Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (28 page)

 

At this, we all fell silent. Sandy ran a shaking hand through her hair. Joan started pacing the room. “We have to tell Scott,” Sandy said. “He’ll have to get it out of your case before they find it.”

 

“And how in the hell is he going to do that?” I wailed, curling up in a ball on the floor. I imagined spending the rest of my life in a crappy little English jail cell like this one. A drug smuggler! They can lock you up for life for that!

 

It wasn’t five minutes before the door scraped open again. It was that old bastard Inspector Hadley, the one who started this whole mess. Behind him was Scott Anderson, still carrying that stupid briefcase of his and looking like a whipped dog. They both stepped inside the room and Hadley took a look at us. He fixed me with a nasty stare. “Zip your top up!” he scolded me. Then he muttered, “Bloody shameful!”

 

I crawled into the bottom bunk and pressed my body to the wall, away from the gaze of the detective. I made frantic hand gestures to Scott like I was raising a spoon to my nose. He just smiled at me dumbly. I finally knew that he understood me when I saw the blood drain from his face. He looked totally shaken. Hadley had noticed the look on Scott’s face. When Scott felt Hadley’s eyes on him, he cleared his throat and stammered, “A-a-apparently the luggage has been sent on to Calais already . . .”

 

For a moment I thought that everything would be okay, but then Scott continued.

 

“Inspector Hadley tells me that it needs to be confiscated by Scotland Yard and searched. So that means—”

 

“That means,” interrupted Hadley, “that you ladies will be staying with us tonight, until the luggage is returned to Dover tomorrow morning. Once we have a look, we will decide how to proceed.”

 

I started frantically signaling to Scott again. Suddenly Hadley swooped down to the bottom bunk and put his face close to mine.

 

“Secrets, eh? We’ll have none of that in here, young lady!” He turned, and sent Scott out of the room like a naughty schoolboy.

 

When Scott returned later that evening, it was with the nice guard with gray hair. The guard left us alone. Scott let us know that the luggage was now in Scotland Yard and would be searched in the morning. If I’d thought for a second that he would be coming with good news, I was sorely mistaken. Instead he and Kent had concocted some harebrained scheme to break into the fenced area where the luggage was being held so they could steal the coke.

 

“It’s your coke, Scott!” I whispered urgently. “I can’t go to jail for your coke!” My stomach was in knots.

 

Scott whined, “If we can’t get into the hold, there’s nothing I can do! You just got to hope that they . . . they don’t find it!”

 

“We have to hope, Scott! Because I’m telling the truth if they do!”

 

“How are they not going to find it, Scott?” Joan asked. “All they have to do is open up her makeup case and there it is. They’d have to be blind!”

 

Scott went quiet for a moment, and looked sheepish.

 

“Seriously, Scott—they’re gonna lock me up forever if they find it!”

 

“What do you want me to do, Cherie? It’s out of my hands! If I could do anything, I would.”

 

“Then tell them it’s yours! You gave it to me! You need to tell them that!”

 

Scott gave me a look, and in that instant I knew that he had no intention of doing that. “It’s too late,” he said. “You signed that piece of paper saying that you take responsibility for what’s in your luggage. That’s just the way it is. We gotta hope for the best, that’s all.”

 

Before I could say another word, he went over to the door and knocked loudly, three times. “Guard!”

 

The door opened, and the gray-haired guard let Scott out. I sat on the bunk and burst into tears. That bastard! That weak motherfucker! He was going to let me take the fall for him! The guard gave me a concerned look before closing the door. Once Scott had left the building, the guard returned with cups of tea for all of us. He sat beside me, and watched me crying and sniveling for a while.

 

“What’s wrong, luv?” he asked.

 

I shook my head and cried. I couldn’t tell him.

 

“Come on,” he said, “it can’t be all bad. . . .”

 

I started blubbering to him about how homesick I was, and how badly I missed my family. About how I’d rather be just about anywhere else in the world than stuck in this stupid cell. About how mean the inspector and the other guards were. By the time I was finished, I was sobbing, on the verge of hysterics.

 

“It’s going to be okay,” he said to me. He put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll see.” I just sobbed and shook my head.

 

Not when they find Scott’s cocaine, I thought.

 

Sometime in the early morning hours, I was lying in the bunk listening to Joan and Sandy softly breathing. The cops had left the lights on, so Joan and Sandy had to sleep with their jackets over their faces. God, I wished I could sleep. Instead, I felt more drained, more fearful, as each second ticked by. I thought I could hear mice in the walls, scrit-scratching against the exposed brick. Every time I started to fall asleep, some cry, or bang, or clang would echo throughout the building and I’d jerk awake, paralyzed by fear and paranoia.

 

I had no idea how long we had been in there. There were no windows, just the bright fluorescent bars of light beaming down from the cracked ceiling. It was only when they brought in breakfast that I knew it had to be morning. The nice guard made sure that we had extra food. I couldn’t eat. I was just staring at my cold toast when the door to the cell burst open, and in came Detective Hadley, Kent Smythe, Scott Anderson, and the nice guard. I looked over to Scott for a clue, but he shook his head. He was still in the dark. I looked over to the nice guard, who shot me a friendly smile, as if to say, “Don’t worry.” I looked to Detective Hadley, and felt my blood run cold. He had a mean smile on his thin-lipped mouth, and he positioned himself right in the middle of the cell. I felt beads of cold sweat forming on my forehead and upper lip. Oh God!

 

I looked over to the nice guard again, and he was staring at me with a concerned look on his face. He could see that I was about to faint, vomit, or both. He knew that I was scared. He knew that I was worrying that I would be stuck here for the next twenty or so years. But his face radiated a calm cool, and that sweet smile was never far from his lips. His eyes stayed on me as Inspector Hadley began his speech.

 

“Well,” he said, sounding slightly disappointed, “I personally feel that you girls are on the wrong path. I also feel that you’re hiding something. Especially you . . .” He pointed right at me. “However, as much as I would have liked to have you stay with us for a while longer . . . it seems that we didn’t find anything in your luggage to warrant keeping you here. Personally I think you were damn lucky, but I will give you fair warning: I’m going to keep an eye on you. All of you. And I swear that next time any of you pull a stunt like this in England . . . we’ll have you. Now gather your belongings, and get out of here. You’re free to go.”

 

We all sat there, dumbstruck. I looked over to the nice guard again, and he gave me a smile and a nod. I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t want to hang around too long to find out that it was a mistake and that they wanted to arrest me again. I grabbed my meager belongings, and on the way out the nice guard whispered, “Take care of yourself, sweetheart.”

 

It was then that it hit me. This guard must have been the one who did the search. He must have found the drugs, and then chose to ignore them.

 

“I will,” I told him. “And thank you. Thanks for everything . . .”

 

When we got back to the car, Sandy let out a sigh of relief and said in a mock English accent, “Fucking hell! That was CLOSE!” I burst into nervous laughter. I had never felt so relieved in my life.

 

Lita was waiting in the backseat with her arms folded and a pissed-off expression on her face. The first thing she said to us was “Yeah, well done. We missed the fucking Paris show because of you three and your fucking room keys!”

 

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Lita!” Joan laughed as we piled in.

 

Scott jumped into the front seat next to the driver and turned back to us. “Say good-bye to Scotland Yard, ladies!”

 

And with a screech of rubber we took off as everybody in the car laughed. Everybody except me, that is. I stared at the back of Scott’s head, and it suddenly became clear just what kind of a man he really was: a wimp. Weak and scared. I started to think that maybe my dad was right about him after all.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 17

 

Postcards from Nowhere

 

 

 

 

After the scare with the hotel keys, the rest of the tour limped on under a black cloud—both literal and metaphorical—hanging over it. The European tour felt like the longest month and a half of my life. I became so homesick that I wanted to die. I had never felt anything like it. Before joining the Runaways, I had never been outside of California. I’d only been on an airplane once before. Suddenly I found myself in strange, foreign countries with a steady rain falling all day and night, and alien food that turned my stomach. Everything looked different. Everything felt different. And it wasn’t like we could go sightseeing and try to get to know the countries that we were in; we rushed from venue to venue, hotel room to hotel room, the whole time. It didn’t matter that we were in France; it might as well have been in Paris, Texas. It all looked the same when you saw it through the window of a speeding car or bus.

 

The fear was the hardest thing to live with. The fear that something terrible would happen. The fans were aggressive and angry, and I actually started to believe that eventually some psycho in the audience was going to open fire on us just like in Joan’s dream. That never happened, but the bottles, coins, spit, and other projectiles that rained down upon us were relentless.

 

To top it off, as soon as we’d hit mainland Europe, I started to get sick—really sick, not just homesick. I would wake up in the morning feeling nauseous, and it would get worse and worse throughout the day. I figured it was the food—something in the mutton or reindeer or whatever other kind of crap they were feeding us over there. I started to worry that some kind of mutant bacteria were eating me up from the inside. It didn’t matter where we were, or what I was eating, I constantly felt like I was on the verge of vomiting. As the tour rolled on I was nauseous all of the time. All it would take would be the faint smell of cologne or food, and I would have to race off to the nearest bathroom to hold on to the porcelain for dear life. With all the nausea and unappetizing food, I started losing more and more weight. My clothes started feeling looser. There were dark rings under my eyes, and hidden beneath the makeup my skin started taking on a corpselike quality.

 

I didn’t get much sympathy from the people around me. Kent Smythe’s solution was to put a bucket at the side of the stage in case I had to puke while performing. It was definitely a strange sensation to be strutting around in a corset in front of thousands of screaming European fans while all I could think was “where’s the bucket?” The audiences didn’t notice. They didn’t care. All they knew about the Runaways was the press image that Kim Fowley had created—the tough, don’t-give-a-shit feral teenagers. They didn’t know how much I was hurting inside, and I couldn’t let them know. This was my job; I was the Cherry Bomb. Suddenly, being a sixteen-year-old rock star was turning into a big fucking drag.

 

If I’d thought I could get any sympathy from Scott Anderson, I was totally mistaken. My worst suspicions about his character after the Scotland Yard incident were confirmed in spades as the tour rolled on. The man who I had lived with before this tour, the man who had held me in his arms, and told me that he really cared for me, treated me like I was an unstable hypochondriac.

 

“You’re just homesick!” he barked when I told him that I felt too ill to perform one night. “And you’re making yourself physically sick because of it. Jeez, Cherie, it’s all in your head! Can’t you just calm the fuck down and try to enjoy yourself?”

 

It was hard to believe that I’d once thought that I really loved this man. He’d told me that he loved me. But now he was treating me like I was his annoying kid sister. As I watched him flirting with the other girls, I continued to suspect that he was fucking them, too. Maybe I was the idiot for believing his bullshit, and not listening to my dad’s warnings. Whenever this thought occurred to me, it would bring tears to my eyes. Daddy tried to tell me! And I was so infatuated with Scott that I ignored him. Dad had never been so relieved as he was the day I told him that I was moving back home, a week prior to the European tour. As soon as I said it, he jumped right into the car and drove me over to the place I was sharing with Scott. Within minutes, it seemed, he had packed up my things. The way my father talked about Scott and Kim, I think he would have liked to have them both thrown in jail.

 

“I trust ’em about as far as I can throw ’em, Kitten,” he’d say to me, his blue eyes gleaming with anger. “They’re not okay cats. I’ve dealt with a lot like them in my time. Goddammit, they need shooting is what they need!”

 

I mean, my father didn’t even know half of the things that went on when I was on the road with the band. I guess he was hoping that some responsible adult was looking out for us. . . . No, if Daddy had known about the drugs, the alcohol, the late nights, and the verbal and mental abuse that I had to put up with at the hands of Kim and his cronies, I would have been out of the band in a heartbeat. Dad would have freaked. Kim would have already been auditioning new singers. Up until this point, it seemed very important for me to keep all of this stuff under wraps so that I could continue to front the band. But as this long, miserable tour ground on, I was starting to wonder if my heart was even in it anymore.