I found then (and I still find) extraordinary beauty in following a simple way of life. Those of you looking for “action” may not understand, but I was finished with my previous lifestyle. I enjoyed rising early with the sun, silently preparing my body and my surroundings for the day, studying a subject (biomedical research) that engaged both my intellect and compassion, trading love and lies with open-minded friends, and closing the night in a warm feeding ritual that coincided with the sunset.
Basic regeneration.
Although Skip and I were still married, we spent very little time together. He was located near Minneapolis, living in an apartment that was close to the large entertainment compound owned by “The Former Artist Usually Known as Prince.” Skip was doing production for the Purple One's projects, so although we spoke on the phone each day, I hardly ever saw him. Essentially, I was living alone, with his occasional visits on holidays. Neither of us could make the final break.
I didn't mind living alone, but it's sort of strange to see gas station attendants and grocery clerks more than you see your own husband.
My new boyfriend went by the name of Buckminister Ratcliff Esquire III. Every day, I'd drive to Tiburon and change his sheets, make his breakfast, straighten up his lodgings, and play with his fat, furry body.
He was a gentle, overweight lab rat.
“Bucky,” who'd been silently and carefully liberated from the University of California's research facility, was now living a pampered life, being looked after and loved by Pat Monahan and myself. Located on Main Street in Tiburon, Pat's animal store was one in a string of beautifully maintained turn-of-the-century shops along the San Francisco Bay. Early each day, before the customers started to fill up the area known as Arc Row, Pat and I would invite Bucky to have chocolate brownies with us in the store's center, which was filled with stuffed animals and various items for cats and dogs.
Like a little Buddha endowed with the ability to be charismatic without doing anything other than just being himself, he made converts of visitors who'd previously considered rats vicious, plague-ridden consorts of the devil. His girth gave him the friendly fat-boy appearance that is cute in animals and babies but gross in the adult human species. An excellent representative of his species, he lived as he eventually died—in peace.
So in the morning, it was the rat, and at night, the raccoons. Quite a shift from making “strawberry jam” with Jim Morrison, eh?
I often spent the middle of my days attending Marin Humane Society functions or participating in meetings on how to stop construction of the huge biomedical research complex called the Buck Center. After Beryl Buck left several million dollars in her will “to benefit the aging population,” local lawyers, business people, the University of California Research System, contractors, and a host of other opportunists saw a potential gold mine. But today, twenty-five years of objections later and with half the money now lining the pockets of the center's supporters, the facility still exists only on the drawing board. Architect I. M. Pei collected a million dollars just to draw the structure.
The Buck Center's proposed site, atop Mount Burdell in Novato, California, is located directly above an earthquake fault—a nifty location for a bunch of toxic chemicals. And, of course, many facilities already exist that do exactly the same sort of research. A better way to have spent Beryl Buck's money might have been to create the Buck Center for Research on Human Stupidity. We all suffer from that ailment to varying degrees, and if they ever figure out a cure for it by rat testing, I'll have to rethink my position on the subject.
But there
are
no cures for the hardball game of living; there are only processes that manipulate the symptoms. Meanwhile, we continue to mutilate everything in our path, trying, perhaps, to distract ourselves from the constant fear of death.
Which brings me to the ultimate topic of distraction: talk shows. Distract yourself from the living/dying process, sell your product, publicize your lifestyle by appearing on talk shows—it's the national pastime. Even when I was living my quiet life in Marin, I revved up a little excitement by playing “Butt Bongo” on
The Howard Stern Show.
I didn't even have a product to sell. I just like Howard and thought it would be an amusing experience.
When I was performing with Airplane and Starship and the records were climbing the charts, our publicist got on the horn and we were booked on all of the talk shows. Way back in the beginning, there was Jack Paar, but I was too young for him. Instead, I caught the polite boys: Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin; Dinah Shore's down-home chat;
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,
where goofy was okay; Dick Cavett, the reigning intellect; Geraldo “Hard Copy” Rivera; early irascible Tom Snyder; easygoing Larry King; and smart and smirky Letterman.
All of that was prelude, of course, to doing Butt Bongo on
Stern.
My daughter, her then boyfriend Kelly, and I played look-out-here-comes-the-fast-ball with “The King of All Media.” Howard decided that China's beau looked liked the devil and told him so. Then he decided I should play Butt Bongo with him, which I did. I positioned himself across his lap and he did Ringo on my fully clothed butt cheeks. It could have been worse, and it probably will be when I do the promo tour for this book. Nobody is exempt from that fun-loving freak Howard Stern—especially not fifty-eight-year-old granny rock stars.
To liven up the usual chat format, I might bring along some of my own games to play with the Chin, Harpo, Worldwide Pants crowd (for a jargon translation, see back issues of
Entertainment Weekly).
Maybe I'll come on as my father, or be escorted by the police, or bring the current celebrity “in recovery” with me to see which of us unsuccessfully took more drugs.
As long as it's something tasteful.
Maybe I'll get everybody to streak into the bookstores, looking for an immediate upgrade in their spiritual condition by buying several copies of Grace Slick's autobiography.
Fire and Passion
I
t was toward the end of 1993, Skip was vacationing in Hawaii, China was living in L.A. pursuing an acting career, and I was close to accepting a monastic life of simple endeavors, when violent surprises started rearranging the tableau. My quiet world of Marin County living was split wide open by two formidable elements: fire and passion.
I returned home one afternoon after doing some errands in San Francisco, and when I drove up the hill that led to my house, I noticed two parked white cars. Nothing unusual in that, except that they were completely covered with orange stuff.
What the hell was it and what was going on?
A little farther up the road, I encountered the chaos. The entrance to my street was blocked by police cars, men were running around talking on cell phones, gesturing to each other as if something unpleasant was going on beyond the barriers. Something was. They stopped me and suggested that I turn around and go back down the hill.
“But I live up there,” I told them.
“Which house?” they asked.
“Eighteen Escalon … what's going on?” I demanded.
A man paused and slowly said, “One of the houses up there burned down.”
“Which one?” I asked. Somehow I already knew.
“I don't know. Let me call the fire marshall to get the address.” He fiddled with his handset and finally said, “Eighteen Escalon.”
I went numb. They took me up to the property, which was crawling with newspeople ready to interview me. “Miss Slick, Miss Slick, what do you think about it? What are you going to do? What happened? Who, what, where?”
“I don't know anything,” I said. “I haven't even seen it yet.”
A host of photographers followed me as I walked up to the front door to see what, if anything, was left of Skip's and my seventeen-year stay in that home. Something inside of me felt cold and sunken, like I was watching a bunch of vultures hover over a dying friend. My beloved house, that once sturdy protector that just hours before had been full of familiar possessions and memories, was now reduced to charred beams and ash.
Fortunately, as devastated as I felt, I was also immediately convinced of the accuracy and timing of the universal process. No matter how it
seemed
on the surface, I knew the event was somehow providential.
The house was almost totally gutted, so where were my two cats? Someone had seen them take off into the forest area behind the house. Good. The raccoons never showed up till after dark, so they were all right, too. I had a sense of relief, however small, that no beings were hurt. Now I had to move on to the depressing business of sorting through the ashes for leftovers.
I got a hotel room at Howard Johnson's in Sausalito and sat there, watching my house burn on the evening news while I tried to find Skip. Apparently, he'd left the hotel in Maui where he'd been staying, bound for an unknown destination. I called Los Angeles, trying to get hold of China, but she'd already gotten the news and was on her way to the airport to come see me. Someone finally reached Skip—I don't know who—but by the time he arrived, six or seven hours later, I was full of red wine and mad as hell at him for
always
being away. I blamed the dark side of my own isolation on him, when in fact, I'd done it to myself.
China and a couple of her friends eventually arrived at the hotel to be with me, whatever condition I was in, and they watched me convert my sense of loss to anger and direct it at Skip. He'd seen it before—Grace's misdirected fury posing as righteous indignation. The next morning I apologized, but if Skip was already gone in spirit, I'd certainly done a good job of driving the rest of him away.
The insurance company showed us several temporary homes we could use during the time that it took to either rebuild the old house or buy a new one. The short-term dwelling we selected was a beauty, but because our marriage was reaching its end point and our home had been trashed, it was hard to enjoy the new, albeit temporary, Tiburon house that was perched on top of Raccoon Straits overlooking the entire Bay Area.
Ironically, we later learned that the Escalon fire had been started by careless county welders who were putting up a sign that read
danger/fire area
. Somehow, they'd forgotten to watch where the sparks were flying. Eventually, Skip and I received enough money to allow us to purchase homes in Pennsylvania and L.A., respectively.
While all this was playing out, into an already confused atmosphere came the explosive element, passion, in the form of Len Calder, an old friend I'd met in San Francisco when I was about eighteen years old. Len was living in South America and we'd been corresponding sporadically over the years. Sporadic became frequent as his relationship with his common-law wife of twenty years disinte-grated and my own marriage did the same. Both of us were greatly in need of comfort, and we toyed with the illusion that we could help each other.
It all came to a head when Len found herpes cream in his wife's medicine chest. Since
he
didn't have the virus, where did
she
pick it up? Incited to finally take action, he boarded a plane with nothing but a checkbook and a passport. Within twenty-four hours, he'd made it to San Francisco, and the game was on.
By the time Len arrived, Skip and I had officially separated; I was staying in the house on Raccoon Straits and Skip had moved into a small apartment in Mill Valley. There was no chance of rebuilding either the house or the marriage—not at
that
point anyway—so I was glad Len had come. But the fact that he'd arrived with more problems than just an unfaithful wife was something I wouldn't figure out for several months.
In the meantime, I took him around to visit his old haunts—UC Berkeley, where he'd gone to school, a rose garden that he loved in the East Bay, some restaurants he remembered from when he'd lived in San Francisco before, and a pier on Fisherman's Wharf where we'd ripped off our clothes and partied till dawn when we were in our early twenties. Len said he felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up after a long sleep, and it was good to see an old friend experiencing the delight of being “home” again.
Whether we were driving up the coast, shopping in Monterey, or walking through Muir Woods, I never saw anyone exhibit such enthusiasm for anything and everything. I bought him a computer, hooked it up to an electric piano, and he sat for hours every day, creating some of the best instrumental music I'd ever heard. And that
mind
of his—the information, the comic slant on the news, the ability to comprehend everything but his own debilitating problem.
Early in 1994, we took an afternoon walk on the beach and climbed around like children on a huge construction machine that was parked near the shoreline. That night, after having dinner and lots of drinks, and chatting with “Bear,” a wonderful bartender at the Cliff House, we came back to Tiburon and decided to do some target practice on empty bottles we'd lined up in the backyard. After a while, I decided to stop shooting because I was afraid the neighbors would call the cops about the noise. Len didn't want to stop, though. He was annoyed with me and started in with, “You just do whatever pleases you at the time, you don't care what someone else wants to do. You think because you're famous, you can just drop everything and ignore people.”
We started arguing and he lost it. He began shoving me around, breaking handles off the screen doors, knocking lamps off tables, and yelling about what a brat I was. He finally gave up when I wouldn't react, and he went to the back of the house. To sulk? To go to sleep? I didn't know what he was doing back there and I was afraid to find out.
At 2:00 or 3:00
A.M
., the doorbell rang. Len went down the hall to answer it, while I headed for the bedroom in search of the shotgun. I'd been robbed three times in Mill Valley, so I thought that this might be another shitty late-night episode of some sort. But what idiot thief rings the doorbell? By the time I'd arrived at the front door, shotgun in hand, there were four cops standing around Len, who was on his knees, handcuffed and yelling “Shoot me!” at the top of his lungs.