High On Arrival (25 page)

27

I used my Mickey Mouse money to buy a house for Shane and me. We’d been renting for years, first near my mother, then nearby in Woodland Hills. When I came home for weekends with Shane, we always spent a little time house hunting. Then we walked into an old Spanish house that I fell in love with on the spot. Shane sat down on the floor in one of the empty bedrooms and said, “This is my room.” The house was a little beyond our budget, but we found a way to make it work, and I was proud. I had owned many houses as a teenager, but they didn’t count. This was my first house as a responsible adult.

In mid-February of 2001, a month after we moved, I was driving down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood and got a call from Dad’s manager. He said, “Your father is very ill. He’s in an ambulance on the way to the UCLA Medical Center. Can you call everybody?” Shaking, I called my siblings, pulled Shane out of school, and drove with him straight to the hospital.

Dad was obviously very ill. Not surprisingly, there was something wrong with his new liver. (A photo of him drinking had appeared in the
National Enquirer
mere months after the successful transplant. On the Howard Stern show he claimed he was just trying to “break in” the new liver.) Dad’s belly was distended; there was dried black blood on his teeth; his hands were like claws. Dad, the smooth-talking, high-rolling drug-rock legend was writhing on the bed, sick and fragile and fallen. Shane, now an eighth grader, tugged my hand and I took him out of the room. He sat down in the hallway with his backpack and said, “Look, Mom, that guy in there? He’s not my grandfather. Chuck was my grandfather. That guy is a bad guy. I don’t need to see him. I don’t even know him. I don’t want to know him.” Fair enough. There were hundreds of photos of Shane playing with Chuck, but maybe five of him with my father. We’d kept our distance—in part at the will of Dad’s current wife, Farnaz— but also, Shane knew what had gone on between me and Dad. He was just fourteen and, unlike me, there
was
much he hadn’t seen. I’d spared him the details, but he knew enough.

With Dad in the hospital, I stopped going to my addicts’ support group. Dad had an album coming out and his “team” didn’t want anyone to know he was sick. I didn’t see how I could go to meetings without talking about his condition, so I stopped going regularly. Instead, I went to visit Dad in the hospital every day. I drove over Beverly Glen to UCLA, driving right past 414 St. Pierre Road, half out of nostalgia and half because it was a traffic-free shortcut. I flew over the hill as I listened to the Coldplay song “Trouble,” about being tangled, twisting and turning, in the middle of a spiderweb.

Late one night at the end of February, I was in the kitchen having tea with Mick when a nurse from the ICU called and said, “Your father wants to talk to you.”

Dad came on the line and said, “The doctor is insane. The nurses are having sex on the floor under my bed. They’re trying to kill me. I need you to get me out of here. You’ve got to come over.” Dad was losing it. Outside, it was pouring rain.

Mick said, “You don’t have to go.”

I replied, “How can I not go? He asked for me. He called me.” Reduced in an instant to a five-year-old, under his spell, I drove over the hill to the hospital and hurried to his bed. When I opened the door in the dim light I saw his quiet form. He was fast asleep. I kissed him on the forehead, squeezed the rain out of my hair, and went home.

No matter how remote Dad had been, during his weeks of illness the whole band of loopy siblings kept chatty, spirited vigil at his bedside. Dad wasn’t talking much. Mostly he wanted to be well enough to be wheeled out into the courtyard to see his pug, Monty. Sometimes he’d ask for a paper and pen and write lines and slashes, hieroglyphics as mysterious and frustrating as the man himself.

When I finally found myself alone with him, I said, “Dad, I want to talk to you.” For all our past together, I felt timid. My dad could cut you with a sentence, making you feel worthless. Just the day before, I had put my head on his chest and said, “I love you so much, Dad.” He’d grunted, “Enough, Max.”

Now I steeled myself for his likely dismissal and said, “You know, we’ve been through a lot. You know what I’m talking about: good times, weird times, bad times, scary times. I would not be the woman I am had I not been your daughter. So I want you to know that I forgive you, and I love you very, very much.”

Dad had never said “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong.” He never even acted like any of it was regrettable. For so long that was what I thought I wanted from him in order to move on, get on with my life, and exorcise that particular demon. But now I realized I didn’t need him to say anything. I had the power to close that chapter for us. He was reaching his end and would never apologize, because that was not who he was. But I could let that go and forgive him, and love him, which is what I’d really needed to do all along.

Dad looked up at me. As I expected, he didn’t say anything; he just sighed and put his head on my shoulder. That was the moment, our moment. The weight of it was even and bearable— welcomed by us both. All that had passed between us was spoken and unspoken. We both knew the scope of it all, and neither of us wanted to reduce the complexity of our relationship to fault and blame. Words and apologies were smaller than what we told each other with our eyes. We were human, and we made mistakes, and we lived with them, and he was dying with them. At the end of his life, where we were standing, the most important emotion was love, in a simpler form now than it had ever been between us. We sat quietly, and it was one of those moments in life when the past washes away and you feel clean and new.

I’d been invited to Aspen for the 2001 Comedy Festival for a tribute to
American Graffiti
. I agonized about going—I knew the end was near for Dad—but I decided to honor my commitment. On my last visit to the hospital before the trip I said, “Look, Dad, I have to go out of town.”

He said, “Fuck you.”

We’d made our peace, and I wanted to keep it. Which meant I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. I said, “No, you’re not going to do this again. The time for you to rule my emotions is over. You can’t destroy me with a word or a look. Not anymore. What I want you to say is, ‘I love you, Max. Have a good trip.’ ”

He looked at me with his tired eyes and said, “I love you, Max. Have a good trip,” a little like a reluctant teenager obeying his parent.

I said, “That’s more like it Pops.” I kissed him and turned to leave.

Then he said, “Hey Laura-bug, you dropped your bag on the floor. Don’t forget it.” There was nothing to the words themselves, but in his voice—in the tone and the way he said it—there was an apology, the regret and love I’d always known was there but had so desperately needed to hear. Shane and I went to Aspen for five days. We went skiing and snowboarding, saw comedy shows, and met cool people. We had a great time. By the time we came back Dad had taken a turn for the worse. He was intubated and unable to speak. He never spoke another word.

At the end, Dad was suffering enough that my brother and I asked the doctors to up his morphine. Even though he was so out of it that he couldn’t talk, we were reasonably sure that if anyone should go out under the influence of an opiate, it was Dad.

I sat with him for a couple hours. He wasn’t conscious, but I told him stories. I said, “Remember when we were on the road and we had that food fight and you used the clear plastic food dome as a shield over your head?” And “Remember when the band got stuck in the Lincoln Tunnel and you made us sing ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ in four-part harmony for hours?” And “Remember in Norway when you were holding Shane and you slipped in the snow, but Shane didn’t get a scratch on him?” I sang songs we’d written together. I knew it was over and I just stayed, holding his hand, loving him.

Watching Dad slowly dying was like watching a great tree fall. A beautiful, old, majestic, noble oak with tree rot and disease spreading through him. His core was tainted and you could see it in his eyes. He was so sad and so sick and so isolated, by design. I thought about his life and his body of work—his potential had been limitless, but after a certain point the production was a bunch of crap. What a waste. I could spend time being furious and damaged, but what was the point? My father didn’t get that he was connected to others, that the harmful stuff he did to himself was harmful to other people. Harmful, in some small way, to the universe.

That night, as I walked out of UCLA, I passed a chapel. I detoured in and picked up a prayer card and a little orange pencil. I wrote, “Please take my father, tonight if possible.” I folded it, put it in the box, sat there and cried for a while, then went home.

At five the next morning Farnaz called. She told me it was the end. I tore ass over the hill, listening to Coldplay, frantically dialing Bijou, Chynna, Jeffrey, and Tam. Nobody was answering the goddamn phone. When the phone rings at five a.m.—
that’s
when you’re supposed to take the call. Bijou later told me that she knew exactly why I was calling and couldn’t bear to hear it.

By the time I got to the hospital, Dad’s eyes were fixed. As I stood at his bedside, I watched Dad’s heart rate drop all the way down to three. Farnaz screamed, “John! Don’t leave me, John!” His heart rate shot up and slowly started falling back down. Farnaz screamed again and his heart rate went back up. This was going on and on. Farnaz was screaming and crying on her knees. Remembering how Dad had silenced Genevieve at his mother’s bedside, I said, “Can you shut the fuck up and let him die already?” If I could let him go, she could let him go. Farnaz quieted and Dad flatlined. He was gone. I called Mick. Dear Mick got in his car, drove to the hospital, and played his guitar and sang to my dad’s body. It was a Monday.
Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day.

Owen Elliot worked with Lou Adler, my dad’s longtime producer, to organize the memorial service. It was held at the Roxy, one of my old Sunset Strip hangouts. It was open to the public and the marquee on Sunset Boulevard said “All the leaves are brown.”

The place was packed with friends, family, musicians, celebrities, and fans, including Denny and Michelle, the surviving members of the original Mamas & the Papas; Scott McKenzie; Spanky; my siblings: Jeffrey, Bijou and her then-boyfriend Sean Lennon, and Tam; Mick and Shane; Tim Curry; Warren Beatty; and Ed Begley Jr. Chynna was not at the memorial service. She had already committed to performing at a Brian Wilson event, so she didn’t come. Hanging on either side of the stage were poster-size photos of my father. One showed him in what he had worn for his
Wolf King of L.A
. album cover—he was standing at the ocean’s edge, with long hair and a beard, wearing a raccoon fur coat, skintight stovepipe jeans, and a silver silk top hat with a rhinestone hatband that Leon Russell had given him. The other poster was the author photo from my father’s book,
Papa
John.
It showed him clean and sanitized, the dad who never quite was.

After a video tribute, the live-music portion of the program started. Shane, who was just learning guitar and had never performed onstage before, sang a song by Silverchair called “Miss You Love.” “I’m not too sure how I’m supposed to feel or what I’m supposed to say,” he sang, and I thought,
That’s my boy
.

When my turn came I sang a song Dad wrote about me called “Fairytale Girl.” In the middle of the song, one of the photos of my father fell down. I picked it up and walked around the stage, carrying it and singing the song.

Once upon a time I knew a fairytale girl.

She flew her plane all around the world.

It all went well until she couldn’t find a place to land.

Jeffrey joined me and others up onstage to sing “Monday, Monday” and “California Dreamin’.” Dad’s light shone in that room, the powerful words and music that drew us all to him, and the imposing, large-as-life presence that made us want to be part of his world.

Two weeks after my father’s funeral, Shane and I walked into a pet store at the Northridge Mall and I saw a pug puppy. I said, “Look, Shane, it’s Max.” Shane said, “You’re right.” It turned out that Max had been born on January 15, 2001, the day I bought our house. He was meant to live there. We brought him home. The same day, unbeknownst to me, Bijou went out and bought two dogs.

Max was my first dog, and he was exactly what I needed right then. I’d kneel on the floor next to my bed and say, “Max, I feel so sad and lonely and scared and my dad is dead.” Max’s buggy eyes looked up at me with that unconditional dog love that replenishes the soul.

When Max was still a tiny puppy, I got a card from a guy named Lee Allan, who asked if I remembered him from acting class. Of course I did. Lee was tall and athletic—a devoted beach volleyball player. He was bright and extremely funny—a working comedian. In acting class we’d had a scene together in which we were supposed to kiss. When the moment came, we started kissing and didn’t stop. The acting coach tried to interrupt: “Ahem … you guys?” Lee was in a relationship at the time, so that kiss stood alone, but soon after my father’s memorial Lee’s condolence note arrived. It started, “Dear Fairtytale Girl …” It gave his phone number, and we started dating. Little Max was like our child. We raised him, and Freddie—another pug I got as a companion for Max—together. It looked like I was moving on.