I needed booze. Or cocaine. Coke would be better. I had some change, so I tried to call Bruce again. I staggered over to the pay phone and dialed the number. I got our answering machine. On the other end of the line, my voice sounded so fucking cheery and happy telling me that Bruce and I weren’t home that it made me want to puke. I slammed the receiver down. I had one quarter left. There was only one phone number that I could still remember. What choice did I have? I dialed it almost on instinct.
Half an hour later I was leaning against the cold car window. Outside, the rain pattered gently against the car. Every fiber of my body felt raw, exposed. I tried to shift position, and felt my bones grinding painfully against one another. Marie was in the driver’s seat, her eight months’ pregnant belly barely fitting behind the steering wheel. She and Steve had been married for a while now. Once Marie was sitting here, the reasons why I’d tried to avoid speaking to her these days were all flooding back to me.
“You smell awful, Cherie,” Marie was telling me, with that nagging anger in her voice again. “You smell like stale cigarettes and booze. Ugh.” When Marie talked to me those days, there was an anger in her voice, an anger even worse than the night she slapped me when I was stoned in Aunt Evie’s house. There was so much that I wanted to say to Marie. There was so much unresolved anger between us regarding the collapse of our album. When Marie walked away from Messin’ with the Boys, she went straight into her comfortable married life with Steve. No problems, no consequences. I was forced into recording that album with her; instead of putting my foot down and fighting for what was right for my career, I put my family first and did something that I felt had a good chance of coming back to haunt me. All of my fears proved correct. The end result was a glorified Toto album, which Capitol basically buried because Marie walked away from it before we could even go on tour. The label knew that without a promotional tour, the album didn’t stand a chance. Marie waited until I had turned down better solo deals, made multiple enemies at Capitol Records, and recorded an album that was a far cry from what I wanted to do before she decided that singing professionally wasn’t something that she wanted to do. I was left to deal with the aftermath. My career was ruined, my name was mud in the industry, and I knew that as a solo artist I was basically finished.
Marie had never apologized to me for that. Even my father, on his deathbed, had apologized for forcing me to cut that album. That was the final step in our making peace before he passed. I’d never had such a resolution with my sister. Marie never considered the fact that this final, terrible spiral into drug abuse had been in part fueled by what had happened during the recording of that album. Instead of being sympathetic, she was now treating me the same way that Daddy’s doctors had treated him. She acted like this was a symptom of my weakness, of my selfishness.
I wanted to say all of this to Marie, but I didn’t. Despite all of the stuff that had gone down between us, I still didn’t want to hurt her like that. And I was too tired. Too defeated. What did it matter? My music career was over; my life was what it was. It was too late to have that conversation. All I wanted from Marie right then was for her to take me back to Bruce. I could barely keep my eyes focused. I had to go home.
“Steve and I are tired of giving you our time and money if you’re not going to change, Cherie.”
God, that self-righteous tone of voice grated on my nerves. I wanted to tell Marie that she was a goddamn hypocrite. That she had done as much cocaine as I had over the years. I wanted to bring up the time that I’d gotten her a job on the Twilight Zone movie and she’d shown up to set ripped on coke on the tail end of a twenty-four-hour partying spree. Just because she’s stopped getting high while she was pregnant, she suddenly thought that gave her the right to act like she was Saint-fucking-Marie. I knew that as soon as the baby was born, my sister would be back to using coke. Instead of saying any of this, I said in a small, defeated voice, “I’m sorry. I’ll change.”
Of course, I had no intention of changing anything. I had no power to change anything. The only thing that it was within my power to change was how I felt, and the only way for that to happen was for Marie to take me home, and once she had scurried off to her suburban existence, I could smoke some more coke. That was the only change on my horizon.
“Will you really change?” Marie asked.
“Sure,” I said with a shrug. Fuck, they were only words, right? How could Marie expect me to think about the future when I could barely see beyond this windshield? My concept of time had become elastic. Time didn’t seem to work anymore. Clocks tried to tell me it was noon, when I knew for a fact that I passed out in pitch blackness only moments before. They told me that only an hour had passed when I’d lived through what felt like several days of horror.
Marie shook her head, not believing me. I felt indignant, even though I was lying through my teeth. She should have believed me! Marie owed that to me at least!
No, there were a lot of unresolved issues that were poisoning my relationship with my sister. She was always telling me how good she had been to me. Reminding me about how she had opened a bank account in my name, and she and Steve had poured money into it for me to use in an emergency, an account I had promptly emptied. What she didn’t understand was that I had used it for emergencies only. When Bruce wasn’t around to provide the coke, it was an emergency. Before I had moved in with Bruce, they had even covered the rent on my apartment in Studio City. What Marie saw as an act of charity for her struggling sister, I saw as rightful restitution for the way that she and Steve abandoned me with a quarter-of-a-million-dollar debt after the Messin’ with the Boys album. Anyway, Steve was loaded. He was in Toto, for God’s sake. It wasn’t as if they were starving.
There was so much to say. But while Marie was driving me home I couldn’t say any of it. I was too miserable, too weak, too preoccupied with my own sickness. Right then, forming a coherent sentence was well beyond me. Without cocaine to make my brain function, I was utterly tongue-tied.
“I want you to know, Cherie, that Steve and I are washing our hands of you. From now on, you’re on your own.”
“I understand.”
We went back to the Hollywood Hills. I could feel the hatred radiating from my sister. That was okay. Hate was something I could deal with. I hated myself. It felt perfectly natural that other people would hate me, too. We sat there in the car, each waiting for the other to speak. The silence was endless, painful. Finally my sister said, “I don’t want you around the baby. Not like this. You shouldn’t be around a baby.”
I nodded, and sat in silence for a while longer. Then I turned to my sister. “Is that it?” was all I could say.
Marie was crying silently. That made me cringe. How pathetic. I hated it when she cried. I looked away again. “When did you give up, Cherie?” she demanded.
Give up? When did I give up? I wanted to tell her that I didn’t give up. It wasn’t like that at all. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t a matter of giving up. It was a matter of losing my footing. My life over the past few years felt like a slow slide down into the pitch darkness. A black, velvet-lined path that seemed comfortable enough until I found myself at the bottom, in a black, velvet-lined tomb. It was a comfortable enough tomb, if dying was all you had in mind.
But I couldn’t tell her any of that. Instead I said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Good-bye, Cherie.”
I opened the door and stumbled out onto the muddy ground. It was raining harder now, and I was instantly drenched. I could hardly stand up. I lost my footing in the mud and staggered around a few times. Finally I slipped, and took a tumble into the ooze. I looked up, feeling bedraggled and pathetic, and I could see Marie crying harder and staring at me.
“I can’t stand this anymore!” she screamed, and then she floored the accelerator.
Mud spattered out from her wheels and the car zoomed off down the mountain with the passenger door still swinging open. I watched it take a right, and the door swin
g shut by itself. The car was gone. Marie was gone. I put a hand to my face. Was I crying, or was it just the rain? I couldn’t tell the difference.
The front door of the house opened behind me. I staggered over to it, and Bruce helped me in. He took me in his strong, dry arms and helped me stand.
“Where were you?” I cried. “I needed you!”
Bruce was what I needed. Not my sister. I had everything I needed right here in Bruce’s house. I wondered if I would ever see my sister again. Right now none of that mattered as much as getting some coke immediately.
Lying in bed, wearing clean clothes after a hot shower, I had Bruce draw the curtains because the sunlight was making me feel ill. Maybe it was still raining, I didn’t know. As I lay there, a terrible, desolate feeling came over me. I felt horrible. Truly, truly horrible.
Bruce came over to the bed and knelt down next to me. “It’s okay,” he said. “Shhhh.” He started rubbing my back. It reminded me of when I was a little girl, and Daddy used to do it to me when I had a fever. “I got something for you. Something to make you feel better . . .”
He opened up the nightstand and pulled out a big glass pipe. Then he produced a rock of coke. Not just a rock—this was a fucking boulder. A monstrous rock, a hundred-dollar rock at least. He loaded the pipe and put it to my lips. He held the flame against the rock as I lay in bed, inhaling the numbing white smoke.
“I love you, Cherie,” he said.
I sucked more and more of the smoke up. My body went numb. The ringing in my ears drowned out Bruce’s voice. That feeling—that indescribable, heart-stopping rush—filled me. It would never feel as good as that first hit had felt, never again. But it did make me feel less bad. And less bad was all I wanted out of life in those days.
Wonderful Bruce, I thought to myself, he’s doing all of this for me. Not like that ungrateful sister of mine! No, Bruce had come through for me yet again. There was no way I could have funded an out-of-control cocaine habit like mine by any pleasant means. No—my wonderful, kind, considerate Bruce was giving it to me for free.
“I love you, Cherie,” Bruce said again, putting the pipe away. He climbed into bed next to me and started kissing my neck. Moments before, this would have repulsed me. There is nothing worse than physical contact when you’re in such a terrible place of drug need. But now all of that was gone. My body felt wonderful again. I wanted the contact. My body didn’t belong to me anymore. It belonged to Bruce. He could do whatever he wanted to me. Anything at all, so long as he kept giving me the coke . . .
Chapter 32
The Twilight Zone
The insistent ringing dragged me out of a dark, dreamless sleep. I blinked awake and looked at the clock next to the bed. I groaned—it was two-thirty. Why on earth was my alarm going off at two-thirty in the morning?
Confused, I looked around the bedroom. Afternoon sunlight was creeping guiltily from behind the heavy curtains. I looked back at the clock. Two-thirty in the afternoon didn’t make any more sense than two-thirty in the morning. Why was the alarm set for such a ridiculous time? I reached out and hit the snooze button, knocking the clock off the nightstand. The ringing continued.
Ring-ring.
Ring-ring.
I had to deal with this noise, this stupid noise that was burrowing into my muddled brain and turning all of my thoughts to mush. I finally figured out that it must have been the telephone. I peered down at the chaos on the bedroom floor. I couldn’t see the rugs anymore. They were buried under a thick layer of debris—abandoned clothes, magazines. There was a time when a scene like this would have filled me with horror, but not anymore. Instead I just shoved my hand into the mess, and struck gold first time around. I pulled the telephone out from under the mess.
“Hello?” I croaked. My voice sounded terrible. Like Elmer Fudd’s. Raspy, weak, comical.
“Yes . . . hello. Is this . . . is this Cherie Currie?” said a voice.
“Yes. Who is this?”
A note of anger had crept into my voice. I had no patience for disembodied voices on the other end of telephone lines. They were interfering with my ability to get high or to sleep. Everything else that went on was a distraction from these two favorite activities.
“This is Michael Finnell. The producer of Explorers.”
There was a long silence. I wasn’t really processing the information. For a moment I zoned out until the voice talked again, sounding a little hesitant. “You do—uh—you do remember me, don’t you?”
The information came at me through the fog. Explorers was a new movie, directed by Joe Dante. Didn’t I have a role in it? I was sure I remembered that much at least.
“Hello, Cherie—are you still there?”
I snapped out of it, and tried to assume a veneer of professionalism. “Oh, yes . . . I’m here. I’m sorry. Are we rehearsing already?”
“Oh no. Not yet. I just wanted to meet with you so we could talk over a few details . . .”
I yawned. I wondered if I could get away with putting Michael on hold for a moment so I could sniff a little coke. It felt like I needed it to continue with this conversation. Either that, or get off the phone as quickly as possible.
“How does today at five sound?” Michael said, after another awkward silence.
“Fine. That sounds . . . great.” I sighed, without much enthusiasm.
“Good. Let me give you the directions . . .”
The voice on the other end of the phone started talking about left turns and right turns, and stop signs and street numbers. I tried to listen, but all of the words started blending together into a senseless babble that was receding farther, farther into darkness. I looked over to my jewelry box with heavy-lidded eyes. It seemed so far away. I would have to sit up so I could reach over to get it. And I was so warm . . . and comfortable . . . and happy in my bed. The voice went on and on. My eyes felt heavy. No . . . it was too far away. I would have to wait until Bruce got home.
From somewhere, far, far away, the voice was saying “Cherie . . . did you get that?” But I was no longer there. I was back in the numb cocoon of a dreamless, deathlike sleep. The phone silently slipped from my hand. These little moments of death were beginning to feel more and more like home.
I was sitting in a chair, in front of the television, when the phone rang again. It was around six in the evening. I wasn’t watching the television; it was on, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. The house was a mess, but I didn’t have the energy to clean it. I’d have eaten, but I didn’t feel hungry. I would have gone back to sleep, if I hadn’t just woken up. If I wasn’t getting high or sleeping, then I was usually sitting around waiting until it was time to start doing one of those two things again.
Ring-ring.
Ring-ring.
I thought that maybe if I ignored the ringing, it would go away. But the answering machine was turned off, and the ringing just went on remorselessly. Eventually I forced myself to walk over to pick up.
“Hello?”
“Cherie—is that you?”
It was Scott, my agent. I was about to say, “Of course it’s me, Scott,” but he beat me to the punch.
“Did you get a call from Michael Finnell this afternoon?” he asked, sounding agitated. “He says he called you!”
I took a deep breath. I did remember something like that. I’d woken up with the telephone off the hook and lying on my chest. As I thought about this, something else came to me. Some vague, half-remembered conversation about a meeting. “I . . . I think so,” I answered.
Sounding more and more pissed off, Scott went on: “He said that you fell asleep while you were on the phone with him. Did that happen?”
“I—I don’t remember.”
I heard him give a long, exasperated sigh. “Cherie—how on earth could you possibly do that? Do you have any idea how hard it was to get you that role?”
I rubbed the sleep away from my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I murmured. “Tell him to call me again. Tell him to make sure it’s
later in the day next time, though.”
Scott laughed, without any humor. “It was two-thirty in the afternoon, Cherie. How much later do you need? Who the hell sleeps to two-thirty in the afternoon, for Chrissakes?”
It was only then that I realized just how mad Scott was. The silence that followed was extremely uncomfortable. This wasn’t the first time that my drug use had impacted my ability to work. I had been guest-starring in an episode of Murder She Wrote not so long ago when I’d decided to go home on my lunch break to smoke a little coke. I lost track of time, and when my sister Sandie knocked on my door, I was half naked, coked out of my mind, and vacuuming the floor. When I didn’t show up after lunch, she’d received a frantic phone call from the set. Apparently Angela Lansbury was throwing a fit because I had held up shooting for the whole day. She was vowing that I would be eighty-sixed from CBS over it, and she stuck to her word. Explorers had been my big chance to prove that I could be reliable. I started to realize just what a big deal that stupid phone call this afternoon had really been.
“I might as well tell you,” Scott said, “that they’re dropping you from the film and they’re giving your part to someone else.”
Scott waited to hear what I had to say. This probably would have been a good time for me to come up with some brilliant excuse, or some eloquent speech about how I was going to snap out of my funk and pull myself up by my bootstraps. Instead, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. My silence sealed my fate.
“I’m pulling out,” Scott said.
“Pulling out?” I parroted. “Pulling out of what?”
“I’m pulling out of this, Cherie. As of now, our contract is terminated. I am no longer your agent. Somebody else can go out there and bust their ass trying to get you a job. Frankly, I feel sorry for them. You don’t deserve any work the way you’ve been conducting yourself.”
I realized then that I suddenly stood to lose everything. An actress without an agent is really not an actress at all. She’s no better than the millions of other people in Los Angeles who call themselves actors, but are really waiters, video-store clerks, or bartenders. I was once a musician, but I no longer had a band or a record contract. If I lost my agent, then really . . . I was nothing at all. Not anymore.