Lips Unsealed (14 page)

This time I wasn’t as secretive. I called Buster from a pay phone in Santa Barbara and broke up with him. Without telling him about Mike, I said, “I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

Buster was totally blindsided. I couldn’t have been colder or more callous. It was one of the shittiest breakups on record. I still hate myself for the way I treated him. Years later, after I got sober, I made amends to him in a letter. But at the time it went down, it was a mess—the kind only a drug addict can make.

I wouldn’t have called myself an addict then.

Now I know better.

Two nights after the breakup, we played the Hollywood Bowl. I stayed
clear of Buster. I couldn’t face him because I was ashamed of the way I had broken up with him. I had even told him to keep my white Cadillac. Everyone in the punk scene seemed to be at the Bowl, and most of them were backstage. They knew what had gone down between Buster and me, and more embarrassingly,
how
it had gone down.

I felt their hatred. No one spoke to me, and I didn’t want to look anyone in the eye. I wanted to get onstage, where I could look at Mike, who was using tickets I had given him. He sat front and center. It was like rubbing salt into a wound. But I didn’t care.

The trouble was, I didn’t care about much of anything.

MIKE AND I went looking for apartments together. He found a place in Marina del Rey. My taste ran more to Hollywood, but then again I still had a lot of tour ahead of me.

It was September 1982, and the Go-Go’s played a show almost every night across the Midwest and South. We had upgraded to a more comfortable tour bus from our cramped white van. If there was still anything glamorous or romantic about traveling to a new city every day, I didn’t see it. The travel and the sameness of each day was a grind that made me feel suspended in a netherworld where many times I found myself saying, “Be careful what you wish for.”

The five of us spent way too much time with one another, waking up and seeing one another through blurry, sleep-crusted eyes, falling into bed as we rolled across dark highways, gossiping, eavesdropping on conversations, compromising on which movies or TV shows we watched, getting wasted, and nitpicking at one another like girlfriends whose inside jokes had gone stale.

Mike came out for some dates and brought along his hard-partying teammate Bob Welch, who was a great guy, though not without his own troubles. He and Charlotte took a liking to each other.

In the middle of the month, somewhere between the Carolinas and Georgia, I suffered my worst panic attack since I had broken down in my apartment after the Go-Go’s first album went number one. I walked into my hotel room after a long trip on the bus and too much coke the night before. I went into the bathroom, turned on the light—a harsh,
unforgiving light—and glanced at myself in the mirror. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

I saw the truth: a twenty-four-year-old girl who was doing too many drugs, who didn’t have any center of gravity, who felt massive regret, sorrow, and pain, and I knew deep down that I wasn’t compatible with Mike.

I had everything I’d ever wanted, and it wasn’t right.

Ugh.

It was too much truth all at once. I started to cry.

“What am I going to do?” I said to myself. “What am I going to do?”

I repeated the question over and over until I felt like I was drowning—and that’s when the anxiety hit, only I had no idea what it was or what was happening to me. I broke out in a chilly sweat and felt like I was hyperventilating. I feared I might be having a heart attack. By showtime, it had passed and I was able to push beyond the panic-stricken hours I had spent in my hotel room, wondering if I was going to overdose.

I think I figured out the catalyst for the attack. A few days earlier, I had received word through our record company’s office that a man claiming to be my father wanted to meet me at our show in Baton Rouge. Apparently he had told local press there that he was my father, explaining he had been shown a photo of me as a little girl in the
Vacation
tour program and it matched a photo he kept in his wallet.

Ginger and the others were aware I hadn’t seen my father since I was five or six years old. I think there was mention of that in the newspaper story, too. Anyway, they looked at me to see whether this man was real or a nutcase. Before I heard if his name was, in fact, Harold Carlisle, I already knew it was my dad. When I was fourteen years old, I had picked up the phone at home in Thousand Oaks and heard a strange man’s voice ask if Joanie was home. No one called my mom Joanie. I instantly knew it was my father. Ten years later, I had the exact same feeling.

Reluctantly, I agreed to meet him after the show. Then I had to work through the anger I began to feel toward him for handling a matter as private as our reunion in such a public forum. I didn’t like the way he had made a big stink out of it in the paper. On the bus, as we arrived in Baton Rouge, I kept saying, “It just isn’t cool.”

I was angry with him for more than talking to the press. I harbored long-standing feelings of resentment and hurt toward him for disappearing without any explanation when I was little, never sending child support to my mom or making contact on birthdays and holidays to see if I was alive. I also chafed at the nerve he had coming back into my life now that I was famous.

How could I trust any of his motives?

I ran through various scenarios of what seeing him would be like. Each one gave me the creeps. I wished I hadn’t said yes.

My stomach was in a knot through the show, especially toward the end when I began to think about confronting my father. He had brought his new family, a wife and two daughters. Afterward, as they were ushered backstage, I locked myself in our dressing room and snorted coke till I rendered myself emotionally numb and stupid enough to face him, not that I was any good at expressing my emotions anyway.

At our reunion, I was friendly to everyone, probably too friendly and trying too hard in order to compensate for being loaded. My father took me aside and tried to deliver what he must have thought was a heartfelt explanation of why he left—basically his side of the story. As soon as he began to blame my mother, I tuned him out. I pled exhaustion and ended the evening.

However, they wanted to see me again before we left and so all of us met the next morning for breakfast and hung out for a spell afterward. This time, I was hungover instead of high, but still pleasant. As we parted, my father’s daughters, the ones with whom he replaced me, said they loved me.

“I love you!” they called.

Waving good-bye as they got in their car and drove away, I thought, How can these people love me? They don’t even know me.

At the end of October, after playing sold-out venues every night from Houston to St. Louis to New York’s Madison Square Garden, we took our brand of new wave merriment to Amsterdam. I couldn’t wait. Even if we were still working, I was ready for an escape that would let me feel far away from home.

I arrived with the intention of having a great time. But I was run-down and needed to rejuvenate. So, soon after checking into our hotel, the Sonesta, I corralled Charlotte into going to the health club with me. I thought a soak in the hot tubs and a massage would do the trick.

At the time, the Sonesta was a luxurious hotel—and very European, especially the spa. At the desk, the attendant informed us of the club’s policy: We had to take off all our clothes. Though this is common in Europe, we were still surprised. Charlotte and I looked at each other and said what the hell. Then we stripped off our clothes and ran out to find a hot tub to ourselves, hoping the other women we saw wouldn’t stare.

We didn’t even consider the spa might be co-ed—that is, until a French man in his fifties sauntered up to our hot tub. He arrived just as we were starting to relax and gazed down discerningly at us. (We also looked up discerningly.) After a moment, he joined us.

“So where are you girls from?” he said in heavily accented English.

“America,” we said.

“I’m going to guess how old you are,” he said. “Twenty-five or twenty-six?”

Charlotte nodded.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“I can tell by your bodies,” he said.

I didn’t know whether he was creepy or not. Either way, I didn’t want to get out of the water. Neither did Charlotte. It was safe to chat while keeping a careful eye on the bubbles to make sure as much as possible stayed covered up. It became an endurance contest: Which of us could tolerate the hot water the longest, the two of us or our new friend, whom we nicknamed Jeff Jetsetter.

As we began to shrivel up like vegetables in a pot of simmering soup, Jeff invited us up to his room that night.

“I have a big penthouse,” he said.

Charlotte and I traded looks that spoke volumes. We were at a loss for how to politely say thanks, but no thanks. Sensing our wariness, he quickly added, “I also have champagne and cocaine.”

“Cocaine?” I said.

He nodded.

“How much do you have?” I asked.

He smiled. “A lot.”

“Okay, we’ll come up,” I said.

With a satisfied nod, he stepped out of the hot tub and said he’d see us later. When the coast was clear, Charlotte said that was weird. I shrugged. Weird was relative. We were in Amsterdam.

Later that night, the five of us went up to Jeff Jetsetter’s penthouse. It was magnificent. As promised, he had a ton of blow. He was extremely generous, too, but before long I saw what Jeff had in mind. He put it right out there. He wanted to have sex with us. I was equally blunt, as were the others. It wasn’t going to happen.

Buoyed by drugs, booze, and his intense desire to get laid, he refused to give up. He tried charm, jokes, gestures, and direct invitations. He brought out a suitcase full of sex toys. He thought he was being romantic. We thought he was bizarre, and we got completely grossed out. We said as much. He didn’t care. I finally said, “We aren’t going to screw you. Just give us the drugs.”

Something clearly got lost in the translation. That or he was just thick. It turned into a pretty comical scene. He kept going into the palatial bathroom, filling up the tub with bubble bath, and lighting candles. He came out each time grinning mischievously, perhaps hopefully, announcing it was almost ready for us. Then one of us went in there, blew out the candles, emptied the tub, and turned on the lights. We were terrible. This went on for two days.

By the second night, the party broke up and I found myself with a couple of the other girls prowling Amsterdam’s seedier clubs. We had descended into the underbelly of the after-hours scene. We were working our way through a pretty hard-core club when I spotted Jeff Jetsetter. He was there with a rich Texas oil guy and a couple of hookers of dubious gender. We traded hellos, and of course he invited us to have a drink and sex with them.

Again, we declined. Never mind the place was an extremely weird scene. The sun had already started to come up and we had a show that night at the Paradiso.

Jeff Jetsetter showed up there, too. Somehow he looked fresh while I was a haggard facsimile of myself from not having slept for three days. Through the first part of the show, I felt like I was standing in a tunnel. I couldn’t make anything out, not the music or the audience. As I began singing “Fading Fast,” I lost my hearing altogether. I sang anyway, but I couldn’t get my key. My voice was all over the place. Jane glared at me, pissed off that I was
that
bad.

We were a worn-out bunch on the flight back to the States. Charlotte filled up seven vomit bags. I felt like we weren’t ending the tour as much as we were escaping with our lives.

At the end of November, the Go-Go’s went on extended hiatus. After nearly seven months on the road, we needed a break. We had worked nonstop for several years.
Vacation
, though certified gold, didn’t live up to the massive expectations our debut album created and left us scarred. Egos, publishing issues, and drug use also took their toll on us. A
New York Sunday News
magazine cover was right on with its headline “For the Go-Go’s, it’s not easy being rock’s sweethearts.”

Many years later I laughed to myself when I saw that the band Metallica had hired a therapist to help them through issues they were having with one another. We should have done the same thing.

The petty jealousies and comments that we once overlooked or laughed off grew more frequent and caustic. More serious, too. Whereas in the early days we might have sniped about boys, it was now apt to be about business. Songwriting royalties enabled some of the girls to make a lot more money than the others. Charlotte, for instance, bought a large house in Los Feliz while others were still trying to scrape together enough money for cars and condos. The arrangements affected the dynamics within the group and tested friendships.

I never approached the issue myself. I felt guilty about being such a mess. I knew I wasn’t entitled to more of a piece of the pie.

Ginger, who had begun managing the band out of her apartment, opened up an office on Hollywood Boulevard, and then, as the business grew even larger and more complex, brought in high-powered manager
Irving Azoff and his company, Front Line Management. It was the beginning of the end for Ginger, who half-jokingly described her departure to me as “being strong-armed by the music industry.” After receiving a Grammy nomination for her work designing our
Vacation
album cover, she moved back to New York, ending our ties to the all-girls, do-it-yourself ethos that had driven us since we were part of the punk scene.

With our new high-powered management behind us, the band got into a pissing match with IRS over royalties we claimed were due us from our first album. They claimed they didn’t have the money to pay us, and we settled for $1 million, which was really settling. Margot also sued the Go-Go’s, claiming she was owed money for her contributions. As I recall, we settled with her for around $30,000.

Who would have thought a curbside conversation at a late-night party in Venice could have led to all of this?