Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  She also introduced me to booze when I slept over one weekend and we got plastered on Boone’s Farm apple wine. The fun didn’t stop there. The two of us used to watch the Dallas Cowboys run through their workouts at Cal Lutheran College. The team set up camp there every summer before the preseason. Jean liked to watch the good-looking, hard-bodied athletes practice, and she took me along for company. We wore halter tops and short-shorts, and were quite the Lolitas as the players ogled us.

  I’m sure there were older, more age-appropriate women around scouting the players for extracurricular activities. For us, it was an amusing way to spend a summer day. It was harmless fun. Some of the players had probably wished it wasn’t innocent. Bob Hayes, the Cowboys’ Hall of Fame wide receiver, kept a protective eye on us. He made sure the younger players didn’t get any ideas. He also lectured us about being good girls.

  One night Jean and I ran away from home. Both of us had been punished for something that seems insignificant now, but was a big enough deal back then to get us grounded. We snuck out of our homes, met at the local Kmart, and decided to leave town. We walked out to the road and stuck out our thumbs. Who motored by? Bob Hayes. The World’s Fastest Man slowed down, and then stopped when he recognized us.

  He had Jean and I get into his car and then drove us back to our homes. He gave each of us a stern talking-to about being careful and safe.

  But home was the last place I wanted to be. My dislike for being there had intensified from the initial confusion and uncertainty I experienced when my mom and dad split due to the hardships Walt’s drinking caused, as well as from the nonstop burdens of helping my mother. She needed more and more help, too. Something happened to her around this time that was never explained. She grew weak and almost feeble. It was a gradual downhill slide that occurred over months, until one day she stopped getting out of bed.

  She was usually able to prepare meals for us, but otherwise she stayed in bed and I had to pick up much of the slack in running the household and caring for the little ones. When I asked my dad what was wrong with Mom, he said she wasn’t feeling well. He didn’t offer any more information.

  I was forced to figure things out on my own. From conversations that I overheard, I learned she was taking lithium and occasionally seeing a doctor. Then there was talk about the possibility of putting her in a psychiatric hospital for an undetermined length of time. That really scared me. I had no idea what that entailed, but my imagination went straight to the worst: shock treatment, a lobotomy—losing my mother.

  I don’t know how or why, but she gradually emerged from her depression before she had to be hospitalized. It was still a long time before she returned to normal. As much as I loved her, her illness was one more reason I didn’t want to spend much time at home. It debilitated her, but it also put an enormous load on my teenage shoulders.

  I went through a stage where I lied about my family and told all sorts of tall tales whenever someone asked about my home life. I went so far as to say my father was actor Chuck Connors from the TV series The Rifleman and that I was related to Ohio State’s All-American linebacker Randy Gradishar. I lied all of the time. I can’t even remember all the stories that I told.

  In a way, I went into survival mode by inventing my own reality. Instead of facing the reality of my life, I made myself into someone else. For a while, I went through a stage where I decided to be a bad girl. I dressed in dirty jeans and scuffed shoes and washed my hair in baby oil to make it look greasy. I’ll never forget leaving for school one day when my dad’s voice stopped me in my tracks as he snapped, “Where the hell are you going looking like that?”

  I didn’t want to tell him that. By ninth grade, I had my eye on two very cute boys, Jack Wild and Kyle Rodgers. Kyle’s father, Pepper, coached the UCLA football team. Both guys were cool, California types. They wore their hair long and dressed in faded T-shirts and shorts. All the girls, including me, thought that they were hot.

  Jean arranged for the four of us to get together one Saturday night in a vacant house in Westlake Village. I think we had some wine and played Truth or Dare. Then the game morphed into Spin the Bottle and I ended up in a wardrobe closet with both Jack and Kyle, though not at the same time. It was my first time making out, and, of course, I loved it. I secretly hoped Jack would be my boyfriend.

  Sadly, after we were back in school, neither boy acknowledged our kisses or having even spent time with me. It was as if the bottle had never spun. Jack never gave me the time of day after that weekend. I was crushed. Given my lackluster self-esteem, I figured something was wrong with me.

  I was like a lot of girls in that respect but very different in another: I began shoplifting. I learned from three girlfriends of mine, all of whom happened to be Chicano. Like me, they were poor. I went through a phase where I thought their accents and the music they liked were cool. I went so far as to eat menudo, a traditional Mexican soup, on Saturdays the way they did.

  One of them was an especially tough girl who made no secret of the fact that she stole clothes and accessories. She said it was easy, and lo and behold, I tried it at the Thousand Oaks mall and it was. I made a rule: Never steal from people, just stores. Somehow I convinced myself that was okay because I couldn’t afford the stuff I took. It was convoluted thinking, but it made sense to me.

  I was just doing what my friends did. I gave myself free rein at numerous stores, including Judy’s, the mall’s most stylish young woman’s store. It didn’t seem bad even when I was caught taking tikis from a gift shop at Disneyland, but only because the park’s security let me off with a warning. I wasn’t as lucky at Thrifty Drugs. There, security caught me outside the store with a purse full of merchandise from the cosmetics counter.

  That turned into a bad scene. They held me in the manager’s office, said the police were on the way, and called my parents. I didn’t fear the cops as much as I did my dad. I pissed my pants and then pretended to pass out. The store felt bad and let me off with a stern warning. My dad wasn’t as forgiving. As soon as we got home, his belt came off and he let me have it.

  He said it was time I learned a lesson and grew up. Well, I learned a lesson, but growing up was going to take more time—not just years, but decades.

  three

  BENEATH THE BLUE SKY

  THE SUMMER after graduating junior high, I continued to blossom into what one of my friends called “a cute surfer chick.” I didn’t surf and I wasn’t sure about the cute part, but I gladly accepted her description and went out and spent most of my savings from babysitting on a new wardrobe from the surf shop at the Thousand Oaks mall. I also stole a few items from Judy’s and started my freshman year at Newbury Park High School with a whole new look.

  Success! Both guys and girls saw me as a fox, and I used that as leverage to become a cheerleader. I continued to sign up for as many after-school activities as possible, including the debate team. I wasn’t your typical blond pom-pom girl. At the start of my sophomore year, I wanted to play basketball. Since there wasn’t a girls’ team, I asked the boys’ varsity coach if I could try out for his team.

  No such precedent had been set, but I made a good pitch, telling him that I was a guard and my favorite NBA player was the Los Angeles Lakers’ All-Star guard Gail Goodrich. It worked. He gave me a shot, letting me play second-string guard in the summer league, and as far as I know, that made me the first girl in California to play high school sports for a boys’ team.

  I don’t think I was a token player either. I kept pace and still remember making a half-court pass that drew oohs and ahs from the crowd, as if they were amazed a girl could make that kind of play against boys.

  By the start of school, I’d had enough and quit the team. The practice schedule didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to spend more time being social, and a short time into the semester it paid off. I had my first boyfriend, Scott Russell, one of three well-known surfing brothers from Ventura County. He was a sophomore too. We made out in his car and at the beach. H
e surfed every day, and like a good surfer’s girlfriend, I watched.

  On one of the few occasions I went into the water, I got caught in the waves and nearly drowned. The waves were unusually big that day. I didn’t know which way was up or down and thought I was going to die. Then Scott raced in, grabbed my arm, and swam me back to shore. As far as I was concerned, he saved my life.

  But Scott dropped me toward the end of the year because I wouldn’t go all the way.

  I went to the prom with Rick Pond, a nice boy with a huge nose and piercing blue eyes. He was crazy about me. My mom made a gorgeous dress from slinky Qiana fabric I had picked out. I was nervous about Rick coming to the house to pick me up, but everyone was on good behavior and excited about my first big dress-up party.

  Rick brought a corsage and pinned it on with my mom’s help, though inside I was dying a dozen deaths from having his hand so close to my boob as my entire family watched. Unfortunately for Rick, I wasn’t as attracted to him as he was to me, at least in terms of being an item, and eventually did the right thing, working up the nerve to make it clear he wasn’t a boyfriend. To his credit, he stayed friendly.

  I started my junior year as one of the head cheerleaders—a song leader, actually—and dated a basketball player, a football player, and even Scott, who came around again probably thinking he could get me to go all the way now that we were older. He was wrong. I was too uptight and insecure to share that kind of intimacy. It was easier to be admired but unattainable.

  I might have remained an icy blond surfer chick through the rest of high school and gone on to college or junior college if not for the art class I took that year. It changed my life. The teacher was a cool, young hippie type who had long hair in the style of the Monkees’ Peter Tork. He had a stereo in the room and let the students play albums as we worked on projects.

  It turned out the students in that class had phenomenal taste in clothes and music. As I should’ve expected, they were far more interesting than the jocks and cheerleaders with whom I’d been hanging out. That first week a Mexican girl who wore the most beautiful jewelry and looked like a Gypsy captured my attention. I’d never seen her at school. Where had she been? I loved that look.

  Then I met another girl, Theresa “Terri” Ryan, who became better known a few years later as the Germs bassist Lorna Doom. We clicked instantly. She had incredible taste in music. She was into the New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, Nico, and Roxy Music. I hadn’t heard of any of these bands. I felt like she was changing my life. She was.

  She was also into Queen, especially the band’s guitarist Brian May. She loved him. She took me to see Queen when they came through town in support of their 1974 album, Queen II. If I don’t count seeing Glen Campbell at the Hollywood Bowl, Queen was my first rock concert. I left the show in love with the band’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury. I had never seen anyone perform with such energy and passion.

  Who looked like that?

  Who sounded like that?

  In order to go to more concerts, and to get around in general, I bought my first car, a Plymouth Satellite. It cost me $150. It was too good a deal to pass up, and my friends were impressed that I was able to get it so inexpensively. Then they saw why—from the driver’s side, the car looked to be in mint condition, but if you walked around to the other side, you looked straight into its guts. The passenger side of the chassis was missing. It should have been in the junk heap, not on the road. But I didn’t care. It got me around.

  On most afternoons, you could have found it parked in front of the record store, my new favorite hangout. I was obsessed with looking through the bins and discovering new albums. I read liner notes with the kind of attention I should have given my schoolwork. Among those albums, though, I began to find myself. And redefine myself. I spent hours staring at covers, learning about new bands, trading gossip and opinions about songs and records, and developing a sensibility that hadn’t existed before. It was like getting a makeover, but from the inside out.

  I would go home and look at my record collection the way I did my old clothes. Albums from Tony Orlando & Dawn, Bobby Sherman, and Neil Diamond didn’t fit anymore. I’d outgrown them.

  It was a phenomenal period to discover music. I felt like my whole life changed the day I came across the cover of Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power. Time stopped as I lifted the album from the bin and stared at the cover, a photo of a pale, painfully thin, shirtless guy staring off into the distance. He was hanging onto a standup microphone as if it was preventing him from falling over. The effect was ghoulish, dangerous, frightening, beautiful, and about a thousand other things all at the same time. I thought, What is this?

  I didn’t have the money to buy the album. But then someone brought that album to art class and I got to hear “Gimme Danger,” “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell,” “Penetration,” “Search and Destroy,” and “Death Trip.” I looked around and saw that most of the other kids in class were reacting like me: grinning as the raw, sludgy loud music shook the floor, the walls, our desks, our chairs, and our brains.

  It wasn’t ladylike. It wasn’t slutty either. It was new and different. And as I told Theresa, I loved it.

  The two of us also saw Roxy Music, Thin Lizzy, Bad Company, ELO, and the Kinks. At the record store, Theresa always had her nose in one of the British music magazines, like Melody Maker and New Musical Express, or NME. I marveled at how she knew everything going on in London’s underground music scene as well as who was hot and cool in the States months before anyone else had heard of them, including the Babies, Blondie, and the Enemies.

  As much as I was drawn to this new world, I kept one foot planted in everything that was familiar. I still went to church on Sundays with my family, was known around the neighborhood as a dependable babysitter, maintained a B average, and enjoyed being a song leader. I also landed a plum job as an ice-cream scooper at Swensen’s, a parlor whose owner, a guy named Ed, was known for hiring the cutest girls.

  Working there brought immediate status, but there was a downside to spending that much time around ice cream. By the end of the summer, I had gained forty pounds. I also cut my hair off and gave myself an Afro with a Toni home perm. I have one comment: Yikes!

  Call it a transitional period. Everything else seemed to be in flux—why not me?

  Ed eventually sold the store to two women whom I didn’t like. As a result, I began pocketing money that I should have been ringing up and putting in the register. After catching on, they took me aside one day before my shift and said it was time for me to go. I understood and appreciated the way they kept my dismissal low-key.

  By then I was a senior and ready to shed my suburban skin for a whole new scene, Hollywood. I had dumped my Plymouth for a ratty old Datsun, the “Thrash Datsun” as I called it, that Theresa and I took to all the hottest Hollywood clubs: the Roxy, the Whisky, and the Starwood. I knew the girls from my old cheerleader clique wondered what was up with me when I stepped down from my position as the school’s senior mascot, but it didn’t go with the new life I was cultivating in Hollywood. When they whispered that I was changing, they were right.

  Theresa and I joined the regulars who hung out at night in the Sunset Strip parking lot between the Rainbow and the Roxy. That spot was the late-night nerve center of L.A.’s rock scene. Between eleven P.M. and two A.M., rock stars and wannabes, groupies and insiders gathered there and waited for something to happen, though looking back I realize the party itself was in the parking lot and that just by being there we were where it was happening.

  If only we’d known. But everybody who was anybody in music hit the Rainbow. It was the place for exchanging news and information, seeing stars, finding drugs, and finding out where the best party was that night.

  If you were a poseur, this was where you posed. If you wanted to pass around a joint or score quaaludes, you showed up there. The lot was always filled with shiny Rolls-Royces and Excaliburs, clues that a VIP was having a good time inside. It was
also the best pickup spot in the entire city. Everyone was on, as if playing a part in their own movie.

  I was into guys who dressed like rock stars, guys who wore satin pants, platform shoes, and had big pineapple hairdos. As for me, I tied up my jeans at the bottom and teetered around on high platforms that made me feel as if I’d stepped into Hollywood straight from London’s Kings Road. I ripped my T-shirts and wore them in layers, and put a beret on the top of my head. I also smoked colored Sherman cigarettes. Little details were key.

  While I looked the part, I never felt as much a part of the scene as when I met the Who’s drummer Keith Moon. I was inside the Rainbow and noticed he was with a black hooker whom I knew from the parking lot. As I passed their table, she grabbed my arm and pulled me into their booth. The three of us shared a pizza. I’m sure I didn’t eat.

  At seventeen, I was beside myself, sitting with a true rock star and trying to maintain my cool. I smoked my Shermans and let Keith buy me a drink. No one was terribly strict about carding kids then, and certainly the waitresses weren’t going to stop Keith from buying drinks for the women at his table, even if one of them was still in high school.

  They wanted to keep partying at wherever he was staying. I’m pretty sure they intimated or asked outright if I wanted to go back with them. I didn’t, and I made some excuse why I had to leave. I went back outside and faded into the crowd, kind of pinching myself after socializing with rock royalty but still playing it very cool, like it was no big deal.

  I had a similar encounter with Bon Scott, the lead singer of AC/DC. That also took place late at night inside the Rainbow. But he was whacked out of his mind. Keith had been inebriated, but Bon was wasted. He grabbed my shirt as I walked past him and said something along the lines of “My, aren’t you lovely, let’s have sex.”

  I wasn’t remotely ready or interested in anything like that, even with a rock star. Besides, he was out of it. Who knows how much more of the night he saw before passing out. I bet not much. In any event, I said a couple of words to him in response, just enough to get him to relax his grip on my shirt, and then I spun away and disappeared into the restaurant, letting him fish for another girl.