Scar Tissue (5 page)

The centerpiece of his drug paraphernalia in that back room was his triple beam scale, which was put to more use in our household than the toaster or the blender. His work plate and snorting tray of choice was a beautiful green-and-blue Mexican tile, perfectly square and flat. I’d watch him cut up the coke and strain it and then take a brick of Italian laxative called mannitol and strain it through the same strainer so it would have the same consistency as the coke. It was important to the bottom line to make sure the coke had been cut with the proper amount of laxative.

There were a lot of people coming by, but not as many as you would think. My dad was fairly surreptitious about his dealings, and he knew the risk would increase with a lot of activity. But what his clientele lacked in quantity, it sure made up for in quality. There were plenty of movie stars and TV stars and writers and rock stars, and tons of girls. One time we even got a visit from two famous Oakland Raiders on the eve of the Super Bowl. They came over pretty early, about eight or nine
P.M.
, and they looked a lot straighter than the usual clientele, sitting on my dad’s homemade furniture and looking sheepish and unnerved by the fact that there was a kid hanging around. But it all worked out. They got their stuff, and they went out and won the Super Bowl the next day.

What was kind of annoying about the whole experience was the late-night traffic. It was then that I saw the real desperation this drug could induce. I wasn’t being judgmental about it; it was more like “Wow, this guy really wants that damn coke.” One guy who was an insatiable garbage disposal for the cocaine was the brother of a famous actor. He’d come by every hour on the hour until six in the morning, wheeling and dealing and shucking and jiving and talking long promises. Each time he knocked, my dad would get out of bed, and I’d hear him sigh, “Oh, no, not again” to himself.

Sometimes my dad wouldn’t even open the door, he’d just talk to people through the window screen. I’d be lying there in bed listening to “It’s too late. Get the hell out of here. You owe me too much money, anyway. You’re into me for two hundred and twenty dollars.” My dad had a list of what people owed him. I’d look over that list and hear him say, “If I could just get everyone to pay me what they owe me, I’d have all this money.”

It was hard to convince me that we weren’t living large, especially on the weekends, when my dad took me out nightclubbing, where he was known as the Lord of the Sunset Strip. (He was also known as Spider, a nickname he had picked up in the late ’60s when he scaled a building to get into the apartment of a girl he was fixated on.)

Sunset Strip in the early ’70s was the artery of life that flowed through West Hollywood. People constantly jammed the street, shuttling between the best clubs in town. There was the Whisky a Go Go and Filthy McNasty’s. Two blocks from the Whisky was the Roxy, another live music club. Across the parking lot from the Roxy was the Rainbow Bar and Grill. The Rainbow was Spider’s domain. Every night he’d get there around nine and meet up with his posse—Weaver and Connie and Bashara and a rotating cast of characters.

Getting ready for the night out was a ritualistic experience for my father, since he was so meticulous about his appearance. I’d sit there and watch him preen in front of the mirror. Every hair had to be just so, the right cologne applied in the right quantity. Then the donning of the tight T-shirt and the velvet jacket and the platforms. Eventually, we’d go to custom tailors to replicate his outfits for me. It was all about mimicking my dad.

Part of that ritual was getting the right high to start the night. He was obviously saving the grand finale of chemical cocktail for much later in the evening, but he didn’t want to leave the house without the appropriate beginnings of that buzz, which usually revolved around alcohol and pills. He had quaaludes and Placidyls, which were downers that stopped you from having motor skills. When you mixed them with alcohol, they stopped the guy next to you from having motor skills. But my dad’s pills of choice were Tuinals.

When I went out with him, he’d pour me a small glass of beer. Then he’d break open a Tuinal capsule. Because the powder from the Tuinals was so horrible-tasting, he’d slice up a banana and shove the broken-up Tuinal in the banana. He’d take the part that contained more powder and give me the smaller portion. Then we were ready to go out.

Our royal reception would start as soon as we walked up to the Rainbow’s door. Tony, the maître d’ of the club, would greet my dad as if he were the most valued customer on the Strip. Of course, the hundred-dollar bill that my dad handed him as we walked in didn’t hurt. Tony would lead us to my dad’s table—the power table, right in front of a huge fireplace. From that vantage point, you could see anyone who was coming in the club or walking down from Over the Rainbow, a nightclub within the club. My dad was incredibly territorial. If a person who didn’t pass his muster sat down at the table, Spider would confront him: “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Ah, I just want to sit down and hang out,” the guy would say.

“Sorry, pal. Out of here. You’ve got to go.”

But if someone came in who was of interest to my father, he’d jump up and arrange seating. His policing of the table made me uncomfortable. I didn’t necessarily want interlopers to sit down, but I thought my dad could have been kinder and gentler. Especially when the booze and the downers were flowing at the same time, he could be an asshole. But he was a great catalyst for getting interesting people together. If Keith Moon or the guys from Led Zeppelin or Alice Cooper was in town, they’d be sitting with Spider, because he was the coolest guy in the house.

We’d be at the Rainbow most of the night. He didn’t stay put at the table the whole time, just long enough for his anchors to arrive to hold down the table, and then they’d all take turns making the rounds within the restaurant bar area, or going upstairs. I always loved the upstairs club. Whenever one of my dad’s girlfriends would want to dance, she’d ask me, because Spider was not a dancer.

The night wouldn’t be complete without cocaine, and it became a great sport to see how clandestinely you could consume your blow. The experienced coke hounds were easy to spot, because they all had the right-pinkie coke fingernail. They’d grow that pinkie at least a good half inch past the finger and shape it perfectly, and that was the ultimate coke spoon of the time. My dad took great pride in his elaborately manicured coke nail. But I also noticed that one of his nails was decidedly shorter than the rest.

“What’s up with that one?” I asked.

“That’s so I don’t hurt the ladies down below when I’m using my finger on them,” he said. Boy, that stuck in my mind. He actually had a finger that was pussy-friendly.

I was the only child present for all this insanity. For the most part, the adults who didn’t know me just ignored me. But Keith Moon, the legendary drummer for the Who, always tried to make me feel at ease. In the midst of this chaotic, riotous, party-life atmosphere where everyone was screaming and shouting and sniffing and snorting and drinking and humping, Moon would take the time to be still and take me under his arm and say, “How you doing, kid? Are you having a good time? Shouldn’t you be in school or something? Well, I’m glad you’re here, anyway.” That always stuck with me.

We’d usually stay until closing time, which was two
A.M.
Then it was time to congregate in the parking lot, which had filled up with girls and boys in their outlandish glam-rock clothing. The parking-lot scene was all about getting phone numbers and bird-dogging and finding the afterparty. But sometimes it was the scene of an altercation that oftentimes involved my dad. He’d take on biker gangs in front of me, and I’d be the little guy jumping into the middle of these scraps, going, “This is my dad. He’s really wasted right now. Whatever he said, just go ahead and forgive him. He didn’t mean it. And please, don’t hit him in the face, because it really hurts a kid like me to see his dad get hit in the face.”

I did have a horrible feeling that my dad would end up hurting himself badly in a fight or in a car accident. At that point in the night, he’d be so high that walking across the room was a vaudevillian routine of a guy stumbling, falling down, and somehow managing to stay up on his feet. He’d be bouncing off furniture, holding on to anything that was stable, slurring every word, but still he’d try to get into the car to drive to the party. I’d be, “Oh, shit, my dad can’t talk. This is not good.” When he’d had too much, I become responsible for his security, which was a difficult place to find myself.

All of this was taking an emotional toll on me, in ways that I couldn’t even articulate. Even though I had friends at Emerson, and I was going to the Rainbow on weekends as my dad’s sidekick, I was alone a lot and starting to create my own world. I had to get up in the morning and go to school and be a guy in his own private bubble. I didn’t mind it, since I had this space to pretend in and create in and think in and observe in. Sometime that year, one of the neighbor’s cats had kittens, and I used to take one of the fluffy white kittens up on the roof of the garage apartment behind us to hang out with. He was my little friend, but at times, I would scold that kitten, for no reason other than to exert power over him. During one of these scolding sessions, I started thumping the kitty in the face with my fingers. It wasn’t anything deadly, but it was an act of aggression, which was strange, because I’d always been an animal lover.

One time I thumped the kitty too hard, and his little tooth punctured his little kitty lip, and a drop of blood was drawn. I completely freaked out. I started feeling intense self-loathing for bringing harm to this tiny animal that still stayed affectionate toward me even after that incident. I was fearful that my inability to stop myself from engaging in that behavior was a sign of an incipient psychosis.

But on the whole, I wouldn’t have traded my lifestyle for anything else, especially some of the mundane realities of my friends at Emerson. I’d go to their houses and see their dads come home from their office buildings and not have any time or energy or compassion for their kids. They just sat there and drank their whiskey and smoked their cigar and read their paper and went to bed. That didn’t seem like a much better option.

Trying to get some sleep so I’d be rested for school the next day while people were having sex on the couch and shooting cocaine and cranking the stereo was definitely not a mundane reality. But it was mine. On school nights, I’d stay home, but Spider would be right at his power table at the Rainbow. And half the time the afterparty was at our house. I’d be at home asleep, and all of a sudden I’d hear that door open and a stream of maniacs would flood into the house. Then the music would begin, and the laughter and the cutting of the lines and the general mayhem would ensue. I’d be trying to sleep in my back room, which was connected to the one and only bathroom, and people would be in and out of there, pissing and screaming and doing drugs.

Thank God I had my ’70s alarm clock radio. Every morning at six-forty-five, it would wake me up with the popular music of the day. I’d usually be dead to the world, but I’d stumble to my closet, put on a T-shirt, go to the bathroom, and get ready to go to school. Then I’d walk through the house and survey the damage. It always looked like a battlefield. Sometimes there were people passed out on the couch or on the chairs. My dad’s doors were always shut. He was usually asleep with some girl, but sometimes he would still be awake, closed off in his module.

One of the reasons I cherished that alarm clock was that I really was that anxious to get to school every day. I loved almost all of my classes. As crazy and as high and as full of the nightlife as his routine was, my dad was backing me 100 percent in all of my classes. He had come from an academic background himself, and I think he knew the importance of studying and of learning and exposing yourself to new ideas, particularly the creative avenues that were offered. Every day he’d use some crazy-ass esoteric word to get me to increase my vocabulary. He also expanded my tastes in literature from the Hardy Boys to Ernest Hemingway and other great writers.

At school, the class that I looked forward to most was English. Jill Vernon was my teacher, and she was by far the most profoundly inspirational one I’d ever come across. She was a diminutive lady with short black hair, about fifty years old. She really knew how to communicate with kids and turned everything she talked about, writing, reading, whatever, into something interesting and appealing and fun.

Every day we’d spend the first fifteen minutes of class writing in a journal. She’d put a trigger sentence up on the board, and we were supposed to riff on the sentence to any other subject that we felt like. Some of the other students would write for five minutes and stop, but I could have written away the whole class time.

Mrs. Vernon would regularly keep me after school and talk to me about writing, because she could see how I poured my heart into those essays.

“I read all these journals, and I have to say that you have a special gift for writing, and I think you should be aware and do something with it,” she told me. “You should continue to write.”

When you’re in seventh grade and this really wonderful woman whom you look up to takes the time to express an idea like that to you—that was a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing for the rest of my life.

Another bell started ringing around that time. My dad had told me about his first attempted sexual experience, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. He went to a whorehouse in downtown Grand Rapids. The prostitutes were all black. My dad was sent up to a room, and a few minutes later, a middle-aged lady with a little potbelly came in. She asked him if he was ready, but he was so scared that he blurted out, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this.” How could anyone have performed under those circumstances? Going to a weird place and ending up with a weird person with absolutely no connection to you and having to pay for it? I think that experience had a lot to do with him wanting my first sexual experience to be nicer. I just don’t know if he envisioned that my first time would be with one of his girlfriends.