Runnin' with the Devil

by Noel Monk

  As it happened, Edward had no desire to discuss business; he simply wanted to conduct a private bitch fest about David. Nothing arose from this conversation that I had not heard previously, so none of it came as much of a surprise. But there was a persistent negativity, almost hatred, in his tone that suggested a shift in their relationship. Edward had long chosen a nonconfrontational path when dealing with David, but now he seemed more comfortable with the idea of standing up for himself. I admit that the image of a man curled up, childlike, on his manager’s lap, does not exactly support this notion, but again, if you knew Edward, you’d understand. He could be sensitive and sweet; he could also be churlish or childish; depending on his mood and the level and type of intoxicants in his bloodstream, he was also capable of significant rage. By this time one thing was clear: he had grown weary of playing second banana to Van Halen’s loudmouthed lead singer.

  “Fuckin’ guy just drives me nuts,” Edward said, repeatedly and in many different forms, that night.

  “Yes, I know, Ed. You’ve made that clear.”

  Later that night, when Jan returned, she told me all about her interesting night of cards. Jan liked Valerie and found her efforts to be treated as “just one of the girls” rather endearing and admirable. But, for a Hollywood superstar, Valerie was somewhat naive. She was surprised to learn, for example, that most of the other women had been on the tour since the beginning, whereas Valerie had just flown in for a few nights. Her biggest complaint?

  “How come you only get laid on the first night?” she asked. “You’d think these guys would be so horny they’d be dying to see us when we visit.”

  This observation was met mostly with blank stares and suppressed laughter. None of the other women around the table could say what they were really thinking: Well, maybe that’s because Ed’s fucking a different girl every night when you’re not here. What are you, dizzy or something?

  But Valerie was nothing if not a spirited member of the tribe when she joined us. The ladies’ card games were buoyed by alcohol and cocaine, and the TV star partook of both. Cocaine, she explained, helped suppress her appetite.

  “And Ed likes me skinny.”

  Meanwhile, back in my room, between harangues about David, Edward kept telling me how much he loved me. Here’s the thing about a drunk on cocaine: they tend to be a bit repetitious, and so Ed would repeat the usual complaints about David, then give me a big hug and a smile and tell me how grateful he was for my work on behalf of the band. This happened two or three times a week during the first few months of the tour, and after a while I learned to tune it out. But there was one night relatively early on when he said something that piqued my interest.

  “I love you, Noel,” he said, smiling drunkenly. “You know that, right?”

  “Sure, Edward . . . I love you, too.”

  He reached up and tousled my hair like a child. Indeed, sometimes, if he was sufficiently shitfaced, Edward would even refer to me as Daddy. Jan would just look at him and laugh.

  “He’s at it again.”

  But this time he said something unexpected, and it gave me pause.

  “I don’t care what Alex thinks,” Edward slurred. “He can go fuck himself. I always want you to be my manager.”

  Now, given Edward’s level of inebriation, I wasn’t about to interrogate him as to the root of this observation, but considering the level of turmoil within the band, and my ongoing status as a manager without a long-term contract, it did have a sobering effect.

  Not on Edward, obviously, but on me. I couldn’t help but think, My time might be getting short here.

  But what could I do? I was far too busy to waste time obsessing about private conversations that might have taken place between the brothers Van Halen, especially if those conversations were fueled by drugs and alcohol, which they most certainly were. Interestingly, Jan had gotten rather close to Alex during the 1984 tour, which gave me a level of trust and comfort that might have been misleading. One thing I know for sure is that Alex’s slide into addiction was every bit as disturbing as Edward’s. While he might not have enjoyed cocaine quite as much as his brother, Alex drank like few people I have ever seen. Other drugs get most of the attention, but alcohol, in excess, will beat the shit out of you as thoroughly as heroin, cocaine, or anything else.

  It sure as hell did a number on Alex.

  It’s always hard to pinpoint the exact moment when you recognize that someone has more than just a casual relationship with drugs or alcohol, or even when it becomes apparent that they have tumbled into the abyss of full-fledged addiction; as with going broke, it happens slowly . . . and then all at once. Remember, I hadn’t spent that much time with the band during the months of writing and recording 1984. I had my suspicions about the extent of their deterioration based on phone calls and meetings and an abundance of otherwise erratic behavior, but it wasn’t until we got out on the road together that I was able to witness it firsthand.

  There was one moment relatively early in the tour—a month at the most—when Alex came into my room. It was 9:30 in the morning, which in itself was something of a surprise, as the boys of Van Halen were not generally morning people (David being the occasional outlier in this regard). Jan and I were not even up yet, but Alex’s persistent knocking roused us from sleep. I opened the door to discover Al fully dressed and full of energy.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go shopping.”

  Now, as I said, Al and I sometimes would venture off together on sightseeing and shopping excursions, but not usually first thing in the morning. He had also become friendly with Jan, and sometimes, when I wasn’t so inclined, the two of them would go off together while I stayed behind and took care of business. This would be one of those days.

  “Al, I’m not really up for it,” I said.

  He waved a hand dismissively and looked at my wife.

  “Guess it’s just you and me, Jan. What do you say?”

  Jan was usually up for a shopping excursion, and she didn’t mind Al’s company, so she agreed. As she stood to excuse herself and get dressed, Al walked casually to the minibar and popped open the door. He rummaged around for a moment, withdrew two small bottles of vodka, and drank each one in a single gulp. Jan saw this as she walked away and gave me a backward glance of disbelief. What she did not see, over the course of the next half hour, was Al repeating this ritual with another half dozen little bottles of booze: whiskey, gin, scotch, and a couple beers, too. He must have put away the equivalent of ten shots and two beers in a remarkably small window of time. By ten o’clock in the morning, he was completely shitfaced. And yet he seemed no more or less impaired than he had when he knocked on our hotel room door. Having grown up in an alcoholic family, I recognized this as a sign of maintenance: Al had reached the point where he was drunk most of his waking hours, and except when he drank to extraordinary excess (which he sometimes did), it was hard to differentiate between drunk and sober. Maybe he’d been up all night drinking; more likely, he had woken with a ferocious hangover and used my minibar to beat back the symptoms of withdrawal. I presume his minibar had already been drained. Regardless, this little show demonstrated to me that Al had escalated from heavy drinker to full-blown alcoholic.

  And now he was about to head out for a day of shopping with my wife.

  “You know what, Al?” I said. “Why don’t you take a bodyguard with you, just to be on the safe side?”

  He scoffed. “Aw, come on, Noel. I don’t need a fucking bodyguard. I can take care of myself.”

  “I’m sure you can, but Jan is going to be with you, too, and I’ll feel better if you have some protection. Okay?”

  Grudgingly, Al agreed. He and Jan left the hotel in good spirits, and I went back to bed.

  In those days—a good decade before the advent of cell phones—we often carried walkie-talkies to facilitate communication. I had given one to Al before he left the hotel. An hour later the walkie-talkie on my nightstand crackled to life.

 
“Noel, you there?” He seemed agitated.

  “Yes, Al. Everything okay?”

  “Nah, we got a little problem.”

  “Like what? You run out of alcohol?”

  Al did not laugh, and his silence provoked a knot in my stomach. With Van Halen, a little problem might indeed be minuscule. Or it could be catastrophic. There was no way of knowing. Al, however, was not prone to hyperbole, and the fact that Jan was with him made me nervous.

  “Seriously, Al. What’s the matter?”

  “We’re in this shoe store,” Al began. “Everything was fine, but then all of a sudden someone recognized me, and now there’s a huge crowd outside the store. We can’t get out, and your bodyguard can’t clear the way. There’s too many people.”

  “Okay, just sit tight. Tell me exactly where you are and I’ll take care of it.”

  I sent down a team of eight security guards to clear a path out of the store and safely guide Al and Jan to freedom. A short time later Jan returned to the hotel—alone.

  “Where’s Al?” I asked.

  Jan shrugged. “I don’t know. He said he wanted to go drinking, asked me to go along.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him it was a little too early for me.”

  That was life with Alex in 1984. I don’t know what was worse: the fact that he wanted to “go drinking” at noon, or the fact that this supposedly indicated a starting point for the day of imbibing, when in fact he had already consumed more alcohol than most people could manage in an entire day. For Al, that minibar session was merely an appetizer; it didn’t even count.

  Al got away with this behavior for a couple reasons. One, he was Edward’s brother, and the band bore their last name, so it would have taken an extraordinarily level of incompetence or some other egregious offense to get Al kicked out of the band. Frankly, I can’t even imagine what that might have been. Two, Al somehow managed to show up and do his job every night, regardless of how much he’d been drinking. Was he a great drummer? That’s debatable. But he was certainly a very good drummer, and that he was able to sustain that level of performance, while drinking nonstop, seven days a week, nearly every waking hour, is rather remarkable.

  People would notice sometimes that Al drank beer throughout every Van Halen performance. It almost became part of the show—Al pouring Schlitz Malt Liquor all over himself and his drum kit, and then its spraying and splashing all around him as he flailed away. It looked great and was definitely in keeping with the party atmosphere of a Van Halen concert. And what the hell—it was just beer, right? What hardly anyone outside of Van Halen’s inner circle realized was that this was the soberest part of the day for Alex. Before and after the show, backstage, on the bus or in the hotel, malt liquor was mixed with hard liquor—and the occasional hit of weed or coke.

  Sometimes, the morning after a show, Al would joke about having almost no memory of how he had played or even the crowd’s response. And yet, despite performing in a virtual blackout, Al rarely fucked up. Unlike Edward, he wasn’t an innovator; he was merely extremely competent. But Al remained competent until the very end, even as his mind and mood began to fray. He was like his father: a fully functional alcoholic.

  Still, there were some genuinely weird and disturbing moments related to Al’s drinking. Like Edward, Al periodically came to my room at night to chat with Jan and me. But whereas Ed was happy to curl up in my lap and tell me how much he loved me or just complain about David, Al would sometime appear to be losing touch with reality.

  “I’ve been seeing things,” he told us one night. “Crazy shit.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  He hesitated, as if he knew that there would be no taking back the information he was about to reveal.

  “What is it, Al? You can tell me.”

  He nodded. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I see things coming out of the walls.”

  “What kind of things?” I asked. Now he had my attention.

  “Penises,” Al replied flatly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “Big penises. Giant fucking penises.”

  Jan and I looked at each other. Neither of us laughed, because, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, there was nothing funny about it. Al wasn’t kidding. In the moment, he had seen and believed that there were giant penises coming out of the wall, and I don’t doubt for a minute that this hallucination was frightening. Even more disturbing was the revelation—again, shared late at night in our hotel room—that Al would sometimes go back to his parents’ house and climb into bed between them.

  While clutching a rifle.

  “I just want to be safe,” he’d explain.

  Was this true? Did it really happen? I have no way of knowing. I can say only that Al told us it happened, and that was enough to make me worry about not only his safety but the safety of those around him. I would envision Alex, at twenty-nine years of age, creeping into his parents’ bedroom, armed with a loaded gun, and lying there wide awake, prepared to fend off all types of interlopers—including giant penises.

  This was the drummer for one of the biggest bands in the world: a paranoid, delusional alcoholic. What could possibly go wrong?

  Quite a bit, as it turned out.

  Here’s another story, this one related by my wife, who withheld the details until after I had parted ways with the band.

  We were bouncing across Canada in April ’84. There were two big jumps in that portion of the tour, so we flew first-class rather than taking our usual fleet of buses. Jan and I were sitting together, with Alex and Edward in the row behind us. As usual, cocktails were served while we sat on the tarmac, and Alex wasted no time in getting started. After we’d been in the air for a while, Edward asked Jan if they could switch seats.

  “I need to talk with Noel about some business,” he explained.

  Jan said sure, no problem. This sort of thing happened all the time, and Jan was forever gracious and accommodating when it came to the demands Van Halen placed upon my time. Besides, she didn’t mind sitting next to Alex. As I said, they would often go shopping or sightseeing together, and despite his descent into alcoholism, Jan genuinely liked Al and found him good company on the road. For whatever reason, they just clicked, and had for as long as they’d known each other.

  So I had no cause for concern when Jan slid into the seat next to Al. For the next couple hours, while Ed and I talked business and music—and he quietly complained about David—Jan and Al chatted behind us. I didn’t pay any attention to their conversation, but as Jan reported later, it took an unpleasant turn sometime around Al’s sixth or seventh Bloody Mary, when Al began telling dirty jokes. Now, Jan was hardly a prude—she was a New York girl, raised in Queens, and could give as good as she got when jousting with the boys; you can’t spend the better part of a year on the road with Van Halen and not develop a thick skin about carnal matters. Still, there is a line you don’t cross, and Al should have known exactly where that line existed. But if alcohol can make you see giant penises, then I suppose it can trick you into thinking it’s okay to tell disgusting jokes to your manager’s wife and then put a sloppy move on her.

  One joke became two, and two became four, and Al began slurring the punch lines in a way that Jan found troubling. It wasn’t just that Al was drunk and inappropriate; he seemed to be hitting on her. At first, Jan hoped that she was mistaken, but eventually the jokes got dirtier and Al began to lean into her, and finally, out of the blue, he looked Jan in the eye and said, “You know, I would sure like to fuck you.”

  Okay, let’s put the most generous possible spin on this and presume that Al was too shitfaced to know what he was doing, and simply hit the autopilot switch—the one that told him world-famous rock stars could talk trash to an attractive woman, and it would yield the desired result. Let’s presume, also, that he was so fucked up that he forgot the identity of the person with whom he was flirting (if you can call it that). You know—the wife of his band’s mana
ger, who just happened to be sitting only a few feet away from him.

  Even if you give Al the benefit of the doubt on every level, this was preposterously stupid and inappropriate behavior. Tough girl that she was, though, Jan tried to defuse a potentially catastrophic situation on her own.

  “Don’t be silly, Al. I’m married to your manager,” Jan said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Al’s response was a drunken and dismissive wave, followed by, “I don’t give a fuck who you’re married to.”

  At that point Jan knew there was no shutting Al down. He was too far gone. She excused herself, returned to my row, and asked Edward if she could have her seat back.

  “Sure, we’re all done here,” Edward said politely. He got up, went back to his seat, and Jan sat down next down to me. I had no idea there was anything wrong, no inkling of the exchange that had taken place between my wife and my band’s drummer. Looking back on it sometime later, though, I could remember that Jan seemed shaken in some way. She sat down and took my hand in hers.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  She squeezed my hand tightly. “Yeah, just a little motion sickness. I’ll be fine.”

  Nearly a year later, after my tenure with the band had ended, Jan finally told me this story. I was neither surprised nor particularly angry; by then I had learned to expect the worst from Al. I just felt bad for my wife. Not only had she been badly disrespected but the perpetrator was someone she considered a friend. Al and Jan had spent quite a lot of time together on that tour, often hanging out backstage before the show. Jan had always considered theirs a strictly platonic relationship. She was married, after all—and to the band’s manager. Her friendship with Al seemed safe, but there is no such thing when you are dealing with someone who has not only spent the past five years getting laid a couple hundred times a year but who is also an alcoholic.

  “I guess it’s true what they say about men,” Jan said. “They can only be your friend for one reason—and it has nothing to do with friendship.”