This was the man in the photograph.
Sometimes in books people fudge the details about someone, change names so that they can tell a version of the truth without fear of legal action. But Joe Lala is dead, which is an exceptionally good thing because it frees me to tell the real truth about him. You can’t defame the dead, though nothing I’m going to say is defamatory anyway. Unfortunately, it’s all true.
So yeah, I’m going to say his name: Joe Lala.
He died of lung cancer, and boy, I hope it hurt. And I’ve never felt like that about anyone. I am not someone who gains joy from others’ pain; I’ve had enough pain in my own life to pray that no one else feels what I feel. By the time I was fifteen, I was telling my diary,“Shit, if anyone read this, they’d think that my life was pretty bad… Druggy, alchi, violent stepfather doesn’t sound like a nice life…”I wouldn’t wish this kind of feeling on anyone, so for me to be so virulent about Lala’s death… and yet I make no apologies.
Lala was my “stepfather” from the time I was three years old until I was seven. When he died many years later there were gushingtributes to him—things like “To play with so many legends, you have to be a legend”—but the truth is, he was an abusive alcoholic and a junkie. He even burned my cereal spoons while shooting his heroin, but that wasn’t close to the worst of it.
When my mother got with Lala, she was already having trouble sleeping—she had been through so much anxiety and pain after my dad left, and she was struggling. Misery loves company, and Lala told her he had this “herb” called China White that would help her get some rest. Nancy Priddy was from a place as close to true, innocent America as you can imagine: South Bend, Indiana, a safe, uncomplicated town where the worst people did was drink too much. And even though by the time she reached her twenties she had lived for a few years in very different places—the artistic, stoned streets of Laurel Canyon, California, and before that, the folk-filled streets of Greenwich Village, in New York—my mother didn’t know drugs. This was so not the world she was from; she was dangerously naive about it. Given that she was desperate to get some rest, and that she trusted this new man in her life, she happily tried this herb called China White, and she slept. She felt great, so she took some more China White, she slept some more, on and on and on, all the way down the waterslide that is heroin addiction.
Being an addict like Lala was one thing; inveigling someone else into that world is another level of evil, especially someone as lost as my mother was in those years after my father left. The palpable selfishness, and the disregard for someone else’s safety and health, shows me just what a terrible partner Joe Lala was to my mother. He’d found a weak, battered heart, and he had preyed upon it. He desperately needed someone next to him while he spiraled. It wouldn’t have been any fun spiraling alone, so he brought my mother along for the terrible ride.
My mother always did the very best she could for me. But we suffered the twin scourges of poverty and trauma. We had both been left by a loved one; we were each a mirror to the pain the other was feeling.
What transpired was a childhood that, though it didn’t involve malnutrition, as I would later learn my father’s had, still had its fair share of deprivations. At home there were times when I’d think,What’s this fun powder in this baggie? Is it flour?My mom would sometimes send me to school with tuna fish sandwiches in plastic bags, where they’d sit for hours in the California heat until lunchtime came around. We all could have died. In fact, I’m amazed more of us didn’t die in the seventies.
There was no spare money for things even as cheap as hamburger buns, so we’d have hamburgers on white bread that would turn pink from the ketchup. I still remember the day she bought hamburger buns for the first time.
“Mom!” I said. “Thank you!”
I couldn’t believe it. We were so rich. We had hamburger buns.
My mother managed to keep the truth of her addiction away from me, at least. You would never have known she was in such distress. She didn’t behave any differently. I still loved lying in her lap, and she still smelled of that rose perfume.
I felt safe; I felt safe with her always. I always felt safe with my mommy…
I have incredible empathy for my mother.
She is my hero. She raised me alone; she would go on to survive cancer three times. But Joe Lala ruined my mom, putting her on atrajectory in which she would struggle with drug and alcohol abuse until only a decade or so ago.
The memories are burned into the backs of my retinas like sunlight. I sometimes think sharing the memories will lessen their power, but that’s not the case. What Lala did, and who he was—and at such an important, formative time in my young life—compromised so many things a child needs: stability, tenderness, peace. Love. The safety supplied by my beautiful mother was critically challenged by the presence of this man who moved into our lives and brought with him a universe of hurt and danger.
It’s difficult to even share some of the things he did. Like the day we came home to find Lala in a full drug nod, a bite of his own tuna sandwich in his mouth, a menthol cigarette still burning in his fingers, the ash at least an inch long. He could so easily have burned down the house and everyone in it. I can still see him now: he was in our garage room, wearing a short terry cloth robe, so stupidly short that you could almost see his balls.
Everything about him was disgusting, and frightening, and left me in a kind of emotional quicksand.
My mom always said, “I never met a junkie I didn’t like because they tend to be lovely people.” That’s because they feel so damn good all the time, I guess. But Lala mixed his alcohol with the junk, which made him abusive and horrible.
Menthol and tuna and booze.
Mom had no income, no support, her family three thousand miles away, her ex-husband six hours north and in a new relationship.Being so alone, she sometimes left me in the “care” of a bunch of girls who lived in the Canyon.
“Care” is in quotation marks because they were all having sex with rock stars and didn’t care about a little kid in the slightest.
Their wildness wasn’t confined to their own exploits with adults either. In a world where there were no guardrails, it didn’t matter to some of them what damage they did.
This is where the story darkens almost to black, and though I wish I could draw a veil across these pages, I also owe a debt of witness to that little girl who lived at 8723 Lookout Mountain Avenue, the house you could reach from both Lookout and Crescent Drive. But either way you found me, there I was, left to the whims of girls who were already promiscuous and unmoored from basic levels of morality and appropriate behavior.
Because. One day. One of the older ones. Well, she forced me. She made me.
I don’t want to say it.
Fuck this.
She made me eat her out.
I was five years old.
