As a ten-year-old, I was sure that John Taylor was going to be my husband at some point. He wasn’t, but don’t let anyone tell you visualization doesn’t work. For years I held in my head the vision of a punk rock God—I would always see him in my meditations. And then in 1994 he appeared. I was sitting at the Kibitz Room, next door to the famous Canter’s Deli on Fairfax in Los Angeles. I was eating French fries with gravy (this vegetarian was naive enough to think gravy didn’t have meat in it). A guy came around the corner, and my punk rock God manifestation snapped into view.
There he was, bleached blond hair, missing teeth, a brown button-down shirt over a T-shirt. Literally my breath was taken away.It’s my punk rock God,I thought.It’s my punk rock fantasy.
I’ll get to that. But back in 1981, I was all about John Taylor, Duran Duran, and trying to survive the various demons of Laurel Canyon.
Despite the creeping darkness of the 1980s, I couldn’t help but still feel the magic of Laurel Canyon. To this day, one of my favorite things is the smell of the Canyon after it rains. There’s something so poignant to me about the aroma of damp leaves on the ground, the petrichor rich and pungent, the streets near the Wonderland school always slick with runoff, the night-blooming jasmine and eucalyptus filling my head with magic and hope. Each day as a kid, I’d walk up the hill of Lookout Mountain from Wonderland, which I attended until middle school, and I’d find my young self completely embracing this beautiful, magical fragrance. I was all by myself, autonomous, in a world where I desperately wanted safety and a star on the Boulevard. Then I’d reach our house, and a new perfume would envelop me, the nag champa and the fireplace, and as the chimes clanged at the windows, a powerful, otherworldly feeling of calm would come over me.
By this point, with Lala gone and my mother miraculously clean, I didn’t want to leave; I’m still that way, a home person. I just want to stay by my hearth, because the world out there remains frightening to me. Even as a child if my friends wanted to hang out—Mariah, Miranda, Jody, Luke—I always had them come to my house. On the odd occasion when I’d go down to Mariah’s house—she lived across the street from the school—on the way down the hill I would do jetés in the middle of the street so that I could get there faster.
One day a girl named Pharel strode up to me in Laurel Canyon and asked me for a cigarette. We’ve been friends ever since. Early in our friendship we were in her room, where she and her friends liked to smoke pot. I tried it; we had gotten a pizza from a place called Two Guys from Italy and couldn’t stop cracking up. I’ll never forget Pharel saying, “I haven’t laughed this hard from being high since I was a kid.” She was only thirteen years old.
We all shared the sense of the music of this canyon and the lore of the Canyon and the feeling of what it had been, but we also felt something scary there, too. Behind our closed doors, bad things were happening, and to all of us. We were all only children with single parents, single moms. Many of the guys who came into our mothers’ lives were bad, bad men. They were the embodiment of the poor judgment of our desperate, sad mothers, who had had a dream of a family taken from them, only to replace it with distracted decisions, or relationships that started in rainbows and ended in fire.
Consequently, our childhoods veered toward the dark. None of us had yards to play in, and few of us had siblings, so we’d fill our time trying to steal our moms’ pot or booze. Then there was the day my friend Lucy got mad at my friend Heather and chased her a full mile up the hill with a butcher’s knife. Heather, desperately needing protection, headed for my house, burst in, and cowered in my kitchen. Seeing the huge knife, followed by Lucy, coming around the corner, I pulled a six-pack of Diet Coke out of the fridge and hurled it at Lucy’s head to make her stop. This did indeed end the confrontation, only for both of them to turn on me.
“You’re soemotional,Christina,” Heather said.
I don’t suppose it helped that I really didn’t want Nancy Priddy to be with anyone else after Joe Lala. I was so afraid of who that man might be, and the shit he’d bring into our lives, that I probably suffocated her in some ways, but I just didn’t want anyone else to hurt her.
Well into the 1980s my mom was still involved in the music scene—whenever we went to New York, for example, she’d see her former producer, Phil Ramone. By then he’d produced everyone—the Simontwins, Carly and Paul; Celine Dion and Dionne Warwick; Pavarotti; my dear friend growing up Mark Volman, of the band the Turtles; and Peter, Paul, and Mary—and when my mom still hung around with him, he was working with Billy Joel. For a while my mother had a relationship with one of the members of Billy’s band. We went to stay at the guy’s place on Long Island for a couple of months, but I was very much in my “Keep Mom single” phase, so one day I jumped up on his bed and pissed all over it.
It seems I was eventually forgiven because Billy Joel himself made me my first banana and peanut butter sandwich. We were in his kitchen with his whole family, and I can still see him peeling a banana, slicing it right down the middle, and filling it with peanut butter. Long Island clearly wasn’t the land of warm tuna sandwiches—Billy’s PB & banana was, up to that point in my life, the single best thing I’d ever eaten.
We spent a lot of time on the East Coast because we had family there and because my mother is a New Yorker at heart. She’d take me to every single Broadway show back then (there was no age limit in the eighties). I was tiny when I sawA Chorus Linefor the first time, featuring the legendary original cast—Donna McKechnie, Kelly Bishop, Priscilla Lopez, Robert LuPone, and Wayne Cilento, who’d choreographSweet Charityyears later on Broadway—and I also had the pleasure of seeingThe WizandAin’t Misbehavin’. It all just blew my mind. The bug to perform, especially the song-and-dance bug, was birthed in me during those visits.
My mom had put me in dance classes at three years old, another trick she thought would keep me sane, along with meditation. Dance immediately became central to my life. From the age of three, I’ve done ballet, tap, jazz, modern, Fosse… everything. Even if I didn’t feel good, or if I didn’t want to, or was angry or scared or anxious orheartbroken, my mother would always say, “This is nonnegotiable. You’re going to dance class.”
Having escaped her own addictions, my mom wanted me to have a positive addiction, which was to dance, wanted me to have somewhere I could go to express myself, something positive to become obsessed with. Dance became the thing that saved me, and has saved me ever since. Dance, even more than acting, was my whole life. Not being able to dance as I once did now that I have MS is one of the hardest things about the disease. It’s impossible to overstate how important dance is to me. Not just as an expression of my artistic nature, but as a kind of therapy that goes beyond talking, beyond “closure,” beyond making peace with the past. I love dance more than anything in life. It calms me, inspires me, moves me, brings me fully into my body, expresses all the hurt and anger and sorrow I’ve felt across the years. For most of my adult life, I’ve had a dance studio in my house, no matter where I am, replete with the suspension floors, barres, everything. Even the house I funded at seven years old, on Love Street behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store, had one. There was a tiny downstairs apartment that came with that property, and much later I made that whole thing a dance studio. (That downstairs section had formerly been where everyone in the Canyon went to cultivate their pot.) I would go down there for hours, just by myself, dancing out my past, dancing into what I hoped would be a happier future.
These days, I prop myself up on pillows, my cats and dog ranged around me like sentries, and I watch old Bob Fosse dances on a loop. There he is now, slithering across the desert performing his snake dance in the 1974 movieThe Little Prince,inventing moves that would be copied count for count by Michael Jackson a decade later. There’sFosse’smoonwalk, there’sFosse’sspinning of the trilby,Fosse’sleg pops,Fosse’sspats on his black shoes, and yes,Fosse’scrotch grab.
Occasionally, I’ll still dance. I sent a video to a friend recently of me dancing to R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” As Michael Stipe sings, a couple of times I regain my balance holding on to a credenza, but otherwise I’m out there on my own, dancing my ass off. I still have the angles, the reach, the positions as natural as breathing. Late in the song I find a huge smile breaking across my face as all thoughts of MS recede and I’m just dancing, dancing as though I’m perfectly healthy, as though I have not been through cancer and MS and loss and trauma. Because that’s what dance gives me: a place where joy and love win all the battles against darkness and fear.
But then I tire, and the pain returns, and it’s as if the music itself retreats, until all I can hear are the chimes at my window, ringing as if to call the ghosts back to life.
My mother and I also regularly went east to Indiana to visit family.
My maternal grandmother, Katherine Iona Driggs, was one of the most incredible human beings I’ve ever met in my life; she was everything to me. It’s so poignant, the things we remember of a person we loved. For me it was that she didn’t have a coffee maker, so she always drank Folgers instant coffee, and if you wanted a cup, you were pointed to the Folgers crystals and a kettle. To this day that particular taste takes me right back to those moments of my life.
Katherine was a tiny woman with a little puff at her belly—I used to call her Jelly Roll because she felt squishy. We went to South Bend every Christmas to see her, to her perfect Victorian home onVictoria Street with its gently pitched roof. It was just Mom and me; we always slept in my mom and her sister’s room, in their twin beds from when they were kids. There was a smell to the house that I can still remember—something Midwestern and I guess Folgers-y that comforted me throughout all those challenging years of my childhood.
I remember every winter being freezing cold. I was a Laurel Canyon kid, but hell, the Indiana snow was up to our knees so I think anyone would have felt it.
My grandma smelled like the perfume Charlie. Years later, after she died, I took a bottle of it from her house and sometimes I’ll just put it on to remember her while I sip a Folgers. Every Christmas my uncle Tommy and his family would come from Naperville, Illinois, and we’d eat from the same menu for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The stuffing was filled with raisins, water chestnuts, onion, celery… no sage—that’s too fancy. (Actually, my grandma had to make two different stuffings each year: one for us, and one for my uncle Tom, who required an oyster dressing. As a kid I never understood what that even meant except that I guessed it had oysters in it? Ew.) We’d have green bean casserole with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, spiced up with a little bit of soy sauce—one of the recipes from the side of the can. Basic super salty mashed potatoes. My mom would always make creamed corn, too, with crumbled-up, buttered saltines on top. There were biscuits, also from a can.
No salad.
Being in Indiana brought me such a beautiful feeling of family that I didn’t otherwise have. I was the very first grandchild, and I’m not sure what my grandma knew about what was going on in my mom’s life; either way, she turned a blind eye to a lot of it. I don’t think my mom shared too much either.
Most days we’d go up to the top of Victoria Hill and sled down. I remember that at the bottom of the hill we’d be racing toward Route 31, which to a small kid seemed like a roaring freeway. If you didn’t stop before you reached it, you ran the risk of ending up like Frogger—that is, very dead. But we’d sled that hill over and over and over, until our lungs ached from the cold and our fingers could no longer hold the rope. Other days we’d go cross-country skiing out west of the city, in Bendix Woods County Park.
Back at my grandmother’s house, sometimes when the family got too loud, I’d head down to her basement to get away from everybody upstairs. It was a magical room with a pool table half the usual size. The basement walls were decorated with art. My grandfather, who died before I was born, had been a musician and an artist and a photographer. When he was alive, he would take beautiful black-and-white portraits of people and then paint over them—essentially, colorizing them by hand—and hang them on those walls.
There were no addictions in South Bend, no mean people. At least not until I was much older. No one was creepy. We’d all wear Christmas sweaters; there would be game shows on the TV. I’d wake up in the morning and find my grandmother watching General Hospital, sipping on her Folgers.
I would think, “This is what other people do.”
Meanwhile, the Canyon kept slipping in the other direction.
