High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  Barry McGuire, who sang “Eve of Destruction,” was coming with us to the Bowl. He was dressed in a cream-colored suit, but he couldn’t find his shoes, so he painted his feet green. If I’d been a few years older I certainly would have figured out that they were all either on acid or, like me, following the lead of those who were.

  The Hollywood Bowl show is fuzzy. I was really young. I remember screaming, “Dad! Dad!” from the audience. Later, backstage, I met Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix didn’t mean much to me—he had not yet ignited his guitar onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, which my father would organize. A giant purple velvet hat floats in my consciousness, attached to the name Hendrix, a vague visual footnote, my own purple haze.

  My mother flipped out when she saw that my virgin ear-lobes had been violated. Pearl studs at eighteen was more her cup of tea. Plus, the threads weren’t big enough for earrings and I had to have my ears repierced, and the holes were completely crooked and have been my whole life. For all the asymmetry of my childhood, I’m still disproportionately pissed off about that.

  It was a double life: doing what was expected at my mother’s, and not answering to anyone at my dad’s. I always was aware of the effect my father had on my mom. Even in my seven-year-old brain, I was aware that she was envious, angry, and sad. Often sad. I worried as much as a child can, but the fun at my dad’s was irresistible. There was music, guitars, parties, rock stars, and the very seductive attitude of “We’re all kids here.” I’d ask my dad, “Can I go play on the beach?” and he’d say, “Whatever turns you on, kid.” So I’d burst out the back door, free, a crazy kid chasing the dogs on the beach until we were all worn out. Occasionally the cook would attempt to impose a modicum of order. She’d say, “Now, young lady, you clean your room. Your dad’s going to be mad,” and I’d say, “No, he’s not.” How could he when he lived so wild? Meanwhile, in Tarzana, my mom was watching me walk down the street, yelling after me to tuck in my shirt. She was trying her best to raise her kids, but we were being shown another kind of life, and it was no competition. Would you rather live at Disneyland or in a condo in Tarzana? Being at Dad’s was like riding the Matterhorn all day long, and the weekends, by moment and memory, dominated the school week.

  My dad’s friends never treated me like a child, not exactly. I was more like an accessory, a cute little prop who might amuse or entertain. One weekend before we’d moved to Los Angeles from Virginia—I must have been five or six—we were with Dad in L.A. for a visit. His fellow band member Cass Eliot (the other “Mama”) had a party at her house in Laurel Canyon. We walked into Cass’s house and there were Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

  When I saw Paul McCartney I glommed on to him like a baby groupie. He kept saying, “Go on, love, get up and dance.” In a rare moment of shyness, I demurred. I was afraid people would laugh at me. He insisted. I refused. This exchange circled, a teasing game between a little kid and a world-famous musician.

  Finally I broke down and started dancing. The adults began to point and laugh at the little five-year-old dancing for the rock star. I turned bright red and burst into tears, but then Paul McCartney started consoling me. I was no dummy. I liked being consoled by Paul McCartney. The more he comforted, the more tears I summoned. Finally he picked me up and carried me into a hammock that was suspended in the middle of Cass’s dining room on a pulley. Someone hoisted us up, up, up. The ceilings were two stories tall and we were suspended fifteen feet in the air. I was still snuffling. Paul snuggled up with me until I finally calmed down and eventually fell asleep. The two of us napped together in that hammock, suspended high above the party. You could say I got high and slept with Paul McCartney.

  There was something about my father. He was a cool, countercultural guy who attracted some of the most creative people of his time: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Gram Parsons, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Candy Bergen. Most of his friends did drugs, didn’t sleep much, and made lots of money: Excellent role models all. What was it that made my father so compelling? People were so drawn to him—musicians, thinkers, beautiful women. He was tall and cool and always fabulously dressed. He drove fancy cars and threw outrageous parties. He was just as much a master of play as he was a master of music. The world was his drug-rock playground, and everyone wanted a turn on the slide. As his daughter, his light was magnified for me. I always wanted to be closer, brighter, warmer. What was fun and games for his friends would develop into a too-powerful life force for me.

  At the time I was still just a kid with a lot of energy. But Dad wasn’t exactly organizing softball games. The adults at the beach house, and the beach house after that, and the one after that, were always stoned, laughing, and playing guitars. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by men with guitars. Friends, boyfriends, husbands, son. They sit around, jamming, writing, and talking. That’s where the men-with-guitars theme began, in my dad’s beach houses.

  Gram Parsons was a good friend of my dad’s. I didn’t know who he was—as far as I was concerned he was just a gentle, quiet man who was at Dad’s house all the time and could play the piano like nobody’s business. Dad had a baby-blue baby grand in his bedroom in Bel Air. I’d sit there on the piano bench listening to Gram Parsons play for hours. Chuck Barris was often there too. I recognized him as the host of The Gong Show. He’d sit on the couch in a big fur coat, not saying much, not gonging Gram Parsons, just hanging out. But as I look back it’s hard to believe that Barris’s claims to have worked for the CIA were true. I was only a kid, but I was pretty sure he was stoned.

  Stoner hangs weren’t very kid-friendly. I got bored. Sometimes I found ways to entertain myself. I would walk to the market with money my dad gave me, buy seeds, and plant a wildflower garden. Or I’d climb into my dad’s beautiful old Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. I’d drag the neighborhood beach cat into the backseat with me and pretend we were having tea. There was a big phone in that car; I have no idea how they managed to put a phone in a car in the seventies, but mine was not to question the technology—which I was explicitly not to use. The backseat had mahogany tray tables. I’d pull one down, lean against it, and chat with my friends for fifty dollars a minute. That car phone was the most expensive babysitter in history.

  One time when the limo dropped me off in Malibu, I walked in to find a completely empty house. This was not wholly unusual; I was expected to fend for myself. So I was chilling, wondering if anyone would show up, waiting for my father as I often did, when Donovan Leitch walked in the door. “What’s going on, kid?”

  In “Mellow Yellow” Donovan sings, “I’m just mad about Fourteen / She’s just mad about me,” a lyric that aroused suspicion of pedophilia. But I was only ten—still safely under underage. He chatted with me, goofing with the kid who happened to be home, and we decided to make something to eat. We discovered brownie mix in the kitchen and we agreed that brownies would make an excellent lunch. Donovan found a bowl, I got a spoon, we added eggs, we took turns stirring, all the while happily chatting about how yummy they would be. We dug up a pan we were pretty sure would do the trick and put the brownies in the oven. They were cooking; they smelled delicious; and then, out of the blue, Donovan said, “You can’t have any.” This had to be a cruel joke.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “These are special grown-up brownies,” Donovan said. It turns out Donovan had found my dad’s pot and added it to the mix. Well, that was just plain mean. When he went into the other room, I looked at the brownies. They didn’t look different from any other brownies. They sure smelled like regular brownies. I was hungry. And besides, I was in my dad’s house. There were no rules here. I helped myself to a brownie. And another. Next thing I knew everything was funny and Donovan and I were sliding down the banister over and over again. If you don’t count my hammock suspension with Paul McCartney, that was the first time I got high. I was ten.

  Two days later I was playing Barbies by the pool in Tarzana with my best friend, Julie, to all eyes looking like
a kid who comfortably straddled two worlds. But the Barbies masked what was really going on. At Dad’s I was a weird little savage on the periphery, tap-dancing and singing, eager for any kind of attention. I’d transform over the weekend into an out-of-control little maniac, and when I came home to Mom’s, she’d spend all week retraining me in manners and etiquette. How hard it must have been for my mother, watching us go off every Friday and knowing that the kids who came home weren’t going to be the same. In Tarzana I wanted to fit in too—I faked failing an eye test to get glasses and fashioned a retainer out of paper clips so I could look like the other kids—but between the controlled order of my mother’s home and the wild freedom of my father’s decadence, I already knew which I’d choose. I was my father’s daughter.

  2

  My father wanted me to live and learn as he did, through experience and experimentation, so he sent me to Summerhill, a “free” school, which meant that going to classes was optional. The teachers were hippies and the kids were rich and undisciplined. Our class was called the Electric Bananas—from the Donovan song “Mellow Yellow.” People generally thought that line referred to smoking banana peels to get high, but Donovan ultimately revealed that it wasn’t anything so unseemly—he was only referring to a yellow vibrator. Either way, as a name for a school class it set a clear tone. Ollie, the headmaster, took us dumpster diving. Smoking was permitted. I picked up the habit in fifth grade. Sex ed was our favorite course—the teachers drew diagrams in the dirt with sticks, caveman style. You know, life lessons.

  When we opted not to go to classes, which was most of the time, there were horses and chickens and lots of land to get lost in. We pretended to be Jesse James or cowboys and Indians on real horses. And deep in the woods we played kissing games, the standard “doctor” scenarios but amped up by the hippie culture. Jefferson Burstyn, Ellen Burstyn’s adorable son, was my sweetheart. In the shade of the trees we climbed under a blanket, took our pants off, and thought we had sex. Those stick drawings left a lot to the imagination.

  For a while California had brought out some of the hippie in my mother, but as soon as she got involved with Lenny, a big Jewish businessman who wore slacks, button-down shirts, loafers, and a belt with a gold buckle, she shaped herself to his ideal, acting the role of a proper wife. The other Summerhill parents had beat-up VW buses, braids, and fringed boots. They lived in Topanga Canyon or Laurel Canyon, Bohemian enclaves. Meanwhile, Lenny would drop me off at school in his Cadillac. Once I got out of that car, I was in my father’s world. Poor Mom, she must have seen that her hold on me was slipping. I was a person with no boundaries going to a school with no boundaries.

  To celebrate my tenth birthday, Dad threw a party at the Bel Air house. All the kids from school were there. I met Dad’s new girlfriend, Genevieve Waite, that night. She was eighteen, a South African model, singer, and actor. Also there was my now-ex-stepmother Michelle’s daughter, Chynna, my new little sister, who was only a year old, so it couldn’t have been an easy time for them, but as far as I was concerned the shift was subtle. I watched my father’s lovers and wives crisscross paths: involved, broken up, jealous, mellow. As far as I knew, love and lust ebbed and flowed and my parents and their lovers were just splinters of driftwood bobbing along with the tide. Michelle and Chynna were still always around the house, so I never felt like I lost them. Half the time I wanted to play with Chynna—she was like a little doll—and the rest of the time I wanted to strangle her for dethroning me as Daddy’s little princess.

  For the birthday party, my father screened Dumbo on his movie projector, though at ten we were too old for it. It was probably a stoner favorite. Then, oddly, he screened the Monterey Pop Festival. I guess he was showing off. Dad was proud of having organized the festival and introducing not just Hendrix but the Who, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding to the American public.

  Not long after that party I started hitting puberty. My dad and his friends were sitting around rolling joints on a Saturday morning when, in front of ten adults, my father said, “Look at my little girl. She’s poppin’ tits.” It was the kind of thing that some men of that time used to say—“Look, she’s becoming a woman”—not lascivious, just oblivious to how sensitive a young girl is about her development. I felt horribly exposed. I wanted to disappear. To this day the word “tits” creeps me out.

  Anyway, maybe it hooked into my father’s head that I was getting older, because later that day he gave me a new, adult responsibility. That afternoon his friends were … still sitting around rolling joints. I was bored and bouncing off the walls: “What can I do?” “I want to plant flowers.” “Can we go get sea-shells?” “Can we go to the store?”

  At loose ends, I tried to find ways to occupy myself, but you can only make so many sand castles or expensive covert phone calls. So on this particular day—the same day he outed my blossoming womanhood—Dad said, “I’m going to give you a project.” Dad had a job for me! This was exciting. I was in. He took the top of a shoe box and put a bunch of Thai sticks in it. Then he tore off the stiff cardboard top of a rolling paper pack. He showed me how to scrunch up the dried buds into pieces, shuffling the leaves with the cardboard so the seeds fell to the bottom. Once the pot was clean, he showed me how to attach two papers to make a fat joint. I had ten-year-old fingers, but in short order I got really good at rolling joints. I was the official joint-roller for all the adults. Sort of a rite of passage to go along with puberty, I guess.

  Parents have certain responsibilities. Most have an innate sense of what might be good for their kids, and what might be bad for them. They make choices based on those beliefs. They shelter their children from activities and influences that might harm them or lead them in the wrong direction. That feeling of protection hit me the instant I saw my newborn son, and it was so powerful and intertwined with love that I can’t imagine separating the two. My father was different. He loved me, but under ordinary circumstances he didn’t see himself as my protector and guide. He saw himself as a very cool person who loved to hang out with other cool people, including his own cool children.

  And so it was that my father and Genevieve, while hanging out in their new part-time digs—the penthouse suite at the Chateau Marmont—had no qualms about dipping into a cereal bowl filled to the brim with white powder and inhaling it in front of me and my brother. We watched them, fascinated, until they went to “take a nap,” which seems an unlikely thing to do after snorting massive quantities of cocaine, but whatever. They stowed the bowl of coke in the cabinet under the TV. After they left the room Jeffrey said, “Let’s try it.” It wasn’t his first time. He was twelve, after all. I asked him what it felt like. He handed me a vibrator—because such things were occasionally randomly accessible (though not, in this case, yellow like Donovan’s legendary dildo)—and told me to put it between my teeth. That, he said, was what cocaine felt like.

  I didn’t snort enough to feel a physical response, but the ritual of it was fun, and it made me feel bigger and older and grown-up. Because, as most parents realize, children want to grow up to be just like their parents. The following weekend I found a silver box that had a little spoon attached on a chain. I filled it with my dad’s coke and took it to school.

  I was now enrolled in Highland Hall, a Waldorf school. We read Tolstoy in fifth grade and studied Greek, Spanish, and German, each once a week. My friend Lisa, who’d moved from Summerhill at the same time, was my best friend at school.

  I brought my secret stash of coke to our seats near the back of the class. Lisa was a funky girl who always carried a briefcase, and now she opened it up on the desk to shield me from the teacher’s view. I took out the coke, but just as I was about to snort my first spoonful I accidentally dropped the silver box and coke spilled all over the floor. The teacher said, “What’s going on back there?”

  I replied, “It’s only baby powder for gym class.” The teacher let it slide. I guess the notion that sixth graders would be snorting coke in the middle of math class di
dn’t occur to him. I didn’t care so much about the lost drugs—the point was to break the rules and get away with it, and we did. The next weekend when I walked into the beach house, Genevieve said, “Oh, here comes the little drug thief.” I was worried that my dad would be pissed—he really didn’t like me dipping into his supply. But that was the last I heard about it.

  The 1971 San Fernando earthquake happened exactly at six in the morning. In my bedroom at my mom’s I had one of those pre-LCD digital clocks where the numbers flip by and I remember waking up, seeing the clock turn from 5:59 to 6:00, and feeling the whole place go bananas. We kids were oblivious to the lives lost and damage done and thought the earthquake and its aftermath were great fun. School was canceled. The sidewalks were all buckled and broken up, so roller skating, which was one of our favorite pastimes, became an obstacle course. With a pack of the neighborhood kids, I went skating for hours. Those post-earthquake days were unexpectedly special for me. For that moment in time, having good, clean, post-disaster fun, I felt the rare sensation of being a normal kid, just like the other kids. We were all in something together. I was oblivious to the deeper meaning then, but later I would collect and cherish memories of feeling like I was part of a community instead of an oddly privileged outsider.

  Our double life affected both me and my brother, but whereas I was willful and mischievous, my brother was downright bad. It was the usual stuff between him and my mom: clean your room—you live like a pig; do your homework; don’t give me any lip, young man; stop playing your saxophone— it’s midnight! But it always escalated to a screaming match, and there were times when it almost got violent. Dad didn’t help matters, of course. He bought Jeffrey a BB gun, and my brother promptly shot out all the lights around my grandma’s pool. Jeffrey always had a sweet heart, but in those days he was a volcano, ready to erupt.