Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (27 page)

After the work was done Donnie led me to his private jet, outfitted with catered caviar and baby vegetables ripe for the dipping, and to his new two-story dream pad in Aspen. I didn’t ski even though I was supplied with the newest in slope fashion. Freezing, falling down, getting real wet, and sprouting a Rudolph nose in front of Jack Nicholson didn’t appeal to me. Instead I wandered around the tiny shopping area in the snow, marveling at the chichi fashions and baubles for billionaires. Aspen in late ’86 was a cross between Melrose
Avenue and cowpoke country. Now it’s almost exclusively Mel-rose verging on Rodeo Drive, but it’s still a beautiful place. You can bump into Don Henley at any given moment. Ha ha. Anyway, while I was scarfing illicit strawberries and honeydew melon balls in Aspen, Michael was doing the same thing back in Los Angeles, only with a luscious human female piece of fruit. And once again I was kept blissfully in the dark.

The one bond between Michael and me that never wavered was our commitment to Nicky, and together we wrung our tied hands over his growing difficulties. We were becoming painfully aware that he needed a new shrink, that Janine, with all her puppet work and singsong games, was totally ineffectual. I asked around and came up with the name of a supposedly “good” child psychiatrist, for I’d begun to wonder if, as a last resort, some type of medication could help Nick’s powerful mood swings. In her book Patty Duke described how her life had been a tortured shambles until somebody had prescribed lithium for her (. . . they walk alike, they talk alike—at times they even drop alike . . .). So Nick and I waited in the stuffy, tiny outer office until the great man let us in. Nick was understandably agitated, and the “doctor,” who studied him like he was an amoeba under a microscope, had the gentleness of an iron lung and the patience of a demon on speed. In fact, after about a half hour of attempting to reach Nick, he became more and more red-faced and furious, until Nick climbed behind the couch, shrieking and sobbing, “Demon! He’s a demon!!” After I’d coerced him out of his hiding place by promising him we could leave, the good doctor said—
right in front of Nick
—“Yes, I agree that your son is crazy, and I don’t think there is anything I can do for him.” The word
crazy
sank into Nick’s head like a hatchet, and he cowered behind me, shaking and breathing hard like he had just witnessed an exorcism. I glared at the beast in doctors’ clothing, but it was too late. For the next few years, when anyone questioned his behavior for any reason, Nick declared that he was crazy. I canceled the creep’s check and wrote him a scathing letter, but I should have called the American Medical Association, taken him to court, and put his pancreas through a meat grinder. Thwarted mother-hen retaliation dies hard.

It wasn’t only maternal pride that made Nicky’s intellect seem dazzling. Since he was a tiny kid he had been enthralled with all
things Japanese, and at age nine was actually teaching himself to speak the language. Our main weekly outing was downtown to Little Tokyo, where he bought Japanese comics and browsed among the much-coveted robots. One remarkable afternoon, as he carefully walked the fence in our front yard, he told me a wondrous tale about his previous life as the caretaker of sharks in a “Sea World—type place,” where he had drowned after falling into the water while feeding his shark charges. “Now you know why I don’t like to swim, Mom,” he said, “so don’t bother me about it anymore.”

But there was a kernel of darkness in his brilliant imagination that made him prey to haunting fears he could hardly name or describe. He saw tortured faces, ghosts, and other strange apparitions in the corners of his room. He saw people from other planets out the windows. He would finish a book about scientific progress and worry it was all going too fast. After watching a TV show about children starving in India, he sobbed for two days. Already an eco-monster, he clipped the plastic six-pack holders so they wouldn’t wind up on the snout of a porpoise. He mourned the vanishing rain forests. In attempts to help him figure what in the world was going on, I took him to the Bodhi Tree bookstore, and he pored through spiritual tomes seeking refuge. He tried yoga, putting himself in all sorts of contorted asanas (yoga positions), he went through a stage of transcendental meditation, oming for inner peace. We kept up our trips to the Self-Realization Lake Shrine and the air would fill up with incense smoke and comic books on Krishna and Shiva. Lordy, Lord, Lord.

Speaking of the glorious Lord, Nick spent a few months at a Jesus-oriented school after the final, final straw at Westland, in which he tossed a chair over the heads of his classmates, almost breaking a window, and was asked to leave the fancy, haughty private school. I had to find a replacement fast and came up with this Bible-thumping institution. The long-suffering, do-gooder born-agains thought it was their Christian duty to help the pissed-off little fellow find Jesus, and in their attempt to save his soul, he was placed in many corners and given many hellfire-type lectures, but they never asked him to leave. He told me about these outmoded procedures and complained about being bored and understimulated, but I was at my heart’s end and needed some of my own time and space, please Jesus, and I also believed it was better for him to be with other kids then to sulk around the house. However, after a little Christian walk to
McDonald’s one afternoon, I yanked him from Jesus school real fast. The class had wandered by a Far East antiques store that sold Buddhas and other religious statues, and when Nick pressed his nose to the glass to check out the merchandise, the teacher harped, “Cast your eyes away from the devil, Nicholas. Those pagan statues came straight from Satan.” I realized their shallow values were so foreign to Nick that the potential for screwing up the one thing that gave him solace was too strong. I also remembered visiting my born-again relatives down in the gorgeous hills of Kentucky and the agony I felt. Guilt-stained and wracked from carrying the cross down the Sunset Strip, I found myself down on my knees in front of the TV set, praying with Billy Graham. Seeking forgiveness for being young, free, joyously wild.

Michael and I had a thousand meetings with the Santa Monica school system and state board of mental health, and Nick was put through way too many days of ink-blot and IQ testing. For one test he was told to draw a picture of himself, and Nick produced a perfect log like the one the “log lady” carried around on
Twin Peaks
. Confused by the boy wonder, the official fools could only advise us to find him a good therapist while they attempted to find us “proper placement.” So Nicky returned to the local public school under great duress, and I met with many child psychiatrists, extremely wary and on guard, until I finally came upon a sweet, big bear of a man called Laurance at a children’s facility in West Los Angeles. Since Nick didn’t think this guy was on a mission from Hades, sent to torment him, he started twice-weekly sessions and actually seemed to be feeling a bit better about himself.

He had even made a new friend, Taliesin Jaffe, T.J., the blond little actor boy in the movie
Mr. Mom
. T.J. was an outgoing, intelligent charmer who had to work on Nick for thirty minutes to get him through his front door, but when he did, they found they were both interested in astrology, astronomy, Greek myths, and most important, Japanese animation. T.J.’s mom was a casting director friend of Michael’s, and the next time we all got together T.J. introduced Nick to the spellbinding world of Nintendo—and the all-encompassing place where he could destroy the bully bad guys and control his own destiny. He soon had his own Nintendo system, followed by every game he wanted, then more systems, more games. More games. More systems. More. Sega. Genesis. Turbo Grafx CD. P. C. Engine. Sega Master System. Game Boy. Game Gear. Famicom, Super Famicom. Neo Geo. Super Nintendo.

Big, new weighty worries were waxing as the old year, 1986, was waning. My dear friend, Shelly—Michele Myer—was suffering insurmountably with the Big C. My brilliant, stubborn, longtime girlfriend had always cursed her mammoth bosom and hated doctors due to her truly prudish Catholic school upbringing, so had put off getting a breast lump checked out, and now the disease had spread to her spine. She was banging weakly on heaven’s door. Shelly had been the black lamb in an alcoholic family, striking out the only way she knew how—through music, shoving her way up through the rock ranks slowly but surely until she booked the coolest local clubs, discovering incredible bands and making almost no money for her dedicated inspiration. She was the first person to book Van Halen, and the Go-Go’s, among so many others, but still didn’t have a darntootin’ dime to call her own.

Michael and I decided to put together a benefit for Michele and called out all the dogs. We rented the Roxy, and there were lines around the block to see the Knack, a few of Motley Crüe, re-formed Chequered Past featuring Michael and Steve Jones and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols, Charlie Sexton, Dweezil Zappa (in his first appearance), some of the Go-Go’s, and a heavy-duty jam session dedicated to the “den mother of rock and roll,” featuring our new pal Bruce Willis on harmonica. At the close of the show Michael crooned to Shelly, “Mee-shell, my belle,” and the whole place cheered while she silently bawled, so sweetly grateful to be acknowledged. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS came through with a hefty donation, as did David Lee Roth and Ronnie James Dio. At least she didn’t feel beholden and skint while she suffered and swigged liquid morphine to curtail her ever-expanding pain.

After the benefit Michael went to that other balmy coast to cavort with Donnie on the set, where he had started to rule with an overwrought iron thumb, and Michele stayed with Nick and me for a few days in Santa Monica. Her most surprising comfort came from the person she had loved more than life, almost all her life: Chris Hillman. She liked to say that her rock-and-roll obsession had been all his fault. Her favorite band had been the Byrds and then the Flying Burrito Brothers. I met her in 1969 at a Burrito session at A&M Records. She announced herself as “the original Burrito fan,” and I let her have the all-important credit. Shelly had always underestimated herself profoundly or got severely angry about not getting
the respect from the rock mutts she thought she deserved. In the old days Mr. Hillman had often ignored her desperate adoration at his gigs, sometimes just being downright mean. I had kept in touch with my first love through the years, kept track of his various musical projects, and had noticed a gradual change in his bravado attitude, so was not dumbfounded by his response to Michele’s illness. “I’ll come see her tomorrow,” he announced, and we prepared for his arrival. Shelly camped out on the couch (she was almost to the point of immobility) dressed in her most colorful oriental robe. She had lost almost all of her hair and was on a constant search for the perfect turban. We found her a bright yellow one with gold thread running through it, and she was ready to greet Mr. Hillman.

The knight in shining armor arrived wearing tight faded jeans, carrying a bunch of flowers, and brought the house down. He spent hours with Shelly handing her such a luminous hunk of light that she felt that the whole, hard trip had been worthwhile. Then he decided to make me feel good, too. While I was making tea for us in the kitchen, he came up behind me, encircling my waist with his big arms. “I’m really proud of what you’re doing for Michele. You’re a good girl, Pamela.” Do you ever fall out of love with your very first heartthrob? I stammered, I held his hands, I looked into his bright blue eyes and yearned for yesterday’s busted-up teen dreams. When it was time to go Chris hugged Shelly tight and promised to see her soon, and I walked him to his car. I thanked him for lifting Shelly’s heart. We stood in the driveway looking at each other the way I dreamed about when I was too young to know better, too far gone to care. “I’ve always loved you,” he said. Then Prince Charming roared off in his 4x4, leaving me standing in a dewpond of ancient, unrequited desire.

Shelly finally had to move back to her hometown, San Francisco, to be with her sister, and I made a couple trips north to bask in her sorrowful company and try to boost her morale. On my first trip her sister Claire lent me her bomb of a car, and I loaded Shelly and her wheelchair into the wreck for her last sojourn into the wilderness. We went straight to Haight-Ashbury, where we had lunch at an old hippie diner and found two like-new three-ring Beatle binders for twenty-five bucks each. We scored heavy and she was wearily ecstatic. She slept for hours and hours afterward, missing a show that she had
circled twice in the TV listings, while I sat beside her and listened to her troubled, aching sleep. That night, attempting to find Mr. Sandman in Claire’s water bed, I cried for Shelly and her bare, thwarted life full of self-inflicted burdens. She despised her giant breasts, looking forward to the day she could afford a reduction; she cursed her family, the nuns, the record industry that wouldn’t recognize her potential. And even though she had a razor-sharp one-liner mind and a hidden sweet heart that came out in her “Auntie Shelly” mode with Nicky, she complained constantly about her lot in life, “Why am I alive?,” her constant bitter query. I had always chastised her about shoving so much negativity into her atmosphere, but she thought I was nuts. I tried to drag her to Science of Mind, but she told me she had enough religious input from Catholic school. Still, she had her glorious moments. I remember one of my favorite Michele Myer quotes: “We know our limits—and there are none.” If only she had believed it.

By my second trip she had weakened dramatically. While the game shows droned, she lay under her blankets like a gasping fish out of water—every breath labored and tight, clutching her ever-present bottle of liquid morphine, even in sleep. She had me go through all her collected, precious papers: autographs of heroes, shots of her with David Lee Roth, John Entwistle of the Who, the Go-Go’s, the coveted piece in the L.A.
Times
that called her “the den mother to the L.A. rock scene.” I read it aloud to her: “Myer’s job doesn’t end with the last encore of the night. She’s a rock and roll Mother Goose, chaperoning out-of-town bands, baby-sitting for rock rookies and protecting her charges from the sharks that feed on naive young rock stars. ‘Michele has a lot of heart,’ said Peter Case from the Plimsouls. ‘When we were really down and out, she’d take us out to dinner and make sure we were OK. She’s always gone out of her way to take care of us.’ Another local rocker adds: ‘She has kept people alive. Who knows how many times she’s propped up some kid backstage and said, ‘Do you know who you are? Let’s talk about it before you go out and die in the street.’ ” She smiled thinly and said she never knew who the “local rocker” was that gave her such celebrated credit.