Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up

by Des Barres, Pamela

  I was too stunned and overjoyed to jinx the idea by over-praising him. Besides, who knew if AA would make any difference? But an itsy-bitsy spark of hope started glowing in the closed-up pit of my heart. Michael had admitted only one time that he had a problem, but this was very close to the confession I’d almost stopped dreaming about. When Paul came to pick him up, I waved good-bye like he was off for another night of revelry but got down on my knees when the door closed and prayed for a real miracle.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I

  Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months (which is what usually happens), and Michael didn’t have a drink, smoke a joint, drop a pill, or inhale any powder. He followed the rule of going to one AA meeting a day, and in the first few weeks he often went to two or three. Some upstanding soul would honk the horn in front of the house, he would kiss me good-bye, and take the “big book” out into the much safer night. He took to the concept like the dying man he was, getting a sponsor right away: Ed Begley, Jr., who had two or three years in the program and a firm faith in sobriety. We got all chummy with his wonderful family and spent many fun-time hours at dinner bashes and on kiddie outings. Ed seemed to know the entire world and shared all his show-biz friends with us like he was passing around a very special bowl of candy. He was the first in town to get the Trivial Pursuit game, and one lovely night I had Tom Cruise on my team, right before he became a household hunk. He was so good-natured and generous that our team lost by a humongous margin. He blushed easily and grinned nonstop. I found myself in yet another new element, tête-à-tête-ing with Rebecca De Mornay about the hazards that fame can bring to a relationship (she was with cutie-pie Tom at the time) and sidling up to Jeff Goldblum to hear his views on the naughty interference of the press.

  I was really on Michael’s side, proud of his three-month chip, and totally behind, beside, and in front of his newfound life-style, cautiously commending his decision—hardly able to believe my eyes, ears, and heart—but when he suggested I attend some Al-Anon meetings, I balked big-time. Wasn’t he the one with the problem? Here comes a super-duper serious regret: I didn’t become his partner in recovery because I had absolutely no idea that by loving Michael—an alcoholic drug addict—I had been part of the problem myself. I did go to a couple meetings, agreed with what everyone said, then went home and thought I had done my wifely duty. I thought I had done enough for him, gone through enough with him, and I wanted to wash my hands of floundering, heroic intervention. Let them pick up where I left off. I didn’t realize the Al-Anon meetings were for me. I needed to know why I drew Michael to me in the first place, why I put up with abusive alcoholic behavior but was content to wave good-bye at the door and welcome him home with a hot cup of tea. So I remained part of the problem.

  A snotty-haughty, throaty-voiced actress became one of Michael’s AA buddies, picking up the non-driver and bringing him home, sometimes very, very late. After meetings there were gatherings that took place in trendy restaurants, lasting well into the night, and knowing this, I would go to bed, and when I felt him crawl in at 3 A.M., I was grateful. At least he wasn’t comatose. I had started to acknowledge my stirring suspicions, but since this broad was such a self-serving swankpot, she intimidated little wide-eyed me into inviting her over for dinner and letting her sell worn-out Rodeo Drive dresses at my yard sales. I was always trying to be nice and believe the best, even though her reputation for eating married men for brunch was well known. I didn’t have the fallopian tubes to rub my wedding ring along the highfalutin, Chanel-powdered ridges of her high-assed cheekbones, even when she bought Michael a fancy pair of cowboy boots that some poor ostrich had to die for. I kept my suspicions to myself and, as usual, she passed into history. I was doing a TV show when I’m with the Band came out; I believe it was Sally Jessy Raphaël, and one of the guests was an old AA friend of ours. She and I were gabbing it up about old times in the back of a limo, and she said, “I don’t know how you put up with Michael and that witch having that affair right in your face. I was at your place for dinner one night and they were making out in one room while you cooked in the other.” The old pal assumed that since Michael and I had broken up a few months earlier, I knew all about the tawdry tryst. As we pulled into the studio, I was flooded with hazy images of serving stuffed trout with green grapes to the conniving, strumpet cow, but I didn’t let on that the antique fling was news to me. I didn’t want to make my friend feel red-handed and guilt-ridden right before a national TV show. I had always known down deep anyway, and it was good to get my feelings confirmed, despite the shooting sting, like Bully Toilet Cleaner being pumped through my veins.

  II

  Even though my darling philandering man was finally sober, I had started to feel something amiss and went on a seeking binge, not realizing that Al-Anon might have quenched some of my Death Valley thirst for inner self-savvy. While storming around my local cosmic bookstore, the Bodhi Tree, I came across some fascinating hit-home literature from the Church of Religious Science. As I sat in the incense-sweetened room, sipping tea made from straw, scouring the stack of volumes, all of my many frustrating spiritual quests started taking form and shape in the Science of Mind. Krishnamurti’s seemingly complex ideas were laid out in simple, direct language that jumped into my aching head as (gulp!) the truth. Concepts I had gleaned from Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship lessons, Swami Muktananda’s books, tons of Tibetan and Buddhist literature, and of course, the original “big book,” the Holy Bible itself, cohered into something I might actually be able to use on this planet, in this lifetime! I bought reams of tomes by Ernest Holmes and Emmett Fox, spending way too much dough but feeling like I was onto something mighty. I soon discovered the Hollywood Church of Religious Science and the formidable pastor, Dr. Robert Bitzer, and every Sunday I sat in the front row for my weekly bolt of spiritual lightning. It was a contemplative atmosphere, no screaming out to be spared from hellfire, no pushing on people’s guilty buttons. I took it in, drank it down, like a tall, icy bottle of Dr. Pepper. The knowledge seeped slowly into my heart and did battle with the little devil jabbing his poison pitchfork into my smoldering brain. I worked on tuning out that frightened, picky, nagging voice (“This won’t work, it’s all hype, it’s too good to be true”) until it became a whispered litany of jibber-jab. I acted “as if again, until it absolutely was. If a yucky thought or nerve-racking worry passed through, I would look at it and let is dissolve, without giving it a smidge of energy. I learned how to reverse the offending brain wrinkle by seeing a big, giant eraser rubbing the damning thought right out of my head.

  Ever so gradually I came to accept that the mind is creative and we actually create our entire world with our thoughts. We can direct our thinking to create crap or glory. We can make love, money, health, and success in our lives by willing it so, by believing we can. I started to realize the only person I was responsible for was myself, and I had to well and truly love myself because the power of God was hanging out within me. I could use the sparkling mass of stuff as I saw fit, turning it into diamonds or cubic zirconias. Dr. Bitzer told us that when Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek,” it was to get another point of view, not another slap in the face. That insight was a relief and a revelation to me. How we respond to things that happen to us and how we react is our choice. We can wail or laugh, lie down and rot, or dance all over the problem like it was a shiny tabletop.

  I yammered at Michael until he joined me at church one Sunday morning. I inflicted my inflated rubber soul upon him, jabbing him delicately in the ribs or sending out knowing, gently piercing looks when Dr. B. hit upon one of Michael’s obvious, unattended Major Problem Areas. I was still so bowled over by the vast significance of what I was hearing that I had the subtlety of a ton of bricks covered in tar and feathers. Michael understood all too well what was being said, but I’m sure he resented my blatant pushing and shoving attempts to nurture his needy soul.

  I really should have gone to Al-Anon. Reall
y and truly. But by this time I think Michael was just as happy to have me stay at home. Happier, actually.

  It certainly did appear that the fates were against Michael, if you believed in that sort of thing. Whenever he made a little headway, it seemed a monster foot would haphazardly stomp him flat. Dreamland Records and Tapes went out of business right after the release of his solo album, and then he hooked up with a feisty female hitmaven, Holly Knight, to form a short-lived duo called Knight and Des Barres. They had a tempestuous creative relationship, but Holly and Nicky became best buddies. In fact, his very first overnight was at Holly’s house, where she allowed him free rein over her many synthesizers. He became enthralled with the keyboard and Holly gave him his very own mini-version, a Casio that he carted around everywhere in an important-looking carrying case. Michael and Holly cranked out song after song, some of which sounded like real, live smashes but Michael and Holly bickered nonstop. After these Knightmare temper flare-ups, he would come home in sodden rage, bemoaning his lowly place in life. He saw much grander things in life for himself and was either bemused or infuriated. While he spit and snapped at those higgledy-piggledy powers that be, I came along behind him with affirmative hot air. “Think of this as a challenge, Michael, one of those learning experiences!!” I tried to wiggle through his ear and think positive thoughts for him. I might as well have tried to change his diaper. You just can’t change someone’s mind for them, but I didn’t know it yet, so I continued to bang my head against the wall like it felt good. A cup of Krishnamurti, a dose of Bitzer, and how about three rounds with Mickey Mouse? That’ll fix you right up, honey!

  September 8, 1982—On the verge of my thirty-fourth year, I’ve been reading my old diaries, and they were so full of ideas, hopes, and crazed dreams—the hopes were so high in those days, I was always such a seeker—tho’ all the way through it seems I had an unworthy feeling, like I didn’t deserve the great things in life but somehow kept expecting them. My constant hope seems to have diminished, but I know I could change it in a snap! So why don’t I? I spoke to Miss Lucy yesterday, she sounds so full of life. Always a nutter, but so ALIVE and living it up. She’s having another baby! I love life too, I must be more open, tolerant, and loving towards Mikie, the world, and MYSELF! Nicky is glorious. He uses such big words, so bright, clever, and perceptive! I almost forgot, old flame Chris Hillman called today, always such a thrill to speak to him. He stopped getting bombed two years ago and is pumping so much iron that he called himself “Chris Swartzen-hillman.” I’d like to check those muscles out—something about him still tears me up. Aah, I was such a little girl when I loved him, and I’m now a grown-up woman grappling with expansion, looking for the door out/in. I know I can clear the way with my mind, even though negative thoughts creep in sometimes. I used to put myself in the hands of fate. Let’s create fate!

  III

  My soul may have been coming out of bondage, but my body was doing menial labor. I actually cleaned friends’ houses to make those damned endless ends meet. Scrubbing toilets was good for humility but it assassinated the ego. I had to deal with Danny Goldberg’s crotchety landlady, a B-minus, aging actress who treated me like I was a maid without honor, despite the glaring fact that we had both been in that spectacular opus The Carhops a few years earlier. One day I found a fangs-bared, heaving rat in the kitchen cupboard, and when I complained, the bitch snorted contemptuously like I had planted the nasty beast just to give her grief. I put off calling the exterminators until the gnawing sounds drove Danny nuts, and when the jovial murderer-for-a-living arrived with his lethal spray gun, I wept for the idiot rodent and his doomed family.

  My next Mad magazine–type job was a real kettle of piranha fish. It sounded completely legitimate, and that’s why I did so well the first few weeks. I had to sit on the phone in a room with seven other prattling salespeople, call various companies, and in a chirpy, this-is-your-lucky-day voice, offer the employees two days and three nights at a fabulous resort in Las Vegas for two, for the mere pittance of 39.95! One of my early paychecks was 706.09, and it felt swell to be able to spend hours at the swap meets and flea markets, pulling Nick in a little red wagon, on the lookout for grimy treasures disguised as trash: serene masks from Africa, handpainted silhouette fairies, exquisite lace shawls wadded into a ball for two dollars and fifty cents. I’m such an innocent geek that it took me awhile to realize it was a time-share situation, and when the poor slobs got to good ol’ Lost Wages (using up their hard-earned vacation time), they were treated to a three-hour hard sell for a time-share condo in the middle of the desert, complete with little slips of paper they could trade for a free dollar keno ticket and a frightening fake-shrimp cocktail. I felt real bad about the semi-deception, but my daddy was sure impressed with my paychecks. He loved the idea that his little girl was making good. I would show him the aging trinkets I found at swaps and garage sales, gleaned from the bottom of someone’s barrel, and he would commend me for my keen eye. Underneath it all, I ached to make him proud of me.

  IV

  My daddy is the guy who turned me on to the glory of collecting junk. He took me to the Saugus swap meet when I was barely in a bra, and we poked through people’s old, dusty, rusty stuff, hoping to score a masterpiece for fifty cents. He had the highest hopes of anybody I know, and my mom always said that I was born with his optimism and ridiculous hope for the future. It must be genetic, because at the time his pipe dreams appeared to be just so many frustrated, bungled attempts at grasping for that star-spangled, gold-plated brass ring. Not only did he miss it most of the time, he crash-landed so hard that we were constantly in debt and eating potato soup. It was delicious but redundant.

  In his early days in Lancaster, O. C. Miller ran a gas station, where he cut off the tip of his finger slamming the hood of an Edsel, and he wasn’t able to play guitar or banjo anymore. Good-bye highfalutin dreams of show biz. He fixed vacuum cleaners and big American cars, then got a job bottling Budweiser, thanks to Mom’s heroic, valiant attempts to settle him down and coax him into normalcy. Those blasted Budweiser labels littered our house, their backs waiting to be covered with my childish stick figures and girls’ pointy-nosed profiles or Mom’s notes for recipes. I even passed boy-notes on them in school. Still, Daddy schemed and dreamed, gambling our modest fortunes on several gold digathons down in Mexico, convinced there was treasure in them thar hills. He actually did find a thick, long vein of gold way, way down past Mazatlán but didn’t have the cash or connections to have roads built to get to the mother lode. I still have a snapshot of him astride a put-upon mule, his feet dragging the ground, a look of obstructed, fading glory in his green eyes. He brought back a small canning jar half-full of nuggets, which he would gaze at bleary-eyed after they pulled our perfect house in Reseda right out from under us. And we had just gotten wall-to-wall. Mom wouldn’t speak to him as we packed our worldly goods and headed for a cheap apartment in North Hollywood. But by then I was swimming in rock and roll and dying to get back to the Sunset Strip where I could cavort with the Iron Butterfly. It was a sorry scene.

  Oren Coy Miller was born in 1914 in North Carolina to a hotheaded, Napoleonic Pilgrim Holiness preacher and his downtrodden, saintly wife. In his rebel youth O.C. was already working in the coal mines, going down, down, down, bringing home the bacon to subsidize ten siblings while his banty-rooster father roamed the hollers, dragging sorry souls to Christ. He had a mess of sisters who were devoted to Jesus and were always out to trap his soul behind those heavenly, pearlescent guilt-stained gates. He ran the other way until the very last minute. Daddy was so damn gorgeous by the time he was twenty years old, looking so much like Clark Gable that people started calling him Hollywood, and he stayed an aloof, tempting playboy until he met my stunning mom, Margaret Ruth Hayes, ten years later. She has since told me it was a serious mismatch but she had been determined to entrap the guy-most-likely-to-remain-a-bachelor-forever because of the enticing challenge.

  He called me, his only child,
“punkin’ ” and “birdlegs” and took me swimming at his divorced friend’s fancy house in Sherman Oaks. When I think of the fifties, I always see Emil Decker’s twinkling, Technicolor, sun-drenched swimming pool, I smell the exotic, pungent chlorine, I feel the dripping wet suit clinging to my scrawny prepubescent ribcage as I fly through the air off the springy diving board. I was usually alone in the pool while Daddy played poker with Emil and his buddies. I could hear big laughter and shuffling cards, clinking ice cubes, and Dean Martin’s lazy promises of amore while I paddled around in the sparkles, wishing I could look just like Jayne Mansfield with her sucked-in tummy and stiff white pageboy.