Neon Angel

by Cherie Currie

  I was rooming with Sandy this time around. As soon as we got into the room, she flicked on the television and started complaining about the lack of channels. I went straight into the bathroom and locked myself in. In the bedroom Sandy yelled, “Cherie, you ain’t gonna believe this. There’s only two fuckin’ channels, and one of them is showing a bunch of old geezers playing darts! Goddamn!”

  I dropped the hotel key into my purse and then reached into my bag for a Placidyl. I popped it in my mouth and swallowed hard. I yelled to see if Sandy wanted to go get a drink with me. Another day loomed in front of me, and I wondered how I was going to get through it.

  In Glasgow, the audience screamed at us, and beat the living crap out of each other in the aisles as we played. Debris rained down upon us, and we did our best to dodge the bigger items while still hitting our notes. As a song ended and the stage was plunged into darkness, I felt a heavy thud at my feet. When the lights came up again, I saw that it was a huge bowie knife that had flown through the air, landing only inches from my feet. I had actually felt it as it embedded itself in the stage.

  I felt my blood turn to ice, and I ran offstage in terror. Backstage, I screamed at Kent, who was uselessly trying to calm me down. “That’s it, Kent! I’m not going back out there!”

  “But, Cherie . . . listen!”

  “They want to kill us!”

  “Cherie—they’re gonna tear this place apart if you guys don’t finish the set!” Then I saw Joan storming off the stage with a worried look on her face. She ran over to me, her guitar still around her neck.

  “What the fuck just happened?” She had obviously seen the knife sticking up out of the stage, and it had scared the holy shit out of her, too.

  “I don’t want to go back out there, Joan!” I said, on the verge of hysterics. “I don’t want to die playing this stupid show!”

  “Look!” Kent interceded. “I’ll talk to them. I’ll calm them down. They’re just kids . . .”

  First Kent walked out onstage and said that if they continued throwing stuff at us, the show was going to be canceled. You could barely hear him above the screams and jeers. Then Joan went out, threatened the same, and they quieted down a little. After a few tense minutes, we reluctantly went back out and finished the set. From that point on, I stood back from the edge of the stage, my eyes combing every inch of that audience. I was determined to head off any more attacks, in case they were planning on throwing grenades, Molotov cocktails, or whatever other shit they hurled at bands they “liked” in this hell hole of place.

  I looked down and all I could see was a sea of faces, all twisted up in a mask of rage and hate. Hate was definitely “in” all of a sudden. All of the music I had grown up on seemed quaint, sweet even. These kids were fucking insane. I thought I had taken it to the extreme, but the audiences here actually scared me. They made me look like Cinderella! From the corner of my eye, I noticed something twinkling, suspended in the air for a split second. Then it careened toward the stage, and I realized that it was a large glass bottle. It hit Joan’s guitar with a loud clunk, deflected, and then shattered at our feet. I caught Joan’s eye—she looked as pissed off and scared as I felt. That was too close.

  When the show finally ended, a dozen security guards had to clear a path to get us out of the venue in one piece. We huddled our way toward the waiting limo, and I realized that this is what it must feel like if you’re an infamous prisoner running the gauntlet of a screaming mob on your way to court. Desperate hands reached out to us, trying to tear away a piece of our clothes, a chunk of our hair, anything they could rip away from us to keep for a memento.

  “GO!” screamed the security guard as we shoved our way into the limo and the door slammed behind us.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Joan, her voice dripping with fear and awe.Looking through the windshield, I could see the sea of screaming kids parting slightly as the limo started to roll slowly forward. There was a heavy, rhythmic hammering as the throng of rabid kids slammed their palms against the hood, the roof, the windows.

  “I feel like I’m on the last plane out of Burma,” Jackie said.

  “Me, too,” I agreed, although I had no idea what she was talking about.

  The limo inched forward, coming to a stop every few moments because the crowd was blocking the way. The driver honked and cursed at our insane fans through the tinted glass.

  Sandy smiled, and looked at me. “Man, I’m thinking that we should maybe throw you to them, Cherie. Hey, guys—d’you think that they’ll let us go if we give them Cherie?”

  Everybody laughed at this, and I joined in. But a part of me wondered how much of a joke it was. I suddenly felt like I was fourteen again, hanging out with Marie and her cool friends. On the outside, looking in.

  “Where the fuck are the security guards?” Lita sneered as the limo started to rock from side to side. They seemed to have vanished, and the limo wasn’t even moving forward anymore. In fact, the crowd was swarming the vehicle from all sides. I felt hot, claustrophobic. The inside of the limo got dark as the crowd pressed up against the windows, blocking out all light. Faces, smushed out of shape like Play-Doh masks, were pressed up against the glass. Screaming, squished mouths and saliva dripping down the glass, steaming up on the outside. Mohawks and skinheads, leather jackets and chains, and fists pounding against the glass. The rhythmic rocking of the limo got more and more intense. Side to side. Like they were trying to flip us over.

  I looked over to Joan, and she looked pissed off and terrified at the same time. “This really sucks!” she said with a slightly hysterical note in her voice.

  The pounding got louder. I had this terrible image in my head that they would rip the roof off of the limo like the lid off a tin of sardines, and then drag us all out, screaming, to be ripped to pieces. “Fuck!” the limo driver screamed, and he lurched forward in a panic. The crowd didn’t move. The left wheel lifted off the ground. Jesus—the mob was going to turn the limo over any second now.

  With a clunk, we righted ourselves. Sensing an opportunity, the driver stepped on the gas again. We lurched forward once more and the crowd started to part. I could see light at the end of the long, bleak back alley we were in. As we took off, even over the howls and screams of the crowd, I heard a bloodcurdling scream as the limo rolled over something solid. Oh God. I realized in a moment of horror that we had run over one of the teenagers who were rushing the limo. The limo tore away as we all stared out of the back window at the crowd forming around the fallen kid.

  In Liverpool, the crowds were just as insane. We played on while bottles and garbage rained down on us like confetti. By now we were used to it. We performed around it. I learned to sing with one eye slightly above the crowd to watch out for the missiles launched by the audience. As I moved around the stage singing, I could hear glass crunching underneath my platform soles.

  Ever since the limo ran over the kid in Scotland, security had been beefed up. As well as a metal barricade, there was a line of roadies standing between the audience and the stage, on the lookout for potential trouble.

  In the middle of “Born to Be Bad,” the crowd lost it. They seemed to surge forward as one entity, and it became apparent that the audience was preparing to make a break for it. The barricades started tipping forward, and the roadies rushed to prop them up and push the kids back. It was no use: there was a crash as the barricade came down and a sea of kids charged toward the stage, trampling the roadies in their wake. Security flooded the area and pushed the kids back, but I saw one of our road crew being dragged out from underneath a barricade. We found out later that his leg was broken in the melee. Scott was laughing when he told us this. “Don’t worry about him! The lucky bastard got a shot of morphine in the hospital!”

  After our final show in the UK, we were physically and mentally exhausted. The following day we were due to leave from Dover on the ferry to play in Paris. It had been weeks of rain, cold, uncomfortable hotel rooms, and hostile audiences. On top of it
all, I was starting to get sick. Waking up in the morning was getting harder, and when I did, sometimes I’d be nauseous beyond words. A part of me wondered if it was because of the pills I was taking, but if it was, then it was a side effect I was willing to tolerate. If I didn’t have drugs that could make me stop feeling for a while, I thought that maybe I’d have thrown myself out of the window of one of these cold, old English hotels. It had been weeks since we’d arrived, and so far we’d had only two sunny days. The rest of the time it had been cold, gray, and damp. I’m a California girl—I needed the sunlight. I had never felt as homesick.

  “Have you ever wondered,” asked Jackie as the van tore through the night, heading toward the hotel, “where all of the money goes?”

  “Didn’t Scott give you a per diem today?” I asked. “He gave me ten pounds.”

  “Yeah,” Sandy said, “me, too. You should ask him.”

  “No! I don’t mean like ten dollars here and there. That’s pocket money! I’m talking about the actual money money.”

  Lita sighed. “It’s paying off our debts, remember? You know that. We owe money to Mercury Records, the tours are expensive, Kim’s been putting tons of money into promotion . . .”

  “Every band has to do that stuff,” Jackie countered, “but I don’t think that they have to rely on handouts from their tour manager to survive.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Kim pays Scott. He pays the roadies. They aren’t here for free. They’re on a salary.”

  “So?” Sandy laughed. “Of course they are. They’re working. If we didn’t pay them, we wouldn’t have a tour!”

  “I just think,” whispered Jackie, “that it’s a little weird that the fucking tour manager is making more than the band. Don’t you?”

  A silence fell over all of us. Jackie shook her head. “I think that a lot of people are getting rich off of us, and that we’re getting ripped off.”

  Nobody had an answer to that. I guess we had all been suspecting it in our own way, but there was no way to prove it, and no time to try. In the end, all we could do was pretend that it wasn’t happening. Keep playing, keep recording, and try to make the Runaways the biggest band in the world. Jackie may have been book smart, but she would have been no better than any of us at trying to call Kim out on this. She’d be fired before she’d finished her first sentence.

  “Well”—Lita laughed—“that’s one way to kill a rock band. Starve it to death.”

  She was trying to be funny, but what she’d said actually made sense. The truth was that bands don’t break up; they die. The way things were going in the Runaways, that death was looking to be a particularly violent and ugly one.

  “Shhh!”

  We looked up. Scott Anderson was walking back toward us. Everybody got back to what they were doing: Sandy and Joan were listening to music. Lita was playing the guitar. Jackie had her nose in a book. Scott came over to me.

  “Hey, Cherie,” he said.

  I stared out of the window, ignoring him. When I felt his hand on my leg, I softened a little.

  “You okay?”

  I looked at him. He was smiling at me, looking concerned. I shrugged.

  “Betcha can’t wait to get out of this dump, huh?”

  I laughed a little. “You got that right.”

  Scott looked around furtively to make sure nobody else was listening. “You, uh, you want some coke?”

  “Sure.”

  “Here.” He pressed a vial into my hand. There was quite a bit. “Have fun, and just stick what’s left in your makeup case. Oh, but save some, because I don’t know how easy it’s gonna be to score in Paris.”

  I nodded, and then Scott was off doing the rounds, speaking to everyone. We were all off in our own worlds these days, not talking, not even looking at each other. The misery in the van that night was palpable.

  At the hotel in Dover, I was back to rooming with Joan. I popped a Placidyl and waited for that feeling of pleasant numbness. It didn’t cure the ache that I felt down inside of me, but it took my mind off it. I decided to spend the night watching TV, but at midnight the channels closed down after playing the British national anthem. And then it went to the test screen. I changed the channel, and everything was the same. Dead. Dead, dead, dead.

  Jesus, I thought, David Bowie really came from here? Maybe he wasn’t lying when he said he was an alien.

  I wanted to take another Placidyl but decided not to. I had been feeling sick lately, a weird lingering nausea that never seemed to leave me. My weight had dropped a worrying amount since the start of the tour. I didn’t want to take too many drugs in this state and end up in a coma or something. Even when I took the drugs I realized that this just wasn’t fun anymore. The drugs had become a part of my routine. Something to wake me up. Something to help me sleep. Something to calm my nerves. There was a time when I was able to wake up, go to sleep, and have fun without a pill or a line to help me function. These days it felt like I might have a nervous breakdown if I didn’t have them.

  I vowed that as soon as we were back home, I’d stop. I just needed this to help me deal with all of the bullshit and the stress of this damned tour. It took a while, but I fell into a shallow, fitful sleep.

  I woke up in the middle of the night. Joan was screaming. I flicked on the lights and she was sitting up in bed, gasping for air. She had a look on her face that I saw her get every so often—like she wanted to cry, but she was too tough to do it. So she’d get angry instead.

  “Joan? Joan? What’s wrong?”

  “Oh shit . . .” Joan said. “I just had the craziest dream. It was terrible.”

  “Fuck, you scared the shit out of me.”

  “Sorry, I dreamed that we were performing. I was singing ‘Born to Be Bad’ . . . and then out of nowhere I hear BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM! Like a fucking machine gun is going off. And I feel my body—just shaking and on fire. Like I’m riddled with bullets. I look down and there are bullet holes all across my guitar, and there’s . . . blood. Blood just pouring from the guitar. And—and I turned to you, and the others, and I’m yelling, ‘I’m shot! I’ve been shot!’ but nobody will help me. You all think it’s a part of the act . . .”

  We talked about the dream, and the tour, and everything else until Joan fell asleep again at around three in the morning. I just lay there in the cold, dark hotel room. I could feel the Placidyl still swimming through my brain, but it was no good. Sleep would not come. I crawled into the fetal position and thought of Dad, and Grandma, and most of all I thought about Marie. All of them were back at home, lying in their own beds. More than anything in the world, I wanted to be at home, too, away from all of this. The tour stretched out in front of me, infinite and terrifying. Oh God, I wanted to go home.

  Chapter 16

  Greetings from Scotland Yard

  We were in the car the next morning, sitting in a line of traffic at the shores of Dover, waiting to catch the ferry to Calais, France. Scott had told us that the concert in Paris was sold out, and despite the typically damp, gray English skies, our spirits were pretty high. It felt good to be heading to a new country.

  We had a few vehicles in a convoy, and the British police were going from car to car checking things out. They seemed especially interested in our road crew.

  “It’s the walkie-talkies,” Jackie explained to me. “They’re illegal here, unless you’re police. That’s why they’re checking us out—all the roadies have walkie-talkies.” I, for one, was uninterested in Jackie’s civics lesson. I was lost in a British fanzine, trying to catch up on the latest happenings back in the good old USA.

  A tall man with a malformed, red drinker’s nose and a sour, twisted mouth approached the car. He was wearing a battered-looking trench coat and was flanked by two British bobbies in full uniform. He knocked on the window of our car, and Scott rolled it down. There was a brief, murmured conversation, and then Scott turned back to us.

  “I’ll be right back, ladies!” he said with a weak smile.

  When Sco
tt walked off to go talk to the police we started making jokes.

  “Maybe they think Scott is running a white-slavery ring . . .”

  “Maybe they’ll strip-search him!”

  “Nah, he normally has to pay for that kind of treatment . . .”

  After a few moments, a slightly worried-looking Scott returned to the car. The ugly guy with the red nose and the two policemen were with him. He opened the door and said, “Would you mind stepping out, girls?”

  “Aw, what the fuck, man?” Joan sighed. She was trying to sleep in the back, using her battered leather jacket as a blanket. I continued to read, basically unaware of the command. That is, until a badge was flashed before my eyes, breaking the spell.

  “Scotland Yard, get out of the car! Now!”

  That got my attention, and we reluctantly got out of the car. It was freezing, and we stood there shivering in the misty, gray morning.

  “Inspector Hadley, Scotland Yard,” the ugly man said curtly, by way of introduction. He looked us over, with visible disgust. Five teenage girls wearing leather jackets and low-cut tops with their arms folded and insolent looks on their faces stared back at him. I was sure that he thought we were dressed too outrageously. He seemed the type. Probably thought we should have been in school, dressed like proper young ladies. Ugh, what a creep. Everybody was smirking and trying to look cool. “Will you empty your bags please?”

  He went to Sandy first. We thought nothing of it until he triumphantly produced one of those cheap, barely functional hair dryers that they provide in hotel rooms. We didn’t know Sandy had taken it. None of us realized that they had a different power system in England, which left our hair dryers useless. Joan and I’d bought an adapter but Sandy must have thought it would be easier to just take the dryer. Nobody thought it was a big deal; after all, they leave those things just sitting there in the hotel room . . . and how exactly was a girl supposed to tour Europe without a functioning hair dryer?