I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  I remember once I asked Melinda out on a date. Dr. Landy let me do it that time. He sent us out on a sailboat. The captain of the boat was his son. It was like the first visit to the car dealership but worse. The only thing I could hope for was that the noise of the wind would cover up what we were saying and we could get some privacy that way. Melinda kept asking me if I was okay. I couldn’t say yes because that was a lie, but I couldn’t tell her the truth either. The whole situation was just so strange: out in the middle of the ocean, away from it all, but still right in the middle of it. At one point the boat got close to the shore, maybe a hundred yards. I had an idea. “Can you swim?” I asked her.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Let’s jump,” I said. “From here we can swim to my house.” At that time Dr. Landy had me swimming up at Pepperdine for an hour a day. It was part of the whole regimen: run, swim, eat chicken and rice instead of steak and potatoes. I felt like I could do it. How far away could land be? We splashed down, almost at the same time. We made it to the house and we had about three hours to ourselves before anyone came to check on us. It was the most romantic three hours I had had in a long time. I told her that Dr. Landy made me say “I love you” to myself three times a day. I asked her if it was okay to say it to her, and she just smiled and said, “I’d like that very much.”

  A little while after that, Melinda came by the house. I didn’t talk to her inside. I went outside to meet her. Dr. Landy wasn’t there but the bodyguards were. We were talking about music or a restaurant and I just burst out with how I was feeling. “I’m living in a hellhole,” I said. “I can’t stand it any longer.”

  She looked straight at me. “Do you really want me to help you out of this?” Later she would tell me that she was already helping, that she had started talking to Carl’s lawyers and trying to explain the situation to them. It was probably hard for people to believe at first. “I’ll help you, Brian,” she told me. “Just say the word.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  I went to go back inside, but I guess even outside wasn’t safe enough. One of the bodyguards had heard me talking to Melinda, and he told Dr. Landy. After that, Dr. Landy was angry. “That’s it for Melinda,” he said. He took her number away from me, and because of the pills there were times I couldn’t remember it well enough to call her. Other times I remembered but the phone calls were short because I thought someone was listening in. “Melinda?” I would say, and she would say, “Yes,” and I would say, “Gotta go” and hang up. A few times I saw her while I was doing my jogging on the Pacific Coast Highway, but even that was a problem because Dr. Landy timed my runs and if I took too long he would know. I could stop and talk for a minute or so but nothing more than that.

  Without Melinda, the days got worse again. I don’t even remember them as separate things. I gained back some of the weight I had lost. There were hours on end spent in bed. I didn’t always remember to clean myself up. Old friends were fuzzy pictures; once I was at lunch with Ray Lawlor and I asked him who he was. “I think I know your face,” I said. But I was lying. I didn’t know his face.

  At the house there was more screaming about making music. Since the first solo record had been a success, Dr. Landy wanted me to go right back and make another record. We started one that was going to be called Brian and then was going to be called Sweet Insanity. The title wasn’t exactly the best. It was supposed to be a comment about the way that mental illness could turn into something beautiful, but I wasn’t sure I wanted a title like that. I had spent a lifetime proving that point, but why did we have to say it straight out like that? Plus the way Gene was trying to force me to make the record wasn’t a good scene. He kept on me all the time. He asked questions about every part. It was the strangest and worst way to make a record, with so much pressure and so much interference. People like Andy Paley who were my friends and really wanted me to make music came around during that time or visited studio sessions, but I could tell they didn’t like what they were seeing. But some of them liked some of what they were hearing. There was one song, “Water Builds Up,” that started with keyboard chords almost like “Good Vibrations,” but it had the opposite message. It was all about bad vibrations and what happened when I got too anxious or frustrated.

  So many times I’ve had that helpless feeling

  And no kind of booze or medicine helped at all

  I’m drowning in too many contradictions

  I’m about to lose all my self-control

  Water builds up

  Water boils over

  Gettin’ too hot

  The pot’s starting to whistle

  Running over the edge

  Steaming up my aching head

  The water getting higher

  There’s a dam bursting in my soul

  Sweet Insanity never came out. The record label wasn’t sure about it, and then the master tapes disappeared. But tapes that go missing aren’t the same as people who go missing. Even though the tapes were gone, they started popping up on cassettes, and then people started making CDs of them. For an album that never existed, lots of people have heard it.

  It was a jumbled time. Everyone around me grew more and more sure that Gene was hurting me worse than before. Melinda wasn’t around, but she was still talking to Carl’s lawyers. Eventually they went to a judge and argued that the way Gene tried to take control of my money and my songs was wrong. The final straw was when he had me change my will so he would get most of my money when I was gone. Somehow Melinda scored a copy of the will from Gloria and got it to Carl’s lawyers. It was robbery. The judge ordered him to stay away. Gloria took care of the house for me, and I was slowly getting a clearer head. One of the main things that helped was walking. It made my head a little clearer. I walked all the time from the house down the Pacific Coast Highway. It was where I used to run into Melinda. But I didn’t run into her anymore.

  One day I wasn’t out walking, not on the PCH. I was at my studio on Pico, trying to make music. I decided that I needed to sneak some cigarettes, and I went across the street to a liquor store. On the way back, I stepped off the curb and almost got hit by a car. It was Melinda. Can you believe that? She actually almost killed me! She pulled over and said hi and then as we talked she said we should get together. “Sure,” I said. “Do you think it was fate that you almost killed me?” We laughed like hell about that.

  It was obvious that she was as happy to see me as I was to see her. I couldn’t wait to ask her out, but she said she was splitting town for three weeks. I was sad, but she gave me her number again and told me to call when she was back. For three weeks I was looking at my watch every half hour or so. When the time came to call, I called, and the very next day she came to the house and took me down to Hollywood Boulevard. It was beautiful to look at, all the souvenirs and the way the street was a little run-down. We went to Musso and Frank, and I think I had a steak. I didn’t remember being there since the ’60s, but I might have been.

  Melinda took me to another lunch and then to a dinner, and we drove around listening to K-Earth 101 and pretty soon we started kissing and expressing love to each other again. We were back together for real. That time blends together, but it blends together in good ways, like the conversations at the bagel place in Santa Monica, not in bad ways, like the weeks and months with Gene. I had a partner again for real: not Brains and Genius but Brian and Melinda. Around that time I started seeing new doctors at UCLA, three guys including Steve Marmer, and they worked hard to undo the damage Dr. Landy had done. They got to the questions of my medication mostly, and explained how important it was to have the right balance. Without it, I couldn’t even really take a step into the world. But they explained it in a way that didn’t make me feel like I was dependent on it either. I was independent on it. When you are dealing with a mental illness and you’re not afraid to call it that, then you do what you can to make sure you get it under control. That’s the three things I mentioned earl
ier: the right doctor, the right medicines, and the right people around you. For the first time I could ever remember, that was starting to happen.

  Melinda was basically living with me then, and had been for about a year. She still had her own place, and she would have to drive home after work to feed her dogs. Then she would come over. Eventually the animals started coming with her. Once we were at my place and there was a wildfire. They announced it on the news but then we saw it in real life, coming toward us. It was a hazy orange. We split our house quick. We had to take all the animals with us, and we went over to Thousand Oaks. Nothing happened to the house, luckily, and we came back. It felt like home there with Melinda. I didn’t think about getting married so much. But Gloria was always asking me about it. She told me I needed someone to take care of me. I told her she was doing that, and the conservator, and the doctor, and she shook her head. “No,” she said. “A wife.”

  Then one night Melinda and I were having dinner at Lawry’s the Prime Rib on La Cienega. “Why don’t we talk about marriage?” she said.

  I didn’t think it worked that way. I thought that was for the guy to ask the girl. But it didn’t seem like a bad idea either. “Well, why not?” I said. I didn’t say anything else. She kept looking at me. She was probably worried that I was bothered by her question, or that I didn’t want to do it, but none of that was true. I was just thinking.

  We got back in the car and drove home. It wasn’t the car she had sold me, not anymore. I got rid of that one and bought a yellow Corvette. I think there was a white Corvette in there somewhere, too. Corvettes were cooler cars than Cadillacs, even though I liked the smooth ride the Cadillac gave you. We drove home. When I was with Dr. Landy all those years, I was in a house but I had no home. That night in bed, I decided to ask the question back to Melinda. “Would you marry me?” I said. She said yes immediately. She was so happy. We called a bunch of people right there in the middle of the night: her parents, my mom. Now there was a home again, for the first time since my first marriage. I had a home with my parents back in Hawthorne, but that was so far away.

  My first car, a light burgundy Mercury, was my mom’s car, but after that it became mine. I called it my Merc. I drove it first on a permit, but when I went to get my license, I failed the first driving test. For my whole life people said I wasn’t a good driver because I was always distracted, but I was good enough to pay attention. I just didn’t like thinking only about the driving.

  My dad worked with me on driving. He was great and patient, which was a surprise considering how he usually was. He told me where to put my hands and how to move my foot down on the pedal. I thought for a minute that it was like playing an instrument, because it worked by feel. You couldn’t be too hard or too fast or the car wouldn’t do what you wanted. But it was different from playing an instrument because in music it was a good idea sometimes to get different or unique sounds. In driving you didn’t want to do anything too unique. It took me a couple days to get the knack of it with my dad’s help, and a couple weeks later I went back and passed the test. It may not seem like very much time, but to a teenager it was like waiting forever.

  A year after that I got a Ford Fairlane—not a new one but a ’57. In Hawthorne it was a great car. But guys from other neighborhoods had better cars. They came in with them from Inglewood or Morningside. They might be driving Fords that were only one or two years old, with something custom on them. Our cars were ten years old and in great shape, but with nothing fancy. If it went bad, you just took it to the junkyard and bought another car. The ’57 Ford, I loved. That was the car I was driving when we first heard “Surfin’” on the radio. After that the station had a thing called Pick of the Week, where they played a few songs and then people would call in and vote. We won and my family was so happy. There was a tunnel near the neighborhood that ran under a corner of the airport. I drove the Ford fast in there. No one believed me. I told people I could and they said I couldn’t. I revved it as much as I could. I think I had it in low gear, though.

  We were in the car all the time. My buddies and I would go to Skippy’s, a hamburger stand. Other times it was the Foster’s Freeze, an ice cream place near school. I loved the shakes and cones there, mostly the cones. My favorite flavor was strawberry. I didn’t like chocolate. On the weekends we would drive to a place called Crestline. It was a little city in the mountains near Lake Arrowhead. Once on the way there, a car was following us pretty close. We didn’t know the people in it, but it was on our tail up these mountain roads. On one straightaway something ran in front of the car; I hit the brakes hard for a second and this car behind us ran right off the road. I pulled off to the side to see if they were okay. They were, and we kept going up to Crestline. It shook me the hell up, though. Someone really could have gotten hurt.

  Crestline was where we had our times as teenagers. We would play horseshoes and maybe go to a store and wait until an older guy came by and then ask him to buy us a six-pack of beer. That was the first time I got drunk, up there on a weekend. I wasn’t completely into it. I wasn’t one of those kids who dove right in and drank a whole six-pack every time he could. I was just looking to score a few beers and a little buzz. We had our times and slept them off, and then we got back in the car and headed home.

  Cars took you places. They took you away from home and then they brought you home. So did girls. The first girl I ever went with, at least any way I can count, was Mary Lou Manriquez. We walked together back and forth from school, and I made jokes about weird trees along the road or weird dogs in people’s yards or else I told her about things I had seen on Time for Beany. When I was eleven, I gave her a ring. It wasn’t anything fancy. It was a ring I found on the ground, but it was nice and shiny and I wanted her to have it. We walked together for another month, and then one afternoon without warning she gave the ring right back to me. “Don’t hurt me,” I said and ran home and cried.

  After Mary Lou I was even shier around girls. I liked to look at them, but I wasn’t brave enough to start a conversation. Sometimes they started talking to me or a louder kid would introduce us or pull me into a group. Once that happened they liked me fine. They told me secrets and I was a pretty good listener. In high school, when it became more important to be noticed in that way, I hung out with younger girls. I was friends with fourteen-year-olds when I was seventeen. I was friends with freshmen when I was a junior or a senior. That way I could make sure they would look up to me. We had proms and we had backward dances and I went to them, but I was never what anyone would call a convincing dancer. The way I showed interest when I really liked a girl was by writing something. For one pretty girl named Renee Osler, I wrote a poem called “Lavender.” It was just words in a notebook, but then Hite Morgan’s wife, Dorinda, helped me finish it as a song. We even cut a demo of it, but it never turned into an actual record.

  My first real date was with a girl named Carol Mountain. In my junior year in high school, I absolutely was out of my mind for Carol. She was beautiful: her hair, her eyes, her voice, her legs, everything. She knew that I had feelings for her. She was dating a kid named Gordon Marin, and when they split up Gordon asked me to take her to a party he was throwing. I guess he wanted to keep tabs on her or maybe make her jealous by showing off his new girl. Carol and I went to that party and became friendly enough that we started to spend more time together. I was over at her house more than she was over at mine. Her parents liked having me over because I was a polite kid. I could do rude pranks with other kids, but with people’s parents I was polite, and if I ever made a joke, it would be a joke that parents understood also. I guess I was a little old-fashioned in that way.

  I was old-fashioned in other ways, too. In my senior year of high school, I wrote a paper called “My Philosophy” where I talked about how I saw the world. “Being the first time I have taken a close look at my philosophy,” I wrote, “I find it hard to reveal my beliefs about living. I will try to give my general impression of life.” The beginning o
f the paper was about how I always wanted to get better: “The first thing that I find about myself is that I am constantly trying to improve myself.” I also had an idea of what kind of job I wanted: “I don’t want to settle with a mediocre life, but make a name for myself in my life’s work, which I hope will be music. The satisfaction of a place in the world seems well worth a sincere effort to me.” I talked about how my parents helped to develop my character, and then there was a long paragraph where I discussed my ideas about romance. “I have often wondered what the girl I marry will be like,” I wrote. “I want someone who will love me (of course), and who will reason with me and understand my way of living.” Those were all big parts of my life, and all things I thought were important to deal with honestly. But I was still so young. I couldn’t even see past high school.

  Right after high school graduation, I asked Carol out on a real date, and she said yes. We went to get some food and walked around. The whole time I was silent, almost shaking. I could barely even talk. I had so much to say that I had nothing to say. That’s how my brain worked back then, and how it sometimes still works. There are a million thoughts, but unless there are other voices and instruments to bring them all out, I end up with just a few words or no words at all. Carol was nice, but I could tell there was something keeping us apart. That was the only time I went out with her.