Chapter 3 The Bathroom Floor #2
My mom sometimes left me with Burke while she went to auditions 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 called Creative Visualization.
In that now-classic book, Gawain argues that we can create a better life for ourselves by changing our inner 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 called Samantha 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.
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.