Scar Tissue (4 page)
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.
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 called 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.
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.”
We made it back to L.A., and I later found out that my dad was only getting two hundred dollars a trip to mule that pot for his friends Weaver and Bashara. I also discovered that he was supplementing that meager income with a nice steady cash inflow from a growing coke-dealing business. In 1974 cocaine had become a huge scene, especially in L.A. My dad had developed a connection with an old American expatriate who brought up cocaine from Mexico. Dad bought the coke and then cut it and sold it to his clients. He wasn’t selling ounces or kilos, just grams and half grams and quarter grams. But over the course of a day or two, it started to add up. He’d also move quaaludes. He gave a doctor a sob story about never being able to sleep, and the doc wrote a prescription for a thousand quaaludes, which cost maybe a quarter apiece and had a market value of four or five dollars. So between the coke and the ludes, it was a pretty lucrative business.
Pops never tried to hide his drug dealing from me. He didn’t go out of his way to tell me about it, but I was such a shadow to him that I’d observe all his preparations and transactions. There was a small add-on room, similar to my bedroom, off the kitchen. It even had a door that led to the backyard, and my dad set up shop there.