Lips Unsealed (23 page)

They were shocked when we informed them that he wasn’t a friend. All of us had a good laugh. We had an even bigger laugh a few weeks later when another ultrasound showed that the baby was actually a boy, not the girl for whom I now had a stockpile of pink baby clothes.

But my smile was short-lived. Soon after the shower, my mom expressed concern at the way I looked. I was about six and a half months along, and she had come to visit. I’ll never forget the expression on her face as she stared at me. It was as if she was looking at something no one else could see.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t think you have a good doctor,” she said.

“What?”

It was such an odd thing to say out of the blue. I didn’t understand. She stepped closer and put the back of her hand against my skin.

“Something about you doesn’t look right,” she said. “Have you been to see your doctor?”

“Yes,” I said. “I go regularly.”

“Then I think you need a new doctor,” she said. “You look like you’re sick.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She took hold of my hands and looked at them as if she was a palm reader. Like the rest of me, my fingers were fat. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual up to that point. But now that I looked along with her, they did have an abnormal, sausage-like tumescence. My face was the same way: large, but without definition. As she said, I didn’t look right.

I saw my OB, who confirmed my mom’s intuition. I was diagnosed with severe toxemia, a serious disorder that my doctor referred to as preeclampsia, a condition defined by high blood pressure and elevated levels of protein in the urine. I also suffered from other symptoms, including headaches, abdominal pains, and nausea. He sent me to bed with strict orders to stay there.

I stayed in bed, ordered in Italian food, and watched
The People’s Court
and
Sally Jessy Raphael
. I never had a day when I felt pretty or like I glowed, as some women do when they’re pregnant. I had a big pumpkin face and looked distorted and grotesque.

After slightly more than three weeks in bed I came down with what I thought was the flu, except it felt stranger than the flu. It was a Sunday and I had a doctor’s appointment the next day, but I told Morgan that I was going to cancel until the bug passed and then go in. He advised against it, and thankfully I listened to him. My doctor discovered that I didn’t have any more amniotic fluid and sent me directly to Cedars Sinai Medical Center for an emergency C-section.

I was hungry, and on the way to the hospital I stopped for a burrito, figuring it would be my last fattening meal. The nurse checking me in saw me holding the half-eaten burrito and, with a look of disbelief, asked, “What are you doing?”

“Eating,” I said.

“Don’t you know you aren’t supposed to be eating before surgery?”

“No,” I said.

By the time I was ushered into a private room, Morgan arrived from his William Morris office. I was given an epidural and taken to surgery.
A short time later, my son, James Duke Mason, announced his arrival in this world with a slight cry. Little Dukey, as we called him, was immediately whisked off into the arms of specialists while I was taken into the recovery room. Doped up on morphine from the surgery, I sailed off into la-la land. As I came out of it, I sat in bed and read the
National Enquirer
, the
Star
, and the
Globe
as if everything was fine.

But it was definitely not fine. Unlike the other babies delivered at Cedars on April 27, 1992, Duke was three weeks early and weighed a mere three pounds, thirteen ounces. He was jaundiced and suffering from a virus, probably the same one that I’d had a few days earlier. Morgan had the unpleasant job of calling all the relatives with the good news but tempering it with an asterisk. It was a scary time.

Late that day, a doctor appeared at my bedside and confronted me about my drug use. Cold, unsympathetic, and aggressive, he ran through a list of drugs from coke and pot to pills and heroin, asking me if I took them during my pregnancy. Each time I answered no, he looked at me and asked, “Are you sure?”

I insisted I was sure, absolutely sure, until it was painful. I felt like I was getting beaten up even though I knew I didn’t have anything more than a daily glass of wine throughout my pregnancy. I didn’t know if I was going to get arrested, have my baby taken away, or what. I answered his questions; he didn’t respond to mine. Once he left, though, I never saw him again.

But I couldn’t relax. I had the TV on as I recovered in bed, and it was full of nonstop news reports about the four police officers on trial in Simi Valley for the beating of Rodney King a year earlier. It wasn’t like I wanted to hear the same story over and over, but I was hooked by reports that made it seem like the city was a powder keg ready to explode if the verdict came back in favor of the police. It was like a weather report predicting sunny today, Armageddon tomorrow.

Sure enough, the next day, April 29, I was watching TV when the local news broke in with a special live report that the four LAPD officers had been acquitted. Within minutes, or so it seemed, riots erupted
across the city. Like millions of people across L.A., I watched coverage of four black men pull white truck driver Reginald Denny out of his cab and beat him senseless. I was glued to the set as stores were looted, cars were overturned, and fires broke out.

I told Morgan to look out my hospital room window. From our perch, we could see black smoke less than a mile away from the hospital. As time went on, we were able to smell the smoke. It went on for days. The National Guard was finally called in to stop the violence and restore order. Seeing tanks and armed soldiers patrolling in front of hamburger stands and shopping malls I’d been to was surreal—and terrifying.

On May 1, Rodney King went in front of the media and made his now famous request, “Can we all get along?” By then there had been 53 deaths, more than 2,500 injuries, and more than 7,000 fires. People were aghast, outraged, and frightened by what they saw happening to the city.

Morgan and I were profoundly affected. We had the same reaction: we had to get out of L.A.

In the meantime, I was out of la-la land and worried about my baby. No one gave me a straight story, at least not one that I could understand. I didn’t like the look on Morgan’s mother’s face when she came into my room after seeing Duke. I saw the fright in her eyes. I saw the same thing in his sister’s, too. It was only after three or four days that my doctor finally met my repeated questions with more optimistic responses. Even then, I felt he was being vague.

When I got clearance to go back home, I didn’t want to leave unless I could take Duke. But he wasn’t ready. The doctor wanted to keep him until he had gained another two pounds—which ended up taking three weeks. I went back and forth between home and Cedars numerous times a day, taking him freshly pumped breast milk and holding him in my arms so he could feel the warmth of his mother.

I was diligent until I was able to bring him home, and then I relied on a trained baby nurse. Soon I began to have trouble pumping my milk and eventually I gave it up in favor of formula and a wonderful nanny.

Was it a coincidence? No. Just as I never felt pretty while pregnant, I didn’t have the bonding experience that most mothers have with their
newborns. It wasn’t postpartum depression; no, at the very beginning, his fragile state frightened me. I wasn’t as confident in myself as I needed to be in that situation. Beyond that, I was, I think, in a prolonged state of shock and denial about being a mother as well as an addict and had a host of other issues that kept me on the run from myself.

So while I was loving and nurturing when I was around Duke, I wasn’t as available as I should have been—or as I wish I had been. In other words, I could have done better.

On the other hand, Duke thrived. With the help of our nanny, he gained weight and progressed quickly. Morgan was also a sensational dad. Despite my shortcomings and fears, things worked out. I got tips from other mothers and read the basic new-mom books to fill in the gaps. I was a vegetarian then, so when it came time to add solid foods to Duke’s diet, I asked my more experienced friends for advice and found out it was okay to raise him as a vegetarian, too.

My pediatrician disagreed. But then he generally didn’t offer the support I needed. Neither did his staff. In fact, they were all so horrible that I hated going there. When I told him that I wanted to raise Duke as a vegetarian, he took a step back as if I had absolutely no sense and in a scolding tone of voice said, “No, Belinda, you can’t do that. Did you see how small he was? He’s playing catch-up. If you raise him as a vegetarian, he’ll never be a football player.”

I immediately thought of my experience with Mike Marshall and said to myself, “Good. I don’t want to raise a jock.” Truth be told, I didn’t want my pediatrician any longer either. After double-checking with my friends who were raising healthy children on a vegetarian diet, I took Duke to a new doctor. At the beginning of that first appointment, he asked why I was in his office when I already had a highly regarded doctor. I explained the situation. By the end, I was in tears.

He then took me into his confidence and said, “I could get in a lot of trouble for telling you this, but your pediatrician called when I requested your file, and warned me that you had been doing cocaine throughout your pregnancy.”

I turned white as a sheet with both outrage and humiliation. I looked down at Duke, who was cradled in my arms. Yes, he had been born
early, sick, and small. But you wouldn’t have known that from looking at him then. The doctor let Duke squeeze his finger and looked at me.

“I can see he’s not a cocaine baby,” he said.

I wanted to explain.

“I haven’t done—” I stopped, unsure what to say. I decided on the truth. “I had a cocaine problem,” I said. “But I didn’t—”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he interrupted.

“Ask me,” I said. “I may not have always told the truth in the past, but I will tell you anything where my son is concerned.”

I switched doctors, and a short time later a story appeared in one of the English tabloids that I had done cocaine throughout my pregnancy. The newspaper cited unnamed sources at the hospital. I suspected my old pediatrician as the source. Who else could it have been? Almost four months had passed since I had given birth. I was livid. I wanted to sue. Morgan urged me to ignore it and calm down.

“Let it go,” he said. “We know the truth. We have to move on.”

WHEN MORGAN’S MOTHER, Pamela, threw Duke his first birthday party, I was already in the process of trying to go back to work. It was a juggling act familiar to other mothers. My days were full. I played with Duke, helped organize his day with the nanny, planned most meals, and made sure our six dogs felt like they received attention, too. We may have lived in a multimillion-dollar home, but inside it was filled with toys and the chaos of busy lives. Outside, there was dog poop that needed to be cleaned.

“Where’s the glamorous life?” I laughed one day when I was talking on the phone to Charlotte, who was a few months away from her marriage to Redd Kross guitarist Steven McDonald and mulling whether her future would include children. “I have to watch where I step or I’ll ruin another pair of shoes.”

I could have said the same about my career. It was in an even more perilous state than a walk through my backyard at night. After
Live Your Life Be Free
flopped, my label dropped me. Most people thought I was cut after I had a run-in with MCA president Al Teller. Not true. I had already been tossed in the trash before I spotted him one night before an Arc Angels show at the Roxy, holding court at a table of executives.

He had no idea a storm was about to blow in. But I knew. Emboldened by a couple of margaritas, I strutted across the club until I was looking down at the thinning hair atop his round pate.

“If it isn’t Al Teller,” I said. “Well, fuck you.”

Then I unloaded all my frustrations at the duplicitous way I thought
the label had treated me on my previous effort, assuring me that they were behind my record in the U.S. but leaving me out to dry as the singles failed to chart. I understood the business—just don’t tell me one thing and do another.

“You’re a fucking liar!”

Left to shop for a new deal, I signed with Virgin America. Cochairmen Jeff Ayeroff and Jordan Harris were excited to have me on the label. They were veteran music guys, ages forty-six and thirty-eight respectively, and they had three albums at or heading toward the top of the charts when I began work on my album. Buoyed by their enthusiasm, I felt like I had another chance at resuscitating my career.

Drug-free and present, I focused on making the album. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work on every aspect of the project. I worked closely on the songs with Charlotte, her brother Tom Caffey, and Ralph Shuckett, who was married to Ellen Shipley and had as a keyboardist played with a long list of music luminaries, including Carole King, Lou Reed, and Todd Rundgren. I had credits on half the songs. I felt like an artist as opposed to the puppet I’d felt like so many times in the past.

It was my first time being in the studio as a producer, and I found that I enjoyed showing up every day, working with the musicians as they laid tracks, and making the important creative decisions. I had always known I had more to offer; I had always been lazy or irresponsible. Not this time. I put in long hours. Sometimes I brought Duke into the studio. I found the hard work very satisfying and was quite open about feeling like I needed to prove myself.

For the first time since the earliest days with the Go-Go’s, I wasn’t abdicating responsibility. Good or bad, my signature was going on this piece of work. Sometimes I wondered if it was motherhood that was causing me to mature. I fell into a good, productive rhythm—and a creative one.

Real
became a metaphor or mantra as well as a title. Musically, I wanted a sound that was stripped down and organic, a change from the previous effort especially. It was also one of the first albums to use a loop, predating Alanis Morissette’s phenomenal 1995 megaselling album
Jagged Little Pill
. Charlotte, Ralph, and I were listening to a loop
of music one day, trying to come up with a concept for it. One of us asked, “What is love?” Another answered, “A big scary animal.” The first single, “Big Scary Animal,” was thus born. One of my favorite songs on the album, “Too Much Water,” was written at Charlotte’s house, where we sat around in the afternoon and worked on melodies.