I spiral down, money runs out, David's enthusiasm fades away, and after a few short months of being on the West Coast, I start to worry about money. I start counting change, figuring out how long I can make a bag of brown rice last, and begin using a set of guitar strings a lot longer than I used to. I am about to hit bottom, and as I do, it opens like the mouth of a whale to become an abyss.
Before my little Fiat Spider gets repo'd I decide to take a trip with my girlfriend, Della, to Palm Desert to see Henry, a friend I made while in the Animals. We leave around nine P.m. and I drive the whole way with the top down, enjoying the beautiful California evening. When we get to Palm Desert I have to locate Henry's house, which is somewhere off the main road. I have to find it by the number painted along the curbside, so I start swinging the car from one side of the road to the other. Suddenly-and practically scaring me through the roof of the car-a loud amplified voice cracks through the air, commanding me to stop right where I am. I turn around and there's a cap car right behind me, its headlights scorching my little convertible with a blaze of white light. I pull over, feeling scared because sitting between me and Della on the floor is a bag of marijuana. I lean down, pick it up, and stuff it into my pocket. This is a mistake. The cop walks up to the car with a gun aimed in our direction and tells us to get out of the car.
We climb out and he asks me why I leaned down, and after I mumble some incoherent answer, with his gun aimed at my head, he pats my left pocket and pulls out the dope-which is his big mistake. "You are under arrest for a federal offense," he barks like a rottweiler, then handcuffs me and tells me to get in the back of his car. In the middle of all of this, poor old Henry has come out into the street and watches dumbfounded as the arrest takes place. The cop, excited that he has hippie scum in his grasp, forgets about Della, slams the door, and takes off with me in the back as Henry and Della stare in disbelief at the disappearing taillight. In the backseat, handcuffed and seated behind the barred screen between us, I feel my heart beat like an exhausted rabbit. I ask the cop why he's arresting me-"Can't you let me go?" I plead. "You have commited a federal offense," he snaps back. Outside, the sky is refulgent with starlight, the air filled with the aroma of date palms, desert flowers, and sage brush. Behind a thick meshed window I slump against the backseat with anguish flooding through me like a black river.
We arrive at the Indio county jail ten minutes later. Towering in the front office like something out of a Dickens tale is an oversize pulpitlike desk that might have come from a film set. Its monstrous girth is like a surreal hallucination and adds to my state of confusion as I stand below it-a skinny, frightened white kid with blue eyes, long blond hair, and silver handcuffs. My details are entered with icy cold detachment by the night sergeant, and then I'm hustled into the drunk tank.
This part of California-near the Salton Sea-is rough and weird, a magnet for those who live on the fringe. I have entered an alien world and I sit on the cold iron bench of the cell, shaking and staring at the iron bars between me and what already seems like my former life. I feel as though I am disappearing down the gullet of a large black beast, Jonah in the whale; I feel sick inside and a very long way from home. I am in possession of marijuana-fn7b5-a federal offense-B09-I could be here for years- 6m9....
At five A.m. a silent cop takes me to what they call the day cell, where they keep the real cons. Men who are in for rape, violence, murder, or crimes committed at gunpoint. As I am marched along the corridor toward the cell I hear a chorus of wolf whistles. I have a somewhat androgynous face, and no doubt to those who have been missing female company for a while, I look tasty. My heart sinks as I imagine all the worst jail-movie cliches. The door to the steel cage is unlocked and they push me, now a common criminal, inside.
Various brutes are sitting around and they look at me with interest, like vultures circling over a fresh piece of carrion. In an effort to become invisible I move into a corner, a place from which I don't intend to move. I have made the one allowed call-to David, who groans as I desperately explain the situation. Luckily for me he has a house in Palm Springs and is there this weekend. He promises to bail me out, but it sounds as though he doesn't really want the bother. I offer up a prayer to make it a reality. I notice another kid who is about my age. We start up a conversation: like me, he's in for pot, but it's been months and he hasn't been able to get out. I panic. Is this to be my fate? How will I explain this to my mum? Letter from jail: Dear Mum, Having a lovely time--behind bars in America, food so-so.... I stare at the wall, and a wave of nausea passes through me-I long for my guitar, the sweet open air, girls, the life that was out there, anything but this nightmare.
At nine A.M. another humiliation is delivered as we are marched at gunpoint out into the prison yard for an inspection. This consists of standing in line naked while a prison doctor passes in front of us and feels our testicles with his rubber-gloved hand, at which time we are supposed to cough. Personally I feel like choking at this outrage, want to call the British embassy. What a pathetic cliche, but here I am-naked, vulnerable, with someone's nasty mitt on my balls. manhood stripped. Eventually we are passed fit and miserably troop back to our steel cage.
The longest day of my life passes in torturous increments, and I feel as if I should be on my knees, praying, but then I probably would be the recipient of a rearguard action. My imagination goes into overtime as I contemplate a life inside. I wonder if it would be possible to escape; I imagine trying to saw through several tons of concrete with a nail file (probably be dead of old age before the task is completed), starting a riot but then going down in a hail of bullets or becoming impaled on barbed wire, finding the sewer tunnel and getting flushed out into the desert covered in shit and piss to die of a disease in the baking sand.
As I am thinking up these fantastic scenarios David finally shows up to bail me out, and it's almost with a sobbing relief that a few minutes later I pass through the gate to freedom. As we walk toward the car, the smell of hot tarmac fills my head like perfume, the key turning in the car door lock sings a sweet melody of freedom in my ear, the engine hums a Bach chorale, and as we pull out onto the road for Palm Springs, the sweet air and high desert sky combine in a moment of blessed reprieve. Driving back to David's place, I look out across the desert at the late-afternoon shadows and think, Yeah, whatever doesn't kill you ... Sixteen gut-wrenching hours. I wind down the window and spit in the sand.
Back in L.A. I try to stay out of trouble while my circumstances crumble. A few weeks after the arrest the case gets dismissed for illegal search and seizure-stupid cop-and I can breathe again. I stare out across Laurel Canyon and begin to feel isolated. I'm not in a band, David has disappeared, and within a week I will be in a foreign country with nowhere to live.
One house up from me lives a tough-guy actor. No one around here likes him. Middle-aged with a paunch and a surly demeanor, he yells at the mailman and seems to be permanently pissed off, probably doesn't get enough parts. He confronts me out on the dirt one day and snarls, "You play guitar?" "Yeah," I say, watching a blue jay out of the corner of my eye. "Whydonya come over and teach me." "Okay." "How much?" "Five dollars." "Come up in half an hour," he says. The blue jay disappears through a window into my house. Half an hour later I trot up to his front porch and ring the bell. We spend an hour together: I teach him a few beginner's chords as he frets about my putting an orange juice down without a coaster. He's an asshole, but I take the five dollars and am glad to get it. A day later I meet a girl who is a friend of Della's, a gifted songwriter by the name of Robin Lane. Robin has sung with Neil Young and Stephen Stills, and her dad, Ken Lane, is the piano player for Dean Martin and the Rat Pack. He is also the composer of Dino's greatest hit, "Everybody Loves Somebody." I start hanging out with Robin, seduced by the songs that seem to pour out of her. I meet her friends, and the two of us become embroiled.
Within a week of my getting a new girlfriend, my house is taken away, the car gets repossessed, and I bury the blue jay. I m
ove in with Robin and her mother and, almost without realizing it, I am in the San Fernando Valley and another life. I sink into the California sunlight, the smell of oranges, and the sound of guitars. Robin's friends crowd around me, and everything is about music. I don't leave L.A., go home, or return to the grey, rainy streets of London, the moldy basement flat, the gas fire, the bands, pubs, bars, and guitar shops of my former life.
The heat of the sun, penetrates the surface of my skin, papaya juice trickles down my throat, the scent of exotic night flowers fills my head, the proximity of Mexico puts a spell on me, and under this glow the call of safety and security fades. I don't feel compelled to return to the familiar, to pick up where I left off, or struggle on up the ladder. I am out west.
But after a successful five years in London, culminating with the period in the Animals, I have plummeted to rock bottom. I have no money, no car, and nowhere to live except the house of my girlfriend's mother. And this begins my forty days in the desert, which turns into five years in about five minutes.
The bluntness of this situation is softened by having a girlfriend and being surrounded by people who are all possessed by music. Something inside me has snapped, but though I feel compelled to withdraw from the world of bands, to do something else, I can't stay away from music, which remains the force in my life. As if staying faithful to a faint signal-like a man rowing to a distant shore guided by a star-I make one decision. I know that music is the way and that I have to go deeper with it, to study and play in private without the distraction of being in a band. I marry Robin, enroll in college, begin studying classical guitar, take in all the music I can, and scrape by with some minimum-wage teaching gigs. These conditions don't make for much of a marriage, and within two years Robin and I separate. I continue on in college and for a while enjoy it, but I question academia.
I survive on sixty to a hundred dollars a month and don't care much, as I have no responsibilities other than practicing the guitar. I survive by teaching when I can at a little guitar shop out at the west end of the valley. Most of the time it is excruciating, with only the odd student sparking my interest. Some of them know that I was in the Animals, but I tend to keep quiet about it. At four in the afternoon, with a heavy sense of irony and long shadows dogging my steps, I walk over the road to the Robin's Nest, where I drink some tea, read a book, and try to remember who I am.
Three years pass and I begin to feel like I'm living on borrowed time. My life is without momentum, and the only time I feel forward motion is when I'm practicing. I begin to feel sick inside. I don't belong here but, driven to finish what I started, I slog on. I drive an ancient Cadillac with retread tires and no windows, buy gas for twenty-two cents a gallon, move to a new house every few months, and use fake names to get a telephone account. For a while I live in a small apartment building under the Hollywood sign. At night it strobes through the window as if taunting me while I practice Bach. This apartment building is seething with marijuana plants-all the occupants have them growing in their apartments. The landlord is a grumpy old guy of about seventy who knocks fiercely on your apartment door and demands his monthly rent as he steps across the threshold. Somehow he misses the giant green plants that, like "Audrey II" in Little Shop of Horrors, grace every cheesy apartment.
My interest in Buddhism, and Zen in particular, continues and I begin getting up at four-thirty every morning to go to a zendo, where I sit in meditation for a few hours and grapple with a koan. This period of my life is akin to the training of a monk, enduring poverty and surviving on almost nothing but rice. Practicing is everything, and I work up to ten hours a day. Despite the rigors of this existence, I retain a sense about myself, not one of cheery confidence but the grim inner conviction that the path is leading in the right direction even though I can barely see it.
Although Robin and I have split, I continue to interact with the crowd of musicians I first got to know through her. In this crowd and also on the brink of a failed marriage is a stunning girl by the name of Kate, who has recently returned to Los Angeles. I met her before and was immediately attracted to her, but she was married and so was I. But now within the parameters of the incestuous set and her fading marriage, we fall in together.
For a while we have an empathetic relationship, and for the first time I experience the feeling of being with someone I believe I could spend the rest of my life with. She is the one. We lie in bed and talk all night about every possible subject while I covertly record everything on a cassette tape recorder and then play it back in the car the next day, much to her cringing embarrassment. Somehow we swing into a zone that feels as if it has always been there. Kate is not bothered by my material poverty, and for a moment I also forget it as we groove together. But there is a shadow in the form of her husband, who is still around and pressure is on her to make her marriage work. It reaches a point where she feels it necessary to give it one more try.
On New Year's Eve, the night of my birthday, knowing that she is returning to her husband, we are at a friend's house as if for the last time together. We drink champagne and toast each other; she leans over a kitchen counter to pull a cracker apart with me; our eyes meet and, knowing that I'm losing her, it feels like a knife is slicing through my gut. It's over and it seems to symbolize the end of everything in L.A. for me. The evening comes to an end and, feeling suicidal and slightly drunk, I return to Hancock Park, where I live in a stable at the back of Fatty Arbuckle's old Hollywood villa. As the clock strikes midnight I stare at an empty bed and, like a ghost, open a letter from my mother.
In the morning I get up and make a small cup of green tea on the singlering gas burner and stare through the window across the vast expanse of lawn to the white Mediterranean-style villa. At the other end of the grass the owners lean back in their chairs, laugh, and clink glasses to the New Year. A girl student knocks at the door. She is here for a lesson. We sit down and in some sort defiant and desperate attempt to have spirit, I give her the best possible guitar lesson I can. She is a sweet girl and she raises her head from the guitar at the end of our session and says, "You're great." At that point I find it hard to contain myself-her remark like a candle flame in a cave mirrors my fragility and I feel like wailing like a baby who has lost his mother. She leaves-I pick up my guitar, hit a chord, and put it down. Kate's gone, four years have passed since I arrived here, and now like a page in a book on Zen, I am a brushmarked circle, a zero.
I begin to experience an unshakable depression, an emotional landscape that becomes so black that I can find literally no reason to get out of bed in the morning. The will to survive-to push forward-becomes a thin thread, a few remaining routines that I pass through as if wearing a blindfold.
A few weeks later one of my few students brings an old guitar to a lesson and offers to sell it to me. It's a battered '61 Fender Telecaster. I don't really want one but when I start to play it something stirs within me, comes back like a memory as if reminding me of a self I had forgotten. It shakes me and I ask him to leave it with me. That night I take it home to try it out for a few hours and find that I can't stop playing it; this guitar sparks something in me and I have to have it. I call the kid the next morning and tell him it's a deal. I start practicing, and something comes back, begins again, pushes toward the world. This new energy is sustained a few weeks later when I get the chance to join a local band. I start playing guitar solos again, look forward to the group sessions, begin thinking up guitar parts. This activity has the effect of renewal; the old Telecaster has a fantastic tone, and I play like a man possessed.
Through a friend of Kate's I still see from time to time, I meet up with Tim Rose, a well-known singer who has had a hit with a song called "Morning Dew." Tim is also down on his luck, but we hit it off and he uses the band I have just joined as his backing group. We start playing around L.A., and within a short while I am back into the group thing.
One night we go to see a band at the Troubadour, and after the show I leave on my own. As I cross th
e road I see an orange VW. I recognize it as Kate's car. I feel a jolt and decide to wait for her, leaning on the car and staring across the street at the neon sign of the Troubadour. A few minutes later she exits the club. With a big smile on my face, I watch her cross the street and wait for her to come up to me and throw her arms around me, but instead she walks right past me, unlocks the door, and tells me to please get off the car. Typical of her otherworldly sense of spatial perception, this is par for the course. "Kate, it's me," I sigh, and laugh. She stares myopically through the L.A. mist-the last scene in Casablanca. "Oh, my God," she murmurs, and comes over. We embrace, and somewhere violins play.
From that dime-size moment everything begins to unfold as if by magic. The attempt to repair her marriage has failed, she is free, and this time there doesn't seem to be any question that we will he together. I want to scream, "I love this woman!" She makes me strong and I am ready to take the bullet between my teeth.
I begin living with Kate in her little house in Echo Park. With three rooms and a roof like a Japanese temple, it is a romantic setting; every night we lie in bed listening to the scrabbling sound of raccoons as they climb across the roof. I get a Saturday-night gig playing in East L.A. at the El Dorado bar and compound that with my other new band, more gigs, and college. Everything begins to move forward again. The only ironic little shadow in all of this is that yet another admirer of Kate's now begins to threaten me. We begin getting phone calls from him in which he describes the weapons he has and how he is waiting where I can't see him.
And then I know that I am done with this part of my life and that it is time to return to the U.K. I have the guitar, the girl, a gun aimed at my head, and a future like a freshly wiped plate. We finish up our do-it-yourself divorces, Kate sitting on the steps of City Hall at eight A.M. with a typewriter on her knees minutes before we both go in front of the judge to get divorced from partners with identical first names. I pack up my stuff-which takes nearly three minutes-and with a loan from my dad book two seats on British Air. I am twenty-nine.
One Train Later: A Memoir Page 17