Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life in Rock

by Stephen Pearcy

  None of it made sense unless you were coked to the gills, which, of course, everyone was, except me—as everyone knows, I only had a vial of krell around for the girls who needed a wake-up call. There were giant bowls of blow everywhere you looked in those days. My jaw tightens just thinking about it.

  The ’80s was my decade, but I refuse to take responsibility for all that went on. Scott Baio produced an album of soft-rock songs, Jason Bateman guest-starred on Win, Lose or Draw. Gary Busey burst out of bathrooms at parties in Beverly Hills, eyes bulging and his jaw tighter than a running back’s. Michael J. Fox boinked Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Jessica Parker dated Nicolas Cage, Nicolas Cage got down with Uma Thurman, Uma Thurman ran into the arms of Don Johnson, Don Johnson dived into Barbra Streisand. Nikki Sixx dated Vanity, Prince’s creation. She was a light-skinned diva with hair like a glam rocker and a freebase habit that would have alarmed Richard Pryor. Millions of eyeballs watched both Nikki and Vanity on television, creating a power couple comparable to Sean Penn and Madonna, or Slash and Traci Lords. Robbin Crosby dated Apollonia.

  Cocaine was never my drug, but I might have been the only one who felt that way. (I dabbled here and there. It made me sleep more than hyped me up.) George Clinton, on the other hand, did so much blow in the ’80s that he spoke in tongues. Rick James burnt a chick with a crack pipe—or so we hear. Stevie Nicks had a hole in her nose the size of an eyeball. The only sober musician for miles around may have been young Tiffany, whose ballad “I Think We’re Alone Now” topped the pop charts for months in 1987. The song played constantly. You couldn’t get away from it.

  We were recording artists of the Reagan era, crafting power chords, American music, earning platinum albums and untold millions of dollars. We were flailing around like Godzillas, whipping our immense tails, destroying everything in our path. We shoveled painkillers down the hatch, chased them with domestic beer, and flipped over our cassette tapes. It was the ’80s, and the smell of money was in the air.

  BY THE TIME I WAS ELEVEN, I was a teenager, smoking, drinking, getting kicked out of Catholic school for the minor offense of groping some girl behind the gym on a perfect L.A. night in 1968. You might say I was an Instant Teenager. And I stayed that way forever: also, Constant Teenager.

  After being expelled from Catholic school, the only possible solution was Orville Wright Junior High School, located in Westchester, near the airport, LAX. Andy Holgwen came with me. We added to our posse Victor Mamanna (of the Alice Cooper poster), Mike Hartigan, and Dennis O’Neill, a good-natured blond surf kid who would slowly evolve, over the next few years, into the kind of bell-bottom-wearing, bong-smoking, tapestry-digging hippie pothead upon which the foundation of the stonerrific 1970s were built.

  We were a tight gang of hooligans, young punks obsessed with Schwinn Stingray bikes and the idea of copping trim—or, more realistically, at least an ass squeeze here and there. We lived for speed and joy and escape, and the maximum amount of freedom a twelve-year-old could grab. We raced to school, to the beach after school. We pushed and cursed relentlessly, pretending to be older than we were.

  “Watch out, man, move to the side. You go too slow, fag!”

  “How am I a fag? Your hair goes down to your ass!”

  Cars existed only for us to fuck with. We weaved recklessly through traffic on our bikes, dodging buses, flipping off pedestrians, ignoring the furious honks of the cars around us. At lunch, we’d sneak off campus, haul ass over to the mall, and engage in shoplifting.

  Backyard parties were the cool thing to do on weekends. The five of us congregated at every gala, wearing Levi’s and tennis shoes, smoking shitty joints and eating crossroads, a type of amphetamine popular at the time, referring to the scored cross mark on the tablet. California was a polluted hell at the time, but in Playa del Rey or in Venice, at some rich kid’s place, with Deep Purple or Cream warbling over the stereo system, soft breezes blowing on the back of your neck, the pleasure of being alive was undeniable.

  My dad was out of the picture. Tired of the constant fighting and abusive behavior, my mom had eventually mustered up enough nerve to leave him. He lived out of a seedy motel near the airport, laboring at killing himself in one never-ending, horribly painstaking, perfect smack binge. My sister and I visited him there in his bunker a few times, celebrated a grim birthday in his room, complete with cake and soda pop.

  “Blow out the candles, Stephen,” my dad instructed me. His face was swollen and miserable. The cake was frosted elaborately.

  I took in an enormous breath. My cheeks swelled as I prepared to huff the flames into oblivion.

  “Stop playing around and just do it already,” he muttered.

  Deflated, I just let the breath wheeze out of my mouth.

  We didn’t linger for long. My mother yanked us out soon after the cake was cut. My dad gave me a weak hug right before I left, and that was basically it—forever. He overdosed a couple of months later. My mom lied about it, told us it was a heart attack. I’d be an adult before I would find out how he really died—and what he went through; and the predilections I would eventually inherit.

  Sometimes she asked me if I missed him. I would always answer yes, and once in a while, I even meant it. But for the most part, what the hell was there to miss? The guy’s main contribution to my life was tearing the skin off my face with his enormous knuckles. Ask my brother and sisters if they missed him. Although maybe not my sister Debbie, because I still have a memory of her holding up a serrated steak knife at him the last time he laid into my mom, sobbing her eyes out, screaming, “Get the FUCK away from her or I’ll gut you!”

  Without our father, we were on our own, but it didn’t feel bad. I’ve always been good at being alone. My mother, however, wanted a partner, and after mourning the loss of my father, she started dating a guy named Jim, a good-looking dude her own age, kind of a playboy type. He was a man’s man who hunted elk and had a thick brown mustache.

  When I was fourteen, I became obsessed with drag racing. Everywhere we moved, through my early teens, it seemed there was always a dragster or funny car parked nearby. Through a set of strange coincidences, I managed to insinuate myself onto a pit crew for one of the best racers in Southern California, Walt Rhoades, a kind man who owned a ragged dog that ate lit cigarettes.

  “Stephen,” Walt instructed me, “check this out.”

  Walt dropped his smoke on the pavement. His dog attacked the butt, extinguished it with his muzzle, then slobbered the cigarette into his mouth. He sucked furiously, swallowed the tobacco, and finally coughed out the filter. The whole operation took no more than five seconds in total.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  “Perfect animal, right?” Walt agreed, nodding.

  Racing had it all: danger, noise, speed, and style. Each day I dreamed of nitromethane and methanol, and of becoming the nation’s youngest Top Fuel drag racer. I was obsessed with every detail: the hammering sound, the shrieking metal, the blasting tailpipes, the parachutes on the cars. Walt took me to every racetrack in Southern California. It was before the days of semis, plush coaches, and the multimillion dollar race deals we see today.

  “Here comes Pearcy staging his Top Fuel car!” I’d whisper to myself, at night, in bed, entertaining myself by creating intricate fantasy races.

  My mother met Walt and approved of him sufficiently, allowing him to take me to Indianapolis with him when he raced at the nationals—the biggest, most important race on the circuit. The Super Bowl of drag racing. The morning we were set to take off, my mother walked me out to the curb.

  “Make sure to eat, Stephen. And don’t let those damn cars trap you and roll on top of you.”

  “Mom,” I said, embarrassed, “I know my way around a racetrack.”

  “Watch out for him, Walter.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Pearcy.” Walt tossed his half-smoked cigarette on the ground and his dog fell on it with relish.

  “What is that . . . dog doing?” my mother asked, horrifie
d.

  “Breakfast,” said Walt.

  I recall the races perfectly: the earsplitting sound, and the pure deafening adrenaline created by the churning and gunning that went on for an eternity before the starting green, our pit crew so alert with nervous excitement we were higher than any man could get on amphetamines, swarming Walt in his space-suit helmet and goggles, inspecting every inch of the anteater-snouted dragster, moving in perfect synch, reading one another’s body language with total clarity. I was the guy who poured the bleach for the burnout; I was the guy who poured the used oil against the fence. And I was loving every minute of it.

  When I came back that summer, my mother moved us down to San Diego, where Jim had a house. I wasn’t anxious to go with her: I had my racing dream to follow—to become one of the youngest drivers on the circuit. I loved L.A. But I had no choice in the matter.

  On my very first day of school at Clairemont High—which, a decade later, would serve as the model for Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High—I arrived in the parking lot early, nervous, a meek, lonely, new-kid sensation inhabiting my body like a flu bug.

  “HEY!” came a voice. “You want a beer, man?”

  A dude with a thin blond mustache and a waterfall of dirty hair offered me a translucent plastic cup full of amber liquid. At his hip stood a small pony keg.

  I stared at him, confused. “Thanks, not right now?” It was seven thirty in the morning.

  Before I moved to San Diego, I thought I was a pretty competent pothead. But these Clairemont kids just blew me out of the water. There was no roach too small to smoke, no pill too speedy to pop, no vodka too cheap to guzzle at Clairemont High. At lunch, around the flagpole, blossoming concentric circles of stoners passed an endless procession of joints around and around. Pretty, braless girls in faded bell-bottom jeans pulled enormous bongloads in broad daylight, coughing up a storm, awash in the pungent scent of marijuana. There were ten-dollar bags of weed, four fingers deep, for sale. Uppers, downers, acid—anything went. Even keg parties in front of the school before class.

  For a good long time, I wasn’t sure what the fuck was going on.

  I was fine with going to school with a bunch of deviant partiers; given enough time, I would probably come to enjoy it, if not surpass them in their habits. But on those first few mornings, I felt like a fish out of water. How to describe it? I guess it boiled down to that I was still a full-blooded Angeleno at heart. Dirty, scraggly, greasy—all about the cement and the industry. These kids were patchouli, feathers, peace signs, pendants, too clueless or too buzzed to realize the ’60s were over, and that the hippies had lost.

  Mostly, I was just new. I didn’t know anybody. That was the long and short of it. Not to mention I had a new “cool” stepdad at home to deal with—my mom’s new man, Jim. The man with the well-trimmed porno ’stache. I gave him a little speech, right out of the gate.

  “You had better be good to her,” I said. I was a little shrimp of fifteen, but my voice was dead serious.

  “Hey, Steve!” he laughed. “I like your style!”

  “I’m not kidding,” I said, unblinking.

  I don’t know where that came from—maybe from some part of me that was trying to grow up into a man. It didn’t really matter. Jim was going to do what Jim was going to do. He was hip, man, kept a stash of marijuana in the trash compactor, which me and my brother discovered in about ten days and set upon like industrious little mice.

  “Don’t take too much, Stephen,” my brother warned me.

  “This stuff smells like garbage,” I said, sniffing the buds.

  “Well . . . how could it not?”

  Jim’s liquor cabinet wasn’t safe, either. Vodka could be gulped straight, then refilled with water. I figured it was the price of doing business with our family. And hey, I had to fit in with the kids at Clairemont—right?

  “I go to the weirdest school ever,” I confessed to Andy, the first weekend I made it up to Los Angeles. “There are kids dropping acid in the cafeteria! Just eating tabs right out in the open, and the teachers don’t say a word.”

  “Those San Diego dudes wouldn’t know good acid if it hit them,” said Andy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We got Pyramid acid up here now, Stephen. Everyone’s talking about it.” Andy reached across me to dig around in his desk drawer. “Wanna eat some?”

  Andy and I dropped doses on our tongues. Within an hour, we were watching the walls melt.

  Round-trip flights up to Los Angeles were just twenty dollars. If I played the lonely-guy card just right, I could convince my mom to pop for one. Around lunchtime on Fridays, I’d chow down on a hit of Pyramid blotter. By the time my mother arrived to take me to the airport, all the hairs on my arms and legs would be standing on end. By the time I was in the air, soaring over stretches of clouds and mountains, those magnificent vistas seemed to really mean something.

  But in the end, the high always petered out, and I always had to come home. Jim’s house in San Diego wasn’t too bad. It stood atop a large hill that overlooked the bay and SeaWorld. Our hill was steep and attractively treacherous, and if I cruised down on my bike without touching the brakes once, I could attain speeds of nearly forty miles an hour, long hair flying behind me, teeth rattling as the bike jagged down the blacktop. Top Fuel racing it wasn’t, but it was all I had.

  One day, pulling my fastest-man-on-a-Schwinn routine, I came to the end of a road in our neighborhood, looked down, and there was a deep, diving canyon, a vast expanse of secret, dusty mountain terrain. Straining my ears, I heard the out-of-tune plunkings of an acoustic guitar.

  “Hey!” I yelled, after a minute. “Hey! Who’s down there?”

  There was nothing for a moment. Then a voice: “Come on down and find out!”

  I abandoned my bike by the side of the road and scrambled down the hill, sliding around, then finding my footing beneath me. When I reached stable ground, I was greeted by the sight of a scraggly-bearded teenage boy and his peaceful blond female counterpart. She was wearing a white peasant blouse. He was shirtless, strumming the guitar I’d heard, and an unlit joint was gummed to his lips. They grinned at me like friendly aliens.

  “Who are you?” I said, slightly spooked.

  “We’re Canyon People,” they explained.

  “Do you . . . live here?” They looked so at home in their kooky surroundings. I had a sudden vision of them eating bark to survive.

  “No,” laughed the girl. “We come here to hang out, play music. Get high. What’s your name?”

  “Stephen,” I said.

  “Well? Wanna jam with us?”

  “I don’t jam,” I admitted. I looked pointedly at their joint. “But I smoke.”

  So the Canyon People, for lack of any other company, became my first San Diego friends. They were unrelentingly nice, to an occasionally nauseating degree, grease-toughened dragster that I was—but how could you argue with a pack of twenty to thirty largely interchangeable hippie moppets who basically lived to swallow reds, smoke Thai stick, and throw nighttime sing-along parties complete with acoustic guitar, tambos, and kegs? (Yes, occasionally they managed to pass hundred-pound kegs of beer down into the canyon.) Most importantly, I’d found a clique, a way to fit in, and I intended to stick with it.

  School became bearable once I had friends. San Diego was a playground, possibly the most lush and beautiful place I’d ever been. Canyon parties led to beach parties. I learned how to surf. My buddies from Los Angeles would come down to see me on weekends. The sun tanned my skin a golden-brown. One evening on the beach, a cute little black-haired chick and I lost our innocence to each other, sand swirling around us, and it was every bit the experience I had imagined it to be.

  Everything was going real smooth, in fact, until the afternoon I took off biking after getting high at the house of a couple of People’s Park members in our neighborhood. I was gaining speed, pumping hard, that voice going in my head, Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, witne
ss the youngest Top Fuel drag driver in the world! Steve Pearcy, off to a smashing start, folks, just barreling down a hill, hauling ass.

  I whipped around a corner, and unfortunately, a woman in a station wagon at the approaching intersection was hauling ass of her own, not to mention a trailer, and she didn’t see me until it was way too late. She hit me squarely, and I flew off the bike, going upward in that perfect blue San Diego sky, swimming freakily with my arms, my bike long gone on its own trip and it seemed like the seconds stretched into perfect long minutes and then into hours and then days.

  Then I hit the pavement with a brutal crunch of leg bone and cartilage, so hard that my teeth and my hair still remember it.

  The pain was instant and intense: eye-opening.

  Adrenaline coursed through my veins and I kept trying to rise up off the ground. Both of my legs had instantly swollen with blood. My legs, already the size of an elephant’s, inflated my jeans like a life preserver.

  “Don’t move!” the woman who’d hit me yelled, running toward me. “Stop it! Stay down!”

  “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!”

  “Stop it!” cried the woman. “Stop moving, dammit!” After some time, off in the distance, I heard the faint wail of sirens.

  Soon, a fire engine screeched to a stop next to us. Men jumped from the cab of the truck and surrounded me. Strong hands lifted me. I was placed on a hard board, fixed to it by nylon straps. I was weirdly coherent and saw what was going on around me. They loaded me into the ambulance and I watched the horrified faces of the crowd that had begun to gather around me. I tried not to scream, but the pain was like a whole other universe. I believe my mom and my brother and sisters were there, having heard the sirens not too far from the house.