Scar Tissue (6 page)

As soon as I moved in with my dad, the idea of having sex became a priority for me. Actually, the anticipation and the desire and the infatuation with the inevitable act had been rolling long before I got to California. But now I was eleven on the cusp of twelve, and it was time to act. Girls my age at Emerson wanted nothing to do with me. My father had a succession of beautiful young teenage girlfriends whom I couldn’t help fantasizing about, but I couldn’t quite get up the nerve to approach them. Then he started seeing a girl named Kimberly.

Kimberly was a beautiful, soft-spoken eighteen-year-old redhead with snow-white skin and huge, perfectly formed breasts. She had an ethereal, dreamy personality that was typified by her adamant refusal to wear her glasses despite terrible nearsightedness. I once asked her if she could see without them, and she said that things were very fuzzy. So why didn’t she wear the glasses? “I really do prefer the world unclear,” she said.

One night shortly before my twelfth birthday, we were all at the Rainbow. I was high as a little kite on a quaalude, and I got up the courage to write my father a note: “I know this is your girlfriend, but I’m pretty sure she’s up for the task so if it’s okay with you, can we arrange a situation where I end up having sex with Kimberly tonight?”

He brokered the deal in a flash. She was game, so we went back to the house, and he said, “Okay, there’s the bed, there’s the girl, do what you will.” My father’s bed was bizarre to begin with, because he had piled four mattresses on top of one another to create an almost thronelike effect. He was a little too present for my taste, and I was nervous enough as it was, but Kimberly did everything. She guided me the whole way, and she was very loving and gentle, and it was all pretty natural. I can’t remember if it lasted five minutes or an hour. It was just a blurry, hazy, sexy moment.

It was a fun thing to do, and I never felt traumatized then, but I think subconsciously it was probably something that always stuck with me in a weird way. I didn’t wake up the next morning going, “Geez, what the hell was that?” I woke up wanting to go brag about it to my friends and find out how I could get the arrangement happening again. But that was the last time my dad ever let me do that. Whenever he’d have a new beautiful girlfriend, I’d say, “Remember that night with Kimberly? How about if—”

He’d always cut me off. “Oh, no, no, no. That was a onetime deal. Don’t even bring that up. It’s not going to happen.”

The summer of 1975 was my first trip back to Michigan since I moved out to live with my dad. Spider gave me a big fat ounce of Colombian Gold, which was at the time the top of the food chain when it came to weed, and some Thai sticks, and a giant finger brick of Lebanese hash. That was my supply for the summer. Naturally, I turned my friends Joe and Nate on for the first time. We went to Plaster Creek, smoked a fattie, and emerged doing somersaults and cartwheels and laughing.

All summer I told people about the wonders of living in Hollywood, and about the different, interesting people I had met and the music I was listening to, which was everything in my father’s collection from Roxy Music to Led Zeppelin to David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and the Who.

In July of that summer, my mom married Steve. They had a beautiful wedding under a willow tree in the backyard of their farmhouse out in Lowell. So I felt that things were okay for her and my sister, Julie. I went back to West Hollywood at the end of the summer, anxious to resume my California lifestyle, and to get back to someone who would become my new best friend and partner in crime for the next two years.

I first met John M at the end of seventh grade. There was a Catholic boys’ school immediately adjacent to Emerson, and we used to razz each other through the fence. One day I went over there and got into a verbal put-down match with some kid who claimed to know karate. He was probably learning his forms and had no idea about street fighting, because I whomped on his ass in front of the whole school.

Somewhere in that melee, I made a connection with John. He lived at the top of Roscomar Road in Bel Air. Even though it was in the city, there were mountains and a reservoir behind his house that had a giant waterfall that drained into another reservoir. It was the perfect playground. John’s dad worked for an aerospace company and was a heavy drinker, so nothing was discussed, feelings were not talked about, you just pretended like everything was okay. John’s mom was super sweet, and he had a sister who was confined to a wheelchair with some degenerative disease.

When I started eighth grade, John became my best friend. It was all about skateboarding and smoking pot. Some days we could get pot, and some days we couldn’t. But we could always skateboard. Up to that point, all of my skateboarding had just been street skating for transportation, and jumping off curbs, basically getting where I had to go with a modicum of style in the way I rode; really, it was as functional as it was anything else. In the early ’70s, the sport started to elevate, and people were riding in drainage ditches and along banks and in emptied-out swimming pools. It was about the same time that the Dog Pound skaters in Santa Monica were taking skateboarding to a new, higher semiprofessional level. John and I were doing it for fun and challenge.

John looked like an all-American kid. He had a real taste for beer, and we’d go and hang out in front of the local country market and talk adults into buying beer for us. Getting drunk wasn’t my preferred high, but it was kind of exciting to get out of control in that way, to feel you didn’t know what was going to happen.

We graduated from asking people to buy us six-packs to pulling off heists for our booze. One day we were walking through Westwood and saw workers at a restaurant loading cases of beer into a third-floor storage area. When they left for a second, we climbed up on a Dumpster, grabbed the fire-escape ladder, pulled ourselves up, opened the window, and took a case of Heineken that lasted us for the next couple of days.

We graduated from beer heists to stealing whiskey from the supermarkets of Westwood. We’d go to the supermarket and take a bottle of whiskey and slip it up a pant leg, pull the sock up over it, and walk out with a bit of a peg leg. It was terrible-tasting, but we’d force ourselves to get it down. Before we knew it, we were out of our minds on the firewater. Then we’d skate around and crash into things and get in mock fights.

At a certain point, John decided to grow his own marijuana garden, which I thought was very inventive of him. Then we realized it would be easier to search out other people’s gardens and steal their weed. One day after we’d searched fruitlessly for weeks, we found a patch that was guarded by dogs. I diverted the dogs, John stole the weed, and we brought all these huge plants back to his mom’s house. We knew we had to dry them out in the oven first, but John was worried that his mother would come home, so I suggested since most people were still at work, we should use somebody else’s oven.

We walked a few houses down from John’s, broke in, cranked the oven, and shoved this mound of weed in. We stayed there for an hour, and though the weed never became smokable, now we knew how easy it was to break into people’s houses, and we started doing that with some regularity. We weren’t out to take people’s televisions or go through their jewelry; we just wanted money, or stuff that looked fun to have, or drugs. We went through people’s medicine cabinets, because by now I’d seen a lot of pills and I knew what to look for. One day we found a huge jar of pills that said “Percodan.” I’d never taken one, but I knew they were considered the crème de la crème of painkillers. So I took the jar and we went back to John’s.

“How many should we take?” he asked.

“Let’s start with three and see what happens,” I guessed. We both took three and sat around for a few minutes, but nothing happened. So we took a couple more. The next thing we knew, we were out of our minds on an opium high and loving it. But that was a onetime thing. We didn’t take the Percodans again.

Our small successes with pulling off heists emboldened John. He lived across the street from his old elementary school, and he knew that all the day’s receipts from the cafeteria were kept in a strongbox and stored in the freezer every night. It turned out that during his last month as a sixth-grader, John had stolen a set of the janitor’s keys to the school.

We plotted out a strategy. We got some masks, wore gloves, and waited until after midnight one night. The keys worked. We got into the cafeteria, went to the freezer, and there was the strongbox. We grabbed it and ran out, right across the street to John’s house. In his bedroom, we opened that box and counted out four hundred and fifty dollars. This was by far the most successful take we had ever had. Now what?

“Let’s get a pound of pot, sell some, and make a profit and have all the weed that we ever wanted to smoke,” I suggested. I was sick of running out of pot to the point where we would have to clean pipes to try to find some THC resin. I knew that Alan Bashara would have a pound of pot lying around, and he did. Unfortunately, it was shite pot. I had the idea to sell it out of my locker at Emerson, but that was too nerve-racking, so I ended up taking the pot home and selling it out of my bedroom, all the time dipping into the brick and smoking the better pieces. At one point, I was trying to sell this shitty pot to a couple of junkies who lived across the street, but even they were critics. When they saw my bottle of Percodans, they offered me five dollars a pill. I sold the whole jar in one fell swoop.

The pinnacle of my eighth-grade drug experimentation with John was our two acid trips. I didn’t know anyone who took LSD; it seemed like a different generation’s drug. Still, it sounded like a more adventurous experience that wasn’t about getting high and chatting up the ladies but about going on a psychedelic journey to an altered state. That was exactly how I saw my life then, going on these journeys to the unknown, to places in the mind and in the physical realm that other people just didn’t. We asked all around, but none of our stoner friends knew how to score acid. When I went to Bashara’s house to score the weed, it just so happened that he had a few strips with twenty little pyramid gelatin blotches, ten bright green and ten bright purple. I took two hits of each color and ran home to John. We immediately planned the two trips. The first would be that upcoming weekend. We’d save the second for when John and his family went to their beach house in Ensenada, Mexico.

We went with the purple acid first. Because it was so pure and strong, we immediately got incredibly high. It was as if we were looking at the world through a new pair of glasses. Everything was vivid and brilliant, and we became steam engines of energy, running through the woods and jumping off trees, feeling totally impervious to any danger. Then the spiritual aspect of the acid kicked in, and we started to get introspective. We decided to observe families in their homes, so we broke into different backyards and started spying on the residents through the windows; as far as we were concerned, we were invisible. We bellied up to the windows and watched families eat dinner and listened to their conversations.

The sun began to set, and John remembered that his father was coming home from a business trip that day and he was due for a family dinner.

“I don’t think that’s a great idea. They’re going to know that we’re crazy out of our minds on acid,” I said.

“We know we’re crazy high on acid, but I don’t think they’ll be able to tell,” John said.

I was still dubious, but we went to his house and sat down and had a full formal dinner with John’s straight-laced dad and his sweet mom and his sister in the wheelchair. I took one look at the food and began to hallucinate and couldn’t even think of eating. Then I started watching with fascination as John’s dad’s mouth opened and these big words came floating out of it. By the time John’s parents started turning into beasts, both of us were laughing uncontrollably.

Needless to say, we both absolutely loved it. It was as beautiful and remarkable and hallucinogenic as we ever could have imagined. We’d had mild hallucinations from smoking pot, when we might see colors, but nothing where we felt like we were traveling to a distant galaxy and suddenly understood all the secrets of life. So we could hardly wait for our next acid trip in Mexico.

John’s folks had a beautiful house on a white sandy beach that went on forever. We dropped that green acid in the morning, walked out to a sandbar, and stayed out in the ocean for seven hours, just tripping on the shimmer and sparkle of the water, and the dolphins, and the waves. Those two times were the best acid trips I ever had. It seemed later like they stopped making really good LSD, and acid became much more speedy and toxic-feeling. I’d still hallucinate wildly, but it was never again as peaceful and pure a feeling.

I don’t want to imply that John was my only friend at Emerson, because that wasn’t true. But again, most of my friends were outsiders in the social scheme of things. Sometimes I’d have the occasional feeling of less-than. I was less than because I wasn’t as rich as most of these kids. I also felt left out when it came to girls. Like every good boy going through puberty, I started fixating on every hot girl who came into my line of vision. And Emerson was full of them. They were rich little prima donna debutante girls with names like Jennifer and Michele. Their skintight Ditto jeans came in a myriad of pastel colors and did something truly wonderful to the young adolescent female body. Just framed it, formed it, cupped it, shaped it, packaged it perfectly. So I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

But whenever I approached a girl and asked her to hang out with me, she’d go, “You’re joking, right?” They were beautiful, they were hot, but they were snobs. All those girls wanted a guy who was a couple of years older, or one who had some game or a car. To them I was a freak to be avoided, and I hated it. The same sense of confidence and self-assuredness that I took into my other life, my club life and my party life, and my father’s friends’ life—where I felt at ease and in control and capable of communicating—I just didn’t have that with the girls in my junior high school. They didn’t give me anything in terms of confidence-building—with the exception of Grace.