Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (46 page)

 

Visiting Dad in the ICU was a harrowing experience. We just sat with him and cried. He was hooked up to every machine available, including one that kept him breathing. He seemed to improve for just one day—our twenty-first birthday. Even though he was still on a ventilator, he looked so at peace and so young, just like he did in the pictures from his war days. We started to feel some cautious hope that he might improve. When we left the hospital that night, we really believed that Dad was going to pull through.

 

Daddy died clean and sober, three days later, at 4 a.m. They told us that he died peacefully, just as the sun was coming up. A male nurse told me he was with him, and that those quiet predawn hours were the nicest time to die. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a nice time to die. But I did feel that our father died with dignity.

 

When I got the news, the memories came back—some painful, some sweet. I had lost the man who had meant the most to me in my life. I was a daddy’s girl, and now my daddy was gone and I was totally lost. My father’s death added to what was becoming a great black void inside of my soul that became impossible to fill. I missed, and continue to miss, my dad so much.

 

My mom was luckier than my dad. She beat her cancer, as if it were no contest at all. It was a miracle, they say. Mom had always been very religious, a devout Catholic. My mom is a tough lady, I had known that all along, but she took no personal credit for her incredible—or should I say miraculous?—recovery. My mom told us that when she lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, she’d fly to Singapore for her chemotherapy. Her doctors had told Wolfgang that she had maybe four to eight months to live. He said that the cancer had spread throughout her body and that all we could do was pray.

 

A friend drove my mom to her treatments. On the way they stopped at a small chapel in Singapore so Mom could say a prayer for a friend who was having surgery that day. Mom was praying to the Blessed Mother for her friend when she said the miracle occurred. She felt a tingling in her feet and then the sensation rose steadily up through her body. The feeling crept up to her throat, and my mom remembered raising her eyes to the statue of Mary in utter and complete amazement. She realized that she was hungry for the first time in months, and asked her friend to take her for lunch before the appointment.

 

At the clinic, after drawing blood, the doctors were about to administer the chemo when a nurse rushed in to say that my mom’s blood sample had shown something incredible. The cancer was gone; our mom had been cured. Her doctor later wrote and said that it was only God—with maybe a little help from Mom—who could have made that happen.

 

Although we were all beyond grateful for this news, it made me sad to think that miracles must only happen in Singapore. With my father passing, the last vestige of my old family life in California was lost forever.

 

Although Foxes was not the box-office smash I’d hoped it would be, the critical reception was very positive and other roles followed: I played Sara in Twilight Zone: The Movie. My character ended up with no mouth, the victim of an evil kid brother with paranormal powers. The director of my segment, Joe Dante, had called my agent because he’d seen a publicity picture of me and he liked my eyes. I had managed to get Marie a job on that movie, working as a body double for me. When I picked her up to take her to the set for my one day of shooting, she had been up all night doing coke and was a mess. She swore to me that she wasn’t high, but just one look at her saucerlike eyes gave her clean away. I scolded her all the way to the set, embarrassed that everyone would know by simply looking at her. She had always given me a hard time about my drug use, so I guess this was my turn to feel what she had felt. By the time we made it over there, she had passed out completely. It was mortifying: I had done a small toot before the shoot as well, but I at least had been professional and had a good night’s sleep. When the makeup guy, Rob Bottin, saw Marie, he rolled his eyes and gave me a look that made me feel about two feet tall. I felt terrible for her, but I was angry nonetheless. I cursed myself for not making her stay home the minute I saw the condition she was in. Despite the rocky start, Rob and I ended up becoming friends. Rob was a very talented artist, and had recently completed work on the remake of The Thing with Kurt Russell, which even now—over a quarter of a century after it was released—still looks amazing.

 

The Twilight Zone became infamous because of the terrible accident on the set of John Landis’s segment, which killed Vic Morrow and two child actors. I remember the stunned mix of emotions I felt when I’d heard that Vic Morrow was dead. The main emotion that the very mention of the name Vic Morrow had made me feel for years following his attempt to convince me not to testify against my rapist was fury. However, Vic did apologize to me after he saw me testify in court, and his death—along with the deaths of the two innocent children—was a terrible shock to everyone everywhere.

 

I also played Dana in the cult horror movie Parasite, which was the responsibility of director named Charles Band. To his credit, he did spin out a long career churning out cheapie B movies like the Puppet Master series and other “classics” like Ghoulies and Mansion of the Doomed. But even as we were shooting, I had the feeling that this director didn’t really know what he was doing and that the movie was probably going to stink. That movie introduced the world to a young, up-and-coming actress named Demi Moore, and we became very close on set.

 

One of my strongest memories making Parasite was the late-night shoot where everybody got so drunk on Crown Royal that the lead actor could literally not say his lines. And then there was the accident on set that left me with three pinched nerves and reverse curvature of the spine, all because of the director’s recklessness and incompetence. I ended up getting six thousand dollars’ compensation after paying the lawyers’ fees, and probably would have gotten more if I hadn’t been dabbling so much in the coke that I blew off most of the physical therapy. I wouldn’t even have sued if my mom hadn’t insisted upon it.

 

I played Iris Longacre in the sci-fi movie Wavelength, which featured a soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. That movie is still considered something of a lost favorite among science-fiction fans. I fell in love on the set with my costar Robert Carradine, and we started having a passionate affair right under the nose of my live-in boyfriend, Jai Winding. I was doing so much coke during that shoot that it was kind of amazing that I got away with it all. I remember during one kissing scene in the movie, Bobby leaned in and licked my nose. Afterward he confessed that his entire mouth had gone numb after he did it. But the electricity between us was incredible. The first time we got together we were driving in his truck, following a long shoot. He was taking me back to the house I shared with Jai. I just told him, “Pull over!”

 

“Huh?”

 

“Come on! Pull over! You know this is going to happen . . . let’s just make it happen. Right now!”

 

And he did. We pulled up to the deserted tip of the Hollywood Hills and did it right there on the hood of his truck. I was deeply unhappy in my relationship with Jai and I suppose I was subconsciously sowing the seeds for the destruction of that relationship. I’ve always regretted letting my relationship with Bobby end. We were so close. However, the last straw came when he found out that I had also been seeing Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple. I truly loved Bobby, but in the end my promiscuity and my drug use broke his heart.

 

Following the completion of Messin’ with the Boys, Marie and I did a string of television appearances in the United States, Japan, and Europe. All lip synching. It was fun at first, but soon the familiar tension between Marie and me reared its ugly head. When it came time to put a live band together and get on the road to start really promoting the album, Marie bailed. “I’m sorry, Cherie,” she told me. “I just can’t do it.”

 

I was at Jai’s place when she called me. At first I had no idea what she was talking about. “You can’t do what?”

 

“The tour. The rehearsals. It’s just too much. My heart . . . my heart’s not in this anymore.”

 

And that was that. Marie was in love with Steve Lukather, and suddenly she had no desire to be on the road promoting Messin’ with the Boys anymore. She wanted to be at home, and be a wife, maybe even a mother. And if I didn’t like it? Well, there really wasn’t much that I could do. After all, the sessions themselves had been hard on all of us. I had ended up putting my name to an album that sounded nothing like the way I wanted it to sound. But to keep my relationship with Capitol alive, I had to make the best of it. With Marie bailing on me, I knew deep down that it was only a matter of time before the label decided to cut their losses and drop me.

 

I immediately went back into the studio with Jai to record another album. We had completed just six rough tracks when the ax fell. Jai got the word from the higher-ups at Capitol Records that they were pulling the plug. He broke it to me over dinner. I was heartbroken, but it would have been a lie to say that it was a total shock. Some locked-away, ignored part of myself had been predicting this since the day I agreed to cut an album with my sister at our father’s behest.

 

But by the time I was twenty-four years old, there was only one thing I really did with any regularity, and it wasn’t acting, or music, or anything close. Instead, I filled the emptiness in my soul with cocaine. I did cocaine when I woke up, and I continued doing cocaine until the moment I passed out. Then I would wake up and start all over again.

 

After the demise of my contract with Capitol, my relationship with Jai quickly fell apart. I originally met Bruce through an old friend of mine who I had helped to get a job doing makeup on Wavelength. He and the friend broke up around the time that my relationship with Jai was crumbling. I started hanging out with Bruce, up in his house in the Hollywood Hills. This was the early eighties, and a new drug craze was sweeping Hollywood: freebase. It was my brother-in-law T. Y. who introduced me to smoking cocaine, but on that occasion I didn’t really “get it.” The next time I did it, with Bruce, it was all over. I started romancing that pipe like a long-lost lover.

 

When I smoked cocaine, I knew that I had finally discovered the high that my years of drug use had been leading up to. Smoking cocaine was the most powerful, intense, thrilling, and addicting high that I had ever experienced. I erupted out of my own body, my ears ringing as the blood rushed around my ears, while a tidal wave of pleasure roared through every fiber of my being. It was better than an orgasm: it was the ultimate orgasm, because it felt like every single part of my body was climaxing at once. Have you ever wondered what it would be like for your brain to experience an orgasm? For me, that was what freebase was all about.

 

I knew that a rush this intense had to be dangerous, so I made a vow never to freebase with anyone but Bruce. That way I wouldn’t end up doing it to excess. Within a few months, though, I was living with him, and I was freebasing as much as my body could physically stand. In a very short period, my entire existence became sidelined by my insatiable hunger for The High.

 

I grew to believe that I loved Bruce very much, despite his not really being my type. He was a big guy, not very handsome, and he was such a cokehead that he always had dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep. He always wore sunglasses, even inside the house. The house we shared was tucked away in the Hollywood Hills. We had high beamed ceilings, and huge windows that looked out over the glittering lights of Hollywood below. The house itself was suspended in the sky on forty-foot stilts, and it only touched the mountain at the place where the front door met the street.

 

Bruce loved me, totally. He worshipped me. No man had ever treated me like that before. He took me out to dinner whenever I wanted, and bought me whatever I asked for. His “real” job was as a jeweler, and when he felt it was time to ask me to marry him, he let me pick three of the biggest diamonds he had for my engagement ring. He made the ring himself. And of course, cocaine was everywhere: it flowed like air through our home. There was so much of it around that we jokingly referred to the place as “the White House.” Ounces of the stuff were everywhere, and it was all for me. Well, mostly. Bruce was a drug dealer, a very successful one at that, and he made his living by buying directly from the smugglers and selling it to certain . . . people who had the ability to distribute it. He didn’t really have to get his hands dirty, and he was not at all like you’d imagine a drug dealer to be. He was more like a regular businessman than anything else. Of course, having that much cocaine around could be a dangerous business, so there were some guns in the house. There was at least one gun in every room: shotguns, pistols, revolvers, and rifles. There were enough guns and cocaine in the White House to topple the government of a South American country. But Bruce kept the firearms well hidden, and the veneer of normalcy was perfectly maintained. If I didn’t dwell on it, it was almost as if they weren’t really there.

 

No, I felt that I was a lucky girl. I was lucky because Bruce had dedicated his life to making me happy. He gave me everything I’d ever wanted. So in a way, it was a good thing that he was a cocaine dealer. Because all I seemed to want in those days was cocaine. It had taken a long time for a purpose to rise up from the chaos of my life. I was being pulled in so many different directions by so many outside forces for so long that I no longer knew what I wanted. Bruce suddenly changed all of that. I realized that there was only one thing in this world worth living for: coke, coke, and more coke.