Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (20 page)

 

The tutor was never mentioned again. Unless Scott or one of the roadies was going to surprise me by pulling out some high school textbooks, there was no evidence of an attempt to keep any of us up-to-date with our education. At least, not the kind of education that you get in school!

 

“The Runaways” was not just a name to Kim Fowley. It was a concept. He wanted us all to act out. He wanted bad girls. Our families had signed us away to him, dazzled by promises of world tours, of fame and fortune, and now Kim was furiously making sure that we lived up to our bad-girl image. As the tour wound on, I’d begin wonder if it wasn’t for the best that my mom was away in Indonesia.

 

As we got closer to Cleveland and the empty feeling continued to preoccupy me, Joan noticed the look on my face and turned away from the portable TV to come over and speak to me. Just before the tour she’d dyed her hair jet black with a hue of blue in it. It looked amazing, but I was still getting used to seeing her like that. “Hey, Cherie,” she said, sitting next to me and nodding out of the window. “Almost there. Aren’t you excited? Your first time in Cleveland!”

 

I started to laugh.

 

“I mean—you must have been excited about this, too, right? I know it’s a dream come true for me . . .”

 

And just like that, Joan had taken me out of my negative thoughts and I was smiling again. I looked at her and thought, “If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know if I could take this.” Though I didn’t say it, I think she sensed how I felt.

 

“Look,” Joan said. “I hate being away from home, too. And being stuck in this bus is as boring as hell. But the concerts are gonna be worth it! And it’s only for a month . . .”

 

“Yeah.” I laughed. “Not if Kim has his way!”

 

Kim was always hustling to get us more shows. His attitude was that we should be playing every city, town, and rest stop in the nation. His latest news was that we were going to be opening up for a San Francisco band called the Tubes, who just had a radio hit with a song called “White Punks on Dope.” I knew that if it were left up to Kim, this tour wouldn’t end until it was time to record our second album. The novelty factor was really helping him find us places to play. Venues were booking us without ever hearing our music: the idea of five tough teenage girls playing balls-out rock music was something totally unheard of. All of the press out of California talked about the crazed reaction we got from our audiences. As much as I wanted the Runaways to succeed, I couldn’t help but feel more and more anxious as this thing started to snowball.

 

After I had gotten over my homesickness, there was the pressure. At first nobody had any expectations—the tour was an exciting novelty. But as it went on, we were expected to be stars—act like stars, perform like stars, all of the time. It was easy in the beginning when I could just pretend to be David Bowie, and fronting the band was basically an extension of dressing up and miming along to my favorite records in my bedroom mirror: if I screwed up, it didn’t matter because it was all make-believe. Now it was for real, and when I stepped out onstage, everybody was watching: especially Kim. And just like in the studio, Kim did not tolerate screwups. If I flubbed a note, he’d scream, and yell, and tell me that I was a useless piece of dog shit. All of that coupled with the fact that I barely knew the girls in the band and I still felt kind of awkward around them . . . it was difficult. The idea of fronting a rock band seemed so easy, so much fun, but in reality it was very difficult. The pressure was scary, and the workload was already intense.

 

“I’m telling you, Cherie,” Joan was saying to me. “Once we start playing these big gigs . . . man, we’re NEVER going to want to stop! The big halls will be so different from those little clubs we play back home. Just imagine it! There’s going to be thousands of people. Thousands! And they’ll be screaming for us! The stage is gonna be the size of a fucking tennis court! Now THAT’S rock and roll!”

 

When I closed my eyes and tried to picture it, I asked, “You really think it’s gonna be that way? You really think we can be that hot?”

 

“Hey, babe,” Joan said, ruffling my hair, “I know we can! We’re gonna be like Benny and the Jets!”

 

The next night, the Celebrity Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio, was sold out. A capacity crowd was squeezed into the hall, and another five hundred were turned away at the door. We were the headline act, which meant that all of those people showed up to see us. Backstage, everybody was pumped, but I was sure I wasn’t the only one who was feeling anxiety about the upcoming performance.

 

“Five minutes, girls!” someone yelled through the dressing-room door. We were blasting Suzi Quatro’s album, and whenever a track faded out, we could hear the stomping, clapping, and cheering of the impatient crowd. I bit my lip, and checked one last time that my black fishnet stockings were pulled up all the way, and secured tightly to my white satin corset. I checked myself in the mirror, which was covered in Magic Marker graffiti left by all of the other bands that had passed through. I didn’t feel like a sixteen-year-old girl anymore. The lyrics to “Cherry Bomb” had pretty much become autobiographical at this point: I was not in school; I wasn’t at home. I had become the girl that your mom warned you about. I smiled a little as I thought this. Suddenly Scott Anderson was behind me. He put a hand on my bare shoulder and put his mouth close to my ear.“You look so fucking hot,” he whispered, before straightening up and continuing with whatever it was that he was supposed to be doing. I looked around, but none of the other girls had noticed. They were all busy: Sandy bouncing her drumstick against her legs and nodding along to the music, Joan fixing her makeup with the guitar slung casually over her shoulder, Lita tuning her guitar. True to form, Jackie was off in the corner reading a fucking book.

 

I put on my black jumpsuit, covering the corset. Right before “Cherry Bomb,” I was supposed to strip it off; it was easier that way. Bad girls: that’s what they expected and that’s what they were gonna get.

 

I thought about the order of the songs one last time. We had rehearsed the set so many times, I felt like I’d been born knowing it. There was no uncertainty. Every move, every gesture, had been practiced and practiced until it became second nature. A little bit of Bowie, a little bit of Cherie. I was my own creation now: the Cherie-thing that first came alive back in junior high school was fully grown now. I was complete.

 

My hands were cold. I thought about that first audition. I felt the same way—like a scared little kid. I could hear thirteen hundred fans chanting our names, I was surrounded by the band, by the road crew, but that dark pit was still inside of me. That emptiness.

 

A fat roadie called Ralph came over to me. He was wearing a filthy Playboy T-shirt and chewing a wad of tobacco. “Mellow out!” He grinned, exposing brown teeth and giving me a friendly nudge. “It’s only fuckin’ Cleveland!” Then he cackled a dirty laugh and walked out toward the stage. The truth was that the idea of being anywhere but Los Angeles was enough to set my heart racing. Up until earlier this week, I had never been more than one hundred miles outside of L.A. in my life.

 

Suddenly the crowd’s cheers became a roar, like a tidal wave about to crash. The lights must have gone down. The door burst open, and we all gave each other one last look before Joan led the way through the darkness to the stage. We stood there for a moment, shrouded by darkness. When the lights came up, I was in another world.

 

I could see dozens of guys wrestling with the security guards, all trying to push, punch, or otherwise force their way to the front so they could be close to us. Some people were holding up our posters, or copies of our LP. They screamed our names, and reached their hands out toward us as Sandy counted off the first song. . .

 

All at once the stuff Joan had been saying to me made perfect sense. With the spotlights on me, and the makeup already beginning to melt down my face . . . with the earsplitting roar of the crowd and the scream of Joan and Lita’s electric guitars . . . With the pounding of Sandy’s thunderous, heavy beat, the throbbing of Jackie’s bass . . . with all of this going on around me—the frenzied mob in front and the band all around me—I could understand everything that she said. “Benny and the Jets”—idols of teenagers all around the world—that was US!

 

I realized that the crater inside of me was instantly gone. I realized that the screams of the crowd had filled that hole inside of me in a heartbeat. I didn’t need my mother! I didn’t need any of that shit! I had rock-and-roll authority, just like Kim demanded, just like my audience demanded. I realized that yes, YES! This IS what I wanted! This was the answer to all of my problems. The crowd, and the music, and the smell of burning pot rising up from the audience in great waves—this was my life! This was my family!

 

I used to want to take what everybody hated and shove it right back into their faces. Not anymore! Now I wanted to give the fans what they wanted. If they wanted their sexy little Cherry Bomb, then that’s exactly what they’d get. I concentrated on the primal momentum of the music. In an instant all of my fears, all of my anxieties, were gone. All that was real in the universe was the driving beat of Sandy’s drums, the glorious wailing of Lita’s guitar. Song by song, we fucking destroyed them. I knew that some of these people came here to gawk, to see if we really could play our instruments like on the record. I wanted to give the doubters the most insane, intense rock-and-roll experience of their lives. I wanted to touch them, the way that David Bowie touched me all those years ago on the Diamond Dogs Tour. I wanted to change their lives! I wanted to alter them—transport them! I realized that we were their fantasy. We wanted to be their fantasy. . .

 

As Joan sang “You Drive Me Wild,” I ran offstage and stripped off my jumpsuit. I ran my hands through my hair, my body literally vibrating with the adrenaline pumping through it. I stood by the curtain, watching the performance go on. I waited for the downbeat that announced the start of “Cherry Bomb,” and then I appeared—strutting across the stage, and teasing the boys in the front row who were all beating the shit out of each other for the chance to edge close enough to the front to be in touching distance of me. I wrapped the microphone cord around my body like a snake, and I wailed the opening line of the song . . .

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 12

 

Kim Fowley’s Sex Education Class

 

 

 

 

It was New Year’s Eve 1975, and we were in our roadie’s VW bus, rumbling toward an anonymous motel in Orange County. Tonight we were due to open for the Tubes. Just over a month before, I turned sixteen years old. Somewhere out there in the California heat, I knew that people were getting ready to celebrate at midnight, but for me and everyone else in the van, today was just more miles of asphalt zooming past with monotonous regularity as we were shifted from the venue to the motel and then back again. What nobody tells you about being in a band is how fucking monotonous it can get between shows. Already I had seen—and smelled—enough of Stinky’s van to last me several lifetimes.

 

I felt lousy. The van didn’t have air-conditioning, and the passenger window was jammed, so only a sliver of fresh air was making it inside. With me and my friend Rick shoved in the back with all of Stinky’s junk, it felt like it was a hundred degrees at least. To top it off, there was Stinky’s body odor, which permeated the entire place like mustard gas. The radio was on, and our driver was tapping the steering wheel, singing along to Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line.” The steady rocking of the van started to make me feel nauseous.

 

“Are we almost there?” I groaned.“Yeah. Like, five miles to go . . .” Stinky said, before returning to his drumming. Ugh! Five miles. I concentrated on breathing through my mouth. Rick, sensing my discomfort, pulled me closer, giving me a hug.

 

Rick was a friend of mine from the Sugar Shack scene who was going to join the band on stage tonight. We all called him Rick Bowie, because he had based his entire look on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust period. He had been helping out backstage for a while, sometimes assisting me with the costume changes, but tonight he was going to get up onstage with us and dance, doing his whole Bowie bit. The show was at the Golden West Ballroom, a nice big local club. Opening for the Tubes was always a highlight for us: we liked the guys in the band a lot, and Kenny Ortega, our choreographer, worked with them as well, and was a part of their stage show. Playing shows with our friends was always a good time.

 

Sandy, Kim, and Scott were waiting for us at the motel, which we were using as a dressing room. Lita was supposedly driving to the sound check herself, and I supposed that maybe Jackie would be coming with her. Up until the stink in the van started blowing my groove, I had been feeling really good about the upcoming show.

 

“Are you okay?” Rick asked. “You look pale . . .”

 

“Yeah,” I croaked. “I’m just a little carsick . . .” I signaled by pointing to Stinky and holding my nose. We started giggling like schoolchildren, which, I suppose, we actually were.

 

After what seemed like an hour, Stinky pulled the van into a motel parking lot and announced that we’d arrived. We piled out of the van, and I started taking huge gulps of fresh air. Thankfully, the nausea started passing, and I took a look around me. It was still early afternoon, and the bright sun was unforgiving. True to my expectations, the motel was a total dump.