Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (43 page)

 

They called us out for our next scene. As we stepped out of Jodie’s trailer, my mom was waiting for me with a concerned look on her face.

 

“There you are!” she said, sounding mightily relieved. “I was looking all over for you! Do you know your lines?”

 

“Yes, Mom.” I sighed.

 

“Have they touched up your makeup? Did they check?”

 

“Yes, Mom they did . . .”

 

“Well then . . . go to it, sweetheart!”

 

I went to walk toward the set, but before I could, Mom grabbed me and gave me a big hug. She held me in her arms for a long time. It felt like she hadn’t hugged me like that in ages . . . since before she and Dad got divorced, at least.

 

“I’m so proud of you, Cherie!” she said, her eyes looking wet.

 

I smiled. “Thanks, Mom . . .”

 

When I thought about it later, I realized that all I ever really wanted was for my mom to be proud of me.

 

The apartment that I was renting in Encino was a small one-bedroom. It was tiny, but I loved it. It was a strange feeling to finally have a place I could call my own. But I definitely missed Aunt Evie’s a lot, and I visited often. Not having my family around me took some getting used to. There was something a little sad and lonely about coming home to an empty apartment.

 

On this particular day I was on the couch with my father, scratching my head and looking distractedly at my watch. I felt like I was late for something, although I didn’t know what. It felt like there was always something I was late for, like there was always some other place I was supposed to be.

 

“Kitten,” my father said, cutting into my thoughts, “I’ve been worried about you.”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“Worried. About you. The last time I saw you, you were thin . . . I mean, I thought that you couldn’t possibly get any thinner. But . . . you look even worse now. You need to start taking care of yourself!”

 

This was the first time I’d seen my dad in a few weeks. My schedule had been so grueling that I hadn’t had the time to be anywhere but the set or the rehearsal studio. Even Adrian Lyne had noticed that I was looking a bit thin.

 

“You need to eat a few steak-and-kidney pies, luv!” he’d told me.

 

“Steak and . . . kidney?” I laughed. “Man, you Limeys eat some pretty crazy stuff.”

 

“Ha! I’ll have to tell you about toad in the hole sometime. Seriously, though—you’re looking worn out, luv. What’s going on? Are you getting decent rest? Do you have anything else going on besides the movie?”

 

“Well, there’s the album. I’m working on that in the evening when I can . . . I guess I’ve just been spreading myself pretty thin recently.”

 

“You want to know the best advice I can give you about that album?”

 

“Sure. What?”

 

“You need to stop working on it until we wrap this. I need you to be there one hundred percent for me, every day, Cherie. Three months is a tight schedule. No distractions, okay?”

 

“Okay.”

 

So for the time being, the album was put on hold. Capitol understood, but Marie was pretty disappointed. Being able to focus entirely on Foxes helped a lot, but there was still pressure and stress, and even when I was alone, or with my family, I couldn’t really relax. I couldn’t seem to unwind. Also, a strange thing had recently happened: my heart started palpitating wildly, for no reason. It freaked me out the first time, and I promised myself that I would see a doctor, but I was determined to finish the shoot first. Putting in twelve-hour days on the set wasn’t helping. Sometimes I was so preoccupied that I’d forget to eat. It’s easy to forget to eat when you’re taking Benzedrine. You don’t notice the hunger, your stomach feels detached from the rest of you. With all of that going on, my weight had been dropping dramatically.

 

So now my father was looking at me with a concerned look on his face. I gave him my best smile. “I’m fine, Dad. Don’t worry . . .”

 

“But I do worry, Kitten. I’m your father! How come you’re so thin? Don’t you keep food in your apartment?”

 

“Of course I have food! I’m eating fine, Dad . . .”

 

Looking at my father, I wondered if he shouldn’t have been worrying about himself. He looked terrible. I was getting really concerned about his health. His skin had taken on this scary, yellowish tint; his eyes, too. Every time I saw him, he seemed to have deteriorated further. He looked older, frailer, and sicker. The booze was really eating him up from the inside.

 

Marie would keep me updated on his drinking. She told me that it was getting worse. That he couldn’t go more than a few hours without a drink. That he was losing his balance, and that he seemed down and depressed. She was seriously considering putting him in the hospital.

 

When I was younger, I’d thought that my father’s drinking was perfectly normal. I thought that my dad just needed a drink to relax, and I didn’t see how this was a big deal. Some people just enjoy alcohol, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re an “alcoholic.” Because my father could always handle drinking so well, I felt sure that he didn’t have a problem. That’s what I’d thought for most of my life. Now I was beginning to realize just how wrong I had been.

 

Dad was drinking a glass of milk as he talked to me. I could tell that he hadn’t had any booze for a while because his hand was trembling. We both did our best to ignore it, but I couldn’t stop my eyes from drifting back to that telltale, trembling hand. He tried to casually place his other hand on top of it, to steady it, but it didn’t work. A week before, Marie had told me that Dad tried to stop drinking completely, but he couldn’t do it. He began to shake so violently that he couldn’t function at all. In the end, she whispered, he had to have a drink. She told me that he was shaking so badly by then that he could barely raise the glass to his lips.

 

“How are you feeling, Dad?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

 

He smiled weakly. “Don’t you worry about me, Kitten,” he said, putting down that shaking glass of milk on an old water stain. “I feel like a tiger.”

 

My father was not a good liar. I decided to let that one go. It was easier to ignore it than to have that painful discussion right then. I ignored the yellow skin, the yellow, watery eyes. I ignored the hand that would not stay still. Maybe I honestly did believe that if I ignored these things, they would simply go away.

 

“Mom’s been on the set,” I said. I don’t know why I said it; it was just the first thing that popped into my head in my rush to change the subject.

 

“How is she?” he asked. I couldn’t tell whether he really cared, or he was just being polite. I suppose he was just as eager as I was to speak about something—anything—else.

 

“She’s fine.”

 

We continued talking about nothing in particular. An unspoken accord had been reached. No more words about my weight, and no more words about Daddy’s drinking. Maybe if we just kept on in this state of denial for a while, everything would be fine.

 

It was a week or two later, on the set, that I really stopped and took a good look at myself in the dressing-room mirror. I looked tired. I hadn’t been sleeping much. It was taking more and more Benzedrine to get me going. And the worst thing was that the more I used one morning, the more I would need the next just to get the same effect. And then that palpitating would begin again.

 

“Dad might be dying,” I said to myself. There was no one else in the dressing room. I said it because the thought had been hovering around me for a while, an unfathomable darkness that lurked in the corner of every thought I’d have. This was the first time that I had ever spoken the words aloud. As soon as I said it, I felt that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Shut up, Cherie,” I added in a hoarse whisper.

 

I wanted a qualuude. I wanted to lose myself, to shed those toxic thoughts, and I dismissed the idea as soon as it surfaced. I couldn’t do them anymore. It was bad enough that I’d started drinking again—nothing heavy, just a little wine now and then. Still, my racing mind tried to beat me up about this sometimes, but I dismissed those thoughts, too. But ludes? I knew that taking those again would be a disaster. Booze was different; booze didn’t hurt anybody, right?

 

Wrong! my mind snapped. An image of Dad’s yellowish skin flashed through my brain. “Shut up, Cherie!” I whispered again.

 

Looking in the mirror, I turned to the side, admiring my profile. I was down to 103 pounds. Was I too thin, like my dad insisted I was? I smiled at the thought. No, you can’t be too thin, can you?

 

“Anorexic” was how my father put it. He must have gotten that word from a magazine article. But I knew deep down that I wasn’t anorexic; I just wasn’t hungry anymore. Marie had recently accused me of being on drugs again. “That’s why you’re so thin! You’re doing coke, aren’t you?” She was wrong, of course, because the only thing I was taking regularly was the Benzedrine, and Benzedrine was legal, so it was practically not even a drug as far as I was concerned.

 

Of course it’s a drug! my mind snapped.

 

Oh, shut up! I snapped back.

 

The back-and-forth in my head was getting pretty tiring. I wondered if I was going crazy from stress. No, I needed to calm down. I took a deep breath. I started thinking calm, rational thoughts.

 

Of course I’m not anorexic. I would know if I was anorexic. Jodie Foster loses weight by eating papaya and cottage cheese, and nobody is calling her anorexic. And Dad’s not dying! The reason he looks older these days is because he is older! He’s settling into his sixties, and I can’t expect him to look the same as he did when I was a child. This is life. Everything is fine.

 

I approached the mirror in my dressing room to check my makeup. The bright bulb lights shone down upon my face. I starting toying and fluffing my hair . . . then froze. I thought for a moment that my eyes were playing tricks on me. I blinked hard and started parting my hair.

 

I gasped, and felt my blood turn cold in my veins. Oh God, what on earth was that? I moved closer to the mirror and put my fingers back into my hair. Looking closely, I saw something that terrified me. In the thickness of my blond hair there were barren patches—areas of thinness. Areas of baldness. There were raised welts under my hairline all through my scalp. I swallowed hard and stepped away from the mirror.

 

There could be only one explanation for this. I went to my purse and took out the vial of Benzedrine. It looked so innocent—just a silly little yellow vial. It had tricked me, I fumed. Tricked me into thinking it was a harmless medicine, into thinking that it was good for me. Now look what it was doing! I had to get off of this stuff!

 

I walked over to the dressing-room window and tossed the vial out into the bushes. As I did, there was a knock at the door. “We’re ready for you, Cherie!” the assistant director called.

 

“Be right there!”

 

I was scared. Scared about what was going on in my body. What other side effects would this terrible powder have on me? I put a gentle hand up to my head and softly touched my damaged scalp again. This was all the Benzedrine’s fault!

 

I started to panic, but I managed to catch myself. I forced myself to breathe slowly. I knew what I had to do. The solution to this problem was very clear to me. There was only one rational way to deal with it.

 

Before I returned to the set, I went to the nearest pay phone and dialed a number. On the second ring, she picked up.

 

“Hello, Stacy? It’s Cherie.” Stacy was a friend of mine. The one who’d introduced me to Benzedrine, and had been supplying me with it. “Listen . . . that Benzedrine stuff has been doing weird things to me. I don’t think I should take it anymore. Could you do me a favor?”

 

“Sure. What is it?”

 

“Can you come to the set? I need you to bring me some blow,” I said, gripping the receiver very tight. “I need you to bring it . . . as fast as you can.”

 

I hung up, already feeling better. Coke had never made my damn hair fall out. No more of that stuff for me! No, this was a new Cherie Currie, a responsible Cherie, who would recognize when she had a problem and deal with it accordingly. Feeling highly responsible and totally in control, I strode over to the set, ready to act, ready to deal with my life. Because my life was good. It was better than good—it was great.

 

And I was in control. Right?

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 28

 

Battlefields

 

 

 

 

It was April. Although I was no longer on the set of a movie in progress, everything around me still had a vague hint of unreality. The clear California sky looked like a movie backdrop. Maybe that was just wishful thinking. There was certainly a part of me that hoped that I would wake up at any moment, and that all of the past few months would turn out to be some kind of terrible dream.

 

It had been three months since we’d wrapped up the shooting on Foxes. In those three months my life had undergone some pretty major upheavals.