And there was joy, too.
We used to drive up the 5 freeway to Magic Mountain all the time, just the two of us, and always on Mother’s Day. I can’t imagine that many mothers would choose a trip to Magic Mountain for their special day, but she knew how much I loved it, so it became a family tradition, me hoping each year that I was finally tall enough to be allowed on the Gold Rusher, the Log Jammer, the Colossus, or the Great American Revolution. And given what we’d both been through—the violence, the fear, the struggle to just survive—we’d think nothing of those huge roller coasters, whooping and hollering as our stomachs got left behind, free for a few minutes from the pressures of our shared pasts, our challenging presents, and our uncertain futures.
The two of us—always the two of us. Some weekends we’d drive down off the mountain and head to the coast. We’d roller-skate through Venice all the way up to Santa Monica, which at the time wasn’t the safest thing to do, despite the lo-fi, retro filter through which we now view the seventies. It might have been the era of free love, but there was plenty of hatred, too—we’d see blood splatters on the bike trail that hugs the beach because some dudes in jean shorts had been fighting drunk again. But I was never afraid—my mom always made me feel safe, that I was okay, that no one would get me. We’d buy a hot dog on a stick, or a corn dog, or even a cheese corn dog if we were feeling fancy, and then on we’d roll until the sun started to set and the L.A. chill descended.
In the end, I became a really good skater, joined a troop, the whole bit. We were even highlighted in the opening shots of an episode ofCHiPs,rolling along the boardwalk in Venice. It’s funny tome how even my hobbies would end up as jobs; we were thankful, as ever, for the work.
Other weekends, when I wasn’t with my dad in Woodland Hills, my mom and I would head south to Laguna Beach, where we’d stay at the Laguna Riviera, a beachfront motel with an indoor pool on the street side. There was no room service, just a Danish and a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup in the lobby. We’d eat at a cool little vegetarian stand around the corner, and that’s how it was: just the two of us.
One such weekend my mom suddenly said, “Let’s go to Tijuana!,” just over the border into Mexico, about a hundred miles south of Laguna. We sang “Cuanto Le Gusta” all the way there, which was funny as we often didn’t have a dime, but we had a happy time, just like the song says.
We’d long since given up the Nova and now my mom drove a sage-green used Cadillac, and I felt like I was in an episode ofLifestyles of the Rich and Famous.Once we’d crossed the border, we bought a pair of sombreros and a little purse for me that had, confusingly enough,ACAPULCOwritten on it.
I put all my money in that purse, but one of my junkie babysitters stole it. I still get mad when I think of it—$300, which was a lot in 1979.
Once my mom was off the heroin, it’s hardly surprising that she turned to Valium to calm her nerves. She was, as they say, “California sober,” meaning she’d quit the really bad stuff. She had bad anxiety and constantly fussed about her weight. Some of those issues surely rubbed off on me. Some years later, when I was probablytwelve or thirteen, my mom sent me to school with a bottle of pills all my own. At first, it was a mixture of diet pills.
My mom always thought I could lose a little weight. She made me go to Weight Watchers, and we always had Weight Watchers food in the house for her. I was in my teens and no longer teeny tiny anymore. I had hips, and a butt, and my mom would often say, “You could stand to lose five pounds.” But we were all a product of the times as much as anything. These were the days informed by ads like the one for the diet cola Tab, in which a honey-voiced male actor croons over a sickly song, “When you can’t be with him, be in his mind. Be a ‘mind sticker,’ with a shape he can’t forget.”
This was standard stuff in the seventies zeitgeist, and my home was no different.
The issues of the time became her issues, and her issues became mine, and soon she started sending me to school with my own stash of Valium. Those she told me to chew so they activated faster. One day I got into a fight with some kid and chewed all the pills. When my mom came to pick me up, I was lying on the cot in the nurse’s office. She was so mad she threw her keys at me.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said.
Drugs were everywhere in the Canyon by that point, and the days of weed had long been supplanted by a darker scene.
One of the renters we took on to fill the garage was a weird guy named Alan Burke. Not only did he provide some much-needed income, but his presence also offered some additional babysitting for me.
My mom sometimes left me with Burke while she went toauditions or to the work that came from auditions, and one night I remember going into the garage to find a huge mirror on his bed and a ton of people around the mirror.
I had no idea what they were doing, but I knew it wasn’t right.Who are all these people? Why is there a mirror on the bed in the (illegal) garage apartment?And why are they so intently focusing on it like it contains the meaning of the universe?
The people around the mirror didn’t notice that there was a little kid—probably no more than five years old—just knocking about, watching them. Actually, they may have noticed and just not cared. They weren’t even friends of Burke; they were there to try out whatever drugs he had that day before buying a baggie of whatever worked best for their fucked-up minds. Burke was like those middle-aged women in supermarkets forcing chips and the latest salsa on shoppers who were trying to just get their shopping done. Only in this case, I realize now that it wasn’t salsa; it was cocaine and heroin and God knows what else.
There are times I’m still pissed about what I was exposed to as a kid. My mom and I have talked about it so many times, and I have to believe her when she says she just simply wasn’t aware. She had so much else going on that it was hard for her to see what was in front of her.
All these years later, I can only assume that she knew Burke was a drug dealer, but I think the South Bend, Indiana, in her didn’t want to believe such things. She’d been through so much that I think for a while it became impossible to fully comprehend where her life had taken her, and what difficult things it asked of her daughter.
My young heart felt the stress of it, the danger, the fact that it was transgressive, and that these people were strangers and were acting oddly, manically, urgently.
I stood there and I watched them. I knew I deserved better.
So much for Burke, my “babysitter.” The best I can say is that a crowd of addicts around a mirror was at least a better situation than the party I was taken to a couple of doors down around that time. It was at some musician’s house. I don’t know why I went or who took me; those were still the days when the Canyon was a small community and everyone was invited to everything, doors were open, people came and went. But at some point during the party, the musician felt it was his right to run his hand up along my leg. I remember crying and him laughing at me. Everything after is black, once again the dark veil pulled hard across my memory, so I don’t really know what happened.
These were the kinds of scary things that the adults were doing to little children in Laurel Canyon.
I think my mom sensed my discomfort, though she didn’t know the full extent of what I’d been going through. She knew enough to start me on what has become a lifelong practice of meditation, weaving spirituality into my childhood. She taught me to think in metaphysical ways from an early age, which helped save my soul from the worst excesses of what was going on, even if my body was constantly put in places of danger and turmoil.
For a while my mother had been trying to find something in her life, something that might hold back the pain into which she had been thrust by Lala. In the late seventies, she’d read a book by Shakti Gawain calledCreative Visualization.In that now-classic book, Gawain argues that we can create a better life for ourselves by changing ourinner visions. My mother was taking what she’d learned and teaching me that I must be careful how I think and talk about myself—as she once said, there’s no one more tortured than a metaphysician who’s not practicing. So I learned to practice creative visualization, which to my mind is really just another form of prayer.
As a young girl I suffered greatly from anxiety and insomnia. I found myself unhinged by all the unanswered questions about the world around me. “If you fell off the face of the earth, you wouldn’t land. But if you did land, then we’re inside of something, which means there’s a bottom to that something, but still, you wouldn’t land.” “This thing has a name, this thing has a reason, this thing has its place. We’re in a car, we’re in a house, we’re in a country, but the universe is infinite?” “We’re taught that everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But there’s no end to grief?? Grief just changes colors.”
All these things and more would keep me up at night. My mom would get into bed with me and try to calm me down with her newfound practices of meditation and visualization. She’d say, “Imagine your forehead is a chalkboard—erase everything and write what you want to see instead.” I know now that visualization is more about thinking our way into happiness and joy and health, giving to the universe so that the universe returns good things to us, et cetera, but as a little girl, rather than inviting karma—a concept altogether too advanced for my young soul—I would visualize walking down a beach while filming a TV show in which I was the star… just me and, oh, all five members of Duran Duran.
John Taylor, especially, was the Man. I was pretty sure I was going to marry him. He may not have known that yet, but that didn’t stop me from imagining it as a real option for my future. To seal the deal,even though I was still a preteen, I would go to Duran Duran concerts and write stuff on T-shirts and put them into the bins they provided for fans to give things to the band. (That’s what we all fervently believed; now, of course, I’m pretty sure the band never saw any of it.)
Because the universe has no timeline, many years later I starred on a sitcom about a woman with retrograde amnesia calledSamantha Who?,and the script called for my character to have a rock star boyfriend. Someone on the show announced that they were friends with John Taylor of Duran Duran… and hey, presto, there I was as an adult person, and the love of my life, at least as a child, was opposite me, playing Tommy Wylder, my boyfriend on my show, a show that I had also visualized as a little girl.
