Even though I had concerns about my dad’s well-being, those trips to California were the happiest, most carefree, the-world-is-a-beautiful-oyster times I’d ever experienced. I went to my first live music concerts and saw artists like Deep Purple and Rod Stewart. We’d go to see Woody Allen movies and even an R-rated movie or two. And then we’d sit around the house watching all those great psychedelic TV shows like The Monkees and The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, a show that featured these guys dressed up like big dogs, driving little cars and going on adventures. That’s how I looked at life at that time, psychedelic, fun, full of sunshine, everything’s good.
Every so often, my dad would make an unscheduled visit to us in Michigan. He’d show up with a lot of heavy suitcases, which he stored in the basement. I realized from my trips to California that he was involved in moving huge truckloads of marijuana, but it never registered that when he came to visit, that was what he was up to. I was just euphoric that he was there. And he couldn’t have been more different from every other person in the state of Michigan. Everyone on my block, everyone I’d ever come into contact with there, wore short hair and short-sleeved button-down shirts. My dad would show up in six-inch silver platform snakeskin shoes with rainbows on them, bell-bottom jeans with crazy velvet patchwork all over them, giant belts covered in turquoise, skintight, almost midriff T-shirts with some great emblem on them, and tight little velvet rocker jackets from London. His slightly receding hair was down to his waist, and he had a bushy handlebar mustache and huge sideburns.
My mom didn’t exactly embrace my dad as a good friend, but she recognized how important he was to me, so she was always pleasant and facilitated our communication. He would stay in my room, and when he left, she would sit down with me, and I would write him thank-you notes for whatever presents he’d brought me, and tell him how much fun it was to see him.
By the fifth grade, I had begun to show some entrepreneurial talent. I’d organize the neighborhood kids, and we’d put on shows in my basement. I’d pick out a record, usually by the Partridge Family, and we’d all act out the songs using makeshift instruments like brooms and upside-down laundry tubs. I was always Keith Partridge, and we’d lip-synch and dance around and entertain the other kids who weren’t quite capable of partaking in the performance.
Of course, I was always looking to make a buck or two, so one time when we had the use of a friend’s basement, I decided that I would charge whatever these kids could come up with, a dime, a nickel, a quarter, to come down to my friend’s basement and attend a Partridge Family concert. I set up a big curtain and put a stereo behind it. Then I addressed the crowd: “The Partridge Family are basically shy, and besides, they’re much too famous to be in Grand Rapids, so they’re going to play a song for you from behind this curtain.”
I went behind the curtain and pretended to have a conversation with them. Then I played the record. All the kids in the audience were going, “Are they really back there?”
“Oh, they’re there. And they’ve got someplace else to be, so you guys get running now,” I said. I actually got a handful of change out of the deal.
During fifth grade, I also devised a plan to get back at the principals and the school administrators I despised, especially since they had just suspended me for getting my ear pierced. In a school government class one day, the teacher asked, “Who wants to run for class president?”
My hand shot up. “I’ll do it!” I said. Then another kid raised his hand. I shot him a look of intimidation, but he kept insisting he wanted to run, so we had a little talk about it after class. I told him that I was going to be the next class president, and if he didn’t bow out immediately, he just might get hurt. So I became the president. The principal was dismayed beyond belief. I was now in charge of assemblies, and whenever we had special dignitaries come to the school, I was the one who showed them around.
Sometimes I’d rule by intimidation, and often I’d get into fights in school, but I also had a tender side. Brookside was an experimental school with a special program that integrated blind and deaf and mildly retarded older kids into the regular classes. As much of a hooligan and an intimidator as I was, all of these kids became my friends. And since kids can be evil and torment anyone who’s in any way different, these special students took a beating at every recess and lunchtime, so I became their self-imposed protector. I was keeping an eye on the blind girl while the deaf guy was stuttering. And if any of the jerk-offs teased them, I’d sneak up behind the offender with a branch and brain them. I definitely had my own set of morals.
In sixth grade, I started coming home for lunch, and my friends would congregate there. We’d play spin the bottle, and even though we had our own girlfriends, swapping was never a problem. Mostly we just French-kissed; sometimes we’d designate the time that the kiss had to last. I tried to get my girlfriend to take off her training bra and let me feel her up, but she wouldn’t give in.
Somewhere late in the sixth grade, I decided that it was time to go live with my dad. My mom was at her wits’ end with me, clearly losing all control. When I wasn’t given the green light to go live with him, I started to really resent her. One night she sent me to my room, probably for talking back to her. I don’t think I even grabbed anything—I went straight out my bedroom window to make my way to the airport, call my father, and figure out a way to get on a plane and go straight to L.A. (None of the flights went straight to L.A., but I didn’t know that.) I never even made it as far as the airport. I ended up at the house of one of my mom’s friends, a few miles away, and she called up my mom and took me home.
That was the point at which my mother started considering letting me go. A big factor in the final decision was the entrance into her life of Steve Idema. Since Scott St. John had gone to jail, my mother decided that maybe her idea of reforming bad boys wasn’t such a good one. Steve was a lawyer who provided legal aid for the impoverished. He had been a VISTA volunteer working with poor people in the Virgin Islands. He was a totally honest, hardworking, compassionate, stand-up fellow with a heart of gold, and my mom was crazy about him. As soon as I realized that he was a good guy and that they loved each other, I began lobbying harder to go to California and live with my dad.
Chapter 2
Spider and Son
When I left Michigan at twelve years old in 1974, I told all my friends that I was moving to California to be a movie star. But as soon as I started driving around with my dad in his Healy, singing along to the pop songs on the radio (which I wasn’t particularly good at), I announced, “I’m going to be a singer. That’s really what I’m going to do.” Even though I verbalized it, I didn’t think about the vow for years.
I was too busy falling in love with California. For the first time in my life, I felt like this was where I was supposed to be. It was palm trees and Santa Ana winds, and people I liked looking at and talking to, and hours I liked keeping. I was forging a friendship with my dad that was growing by leaps and bounds every day. He thought it was great because he had this young guy who could handle himself, whom all of his friends and girlfriends loved. I wasn’t slowing him down in the slightest; if anything, I was giving him a new prop. So it was working out to our mutual benefit. And I was going through the roof with new experiences.
Some of the most memorable of those new experiences happened right in my dad’s little bungalow on Palm Avenue. He lived in one half of a house that had been split into two units. It had a quaint kitchen and wallpaper that was probably from the ’30s. There were no bedrooms per se, but my father converted a small add-on storage room into a bedroom for me. It was all the way at the back of the house, and you had to go through a bathroom to get to it. My dad’s bedroom was the den, a room that was enclosed by three swinging doors that led to the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom. It had nice black wallpaper with big flowers, and a window that looked into the side yard, which was teeming with morning glories.
I had been there only a few days when my dad c
alled me into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table with a pretty eighteen-year-old girl he’d been hanging out with that week. “Do you want to smoke a joint?” he asked me.
Back in Michigan, I automatically would have answered no. But being in this new environment made me adventurous. So my dad got out a thick black American Heritage Dictionary box. He opened the box, and it was full of weed. Using the lid as a preparation area, he broke off some of the pot, letting the seeds roll down to the bottom of the lid. Then he took out some rolling papers and showed me exactly how to roll a perfectly formed joint. I found the whole ritual fascinating.
Then he lit up the joint and passed it to me. “Be careful, don’t take too much. You don’t want to cough your lungs out,” he counseled.
I took a little drag and then passed the joint back to him. It went around the table a few times, and soon we were all smiling and laughing and feeling really mellow. And then I realized I was high. I loved the sensation. It felt like medicine to soothe the soul and awaken the senses. There was nothing awkward or scary—I didn’t feel like I had lost control—in fact, I felt like I was in control.
Then my dad handed me an Instamatic camera and said, “I think she wants you to take some pictures of her.” I instinctively knew that some form of skin was about to be exposed, so I said to her, “What if we pull up your shirt and I’ll take a picture of you?”
“That’s a good idea, but I think it might be more artistic if you just had her expose one of her breasts,” my dad said. We all concurred. I took some pictures, and no one felt uncomfortable about it.
So my entry into the world of pot smoking was as smooth as silk. The next time I smoked, I was already a pro, rolling the joint with an almost anal precision. But I didn’t become fixated on it, even though my father was a daily pot smoker. For me, it was just another unique California experience.
My first priority that fall was to get into a good junior high school. I was supposed to enroll in Bancroft, but when we went to check it out, we saw that the building was in a shady neighborhood and scarred with all sorts of gang graffiti. The place just didn’t scream out, “Let’s go to school and have fun here.” So my dad drove us to Emerson, which was in Westwood. It was a classic California Mediterranean building, with lush lawns and flowering trees and an American flag waving proudly in the breeze. Plus, everywhere I looked, there were these hot little thirteen-year-olds walking around in their tight Ditto jeans.
“Whatever it takes, I want to go here,” I said.
What it took was using Sonny Bono’s Bel Air address as my home address. Connie had left my dad for Sonny, who had recently split with Cher. But everyone stayed friendly, and I’d met Sonny on my previous visit and he was fine with the deception, so I enrolled.
Now I had to find a way to get to school. If I took a city bus, it was a straight shot, 4.2 miles down Santa Monica Boulevard. The problem was the RTA was on strike. My dad was established in his routine of staying up late, getting up late, being high most of the time, and entertaining women all the time, so he wasn’t exactly going to be a soccer mom and drive me to and from school. His solution was to leave a five-dollar bill on the kitchen table for a cab. Getting home would be my project. To facilitate that, he bought me a Black Knight skateboard, which had a wooden deck and clay wheels. So I’d skateboard and hitchhike or walk the four miles home, all the time discovering Westwood and Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.
I went through almost all my first day at Emerson without making a friend. I started getting worried. Everything seemed new and daunting. Coming from a small midwestern school, I wasn’t exactly an academic. But at the end of the day, I had a creative arts class, and there was a friend waiting to happen—Shawn, a black kid with bright eyes and the biggest smile. It was one of those times when you march up to somebody and say, “Do you want to be my friend?” “Yeah, I’ll be your friend.” Boom, you’re friends.
Going to Shawn’s house was an adventure. His dad was a musician, which was a new one for me, a dad who went out to the garage and practiced music with friends. Shawn’s mom was as warm and loving as could be, always welcoming me into the house and offering me some exotic food as an after-school snack. I had come from the most clueless area of the world when it came to cuisine. My culinary world consisted of things like white bread and Velveeta and ground beef. Here they were eating yogurt and drinking a strange substance called kefir. Where I came from, it was Tang and Kool-Aid.
But the education was a two-way street. I taught Shawn a new pickpocketing technique I invented that semester, something I called “The Bump.” I would target a victim and walk up to him and bump into him, making certain I bumped him right on the object that I had coveted. It might be a wallet or a comb, whatever, it usually wasn’t anything over a few dollars’ value, because that was what most kids had.
My antisocial behavior at school continued unabated at Emerson. The minute someone would confront me in any way, even just telling me to get out of the way, I would pop him. I was a tiny fellow, but I was a quick draw, so I soon became known as the guy you didn’t want to fuck with. And I’d always come up with a good story to avoid being suspended after a fight.
Perhaps one of the reasons I didn’t want to get suspended was that I would have let down one of the few conventional positive role models in my life at that time—Sonny Bono. Sonny and Connie had become surrogate parental figures to me. The Sonny and Cher Show was probably the biggest thing on television then, and Sonny was always generous about ensuring that I’d get whatever extra care I needed. There was always a room for me in his mansion in Holmby Hills, and an attentive around-the-clock staff to cook whatever I desired. He lavished gifts on me, including a brand-new set of skis and ski boots and poles and a jacket so I could go skiing that winter with him and Connie and Chastity, Sonny’s daughter with Cher. We would sit on the chairlift, and Sonny would give me his version of life, which was different from my father’s or even Connie’s version of life. He definitely was on the straight and narrow. I remember him teaching me that the only unacceptable thing was to tell a lie. It didn’t matter if I’d made mistakes or fucked up along the way, I just had to be straight with him.
One time I was at his Bel Air mansion during a star-studded Hollywood party. I didn’t care about the Tony Curtises of the world at that point, so I started going up and down in the mansion’s old carved-wood elevator. Suddenly, I got stuck between floors, and they had to use a giant fireman’s ax to free me. I knew I was in big trouble, but Sonny never screamed at me or demeaned me in front of all the adults who were watching this rescue. He just calmly taught me a lesson to respect other people’s property and not play in things that weren’t made to be played in.
I never liked that there might be some expectation of how I should behave in order to be in that world. I was a twelve-year-old kid, destined to be misbehaving and out of line.
One time later that year, we were hanging around the house, and Sonny and Connie asked me to get them coffee. “How about if you guys got your own coffee?” I answered somewhat flippantly. I had no problem getting the coffee, but it seemed to me that they were bossing me around.
Connie took me aside. “That’s curbside behavior,” she told me. “If you act that way, I’m just going to say ‘Curbside,’ and you’ll know that you have to go and rethink what you just did.” Forget that. Where I was coming from, I could act however I wanted. My dad and I were getting along famously precisely because there were no rules and no regulations. He wasn’t asking me to get him any coffee, and I wasn’t asking him to get me coffee. It was “take care of yourself” where I came from.
I was growing up quickly, and in a way that definitely wasn’t Sonny-friendly. More and more, I was getting high and partying with my friends and skateboarding and committing petty crimes. All the stuff I wasn’t supposed to do was the stuff I wanted to do immediately. I had my eye on the prize, and it wasn’t really hanging out with Sonny. So we grew apart, and I was okay with that.
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br /> Correspondingly, my bond with my dad got stronger and stronger. As soon as I had moved in with him, he instantly became my role model and my hero, so everything I could do to bolster the solidarity between us was my mission. It was also his. We were a team. Naturally, one of our bonding experiences was to go together on his pot-smuggling escapades. I became his cover for these trips. We’d take seven giant Samsonite suitcases and fill them up with pot. At the airport, we’d go from one airline to another, checking in these bags, because at that time they didn’t even look to see if you were on that flight. We’d land at a major airport, collect all the suitcases, and drive to someplace like Kenosha, Wisconsin.
On our Kenosha trip, we checked into a motel, because my dad’s transactions were going to take a couple of days. I was adamant that I wanted to go with him when the deal went down, but he was dealing with badass biker types, so he sent me to a movie, which turned out to be the new James Bond flick, Live and Let Die. The transactions took place over a three-day weekend, so I wound up going to that movie every day we were there, which was fine with me.
We had to return to L.A. with thirty grand in cash. My dad told me I’d be carrying the money, because if they caught someone who looked like him with all that money, he’d be busted for sure. That was fine with me. I’d much prefer to be part of the action than be sitting on the sidelines. So we rigged a belt piece, stuffed it with the cash, and taped it to my abdomen. “If they try to arrest me, you just fade away,” he instructed me. “Just pretend you’re not with me and keep on going.”
Scar Tissue Page 3
