Somebody to Love? (28 page)
I was told to stand in one.
—G
RACE
S
LICK
,
FROM
H
YPERDRIVE
I wore the fashion of the moment, whatever it was—no let's-be-freaky outfits. I cut my hair, smiled for the cameras, answered press questions, watched the charts, made the records, and kept my ass out of jail. I didn't even mind the restrictive lifestyle because it was unique for me—a new link in a chain of shifting priorities that served to remind me of who I was, who I could be, and who I wanted to be. But conformity is never more than a temporary diversion for me. Inevitably, I revert back to my true nature.
In any situation, I ask myself, “Does this particular way of being resonate with
my
being?” Yes? Then I grab an extra-large helping. No? Then fuck it. I take what I can use and leave the rest.
Exits
I
t was 1984, the year George Orwell made famous, when my mother died of a heart ailment. I was at the Hyatt in Los Angeles, getting ready to do the TV show
Solid Gold,
when I received the call from my father. In the saddest voice I'd ever heard, he told me that everything possible had been done to help her, but it just hadn't worked.
I received the information and then I turned into a machine. Automatic pilot. I didn't tell the band that my mother had died until after we'd performed, and I have no idea how the performance went or what songs we played. I just knew I had to keep moving, because if I stopped, I'd have to think about an incomprehensible loss. The days following my mother's death were a gray vacuum. I remember Skip being gentle, not at all melodramatic, just close and concerned for my feelings. He'd have to be that strong again a few years later when my father died while we were on the road.
For several months before his death, my father had a private nurse attending to his needs. I'd call him from the road or write silly postcards trying to cheer him up, but I don't think there's any substitute for the physical companionship of someone you love when you feel sick and lonely. I've often wondered why I'm never
there
when people die. I'd like to have held both of my parents and shared some of their thoughts on the process of dying. I'm not sure I could have said no to touring without causing major problems to Starship, but the more I think about it now, I see that I should have been with my father. Even with the nurse there, family might have made him a bit more at ease with what he knew were his final days.
“Now
you're
the matriarch,” Paul reminded me of the natural but bewildering reality.
Some whiny little part of my mourning was anger— “How could you leave me?” No matter how old a person is, it feels like it's too soon for them to go. I talk to my father and mother sometimes, hoping their spirits can hear, about my love, my mistakes, and my gratitude for their peaceful parenting.
The older I get, the more I see the striking similarities between a parent's and a child's genetic makeup. In my case, I got my mother's personality, or at least the showtime aspects of it, and from my father, I got an almost exact duplicate of his body (minus the critical gender specifications). But there's an added element that distinguishes each of us, one from the other. It's the individual's specific way of perceiving the world that swings the whole game in a different direction.
The way I see it, that missing number in the DNA soup is the soul, our unique spirit that puts a seemingly new spin on the predetermined template. But sometimes the inherited parts are so similar, it's astounding. Everything about my body structure, hair texture, and the shape of my hands, feet, legs, and nose corresponds with my father's. It goes so far that when the dentist made a mold of both the top and bottom rows of my teeth for braces, and I placed them beside my father's molds, each tooth was in exactly the same place. Not just similar—exact. When I looked at him then, I thought I was seeing myself thirty-five years in the future, doing some conservative banker cross-dressing. But his shy, retiring personality was not part of the genetic hand-me-down.
That's where my mother stepped in. She and I could make the same remark at the same time about the same person, without any of it having been part of the context of the previous sentence. And she gave me my only paranormal experience. Several months after she died, I was lying in bed reading an unrelated spy novel, and I heard
her
voice say, “Grace?”
All right!
I thought.
I'm going to talk to a spook, and it's my mom.
I said, “Yes?”
But that was it, no comment, no advice, no warnings, no bad jokes, just a query in the form of my name. I kept at her for a while, talking out loud, saying, “It's okay. I'm not afraid, you can chat—say anything. I can hear you. What do you want to talk about?” But she didn't feel it necessary to say anything more. She just made the brief connection—then silence. I still don't know exactly what I was supposed to understand from that, maybe just that she does indeed live without form. Is it something my mind did for the comforting aspect? No, I'm already open to intangible phenomena, so I wasn't looking for proof. It was the shortest gabfest I've ever had.
I know my parents live in me, with or without aural remarks. They are not missing, but their forms are missed.
Panda
I
n 1985, somewhere on the road, I was watching TV and saw this fat little black-and-white ball of fur sitting on a weighing scale in the middle of a roomful of popping flash bulbs, shuffling cameramen, yelling reporters, squirming children, and white-coated veterinarians. It was a baby panda at the Ueno Zoo in Japan, and they were all closing in on him like he was a sack of diamonds. When I noticed that he was watching the chaos with a certain dignified composure, I was intrigued. I knew he must be feeling some fear, and I could relate to that. After all, I'd been in the rock-and-roll press pit, in the midst of a frightening pack of agitated, overadrenalized Homo sapiens shouting out my name, ignoring whatever civilized behavior had been attributed to their species.
The panda just sat there. He could have tried to lurch off the table, but he seemed to be enjoying the stupid human tricks, and I learned an important lesson from him: it's all just a passing show. When I got back home from the tour and was sorting through my mail, an envelope with a picture of a panda in the upper left-hand corner caught my eye. I hadn't cared one way or the other about animals before; I'd always thought they were just a part of the scenery. But that little guy in Tokyo had shown me something I'd never noticed in anything but humans—a
soul.
I suddenly realized that all these creatures were running around with fur and feather outfits on, just like our skin suits, and for the first time, I saw that inside all the different forms were individual personalities. These “animals” were, in fact, sentient beings who wanted the same things we wanted—food, shelter, peace, entertainment, health, and all the rest of it. Some of them could fly, swim, run, and sleep better than we could, and some of them could swat your head off in one fast move—like a panda bear. I'd discovered a whole new set of friends to hang out with. For a “city girl” like me to come around to this perspective was akin to landing on another planet. Except I hadn't landed on another planet so much as I'd taken a good hard look at the one I was on.
I'd love to
have
a panda, I thought. So I wrote to the outfit with the panda logo and asked them how to go about acquiring one.
They were nice enough
not
to say, “Wow, are you dumb!” Instead, they sent me a load of information, which included the fact that pandas couldn't be owned by anyone but the Chinese government, which, if it felt like it, occasionally gave one or two to another country as a diplomatic gesture. But that was it. Pandas were almost extinct; there were one thousand or so left in the entire world. Their land had been taken by man, and bamboo, their main source of food (each panda eats forty pounds of it per day), routinely dies off en masse every sixty years or so. Without land or bamboo, the pandas were in big trouble.
So, no, apparently I couldn't have a panda. But I could write a song about them:
He can feel the night, the last sunset is in his eyes
They will carry him away, take his beauty for their prize
Ah, but hunger would have come when the bamboo forest died …
Oh Panda Bear—my gentle friend
I don't want to say goodbye
Oh Panda Bear—when will the killing end
When will we get it right?
Panda
Once I'd gained this new awareness of the animal kingdom, I remembered that Skip, on Christmas or Thanksgiving, used to take a large plate of leftovers “out to the backyard for the animals.”
“What animals?” I'd asked him.
“Oh, you know, possums, squirrels, foxes, raccoons …”
Raccoons? They're related to pandas—cousins with the same heavy eye makeup.
I started putting food out at night (raccoons are nocturnal animals) and looking out the window to see if any masked bandits wanted to dine at our house. Yup. Several bellied up for dinner, and several more of their fellow critters followed: foxes, possums, vultures, squirrels, deer, even the occasional neighborhood cat or dog. In fact, it got to be such a spectacle that some humans with cameras from the local TV stations arrived to film the menagerie.
My favorite visitors, though, were the raccoons—they were smart, tough, and surprisingly peaceful. They brought their babies and they'd hang out with each other and play under the solar panel where I burned the words
Raccoon Saloon
into the supporting horizontal wooden beam. I was hooked. Every night they'd come and eat two large bags of dry cat food, two dozen raw eggs, four bags of Oreo cookies, and assorted grapes, watermelon, leftovers, and anything else lying around in the grass, creating a scene that looked like one of those anthropomorphic paintings of animals doing human activities. They would lie around on the lounge chairs, swim with each other in the pool, eat grapes, and have sex on the lawn—a regular Roman orgy.
Among the tribe who lived part-time around the south end of our property in Marin were a mother and baby raccoon who arrived every evening for about a month. One particular night, when they reached the top of the hill near the solar panel, I noticed they were moving at a pace that was far slower than usual. Then I saw that the little one had dragged himself up the hill by his front paws with both of his hind legs splayed flat and immobile on the ground.
I called a wildlife organization to ask how best to trap the young raccoon and bring him in to be treated, but they said it wouldn't be a good idea, that his mother might not take him back after he was returned. I had to just leave it alone and see what happened. Skip dubbed the baby Sore-foot, a sweet sort of Native American–sounding nickname, and night after night, I watched this amazing scene of a patient mother climbing the hill from wherever they called home during the day, guiding her baby to the food at the top of the hill. I called the mother Torn Back, because she had four gashes about an inch and a half apart down the side of her hindquarters. The deep scratches looked to be the result of a fight with some kind of large wildcat or puma, wounds she probably had received while protecting Sorefoot from becoming a meal for the feline predator.
After about a month and a half, I noticed that Torn Back's oozing scratches and Sorefoot's seemingly dead rear feet were starting to heal. Eventually, thick soft fur covered the mother's scars and the baby began to run and play with the other young raccoons as if nothing had happened. Did they know about some herbal healing root? Did they just wait it out, dealing with what
is,
rather than succumbing, as humans often do, to what
should be?
Maybe mom rubbed his hind legs, or baby licked his own wounds and hers—I'll never know. But I'll always honor the courage and compassion these raccoons had for each other, and their inner knowledge of how to exist, no matter what the circumstances. Torn Back and Sorefoot—teachers come in all shapes, sizes, and strange given names.
May they all continue to ravage your garbage cans. And mine.
After I wrote to the panda people, my name was added to the universal master list of “Suckers for Animal Causes.” The mail poured in. From PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) I received, among other distressing photos, an image of a white rabbit torn open to his ribs for the purpose of cosmetic testing. That one really hit home, and I began to seriously investigate the phenomenon of animal testing and biomedical research (fraud).
After several years (1987 to 1992) of reading American Medical Association “white papers,” along with hundreds of books and reports on the practice of vivisection, I started to get offers from radio stations, TV programs, and magazines to give my views on the subject of biomedical research. I even found myself on the same side of a debate once with G. Gordon Liddy (the mind boggles), who from a scientific rather than an ethical stance was objecting to extrapolating from animal studies. In the end, our strange combination of personalities probably did more to undermine our point than prove it. After all, if Grace Slick and G. Gordon Liddy, coming from extreme left and right politics, actually agree on something, isn't that a demonstration of solidarity that both sides ought to stay away from? But it also demonstrated that, when it was necessary, political adversaries could drop their differences for a universal interest.
Since the rest of this chapter has nothing to do with prurient sex in the sixties, you may decide to skip over it, but for what it's worth, here are three solid reasons to be wary of pharmaceutical drugs (yeah, the ones that are endorsed by “the suits”):
1. More people experience incapacities or death from pharmaceuticals than from all street drugs combined.
2. Pharmaceuticals are
all
tested on animals.