and utter Mercyness stayed intact.

When she hooked up with a fellow she met on the crack circuit, I knew I was in for more hand-wringing. Leonard was dark eyed and good looking, a former air force vet with a monthly paycheck, which was part of the reason Mercy moved in with him and eventually married him. "We were a lot alike, but I had no idea he was so violent or I would have never dealt with him. One day he just started beating the crap outta me, but by that time I was too far gone. Once you start doing crack, you just dive into it." They smoked Leonard's entire check every month, and pretty soon the rent became an afterthought and they were living on the street, sleeping under the Hollywood freeway. I often found Mercy pushing a shopping cart, prodding through dumpsters for leftovers or something to sell. "Was crack your every waking thought?" I ask. "Waking?" she snickers. "There was never any sleep." It went on for years.

"Yes, it went on and on, and when he bashed my face in I was gonna leave but I couldn't because I was stuck to him financially and I thought he'd change."

It took awhile, but amazingly, Leonard did change. He put crack down and picked up a decent job at a Goodwill store downtown. But Mercy stubbornly kept smoking until the Easter Sunday she couldn't find her pipe. "I had put it out by the garbage cans and couldn't find the damn thing. So I said, `That's it.' Never to pick up again." After a beat Mercy adds, "Well, you gotta hit bottom sometime." She started going to AA meetings and reconnected with her gifted, charming, and tolerant son, Lucky.

I've made certain to stay in touch with my outrageous pal, whatever shape she might be in, and our friendship took an unforeseen shift in 1998 when my sweet mother, Margaret, moved in with me. I took the newly clean and sober Mercy to the hospital to visit with her, and it was evident in their comfortable chitchat that, despite appearances, down deep Mercy and Mama were kindred spirits. Although Mercy worked part-time at Goodwill with Leonard, she came to my house and entertained my mother three days a week, which blessedly gave me time to run errands and write.

Three years later when Mama passed away from a lifetime of puffing Pall Malls and Virginia Slims, Mercy made an eloquent, wry speech at her funeral. She surprised us all by putting a toy gorilla that sang the "Macarena" in Mom's casket to keep her company-because it had cracked them up so many times.

Mercy is now an auction clerk at www.shopgoodwill.com in Los Angeles, listing an array of unique hand-picked items that are snatched up daily by happy bidders. She is eight years sober (yay!), but sadly, Leonard went back to his dismal old habits and they haven't seen each other in over two years. She lived with me for awhile after she found him smoking crack with a hooker, and recently got her own pad in a grandiose, antique building downtown, not too far from Skid Row.

Luckily (it's good she didn't call him jinx!), her son Lucky was blessed with the bluesy Otis bloodline. He played bass with his revered grandfather in The Johnny Otis Show for several years and is an esteemed musician in his own right. Her lanky, hazel-eyed boy is now hosting his grandfather's radio show, showcasing the same music that his mother was devoted to back in juvenile hall.

That Mercy is here to tell this tale is a downright miracle, since her hazardous life has consistently been in jeopardy. The night Janis Joplin OD'd, Mercy was with their dealer. "He was on his way to see Janis and he said, `I want you to try this heroin,' but didn't tell me why-so I did it while he sat by with a shot of coke. I said, `I'm going down too fast,' so he gave me the coke to bring me up, watching everything I did. Later that night, I heard on the radio that Janis had died."

So much of her time was spent high and looking to get high, does Mercy wonder what might have happened if she had made different choices? "Oh, yeah, all the time," she admits freely. "Opportunities just knocked at my door and I sat down and got stupid ... got stupid. But I married Shuggie, who I dreamed I was gonna marry, who I really wanted to marry: that was my main goal in life. And I'm sure it was to produce Lucky. Yeah, sometimes I go back and think, `Why didn't I pursue Al Green instead of Shuggie Otis?' Maybe things would have changed, maybe I would have ended up with Al. But if I had taken any other road, there would be no Lucky, and as much as I've screwed up with him, he's the real reason I'm still on the planet."

After all the ups and lowdowns she has experienced, Ms. Mercy Fontenot is still the most memorable, uncompromising, point-blank woman in any room. Her very presence is a vivid reminder that walls cannot hold your soul. "If I could sing," she tells me finally, "the title of my song would be, `The Blues Ain't Nothin' but a Color, Baby."

Love in Her Eyes and Flowers in Her Hair