Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (40 page)

Finally
the paperwork was completed, all the meetings taken, and Nick started “special” school and therapy sessions the following week with a furrowed brow whom I’m going to call Adolf. He instantly hated the place, equating “special” with “crazy,” and tantrums erupted in bitter protest at having to sit in a room all day with six other boys (no girls) whose problems ranged from Tourette’s syndrome (constant cursing and twitching) to extreme goofballism. One uncontrollable boy became the enemy right away. He physically abused Nick when no one was looking, and his vocabulary was severely limited. All day long he repeated over and over, “The copper cat is
too
long, you are
too
long, the copper cat is
too
long. . .” At first Nick found this litany humorous but soon had to hold his ears, and create his own incantations to escape the incessant jagged jibberish.

Many sessions ensued with stern-burn Adolf, the ever-changing teachers who couldn’t seem to cope, and astringent, bespectacled know-it-alls who tried to figure out why Nick couldn’t fit into the big, bad world—why he
refused
to make the attempt to fit into any type of program. Adolf soon became the devil, and Nick would cross himself before entering the therapy room. Sometimes he had to be dragged in and held down. The heavy-handed psychologist was so sour-faced and deadly serious that even though I was supposed to meet with him weekly, I found it very difficult to open up to him. He made me cry one despairing afternoon in a rush of release, and the self-satisfied look on his face (one of the only times he smiled) ate up the moment and spat it out in a glob. He sat in cheerless judgment of the Des Barres psyche, and I wondered how it had come to this. How had I created this poker-faced goblin into my life? What lesson could he possibly teach me? Or Nick? Sometimes Nick would absolutely refuse to enter Adolf’s therapy room and wound up being “restrained” by big burly men in white overalls whom he kicked in the nuts, then being put into a carpeted closet called the “time-out room.” Some days he spent three or four hours alone in the tiny space. They said it was good for him, it gave him time to figure out what he had done wrong. I asked why he had to be in there so long. Because he refused to apologize for his mistakes, of course, they said. Nick’s sense of fair play was highly refined, and if he thought he was in the right,
nothing
could get him to say he was sorry. Nothing.

I was constantly aching inside for my darling son who couldn’t figure out why he was alive. “Why am I back here, Mom?” he said to me after a particularly hard, hard day. “I thought I had finished on this planet.” How, how,
how
was I supposed to answer a question like that? There must be something real important for you to do this
time around, little boy. Something special. (Oops, that word again.) Something to help all of humanity. So much blah, blah, blah, I felt like my hands were tied with barbed wire and on fire.

I begged for a name, a title to hang on Nick’s supposed illness. After Adolf could no longer avoid telling me
something
, he looked at me grimly and said Nick had a “personality disorder.” A vague term for “We don’t have any fucking idea.” Only long-long-term therapy could put a dent in his pain. “We have a long road ahead of us,” Adolf was fond of saying. It got to where I could hardly look at him, the man who was supposed to be helping my son.

To give Nick a break, I took him on a little trip to Vancouver, where I was taping a dumb rock show. I had recently heard from another long-lost—one of my Beatlefriends, Linda, who now lived in Oregon. She and her daughter, Aura, would take the train to Vancouver, and Victor would drive up to join the reunion. It should have been a lot of fun. It should have been. Anybody who called their kid Aura should have had some sort of clue, right?

The first day started out fine. We went shopping, we ordered room service. Aura and Nick seemed to hit it off. Then I noticed how Linda was looking at me—kind of off-kilter. She spoke sharply to me; I wasn’t living up to her expectations, I could feel it, but what could I do? She had had a crush on Victor in high school, but now—apparently in her estimation—he didn’t make the grade either. She seemed to want to feel a part of things, but wouldn’t let herself. Aura, on the other hand, was twelve and a half pushing twenty-six and was trying to have some fun. I attempted to keep a happy face, as usual.

Nick got hellishly sick on the second night, high-fever hallucinations. I couldn’t keep him in bed; he was on some kind of dangerous mission, so hot, crawling around the room, calling out to some wizard who kept evading him. I put cold washcloths on his head, I fed him medicine, I tried to keep him prone. Linda and Aura were in sleeping bags on the floor, trying not to notice the foreign language Nick was speaking. You can’t even imagine what it was like. Thank God Victor was there with us.

January 30, 1989
—
Back from Vancouver, a nightmare trip
—
mainly in retrospect
—
I tend to drizzle honey over the facts as they happen. Nicky got that horrid flu, and I wasn’t what Linda was expecting, or projecting, I
should say. Aura is very grown-up and pushing it to the max, and Linda can’t seem to fit in. I recognize that paranoia, having been there myself, but not so constantly. Aura called today and told me her mom said I had let success go to my head and I was living in a phony world of my own creation. I really tried. I know I have moments of pride, but it’s harmless, isn’t it? I could have been more generous, I suppose. Where is my lesson?

Try as I might, I couldn’t find one in that situation. Should I have paid for everybody’s pancakes? Grilled cheese and fries? Brought colorful gifts and balloons to make up for the hours spent wrestling with my delirious, sweating son? Victor told me to forget about it, I had a lot of other stuff to deal with. He was right. Maybe my lesson—though it broke my heart—is that not every single closed door should be opened.

One more flash from the past, Darryl DeLoach the first Iron Butterfly singer that had unleashed a primitive personal series of events back in ’67, came back into my life for a tiny while.

L.A. Weekly
had the idea of teaming Darryl and me together, piling us into a convertible, and driving down the Sunset Strip to gab about the good old days one more time. It was silly-nilly fun, and the fact that Darryl had as many memories of me as I had about him, boosted my question-mark self-esteem a notch or two.

Darryl lived in San Diego with his longtime girlfriend and invited Nick and me on a weekend visit to Tijuana. The four of us cruised the colorful, noisy streets eating borderline food, buying trinkets. Darryl, the former rock maniac, seemed to understand Nick, which helped make up for our boo-boo visit to Vancouver. “You know, Nick,” Darryl surmised, slapping a giant sombrero on Nick’s blond head, “with a brain like yours, you could take over the world some day!” Nick grinned and bent down to a cross-legged, brightly bundled lady, inspecting her merchandise. Darryl bought a giant pile of her cheerful handmade friendship bracelets, draping them over Nick’s arm. You’re supposed to give them away, but Nick still has every single one of them.

The spring of ’89 I entered a lengthy introspective phase. I was still in therapy with Frederick, seeing Adolf on a weekly basis regarding Nick and his frustrating lack of progress at school, and since I felt like I hadn’t done shit to help humanity, I started lending my
time to an over-sixty-five free lunch program at Virginia Park. I poured milk and passed out easy-to-chew slabs of protein and different shades of wobbly Jell-O. I felt the trapped young hearts of the senior citizens as they told oft-repeated stories as if for the very first time. Some of the old guys gave me a nudge, nudge, wink, wink, and commented on how red my hair was, how tight my skirt.

That was the extent of my erotic life. I had gotten over my sweet, unrequited crush on Sandra, and stopped seeing HIM because it had gone as far as it could go and had started to backfire a bit. I got a call from one of the rags right in the middle of a high-impact workout with Kathy, a clipped British voice saying, “We have it on good authority that you are having an affair wth HIM.” Oh, no, you don’t, you slimecreeps. I gave an unheralded Academy Award performance on the phone that day, and nothing ever came out in print. So ha, ha, HA! Kathy was really impressed. I told her I had studied acting for many years and still had my SAG card.

But the gnawing sexual impulse demands expression. I started a rock novel, hoping to continue the career I had sliced out for myself. It was going to be about an aging groupie named Blush—someone
unlike
myself, in that she just couldn’t stop flinging herself at the tempting rock gods.

BLUSH
By Pamela Des Barres

I’m alive.

Isn’t that something? Surprise, surprise, surprise.

I must be in a hospital, because the air smells like serious medicine, cloying chemicals. It makes me gag. When I try to check it out, I can’t open my eyes and I can’t move. I feel like someone has shot me up with ice cubes full of razor blades. Bandages across my eyes, I obviously can’t see anything. When I try to move my arms, I realize they are strapped down, tubes and needles in profusion. I am reeling, dizzy, stoned on painkillers. Even so, the deep, pulsating agony throb in my pussy is profound. The filthy ache of too many cocks where I didn’t want them. I have been raped. One of those things that could never happen to
me
has happened big time. But how?? My thoughts are too pure. I surround myself with white light every morning so the boogeyman can’t get in. Had I forgotten this morning? Had I been in too much of a hurry to imagine that big hand holding the shimmering sparkler, moving over me, up and down, round and round? Protection from the shiny, sticky, red unknown. I have been mortally invaded.
What day is it? The next day, or many days later? How bad is it? How damaged are the goods? Rip, tear, bleed. Beg, plead, bleed. Where is my son? I left him at home with the baby-sitter; he was playing his newest Nintendo game, he hardly even noticed when I left for the concert. The mother-fucking concert. Why are Jim Morrison’s lyrics pounding through my temples? Pounding, beating, begging for some of that bloody, motherfucking mercy; we want the world and we want it now. . . . Mother, I want to … when the music’s over . . . turn out the lights, turn out the . . . cancel my subscription to … the . . . res—ur—ec—tion. . . .

It’s my second day in the hospital. The bandages have been removed, and I can see. The metaphor here is too obvious. I can see clearly now, the rain is gone. Let us not talk softly now, the hour is getting late. My head hurts. I have been pondering my fate and my faith as my private parts heal. No permanent damage unless you consider that my soul has been charred and shredded. I have been humbled before the Lord. I have crawled on my belly, repentent, to the dungeon where sluts are bound and gagged. I have acquiesced and apologized for being raped by rock and roll. My life-style preceded me, and I got what I deserved.

What a crock of shit! I didn’t deserve to be split apart by an entire rock band and two roadies. I didn’t ASK FOR IT. I was skewered by fate and then decided to poke more holes in myself for good measure. Lots of groggy time to think and rethink, spin around in raw sewage, float undamaged in crystal-clear waters where it never happened at all. Take me down to Paradise City, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.

I’ll never forget the look in the drummer’s bleary eyes when the blood started pouring out all over his stubby hands. I don’t think he’ll ever get over it. He climbed off me and started bawling, trying in vain to zip his jeans and wipe the blood across the wall like he’d been contaminated with it. I had seen his face so many times on MTV, grinning maliciously at his many devotees. Is he afraid of me now? Will he try to make up for it the rest of his fucking life? Play gigs for charity? Give all his royalties to Mother Teresa? God, I hope so, but I’m probably giving his cum-stained conscience way too much credit.

After the final insult of the sweaty, stinking roadies taking turns on me, I was dragged, mewling, into a janitor’s closet that reeked of ammonia and sour rags and left there to rot. I lost my mind and wandered around on another plane—one where lilies bloomed in slow-motion synchronicity, and cocker spaniel puppies frolicked in
perfect pastures. And I woke up here at Cedars Sinai, where many movie stars have cleansed insulted veins and dried out gin-soaked livers. I believe Zsa Zsa had her skin tightened one too many times right here within these walls. I recuperate among the glorified, and a misguided part of me glides painfully and silently down the cool corridors at night. I peek into the closed doors where the mighty have fallen, at least temporarily. We are all one.

Raped by an entire rock band and not one, but
two
roadies! What was up with me? This was just the first few pages out of a hundred or so that I had completed. The entire book was going to take place with Blush in her hospital bed as she thinks back over her wild-child life, and tries to make some sense out of it. I should have shown this stuff to Frederick, but I sent it off to my publishers instead, just knowing I would be the new queen of rock novels.

Then I flew off to Aspen to don a wedding frock.

Melanie had had yet another bout with cocaine—her final one. I had been worried about her in New York, but she always half-assedly hid her addiction from me, so it was difficult to help. After
Working Girl
wrapped, she checked herself into rehab and called her first husband, Donnie, Mr. Clean and Sober, for moral support. They spent hours and hours on the phone while she fought her scary battle, rediscovering each other, and ah, romantic corn—surprise! surprise!—falling back in love. I felt real bad for Barbra, because I knew from experience that Donnie was addictive, but it was obviously the right heartfelt move. And now Melanie was pregnant, and I would be her matron of honor.