Life (49 page)

Anita and I, to this day, have never talked about it. I dropped it because I didn’t want to open old wounds. If Anita wanted to sit around and talk to me about it, I might, but I couldn’t bring it up. It’s too painful. Neither of us, I’m sure in her case too, have got over it. You don’t get over these things. At the time it certainly further eroded our relationship, and Anita descended further into fear and paranoia.

There’s no question that losing a child is the worst thing that can ever happen, which is why I wrote to Eric Clapton when his son died, knowing something of what he was going through. When that happens you go totally numb for a while. It’s only very slowly that the possibilities of your love for the little chap emerge. You can’t deal with it all at once. And you can’t lose a kid without it coming to haunt you. Everything’s supposed to go in its natural order. I’ve seen my mum and my dad off, and that’s the natural order. But seeing a baby off is another thing. It never lets you rest. Now it’s a permanent cold space inside me. Just selfishly, if it had to happen, I’m glad it happened then. When he was too young to form a relationship. Now he bangs into me once a week or so. I have a boy missing. Could have been a contender. I wrote in my notebook when I was working on this book, “Once in a while Tara invades me. My son. He would be thirty-odd now.” Tara lives inside me. But I don’t even know where the little bugger is buried, if he’s buried at all.

That same month that Tara died, I looked at Anita and saw that there was only one place Angela could go while we sorted this out—to my mother. And by the time we could even think about her returning to us, she was ensconced in Dartford with Doris. So I thought, better leave her with Mum. She’s got a settled life, no more of this madness for her, she can grow up a normal kid. And she has, and brilliantly. Doris was in her fifties and she could bring up another kid. Given the chance and the possibility, she took it on. She and Bill did it together. I knew I was going to be busted again and again and again, and what was the point of bringing up a daughter, knowing that the cops were at the door? At least I knew there was a shelter for Angela in my mad world. And Angela stayed with Doris for the next twenty years. I kept Marlon with me, on the road, until the tour ended that August.

*   *   *

I
packed all my
stuff up at the Wick when Ronnie Wood emigrated for tax reasons to America that year, 1976. We couldn’t go back to Cheyne Walk because of the twenty-four-hour patrols and the “Oh hello, Keith.” If we stayed there, it was with windows closed and curtains closed, a hermetic existence, a real siege, drawn into ourselves.

We were just trying to stay alive and stay one step ahead of the law all the time. Always traveling, a phone call in front, can you get needles there? Mundane fucking junkie shit. It was a prison of my own making. We lived for a while at the Ritz Hotel in London until we were forced to flee on account of our room being in need of refurbishment courtesy of Anita. Marlon began going to school for the first time properly, to Hill House, a school where they wore orange uniforms and seemed to spend much time walking in crocodile lines through the streets of London. The boys of Hill House were a London institution, like the Chelsea pensioners. Marlon, needless to say, found this a profound shock, or what he terms in retrospect a “bloody nightmare.”

At this moment John Phillips, of the disbanded Mamas and Papas, was living in London. He and his new wife, the actress Geneviève Waïte, and his small child, Tamerlane, had a house in Glebe Place, Chelsea. And we took refuge there for a time. We moved in. There were already plans to work together, for Rolling Stones Records to produce John’s solo album, with Ronnie, Mick, Mick Taylor and me playing on it. Ahmet Ertegun was funding it from Atlantic Records. Good idea too—on paper. John was a great guy, really funny and interesting to work with (although he was nuts). He’d written almost all those songs for the Mamas and others that defined a certain period, some with his ex-wife Michelle Phillips—“California Dreamin’,” “Monday, Monday,” “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).”

Phillips was amazing. I’ve never known anybody to be so hooked on dope so quick, and I had something to do with it. The night Ronnie was leaving the Wick, John had called up and said, I’ve got a bottle of this stuff called Merck. And he said, does anybody have some use for it? I don’t do that stuff. I said I would drop by on my way out of Ronnie’s. I left the Wick and went straight to John’s joint. We were playing and everything, and he’d shown me the bottle. We were there two or three hours and I said, John, can I use your john? I’ve got to take a hit. So I went in the john, shot up. I mean, I didn’t want to pull it in front of the family or anything like that. And when I came out, John said, what was that you were doing? I said, John, it’s called smack. And I did the thing I never, or very rarely, did. I think it was the only time. You don’t turn other people on; you keep it to yourself. He’d just given me this cocaine, and I felt, well, you want to know what I’m doing? Here we go. So I shot him up. Just in the muscle.

I always felt responsible for John because I turned him on to smack. Within a week, he’s got a pharmacy under control and he’s become a dealer. I’ve never seen a guy become a junkie that quick. Usually it takes months, sometimes years, for a guy to get hooked hooked hooked. But John, ten days later, he’s running the show. It changed his life. He moved back to New York, and so did I, the following year, when even greater madness took place, but more of that later. The music we played together with Mick and others was released after John’s death in 2001, with the title
Pay Pack & Follow
.

A
nita,
M
arlon and
I
moved around. We stayed in Blakes Hotel. We didn’t last long there either, so we moved into a rented house in Old Church Street in Chelsea, recently vacated by Donald Sutherland. It was here, in this house, where Anita really lost it with me. She had become delusional, very paranoid. It was one of her darkest periods and it developed with the dope. Wherever we went, she was convinced that someone had left a stash before doing a runner. She’d take the whole place apart looking for it. The bathroom at the Ritz, sofas, wallpaper, paneling. I remember once I took her in the car and told her to concentrate on the number plates, something mundane to try and calm her, connect her to reality. We made a pact, at her request, that I would never take her to the nuthouse.

I like a high-spirited woman. And with Anita, you knew you were taking on a Valkyrie—she who decides who dies in battle. But she went right off the rails, became lethal. Anita had rage whether there was dope or not, but if there was no dope she’d go crazy. Marlon and I used to live in fear of her sometimes, of what she would do to herself, let alone to us. I used to take him downstairs to the kitchen and we’d hunker down and say, wait for Mum to get over it. She was slinging shit about, which might have hit the kid. You’d come back to the house, and the walls were covered in blood or wine. You didn’t know what was going to happen next. We would be there just hoping that she’d stay asleep and not wake up in one of her screaming fits, raging at the top of the stairs like Bette Davis, throwing glass objects at you. She was a tough bitch. No, there wasn’t a lot of fun for a while with Anita in the middle ’70s. She became unbearable. She was a real bitch to me, a bitch to Marlon, she was a bitch to herself. And she knows it, and I’m writing it here in this book. Basically I was looking at how the hell do I get out of there without screwing it up with the kids. I loved her dearly. I don’t get that involved with women if I don’t love them dearly. I always feel it’s my failure if it doesn’t work, if I can’t pull it together and make it all right. But with Anita I couldn’t make it right. She was unstoppably self-destructive. She was like Hitler; she wanted to take everything down with her.

I tried to clean up loads of times, but not Anita. She would go the other way. Any suggestion of it and she would go into rebellion mode and if anything take more. Domestic duties, at this point, were not something she took on gladly. I said, what the fuck am I doing? OK, she’s the mother of my children. Swallow it. I loved the woman; I’d do anything. She’s got a problem? I’ll take over. I’ll help out.

“Unscrupulous” is not a bad word for her. I don’t mind flinging it in her face right now, and she knows it. It’s up to her to live with. I just did what I had to do. Anita will still have to wonder how the hell she screwed up. I’d still be with her right now! I’m never one to change, especially with the kids. Anita and I can now sit around at Christmastime with our grandchildren and give each other a bemused smile; hey, you silly old cow, how you doing? Anita is in good shape. She’s become a benign spirit. She’s a marvelous granny. She’s survived. But things could have been better, baby.

I sealed myself off much of the time from Anita, or she didn’t care to join us in the studio at the top of the house. She spent most of her time in the Donald Sutherland memorial bedroom, which had massive chains hanging from the wall, purely decorative but giving an overall S&M feel to the room. The regulars came by—Stash, Robert Fraser. I was seeing a lot of the Monty Python people at the time, particularly Eric Idle, who used to come up and hang.

I
t was in this
Church Street period that I achieved my longest feat of Merck-assisted wakefulness—a nine-day epic of no sleep. I was still going on the ninth day. I may have had a couple of snoozes, but no more than twenty minutes. I was busy doing my sounds, transferring this to that, making notes, writing songs, and I’d become manic, basically a hermit. But over the nine days lots of people came to visit the cave. Everybody I knew in London at the time dropped by day by day, but to me it was just one long day. They’d been doing other things, whatever they had to do. They’d slept and brushed their teeth and shit, and I’m up there writing songs, reorganizing my sounds and making double copies of everything. This was all on cassette in those days. And then I would get into artistically decorating the labels. The reggae one had a beautiful Lion of Judah.

It was into the ninth day and I was still, as far as I was concerned, in fine form. I remember I was going to copy one cassette onto another. I’d got it all down, noted which track,
boom,
pushed play. I turned around and fell asleep on my feet for three-tenths of a second, then I fell forward and hit the JBL speaker. Which woke me up, but worse than that, I couldn’t see a thing. It was just a curtain of blood. There were three steps, I still remember them now, and I managed to miss every one, and I rolled over and fell asleep on the floor. I woke up with an encrusted face, maybe a day later. Eight full days, and on the ninth day, he fell.

T
he band was waiting
for me in Toronto early in 1977. I put off going for many days. They sent me telegrams: “Where are you?” We had a gig at the El Mocambo, which would provide more tracks for our
Love You Live
album. We needed some days of rehearsal. I couldn’t, apparently, extract myself from the rituals of Old Church Street. And I had to get Anita on the road too, which was just as difficult. But finally we flew there on February 24. The gigs—two nights at the club—were scheduled for ten days later. I took a hit on the airplane and somehow the spoon ended up in Anita’s pocket. They found nothing on me at the airport, but they found the spoon on Anita and busted her. Then they bided their time. They went to great effort to prepare the big bust of me in the Harbour Castle Hotel, knowing that they’d find something— just follow the junkies. They had intercepted a package of stuff I’d sent ahead. Alan Dunn, the longest-serving Stones man, the logistics and transport supremo, discovered later that the regular personnel who worked in the hotel suddenly found themselves working alongside many extra people, who had been hired mostly as telephone and television engineers. The police were setting it up: massive resources against one guitar player. The hotel manager would have known, but of course nobody tipped us off. To save money, Peter Rudge, the tour manager, had taken any personnel off the floor. So the police came straight to the room. Marlon would not normally have let in any policemen, but they were dressed as waiters. They couldn’t wake me up. By law you have to be conscious to be arrested. It took them forty-five minutes—I’d been up for five days and I’d had a heavy-duty shot and I was out. This was my last rehearsal day, and I’d been asleep for about two hours. My memory of it is waking up and them going slap slap, two Mounties dragging me about the room slapping me. Trying to get me “conscious.”
Bang bang bang bang bang.
Who are you? What’s your name? Do you know where you are and do you know why we’re here? “My name’s Keith Richards, and I’m in the Harbour Hotel. What you’re doing here I have no idea.” Meanwhile they’d found my stash. And it was about an ounce. Quite a lot. No more than a man needs. I mean, it wouldn’t feed the city. But obviously they knew their shit, like I knew my shit, and it was clearly not the Canada smack. It had come from England. I’d put it in the flight case.

So they arrest me, take me to this Mountie police station, and it’s really not my time of day. They put me through the books and everything. And because of the amount they found, they decided to charge me with trafficking, which is an automatic jail sentence for a very long time, in Canada. I said, OK, fine. Give me a gram back. “Oh, we can’t do that.” I said, so what are you going to do now? You know I need it and that I’m going to have to get it. What are you going to do? Follow me and bust me again? Is that your game? How are you going to play this? Give me some back till I figure this out. “Oh no, no.” And that was when Bill Wyman came through. Bill was the first one to come around and say, is there anything I can do? And I said quite honestly, I’m out of shit and I need some shit. And of course that’s not Bill’s area, but he said, I’ll see what I can do. And he found somebody. We’d been working at the El Mocambo club, so we had local connections. Bill came through and got some shit to get me off the hook, over the hill. And that was a big risk for Bill, considering the attention I was getting. That was about the closest emotional thing that I can remember with Bill.