Scar Tissue (3 page)

Weaver and Bashara had a house near Connie’s, and they ran a rather enormous marijuana business out of Topanga Canyon. When I first got there, I didn’t realize all this; all I saw was a lot of people constantly smoking pot. But then I walked into a room, and Weaver was sitting there counting stacks of money. I could tell that the vibe was very serious. I thought, “Okay, I don’t even know if I want to be in this room, because they’re doing math,” so I went into the next room, where there was a small mountain of marijuana on top of huge tarps. Connie would constantly have to come get me and take me out to play in the canyon. It was “Don’t go in that room! Don’t go in this room! Keep an eye out, make sure no one’s coming!” There was always the element of suspense that we were doing something we might get caught for, which would give a kid some worry, but at the same time, it’s like, “Hmm, what’s going on in there? Why do you guys have so much money? What are all these pretty girls doing everywhere?”

I do remember having a sense of concern for my dad. At one point some friends of his were moving from one house to another, and they filled this big open truck with all their possessions. My dad jumped up and rode on top of the mattress, which was precariously balanced on top of all of the other belongings. We started moving, and we were careening down these canyon roads, and I was looking at my dad barely holding on to the mattress, going, “Dad, don’t fall off.”

“Oh, don’t you worry,” he said, but I did. That was the beginning of a theme, because for many years to come, I’d be scared to death for my dad’s life.

But I remember having a lot of fun, too. My dad and Connie and Weaver and Bashara would all go to the Corral, a little shit-kicker bar in the middle of Topanga Canyon where Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles and Neil Young played regularly. I’d go with the adults, and I’d be the only kid in the crowd. Everyone would be wasted, drinking and drugging, but I’d be out on the floor, dancing away.

When I got back to Michigan, things hadn’t changed much. First grade was pretty uneventful. My mom worked days as a secretary at a law firm, and after school I’d stay with a babysitter. But my life took a decided turn for the better in the fall of 1969, when we moved to Paris Street. We’d been living in a real poor white-trash section of the city, with lots of quadruplexes and shantytowns, but Paris Street was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Single-family houses and manicured lawns and neat, clean garages. By now Scott was mostly out of the picture, but he had stayed around long enough to impregnate my mother.

Suddenly, I had a trio of beautiful young teenage girls watching me after school. At age seven, I was a little too young to be having crushes, but I adored these girls in a sisterly way, in awe of their beauty and their budding womanhood. I couldn’t have been happier to spend time with them, whether it was watching TV or swimming in the local pool or going for walks in the small wildlands in the area. They introduced me to Plaster Creek, which would become my secret stomping grounds for the next five years, a sanctuary from the adult world where my friends and I could disappear into the woods and make boats and catch crawfish and jump off bridges into the water. So it was definitely a huge relief to move to that neighborhood where everything seemed nicer and where flowers grew.

I even liked school. Whereas my previous school seemed dark and dismal and dreary, Brookside Elementary was a pleasant-looking building that had beautiful grounds and athletic fields that ran beside Plaster Creek. I wasn’t as JC Penney as the rest of my classmates, because we were on welfare after my mom gave birth to my sister, Julie. So I was wearing whatever hand-me-downs we’d get from the local charitable institutions, with the occasional “Liverpool Rules” T-shirt I’d get from my dad. It didn’t really register that we were on welfare until about a year later, when we were at the grocery store and everyone else was paying in cash, but my mom broke out this Monopoly money for the groceries.

Being on welfare bothered her, but I was never fazed by that so-called stigma. Living with a single parent and seeing that all of my friends had mothers and fathers in the same house didn’t make me envious. My mom and I were actually having a blast, and when Julie came into the picture, I couldn’t have been happier to have a baby sister. I was really protective of her until a few years later, when she became the subject of many of my experiments in torture.

By the third grade, I’d developed real resentment toward the school administration, because if anything went wrong, if anything was stolen, if anything was broken, if a kid was beaten up, they would routinely pull me out of class. I
was
probably responsible for 90 percent of the mayhem, but I quickly became a proficient liar and cheat and scam artist to get out of the majority of the trouble. So I was bitter, and I’d get these ludicrous ideas, such as: “What if we detached the metal gymnastic rings that hang next to the swings, use them like a lasso, and put them right through the picture window of the school?” My best friend, Joe Walters, and I snuck out of the house late one night and did it. And when the authorities came, we scampered like foxes down to Plaster Creek and never got caught. (Many, many years later, I sent Brookside an anonymous money order for the damages.)

My problem with authority figures increased as I got older. I couldn’t stand the principals, and they couldn’t stand me. I had loved my teachers up until fifth grade. They were all women and kind and gentle, and I think they recognized my interest in learning and my capacity to go beyond the call of scholastic duty at that stage. But by fifth grade, I’d turned on all the teachers, even if they were great.

By now there was no male figure in my life to rein in any of this antisocial behavior. (As if any of the males in my life would have.) When my sister, Julie, was three months old, the police started staking out our house looking for Scott, because he had used some stolen credit cards. One night they came to the door, and my mom sent me to the neighbors while they interrogated her. Weeks later, Scott showed up and came storming into the house in a complete violent rage. He’d found out that someone had called my mom and told her he’d been cheating on her, so he rushed over to the phone in the living room and pulled it out of the wall.

I started shadowing him every inch, because my mom was terrified, and I wasn’t having any of that. He started to go into my room to get my phone, but I threw myself in front of him. I don’t think I was too successful, but I was prepared to fight him, using all the techniques that he had taught me a few years earlier. My mom finally sent me next door to get the neighbors, but that was clearly the end of his welcome in that house.

Still, about a year later, he attempted to reconcile with my mother. She flew to Chicago with little Julie, but he never showed up at their rendezvous spot—the cops had busted him. She had no money to get back home, but the airlines were nice enough to fly her back free. We went to visit him at a hard-core maximum-security prison, and I found it fascinating but a little disconcerting. On the way home, my mom said, “That’s a first, and that’s a last,” and shortly after that, she divorced him. Lucky for her, she worked for lawyers, so it didn’t cost her anything.

Meanwhile, my admiration for my dad was growing exponentially. I couldn’t wait for those two weeks every summer when I’d fly to California and be reunited with him. He was still living on the top floor of a duplex house on Hildale. Every morning I’d get up early, but my dad would sleep until about two
P.M.
after a late night of partying, so I had to find a way to entertain myself for the first half of the day. I’d go around the apartment to see what there was to read, and on one of my searches, I came across his huge collection of
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines. I just devoured them. I even read the articles. I had no sense that these were “dirty” magazines or in any way taboo, because he wouldn’t come out and say, “Oh God, what are you doing with those?” He’d be more likely to come over, check out what I was looking at, and say, “Isn’t that girl incredibly sexy?” He was always willing to treat me like an adult, so he talked openly and freely about the female genitalia and what to expect when I ended up going there.

His bedroom was in the back of the house, next to a tree, and I remember him explaining his early-warning system and escape plan. If the cops ever came for him, he wanted me to stall them at the front door so he could jump out the bedroom window, shimmy down the tree to the top of the garage, go down the house behind the garage to the apartment building, then on to the next street. That was confusing to me at eight years old. “How about if we just don’t have cops at the front door?” But he told me that he had been busted for possession of pot a few years earlier, and he’d also been beaten up by cops just for having long hair. All that scared the pants off of me. I certainly didn’t want my dad beaten up. All this only reinforced my distaste for authority.

Even though I had concerns about my dad’s well-being, those trips to California were the happiest, most carefree, the-world-is-a-beautiful-oyster times I’d ever experienced. I went to my first live music concerts and saw artists like Deep Purple and Rod Stewart. We’d go to see Woody Allen movies and even an R-rated movie or two. And then we’d sit around the house watching all those great psychedelic TV shows like
The Monkees
and
The Banana Splits Adventure Hour,
a show that featured these guys dressed up like big dogs, driving little cars and going on adventures. That’s how I looked at life at that time, psychedelic, fun, full of sunshine, everything’s good.

Every so often, my dad would make an unscheduled visit to us in Michigan. He’d show up with a lot of heavy suitcases, which he stored in the basement. I realized from my trips to California that he was involved in moving huge truckloads of marijuana, but it never registered that when he came to visit, that was what he was up to. I was just euphoric that he was there. And he couldn’t have been more different from every other person in the state of Michigan. Everyone on my block, everyone I’d ever come into contact with there, wore short hair and short-sleeved button-down shirts. My dad would show up in six-inch silver platform snakeskin shoes with rainbows on them, bell-bottom jeans with crazy velvet patchwork all over them, giant belts covered in turquoise, skintight, almost midriff T-shirts with some great emblem on them, and tight little velvet rocker jackets from London. His slightly receding hair was down to his waist, and he had a bushy handlebar mustache and huge sideburns.

My mom didn’t exactly embrace my dad as a good friend, but she recognized how important he was to me, so she was always pleasant and facilitated our communication. He would stay in my room, and when he left, she would sit down with me, and I would write him thank-you notes for whatever presents he’d brought me, and tell him how much fun it was to see him.

By the fifth grade, I had begun to show some entrepreneurial talent. I’d organize the neighborhood kids, and we’d put on shows in my basement. I’d pick out a record, usually by the Partridge Family, and we’d all act out the songs using makeshift instruments like brooms and upside-down laundry tubs. I was always Keith Partridge, and we’d lip-synch and dance around and entertain the other kids who weren’t quite capable of partaking in the performance.

Of course, I was always looking to make a buck or two, so one time when we had the use of a friend’s basement, I decided that I would charge whatever these kids could come up with, a dime, a nickel, a quarter, to come down to my friend’s basement and attend a Partridge Family concert. I set up a big curtain and put a stereo behind it. Then I addressed the crowd: “The Partridge Family are basically shy, and besides, they’re much too famous to be in Grand Rapids, so they’re going to play a song for you from behind this curtain.”

I went behind the curtain and pretended to have a conversation with them. Then I played the record. All the kids in the audience were going, “Are they really back there?”

“Oh, they’re there. And they’ve got someplace else to be, so you guys get running now,” I said. I actually got a handful of change out of the deal.

During fifth grade, I also devised a plan to get back at the principals and the school administrators I despised, especially since they had just suspended me for getting my ear pierced. In a school government class one day, the teacher asked, “Who wants to run for class president?”

My hand shot up. “I’ll do it!” I said. Then another kid raised his hand. I shot him a look of intimidation, but he kept insisting he wanted to run, so we had a little talk about it after class. I told him that I was going to be the next class president, and if he didn’t bow out immediately, he just might get hurt. So I became the president. The principal was dismayed beyond belief. I was now in charge of assemblies, and whenever we had special dignitaries come to the school, I was the one who showed them around.

Sometimes I’d rule by intimidation, and often I’d get into fights in school, but I also had a tender side. Brookside was an experimental school with a special program that integrated blind and deaf and mildly retarded older kids into the regular classes. As much of a hooligan and an intimidator as I was, all of these kids became my friends. And since kids can be evil and torment anyone who’s in any way different, these special students took a beating at every recess and lunchtime, so I became their self-imposed protector. I was keeping an eye on the blind girl while the deaf guy was stuttering. And if any of the jerk-offs teased them, I’d sneak up behind the offender with a branch and brain them. I definitely had my own set of morals.

In sixth grade, I started coming home for lunch, and my friends would congregate there. We’d play spin the bottle, and even though we had our own girlfriends, swapping was never a problem. Mostly we just French-kissed; sometimes we’d designate the time that the kiss had to last. I tried to get my girlfriend to take off her training bra and let me feel her up, but she wouldn’t give in.