Lips Unsealed (15 page)

I guess I did, in some way.

In February, I joined Mike for spring training at the Dodgers’ complex in Vero Beach, Florida. There was nothing for me to do. While he worked out with the team, I went to Bible study sessions with the other Dodger wives and girlfriends, which I found as torturous as Sunday school when I was a kid. I had no idea what I was doing in those sessions—or in Florida, period.

By the time we returned to L.A., our relationship was fodder for gossip columns and tabloids. Writers dug up old photos of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Hollywood and baseball’s most famous couple. They had wed in January 1954 and nine months later Monroe filed for divorce, citing mental cruelty.

My relationship with Mike followed a similar course, minus the marriage. Once the season began, Mike turned into a different person and living with him was difficult. He blamed me for his strikeouts, groundouts, errors, and anything else that went wrong. I fretted about what kind of mood he would wake up in in the mornings. I was constantly afraid of doing something that would upset him. I walked on eggshells; sometimes it felt like it was a minefield.

One time he lost his temper after smelling cigarette smoke in his car and berated and bullied me all night until I reluctantly admitted I had smoked in it, which he forbade. In many ways, my life with Mike reminded me of growing up with my dad when he drank. Mike wasn’t an alcoholic, but he created a volatility that, although unhealthy, was very familiar ground to me. A few times I reminded myself of my mother as I yelled back at him.

Meanwhile, Mike had no idea I was a druggie, something that obviously contributed to the tension in our relationship. I was hiding a pretty big and serious secret. Shortly after we settled into the Marina del Rey apartment, I was at my lawyer’s office and asked one of his assistants if they knew of a coke dealer in the Marina. I needed a connection closer than Hollywood. My lawyer’s assistant made a call and gave me a slip of paper with a number on it and said it was okay for me to call.

I went home and it turned out that the dealer lived on the floor directly below mine. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

“You’re in the same building as me?” I said.

“Yeah, the same one,” he said. “I’ve seen you here.”

He told me his apartment number.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

Mike never picked up on the frequent visits I made downstairs. He was too into himself to notice I was high out of my mind. As he slept, I sat on the floor of his walk-in closet, snorting lines till the sun came up. On game days, I showed up at Dodger Stadium just before the opening pitch, and I was always loaded. I have no idea how I made those drives back and forth without an accident.

At the stadium, I sat in the section reserved for the players’ wives and girlfriends. These were women with the big hair, jewelry, and designer outfits. They had their own social pecking order. I was not a part of their hierarchy. It was like being a guest at a club where they don’t allow those of your skin type or religion. In my case, I was a nonconformist, drugged-out rock star. I was a celebrity in my own right, not dependent on Mike in any way. They also hated me for all the attention I received from dating Mike. I just clearly didn’t belong—and none of them wanted me around.

Not that I cared. I had nothing in common with them, plus I was coked up to my eyeballs and focused on Mike’s play on the field only so I could gauge how he was going to treat me at home.

I’ve been told our relationship helped inspire playwright Neil Simon to pen the movie
The Slugger’s Wife
. If he had only known the truth!

Miserable, I sought out Jack, my model friend from Japan, who had moved back to L.A and was working at the China Club in Hollywood, and I spent quite a bit of time partying there. I noticed who was with whom and looked for other, more interesting opportunities. One came along in May when I took a small part in the movie
Swing Shift
, director Jonathan Demme’s romantic comedy about Rosie the Riveter–type women who took over factory jobs when the men went to Europe to fight World War II. The film starred Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.

I hit it off with Jonathan, who was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Mike. In his late thirties, Jonathan was brilliant, clever, funny, way hip, knowledgeable about music, and adorable. One day on the set, as I stood amid the clutter of cameras and lights, he came up alongside me and with a playful twinkle in his eye that was pure Jonathan, he said, “So how does somebody get a date with you?”

“Just ask,” I said.

I BEGAN SEEING Jonathan on the sly. I had a great time with him. He was smart, talented, and funny. We shared common interests and knew some of the same people. All these things made me ask myself, Why was I with Mike? Friends of mine, those who hadn’t dropped me because they were put off by Mike, asked the same thing: What do you see in him?

My gay friend and sometime assistant, Jack, had the best line. One day, after Mike made some off-putting comment about him when he’d called (like “it’s your fag friend”), Jack simply said, “Honey, I don’t get it. He’s not even cute.”

But like many women, I was unable to step outside of the hold he had on me. In fact, I got deeper into it. Against my business manager’s advice, I let Mike talk me into buying a condo in the Marina and we moved into it after his lease on the rental was up. At that point, splitting with him would have required too much energy, something I didn’t have to spare.

After
Swing Shift
, I was cast in the Long Beach Civic Light Opera’s production of
Grease
. I thought it would be fun and different to act in a play, and would broaden me as a performer. I don’t know what was wrong with me. Even though I was secretly insecure, I tested myself, maybe even tortured myself a little, by putting myself in this situation.

But it was okay. I starred opposite Barry Williams, who was best known from his years on
The Brady Bunch
. Working with him was surreal. I had grown up wishing I could be Marcia Brady, and now I got to
kiss Greg Brady every night. He was a really upbeat, hardworking guy, and loved musical theater.

Jonathan saw the play numerous times. For some reason, he always cracked up during the same scene at the beginning of the play when, after the T-Birds and Pink Ladies complained that the new school year meant the return of bad food, I said, “You want my coleslaw?” Maybe I pronounced it in a funny way.

Sadly, Jonathan eventually gave up on me. Though we had a great time together, he saw that I wasn’t going to leave Mike, not for him, not for something that was healthy and made sense. I have a hunch that Jonathan also realized he was competing not only against a Dodger but also against another equally fucked-up relationship of mine—with cocaine.

As much as I didn’t want to acknowledge it, I was now an addict. Early in the production, I asked a young woman on the crew who was helping me get situated in my dressing room if she knew anyone who had coke (I could always sniff out who knew where the drugs were). She said, “Well, I happen to be a coke dealer.” From that day on, I never gave another performance of the play sober.

Since the reviews were all positive, I thought I was getting away with it. After each show, I went to the drug dealer’s house in Long Beach and stayed until the sun began to come up the next morning. If Mike was in town, I made sure to get home before he woke up. By the time the play ended, I weighed about five pounds. I thought I looked phenomenal, like I had finally lost the baby fat that made me Belimpa. I lived in a pair of size 2 hot-pink leather pants that I wore with a black top. I remember catching sight of myself in a window, seeing the way my clothes hung on my stick-thin frame, and thinking I was the picture of elegance.

For fun, Jack and I dressed up in crazy outfits and paraded up and down Sunset Boulevard, like two peacocks on display. We were completely tweaked. That’s when people began whispering about me doing too much coke. My sister was the only one honest enough to say something to my face. I had taken her to a Dodgers game, and as we entered the VIP section, she turned to me and said, “Belinda, I hate to say this, but you look really old.”

I was just shy of turning twenty-five.

* * *

That summer, Charlotte, Jane, Kathy, and Gina all began writing songs for our third album,
Talk Show
. Jane lectured me on the importance of my writing and getting songwriter credits on the album so I would make money, and Charlotte came over to my house numerous times to write with me, but I was too scattered to be creative. I couldn’t focus enough to find the words and melodies that I knew were somewhere inside me.

It was no secret why. On some tapes we made of us trying to work, I could hear myself in the background snorting coke. On other tapes, I was on the phone arguing with Mike.

Mike was a problem. I had promised myself that I was going to break up with him. I knew there was nothing there but negative energy. The issue was that I couldn’t pull the trigger, I couldn’t find the wherewithal to escape. It was like a trap. As I made a salad one night, he yelled at me for cutting the lettuce instead of tearing it. I stood there with lettuce leaves in each hand and thought, What’s wrong with me that I can’t leave this guy?

As usually happens in such situations, I started a friendship with someone else, in this case Jimmie Vaughan of the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Now I kept two secrets from Mike, a dealer downstairs and a guy across town. Instead of doing the right thing, I kept complicating the situation.

I knew I was in a bad place. I was aware that I wrote a lot of checks that year that said “Pay to the order of cash.” I finally reached out to Michael Des Barres, the British rocker-turned-actor who had helped a few wayward Hollywood souls like myself get sober. He’d been through it himself. We met at the Border Grill restaurant on Melrose and he talked to me about addiction and sobriety in an understanding and gentle manner.

I realized from the stories he told about his own life and how he related to me that he knew me better than I knew myself—or at least what I was willing to admit to myself. He brought out a book of daily reflections, which he signed and gave to me. I still keep it on my bedside table.

Michael urged me to start attending AA meetings, and though I
promised I would, I never went to any meetings. I’m sure I had a million excuses. I just wasn’t ready for abstinence. I wasn’t ready to face any of my issues. I came up with my own solution. I thought I could learn how to use in moderation, rather than give it up completely.

Of course, it didn’t work, and I was still using heavily in early September when the Go-Go’s played a handful of dates in the Southwest. We brought in ex-Rockat Tim Scott to play guitar for Charlotte, who was struggling with carpal tunnel syndrome. We performed one of our biggest gigs ever at Anaheim Stadium when we opened for David Bowie. I was a massive Bowie fan, and I could have used the opportunity to seek him out and watch from the side of the stage. But I was too insecure and really more interested in partying in my dressing room. I didn’t even want to mix with our old pals from Madness, who were the first act on the bill.

I went straight home after the show, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why I was going there. The place was empty. Mike and I had broken up. He had finished the baseball season and moved to the Valley. When the girls and some of my other friends like Jack heard about the breakup, they called—not to console me with soothing advice but to offer their congratulations for getting out of a toxic relationship. All of them wanted to celebrate.

I rewarded myself with a trip to Rome. I thought it was a perfect time to indulge the
La Dolce Vita
fantasy I had harbored since my senior year of high school. I wanted to ride through the city on scooters, smoke cigarettes at cafés, and pretend I was Anita Ekberg. I flew there and lasted exactly twenty-four hours.

As a young, blond American girl on her own, I was pestered nonstop. I wouldn’t have minded getting complimented, hit on, or even pinched one or two times. But twenty-five times before lunch was too much. I realized this plan of mine was a disaster and flew to London, where I was scheduled to meet up with the girls anyway and start recording the next Go-Go’s album,
Talk Show
.

Earlier, we had decided to make the record in London. It was an opportunity for all of us to leave our demons at home and work as a band. On the previous album, we had seen that working in even the
most remote and inconvenient outpost in Malibu wasn’t far enough away to remove us from trouble. Miles and the record company knew the band was struggling under the weight of our individual issues, a nice way of saying we were barely holding it together. On paper, London was a good plan.

In reality, it was a nightmare.

Martin Rushent, who had worked with Spandau Ballet, the Human League, and ex-Buzzcock Pete Shelley, was hired to produce and bring in fresh, new influences. He was a lovely, low-key Englishman whose success had brought him a measure of wealth, stature, and a particular way of working. Then he ran into the Go-Go’s; we were like a storm hitting his verdant Tudor studio in Berkshire. We recorded from November through January 1984. But Martin preferred to work on tracks methodically with each girl individually, which allowed those of us not involved to take off for London or Los Angeles, or just to take off.

I made what was supposed to be a quick trip back to L.A. to deal with the last details of my breakup with Mike and see friends. I wasn’t in good shape upon arrival and it only got worse when I found Mike had taken the washer and dryer when he moved out of my condo. I argued with him until he agreed to return my appliances and then I spent several days getting high by myself in the dark in my bleak, sparsely furnished apartment.

When it was time for me to return to London, I had the kind of trouble you’d expect from someone in my state. I missed two flights in a row. I got to the airport okay, but I was too high to navigate the terminal and get on the plane. I caught a cab home after both false starts. On the third try, I had a big wad of coke with me and I went into the bathroom to do a line and figure out how to deal with everything. Realizing I couldn’t deal, I decided to go home.