Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (32 page)

Cyrinda could provoke me to violent reactions more than anybody I’ve ever known—with the possible exception of Joe Perry. Cyrinda wasn’t gay, but she’d adopted the grandiose gestures of a queen. “
Uhnk!
Oh, what are you FUCKIN’ tawkin’ abawt?! Oh, Jesus
Cher-ist!
You stupid fuck! Jesus! Get him the fuck outta heah! Oh, what a cunt! Oh,
Jay-
sus!” That kind of high-camp verbosity.
Huh-hoo-ahhh!
Cyrinda’s vicious put-downs were like getting slugged. I couldn’t take it after a while, because when I’m sober I get quiet. I think I’m such a fuckin’ bore.

O
ver a period of, say, twenty-five years I’ve gone to a bunch of different rehabs. I don’t remember the exactomongo timelines. So, to rehash—
ha-ha-ha!
—all my rehabs (maybe we can crush one up and share it,
heh-heh
): (1) Good Samaritan Hospital in New York way back in ’83, then (2) Hazelden to (3) East House (and back to East House) to (4) Chit Chat in Wernersville, then (5) Sierra Tucson, then (6) Steps in Malibu in 1996 to (7) Las Encinas in 2008 with Erin, and (8) Betty Ford in 2010. Whatever it takes.

The first rehab I went to was back in ’83 because I was so fucked-up I was too wobbly to walk down the sidewalk. One of the reasons I wanted to go to Good Samaritan was that I’d heard they did tests on heroin there.
I’ll go!
I thought. “Well, can I be one of the guinea pigs for the heroin? What do we get, uh, a shot every day? I’ll do it!” NOT! That was Good Samaritan. Their motto came from the Bible: “T
HE
S
PIRIT OF THE
L
ORD HATH SENT ME TO HEAL THE BROKENHEARTED AND RECOVER SIGHT TO THE BLIND
,” but as Saint Augustine said, “Please deliver me from my sinful life, O Lord—but not today.”

While I was on tour with the Jimmy Crespo–Rick Dufay version of Aerosmith in ’83, David Krebs had sent a psychiatrist, Dr. Lloyd Moglen, out on tour with the band to see what could be done, but—poor man!—he was aboard the ship of fools and their rabid pharmaceuticals. Lost souls! We were dazed and confused, divers in the murky depths of drugs and our din. We were down below the five-hundred-foot line—we couldn’t come up for air or we’d get the bends. The doctor threw up his hands: “There’s no saving them,” he cried. “The band is broken and cannot be fixed.”

Cyrinda and I were in Florida around this time and I got into a vicious fistfight with her. She may have looked like Betty Boop but she could pack a punch like Sonny Liston.

Hey Betty Boop you got me droolin’

I’m buzzing round your hive tonight

You play the hooky stead of schoolin’

Son of a bitch put out the light

The fights with Cyrinda became so violent that David Krebs sent another psychiatrist to come get me. He brought me out to Saint Something’s Hospital in San Francisco. It was a mental institution. They put me on a gurney, wheeled me into a room. I was kicking like a mule, my feet were twitching. I’d been up for days, I needed sleep. I drank on the plane, but you can’t sleep on booze, you’ve got to pick it up and drink again after three hours. They put an IV in my arm. “Um, Doctor,” I pleaded, “I need some more Valium.” The fuck
promised
me he’d give me Valium. “All right, Steven, here it comes, look!” And I’d watch him hook up the tube. But it wasn’t Valium. They were dripping saline solution into my arm. Some junkies are
so
bad that they go shoot water into their veins because they want to shoot something. But I’m not that kind of junkie. I never liked to shoot heroin. I did it once in my vein. Mainly I shot it in my ass.

Cyrinda and I were really bad drug addicts. We spent
years
shooting cocaine. After that I went with Cyrinda down to Saint Martin, and we got into another
raging
fight. We had bought all this blow from everybody before we left. The cops knew what was going on and they threw us
off the island
! We got deported from Saint Martin. You can imagine how outrageous you’d have to be to get deported from a Caribbean island for being rowdy. There were insane, uncontrollable fights; she’d hit me in the face and I’d slap her back. “You mean, Steven, you were
hitting
a woman?” Oh god! Yeah!

Cyrinda was driving away during this one horrific fight and I became so enraged I took my man bag and
smashed
her windshield—I jumped up on the hood of the car and whacked it and it shattered into a hundred pieces. Cocaine in
sanity
! She got out of the car and came over and a violent, uncontrollable fight erupted. We were punching and scratching and we fell over and rolled on the ground. I yelled, “Stop!
STOP!!!
” What was this fight about? What they were mostly all about: drugs. “Where’s the fuckin’ pills?” “I don’t know!” “What do you mean you don’t know? You had ’em last!” She came over and smacked me in the face with her bag and the bag fell open and all the pills fell out onto the floor. “They’re
in your bag,
you fucking cunt!” She was fucking hoarding them. “Okay, liar, give me the bag,” I screamed at her and ripped the bag out of her hand and in it were bottles and bottles and baggies full of pills. What kind of codependent fucking drug-addicted behavior is that? When I had drugs I’d always share—Cyrinda was more like Joe and Elyssa in that way. They would
have
pills or coke or heroin, but they wouldn’t part with one pill or one line of it even when I
begged.
I would get dope sick and still have to get out there and sing. “You gotta give me a little something, man, I’ve got to go onstage tonight.” And I would have to go on and perform fucking strung out! Do you have any fucking idea what that’s like? I barely got through, barely made it to the end of the show. As bad as things got—and they got insanely ferocious—I never hated Cyrinda; I love her to this day. May she be in peace wherever she is. I loved her dearly, and when I went away for drug rehab, I wish she’d have come, too.

The beginning of the end with Cyrinda came about in an odd way. I took Teresa and her sister, Lisa, to eat dinner at this restaurant called the Twins—it’s on the East Side, and only twins eat there. It’s a really funny scene. I’m in the middle of a tour, the band was cooking, and some guy spots me and goes, “Hey, Steven Tallarico!” And next thing I know it’s in the paper, Cyrinda hears about it, and wants to sue me for divorce, to serve papers. So that blew that night . . . ruined everything. I guess she loved me, but she didn’t know how to do anything for herself. A love story could be written about how she loved me so much that it hurt her that we fought all the time and she became distraught. I’d like that to be the case, but that isn’t really our story. We fought in person, we fought on the phone, she’d yell at me, I’d yell at her—another song inspired, a couple years down the road, from
Done with Mirrors
, “The Reason a Dog” . . .

Yak yak yak

Lord, you give me the bends

Heads and tails

You’re all out of love

Like the reason a dog

Has so many friends

He wags his tail instead of his tongue

It was “You know what? Well, fuck you! You better come up here and—” I’d say, “Cyrinda, you gotta calm down—” She was just a little too overbearing and over-the-top for me, not that I’m exactly a soft-spoken shrinking violet. We clashed, we fought like cats and dogs, and in the end, it just fell apart. I would tell her this on the phone: “Honey, I don’t think it’s going to work out, so let’s get a separation and see, okay?” And finally that’s what we did. She didn’t like that I was seeing Teresa—naturally. She was jealous and and and and and and . . . What more can I say that will make my side the truth and hers not?

I was married to Cyrinda for twelve years. That’s a long time, although we probably only spent three and a half to four years physically together. I was living in New York . . . Cyrinda stayed up in Sunapee. When she came to New York with Mia, I’d have Teresa hide behind the refrigerator and stuff like that. Things were very bad between us. I was trying to get sober; she was still getting high. Our divorce became final in September 1987. A year later Teresa and I got married.

T
eresa and Ranger, as a puppy, fall 2009. (Chris O'Brien)

By then Elyssa was gone, too. Her parents put her in the loony bin. Joe’s new squeeze was Billie Paulette Montgomery—I introduced her to Teresa. They liked each other. Hey, this could work.

B
ut I’m getting ahead of myself.
Rock in a Hard Place
only made it to number 32 in the charts in the fall of ’82. For the first time in two years we went out on the road again, with Jimmy Crespo and Ricky Dufay, but it was a disaster and I ended up in rehab at Hazelden. Four fucking hellish nights of withdrawal. I knew what those fucks were up to. I called David Krebs: “Get me the fuck outta here. I’ve seen those movies. Fiendish scientific experiments! Spirit possession! Hypnotic trances! They’re exorcising my demons, the precious demons that brought me my power, my drugs, world-renowned narcissism. How do you expect me to write lyrics without demons? They have machines here to siphon off your creative juices and sell them to the Japanese!” I so desperately missed that drug high I would spin and spin until I got dizzy just to feel that narcosis starting to set in, to feel that tingling in my cerebellum. Five hundred dollars and a fast horse—that’s what I always need.

Not surprisingly, Hazelden didn’t work—I didn’t get it. It was years and a few more rehabs before I would get it. All I got was people experience. I’m a performer; I know how to work a room. While I was in Hazelden, Teresa came to visit me and brought me shooters from the plane. I snuck out and drank them all. It was the worst drinking bout I ever had. You could smell the liquor on my breath and I was ashamed to go to class. I didn’t get busted for it, but still I felt so mortified that I had disgraced myself.

My god, by 1983 I had no money and no future except getting further into the pit. I felt I could hear the Voice of Doom saying, “I’m sorry, man, you’ve sung your aria.” I’d done everything I said I never would. Back in 1976, when I read stories about guys who lost everything and blew a million bucks snorting all they had, I used to say, “That’ll
never
happen to me.” But in the end I blew twenty million. I snorted my Porsche, I snorted my plane, I snorted my house in that din of drugs and booze and being lost.

David Krebs told me I was broke and put me on twenty dollars a day, presumably to curb my drug intake. The way I got around that was to give the limo driver a two-hundred-dollar tip. He’d keep fifty and I’d get the rest to spend on my drug of choice, which increasingly was heroin. I was so out of it that when I got mugged—the guy stuck a pistol in my mouth—I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I was half dead anyway.

Eventually I moved into the Gorham Hotel with Teresa. Teresa would go down to Alphabet City—the East Village—daily and get me dope. Then I met one of our security guys, and he said, “What, are you crazy, man? You can get it right on Ninth Avenue.” I said, “Bullshit!” He goes, “Ninth Avenue. What’re you kiddin’? Ninth Avenue’s where you score smack. Everybody knows that!” I said, “Well, I don’t know it! Show me!” I got in his Corvette, he got me a bag, we drove back to the hotel, I dumped it out on the mirror, and it was a fucking pile! For twenty bucks? Twenty dollars’ worth of this stuff was more than you’d get in five bindles from downtown. A bindle was just a little bit, and you were lucky to get high off of two of them. It was too good to be true. I snorted the stuff from Ninth Avenue and went,
Uhhh-gorrrrhhhh!
I spun right there. I got sick. It was fucking great shit! So for about a year, we got bags from there. Five, sometimes seven, mostly six, from the same guy. It came in a big white envelope. Forty weeks we lived at that hotel. We saved the envelopes, and when you ran out you could dump them out on the mirror, and when you scraped it all up you got a nice pile. Enough so that Teresa and I wouldn’t get dope sick. The brands of heroin all had these great fucking crazy names: Poison, Fat Boy, Hot Girl, General Westmoreland, Toilet.