Breaking off with Smokey was the more complicated feat—more than expected, actually. At a window table at the Great Greek restaurant, he gloated about finally having real time to spend with me—a rarity, in that Joe was traveling while Smokey (for reasons I don’t recall) was neither with him nor in Detroit—the two places he’d normally be. Smokey expected to spend all evening with me, our first chance to have sex without rushing. I told him it was over before his first bite of salad, my terrible timing par for the course.
Little about my affairs had been the way I’d hoped. Why should ending them go any better? It was too late for Smokey and me to even have one last go. After a year of sneaking around—to the day, he wistfully informed me—I no longer felt uplifted in his arms, but dirty. I thought ending it would be a favor to us both—that he’d feel relieved or have seen it coming. Instead, he was hurt and got sentimental on me. I tried to be kind, but inside I fumed, appalled at the notion I should feel bad for him, when throughout our affair his scarcity had left me wanting.
•••
In July, the All-Starrs spent three weeks in Europe and though Joe wanted to take me, he didn’t. He said the band would make a dozen border crossings, and as he was still flagged from the caffeine bust in Hawaii, if I traveled with him, I’d be subjected to extra searches too, potentially delaying the band. “Besides,” he said, “we have the rest of our lives to do Europe together.”
I believed him. Joe’s career would get back on track, and I’d bore with cocaine in all forms. We’d buckle down to write his biography, a true team, like Jeanna Fine and her fiancé. Until then, I’d saturate self-doubt in dopamine, a feel-good flood of biblical proportions.
In picking a partner in crime, my options were limited and Felicia was easy—also clingy, which had its pros and cons. Joe ruled the roost at home—where he led, I followed. When he was a clown, I applauded. Felicia idolized me. We had had our own sick chemistry.
For starters, we smoked crack like a Vegas act. We were the big-game illusionists meets comedic improv contortionists of freebasing. For the first time, I understood the impetus behind Joe and Rick’s fart noise and prank call recordings, though my videos with Felicia were the funnier shtick. Our best was a workout class—the aerobics of crack. Out with the good air, in with the bad, I intoned, demonstrating with exaggerated exhales while Felicia made Vanna White gestures at my diaphragm. We’d wrap it up by taking massive hits and dancing around the room like idiots.
I’d finally taught Felicia to freebase properly—Olympic-level techniques meant to maximize every toxic molecule. A dubious talent to be sure, it nonetheless impressed her dealer. Max made a long, slow whistle at my performance. “Never seen anything like it,” he said, and I beamed like I’d won an Oscar. We had Max deliver twice, but since I knew Joe would blow a gasket, I made Felicia drive us to Max’s after that. His girlfriend was young—fifteen at most—with a slack-toned moon face and minimal reading skills. When she ruined a batch of cooktop pudding, Max scolded her in a way that made me want to leave. I couldn’t get home fast enough.
I didn’t equate my lifestyle with theirs. I lived in Studio City and hung out in VIP rooms and limousines. Max trolled Hollywood selling to addicts (I imagined) and was as different from me as Austin speed freaks. I started wanting distance from Felicia, too. Initially, she would go home between binges; then one day she just stopped leaving. If I hinted at it, she’d score more crack to distract me. One day I woke with a pipe in my mouth, because (as Felicia explained) she didn’t like getting high alone and thought waking me up that way would be funny. When Joe was due home, Felicia finally got the boot. I cleaned house, erased our videos, and stashed my gear under the bathroom sink.
I went to LAX with Cici, Dave being on Joe’s same flight. Between my friendship with her and Joe’s return, my heart was full enough to burst. Our foursome piled into the limo and I handed Joe the eight ball (three and half grams) I’d brought from Gary’s. For the rest of the day, Joe and I floated on air. It felt like starting over, like re-falling in love.
He apparently thought so too, because at 11:00 p.m. he set aside my pool cue, took my hands, and dropped to one knee. Gazing up into my eyes, he said, “Will you marry me?”
I squealed. “Yes! Of course I will!” I pulled him to his feet for a kiss, then said, “I had no idea. When did you—I mean, why…?” I didn’t know what to say. I never saw it coming.
“Being apart three weeks made me realize I can’t live without you. I want you with me forever. On the flight home, it hit me, I have to propose. Lock Kristi down and make it official.”
It was the fulfillment of a premonition from four years earlier, yet the moment felt oddly flat. I’d been smoking crack for weeks and snorting hog rails for hours. Maybe that was it. All I knew was that the voice in my head that had once said with conviction This is the man you’re meant to marry, now whispered numbly, Is this even real? Is this really happening?
Crawling from the Wreckage
Journal Entry
August 1, 1992
The night after Joe proposed we celebrated at the Bistro Garden. Our corner table was as wobbly and unbalanced as I was. We sat as close as we could and wrote on the tablecloth, in Sharpie, eleven promises and vows. When I went to the ladies’ room, Joe wrote “12” on a napkin and laid it atop a ring box (a temporary “fill-in” ring—fake diamonds, still pretty).
Laughter, kisses, tequila shots at the bar. Joe raised his glass and yelled, “We’re getting married!” The owner and staff patted his back and said congratulations.
We’ve been monstering since (days now). More in love than ever.
•••
I’d been honest with Joe about my activities while he was in Europe. He’d taken it in stride, and even allowed me to switch from snorting to smoking later that night. We were on a roll—celebrating his homecoming and our engagement, both. In twenty-four hours we’d done enough blow for forty-eight, making my segue to crack feel, if not “natural,” at least practical. I called Max for a delivery, after which Joe said, “Nothing against the guy, but let’s not use him again. The fewer people who know our business, the better.”
Most of our friends looked down their coke-encrusted noses on crack. I had a hole in my septum partly caused by a bad batch of blow from one of those very insiders. Hardly the only casualty in our circle, I knew of at least one, and suspected two more, with septal perforations. Not because it was openly discussed (it wasn’t), but from a telltale whistle I heard when they inhaled. Though faint, it was unmistakably pitched, and every time it sounded I wondered if they noticed, either in their own breathing, or in mine.
Alternating blow with crack gave my nasal tissue a break, the drawback being that once the smoking started I couldn’t just roll it back. To switch from blow to crack was easy, but the reverse caused jonesing. So when Joe suggested dinner out, I hesitated. “Down the street to the Bistro Garden,” he said. “We’ll be gone ninety minutes.”
“I’ll be climbing the walls before your entrée is served.” (For obvious reasons I didn’t plan to eat, myself.)
“Oh,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” The man hadn’t eaten a decent meal since Europe, and I suggested he go without me. “No way. Only if you come too.”
“How? I’ll need three or four hits in that time frame.”
Joe had an idea. He put a piece of notebook paper on the bar, then rolled an unlit cigarette softly between his fingers until a third of its contents fell out onto it. Then he inserted a small crack rock in the hollowed-out paper, mixed in some of the displaced tobacco, then kept mixing in little rocks with tobacco until the cigarette was full again. He dosed three Marlboros that way. All I had to do was light up at dinner every twenty minutes, for a maintenance drip, basically. I did a test run before heading out, smoking in my normal fashion, until burning embers reached one of the little rocks, when I got an extra whoosh of cra
ck smoke in my lungs—not enough to rush, but enough to stave off a jones.
His ingenuity impressed me. “But won’t the smell give me away?”
“It’s barely noticeable,” Joe assured me.
We didn’t count on the inconsistency of those rocks—some bigger than others, or that what had been barely noticeable at home would be cartoonishly absurd at the restaurant. Thick, smelly plumes of bright white smoke wafted from my cigarette, engulfing our table like an out-of-control magic trick. I looked to Joe, alarmed, preparing to stub out the culprit. He scanned the room, but it was late on a weeknight, with hardly anyone there to notice. Nearby, at the bar, a group of servers waited to close out for the night. They could hardly help noticing the bizarre display, and we got a raised eyebrow or two—that was all. I asked Joe what to do and he shrugged. “It’s LA… No one cares what we’re up to.”
Maybe that was true, but I cared. I hated what I’d gotten up to.
One of the vows on our tablecloth was that I would quit crack before we got married. I’d signed off with a flourish, excited by the prospect. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even pause to celebrate our engagement. I’d ended my affairs. The love of my life had just proposed. If this wasn’t a fresh start, what was? But it didn’t feel like it.
•••
I do not recall how I finally learned to cook my own crack, but from that day on I eschewed powdered blow whenever possible in favor of a home-cooked batch.
Back in Austin, Freddie had cooked big batches at the stove using a pot of water, tongs, and a test tube. I needed only a spoon, a Zippo, and ten minutes at my vanity-cum-chem lab. My batches were small yet potent, and for the next two weeks I left the house only to resupply. My sudden uptick in business worried Gary, but instead of a scolding, he extended a sailing invitation. I loved sailing so much I agreed to leave my pipe behind. Then Captain Gary informed me of a policy—no coke on the boat—in his booming, British voice.
“At all? Not even lines?”
“Which part of ‘no coke’ don’t you get, little girl?”
“I’m just clarifying, Gary, don’t get pissy.”
“I’m not being pissy, you! Now, c’mon, let’s have fun in the sun. It’ll be good for you.”
I appreciated what Gary was trying to do, but I was too far gone to get onboard. A cold-turkey crash landing, miles from shore, would not be good for me or anyone else on his boat. I couldn’t be bothered to grab a life preserver until I was officially drowning.
In 1986, at the peak of my meth use, my partner in crime—a suspected murderer and two-decade-long addict—begged me to go home and get some sleep already. I’d just offered him a full syringe, which he flatly rejected before banishing me from his home. Distraught, I peeled out in the middle of the night, tweaking too hard to remember headlights or which side of the road to drive on. My friends (my real friends) had been worried for weeks, but until that night I’d been convinced I was fine, right up to a very narrowly missed head-on collision.
My track record for self-appraisement left much to be desired. I slipped in and out of denial with the speed of a strobe light.
•••
As my crack habit spiraled, so did Joe’s tolerance for it.
Post-Europe, the All-Starrs had one week off, then a week on the road, followed by a string of local shows. During that time, Joe played almost every night and spent most of every day trying to distract me from the pipe. He’d suggest hot tub dips and backyard photo shoots, anything to make me put it down for twenty minutes. I participated in spurts, like Lisa shooting pool that night. When Joe complained about my behavior, I told him to lighten up and quit being a jerk.
I liked the Polaroids, having never been thinner or, to my mind, looked better. I’d always been trim, but in LA, skinny was lauded. I had dropped from a size four to a size two that summer. I planned to wow them backstage at the Greek—if I could put down the pipe long enough to get there. The Bistro Garden incident had scared me off smoking away from home. I also wanted to abide by Joe’s wishes and Ringo’s rules, but there were bigger forces in play—inertia, for starters. The day of the gig, I may as well have been shot out of a cannon for how unstoppable I was.
Instead of going with Joe to the venue (which would’ve required more “pee breaks” than ever), I planned to drive myself later, despite that after four years of limos, I didn’t know my way around LA sober, much less high. I made it, albeit not without incident when the Mustang’s roof got stuck at half-mast. I’d tried to lower it while flying down the freeway, and the malfunction made for a less-than-aerodynamic ride, and, for all I knew, an illegal one.
I pulled over to fix it, wearing the stretchy, white, tank dress Vicki had given me in St. Louis, on the date that launched my and Joe’s relationship. It was his favorite, and I’d worn it in the hopes of seeing that awed look he made whenever I did. I arrived backstage streaked in grime and sweat from throwing my body weight against the car’s ragtop to collapse it. I ducked into Joe’s bathroom to freshen up and smoke a few hits. During the show, I snuck back for more but that time couldn’t get a good hit. Whenever I’d start to rush, a surge of anxiety rose up to block it. After five or six tries I gave up, having just enough clarity to see what an asshole I was.
The revelation acted like an antidote. Something in me found the strength to stash my pipe for the night. I eked by on bumps until I felt within the realm of normal, then went to find Cici. She was in the wings watching Dave do his thing, and the line of her adoring gaze gave me flashbacks to myself in better days—loving Joe and being loved back, pre-crack. I retreated to his dressing room and curled up in a ball on the couch. When he found me after the show, he hugged me and said I looked nice. Not the awe I’d hoped for, but better than I deserved.
“I have to make my goodbyes before we leave,” Joe said.
I followed him to the hallway, overflowing with guests. “I’ll wait here,” I said. “Holding up the wall until you return.”
He grinned and it gave me peace. He still loves me, I thought. We’re not dead yet. As the crowd dispersed, I felt my tension dissipate with it. Then Bonnie Raitt tried to slut-shame me and a smidge of it came back.
I’d never met the woman. All I knew about Bonnie was that she played a mean slide and that she and Joe were, or had been, friends. To hear him tell it, she’d tried to kiss him one night and he’d shoved her aside in surprise. Apparently she hadn’t liked that much. (She was pissed! Joe had told me, relaying the story. I’d shaken my head at him. Well, yeah. You should probably stop doing that.)
Backstage at the Greek, I was lost in my own world, fighting yawns and shifting my weight, when a group of women passed by. I barely noticed, too tired to raise my eyes or stand up straight, until a catty remark made my head snap up. It was all in the tone—I wasn’t sure what had been said, but knew I’d been insulted. I looked to my left, at a cluster women by the exit door. Bonnie led the pack, blocking them from leaving until she finished what she’d started. Holding my gaze, as her mortified friends looked every which way, she went on, “Seriously, my husband would never let me out in public like that.” Then she left, followed by three red-faced, cringing friends.
Again, I could only shake my head. I have a crack pipe stuffed in my purse, you crazy bitch. My demons are a mite bigger than your petty diva bullshit. Even by LA standards, it was absurd. I called Cici over and filled her in. She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Bonnie’s like that sometimes. Just ignore it.”
Joe reappeared. “Ready for home?” he said, putting an arm around my shoulders.
I pushed off the wall. “You have no idea.” I’d spent enough of my life traveling alone, lost in circles or broken down on the side of the road. To the depths of my soul I wanted nothing more than to quit crack forever and return to the loving, happy couple we’d once been.
•••
There were four weeks left on tour and an ear
ly stop was Austin. I proudly pointed out landmarks as the bus wound through traffic. After the show, it was straight to Dallas with no time to see friends, but I was content to be with Joe in the life raft of Ringo’s band.
Minutes after settling into our room at the Four Seasons, I noticed a stone missing from my opal-and-diamond bracelet—Joe’s Valentine’s Day gift to me that year. Combing the carpet on my knees, I decided to have a word with God. One more chance, Lord, please. And I’ll never be careless again. Seconds later I found the gem—a sign, I was sure of it.
I returned to simple pleasures—spooning, snuggling, and socializing. Having regained a little weight, I received compliments all around, and after two weeks of sleep and solid meals, I was feeling almost normal.
In New York City, in the Royalton lobby, we bumped into Jack Nicholson and Pete Townshend. Pete greeted Joe like a long-lost brother, then gave me a hug as well. “How wonderful to meet Joe’s lady!” he exclaimed, as Jack nodded in my direction. The men and their dates made room in their booth, then re-launched the sing-along we’d interrupted. After a rousing rendition of “Rocky Raccoon” and idle conversation, we headed to the elevator. Jack followed, heading to his room too. That’s when Joe decided to share our big news.
“I’m taking the leap again, Jack. I’ve asked this one to marry me, and she said yes.”
Jack gave me a once-over before turning to Joe. “Well, my friend,” he said, raising both eyebrows. “Good luck with that.”
The cynicism was not unique to Jack. I sensed it from Geno, Rick the Bass Player, and others, despite their supportive comments. Those who were more excited for us were acquaintances who didn’t know me well.
Back in LA, we went to an Elton John concert where I soon lost sight of Joe backstage. I was deep in conversation when he reappeared, urging me to “come meet someone special.” Suddenly I was standing before Lionel Richie, dazed by his beatific smile. “Lionel is licensed to perform marriages,” Joe said. “He’s agreed to do ours, on one condition.”
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