Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (44 page)

“Should we tell him about Mom?” Marie asked as we drove toward Aunt Evie’s house. My hands trembled as they gripped the steering wheel. I wondered if I should even have been driving. Although I wasn’t high, I still felt that I was in no shape to be in control of a vehicle. I was sick with worry, and hurting inside. “Should we tell him?” Marie asked again.

 

“I don’t KNOW, Marie!’ I snapped. She turned away from me, and a frosty silence descended in the car. After a few awkward moments, I looked over to my sister. “I’m sorry,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “I’m just . . . I’m feeling . . .”

 

“I know,” Marie said. “ I know how you feel.”

 

I pulled up to the house slowly. Turned the engine off, and we just sat in silence for a moment. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to go in. I looked down at my cold, shaking hands. Was I ready to see my own father like this?

 

“How does he look?” I asked Marie, without looking at her. Daddy had been really sick recently; his legs had swollen up so badly that they looked like tree trunks, as gout racked his body. The alcoholism was really tearing him apart. I knew the answer already. Marie had been crying so hard when she called to tell me how sick he had gotten that I could barely understand her.

 

“He looks real bad,” she said.

 

I opened my mouth, about to ask another pointless question, but then changed my mind. I didn’t want to know any more. I thought about Mom again, and a shiver ran through my body. I didn’t want to know how bad Mom was either. My mom was three thousand miles away, back in Washington. Even though they were thousands of miles apart, both my parents were gravely ill. Both my parents had something eating them up from the inside. For Dad, it was alcohol. For my mom, it was cancer.

 

I’d gotten the call the other day when I was in the control room doing the voice-overs on Foxes. That’s how I found out. Although the shoot had wrapped, we still had “looping” to do. Looping is the process of rerecording lines that don’t come out on the audio track. The first edit of the film, the rough cut, was done. This was all about the finishing touches. I was working in the control booth with Jodie and Adrian when the call from Wolfgang came. I had known that Mom was having some tests done, but that’s all I knew.

 

Wolfgang wasn’t the type of person to beat around the bush. The first thing he said was “Your mom has cancer, Cherie.”

 

“What?” I whispered, running a shaking hand through my hair. “What?”

 

He didn’t repeat himself. He knew that I’d heard. He cleared his throat and did his best to assume his typical, businesslike manner. “I know . . . I know it’s terrible, Cherie. It’s hard for all of us, but it’s the way it is. We just got the diagnosis. They’re doing the colostomy. They have to . . . remove her colon.”

 

“Oh my God . . .”

 

I sat there in shock and listened to everything that Wolfgang had to say. He told me that Mom had a good chance of survival.

 

“How good is good?” I asked.

 

“Thirty percent.”

 

I felt the tears welling in my eyes. “What’s so good about thirty percent?” I demanded.

 

Wolfgang didn’t answer. The rest of the call went by in a haze. I hung up the phone and turned to Jodie and her mother, Brandy. They were looking at me with concerned expressions.

 

“Are you okay?” Jodie asked.

 

I started crying. The only word I could sob was “No.”

 

I snapped out of my thoughts. I looked over to Aunt Evie’s front door. Behind it, my father was fighting another war. This time there would be no medals, and the only casualties were likely to be himself and his family. This time around, his body was the battlefield, and this conflict had been going on for so long that the scars of war were plainly evident. My dad—the tough, no-bullshit Marine who had survived despite terrible odds during the war—was now a casualty. I didn’t know if he had another victory in him: the alcohol seemed to have the upper hand this time.

 

“I don’t think we should tell him about Mom,” I said. Marie nodded silently. Maybe Aunt Evie had already told him. But if he didn’t already know, I felt that this was not the time to unload the information on him. “Come on,” I said. “We’d better go in.”

 

Dad was lying in Marie’s bed instead of in his own room. His failing health had forced him to make one of his periodic attempts at detoxing, and he was currently undergoing a violent, cold-turkey withdrawal. I could smell it as I approached. A pungent, fermented smell that radiated from my father as he sweated the alcohol out of his body. Maybe he had soaked through the sheets on his own bed already, necessitating the move into our bedroom. Marie and I crept into the room. When I saw my father, I stifled a gasp. He was lying shivering in Marie’s sheets, curled up in the fetal position. He looked like a baby. This wasn’t my father I was looking at. This was not my dad! I closed my eyes tight for a moment. No father should ever look like this. I opened them again, but the painful scene was the same as before. Marie took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.

 

“We should have done something,” I whispered. “We should have done something when we found him in his car . . . We should have done something, forced him to dry out . . . before it came . . . it came to this!”

 

“Shhh,” Marie said. I didn’t want to look at her. I think she was crying, and I couldn’t bear to see it. “Go see him,” she whispered. “I’m going to speak to Aunt Evie, okay? I’ll be right outside.”

 

She left, and I was alone in my childhood room, looking at the frail, little man who was lying there in place of my dad. There was a half-finished glass of milk on the bedside cabinet. I tried to tell myself that once he went through the detox, everything would be okay. That he would smile at me and tell me that he was feeling “like a tiger.” That he would come out of this, and never drink again, and that everything would go back to normal. He’d be a new man.

 

There was a time when I could have convinced myself of that, but not anymore. I was no longer naive enough to believe fairy tales. As sick as my father was because of the alcohol, and as painful as these periodic detoxes were, they never seemed to stick for any more than a few months. We’d know when my father was on the wagon because the kitchen pantry would suddenly be full of sweet stuff. He’d get an insatiable craving for sweets, and would eat stuff like Entenmann’s cheese Danish or sugar donuts for breakfast, all washed down with a glass of milk. He’d look different, too. Twenty years would fall away from his face. His eyes would clear up. That yellow tinge would fade from his skin. Slowly but surely, though, he would slip back into drinking. That healthier, happier Dad would be nothing more than a happy memory. Then, like clockwork, there would be another painful detox on the horizon. Except that each time he detoxed, my father would be sicker, frailer, and weaker than before. We always feared that he wouldn’t survive the next one.

 

I walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. Daddy. I felt responsible. He was my father! I should have taken care of him. I could feel fat, silent tears rolling down my cheeks. I reached out and touched him.

 

“Dad?” I said.

 

He stirred a little.

 

“Daddy?”

 

I shook him gently. He turned on his back, and his eyes opened, slowly, painfully. The eyes looked yellow, sick. And they looked old—older than Grandma’s. There was no light in them anymore. I watched him blink and try to focus on me. His hair was a mess, sticking up in places, flattened tight against the skull in others. I knew that if he were well, he’d be reaching for his comb right now. Instead he just stared at me, and managed to mumble a hello. I tried my best to smile at him reassuringly.

 

We remained like that, frozen, staring at each other. I sensed some unbreachable gulf in the inches between us. I don’t know why I did it, but I reached into my purse and pulled out my wallet. I opened it and removed a hundred-dollar bill. I folded the bill up, and slipped it into his limp hand.

 

Through my tears I said, “I just want you to know . . . Dad . . . that you have money . . .”

 

Dad smiled weakly, and allowed his eyes to fall closed again. “Thanks, Kitten,” he murmured. I watched him for a few more minutes, but he was asleep again. The bill slipped out of his hand and onto the bed. I wanted him to have it. I wanted it to be there for him when he woke up. Somehow I felt that this hundred-dollar bill would mean something. That it would magically chase away all of the problems, and heal all of the damage.

 

An anger rose in me, drowning out all other emotions. How could my dad let this happen to him? How could anybody willingly destroy their body like this?

 

I put the bill back into his hand. It slipped out. I put it back, but he couldn’t hold on to it. I took the bill and placed it under his glass of milk. I had to get out. I didn’t want my sobs to wake my father up. I felt like there was nothing I could do to help him anymore, so I quietly left him alone, breathing softly in Marie’s tiny little single bed.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 29

 

Annie and Me

 

 

 

 

I am in a Cadillac, gliding down the 5 Freeway with an older couple. I don’t want to be there; I just want to get home to North Hollywood. These two are making me feel strange. They are man and wife, but the guy still puts his hand on my thigh. Right in front of her. She is laughing in the backseat. There is a sense of druggy madness in the air. I brush his hand away angrily. He laughs at me.“The beast with five fingers!” he mocks.

 

I don’t find this funny. I’ve had a bad day. Hell, I’ve had a bad year. Too many drugs. Too many bad decisions. I just want it all to end. I just want to get home. If I can only get home, then maybe I could start over. Maybe I could give up drugs altogether, put my life back together.

 

The man pulls a bottle of Bacardi from between the seats. He takes his eyes off the road as he pulls the bottle free. He’s already drunk; so is his wife. He takes his hand off the steering wheel and we begin to weave madly all over the road. Panicked, I reach over to try to steer for him. I curse my own stupidity. Hitchhiking was a terrible idea. Nothing good can come of this.

 

He puts his hand on my thigh again.

 

I scowl angrily.

 

Nobody is watching the road.

 

I look forward again. With a jolt I realize that there is a truck ahead of us, at a complete standstill. We are heading straight for it at a terrifying speed. I open my mouth to scream as the Cadillac plows into the rear of the truck at sixty miles per hour.

 

Cut to: The hospital, where they slice open my bloody jeans and take off my shoes and socks. They stick a needle in my arm and put an oxygen mask on my face. I cough up blood, splattering it over the inside of the mask. My pulse drops lower. Lower. Then it disappears altogether.

 

The doctors stop their work.

 

It’s over.

 

My friends watch in amazement and horror as the white sheet is pulled over my face.

 

It’s all over.

 

Fade to: Some months later Jodie stops by to put flowers on my grave. She reminisces to herself and laughs sadly to herself about the good times we’d once had.

 

Freeze frame on Jodie’s face.

 

 

 

Suddenly the dark theater erupted into applause. As the credits began to roll, the applause grew louder, people whooping and hollering. Relief flooded my body. I was sitting there with tears in my eyes. My father, sitting next to me, squeezed my hand. I look over at him. He looked better than he had looked in a long time. He was still drinking, but somehow tonight his pride in me seemed to have overcome all of the illness racking his body, and he looked years younger. Grandma was sitting there weeping. She had been doing this for most of the film. Daddy would always say that her kidneys were too close to her eyes.

 

I could barely believe it—I’d done it. I pulled off a heavy, dramatic role! I stood, side by side with Jodie Foster, and I didn’t look like an idiot. All of the hard work had coalesced into this moment, the 1980 premier of Foxes. As the lights came up, I looked down the aisle. My entire family was there: Dad, Mom and Wolfgang, Aunt Evie and Grandma, Donnie, and Marie with her fiancé, Steve Lukather. Even Sandie and T.Y. Everyone I loved was in the same room, something that I honestly thought I would never see again.

 

Not to say that some relationships weren’t strained. My relationship with T.Y. had never fully recovered from his asking me to drop the charges against the man who raped me. The sessions for Messin’ with the Boys had proved to be torturous, and had put a huge strain on my relationship with Marie. When Capitol realized that I was going ahead and recording a duet album with my sister, the pressure started building. The label’s mantra became “We know what we signed up for, and it wasn’t a sister act!” The most vocal critic was the man who had signed us in the first place, Rupert Perry, who was the vice president of A&R at Capitol.

 

On top of all of this pressure, when I started dating the album’s producer, Jai Winding, Marie was furious. She felt that she couldn’t get a fair deal in the studio if I was in a relationship with the producer. However, since we had brought her boyfriend—and soon-to-be husband—Steve Lukather in, I felt that all I had done was level the playing field a little. The power struggle for control of the album had left some scars. With Steve involved, and all of the people he had brought in from Toto, I started to feel sidelined on my own album.