Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (28 page)

She gave me her treasured Bruce Lee puppet to give to Nick, and I wept, trying not to let her hear me. I made her promise to contact me after she reached “the happy hunting ground,” as she called it. She attempted to be funny, but it hurt too bad. I told her to look out for the big light, and thanked God the drugs kept her knocked out most of the time while I sat there feeling hideously inept and
inadequate. I felt for Claire, who had become a constant nursemaid, exhausted and red-eyed. We talked while Michele slept. She wanted to know who her sister was, who she had turned into after she left the miserable, chaotic family nest and headed for Hollywood. She read the
Times
article, she looked at the photos of her feisty older sister with Eddie Van Halen, Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick, Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys (her very first lover). Claire sighed and told me Michele had always been headstrong. A mild understatement. Nothing or nobody ever kept Michele Myer out of a room she wanted to enter. She prided herself on “crashing” any event that didn’t have her name on the guest list, and she never failed.

I left San Francisco knowing I would never see Michele again. She died three weeks later, and I closed my eyes tight and asked Gram Parsons to welcome his number-one fan into rock-and-roll heaven with open arms. Nick was crushed. He still has the Bruce Lee puppet in a place of honor, next to the goldfish that has lived way longer than we ever thought it would.

April 6
—
My darling Shelly went to the happy hunting ground today. Good-bye sweet angel-woman. I love you so. I cried and dazed around, called Claire a couple times, prayed and spoke to Michele on her way. I know she’s floating free of her battered body, God bless her
.

The drama in my frazzled life felt thick and full like a spidersac brewing a ball of black-widows—and with the terrifying loss of Shelly, the decision to have dermabrasion on my teen-picked skin, Nicky’s shadowy sadness, and the looming book tour coming up, it took me awhile to realize those incessant walks Michael took with our dumb dog, Nellie, and the mounds of dimes and quarters all over the place meant big trouble.

When I finally decided I could no longer deal with the fraud my marriage had become, I felt like my heart would burst and poison my quaking guts if I didn’t ask those awful questions: Where do you go every night? Are you seeing someone else? Is there another woman? Are you having an affair? Do you love somebody else? Do you still love me? I
knew
he was at it again, because my intuition never fails me. I had previously ignored the small, still voice screeching and howling, battering at my inner eardrums until it finally weakened, flopped around aimlessly, and faded away. Did you hear something? No? Hmm, I could have sworn I heard something. . . .

To make the entire typical horror show even more god-awful, I had just had the dermabrasion and was red, goopy, and scabbed with Vaseline-dripping bandages hanging off my miserable, sore face. I kept thinking I could keep it all inside until I looked and felt a little better, but once the jig was up, I had to get it out in the open. I had pieced together all the nightmarish cheating facts, and they were haunting me as I thrashed around the house, pacing, rehashing events, looking just like a Stephen King hell-hag. Is there another woman?

Nicky was at my mom’s, and Michael was out walking Nellie for the fourth time that evening. I knew he was going to the pay phone on the corner to call
her
, because up until about three months earlier he never went near the poor dog. At first I was eyebrow-raised and pleased that he began to give a shit about the mutt, but it slowly began to fade as I realized he didn’t take much notice of her until he decided she needed a little fresh air. Are you having an affair? One afternoon I had followed a short ways behind them, my heart slamming hard,
ka-bump, ka-bump, ka-BUMP
, just to see Nellie struggling on her leash to frolic while Michael chatted away on the public phone. I felt like Mrs. Columbo on acid. I had also started to see large piles of coins littering the tabletops, and for a man who used to throw his spare change in the gutter, this was indeed an oddity. The phone rang more often, and I got several hang-ups a day. Hello. Hello! Hello? Hello!!?! So rude. Are you seeing someone else?

I waited silently on the fake Deco couch that we were paying off on our Broadway card, listening for Nellie’s delighted yapping. She was always happy to see me. She didn’t care if I looked like one of the walking dead. I was petrified, shaking, but determined to confront my errant titled husband. I knew he would deny any accusations because he always did, even when faced with clean, straight-ahead facts, but I had a newfound resolve this time around. I was a stronger person, a stronger woman, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that I wrote
I’m with the Band
. Tampering with my past, studying it, reliving it, delving soul-first into all that
stuff
—turning it into a viable, buyable piece of rock-and-roll history gave me some
balls
. What is the female equivalent of balls, anyway? It gave me some ovaries? Fallopian tubes? I finally had some mammary glands?

Even in this precarious, vulnerable position, I sat there on the couch like a cross-legged Indian squaw ready to do battle. I was about to slit open my love-pump and expose that squealing baby girl, and the pain was unutterable. Pondering all that had brought me to this heart-wrenching, heart-pounding moment, I waited for my husband of thirteen years to get home from spewing gooey love words to another woman. Do you love somebody else? Do you still love me?

By the time he got home a few minutes later, I had balanced myself, ready to ask that first big question. Where do you go every night? He unleashed the dumb dog, popped on the TV to watch the news, and got comfortable in his leather recliner across from me. “So, how did Nellie like her walk?” Not quite. “Want a cup of tea?” Nope. I was pissed but still in the adoring-wife mode where I still held myself
hostage. Confrontation is wicked for me. Especially when the doll-house is about to be squashed underfoot. “Where do you go every night?” He didn’t answer, so I posed it to him again. He had gradually built up to about five nights a week and was getting pretty blatant: squirting on the Opium, sucking in those dramatic chiseled cheeks, making a mad dash for the door.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with Stevie,” he said in a strange voice, “I’ve been going to a lot of AA meetings.” He looked everywhere but at my aching face. “I’ve just
needed
to get out of the house.”

We circled the question for awhile until I had him in a hole the size of the Hollywood Bowl. “Michael, I’m not
asking
if you’re seeing somebody else, I’m
telling
you I KNOW you are.” I was letting my intuition shine, speaking my mind—even though I felt like lying down in a dark room for a year—glory hallelujah. He was caught so cold that his scoffing and protests were weakling attempts to get me off the track and then he just shrugged, exhausted, and gave up the fiction. One of those unspoken agonies passed between us; the air chilled, the sun went down, the curtain closed, and the sorrow was transcendental. I had demanded the truth for the first time. I wanted to get down to the splintered bone no matter how many wounds I would have to lick later. I had always nodded enthusiastically when he skirted and sideslipped the truth, not really wanting to know. I had begged his forgiveness when I caught him scarlet-handed, put hazy walls in front of the facts, looked the other way, turned the other cheek to avoid the raw certainty. He had always ended the dalliance when I started asking questions, but I could tell by the crumpled misery, the cave of his shoulders, the bed of thorns in his deep blue eyes, that this time it was going to be different.

Michael’s head had become a woebegone burden, weighing fifty tons and hanging close to the floor when he finally admitted to having another affair. He couldn’t look at me and I didn’t blame him. How about your wife busting you for one more adultery while her whole head looked like it had been eaten by a garbage disposal?

I loved this fucker, even at this ignominious moment. Even now I felt his pain like it pumped through my own arteries. “Who is it? When and where did you meet this bitch?” I asked, wishing I looked beautiful. It just
happened
, and it just
happened
to have happened at Helena’s. Big shocker. I didn’t want to, but I cried, the salt biting
into my scabs. “I know about the phone calls on the corner.” Oh, how he hated to admit he had been that obvious. “She hangs up on me five times a day,” I went on. He grimaced, he fidgeted. Here came the humdinger. “How about when I called you in Palm Springs on our fucking
anniversary
and there was a ‘do not disturb’ on the line? Hmm? The very place we went for our
honeymoon
. How about
that
?” I yelled, sounding like something roasting on a spit. I shouted that his lust-crave for me had gotten up and split, probably a long time ago. And guess what? My desire for him had been flattened paperthin like a run-over cat by his lack of desire for me. Had he ever thought of that? It took two not to tango, remember? I was boiling mad and frozen to the spot, while Michael decided to get up and pace.

“We’ve been together so many years, Pamela, desire fades, we know each other too well.” Age-old breakup words—the mystery train gone way, way down that old railroad track. A speck in the distance.

Too much troubled water under the bridge? Too many blemishes blatant in the morning light before the chance came to daub them with Blasco cover cream? Too much sameness? Everyday, dull, ordinary life-pain? From me, too much veiled desperation disguised as overpowering love, perhaps, a cloak of pink, humid oppression that made Michael shrink, flail, go out on yet another crazed escape binge seeking a cool, hot-tempered model bitch to give him a hard time while I sat home wearing my Goody Two Shoes grin, writing out checks to California Edison, Group W Cable, and Sparkletts water?

Still, I kept pushing. On that awful night I had to know: Did he love this home-wrecking bitch and/or did he still love me?

In the past when I made it clear to Michael that he had better stop seeing a certain little miss adulteress, he would comply willingly, almost happy to be found out because he had the perfect excuse to put an end to the fling. I wasn’t even sure what I hoped for this time. A sub-sleeping part of me wanted him to refute me, so we could somehow move on. I’m sure he didn’t really want to hear one more sodden ultimatum from me, either. Still, I expected him to say, “Don’t worry, honey, it’s over,” or “I’ll never see her again.” Then it dawned on me like the Age of Aquarius that this might actually be IT. “Do you
love
this amoral piglet?” I peeped, attempting to shield my sore face from his answer. Of course he said, “No,” but I didn’t believe him. I had come to know his lying voice well, even though at times I ignored it entirely in favor of keeping at least a piece of the peace, the tranquillity of fiction.

He looked at the wall and said, “I can’t stop seeing her now.” A
knuckle sandwich straight in the kisser. What the fuck did “now” mean?

“Do you still love me?” The sound of my thin, whiny voice in my own ears made my flesh crawl like termites had infested and were about to reach the heart chakra. Michael looked at the floor. “I will always love you.” It came out like a crucified whimper while I sat there like a lump of redundant flesh—weak, worn out, and hollow—the Indian squaw that had been prepared to hurl her brave’s own arrows, transmuting into an ordinary trodden-down, cheated-on wife. After the longest, quietest time in the universe went by, as my heart sagged and my face throbbed, I asked what we were going to do. He suggested I allow him to continue to see this girl until the time came when he might be finished with her.

“I think you’d better move out,” I said, and my voice seemed to be coming from the ceiling.

Dead silence.

Actually living, breathing, choking silence filled the room like nuclear waste. Finally I got up off the couch, went to the bedroom, and climbed under the covers. Michael went out the front door with his pockets full of change. He left Nellie behind.

The party’s over, baby—why don’t we call it a day.

I’m not saying Michael wasn’t hurting over the situation; it’s just that he had something to take his mind away from the hard, cold, breaking-up facts—a young brunette model.
I
had to start the withdrawal process while
his
heart was full of passion for someone else.

Since it was one of those times when the Des Barres didn’t have a whole lot of dough, we agreed—with a sense of unspoken relief—that he should postpone moving out until our finances grew less bleak. His new solo record, “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” had just come out, and I sat in the appreciative audience when he sang on “American Bandstand,” finally meeting Uncle Dick Clark and shaking his hand. And his acting prospects were picking up—he had already done a very amusing episode of
My Sister Sam
and was up for a part in a sci-fi thriller—so the arrangement wouldn’t last long. But it was harder than we could have imagined. In the beginning I hated Michael so deeply sometimes that I didn’t know myself and was scared of the volcanic vehemence of my increasingly nasty thoughts. Of course, I still loved him too, even though I was so full
of resentment I felt like I had eaten a sixteen-ounce steak after twenty years of living on papayas. It was all very, very confusing. Michael was equally volatile, totally on edge, looking for any excuse to go on the rampage. One evening the tension was so syrupy and thick, I was watching every move and slipped up anyway. Nick was reading a book with his tray balanced precariously on his knee, and when I set a soda pop on the tray it tumbled off and spilled all over the place. Michael exploded with rage and, going off the deep, deep end, grabbed the tray, threw it into the front yard, and stomped it, bleating about the bourgeois household he was forced to live in and how the tray incident represented all that was mundane and trivial in his life. There it was: I was from the San Fernando Valley and he was a blue-blooded aristocrat. Nick was caught in between and started quietly bawling.