Neon Angel

  I put a hand over my mouth, and tried to stifle my laughter. Marie looked so funny standing there in her stupid, plain nightgown. The whole scene was so stupid, so suburban, so dull! This isn’t what the Cherry Bomb should be doing! Standing around in a kitchen getting a lecture from her sister! Marie shook her head. “You’re going to kill yourself, Cherie. You drove home like this? You’re gonna kill someone else while you’re at it!”

  “Oh, stop it.” I laughed. “You’re so fucking square sometimes. You sound like Grandma!”

  “Daddy knows about the checks, you know,” Marie said, folding her arms. “You were using Daddy’s money to buy your cocaine!”

  I shook my head. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that if I’d been sober, this revelation would have really upset me. I should have felt awful, like I was the lowest of the low, but all I could think about was how absurd it all seemed. Thank God for drugs, that’s all I can say. I dismissed Marie’s concerns with a wave of my unsteady hand.

  “How could you not expect him to find out!” she demanded. “You spent almost a thousand dollars on coke! You cleaned him out! All of his money!”

  “Oh, phooey,” I slurred. “You do coke, too, Marie. So don’t gimme the Mother fuckin’ Teresa routine.”

  “I pay for my own drugs, Cherie. I’m not a thief!”

  “Oh, blah, blah, blah!” I screamed. As I did this, I gave a drunken wave of my arm, and my purse slipped out of my hand and hit the floor. It yawned open, and my little blue-and-red Tuinal capsules spilled out all over the floor. This started me laughing again, especially when I saw the look on Marie’s face. Oh God, my sister had become such a huge downer these days!

  Marie’s face darkened further. “Did you hear me?” she growled. “Daddy’s broke! Because of YOU! Stop laughing!”

  But I couldn’t stop. I was about to get down on my knees to start retrieving my pills when suddenly I heard a loud crack. It came from nowhere and I suddenly found myself flying through the air, my face slamming into the refrigerator. I didn’t feel any pain. I was on too many pills for that. Instead it was a purely disoriented sensation: the world had suddenly shifted around me without warning. It was only after I sank to the floor that I realized what had happened. Marie had slapped me! My face started feeling numb and puffy where it had collided with the refrigerator.

  Suddenly, out of the fog of booze and Tuinals, I felt the anger rise in me. I leaped to my feet, ready to kill. Terrified, Marie grabbed a chair and actually held it up to fend me off like a fucking lion tamer. I wasn’t laughing anymore. My face was contorted in rage, and suddenly I had a diamond-sharp clarity.

  “YOU FUCKING BITCH!” I screamed. “HOW DARE YOU!” I lunged at her clumsily, and hit my face on the leg of the chair. I tasted copper, but tried to lunge again anyway. Marie’s face had a look of total and utter horror on it.

  “You’re bleeding!” she screamed. “You’re BLEEDING!”

  Marie had never hit me before. When she saw the blood, she dropped the chair and burst into tears. Suddenly the tension was defused, and I staggered back holding on to the sink for dear life, trying to avoid falling flat on my face. The world was spinning faster, faster. I looked up, feeling the hot blood dripping down my chin. I saw my sister sobbing hysterically. I saw the lights on behind her. In the doorway was my father, Grandma, and Aunt Evie. They were standing there, watching this ugly scene play out with looks of disbelief on their faces.

  “Aw, Cherie . . .” my dad muttered. Grandma looked like she was about to faint. I saw my aunt Evie turn her back, unable to even watch anymore.

  Just looking at my father, I could see that he’d been drinking. It was in the way that he stood, in the way that he held himself. Hell, I couldn’t remember the last time he didn’t look like this. My father wasn’t so good at holding his booze these days. Once upon a time he could hide it so well . . . nowadays he was beginning to look like an old man to me, shaky and unsteady. I closed my eyes, and felt the unsteady ground lurch underneath my feet. From somewhere I could hear Marie sobbing, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Nobody else said a word. They just stood there, mortified, too ashamed of me, to say anything.

  The next morning, nobody said a word about what had happened. They were too embarrassed. I started to avoid my family as much as I could, spending more and more time with my new boyfriend, Tommy.

  I’d met Tommy at the Sugar Shack, where he worked as a bouncer. I thought he was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. As well as possessing chiseled good looks, Tommy had a temper and could be as jealous as hell. I liked that about him. It showed he cared. Another thing I liked about Tommy was that he didn’t judge me when I got high. In fact, Tommy took almost as many drugs as I did. But he could hold his drugs well, and that was good, because most of the time I needed someone to look after me.

  I swung by his apartment in Daddy’s scraped-up car to pick him up a few nights later. I remember Tommy warning me not to get too wasted before we’d even left his place. “I’m serious, Cherie,” he’d insisted. “I don’t want you making a fool of yourself like last time.”

  I kissed him and said, “Cross my heart.” I had no intention of making a fool of myself. But then, I never did.

  The Runaways’ booking agent, David Lebert, was throwing the party over at his place in Sherman Oaks. The house was big, beautiful, and packed with people. There were drugs everywhere. Not out in the open, of course, in front of people. But there was a definite undercurrent, and if you had the nose for it, you could sniff it out with ease. In darkened corners, hidden rooms, bathrooms, and patios, people were getting high. If you were straight, you could have shown up at that party and never known for a second that people were snorting coke and popping pills. You might have thought the people seemed extraordinarily talkative, or that they seemed to be extremely drunk, but as for drugs . . . never! But, if you were looking for them, you would find them in all of the expected places. On the drive over I opened my purse and popped a Tuinal. Tommy gave me a concerned look and I said, “What? I’ll be okay! I’m just not going to drink when I get there.”

  Tommy nodded, and then put his hand out. I dropped one of the capsules into his palm and he swallowed it dry while doing sixty on the freeway. I kissed his neck, and made him shiver.

  Ever since getting back from the Japanese tour, I had started developing a taste for booze. Once upon a time I hated it, I hated the way it tasted, I hated the way it made me feel. But in Japan, the drug laws were insanely strict, and nobody wanted to risk bringing anything into the country. Once in a while the road crew handed us strange-looking pills that they claimed were downers, and we would say a silent prayer and swallow them down without question. But they were never as good as the stuff we could get at home. To combat this situation I became something of a borderline alcoholic overnight. Once I got back, I started to crave the stuff.

  Tommy always warned me that downers and booze didn’t mix. The more you drank, the harder it was to remember how many pills you’d taken, so you’d end up taking more and more. It could be a lethal combination, and you’d hear of people all the time who ended their evening by choking to death on their own vomit. Even though I was only seventeen, I’d already known a few people who’d checked out in this sad, undignified manner. But it didn’t worry me. After all, I was immortal. Nothing could happen to Cherie Currie.

  Once we arrived at the party and I had downed a few cocktails, time started to speed up. The evening started to break down into a haze of booze, pills, and cocaine. I would be introduced to people, and then immediately forget their names. Faces passed by in a hallucinatory blur, and people’s voices blended together into a woozy, senseless chatter. Once in a while, Tommy would pull me aside and get mad at me, screaming that I was getting too fucked up and to knock it off. “You’re acting crazy!” he told me at one point. “You’re slurring! You nearly knocked that girl over!” He pointed at some girl who I didn’t even remember seeing before. I didn’t remember much of anything. Hazy mem
ories of someone handing me a strange pill, and my swallowing it without even knowing what it was.

  “God, you’re a fucking mess, Cherie!” he said to me later in the night, after pulling me into the bathroom. “Do you have any more Tuinals?”

  I handed some over, and he swallowed them angrily, staggering out into the party again . . .

  The party swirled on. The music rising and falling, the dim lights twinkling like winter frost. Suddenly, all at once, I found myself on the floor. Thud! I just lay there with my cheek against the hardwood floor, laughing to myself. I tried to move, but my limbs would not work.

  “Goddamn it, Cherie!” I heard Tommy yell from somewhere above me. Then strong arms grabbed me, picked me up. He carried me away, and I felt the cool air hit me in the face, bringing me around a little. I became aware that we were outside, at least. I felt him bundle me into the passenger seat of my father’s car. I tried to say, “Where are we going? I want another drink!” but my words came out in a senseless jumble. I couldn’t sit up straight, and my eyelids felt like they were made of lead. I heard the engine start as the vehicle lurched into life. Tommy was muttering to himself angrily.

  As we sailed through the night, I found myself drifting in and out of consciousness. I felt like I was floating in some vast black pool. Every so often I would break to the surface, and I could see the twinkling streetlights sailing past me before I’d sink into numb blackness once more.

  Suddenly a loud clank brought me around with a jerk. My body jerked forward, and my eyes fluttered open. What I saw didn’t make any sense, at first. There was no road anymore. I was looking at a light pole, and the front of Daddy’s car was up on the sidewalk, the hood bent out of shape. I could hear Tommy cursing. I looked around me. We were in front of a Denny’s, on the corner of Coldwater Canyon and Ventura Boulevard. We’d jumped the sidewalk and hit the light pole. People were rushing out of the restaurant to see what happened.

  Someone was knocking on the window. I looked over and rolled the window down a little, still in a daze. In my haze, I thought that I recognized the guy. He was a guitar player I knew, Joey Brasler. A guy I had once worked with in the studio. He looked concerned. Tommy was desperately trying to get the engine started again.

  “Dude!” Joey yelled. “Are you okay?”

  I started nodding in slow motion as Tommy got the car started and the engine roared into life once more.

  “You’re wasted, man,” Joey yelled. “You shouldn’t be driving!”

  Tommy turned and snarled, “Fuck you, asshole!” before he threw the car into reverse and took off again down Coldwater Canyon Boulevard, with a squeal of rubber on asphalt.

  As we flew into the night again, my head felt like it weighed fifty pounds. I nodded rhythmically, fading in and out. It felt like a preview of death. Little moments of perfect oblivion. I wanted to curl up in this blackness, this dreamless, silent place, and never return. It was so comforting. So still.

  Suddenly my whole world erupted.

  Glass was exploding all around me.

  The whole car was ripping apart.

  Tommy went flying forward, his head going straight into the windshield. Then he bounced back in again, spraying the interior of the car in blood. I felt the engine slamming into my back as I was twisted around 180 degrees by the sudden, violent impact.

  And then nothing.

  That silent, peaceful darkness once more.

  It wasn’t until I woke up to the beam of flashlights, the rhythm of police lights flashing in the night sky, and the chattering of walkie-talkies that I started to become aware of what had happened. There was a tree, and the car was wrapped around it. Daddy’s car was destroyed, crushed like a child’s toy. I knew that Tommy was alive because I could hear him screaming and cursing. Then a cop shined a light in my face. It was very bright. I scrunched my eyes up.

  “She’s alive!” I heard the cop yell.

  “Wasshappening . . . wasshappening . . .” I slurred.

  “They’re wasted!” the cop yelled to the others. “I can smell it from here!”

  Suddenly I became aware of the pain. Not even the booze and the pills could mask it. My leg felt like it was on fire. I glanced down, and could see it was bloody and ripped open. The cops were lifting me out of the wreckage. All I remember is repeating “Take me to the hospital” over and over.

  Amazingly, apart from a badly cut knee on my part, and some lacerations to the head on Tommy’s, we somehow survived the impact intact. Everything was hazy. As the cops checked our injuries, I asked again to go to the hospital. They were about to agree when Tommy started ranting and raving that he wouldn’t go to any motherfucking hospital. Faced with a drunk, stoned, and belligerent driver, the cops decided that instead of bringing us to the ER, they would book him and take us to the station.

  We were left to sober up in the Van Nuys police station. The more sober I got, the more my knee hurt. The pain was unbearable. Some fat, stupid cop said to me, “You’re lucky to be alive, little girl . . .” and I wanted to spit on him, I wanted to claw his face for calling me that.

  It was all Tommy’s fault, I decided.

  It’s my agent’s fault for having a dumb party.

  It was the city’s fault for not lighting the street well enough.

  It was God’s fault for making a fucking tree grow in such a stupid place.

  The cops seemed to think that it was our fault because we were driving while “doped up,” as one of them put it. But what did they know? They were just stupid fucking cops.

  When Daddy and Marie arrived to pick me up, they were both in tears. I guess they were just glad that I was alive. My knee had me in such agony that I cried aloud as I tried to walk. I don’t remember much more about that night, except for the pain and my father saying something on the way home that hit me very hard.

  “Kitten,” he said, “I don’t know what to do with you. I can’t deal with this anymore. You’re going to have to make a decision. It’s the drugs . . . or it’s us.”

  The disappointment in his voice cut me like a knife. I never meant to hurt my father, or anyone in my family. I never thought that I would make my own father cry, but tonight I did just that. I’d stolen from him. Tonight I could have died, just like that. The idea of dying terrified me.

  I started crying, and begging my father for his forgiveness. Through my tears, I promised him that I would stop using drugs. I told him that I would change my ways. I told him whatever he wanted to hear, because the simple truth was that I just didn’t want to hear him talk about it anymore.

  And maybe, some naive part of me, deep down inside, actually believed that I would stop. Maybe.

  Chapter 25

  The Terrible Green Limousine

  Because of the accident, my knee was in pretty bad shape. It had swelled up like a balloon and I could barely move it without severe pain. I left the hospital wearing a leg brace and on crutches. I didn’t see so much of Tommy following the accident. His jealousy—which had flattered me in the beginning—became worse and worse, until it actually frightened me. The last time I called his house, his mother begged me not to call him anymore. In the background I could hear him screaming bloody murder and smashing up the house in some kind of jealous rage.

  While I was recuperating at home Marie helped me with the physical therapy. The worst part of it all was going back to the hospital to get the fluid drained: I was never a big fan of needles, and I had enough stuck in me during that whole period to last me a lifetime. As I continued with the physical therapy, the knee started to improve and the pain gradually lessened. Immediately after the accident, a doctor informed me that I would never dance again, but I had my own ideas about that.

  It was during the physical therapy sessions that I started talking to Marie about doing the next album together. She was really happy about the whole idea. I could see in her eyes that more than anything in the world she wanted a career in music, and she felt that the best way to achieve this was to cut a
record with me. I never told her that our father had basically forced me into this decision. I knew that this had the power to hurt her terribly. As much as my sister could drive me crazy at times, I would have never wanted to hurt her like that. No, I decided that this part of the story would have to remain my secret. I prayed that I was making the right decision, and hated the feeling that yet again, outside forces were pulling me in directions that I was not comfortable with.

  The accident also made me reevaluate where my life was heading. I decided that I would take this opportunity to sober up. I wasn’t planning on quitting booze and drugs for good, but I figured that it was at least time to slow down. I read a bunch of self-help books while I was lying around recovering, and felt determined that I could learn to control my drug use.

  Giving up partying was easy at first, but as the weeks dragged on, a terrible realization came to me. It suddenly struck me that I didn’t enjoy being sober. I thought at first it was just the side effects of the accident; maybe I was depressed because of the pain, or maybe even in shock. But weeks after the accident, life still felt gray and miserable without the occasional “toot” or pill. Before I’d joined the Runaways, I could be happy just being me, just being alive. But now, without pills or cocaine, I felt ill and tired all of the time, and couldn’t find the joy in anything. I found myself having vivid dreams about popping pills or snorting lines of blow. I would jerk awake, bathed in sweat and gasping for breath. I’d look around my room and realize that it was just a dream. The yearning to get high would be unbearable. Throughout each long, pointless day I would find my thoughts returning time and time again to drugs. I longed for that detached, numb feeling that the blow and the pills gave me. I wanted to feel blank again: I wanted to feel nothing at all.

  The biggest test was going back to the Sugar Shack. In the days since I had been a regular at the club, the scene had changed. A lot of the innocence had gone. It had gotten much darker. Once upon a time the drug of choice at the Sugar Shack was pot, maybe quaaludes. Now it was cocaine. Coke was everywhere, and there was a new decadence in the air fueled by the regulars’ rampant coke use: in the darkened corners there was stuff going on that shocked even me. Drug use and sex were going on everywhere you looked.