Lips Unsealed: A Memoir Part 6

In May, we jetted to Italy for a one-off show at a club in Milan. It was a long way to go for one show, but the performance was incidental to the sights I saw, starting with the club's promoter, who had the tightest black leather pants I had ever seen on a human being, male or female. As I discreetly pointed out to the girls throughout the show, you could see everything. Far more exciting, at least for me, were the stores. I spent all my money on clothes and bags and enjoyed every morsel of food I ate except for one meal where my host smiled after I tasted a platter of different-tasting meat.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Camel," he said.

"What?"

"Camel."

I fared much better a few weeks later when we played five shows in j.a.pan, where I caught up with my friend Jack and barely slept over six days. From there, we went to Australia, where I fell down the stairs as I came offstage and broke my foot. I actually heard the bone break. We canceled our final show and flew directly to Honolulu, where I recuperated before our shows there by doing c.o.ke in my penthouse suite and waited for Buster to arrive.

Buster was disappointed when he saw the condition I was in. From the outside, I looked great. I was tan from Australia and a few days in Hawaii. On the inside, though, I was a mess. It made connecting with Buster on any meaningful level almost impossible. Then again, I didn't want to connect with anyone, including myself.

I had been running away from my life since I snuck out of my window as a teenager and then moved to Hollywood. Being in a rock band was perfect for someone like me. Stardom made it even easier. I lived in airports and hotels, where bills were paid and beds were made for me. I wasn't easily reachable. Except for sound checks and shows, I didn't have to be responsible to anyone other than myself. Drugs and booze were plentiful, easily accessible, and considered part of the job. It was a very indulgent and dangerous way to live.

In August, we began a trek up the West Coast. Our alb.u.m, four weeks after its release, had achieved gold-record status, meaning it had sold more than 500,000 copies, and moved into the top 10, along with its first single, "Vacation." We weren't setting the world on fire, but we were happening in a big way. We were working hard and living in our own little Go-Go's bubble. There was the real world, and then there was our world in which strange and exciting things happened.

One night I received an unexpected call in my hotel room from a young man who said his name, Mike Marshall, and then paused in a way where I could tell he expected me to recognize who he was. I didn't.

"I play for the Los Angeles Dodgers," he said.

I still didn't recognize his name, but I knew the Dodgers. As a girl who was never able to get the football player in high school, I realized I had something even better on the line: a professional ballplayer. Not just any old ballplayer either. He was an L.A. Dodger. In a deep voice, he explained that a mutual acquaintance in show business had given him my number. He paid me a number of compliments, said he was a fan of the band's music, and explained that he had a feeling we would get along if we met.

I don't know if it was boredom or intrigue, or a combination of both, but I was interested. When I asked him to tell me about being a Dodger, he explained he was considered a good player, and that he'd actually won the minor league Triple Crown the year before and was now in the major leagues, which was pretty exciting.

"So are you good?" I asked teasingly.

"I hit a home run my first time up to bat at Dodger Stadium," he said.

"Yeah, but are you good?"

This first call turned into a nightly occurrence that I looked forward to. I liked the back-and-forth volley with this strange man. Without him knowing, I tooted up during the call and spewed what I described as my c.o.ke rap. It's what I did when I was in my hotel room and bored, with nothing to do after shows except drugs.

Our conversations quickly moved past playful flirtations and turned into more intimate explorations. It was like a game of Truth or Dare--a drug in and of itself.

I had no idea what Mike looked like or that his teammates had nicknamed him Moose for his thick, lumbering physique. He was a Dodger; that was intriguing enough. Although he knew what I looked like, I probably held the same allure for him: I was a rock star. It was like being in high school again.

I looked forward to his calls as we traveled from Berkeley to Denver, Calgary, and Edmonton. By the time we hit Vancouver and Seattle, Mike and I wanted to meet, and the fact that we hadn't but were talking more and more intimately heightened the antic.i.p.ation. We finally arranged to rendezvous before our show in Santa Cruz. When I saw him for the first time, I didn't think he was handsome or cute. I don't know what image I had in mind, but he reminded me of Lurch, the butler on the old TV series The Addams Family.

However, as I repeatedly told my friends later on, almost as if I needed to convince myself, he was a Dodger. And, as I would tell my therapist much later on, I was on drugs and making poor choices.

After weeks of antic.i.p.ation, we had a hot and heavy time in Santa Cruz. After two solid days together, Mike asked me to move in with him. Just one problem there--neither of us had our own place. There was also an even bigger problem--I already had a boyfriend.

Buster had been checking in with me regularly, asking about the tour and waiting for me to return home. The Go-Go's had a big show coming up at the Hollywood Bowl and his group, the Blasters, was the opening act. We had been looking forward to it being a grand, triumphant night. As Southern California kids, we knew the significance of playing the Hollywood Bowl.

Now the thought of it made me queasy. I dreaded what I was about to do to him.

Buster was as nice as any human being I'd ever met. Probably the nicest. I'd never heard him utter an unkind word about anyone, including me, a feat that should have earned him the boyfriend's equivalent of a n.o.bel Prize, considering the way I sometimes treated him. He had lost his temper with me only once in the two-plus years we had been together. He had come to Disgraceland one night to pick me up. But he arrived too early, and unfortunately I had another boy in my room. In a scene straight out of a bad movie, I pushed the other guy out the window and was then a complete b.i.t.c.h to Buster as he tried to figure out why I was behaving so strangely.

This time I wasn't as secretive. I called Buster from a pay phone in Santa Barbara and broke up with him. Without telling him about Mike, I said, "I don't want to be with you anymore."

Buster was totally blindsided. I couldn't have been colder or more callous. It was one of the s.h.i.+ttiest breakups on record. I still hate myself for the way I treated him. Years later, after I got sober, I made amends to him in a letter. But at the time it went down, it was a mess--the kind only a drug addict can make.

I wouldn't have called myself an addict then.

Now I know better.

Two nights after the breakup, we played the Hollywood Bowl. I stayed clear of Buster. I couldn't face him because I was ashamed of the way I had broken up with him. I had even told him to keep my white Cadillac. Everyone in the punk scene seemed to be at the Bowl, and most of them were backstage. They knew what had gone down between Buster and me, and more embarra.s.singly, how it had gone down.

I felt their hatred. No one spoke to me, and I didn't want to look anyone in the eye. I wanted to get onstage, where I could look at Mike, who was using tickets I had given him. He sat front and center. It was like rubbing salt into a wound. But I didn't care.

The trouble was, I didn't care about much of anything.

eleven.

SPEEDING.

MIKE AND I went looking for apartments together. He found a place in Marina del Rey. My taste ran more to Hollywood, but then again I still had a lot of tour ahead of me.

It was September 1982, and the Go-Go's played a show almost every night across the Midwest and South. We had upgraded to a more comfortable tour bus from our cramped white van. If there was still anything glamorous or romantic about traveling to a new city every day, I didn't see it. The travel and the sameness of each day was a grind that made me feel suspended in a netherworld where many times I found myself saying, "Be careful what you wish for."

The five of us spent way too much time with one another, waking up and seeing one another through blurry, sleep-crusted eyes, falling into bed as we rolled across dark highways, gossiping, eavesdropping on conversations, compromising on which movies or TV shows we watched, getting wasted, and nitpicking at one another like girlfriends whose inside jokes had gone stale.

Mike came out for some dates and brought along his hard-partying teammate Bob Welch, who was a great guy, though not without his own troubles. He and Charlotte took a liking to each other.

In the middle of the month, somewhere between the Carolinas and Georgia, I suffered my worst panic attack since I had broken down in my apartment after the Go-Go's first alb.u.m went number one. I walked into my hotel room after a long trip on the bus and too much c.o.ke the night before. I went into the bathroom, turned on the light--a harsh, unforgiving light--and glanced at myself in the mirror. It wasn't a pretty sight.

I saw the truth: a twenty-four-year-old girl who was doing too many drugs, who didn't have any center of gravity, who felt ma.s.sive regret, sorrow, and pain, and I knew deep down that I wasn't compatible with Mike.

I had everything I'd ever wanted, and it wasn't right.

Ugh.

It was too much truth all at once. I started to cry.

"What am I going to do?" I said to myself. "What am I going to do?"

I repeated the question over and over until I felt like I was drowning--and that's when the anxiety hit, only I had no idea what it was or what was happening to me. I broke out in a chilly sweat and felt like I was hyperventilating. I feared I might be having a heart attack. By showtime, it had pa.s.sed and I was able to push beyond the panic-stricken hours I had spent in my hotel room, wondering if I was going to overdose.

I think I figured out the catalyst for the attack. A few days earlier, I had received word through our record company's office that a man claiming to be my father wanted to meet me at our show in Baton Rouge. Apparently he had told local press there that he was my father, explaining he had been shown a photo of me as a little girl in the Vacation tour program and it matched a photo he kept in his wallet.

Ginger and the others were aware I hadn't seen my father since I was five or six years old. I think there was mention of that in the newspaper story, too. Anyway, they looked at me to see whether this man was real or a nutcase. Before I heard if his name was, in fact, Harold Carlisle, I already knew it was my dad. When I was fourteen years old, I had picked up the phone at home in Thousand Oaks and heard a strange man's voice ask if Joanie was home. No one called my mom Joanie. I instantly knew it was my father. Ten years later, I had the exact same feeling.

Reluctantly, I agreed to meet him after the show. Then I had to work through the anger I began to feel toward him for handling a matter as private as our reunion in such a public forum. I didn't like the way he had made a big stink out of it in the paper. On the bus, as we arrived in Baton Rouge, I kept saying, "It just isn't cool."

I was angry with him for more than talking to the press. I harbored long-standing feelings of resentment and hurt toward him for disappearing without any explanation when I was little, never sending child support to my mom or making contact on birthdays and holidays to see if I was alive. I also chafed at the nerve he had coming back into my life now that I was famous.

How could I trust any of his motives?

I ran through various scenarios of what seeing him would be like. Each one gave me the creeps. I wished I hadn't said yes.

My stomach was in a knot through the show, especially toward the end when I began to think about confronting my father. He had brought his new family, a wife and two daughters. Afterward, as they were ushered backstage, I locked myself in our dressing room and snorted c.o.ke till I rendered myself emotionally numb and stupid enough to face him, not that I was any good at expressing my emotions anyway.

At our reunion, I was friendly to everyone, probably too friendly and trying too hard in order to compensate for being loaded. My father took me aside and tried to deliver what he must have thought was a heartfelt explanation of why he left--basically his side of the story. As soon as he began to blame my mother, I tuned him out. I pled exhaustion and ended the evening.

However, they wanted to see me again before we left and so all of us met the next morning for breakfast and hung out for a spell afterward. This time, I was hungover instead of high, but still pleasant. As we parted, my father's daughters, the ones with whom he replaced me, said they loved me.

"I love you!" they called.

Waving good-bye as they got in their car and drove away, I thought, How can these people love me? They don't even know me.

At the end of October, after playing sold-out venues every night from Houston to St. Louis to New York's Madison Square Garden, we took our brand of new wave merriment to Amsterdam. I couldn't wait. Even if we were still working, I was ready for an escape that would let me feel far away from home.

I arrived with the intention of having a great time. But I was run-down and needed to rejuvenate. So, soon after checking into our hotel, the Sonesta, I corralled Charlotte into going to the health club with me. I thought a soak in the hot tubs and a ma.s.sage would do the trick.

At the time, the Sonesta was a luxurious hotel--and very European, especially the spa. At the desk, the attendant informed us of the club's policy: We had to take off all our clothes. Though this is common in Europe, we were still surprised. Charlotte and I looked at each other and said what the h.e.l.l. Then we stripped off our clothes and ran out to find a hot tub to ourselves, hoping the other women we saw wouldn't stare.

We didn't even consider the spa might be co-ed--that is, until a French man in his fifties sauntered up to our hot tub. He arrived just as we were starting to relax and gazed down discerningly at us. (We also looked up discerningly.) After a moment, he joined us.

"So where are you girls from?" he said in heavily accented English.

"America," we said.

"I'm going to guess how old you are," he said. "Twenty-five or twenty-six?"

Charlotte nodded.

"How'd you know?" I asked.

"I can tell by your bodies," he said.

I didn't know whether he was creepy or not. Either way, I didn't want to get out of the water. Neither did Charlotte. It was safe to chat while keeping a careful eye on the bubbles to make sure as much as possible stayed covered up. It became an endurance contest: Which of us could tolerate the hot water the longest, the two of us or our new friend, whom we nicknamed Jeff Jetsetter.

As we began to shrivel up like vegetables in a pot of simmering soup, Jeff invited us up to his room that night.

"I have a big penthouse," he said.

Charlotte and I traded looks that spoke volumes. We were at a loss for how to politely say thanks, but no thanks. Sensing our wariness, he quickly added, "I also have champagne and cocaine."

"Cocaine?" I said.

He nodded.

"How much do you have?" I asked.

He smiled. "A lot."

"Okay, we'll come up," I said.

With a satisfied nod, he stepped out of the hot tub and said he'd see us later. When the coast was clear, Charlotte said that was weird. I shrugged. Weird was relative. We were in Amsterdam.

Later that night, the five of us went up to Jeff Jetsetter's penthouse. It was magnificent. As promised, he had a ton of blow. He was extremely generous, too, but before long I saw what Jeff had in mind. He put it right out there. He wanted to have s.e.x with us. I was equally blunt, as were the others. It wasn't going to happen.

Buoyed by drugs, booze, and his intense desire to get laid, he refused to give up. He tried charm, jokes, gestures, and direct invitations. He brought out a suitcase full of s.e.x toys. He thought he was being romantic. We thought he was bizarre, and we got completely grossed out. We said as much. He didn't care. I finally said, "We aren't going to screw you. Just give us the drugs."

Something clearly got lost in the translation. That or he was just thick. It turned into a pretty comical scene. He kept going into the palatial bathroom, filling up the tub with bubble bath, and lighting candles. He came out each time grinning mischievously, perhaps hopefully, announcing it was almost ready for us. Then one of us went in there, blew out the candles, emptied the tub, and turned on the lights. We were terrible. This went on for two days.

By the second night, the party broke up and I found myself with a couple of the other girls prowling Amsterdam's seedier clubs. We had descended into the underbelly of the after-hours scene. We were working our way through a pretty hard-core club when I spotted Jeff Jetsetter. He was there with a rich Texas oil guy and a couple of hookers of dubious gender. We traded h.e.l.los, and of course he invited us to have a drink and s.e.x with them.

Again, we declined. Never mind the place was an extremely weird scene. The sun had already started to come up and we had a show that night at the Paradiso.

Jeff Jetsetter showed up there, too. Somehow he looked fresh while I was a haggard facsimile of myself from not having slept for three days. Through the first part of the show, I felt like I was standing in a tunnel. I couldn't make anything out, not the music or the audience. As I began singing "Fading Fast," I lost my hearing altogether. I sang anyway, but I couldn't get my key. My voice was all over the place. Jane glared at me, p.i.s.sed off that I was that bad.

We were a worn-out bunch on the flight back to the States. Charlotte filled up seven vomit bags. I felt like we weren't ending the tour as much as we were escaping with our lives.

At the end of November, the Go-Go's went on extended hiatus. After nearly seven months on the road, we needed a break. We had worked nonstop for several years. Vacation, though certified gold, didn't live up to the ma.s.sive expectations our debut alb.u.m created and left us scarred. Egos, publis.h.i.+ng issues, and drug use also took their toll on us. A New York Sunday News magazine cover was right on with its headline "For the Go-Go's, it's not easy being rock's sweethearts."

Many years later I laughed to myself when I saw that the band Metallica had hired a therapist to help them through issues they were having with one another. We should have done the same thing.

The petty jealousies and comments that we once overlooked or laughed off grew more frequent and caustic. More serious, too. Whereas in the early days we might have sniped about boys, it was now apt to be about business. Songwriting royalties enabled some of the girls to make a lot more money than the others. Charlotte, for instance, bought a large house in Los Feliz while others were still trying to sc.r.a.pe together enough money for cars and condos. The arrangements affected the dynamics within the group and tested friends.h.i.+ps.

I never approached the issue myself. I felt guilty about being such a mess. I knew I wasn't ent.i.tled to more of a piece of the pie.

Ginger, who had begun managing the band out of her apartment, opened up an office on Hollywood Boulevard, and then, as the business grew even larger and more complex, brought in high-powered manager Irving Azoff and his company, Front Line Management. It was the beginning of the end for Ginger, who half-jokingly described her departure to me as "being strong-armed by the music industry." After receiving a Grammy nomination for her work designing our Vacation alb.u.m cover, she moved back to New York, ending our ties to the all-girls, do-it-yourself ethos that had driven us since we were part of the punk scene.

With our new high-powered management behind us, the band got into a p.i.s.sing match with IRS over royalties we claimed were due us from our first alb.u.m. They claimed they didn't have the money to pay us, and we settled for $1 million, which was really settling. Margot also sued the Go-Go's, claiming she was owed money for her contributions. As I recall, we settled with her for around $30,000.

Who would have thought a curbside conversation at a late-night party in Venice could have led to all of this?

I guess I did, in some way.

In February, I joined Mike for spring training at the Dodgers' complex in Vero Beach, Florida. There was nothing for me to do. While he worked out with the team, I went to Bible study sessions with the other Dodger wives and girlfriends, which I found as torturous as Sunday school when I was a kid. I had no idea what I was doing in those sessions--or in Florida, period.

By the time we returned to L.A., our relations.h.i.+p was fodder for gossip columns and tabloids. Writers dug up old photos of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Hollywood and baseball's most famous couple. They had wed in January 1954 and nine months later Monroe filed for divorce, citing mental cruelty.

My relations.h.i.+p with Mike followed a similar course, minus the marriage. Once the season began, Mike turned into a different person and living with him was difficult. He blamed me for his strikeouts, groundouts, errors, and anything else that went wrong. I fretted about what kind of mood he would wake up in in the mornings. I was constantly afraid of doing something that would upset him. I walked on eggsh.e.l.ls; sometimes it felt like it was a minefield.

One time he lost his temper after smelling cigarette smoke in his car and berated and bullied me all night until I reluctantly admitted I had smoked in it, which he forbade. In many ways, my life with Mike reminded me of growing up with my dad when he drank. Mike wasn't an alcoholic, but he created a volatility that, although unhealthy, was very familiar ground to me. A few times I reminded myself of my mother as I yelled back at him.

Meanwhile, Mike had no idea I was a druggie, something that obviously contributed to the tension in our relations.h.i.+p. I was hiding a pretty big and serious secret. Shortly after we settled into the Marina del Rey apartment, I was at my lawyer's office and asked one of his a.s.sistants if they knew of a c.o.ke dealer in the Marina. I needed a connection closer than Hollywood. My lawyer's a.s.sistant made a call and gave me a slip of paper with a number on it and said it was okay for me to call.

I went home and it turned out that the dealer lived on the floor directly below mine. I couldn't believe my good fortune.