Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (31 page)

 

Suddenly the rest of the world fell away, and I realized what was about to happen. I felt sick all over again. Only this time it was a different kind of sick; it was a sick feeling that was deep down inside of me, inside of the core of me. I started to mutter, “No . . . no . . . no . . .” to myself, shaking my head.

 

“You can’t have a career with the band if you have this baby,” Aunt Evie was saying from some faraway place. “Everything is happening for you now . . . this . . . now. It’s just not right. Maybe in a few years when you are with the right man, in a better place—but now? It would be the biggest mistake of your life. You have to talk to Scott. He is the father, isn’t he?”

 

When Aunt Evie said this, I felt my cheeks burning. I put my hands up to my face and groaned. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation with my dad right next to me. Instead of answering, I just nodded.

 

“And look how sick you’ve been, sweetie puss,” Aunt Evie went on. “Some women . . . they’re like that for the whole nine months! You don’t want that! Come on, honey, you know what we have to do. We have to be smart here. We have to do what’s right for you.”

 

When the time came to call Scott, I couldn’t do it. I was so ashamed, so humiliated. All I could think about was how lousily Scott had treated me on tour. I felt like a fool, that I had been used. In the end, my father had to call him. I sat there, cringing, listening to their tense conversation. When my father hung up, there was a look on his face that scared me. God, no father wants this to happen to his teenage daughter, I thought. “What did he say, Dad?” I asked in a quiet voice.

 

Dad shrugged. “He said he’d take care of it. Told me to let him know how much it all will cost and he’ll pay us back.” Then he muttered under his breath, “The little bastard!” He walked to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a bourbon and ice, and spent the rest of the day drinking and quietly brooding.

 

Sandie’s doctor was curt and businesslike. After the examination, he informed my father and me that I was three months pregnant, and that I would have to stay overnight in the hospital to undergo the procedure. When he said that, I squeezed my father’s hand a little tighter. The night before I was due in the hospital, I sat up in my bedroom most of the evening. I held my belly, running my palm over it to see if I could feel any signs of the life that was growing inside of me. I was crushed. An indescribable, desolate feeling came over me. Most of all, I was scared. Scared out of my wits.

 

When it was over, I was lying alone in the clean, white hospital linens staring out of the window. The sky seemed unreal, like the painted backdrop for some awful theater production. The sadness inside of me was unfathomably deep. I can’t say what it was that I felt anymore. I couldn’t cry anymore; it was as if I had somehow run out of tears.

 

When the doctor came in to check on me, I asked him if it was a boy or a girl.

 

He shook his head without really meeting my gaze and said, “I don’t know. I didn’t look.”

 

Maybe he was trying to be kind. Maybe he didn’t want me to know. I knew for certain that a part of me was gone along with my unborn child. I’d lost some vital part of myself in that hospital, and I felt instinctively that I would never get it back.

 

My father and Marie visited. Grandma and Aunt Evie, too. But Scott didn’t. He didn’t even call the house to see how it went.

 

When I made it back home, I stayed in bed for a few days, thinking it all over. I started to suspect that Scott wouldn’t keep his word about paying for the abortion, and it turned out that I was right.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 20

 

Too Many Creeps

 

 

 

 

I was standing alone in Aunt Evie’s backyard later that evening. I was still unable to get the day’s events in the recording studio out of my mind. I’d missed a few days recording because I was recovering from my abortion. When I returned that morning, I discovered that Joan had recorded lead vocals on a number of tracks that I was supposed to sing. The one that hurt the most was the album’s title track, “Queens of Noise.” Billy Bizeau of the Quick had written that song specifically for me. Now I would only be singing on five songs out of the twelve on the album. What would I do onstage while these songs were being performed? I was scared that the others were using this opportunity to push me out of the band altogether. Of course, they denied it, but following my first day back at work, it sure felt that way.

 

It was chilly out there, with the crisp February air all around me. For once, it was quiet. Ever since we all moved into Aunt Evie’s tiny house, privacy had become a rare commodity. In the gloom I rummaged around in my purse, trying to find something. If this had been the old house, I could have flicked a switch, and the backyard would have been bathed in the effervescent glow of at least a dozen lights: the underwater lights would have made the swimming pool glow and shimmer. But all of that was gone now. It belonged to someone else, some other family, some other life. I thought about my mother. Far, far away, she was living in some mansion with Wolfgang. I was sure they had a pool, maybe a dozen pools. Hell, maybe they had their own private stretch of the ocean. She was over there in Indonesia with Wolfgang and my brother, doing whatever it is that people in Indonesia do. I wondered if she thought about Marie and me.

 

I stood there in the dark, rummaging through my purse, my sense of frustration growing. I wondered what my brother looked like now. Amazingly, it had been almost a year since he’d left. He’d be taller, maybe even taller than me. I wondered how old he’d be the next time I saw him. Probably as old as I was now. The thought made my head swim. I looked up, but there were no stars tonight. No shimmering pool. Nothing—just plain, bare concrete and the chirp of crickets.

 

“I thought I heard you come in . . .”

 

“Jesus!” I spun around to see Marie standing behind me, almost totally shrouded in darkness. “You scared the crap out of me!”

 

“Sorry . . .”

 

Marie came closer, and we just stood there for a few moments taking in the unimpressive panorama. After a while Marie asked, “How did it go? Did you have a good recording session?”

 

I shrugged. “They all hate me,” I told her quietly.

 

“That bad, huh?” Marie laughed a sad, little laugh and then we lapsed into silence again. There was no rush for words. Sometimes Marie and I could communicate without saying a word. I knew that my twin could sense that I was hurting inside.

 

“Your friends . . . they’ve been asking for you at the Sugar Shack. They wanted to know if you’ve gotten too famous to talk to them anymore.”

 

I laughed. “No, I’m just busy, you know that. I’ll stop by next week, I guess. How is everybody?”

 

“Fine. Everyone’s good. I, uh . . . well, I don’t think that I’ll be going to the Sugar Shack much anymore.”

 

“Oh yeah? Why not?”

 

Marie shrugged sadly. “Too many creeps.”

 

“Creeps? At the Shack?”

 

I was surprised to hear that. Of course the Shack had its fair share of bozos and losers . . . what place didn’t? But Moose and Ken, the guys who ran the place, did a pretty good job of keeping the real creeps out.

 

“Well . . . you know how it is,” she said hesitantly. “Everybody knows who you are. They know I’m your twin. Every asshole and his brother in the Valley seem to be in there these days, all wanting to hit on the Cherry Bomb’s sister. Some of them . . . well, they’re really scary, Cherie. I mean it—you gotta be careful the next time you’re over there.”

 

Marie lapsed into silence. I didn’t say a word. I waited for her to continue, and when she did, it was in a wistful, sad voice. “They see you up there onstage. Acting like . . . well, acting the way you do. They think you’re really like that. They even think I’m like that. This one creep . . . he . . . he even attacked me.”

 

“What?”

 

“It was nothing. I mean—he was drunk. The bouncers threw him out. It was okay.”

 

I turned and looked at Marie. With everything that had been going on with me, I hadn’t had the time to really consider what my notoriety with the Runaways was doing to my sister. Once upon a time I was the wallflower; I grew up feeling that I couldn’t hold a candle to Marie’s personality. I was always hovering nervously in the background, looking on jealously as Marie went on dates and hung out with the popular kids. But these days Marie obviously felt the same way I once felt. I knew that she had to quit school when I joined the Runaways. Too much attention, too much jealousy. Since then, she’d gained some weight. There was a sadness in her eyes that I’d never seen before. She was working at a fast-food place called the Pup ’n’ Taco over on Vanowen Boulevard to help the family with grocery money, which would be an okay job for any other sixteen-year-old . . . but not when your twin sister is one of the Runaways . . . .

 

Marie had never mentioned it, but Paul once told me that one bunch of guys drove for miles just so they could jeer at her through the drive-in window. He told me that she was totally humiliated, and that she was sobbing when she told him about it. She made him swear not to tell me.

 

“There was this one guy at the Shack,” Marie told me. “He seemed really cool. He was just hanging out with me, and he seemed totally normal. He didn’t talk about you at all. Honestly, I didn’t even think he knew who you were. But then all of a sudden he’s asking me all kinds of stuff . . . all about you. He wanted to know your shoe size, and your bra size, and your fucking hat size. Turns out he’s another damn lunatic. He told me he has pictures of you, and articles about you, all over his bedroom wall. Isn’t that sick, Cherie?”

 

I shuddered, and for a moment I thought about my bedroom in the old house. All of the pictures of Bowie on the walls. I was about to say something, when Marie dropped a bombshell.

 

“Anyway, he told me that he’s in love with you, but since he’d never get the chance to be with you, he figured that I would do just fine.”

 

“Oh my God. What did you do?”

 

“What do you think I did? I told him to go fuck himself.”

 

I could hear her anger, her resentment. It was directed at me, as if somehow I were responsible for every crazy who bought one of my records and then decided to go stalk my sister. I didn’t know what to say anymore. I felt helpless.

 

“After that, I stopped going to the Shack for a while. Like I said: too many creeps.”

 

There was a long silence. An uncomfortable one. It was at moments like these when I guess neither of us really wanted to be attuned to what the other was thinking. I started rummaging around in my purse again, mumbling “Goddammit!” when I still couldn’t find what I was looking for.

 

“You looking for these?”

 

I looked at Marie’s outstretched hand, and in the semidarkness I could see that she was holding my vial of quaaludes. It was a strange feeling, a vague embarrassment, like somebody had just walked in on me while I was using the bathroom. I shrugged, and nonchalantly said thanks. I reached for the pills, but Marie didn’t hand them over. She was peering at the label, as if she had never seen a bottle of quaaludes before. I started to get mad.

 

“I found them on the floor,” Marie said. “Lucky for you! If Grandma had found them, she would have had a conniption!”

 

“Yeah, well,” I said, “Grandma’s so old-fashioned. Can you give them back, please?”

 

Marie held the bottle to her chest. “Are you doing a lot of these?” Something in the way she asked it really bothered me. All of a sudden she was acting like my mother.

 

“They’re ludes, Marie, for Chrissakes. You’re acting like you found some heroin or something. Calm down! They’re just tranquilizers.”

 

“I know what they are.”

 

“Yeah, you do know. You’ve done plenty of them yourself, remember?”

 

She couldn’t deny that. She did them; her friends did them . . . she had no right to get judgmental about this. I stretched out my hand for the pills. “Give me a break, Marie,” I said, slow and deliberately. “I have a handle on it. Now hand them over.”

 

“How many do you do?”

 

“Jesus Christ! A couple a day, at the most. You’re acting like I’m a coke fiend or something! I just need something to help me wind down at the end of the day, okay?”

 

“Just like Dad, huh?”

 

That comment hit like a slap to the face. “No,” I said coldly, “not in the slightest.”

 

Marie looked at me with that superior I-know-what’s-best expression that made me want to strangle her. I knew that she was worried, but I still didn’t think she had any right to be giving me this speech. “I guess that explains it,” she said, with a little smirk on her lips.

 

“What?”

 

“Why our room is always a mess. Why you haven’t done any of your chores.”

 

“Marie! I’m getting really, really pissed off right now. I’m in the middle of recording an album. I’m busy—you have no idea of what’s going on in my day-to-day life, okay? So don’t even—”