Running With Monsters: A Memoir (13 page)

He had me there. He was a good cat and he would lend me money when I asked. Big James fed me. It didn’t feel right to take from the guy without giving something in return. Besides, I thought, where else did I have to go? Was I really prepared to sleep in an alley under a soggy cardboard packing crate with only the crook of my arm for a pillow? That didn’t really strike me as a great alternative, so I became Big James’s dancing, singing rock-and-roll marionette. A punk-rock sock puppet. His glassy-eyed friends rolled in, beer drinkers and hell-raisers, and sat around the living room on the cup-cushioned couch and the sway-backed, threadbare chairs while I thrummed away at my guitar and sang my songs like some drug-damaged and deranged cabaret chanteuse. Halfway through what passed for my set, some guy held up a Bic lighter and shouted, “Play some Skynyrd, dude!”

This is like the twilight of the gods,
I thought.
I live in a fan’s house and I play concerts in the living room.
Big James loved it. “The guy from Thelonious Monster stays at my house!” he’d bellow. “Fuck yeah!”

It was a comedown. A big one. In 1993, Thelonious Monster had played before tens of thousands of screaming, can’t-get-enough rock music fans, and now here I was croaking out my songs in front of a crowd of tens made up of a bunch of slack-jawed goobers and voyeuristic gawkers who probably cringed at what they saw. If they remembered the old Bob, this was his comeuppance. It felt like some cruel cosmic payback for some transgression I couldn’t even remember. What could I have done to deserve this? I could see the writing on the wall, the signpost up ahead, the “No Exit” warning. Things were headed toward an ugly, spectacular crash on the dead-end street of my life.

O
n February 3, 1996—the thirty-seventh anniversary of the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens in a rock-and-roll plane crash—I found myself on rain-slicked city streets in front of Hollywood Moguls, a then-popular nightclub with a façade that resembled, with no weak sense of irony, a decrepit tin toolshed. Traffic lights and headlamps shined on the pebbled mirror of wet asphalt and a cold, sickly rainbow of red, green, yellow, and white reflected back toward a starless sky. The holidays were a month past and although the rest of the city had fallen back into its routine, you couldn’t have guessed from the boisterous club-goers who clogged the sidewalk and bunched up at the door. With a certain crowd, the festivities never ended. And here I was, broke, hungry, down on my luck, but with a firm grip on the invisible keys to every door of the city’s underground as well as its celebrity haunts. I was on the hunt for a soft touch. This was a pattern I had established whenever money got tight, and it was tighter than a firmly clenched fist at the moment. I knew where everybody hung out, and with a little luck, I wouldn’t have to make too many stops before I could spot a friendly face who would let me borrow some cash. Credit cards and checks are worthless currency when you want to buy drugs, and I needed something quick.

Since my earliest days on the club scene, I’d known how to get in a door. I never paid a cover charge and I never waited in line. Tonight was no different. I pushed my way to the front of the line and the doorman recognized me. We exchanged nods.

“Go on in, Bob,” said the huge gorilla who guarded the gate.

“I don’t think I’ll be here long,” I told him, speaking the plain truth as I squeezed between him and the wall.

Inside the club were knots of party people who crowded the floor and the bar. The electronic music pummeled me and I could feel the vibrations from the subwoofers rattle my guts. In my current condition, it wasn’t a pleasant sensation. I felt like I might hurl whatever I had stored in there, although it couldn’t have been much since I had hardly eaten over the past week. I headed for the VIP area and got past the red velvet rope. I did a quick scan and noticed my friend Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction sitting in a corner. Dope-sick and covered with a thin sheen of sweat, I struck up a conversation with him and, with little time to waste, hit him up.

“Uh, say, man, do you think you could let me borrow maybe thirty or forty bucks?” I asked.

Perry was no fool. I could tell right away that he knew what was up and why I needed quick cash, but he showed some mercy and reached into a pocket and said, “I only have hundreds, Bob. Here, take this.” He handed me a crisp note. I ignored the sad—maybe disgusted—look on his face and I snatched the bill with the quickness of a rattlesnake strike.

“Thanks, Perry. I’ll get you back on this real soon.” I could tell that as soon as my fingers touched that money, he had written it off as gone for good. He was probably right. I didn’t have time to dwell on it or even bother to make small talk with my savior. “Uh, I have to run, man,” I said, and I quickly made it out to the street, where I had parked a new Ford Escort wagon. It belonged to a chick named Sandy, who was the girlfriend of an out-of-town drug dealer. I had told her I only needed it for an hour and here I had already been gone for three. Drug time is different from any other time you’ll ever know. Sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it’s fast, but it never, ever has any relationship to actual minutes on a clock. I fumbled the keys with locked-up fingers and slid behind the steering wheel. The Escort’s little four-banger chugged to life and I pulled away from the curb as fast as I could. There was no time to waste and the money I had gotten from Perry was my passport to a better place. But before I got there, I had to travel through purgatory. I drove east on wet surface streets to the intersection of Seventh and Alvarado, just west of downtown.

This was MacArthur Park, a place made famous by songwriter Jimmy Webb in his odd orchestral elegy to the city. The line “someone left the cake out in the rain” still has the power to confuse listeners, but anyone who has ever taken a nighttime stroll along the edge of the park’s artificial lake and scuffled through the ammoniated waste produced by the huge flocks of waterfowl that skim, dive, and float on its murky surface and ride the sullen and slow currents that pile up the slag on the lake’s concrete shore knows exactly what Webb meant. MacArthur Park had always been an underground marketplace where dedicated searchers could find what they needed, provided they had cash. Fake IDs, Social Security cards, sex, steamed tamales, and any kind of drug known to humankind was on sale and priced to move in those dim shadows. Of course, it was also the kind of place where the unwary and foolish could just as easily be killed as complete a transaction. I wasn’t worried. I knew how to be careful, although $100 was more than enough to get me into trouble. But sometimes, you just have to have a little trust in your fellow man.

It didn’t take me long to find some Mexican kid in baggy khakis and an oversized plaid Pendleton shirt who was slinging. He knew I was a shopper. “What you need,
ese
?” he asked. I smiled. We conducted our business in matter of seconds, all communication done by nods, hand gestures, and quickly flashed goods. No need for fake niceties; we both knew the routine and played our parts well. It was time to go, and I trotted back to the car while the kid slipped back into the shadows. I started to pull away from the curb and into the sparse traffic when I saw that a cop car was parked on the other side of the street. He had to have known what a white boy like me was up to in this open-air drug emporium after dark. The chase was on, but, because we were on opposite sides of the street and faced different directions, he had to make a U-turn to get back around and make the stop. By that time, I was gone. That little Ford Escort was maneuverable. I turned off the headlights, swung onto a side street, and made a series of quick turns before I doubled back. This is where I fucked up. I probably should have driven to a well-traveled street like Pico and headed west, but, well, I wasn’t thinking clearly. Instead, I thought I’d be slick. I parked the car, got out, and started to walk. Big mistake. I was busted almost immediately. “Sir, could you step over here, please?” Sometimes the Los Angeles cops can be so courteous. At the same time they explicitly telegraph that they think you’re a scumbag.

“What’s the problem, officer?” I asked with as much unctuous middle-class charm as I could manage.

“Just shut it and put your hands on the car,” he said. I balanced myself with the palms of my hands flat on the trunk of the cruiser as the cop kicked my legs back and apart. He did a pat-down and came up with my newly purchased bag of dope. “And what do we have here?” he asked. He knew the answer, and there was no point in any further remarks from me. “Put your hands behind your back,” he said, and I was slapped into the cuffs. He walked me around the side of the car and opened the rear door. “Watch your head, sir,” he said, and then stuffed me inside like a pile of dirty laundry. And that was that. I was caught and it was time to take a little ride. As we drove, I noticed we weren’t bound for downtown. That could only mean one possible destination—the notorious Rampart station, a place that had a well-deserved reputation for busting heads.

Now, in gangster movies and TV shows, the advice is always, “Just shut up until your lawyer arrives.” This is a great tip in principle, but I didn’t have an attorney on retainer and cops who think you’re being a wiseass can make sure you get put into a cell with some serious dudes who will lay upon you a beat-down or worse. As soon as they brought me in to the booking desk, I used another little piece of advice I had gleaned somewhere along the way. The first words out of my mouth, before I even confirmed my name, were, “I’m gay. I going to need protection.” The booking officer looked at me—maybe with disbelief, it was hard to tell—but he didn’t have any choice but to take me at my word. That’s how it works. Once you’ve dropped that little bomb on them, they reroute you through protective custody and keep you away from the general jail population. Apparently, homosexuals are disruptive to what passes for serenity in “gen pop.” The squalid accommodations at Rampart weren’t any better for those of us in protective custody, but under the auspices of “PC,” I didn’t have to worry—as much, anyway—about the specter of random and sudden violence. I had a bigger concern: withdrawal. This was not the time or place to be dope-sick, given the upcoming court appearances and the stress of incarceration, but that was the reality.

Because of my protective-custody status, I was sent downtown to the “Glass House” facility at Parker Center instead of the nightmarish Men’s Central Jail. Not that any correctional facility is a good place to be, but Men’s Central can be downright lethal. I can’t recall much of my stay in the Glass House. The processing routine is designed to strip the inmate of whatever shred of dignity he might still possess. Everything is delivered in a stream of sharply barked orders by some jarhead sheriff’s deputy.

“Strip!”

“Walk on the blue lines
only
!”

“Bend over!”

“Cough!”

“Lift your nut sack and cough again!”

Then you get a shower and some ill-fitting clothes. It passed in a blur. I was as dope-sick as any junkie’s ever been, and the county doesn’t give you any methadone. You take the cure right there in lockup. After a few days of wrenching intestinal conniptions, I started to feel physically better, but I didn’t have the luxury to reflect on it. Hauled before a judge, I was put on a big, black-and-white sheriff’s department bus and sent to a facility called Wayside in the dusty foothills of Castaic. It was called the “honor rancho” and it was laid out as a group of low-slung buildings that baked in the near-constant daytime sunshine and froze during the clear and cloudless nights. I found myself in a dormitory situation with the other sad-sack miscreants who had drawn the protective-custody card. And there we sat with not much to do but go to court and complain to each other about what a drag it was to be locked up. On the plus side, nobody got raped or shanked. I cooled there for thirty days, which gave me the time to clear up old warrants. Unfortunately, I learned I was also being charged with grand theft auto.

Sandy, the girl who had, perhaps unwisely, let me borrow her newly purchased Ford Escort, was completely pissed off in the aftermath of my arrest. I can’t say that I blame her. I had carelessly left her car on the street and I never had the common courtesy to call her from jail. As a result, her beloved and recently purchased ride was considered abandoned and it was impounded by the city in one of the vast lots where machines go to die. Because she didn’t have any money to get it out, it stayed there accruing fines until it was finally repossessed. As might be understandable—to anyone but me at the time—Sandy wanted payback, and so, to inflict maximum damage on me for my transgression, she alleged that I had stolen her car. Fortunately, I was released on my own recognizance and was able to clear up that mess on the outside. I made a beeline to her as soon as I was out.

“What the fuck, Sandy?”

“I lost my fucking car, Bob.”

“But I was going to cop dope for both of us.”

“Bullshit, man. I never would have seen any of that. And now my credit’s fucked up and I don’t have a car.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that, but, look, I’m staring down some time because you’re mad at me. That doesn’t seem right, does it?”

“I don’t care what happens to you. You fucked me over.”

“What if I promise to make things up? Set it all right? Cover your expenses? I can’t go to prison for something like this. It was all a mistake. I’m sorry!”

Those two words,
I’m sorry,
have a lot of power. She agreed. We cleared things up between us and, more importantly, eventually, between me and the state of California. In the greater picture, the one in which I saw my conflated self-image shrinking by the moment, I had an epiphany.
I’m clean,
I thought.
I’m finally fucking clean.
I hadn’t been in a long time, although I had made numerous, ultimately failed, attempts. It was a revelation. The thirty days I had spent locked up had forced me to take a hard, brutal look at my life and my problems. I couldn’t keep going back to rehab. Since that first time at Hazelden, I’d clean up for a while, fall back into using, get talked into another stab at rehab, and then fail again. I was on an endless rehab roller coaster, and the cure never took. I just loved drugs too much. It was just self-defeating. It didn’t work for me, obviously. This should have been clear to me after the first go-round at Hazelden, but I had been in twenty-six programs in total, and I was still a junkie and alcoholic.

Now, this might come as a shock to somebody who’s never run with monsters, but after that many attempts at self-help—and each one followed by a failure—the despair adds up and starts to demand a price. In my case, it was ego. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without seeing the sad and pathetic clown who stared back at me. It was the same joker who had always been there, but for the first time, I saw him with a degree of clarity and perspective. Twenty-six times in rehab? Was it even possible to be more ridiculous? I was a fool. A jester. A buffoon. The clown of the crack pipe. And that hurt. This time, it was going to be different.

I started to attend recovery meetings again. Sheepishly, at first. I viewed some of the philosophies and concepts with skepticism and disdain—the whole business about a benevolent and all-knowing “power” is still something I have trouble with—but I kept at it because, after so many screw-ups and false starts at getting clean, another stumble would have been the end of the line for me. The pressure was eased a little because the group was supportive, and if I did slip, it wouldn’t feel like a complete failure to me since I wasn’t actually in another rehab program.

It’s not to say I didn’t have worries. I had plenty of them. The main thing was the need to make money. A job to support myself. My musical career was in tatters, and that hurt. I may have gotten myself straight, but I still had my huge junkie ego. The necessity of a paycheck cleared that up effectively near Easter in 1996, when I took a job at a cozy little Silver Lake diner called Millie’s Cafe that served up comfort food to hipsters, both local and transient, and the occasional music-business people. Millie’s offered a touch of hominess complete with checkered tablecloths, hearty fare, and decent coffee. I became a busboy and a dishwasher.