Not Dead & Not For Sale (16 page)

I
NEEDED TO GET AWAY.
I had traveled my entire adult life, but always with an entourage—assistants, tour managers, security. My life was driving me crazy, and I needed time alone.

My idea was simple: go to Paris, book a room in Montmartre, my favorite part of the city, and chill. Write a little. Read a little. Relax for a week or two, hanging out in the bistros and soaking in the arty European vibe. I saw Paris as a city of quietude, beauty, and peace. It was the last place on earth I anticipated violence.

On the flight over, I remembered two violent encounters that had nearly done me in during the years when I was running the streets. In 1997, I was attacked at a downtown L.A. crack house by a crazy man with a homemade prison-style shank that struck me in the breastbone and fortunately broke off. A year later, during an STP tour, I was assaulted in Washington, D.C., when I tried to buy drugs in the projects. Again, I was lucky to have avoided serious injury. But that was all behind me. Paris was where I could chill out and find shelter from the emotional storms.

I arrived in early December. The hotel was cool; the nights were cold; and my head started to clear. I went down to Pigalle, with its tourist traps and fake “live” sex shows, and just wandered around. I was feeling free. Dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a plain North Face jacket, I was just another guy, not a rock star. I was walking through a park, thinking how great it was to be far away, when three guys approached me—one white, two black.

“We know about a party not far from here,” they said. “You interested?”

They spoke in accents. The black dudes said they were Nigerian; the white guy was from Morocco.

“Sure,” I said, thinking there might be weed or hash at the party.

“There are pretty girls too,” they said. “Our car is right around the corner.”

They seemed friendly enough, and I sensed no danger. Turned out, though, that the car wasn’t around the corner. It was several miles away. Didn’t matter. The night was invigorating. I was ready to go.

Once we got in the car and started driving to the party, the guys said they were Muslims.

“Fine,” I said. “I respect Islam. I respect all the religions.”

“I respect Hitler,” said the black guy sitting next to me.

“Hitler!” I said. “How can you respect Hitler when he saw blacks as inferior? Hitler believed in the master white Aryan race. What’s to respect about Hitler?”

“He got done what needed to get done.”

“By creating the Holocaust?”

“Some people don’t believe the Holocaust ever happened.”

“Some people are crazy. The Holocaust is historical fact.”

“I’m not at all sure.”

Suddenly I wasn’t sure what was happening. Obviously the party wasn’t close by, because we had entered a freeway. When I asked where we were going, I got no answers, only sneers. Finally, after twenty minutes, we pulled off the freeway into a housing tract. The Moroccan, who was behind the wheel, kept turning in circles and doing donuts. He was intent on making me lose my bearings, an easy enough task.

“Where are we? What are you guys doing?” I asked.

When I got no answers, I knew I was in trouble. At that moment, as we turned up a dirt road, all my survival instincts kicked in. I opened the door and jumped out of the moving car.

Car screeched to the halt. The white guy came after me, chasing me at full speed. He caught me. We locked arms. I blocked his kicks. When he head-butted me, his forehead caught my open mouth. My tooth cut his skin and blood gushed out. My front tooth cracked in half. He was taken aback.

For all the fear coursing through me—fear of being murdered in cold blood—I was somehow able to hang on to a degree of control. I knew that if I panicked, it would also make things worse. Before I could put together a plan, though, the black guys were kicking me to the ground. One had a pair of pliers and was going for my nuts. I squirmed away and threw a wild elbow that—thank God—caught one of them square in the face. The other grabbed my jacket that, because it was a slippery fabric and loose on my body, came sliding off me. The guy wound up holding the jacket, not me, and I took off.

I ran like the wind. I ran through the snow. When one of my shoes came off, I kept running. I jumped over a hedgerow and rolled down an embankment. Ran even harder until I found myself in a wooded area. My head was filled with one thought and one thought only: “
I’m not going to die here! I’m not going to die here!
” I hid under some leaves for thirty, forty minutes. I was freezing, wearing nothing but a T-shirt, jeans, and one shoe. When I thought it was safe to come out of hiding, I walked out of the woods where I found a neighborhood of small homes. I looked for one that had Christmas lights.

Knocked on the door.

Man answered. He looked me over. I was bruised, my T-shirt torn and covered with blood, my hair matted with twigs and leaves.

“I don’t know French,” I tried to say in French.

“I don’t know English,” he tried to say in English.

He called his daughter, who came downstairs. She knew English. I told her that I had been beaten, my passport and wallet, with eight hundred dollars, had been stolen, and I needed a ride back to my hotel. She believed me. She, her father, and her father’s brother put me in their car and drove me to the hotel. I convinced the hotel manager to give them fifty euros for their trouble and thanked them profusely.

The next day I went to the American embassy for a temporary passport, the police station to file a report, and American Express to get some money.

“After all you’ve gone through,” my manager asked me over the transatlantic phone, “are you coming home?”

“No,” I said. “I’m staying in Paris another four days. Then I’m going to Rome for a week.”

When I finally did get home, I had my teeth reconstructed.

I still love Paris.

My fortieth birthday. A seventies roller-disco party. It turned out to be the last night of our marriage.

Marsey won’t because she don’t
and little Mary’s crying
So what is a boy to do, wouldn’t you
Mary’s won’t because she don’t
and Mary keeps on crying
While promises break in two
And so do you

—SUNG TO THE MELODY OF “MAIRZY DOATS AND DOZY DOATS AND LIDDLE LAMZY DIVEY”

T
HE GREATER MY NEED FOR MARY,
the greater her desire to dump me. More and more, she was expressing her loss of interest in me. All that was understandable. How many times can you put up with a man who moves in and out of rehab through a revolving door that never seems to stop? Mary had her own mental health to protect. I understood. Accepting the fact that she wanted to end our marriage was excruciatingly painful, but I had no choice.

So we separated. I moved out of our house with a pool into the Oakwood Apartments, temporary corporate housing, the same place Rick “Super Freak” James was staying. Mary lived her life, I lived mine. It went well for a period, but then Mary’s dark clouds returned.

When she found out that, after our breakup, I had begun dating another woman, she fell into a crazed fury. Even though she was the one who had ended our relationship, the discovery of my involvement with someone else sent her into an altered state.

At the time, I was living at my own pad, but Mary wanted me back. I said okay. She went with me to pick up a moving truck to haul my stuff. On the way over, while I was driving, she kicked me in the face, screaming about this “other woman.” She was so out of control that, to protect our two children, I took them to a hotel, where I booked a two-room suite.

Mary showed up at the hotel wearing a dress that she had cut up with scissors. I had to marvel at how she was totally aware and yet totally out of control at the same time. She took an entire handful of meds and washed them down with booze from the minibar. She drank until she passed out. I checked on her every few minutes to make sure she was breathing. She was, but she was also out cold.

I quickly came up with a plan. My manager, Dana, then a close friend of Mary’s, agreed to take the kids that night. My mom agreed to fly in the next day.

When, in her semiconscious state, Mary heard the plan, she started yelling, “You’re not taking the kids to Dana’s today! And your mom’s not going to take care of them tomorrow!”

I realized that Mom and Mary had a tenuous relationship, but, when it came to my kids, there was no one I trusted more than my mother. I had to stick with my plan. Mary’s reaction was so violent—she started breaking dishes and mirrors—that I was frightened for our kids and called security. Mary was arrested and taken to a police station in Burbank. When she was released, she returned to the house, pulled all my clothes out of my closet, threw them into the driveway, drenched them in lighter fluid, and dropped a lit match. Eighty thousand dollars’ worth of clothing up in flames. Mary was arrested again.

When Mary came back home, Mom had arrived and things had settled down—or so it seemed. Mary was interviewed by Child Protection Services—in fact we all were. She was ordered to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. She agreed to go, but only if I took her. At this point I was afraid of and for Mary.

Then Mary suddenly changed her mind. She wouldn’t go. To keep me from leaving the house for a rehearsal, she blocked my car with hers. I jumped over the fence and managed to get to my rehearsal. While I was gone, Mary got crazier, so crazy, in fact, that my mother took the kids into the master bedroom, locking the door behind her. Mary started screaming, “I’m leaving and taking my kids with me!” When Mary began kicking down the door, Mom opened it and tried to calm her down. That’s when Mary went for her children; my mother stopped her, but, in doing so, Mary grabbed Mom by the neck, where Mom had recently had surgery. My mother told Noah to call 911. The cops arrived and, once again, Mary was ordered to check into an inpatient psych ward.

The next day Dana and I drove Mary to the hospital, but she wouldn’t leave the car. Six nurses came out to try to convince her. Mary wouldn’t budge. We took her to a bar, hoping liquid courage would help her see the light. She finally acquiesced to our pleading and signed herself into the hospital. Before Mary let us leave, though, she insisted that she needed stronger medication. A doctor agreed to give her a shot of Ativan. Still ranting, Mary was put in a ward for a seventy-two-hour period of observation. I don’t know how, but two hours later she talked the hospital into releasing her. Mary signed herself out and came home, sicker than ever.

The drama went on for many months.

Finally, Mary went back on her meds regimen and found a modicum of stability. In recent times, that stability has deepened. Thank God. Her ongoing recovery has been a blessing for her, for me, and especially for our precious children.

I carry a tattoo of Mary on my arm that I wear like a badge, a jewel, a wound, a way to remind myself that love and pain, like blood and ink, swim in the same sea.

“Our Movie:”

Like a Jean Harlow picture

I look at you through the screen that divides us

I’m aware of the touch of your arms

I’m part of the sofa divider

I respect your space, enjoy your good taste

Yet I’m only one of the pieces that’s in it

More, more, more, you’re never finished

September, October, November, fall

December, January, February, snow

March, April, May, spring showers bear flowers

June, July, 4th of July, independence, here we go

But so long, Mr. August, it’s been a wonderful show