Scar Tissue (7 page)

Before I talk about the anomaly that was Grace, I should backtrack and pick up the thread of my sexual history. After my liaison with Kimberly, I had no sexual involvement with women for about a year. But around the same time as my Kimberly experience, I discovered the art and joy of masturbation, thanks to
National Lampoon
’s Photo Funnies. For some reason, masturbation was not a subject that my dad broached. He taught me every minuscule part of the female anatomy, but he never told me that if I needed sexual satisfaction, I could do it myself.
National Lampoon
inspired me to figure it out.

All this experimentation took place one afternoon in my add-on bedroom. I wasn’t a horribly late physical bloomer, but I was by no means early. Around the first month that I was even capable of having an orgasm and ejaculation, it dawned on me that I could use photos to achieve that end. Surprisingly, I didn’t use my dad’s vast collection of
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines. I was attracted to the realism of the girls in those
Lampoon
s
,
the fact that the girls weren’t in the conventional postures of what was supposed to be sexy. They were just real naked girls. Shortly thereafter, I would abuse every magazine I could in my quest, especially in high school, when it would become almost a contest to see how many times you could jack off in one day, and what stimuli you were jacking off to, and what implements you were incorporating into the process. But that was much later.

Around the time my hormones started raging, I had the wonderful experience of being babysat one night by Cher. I was in the eighth grade and still hanging with Sonny and Connie from time to time, and for some reason, they got jammed up, so Cher volunteered to watch me for the night. We camped out in her bedroom, having a heart-to-heart talk for hours on end, really getting to be friends for the first time.

After a while, it was time for bed. Because it was a large house and I might get spooked being alone, Cher let me crash on her bed until Sonny and Connie came to pick me up. In my mind, there was a bit of tension—not that I was going to make any moves on this woman, just the idea that I’d be in bed with such a gorgeous creature. But I thought it was okay because we were friends.

Then Cher got up to go to the bathroom and get ready for bed. It was dark in the bedroom, but it was light in the bathroom, so I watched her take off her clothes, all the while feigning to be on my way to sleep. There was a woman’s naked body, and it was long and slender and special and just thrilling. Not that I had the wherewithal to want some physical relationship with her, but in my mind, it was a stimulating and semi-innocent moment. After she put on her nightgown, she walked back into the room and got into bed. I remember thinking, “This is not bad, lying next to this beautiful lady.”

The next woman who would advance my sexual education was also older than I was. Becky was an ex-girlfriend of Alan Bashara. She was about twenty-four at the time and small and beautiful, with adorable curly hair. She was also into quaaludes. I would go on errands with her, and she’d break up some ludes, and then we’d pile into her Fiat and drive around town. The days would always end up with us both getting high, coming home, and fooling around. Our sessions turned into great instructional lessons for me, because she showed me exactly how to go down on a girl. One time she even told me to massage her buttocks. “Wow, I never would have thought of that!” I marveled.

Sex was still pretty sporadic for me in the eighth grade. But even then there wasn’t a kid I knew who was getting laid. Every one of my friends was destined to stay a virgin for the next few years, so part of the joy for me was going to school the next day and telling my friends, “Hey, I spent the night with a girl.” They were like, “Whoa, that’s beyond comprehension.” They were even more amazed after my experience with Grace at Emerson.

It started, like a lot of my sexual encounters at that time, with a quaalude. Or half a lude, to be precise. I brought a lude to school and split it with John. We planned to meet up at lunch and share our experience of what it was like to be high during school. By the fourth period, I was totally loaded. I was in my journalism class with a beautiful girl named Grace, who was very physically developed for a fourteen-year-old, especially for a Japanese girl. I knew that she had always had a crush on me. Suddenly, I had a brainstorm. I asked the teacher if I could take Grace on a campus assignment and wander around and see if we could generate some stories for the class newspaper. I was assertive because I was high and feeling the gregarious coercion of quaalude running through me. The teacher said, “Okay, just make sure you’re back before the end of class.”

Grace and I left the classroom and walked down the hallway, right into the men’s bathroom, which was this big old beautiful bathroom built in the ’30s, with lots of stalls and a tall ceiling and huge windows. I started to play with her breasts and kiss her, and she loved it. I was high and she wasn’t, but she was just as horny as I was and equally willing to have this experience. Just as I began to finger her, a little kid came into the bathroom, saw us in the stall, and screamed and ran out. Instead of panicking and aborting the mission, I was determined to find a safer place. So we walked around the campus and found a janitor’s utility shed behind one of the bungalows. We immediately stripped down and started going for it. Much to my surprise, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. As soon as I came, I stood up, and since I was a teenager, my dick stayed hard. Instantaneously, she went right down on her knees and started giving me a blow job, and I came again. I was amazed. How did she even know to do that? We got dressed and ran back to class, giggling the whole way. As soon as I got to lunch, I told my friends the whole story, and they were dumbfounded and envious. That was just another day at the office for me, because I was pretty willing to do whatever came my way.

In July, I went back and spent a typical summer in Michigan, a relaxing domain of forest and lakes and peach orchards, shooting my BB gun and hanging with Joe and Nate. But when the summer ended, my mom and I decided that I should stay on in Michigan for the first semester of ninth grade. My mom was pregnant with her third child, and she wanted me around for the birth so I could bond with my new sibling. Because she and Steve lived in Lowell, which was in the country, I wound up going to school in a town with a population of under two thousand people.

Most of the kids ostracized me. All the popular guys, the meatheads who were sons of farmers, were calling me “girly boy” and “Hollywood” and “faggot” because I had long hair. When school started, I showed up wearing different clothes and a different haircut and a different attitude, and these hay-baling hillbillies wanted to kill me. My only solace was my relationships with girls, who seemed to appreciate me a little more. That semester I hooked up with a hot Hispanic girl and a blonde named Mary, who was the winner of L’Oreal’s Long and Silky hair contest in the Midwest. She was beautiful and a year older, but our relationship never developed into the full-blown romance that I had envisioned. We spent most of our time together holding hands and making out, and she let me touch various parts of her body, but she never gave up the whole enchilada. I couldn’t tell if she was humoring me because I was younger and two heads shorter than her.

On October 3, 1976, my mom gave birth to my second sister, Jennifer Lee Idema. It was a joyful time in the family, and we had a real nice little unit going on with Steve and Julie and my mom and the new baby and Ashley, the dog. As well as bonding with Jenny, I spent some quality time with Steve. He was always so supportive of whatever I did.

When I returned to Emerson for the second half of ninth grade, a sea change had taken place. When I left, I was the king of the campus in the misfit-outcast realm. But when I came back, it was Tony Who? There were new kids who were in charge now, and some of them had whiskers. (I was miles away from having a single whisker.) So I developed a new identity. I was going to become an actor, mainly because that was what my dad was doing.

Spider had always had an interest in acting. By now he was getting tired of life as the Lord of the Sunset Strip. He was fed up with selling drugs and the constant barrage of people invading the house at all hours of the night. So when Lee Strasberg opened a branch of his institute in Los Angeles, Pops decided to enroll. He’d come home after class all excited about Method acting and sense memory recall and all these new concepts. It all seemed quite a craft to get your head around.

As part of his decision to start in a new direction, my dad cut off his long hair. Overnight, he reinvented himself with a distinctive, slicked-back film noir ’30s gangster look. Within days, I was sitting in a barber chair asking for a ’30s gangster haircut. By this time, all of the other kids were starting to catch up to me, and long hair was no longer a real sign of rebellion and individuality, so I got the haircut and baffled all my schoolmates with this new look. When my dad started wearing double-breasted pin-striped suits with black-and-white spectator shoes and nice white button-down shirts with fancy ties, the first thing I did was go out and get an identical outfit made up. Now it was time for me to enroll in acting school. I took children’s classes with a woman named Diane Hull, and they were wonderful. We were taught that there was more to acting than merely pretending: You really had to get yourself into the headspace of the character you were playing.

After a few months of studying, my dad dropped a bombshell on me. He was going to legally change his name from John Kiedis to Blackie Dammett. For his new last name, he had combined the first and last names of one of his favorite authors, Dashiell Hammett. “What do you want your stage name to be?” he asked me. In one more gesture of solidarity with my dad, I said, “Well, it’s got to be something Dammett, because I’m your son.” So Cole Dammett was born. Get it? Cole, son of Blackie.

From that day on, he was known only as Blackie, both professionally and personally. No John, no Jack, no Spider. But I had the two separate identities going. There was no way I was shaking Tony at school. And my family wasn’t about to start calling me Cole. But Blackie did. He called me Cole more often than not, because he always stayed in character.

With our stage names set, it was time to get agents. He found an agent to represent him, and then he got a recommendation for a child actor’s agent for me. Her name was Toni Kelman, and she was the hottest child agent in all of Hollywood. By the time I signed, I had already been cast in a movie. Roger Corman was doing a triple-R-rated version of
Love American Style
called
Jokes My Folks Never Told Me
. It was the quintessential ’70s flick with beautiful naked women throughout. The director had gone to UCLA with my dad, and he came over to visit one day. I answered the door.

“I’m here to see your dad,” he said cordially.

I didn’t know this guy, and I certainly didn’t know his relationship to Blackie, so I summoned myself up to my five-foot-something height and hissed, “Well, who are you?”

What I was saying with my body language was “I’ll kick your ass if you try to come in my house, even though I’m just a kid.” He was so impressed with my confidence that he cast me in two vignettes as this badass kid who tells dirty jokes in a classroom.

Right off the bat, I got hired to do an after-school special and a public-network children’s show. Of course, I was cast as the bad kid in both shows. But it was work. And it was piling up. I started an account at my dad’s bank, and soon I opened that bankbook up and saw a couple of grand in there, a shocking amount of money for me.

I was getting spoiled, cast for every part auditioned for. One afternoon I was at John’s house when Blackie called to tell me that I had just been cast as Sylvester Stallone’s son in
F.I.S.T.,
his next movie after
Rocky
. I was so excited I ran out of the house, whooping and singing the theme song to
Rocky
with my arms up in the air. I was convinced that I would be the Next Big Thing because I was co-starring with Sly Stallone, even though I had only one scene with him at the dinner table.

When I got to the set, I went to Stallone’s trailer and knocked on the door, figuring we should bond before we shot our big scene.

“Who’s that?” said a gruff voice from the trailer.

“It’s Cole. I’m playing your son in the scene we’re about to do,” I answered.

He cautiously opened the door. “
Why
are you here?” he said.

“I’m playing your son, so I thought that we should get some hang time in so I could develop—”

Stallone interrupted me. “No, I don’t think so,” he said and looked around for a PA. “Somebody come and get this kid. Get him out of here,” he screamed.

We did the scene, and when I delivered my big line, “Can you pass the milk?,” the camera wasn’t exactly in tight for a close-up. It turned out to be a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it role, but still, it was another credit.

Having been in
F.I.S.T.
helped when I went to Paramount to audition for a film called
American Hot Wax,
which was the story of Buddy Holly and the DJ Alan Freed. It was a big movie, and I was auditioning for a key role in the film, the president of Buddy Holly’s fan club. After cattle calls and innumerable callbacks and even a screen test, it narrowed down to two candidates—me and the hottest child actor around, Moosie Drier. I was confident that I’d get the role because Blackie had gone all out to help me prepare for the role, learning all of Buddy Holly’s songs and buying the big horn-rimmed glasses. So when Toni called me to tell me that I hadn’t gotten the part, I was shattered.

That night Connie took me to a friend’s house, and we went on a total drug binge—snorting coke, smoking pot, sipping booze, and chatting about how I was going to get them next time and end up being the biggest movie star this town ever saw and yadda, yadda, yadda, an endless stream of nonsensical cocaine gabbing between the boy who had just lost the role of a lifetime, the lady who wanted to help him out but really was kind of lost herself, and the guy who just wanted to get in the lady’s pants. It went on until the wee hours of the morning, when the coke finally ran out, at which point the reality ran in, and it was not so nice. The chemical depression of the drugs wearing off, combined with the reality of the loss, made for a brutalizing twenty-four hours for me.