I won’t say who, but one of the guys in this show before me hurt his back, sued, and won against MGM, scoring himself a cool $40 mil. But my dad raised me in the belief that the only true way to earn money is through your own righteous endeavors and that no good will ever come from “easy” or “blood” money. The fall was an accident. No one wanted me to get hurt, so why should I make someone fund the rest of my existence? Especially since I’m still walking around with all my faculties. I come to the conclusion that it’s hard to kill a Springthorpe. A three-story free fall to a steel deck is usually a recipe for a wooden overcoat and a permanent dirt nap. Someone was watching over me that night. And I think I know who.
I take three weeks off to heal, and then it’s on with the show! Whoo-hooo!
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DARKNESS AT NOON
THE TWO SIDES OF LAS VEGAS
2002–2003
Unfortunately, my dad never gave me the benefit of his views on relationships with women who aren’t your wife. I’m sure it would have helped. There are two female relationships I form up in Vegas. One is chaste, the other not so much.
The chaste one
Her name is Sahara. She is seven years old by the time I begin EFX in Vegas, and she’s a bright and burning spirit. Amy, her mom, has been bringing her to my concerts for a couple of years now, and I have such an instant bond with this sweet little bean sprout of a girl that the only explanation for me is: our relationship was predestined. I’ve experienced this before—a deep connection to another human being that can’t possibly be explained by the brief time we spend together in this life. I know this was most definitely the case when I first laid eyes on my sons as I stood beside Barbara in the delivery room and watched them enter this world. I experienced it with B the moment I laid eyes on her. Occasionally I’ve felt it with strangers I have met and later loved. The feeling is spiritual more than worldly, so it’s not really possible to convey in mere words that anyone other than Shirley MacLaine would understand … oh, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Mostly it feels like recognition. And there’s a sense of relief whenever this connection—or reconnection—is finally made.
There are times when I have almost missed an encounter with someone, destiny made it happen, and it later turned out to be a fateful meeting. These seemingly chance meetings aren’t necessarily for the better, although the ones I mention here certainly are. It’s a beautiful mystery. So, Sahara was five years old and standing in a long line for a meet- and-greet after one of my live shows the first time I “saw” her. I was doing the “Hello, how are you, nice to meet you” thing and I looked up to see how much longer the line was going to keep me there before I could go back to my hotel room and crash, when I caught sight of this little angel face with bangs and a big smile about twenty people back, bouncing in and out of the queue like she didn’t have a lot of time to waste and could we please get to the “meeting” part. She lit up the room, and everyone stepped back to let this little Energizer Bunny have her moment with me. She said, “Hello,” then jumped straight to “Do you want to hang out later?” And this is not precociousness; it feels more like familiarity.
I see her a couple more times at different shows, and when I move to Las Vegas, Amy and Sahara come to visit often. The town is a great match for Sahara’s energy, and she falls in love with Vegas—and Vegas with her. And of course she loves the fact that there is a Sahara Hotel and a Sahara Boulevard here. Amy is a good woman and has been a fan since she was Sahara’s age, but she’s not at all starstruck, having worked for Scotty Moore (Elvis’s guitar player) for a few years in Memphis, where she met celebrities by the dozens. She is enjoying reliving her childhood though her spirited daughter. We occasionally all hang out together at the Hard Rock Café after EFX is done for the night, and Sahara and I play our favorite game, hangman. She is smart, funny, and—if ever there was one—an old soul.
I fall hard for this sweet girl and make room for her in my life anytime she and her mom visit from their home in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I even drag her up onstage during EFX to dance with the cast. And it’s not just me: this reaction to Sahara is universal. Sue Packard, my assistant during the run of the show, isn’t exactly child-friendly, but Sahara manages to draw my kid-resistant right-hand woman into her corner. Sue later says to me, “If I could be guaranteed a daughter like that, I’d have one in a heartbeat.” Although Sahara has no idea who Tony Curtis is when he comes backstage to say hi, she smiles like a champ for a photo with him. And she is a hell of a hangman player. We go to lunch, make fun of the cheesy Elvis impersonators on the street, and hit the video game megastore regularly. Having a relationship like this with such a big-spirited kid makes Las Vegas seem positively homey. But living up here is making me feel increasingly disconnected from my real home, so it’s probably not surprising to anyone that there is also:
The unchaste one
It is a year before I even begin EFX that I meet her backstage, amidst the controlled frenzy of yet another post-concert meet-and-greet. At twenty-one she is barely a woman and still looks like a girl. I give her a quick hug as we’re introduced and she starts crying. I assume she is a serious fan and just overcome. She says she’s sorry and seems genuinely embarrassed; she doesn’t know why she’s crying. I’m instantly attracted to her vulnerability, and as I let go of her hand, she lingers at the final touch and looks me in the eyes but says nothing more. She is gone. I think about her that night. I was deeply turned on by the odd mix of signals: fragility and boldness. Erotic, vulnerable, maybe a bit of craziness somewhere there in her eyes, but with an innocence and softness that begs to be saved. (Oh, no. The worst thing I could possibly do is think I might save someone.)
Some weeks later, I see her again. She’s standing behind a chain-link fence as I enter the gig. She calls to me and I jog over like an eager schoolboy, which, at fifty-one, I am most certainly not. She asks if she can come backstage, and I set it up through my crew, something I never do for a stranger. I see her in the audience as we play that night and I feel like I’m playing for her. She doesn’t take her eyes off me. Backstage after the show I’m feeling like I used to back in the ’80s when I’d scan the backstage group for the perfect candidate to share the night’s activities. I haven’t done this for years. It’s exciting and troubling to be feeling it again. How quickly I could go back to my old ways; I should know better, I tell myself.
We meet for the third time. She tells me briefly about her incredibly dysfunctional family and her desire to become an actress or a dancer. It’s all pretty unfocused stuff she’s saying, but my focus is crystal clear and on her: She has flawless skin; a young curvy body; and sad, pale-blue eyes. Although she isn’t particularly beautiful, smart, or mature, she possesses a disarming mixture of innocence, vulnerability, confidence, and damage (uh-oh). And she has a wicked sexual presence. That sexual presence is the bait I will soon lunge for like a witless barracuda, pretty much unaware of the hook imbedded in the soft, tempting flesh.
Before she leaves backstage, she surprises me by kissing me full on the mouth and whispers “I’m horny” into my ear. I feel a thrill course up and down my spine.
I expect to run into her at the bar in the hotel that night, but she’s nowhere to be seen. She is taunting me. Even though she’s so young, she seems to be fully in control through her sexual innuendo, her looks, and her touches. I have some experience in this area, but she’s running rings around me. And this obvious and overtly erotic attention from such a young girl is a little unsettling. There is also a wildness and recklessness about her that begins to feed my chimera. She is like a contained explosion at this point, but I sense there will soon be a full detonation. I secretly hope that I am inside the blast zone.
Late at night, as I hang on the edge of sleep in a strange bed in a lonely hotel room miles from home, my Darkness tells me that I might really be worth something if I could fuck this girl. “Not that she’d be really interested in an old dog like you, though,” he adds. And this
is his real point.
I start to think about her all the time. Even though I suspect that Mr. D is lining me up for a very, very hard fall, I choose to ignore my own internal warning signs. And I have a sad suspicion as to what’s behind this sudden attraction. At the heart of it, I want to be young again.
In a first real step over the line, I give her an address where she can write me, a PO box reserved for business. And this is business. Monkey business. She writes poems that she asks me to read and sends them to my PO box, which makes the local post office suddenly take on an air of forbidden fruit every time I walk through its once-sterile, government-regulation doors. I’m already in over my head.
The long wait that I have to endure between seeing her and maybe consummating this thing is adding fuel to the fire of my compulsion for this girl. She comes and goes and is not making it easy or, in fact, possible for me to do anything about my reptilian-brain impulses. I think that I’ve completely lost my fucking mind. And still no sex. I’m seventeen again, trying my damnedest to get laid, and the more it’s denied, the more I want it. I am out of control. And confounded.
I eventually give the unchaste one my cell number and we talk sometimes. I pretend our calls are fun and innocent, but they are a betrayal. We talk on the phone like we’re a couple of teenagers, and it reminds me of all the missed times in my late teens when I wasn’t talking on the phone with girls and being just generally goofy and giddy. It’s something I missed out on in my very dark, screwed-up teen years: this mindless, not-a-care-in-the-world, swoony, frivolous boy-girl phone chitchat. Because of the connection I have with her, this relationship is going in a different direction than if we’d just had sex one night … not that we have.
Although there are ads in every paper of every town about this new EFX show I’m starring in, I call her to tell her I’m in Las Vegas in case she wants to come up and hang out. “It would be cool,” I say and I sound like an idiot to myself. I try to seem casual, but by this point I’m on edge every time I hear her voice on the line. She comes to Vegas eventually and finds me lonely and dispirited. I take full responsibility for what happens between us and honestly don’t know how it could have gone any other way. My desire to have her is very strong. And the longer the wait, the more it grows.
She comes to the show, and afterward, backstage to my dressing room. I expect her to run into my arms, but she sashays in, mock-fanning herself dramatically, as though in a sweat after walking by all the hot young bodies of the male dancers backstage. She actually tells me she thinks one of the other actors in the show is sexy. Again, small voice telling me … opposite direction … run fast … don’t look back. But I just stand there and tell her I’ve missed her. She kisses me deeply and asks if there’s anything to drink. I go look. As I am rummaging through my dressing room fridge, the warning bells are ringing loud and clear, but I am wearing my super-silent earplugs and am singing “La la la la” as loudly as I can to drown out anything I don’t want to hear.
I agree to meet her later in her hotel room. As I make my way up though the elevators and corridors, I look at all the video cameras everywhere, watching me, tracking my betrayal in low-def video for the whole security department to see. I make brief “love” to her this one night. It’s not great, and I don’t know what I thought it would be, but I have time invested now and I am left to my own fantasies, doubts, and fears when she goes home, back to her life, and gets consumed by it.
I stop hearing from her. She won’t return my calls. She is not following the time-honored rules of sex on the road—and neither am I. She is supposed to now be under my sway, and I’m supposed to not think very much about her. It seems to be the reverse.
This is probably the wrong time and I am the wrong guy to try to quote the Buddha, but there is something to what he says about lust and desire: that like a weed, it will persist until the root itself is dug up and discarded. I think I’ve trimmed the leaves and branches back quite a bit on my desire/lust plant, but the root is definitely very much alive and sucking up nourishment from the black earth of my wounded soul. I have been vain in thinking I could manage all this.
When we finally do speak again on the phone, she says she’s seeing other guys. This hurts like a motherfucker, but I have no leg to stand on, nor do I want to put myself in the position of questioning or challenging her unfaithfulness. I can understand why I was drawn to her in the first place, but what’s keeping me hooked on her now? It makes no sense, but my initial attraction has mutated into a sanity-threatening obsession. If I could just figure out the real “why” of it, maybe I could release myself from what is beginning to feel like a curse. Understanding eludes me. There is no “why.” It just is. And I know it has to end.
Once I stop calling, she starts calling again at my house in Vegas. I sometimes just sit there in the living room, staring at the phone as it rings and rings and rings. I hear her voice as she leaves a message and my heart races. I know this is not love, because I know what love feels like, and it’s back home waiting for me—I hope. But whatever this is, its pull is strong. I feel like I’m losing my mind. She calls one day when I’m feeling weak, and I pick up.
“Hi,” I say.
“Oh God, I’m so buzzed.”
“What are you on?”
“Hello?”
“I’m here.”
“You won’t believe what I just did.”
“What?”
“I just had a foursome with three guys.”
“You did?
“Yeah …”
“Wh … why?”
“I don’t know, I guess I was drunk. They were pushing me.”
“I thought … didn’t we have … I mean … I thought …”
“Hey, you’re married. What am I supposed to do?”
“That’s crazy.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I …”
“I’m a skank.”
“No, don’t say that.”
“I’m just a slut.”
“No, no, it’s … where did it happen?”
“At this guy’s house. We drank a bunch of beer and we just … I don’t know … one of the guys didn’t want to do it, but I said it’s okay and he …”
“I gotta go.”
“What?”
Click.
What was I hoping to find in this insane relationship? Not this. I know it doesn’t matter that I stayed away from temptation for so long: it happened in the end, and it makes all the resistance meaningless. I feel like the alcoholic who abstains for a couple of years and then goes on a lost weekend to end all lost weekends. Not only have I fallen off the wagon, I’ve nuked the fucking thing.
And I’ve hit absolute rock bottom.
I am so bitterly angry at this girl, at myself, and at my damned obsessions, and I’m confounded by the giant step backward that I’ve taken. For me there has been no healing in therapy, only recognition and understanding. Healing will take a spiritual path and the abandonment of many desires and needs. It is, in itself, a pretty friggin’ tough nut to crack.
As I get ready for another performance of EFX, the Darkness looks back at me from the bathroom mirror and shakes his head in mock disapproval. “Nice one, jerk.” There’s a slight upward curve to the corners of his mouth. He knows he got me, and I know it, too. Down I go to that familiar place where I’m worthless, needy, and vain and where Mr. D keeps a warm bed for me with a cup of hot cocoa on the nightstand. I go to a local doctor and he prescribes lithium for me, but it makes me crazy and unsteady on my feet sometimes and I fear for my life while walking atop some of the huge sets during the EFX show. I switch to sleeping pills, and they work for a while. At least I can get some peace when I’m unconscious at night.
I miss my family. The Vegas gig is starting to feel like a life sentence, and I’m in such a sorry state that I need intravenous fluids and vitamin B12 shots every night now just to get through a performance. One evening after a show, I sit down by the fireplace in
my home away from home, furious that I’ve wasted a whole year and a half up here and betrayed my family and myself as well. It’s midnight. “I’m not getting up from this chair until I’ve completed a song,” I say out loud. My voice echoes through the empty house. It feels pretty lonely. I know writing is the only way for me to get a perspective on all that has happened. The only place (other than the now-unavailable security of Stein’s study) where I’m unswervingly honest is in my songwriting.
I think of all the time I’ve let slip by, my giant fuckup with this affair, how desperately I want out of this gig, and how much I’ve hurt my girl B and my family with this duplicity. The time I’ve spent here now seems like a terrible, ruinous waste. The song that comes out first is—appropriately—one I call “Wasted.” I have a focus for my writing now. I am hurt, lonely, and angry, and what could be better fodder than this for writing a few happy-go-lucky pop tunes? At last I begin the wonderful and at the same time horrible process of songwriting. It is the only way I know to get these caustic emotions out in the open and look at them objectively in the cold light of day. I need to purge myself of all this shit. And the music that comes out of me in the following months is a cry from my wretched soul.
Late, Late at Night Page 30
