After the Sydney show, a young girl wearing an Asian-style dress comes up with a copy of the photo for me to autograph. I ask her name and in a deep, resonant voice, he says, “Roger.” I’m a little thrown by this but not as much as I am soon after when the predator (meaning me) becomes the prey (me, again).
Zoot is taking whatever steady work we can get, and one of these not-so-stellar gigs is opening for the Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour as it winds its way through the theaters of the Australian countryside. The pay isn’t great, and we sleep consecutive nights in (a) an old abandoned bank’s basement vault (no lie); (b) a motel (all of us in one room) crawling with fleas and various other biting things (some of them probably life-threatening, considering this is Australia); (c) a fan’s parents’ house—one of us has to “give it up” to the fan for the privilege of a good night’s sleep—and (d) our van on top of all the amplifiers. But we are playing music for the people, and that is all we want to do.
The guy who owns the rights to the Magical Mystery Tour film in Oz is a nice enough fellow and he loves us, so when the tour is over he invites me to his home to check out other Beatles stuff he owns. I am pretty naïve (still am), and when I arrive at his house one afternoon, he shoves a drink in my hand and takes me upstairs. “Cool,” I say as we climb the stairs, “I can’t wait to see what you’ve got.”
What I think I’ll be seeing and what he’s intending to show me are two vastly different things. Up in his bedroom he pushes me into a corner and starts kissing me and unbuttoning my shirt. It is so totally unexpected that I don’t know what to do and I freeze. I don’t want to appear unhip or uptight (it is the ’60s, after all), plus I really want to see the Beatles stuff. But after a couple of seconds, I get my head together, push him away, exit the bedroom, and catch the next bus back home. Yep, still no car—in fact, I haven’t even bothered to learn to drive yet.
After that experience I begin to rethink my approach to girls/women. This guy made me feel like—well, quite frankly, some sex object. Another possible lesson. By all means have sex, but don’t be a Neanderthal about it. It doesn’t slow me down, but I think I’m a little kinder to the next succubus I meet.
I sometimes have sex with several different girls in a night. At a party in a bedroom with one, then in the van outside with another, and again, a knee-trembler with a third by the back door of her parents’ house as we drop her off for the night. Having as much sex as I am now, the STDs are coming faster and furiouser. I might as well walk into “The Clinic” backward, with my jeans lowered. The first time I get an antibiotic shot in my ass cheek for the clap, I pass out right there in the doctor’s office. I wake up with my pants around my ankles and the nurse holding a long silver syringe, not really smiling but, well, yes, smiling. And we should have bought stock in the company that made A-200—the “crabs” cure of the day.
Although we (the band) are all screwing our brains out as often as any citizen of the Colonies, we still have to prove our masculinity to some of the male members of the audience, mainly because (a) the girls love us, (b) we are relatively famous, and (c) we used to wear pink and they can’t get over it!! This last one is hard to argue against, honestly, and I often find myself siding with the guys who want to kick our asses. And kick them they try. We get so harassed and are goaded into so many fights after gigs that we begin to load the equipment into the van with microphone stands—a long, solid piece of metal can be a good deterrent—in our hands. And yes, even though we are a “name” band, we have to set up and break down our own gear. A bit of a buzz-kill when you’re trying to be all starlike and special.
One night, a gang of these beer-swilling numb-nuts actually makes it into our dressing room (by virtue of the useless venue security) and start swinging. Girls are screaming, blood is flying, and I crack one of them in the head so hard with a bottle that I would have caused brain damage if he’d only had a brain to begin with. Beeb ends up in the local emergency room getting stitches in a gash over one eye, and the rest of us are treated for assorted bruises and cuts. I don’t see any of the guys who launched the attack in there, so I assume we got the worst of it.
A lot of the time there’s no security at all at the gigs we play, and fights break out in the crowd while we’re performing. We can see the skirmish work its way through the audience until one of the rowdies gets knocked out or throws up. If it starts heading our way, we all move a little closer to our mic stands or unhook our guitars, which, when gripped by the end of the neck, turn into formidable defensive weapons. We wind up bashing a few drunken heads with our beloved guitars from time to time.
I am sick of the shit we’re getting from the blues-rock crowd. We can play rings around most of the bands the in-crowd thinks are cool, so I look for a way to lift us up. The songs I’ve written thus far, the gigs we’ve played, and the press we’ve gotten haven’t done that. So I work on a heavy, guitar-based interpretation of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s a version I think Hendrix might play. I take it to the band, thinking they’ll blow it off as too long and too weird, but they love it. At this point, records on the radio are all short and velvety-smooth with no rough edges. We go into the studio and cut the song “live” with my guitar feeding back and squealing and all kinds of noise, ambience, and uncontrolled junk on the track. It is actually, now that I to listen it, quite proto-punk.
Our friends, other artists, radio people, and even our bloodsucking manager (sorry again, Jeff) think the song is rubbish and suggest we go in and cut a gentler song about the “new generation” and how the times are a-changing. We like what we’ve done and ask for it to be released anyway. It goes to Number 1 and is the biggest hit we will ever have. I still get token residuals from the sale of that record. I learn another lesson: Don’t listen to all the people who say they know the path you should be taking. They are most likely full of shit.
Then one morning while taking a shower and giving my hair its monthly wash (eeuuww!), I feel a lump on my skull. “Oh, God, no,” I think. “Oh, God, yes,” my fingertips say as they feel around the small nodule on the right side of my head. I am sure this is it. I’ve got brain cancer. It’s over before it’s even begun. I drag my sorry ass to the local doctor who looks at it and says things like “Hmmm” and “Well …” but not much else. “I think we better get this X-rayed,” he concedes finally. Back in those days there is no such thing as immediate test results. For any type of analysis you have to bloody well wait ’til they are damn ready to give them to you. I leave the doctor’s office absolutely certain I have only months to live. My old friend depression, my Darkness, comes winging his way back into my life in a heartbeat, like he’s been sitting off to the side somewhere waiting for my eventual arrival back on earth. He says to me, “Looks like it could be cancer, Boyo.”
Because of the complex nature of depression, it still manages to weave itself in and out of my existence. Sometimes the Darkness slips in at discernible moments—like this one, when I’m faced with my mortality and possibly my untimely demise. At other times my Darkness descends seemingly out of nowhere, without any real triggering event. No one really knows what to call my moods at this point. Even me. I think maybe it’s just part of being an “arty” kid. Weren’t all my favorite writers, artists, and musicians in the same leaky boat I now find myself in? Poe, Hemingway, van Gogh, Wilde, Beethoven … I get to write and play music, and the trade-off is that every now and then I feel the urge to off myself. Maybe it’s a fair trade. I can accept that. It’s give-and-take.
We’re flying to Adelaide the next week to open for the ’60s British band the Hollies, and the rest of the band is ecstatic. We’ve all loved them since we were little tykes. But people keep asking me what’s wrong. I’m unusually quiet, and dark circles are starting to form under my eyes. I can’t eat and what little meat I have on my bones is melting away fast. I’m not sleeping, either. We hear the Hollies being interviewed on the radio, and the DJ plays our version of “Eleanor Rigby” to see what they t
hink. They hate it. “That’s crap!” they say publicly and in unison. The guys in Zoot are crushed. I feel like it’s just one more log on my funeral pyre and don’t care either way.
About three hours before we’re to go onstage and open for the bad-mouthing, judgmental fucking Hollies, my dear old mum calls from Melbourne to tell me my test results from the X-rays have come in. “It is a bone tumor,” she begins ominously—my heart sinks—“but it’s nothing to worry about,” she adds brightly. “The doctor says just to keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn’t get any bigger.” “Mum, couldn’t you have said that last bit first?” I think but don’t say. I’m all clear!! I am good. I literally fly onto the stage that night, where we proceed to play the worst show we’ve ever played. I break four out of the six strings on my guitar, trip ass-over-Scuttleboom during “Eleanor Rigby”—our big song—and have the best time of my life!
Not long after that I turn twenty-one during my tour of duty with Zoot, and what a birthday it is. In the middle of the night, on our way back from a gig, our van breaks down and we’re trapped in the smelly thing, under the pouring rain, miles from anywhere, deep in the Australian bush. That’s what I love about being in a band: we’re all in it together, for better or for worse. Kind of like a really good, open marriage. We crack a warm beer and toast my twenty-one years on this earth, with nary a sign of a malignant brain tumor. It is not the worst place I could be at that point in my life. It’s almost poignant, for crying out loud. And it is fucking awesome to be alive!
CHAPTER SEVEN
FAME AND FAMINE
IN HOSPITAL
1970–1972
When I turn twenty-one, my dad is fifty-one. Now, in retrospect, he seems like a youngster to me. For a while I’ve been vaguely aware that he spends some days at home, when he is “sick.” I’m too busy with my life to really grasp what is happening. My mum takes care of it. I later find out that for fifteen years he’s had a “bad stomach” and has been convinced that it’s stomach cancer. But he would never go to a doctor to check it out, because he might find that he’s correct. So he occasionally has miserable days when he can’t even get out of bed.
I’m home alone with him on the morning when he collapses in the bathroom. I hear a thump and pry open the bathroom door to see him lying unconscious on the carpeted floor. My dad is a very masculine, virile, in-charge kind of guy, so seeing him fallen, naked and helpless like this scares me. I get him up and into his bed, then call the doctor and my mother. An ambulance arrives and takes him to hospital with my mum riding shotgun, and I wave from the front door thinking it will all be fine. He’ll be home soon.
We all go in to see him that night and he’s sitting up in the bed, smiling and looking quite dashing with his disheveled gray hair and hospital jammies. We are told it’s just an ulcer and that if he’d only gone to see a doctor earlier it could have been taken care of a long time ago; he wouldn’t have had to suffer all those years of pain. There is some urgency to the situation now, because the ulcer has attached itself to the major artery of his stomach, but they’re watching it, they say, and will get him into surgery as soon as a slot opens up on the schedule. I’ve never seen my dad in this type of debilitated condition before—he has an IV in his arm. Despite his ever-present humor, he seems fragile somehow—and it freaks me out a little. At his bedside that night, I feel woozy and pass out for the second time in my life. As the nurses are bringing me back around, I hear him joking.
“Must be all that hair on his head made him top-heavy.” We laugh in relief, kiss him—my dad is never one to stop kissing his boys, no matter how old they are—and head home feeling relieved that he’s in good hands. We’re all sleeping soundly when the phone rings at 3 a.m. Mum picks up the receiver and a man’s voice on the other end asks if he can speak to the eldest male in the family. We know something is very wrong.
“What? What is it? What’s wrong?” my old mum pleads, but the disembodied voice on the other end of the line is an old-world Aussie male, doing things by the book, and he won’t tell a mere woman anything. He needs to speak to a “man.” If I knew who he was today I would rip his black heart out and feed it to him.
My brother Mike gets on the phone and we hear him say, “Yes … yes … all right. We’ll be right there.” By his stoic face we know things are not good. For my mum, the years peel away. Old memories rush, like bubbles from a drowning diver, to the surface. Time freezes, and in the background, our mum whimpers like a puppy—she is a fifteen-year-old girl hearing again the news that her parents are dead—and she is alone.
My brother hangs up the phone, turns, and delivers the news we already know. “Dad died,” he manages. “They got his heart going again, but the doctor doesn’t know if he’ll survive.”
Mike is told that the ulcer on Dad’s artery had burst and blood had literally poured out of him, stopping his heart. A visiting doctor, who just happened to be in the ward at the time, saw all the blood and rushed to his bedside to give him CPR. Our man had been dead for fifteen minutes before they finally got his heart going again. They’ve taken him into surgery. They doubt that he’ll survive, and if he does, he will most certainly have massive brain damage.
We all go into survival mode. Everything shuts down, save that which we need to do to get to hospital. I don’t even remember the ride, in the dead of night, to be with him, our father. We sit huddled together in a small, dim waiting room for the news that will change our lives forever. Just the three of us. Like it has always been, in a new house or in a new land. It feels like he might just be away working, as usual. Hours pass.
Finally at daybreak a doctor comes out to tell us that they’ve managed to save our father’s life, but we shouldn’t get our hopes up, as the amount of brain damage is severe. The doctor seems a trifle inconvenienced. Is he upset that he couldn’t have done more for our wretched little family or that he’d blown that putt on the ninth hole this morning? It’s hard to tell. He certainly doesn’t say much else to us. So we wait to see what is left of our good man.
We walk into the hospital ward. Dad is sitting up in bed in the hard morning light, a tracheotomy tube sticking through a hole in his throat. His face is slack, hair combed all wrong. His eyes are unfocused, like a baby’s. No movement grabs his attention.
“Hi, Norm, it’s us, love.” My mum’s voice catches in her throat. She is a strong woman but this is too much.
He doesn’t respond in any way to our feeble attempts to bring him back. “You look good, Dad.” “Are you hungry?” Even the nurses chime in. “He’s quite the ladies’ man with that silver hair of his.” Nothing.
The word “vegetable” enters my head. I hate the sound of it, but it goes round and round like an echo, and the more I try to push it out, the louder it gets. Twelve hours ago he was joking with us about my fainting spell at the foot of his bed. Now, we don’t know where he’s gone, but he sure isn’t here with us. We stay all day and there’s no change. Does he even know he’s alive anymore? At last, completely spent, we head home and pull sleeping bags into the living room. No one wants to sleep alone tonight. I wake up at 2 a.m. and hear my mum sobbing softly, helplessly. It’s real. It’s actually real.
What the hell do we do?
Dad stays in hospital for a couple of weeks until he’s strong enough to come home. No improvement, though. We sit him in his chair in the living room. He looks like a big dad-mannequin. Where did Norman James Springthorpe go?
The first reaction we ever get from him is a few weeks later, after the new Zoot album is released. Mum shows it to him, and believe it or not, his eyes suddenly light up when he sees it. A bone-white, crooked, and shaky finger lifts slowly from his lap and points to my image on the front of the album jacket. We all yell and cheer like we’ve won the freaking lottery. He is in there still! We just have to help him find his way back out, through all the blown fuses and broken wiring.
And so we take turns sitting with him and helping him rediscover himself. He’s like a lit
tle kid who knows he should be doing better and can’t figure out why he’s not. He begins to remember our names, but he doesn’t know who anyone else in his world is. I sit with him in the afternoons out in the backyard, as he writes down the names of his best friend, the friend’s wife, and their daughter, trying to figure out who is who in his splintered life. The words come out of his pen in a thin, trembling script, completely unlike his old handwriting. The conversation goes like this:
“George is my friend and he’s married to Mich, and …” he says uncertainly, consulting his fluttering notes.
“No, Dad, George is married to Nan.”
“Right, right. George is married to Mich …”
“No, no—Mich is their daughter. Nan is married to George.”
“I’m … so … stupid,” and he hits his sweet, scrambled head with both clenched fists. “What’s … happened … to … me?” He knows that something has. We tell him his heart stopped for a short while and that his mind has gotten a little forgetful, but that we’re with him and will help him through it. My mum is with him the day he remembers his own mother has died.
“My mum’s dead?” he asks incredulously, and his voice is like that of a little boy. Fifteen years have passed since his mother’s death, but he cries and cries, reliving it again, because, God knows, going through it all once wasn’t enough!
I ask him, a long time later, if he recalls anything from the fifteen or so minutes during the time his heart had lain silent and unmoving in his breast. He says that he didn’t know if it was a dream or not, but he remembers walking through a garden with beautiful flowers every- where and people were smiling, working the earth. He asked them where he was and why they were smiling, but no one answered him. They just continued to smile, tending to their plants. Years later, my aunt Helen has a similar uncanny view of life on the other side. John, my father’s older brother, died early, leaving his wife Helen alone. Twenty years later when it’s her turn to go, she says suddenly, pointing to the foot of her bed, “Oh look. There’s Johnny,” and passes quietly into the next world.
Late, Late at Night Page 13