Neon Angel

by Cherie Currie

  At the clinic, after drawing blood, the doctors were about to administer the chemo when a nurse rushed in to say that my mom’s blood sample had shown something incredible. The cancer was gone; our mom had been cured. Her doctor later wrote and said that it was only God—with maybe a little help from Mom—who could have made that happen.

  Although we were all beyond grateful for this news, it made me sad to think that miracles must only happen in Singapore. With my father passing, the last vestige of my old family life in California was lost forever.

  Although Foxes was not the box-office smash I’d hoped it would be, the critical reception was very positive and other roles followed: I played Sara in Twilight Zone: The Movie. My character ended up with no mouth, the victim of an evil kid brother with paranormal powers. The director of my segment, Joe Dante, had called my agent because he’d seen a publicity picture of me and he liked my eyes. I had managed to get Marie a job on that movie, working as a body double for me. When I picked her up to take her to the set for my one day of shooting, she had been up all night doing coke and was a mess. She swore to me that she wasn’t high, but just one look at her saucerlike eyes gave her clean away. I scolded her all the way to the set, embarrassed that everyone would know by simply looking at her. She had always given me a hard time about my drug use, so I guess this was my turn to feel what she had felt. By the time we made it over there, she had passed out completely. It was mortifying: I had done a small toot before the shoot as well, but I at least had been professional and had a good night’s sleep. When the makeup guy, Rob Bottin, saw Marie, he rolled his eyes and gave me a look that made me feel about two feet tall. I felt terrible for her, but I was angry nonetheless. I cursed myself for not making her stay home the minute I saw the condition she was in. Despite the rocky start, Rob and I ended up becoming friends. Rob was a very talented artist, and had recently completed work on the remake of The Thing with Kurt Russell, which even now—over a quarter of a century after it was released—still looks amazing.

  The Twilight Zone became infamous because of the terrible accident on the set of John Landis’s segment, which killed Vic Morrow and two child actors. I remember the stunned mix of emotions I felt when I’d heard that Vic Morrow was dead. The main emotion that the very mention of the name Vic Morrow had made me feel for years following his attempt to convince me not to testify against my rapist was fury. However, Vic did apologize to me after he saw me testify in court, and his death—along with the deaths of the two innocent children—was a terrible shock to everyone everywhere.

  I also played Dana in the cult horror movie Parasite, which was the responsibility of director named Charles Band. To his credit, he did spin out a long career churning out cheapie B movies like the Puppet Master series and other “classics” like Ghoulies and Mansion of the Doomed. But even as we were shooting, I had the feeling that this director didn’t really know what he was doing and that the movie was probably going to stink. That movie introduced the world to a young, up-and-coming actress named Demi Moore, and we became very close on set.

  One of my strongest memories making Parasite was the late-night shoot where everybody got so drunk on Crown Royal that the lead actor could literally not say his lines. And then there was the accident on set that left me with three pinched nerves and reverse curvature of the spine, all because of the director’s recklessness and incompetence. I ended up getting six thousand dollars’ compensation after paying the lawyers’ fees, and probably would have gotten more if I hadn’t been dabbling so much in the coke that I blew off most of the physical therapy. I wouldn’t even have sued if my mom hadn’t insisted upon it.

  I played Iris Longacre in the sci-fi movie Wavelength, which featured a soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. That movie is still considered something of a lost favorite among science-fiction fans. I fell in love on the set with my costar Robert Carradine, and we started having a passionate affair right under the nose of my live-in boyfriend, Jai Winding. I was doing so much coke during that shoot that it was kind of amazing that I got away with it all. I remember during one kissing scene in the movie, Bobby leaned in and licked my nose. Afterward he confessed that his entire mouth had gone numb after he did it. But the electricity between us was incredible. The first time we got together we were driving in his truck, following a long shoot. He was taking me back to the house I shared with Jai. I just told him, “Pull over!”

  “Huh?”

  “Come on! Pull over! You know this is going to happen . . . let’s just make it happen. Right now!”

  And he did. We pulled up to the deserted tip of the Hollywood Hills and did it right there on the hood of his truck. I was deeply unhappy in my relationship with Jai and I suppose I was subconsciously sowing the seeds for the destruction of that relationship. I’ve always regretted letting my relationship with Bobby end. We were so close. However, the last straw came when he found out that I had also been seeing Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple. I truly loved Bobby, but in the end my promiscuity and my drug use broke his heart.

  Following the completion of Messin’ with the Boys, Marie and I did a string of television appearances in the United States, Japan, and Europe. All lip synching. It was fun at first, but soon the familiar tension between Marie and me reared its ugly head. When it came time to put a live band together and get on the road to start really promoting the album, Marie bailed. “I’m sorry, Cherie,” she told me. “I just can’t do it.”

  I was at Jai’s place when she called me. At first I had no idea what she was talking about. “You can’t do what?”

  “The tour. The rehearsals. It’s just too much. My heart . . . my heart’s not in this anymore.”

  And that was that. Marie was in love with Steve Lukather, and suddenly she had no desire to be on the road promoting Messin’ with the Boys anymore. She wanted to be at home, and be a wife, maybe even a mother. And if I didn’t like it? Well, there really wasn’t much that I could do. After all, the sessions themselves had been hard on all of us. I had ended up putting my name to an album that sounded nothing like the way I wanted it to sound. But to keep my relationship with Capitol alive, I had to make the best of it. With Marie bailing on me, I knew deep down that it was only a matter of time before the label decided to cut their losses and drop me.

  I immediately went back into the studio with Jai to record another album. We had completed just six rough tracks when the ax fell. Jai got the word from the higher-ups at Capitol Records that they were pulling the plug. He broke it to me over dinner. I was heartbroken, but it would have been a lie to say that it was a total shock. Some locked-away, ignored part of myself had been predicting this since the day I agreed to cut an album with my sister at our father’s behest.

  But by the time I was twenty-four years old, there was only one thing I really did with any regularity, and it wasn’t acting, or music, or anything close. Instead, I filled the emptiness in my soul with cocaine. I did cocaine when I woke up, and I continued doing cocaine until the moment I passed out. Then I would wake up and start all over again.

  After the demise of my contract with Capitol, my relationship with Jai quickly fell apart. I originally met Bruce through an old friend of mine who I had helped to get a job doing makeup on Wavelength. He and the friend broke up around the time that my relationship with Jai was crumbling. I started hanging out with Bruce, up in his house in the Hollywood Hills. This was the early eighties, and a new drug craze was sweeping Hollywood: freebase. It was my brother-in-law T. Y. who introduced me to smoking cocaine, but on that occasion I didn’t really “get it.” The next time I did it, with Bruce, it was all over. I started romancing that pipe like a long-lost lover.

  When I smoked cocaine, I knew that I had finally discovered the high that my years of drug use had been leading up to. Smoking cocaine was the most powerful, intense, thrilling, and addicting high that I had ever experienced. I erupted out of my own body, my ears ringing as the blood rushed around my ears, while a tidal wave of pleasure roared through
every fiber of my being. It was better than an orgasm: it was the ultimate orgasm, because it felt like every single part of my body was climaxing at once. Have you ever wondered what it would be like for your brain to experience an orgasm? For me, that was what freebase was all about.

  I knew that a rush this intense had to be dangerous, so I made a vow never to freebase with anyone but Bruce. That way I wouldn’t end up doing it to excess. Within a few months, though, I was living with him, and I was freebasing as much as my body could physically stand. In a very short period, my entire existence became sidelined by my insatiable hunger for The High.

  I grew to believe that I loved Bruce very much, despite his not really being my type. He was a big guy, not very handsome, and he was such a cokehead that he always had dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep. He always wore sunglasses, even inside the house. The house we shared was tucked away in the Hollywood Hills. We had high beamed ceilings, and huge windows that looked out over the glittering lights of Hollywood below. The house itself was suspended in the sky on forty-foot stilts, and it only touched the mountain at the place where the front door met the street.

  Bruce loved me, totally. He worshipped me. No man had ever treated me like that before. He took me out to dinner whenever I wanted, and bought me whatever I asked for. His “real” job was as a jeweler, and when he felt it was time to ask me to marry him, he let me pick three of the biggest diamonds he had for my engagement ring. He made the ring himself. And of course, cocaine was everywhere: it flowed like air through our home. There was so much of it around that we jokingly referred to the place as “the White House.” Ounces of the stuff were everywhere, and it was all for me. Well, mostly. Bruce was a drug dealer, a very successful one at that, and he made his living by buying directly from the smugglers and selling it to certain . . . people who had the ability to distribute it. He didn’t really have to get his hands dirty, and he was not at all like you’d imagine a drug dealer to be. He was more like a regular businessman than anything else. Of course, having that much cocaine around could be a dangerous business, so there were some guns in the house. There was at least one gun in every room: shotguns, pistols, revolvers, and rifles. There were enough guns and cocaine in the White House to topple the government of a South American country. But Bruce kept the firearms well hidden, and the veneer of normalcy was perfectly maintained. If I didn’t dwell on it, it was almost as if they weren’t really there.

  No, I felt that I was a lucky girl. I was lucky because Bruce had dedicated his life to making me happy. He gave me everything I’d ever wanted. So in a way, it was a good thing that he was a cocaine dealer. Because all I seemed to want in those days was cocaine. It had taken a long time for a purpose to rise up from the chaos of my life. I was being pulled in so many different directions by so many outside forces for so long that I no longer knew what I wanted. Bruce suddenly changed all of that. I realized that there was only one thing in this world worth living for: coke, coke, and more coke.

  Quaaludes were child’s play. Benzedrine was for fools. And stardom—well, stardom was the most addicting thrill of all, but as time went on, I realized that it was no longer as important to me as it had been. Stardom, like eating or even breathing, took a distant second place to cocaine. I could admit this to myself in those days and not feel bad. And if I did feel bad, all it took was one more hit on the pipe to blast those negative thoughts right out of my skull. And after all, I didn’t have to worry about what my Daddy would think anymore. No, Cherie Currie was all grown up, and for the first time in my life, I could be really honest with myself about what made me truly happy.

  When I was child, I used to believe in God. It made me smile, back in the days when my life revolved around cocaine, to think that I’d once truly believed all those silly ideas about sin and retribution. Faith is all very well, until the real world comes along and snatches away everything that you hold dear. Then suddenly everything is thrown into sharp focus. No, cocaine was the only god I needed anymore. A god I could rely on to always make me feel good whenever I wanted. It was all I thought about, all I felt, and all I loved. In a strange way, cocaine became my salvation.

  Chapter 31

  Marie Says Good-bye

  There is a scientific principle that says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This principle holds true for cocaine. The greater the high, the more severe the crash. Back in the days when I snorted coke, I could count on feeling pretty crappy the next day. A coke hangover was something like a booze hangover, except that in addition to just feeling beat-up and nauseous, you feel depressed as well. You’d spend the night indulging in hours of intense coke-fueled conversation, telling anyone who would listen about how you were going to change the world . . . maybe sharing information that was so personal that you’d want to hang yourself from embarrassment the next day when you remembered it all . . . When you came around the next morning, all of that artificial goodwill was transformed into a deep-seated sense of misery, which you couldn’t quite shake.

  So, just as smoking cocaine increases the effect of the drug by a huge amount, so the comedown from smoking coke is also magnified: instead of the next-day blues, what you experience is a great void of misery and paranoia that seems to settle on you like an ominous black cloud. And as you smoke more and more, the time delay between smoking the coke and the crash gets smaller and smaller. And so, ten minutes after my last hit, the terror would begin. All of the problems in my life would come flooding back, bigger and badder than ever, twisted to hideous proportions by the chemical deficiency in my brain. This wasn’t just depression: this was pure fear. This was every terrible thing that had ever happened to me being relived in full color, wide screen, and 3-D. And there was only one cure for it: more coke.

  And if there was no more coke, then I’d better find something else quick to knock myself out with before my brain suffered a meltdown from the horror of it all.

  That’s what had happened on this particular day. I don’t remember how I got over there, but I was at the supermarket. I was blind drunk. There was no more coke in the house, and I couldn’t get hold of Bruce. I had drunk a bottle of champagne and whatever else I had found lying around in the fridge. There was a time when I couldn’t stand the taste of booze. Now I could barely taste it as it slid down my throat and raced through my stomach and into my blood. I didn’t enjoy being drunk, but it was a means to an end. It meant that I felt less bad than before, and that was good enough for me. My life had degenerated into a series of ecstatic peaks and terrifying troughs, and the booze was just a way to help take the sharp edges off.

  In the supermarket I was pushing a shopping cart. My brain was not communicating with my body effectively. My head felt like a helium balloon that was floating somewhere far above the rest of me, attached only by a flimsy string. I tried to make a turn, and accidentally demolished a display stand of some kind of dumb cleaning product that they were promoting. The display clattered all over the floor.

  I wondered if I looked as crazy as I felt. I backed up, and continued going around the supermarket, staggering and almost losing my footing. I passed by the food aisles. The last time I weighed myself I was down to ninety-six pounds. I was still losing weight. The smaller clothes that Bruce had bought for me were already loose fitting. I didn’t like to look at myself in the mirror anymore.

  I finally made it to the cash register with my prize, a half-gallon bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a can of Coke. I didn’t think I could make it back to the house if my nerves were not fully coated with alcohol. The woman behind the counter looked at me and wrinkled her nose. She was butt ugly, with red hair all frizzed up by a ridiculous perm. Her face was covered with angry-looking zits. I smiled at her despite the fact that her face scared me. I wanted this bottle. I needed it.

  “I can’t sell this to you,” the woman said with a voice like ice.

  I started rummaging around in my purse. On the counter I started spreading all of the junk I found.
Crumpled-up fifty-dollar bills. A battered pack of Carlton Lights. Lipstick. Keys. Four lighters. Finally I found my ID and handed it to her with a triumphant grin. She didn’t even look at it, the bitch. She just shook her head and repeated, “I’m sorry, I can’t sell this to you.”

  I started trembling. The crash from the coke was so fucking intense. If I didn’t get the booze to make up for the lack of cocaine, I might die. That’s the truth; I felt I might drop dead on the spot. I knew that if I didn’t get this booze RIGHT FUCKING NOW, I might have had to hurt this bitch. “I am a paying customer, and I want this goddamn bottle!” I hissed. She started calling for a manager, some officious-looking little twerp in a button-down shirt with a name tag that read elmer. Elmer looked like the result of some kind of experiment in inbreeding.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Elmer smiled.

  “I wanna make a complaint!” I slurred. “This . . . lady is being rude to me, and she will not allow me to buy this bottle.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elmer said, sounding anything but, “but we can’t sell this to you. If you’d like to make another purchase—food, groceries perhaps—that would be fine. But not this, not in your condition.”

  “Lemme tell you something, Elmer,” I hissed. “You’re on some pretty thin fucking ice right now. I’ll call your goddamn boss, and I will have you fired!”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Elmer said, and before I knew what was happening, he had me by the shoulders and I was being bundled out through the electronic doors. I was standing out in the parking lot, feeling disoriented. A light drizzle was falling. I thought at first that somebody was spitting on me.