Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (47 page)

 

Quaaludes were child’s play. Benzedrine was for fools. And stardom—well, stardom was the most addicting thrill of all, but as time went on, I realized that it was no longer as important to me as it had been. Stardom, like eating or even breathing, took a distant second place to cocaine. I could admit this to myself in those days and not feel bad. And if I did feel bad, all it took was one more hit on the pipe to blast those negative thoughts right out of my skull. And after all, I didn’t have to worry about what my Daddy would think anymore. No, Cherie Currie was all grown up, and for the first time in my life, I could be really honest with myself about what made me truly happy.

 

When I was child, I used to believe in God. It made me smile, back in the days when my life revolved around cocaine, to think that I’d once truly believed all those silly ideas about sin and retribution. Faith is all very well, until the real world comes along and snatches away everything that you hold dear. Then suddenly everything is thrown into sharp focus. No, cocaine was the only god I needed anymore. A god I could rely on to always make me feel good whenever I wanted. It was all I thought about, all I felt, and all I loved. In a strange way, cocaine became my salvation.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 31

 

Marie Says Good-bye

 

 

 

 

There is a scientific principle that says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This principle holds true for cocaine. The greater the high, the more severe the crash. Back in the days when I snorted coke, I could count on feeling pretty crappy the next day. A coke hangover was something like a booze hangover, except that in addition to just feeling beat-up and nauseous, you feel depressed as well. You’d spend the night indulging in hours of intense coke-fueled conversation, telling anyone who would listen about how you were going to change the world . . . maybe sharing information that was so personal that you’d want to hang yourself from embarrassment the next day when you remembered it all . . . When you came around the next morning, all of that artificial goodwill was transformed into a deep-seated sense of misery, which you couldn’t quite shake.

 

So, just as smoking cocaine increases the effect of the drug by a huge amount, so the comedown from smoking coke is also magnified: instead of the next-day blues, what you experience is a great void of misery and paranoia that seems to settle on you like an ominous black cloud. And as you smoke more and more, the time delay between smoking the coke and the crash gets smaller and smaller. And so, ten minutes after my last hit, the terror would begin. All of the problems in my life would come flooding back, bigger and badder than ever, twisted to hideous proportions by the chemical deficiency in my brain. This wasn’t just depression: this was pure fear. This was every terrible thing that had ever happened to me being relived in full color, wide screen, and 3-D. And there was only one cure for it: more coke.

 

And if there was no more coke, then I’d better find something else quick to knock myself out with before my brain suffered a meltdown from the horror of it all.

 

That’s what had happened on this particular day. I don’t remember how I got over there, but I was at the supermarket. I was blind drunk. There was no more coke in the house, and I couldn’t get hold of Bruce. I had drunk a bottle of champagne and whatever else I had found lying around in the fridge. There was a time when I couldn’t stand the taste of booze. Now I could barely taste it as it slid down my throat and raced through my stomach and into my blood. I didn’t enjoy being drunk, but it was a means to an end. It meant that I felt less bad than before, and that was good enough for me. My life had degenerated into a series of ecstatic peaks and terrifying troughs, and the booze was just a way to help take the sharp edges off.

 

In the supermarket I was pushing a shopping cart. My brain was not communicating with my body effectively. My head felt like a helium balloon that was floating somewhere far above the rest of me, attached only by a flimsy string. I tried to make a turn, and accidentally demolished a display stand of some kind of dumb cleaning product that they were promoting. The display clattered all over the floor.

 

I wondered if I looked as crazy as I felt. I backed up, and continued going around the supermarket, staggering and almost losing my footing. I passed by the food aisles. The last time I weighed myself I was down to ninety-six pounds. I was still losing weight. The smaller clothes that Bruce had bought for me were already loose fitting. I didn’t like to look at myself in the mirror anymore.

 

I finally made it to the cash register with my prize, a half-gallon bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a can of Coke. I didn’t think I could make it back to the house if my nerves were not fully coated with alcohol. The woman behind the counter looked at me and wrinkled her nose. She was butt ugly, with red hair all frizzed up by a ridiculous perm. Her face was covered with angry-looking zits. I smiled at her despite the fact that her face scared me. I wanted this bottle. I needed it.

 

“I can’t sell this to you,” the woman said with a voice like ice.

 

I started rummaging around in my purse. On the counter I started spreading all of the junk I found. Crumpled-up fifty-dollar bills. A battered pack of Carlton Lights. Lipstick. Keys. Four lighters. Finally I found my ID and handed it to her with a triumphant grin. She didn’t even look at it, the bitch. She just shook her head and repeated, “I’m sorry, I can’t sell this to you.”

 

I started trembling. The crash from the coke was so fucking intense. If I didn’t get the booze to make up for the lack of cocaine, I might die. That’s the truth; I felt I might drop dead on the spot. I knew that if I didn’t get this booze RIGHT FUCKING NOW, I might have had to hurt this bitch. “I am a paying customer, and I want this goddamn bottle!” I hissed. She started calling for a manager, some officious-looking little twerp in a button-down shirt with a name tag that read elmer. Elmer looked like the result of some kind of experiment in inbreeding.

 

“What seems to be the problem?” Elmer smiled.

 

“I wanna make a complaint!” I slurred. “This . . . lady is being rude to me, and she will not allow me to buy this bottle.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Elmer said, sounding anything but, “but we can’t sell this to you. If you’d like to make another purchase—food, groceries perhaps—that would be fine. But not this, not in your condition.”

 

“Lemme tell you something, Elmer,” I hissed. “You’re on some pretty thin fucking ice right now. I’ll call your goddamn boss, and I will have you fired!”

 

“I’ll take my chances,” Elmer said, and before I knew what was happening, he had me by the shoulders and I was being bundled out through the electronic doors. I was standing out in the parking lot, feeling disoriented. A light drizzle was falling. I thought at first that somebody was spitting on me.

 

I needed booze. Or cocaine. Coke would be better. I had some change, so I tried to call Bruce again. I staggered over to the pay phone and dialed the number. I got our answering machine. On the other end of the line, my voice sounded so fucking cheery and happy telling me that Bruce and I weren’t home that it made me want to puke. I slammed the receiver down. I had one quarter left. There was only one phone number that I could still remember. What choice did I have? I dialed it almost on instinct.

 

Half an hour later I was leaning against the cold car window. Outside, the rain pattered gently against the car. Every fiber of my body felt raw, exposed. I tried to shift position, and felt my bones grinding painfully against one another. Marie was in the driver’s seat, her eight months’ pregnant belly barely fitting behind the steering wheel. She and Steve had been married for a while now. Once Marie was sitting here, the reasons why I’d tried to avoid speaking to her these days were all flooding back to me.

 

“You smell awful, Cherie,” Marie was telling me, with that nagging anger in her voice again. “You smell like stale cigarettes and booze. Ugh.” When Marie talked to me those days, there was an anger in her voice, an anger even worse than the night she slapped me when I was stoned in Aunt Evie’s house. There was so much that I wanted to say to Marie. There was so much unresolved anger between us regarding the collapse of our album. When Marie walked away from Messin’ with the Boys, she went straight into her comfortable married life with Steve. No problems, no consequences. I was forced into recording that album with her; instead of putting my foot down and fighting for what was right for my career, I put my family first and did something that I felt had a good chance of coming back to haunt me. All of my fears proved correct. The end result was a glorified Toto album, which Capitol basically buried because Marie walked away from it before we could even go on tour. The label knew that without a promotional tour, the album didn’t stand a chance. Marie waited until I had turned down better solo deals, made multiple enemies at Capitol Records, and recorded an album that was a far cry from what I wanted to do before she decided that singing professionally wasn’t something that she wanted to do. I was left to deal with the aftermath. My career was ruined, my name was mud in the industry, and I knew that as a solo artist I was basically finished.

 

Marie had never apologized to me for that. Even my father, on his deathbed, had apologized for forcing me to cut that album. That was the final step in our making peace before he passed. I’d never had such a resolution with my sister. Marie never considered the fact that this final, terrible spiral into drug abuse had been in part fueled by what had happened during the recording of that album. Instead of being sympathetic, she was now treating me the same way that Daddy’s doctors had treated him. She acted like this was a symptom of my weakness, of my selfishness.

 

I wanted to say all of this to Marie, but I didn’t. Despite all of the stuff that had gone down between us, I still didn’t want to hurt her like that. And I was too tired. Too defeated. What did it matter? My music career was over; my life was what it was. It was too late to have that conversation. All I wanted from Marie right then was for her to take me back to Bruce. I could barely keep my eyes focused. I had to go home.

 

“Steve and I are tired of giving you our time and money if you’re not going to change, Cherie.”

 

God, that self-righteous tone of voice grated on my nerves. I wanted to tell Marie that she was a goddamn hypocrite. That she had done as much cocaine as I had over the years. I wanted to bring up the time that I’d gotten her a job on the Twilight Zone movie and she’d shown up to set ripped on coke on the tail end of a twenty-four-hour partying spree. Just because she’s stopped getting high while she was pregnant, she suddenly thought that gave her the right to act like she was Saint-fucking-Marie. I knew that as soon as the baby was born, my sister would be back to using coke. Instead of saying any of this, I said in a small, defeated voice, “I’m sorry. I’ll change.”

 

Of course, I had no intention of changing anything. I had no power to change anything. The only thing that it was within my power to change was how I felt, and the only way for that to happen was for Marie to take me home, and once she had scurried off to her suburban existence, I could smoke some more coke. That was the only change on my horizon.

 

“Will you really change?” Marie asked.

 

“Sure,” I said with a shrug. Fuck, they were only words, right? How could Marie expect me to think about the future when I could barely see beyond this windshield? My concept of time had become elastic. Time didn’t seem to work anymore. Clocks tried to tell me it was noon, when I knew for a fact that I passed out in pitch blackness only moments before. They told me that only an hour had passed when I’d lived through what felt like several days of horror.

 

Marie shook her head, not believing me. I felt indignant, even though I was lying through my teeth. She should have believed me! Marie owed that to me at least!

 

No, there were a lot of unresolved issues that were poisoning my relationship with my sister. She was always telling me how good she had been to me. Reminding me about how she had opened a bank account in my name, and she and Steve had poured money into it for me to use in an emergency, an account I had promptly emptied. What she didn’t understand was that I had used it for emergencies only. When Bruce wasn’t around to provide the coke, it was an emergency. Before I had moved in with Bruce, they had even covered the rent on my apartment in Studio City. What Marie saw as an act of charity for her struggling sister, I saw as rightful restitution for the way that she and Steve abandoned me with a quarter-of-a-million-dollar debt after the Messin’ with the Boys album. Anyway, Steve was loaded. He was in Toto, for God’s sake. It wasn’t as if they were starving.

 

There was so much to say. But while Marie was driving me home I couldn’t say any of it. I was too miserable, too weak, too preoccupied with my own sickness. Right then, forming a coherent sentence was well beyond me. Without cocaine to make my brain function, I was utterly tongue-tied.

 

“I want you to know, Cherie, that Steve and I are washing our hands of you. From now on, you’re on your own.”

 

“I understand.”

 

We went back to the Hollywood Hills. I could feel the hatred radiating from my sister. That was okay. Hate was something I could deal with. I hated myself. It felt perfectly natural that other people would hate me, too. We sat there in the car, each waiting for the other to speak. The silence was endless, painful. Finally my sister said, “I don’t want you around the baby. Not like this. You shouldn’t be around a baby.”