High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  When Shane was two months old I went back on the road with the Mamas & the Papas. At the same time, Lone Justice was now opening for U2 on the European leg of the Joshua Tree tour. Mick came out to meet me at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and collected Shane to bring him to Europe. That was the plan—we would both go on the road as needed, and we would trade off taking care of the baby.

  I hated saying good-bye to Shane, but I knew he’d come back soon. His father adored him and had a right to spend time with him too. I handed Mick the baby, a sling to carry him, and a diaper bag, and my boys were off.

  Mick boarded the plane to fly to Rome or someplace like that, with his long black hair, a little of the last night’s makeup, and his guitar, looking every bit the band member that he was. Except he had tiny Shane snuggled up on his chest. Then he reached up to get something out of the overhead compartment and inadvertently banged Shane’s head on the shelf above. Shane started wailing. People on the plane looked at Mick as if to say, “What have you done to that child?”

  The first years of Shane’s life, I was on the road more than half the year. Sometimes Shane was with me and sometimes he was with Mick. While Mick cared for Shane, I thought about my baby constantly. Whenever we sang the song “Dedicated to the One I Love,” I dedicated it to Shane. When Bijou, who was seven, came to the show, she protested, saying, “Here I am, sitting in the audience, and you dedicate the song to a baby who isn’t even here.”

  I was glad to be back at work, but on the road the craziness began again. I had someone FedExing me cocaine, and before long I brought this practice home. Mick still thought I was clean, so I’d wait until he went out of town to arrange a shipment. Then, when I was alone with Shane, I’d put him in the bathtub and play a game. I’d say, “No peeking,” pop behind the shower curtain, and shoot up. Again, Mick had no idea this was going on. As I went downhill, Mick was trying to improve us both. He arranged for us to go to a hypnotist to stop smoking cigarettes. It was a group hypnotism during which I snuck out to the bathroom to do lines. Mick never smoked again. As for me, well, I’m pretty sure that being high doesn’t exactly enhance hypnotism’s success rate.

  Things got very dark. FedExes came from my dealer in New York to hotels all over the country. They would arrive at the hotel before I did with “Hold for Arrival” written in familiar blue handwriting. I’d be on tour, alone in my hotel room, late to the stage. People would be knocking on the door and I’d be in the bathroom shooting up. Then I’d run out onstage. Shooting cocaine isn’t anything like snorting cocaine. The rush of the drug hitting my bloodstream made the world seem like it wasn’t a real place. I saw and heard things that weren’t there. Shapes moved around me. It was frightening. I got to that point, but I still had to go onstage. I was hardwired to go onstage. I couldn’t not go onstage.

  At home, Mick lived my lies. Promises went unfulfilled. I said I would be somewhere and didn’t show up. I said I would “be good” while he was on tour but went on a tear. Soon enough the pretense fell away. Mick became increasingly upset and concerned. He could see that I was going down, down. What he objected to above all was my behavior around Shane. He grew afraid to leave me alone with our son, who was by now four years old, and with good reason. I was not a good parent. When I came home from the road, I’d sleep for days. Then I’d tune out Shane and smoke or shoot coke in the room next to his. When Mick had to go out of town and leave me alone with Shane, I wouldn’t always take him to his daycare/preschool. I’d rent movies and sleep all day while poor little Shane had to fend for himself.

  I always wanted to be a good parent. But I was doing the same thing to my family and child that had been done to me. I was committing the sins of the fathers. Shane wasn’t in dirty diapers or unwashed or unfed. But I did what I wanted to do. I was pursuing my own interests. It’s been hard to come to terms with that.

  What caused the shift? Was it the drugs themselves, or was it the incest, which had escalated? It’s a painful admission, but after Shane was born, when I went back on tour with the Mamas & the Papas, the incest became consensual.

  The first time it had happened, back in Florida, I felt raped. That event stood alone. Many years passed before he touched me again. But as the isolated encounters added up, I could no longer tell myself that I was having sex with my father against my will. It was consensual, but not in the way one might imagine consensual sex. It didn’t happen daily or weekly. It wasn’t planned or discussed. And it most certainly wasn’t romantic or real. We didn’t walk around holding hands. Sex with my father was never anything but an occasional act of drug-fueled desperation, a hopeless grasp at comfort and security in a daze of hell.

  When I woke up in the morning next to my father, my first thought was inevitably, Oh, fuck. How am I going to do this day, this life, again? How can I function with what’s going on in my life and my mind? The sex with my father was like a runaway train. It took on a life of its own. It was a fact. It was happening. This was what I had become. And I felt like I had no power to do anything about it. My world was built around my father. He was my boss. He controlled my paycheck and therefore my drug supply. I was so fucked.

  But now there was a new element. I didn’t want it. I didn’t enjoy it. But at the same time—I did. I started feeling complicit, like I was just as much an instigator as he was.

  Take a girl who has the daddy issues that I did, then throw huge amounts of drugs at the relationship—it’s a toxic mix. And then there was the compelling, magnetic man who was my father. I knew him very well. We had been great friends for many years. We laughed and joked and had great talks. He felt more like a friend than a father.

  Many years earlier, I’d been in New York at my father’s apartment with my dad, Genevieve, and Mick Jagger. Dad and Genevieve went into the bathroom to shoot up. When they came out, Mick said, “Why do you do drugs in front of and with your kid?”

  My father said, “I’m not going to hide anything from Max. We’ve been friends for too long.” His twisted idea of the parent-child relationship was all I had known. But it was more complicated than that. For all I knew him, for all the time I’d spent with him in recent years, I hadn’t let go of the child who was still waiting for him. I was desperate to connect. And here I was spending day in and day out with him. Dad—my charismatic, magnetic sorcerer father—was available to me. That—minus the sex—was the experience of John that all his children would have killed for. And it was happening to me. A route to him had presented itself, and it satisfied some part of me that was at war with the rest.

  Incest is an abuse of privilege. It is an abuse of trust. It is abject manipulation. By making it consensual, I turned my anger and confusion inward and made it my fault. I thought, This is a bad thing. Why am I letting this happen? Maybe Aunt Rosie was right. There must be something inherently wrong with me. I felt dirty, I felt shameful, I felt completely and utterly alone. It brought out many fears—fear that people would find out, fear of my own thoughts. I felt like I couldn’t trust myself. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t put a stop to it. I felt powerless to do so, and I blamed myself for that too. What I never wondered, never, not once, was, How could he do this to me? I couldn’t question him. I couldn’t hate him. So I hated myself. This kind of self-blame is classic, textbook in incestuous abuse, but I didn’t know that at the time.

  But this is important. My father abused me, but he wasn’t a monster. He was a tortured man who led a tortured existence. I waited until he died to talk about this because I didn’t want to put him through it. I had and have profound love and respect for him. This is hard for me to talk about, not so much because of how personal it is to me as because of what I’m doing to his memory—to the way other people remember him—his friends, his fans, his family and other children. My first instinct is to preserve his great legacy. He wasn’t a good father, but he was a musical genius, and the truth about our relationship doesn’t change that. But these are the reasons that people are silent about incest: Con
flicted but deep love for the perpetrator. The desire to protect the family. The fear of what the revelation will do to one’s own reputation. If nobody ever rocks the boat, if real stories of love and incest and survival are kept behind the closed doors of therapists’ offices and judges’ chambers, then current and future victims are destined to do what I did, to weather it alone, to blame themselves, to hide behind drugs or whatever other lies and oblivion they can find. It happens, it happened to me, and the desire to preserve my father’s legacy is not reason enough for silence.

  23

  The Mamas & the Papas had several gigs in Hawaii, and Dad and I had adjoining rooms, but I don’t think I went to my own room the whole time. Dad had brought tons of pills and I found us some coke. We were lying in bed, in a stupor, when Dad said, “We could just run away to a country where no one would look down on us. There are countries where this is an accepted practice. Maybe Fiji.” Then he said, “We can take Bijou and Tam and Shane and raise them as our children.” My father was completely delusional. He was fantasizing about living with me, as husband and wife, and raising my siblings, his children, and my son, his grandchild, as our children.

  The moment he tried to make it romantic, I had a visceral reaction. No, I thought, we’re going to hell for this. What had I wrought? Suddenly I was scared. I wanted to escape. I had to get out. I had a lot longer to be on this planet—I hoped—and finally, in that moment, I saw with certainty that my life was going really, really wrong. But how could I extract myself? He was my boss, my father, my drug supplier, my lifeline, and he was out of his mind. No part of me wanted that husband-wife life with my father, but neither did I have an alternate plan for our relationship or my future. I just played along with it as I went along with everything else.

  God, this doesn’t feel like my story. It seems so distant, as if it happened to another person in another life. I haven’t broken from reality, but it’s almost impossible to reconcile the person I was with the person I am. Sometimes I think that having lived the life I lived, I should be in paper slippers and a johnny coat, shuffling around a psych ward. I understand why my siblings have turned to humor, meditation, family, and recovery, why my son never thought of John as his grandfather. We all look for ways to survive. At one point Bijou, who like her parents is a singer, thought of calling her first album “Raised by Wolves.” And she was right. It was like being reared by a beast. A gorilla. A narcissist, a Svengali, a megalomaniac. A charming, endearing rogue.

  In 1990, soon after the Hawaii gig, Mick joined a band based in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and he, Shane, and I moved to a beautiful old house with a hundred-year-old attached barn. With a little financial assistance from my parents, I was able to get all of my furniture and clothing out of storage in L.A. and ship it east. Here, after four years, were the boxes from the decrepit Crescent Heights apartment—the boxes that Mick had packed up for me when I fled to Albany as a six-months-pregnant cokehead. I spent days going through box after box of smelly, gross old stuff. All my vases and dishes were covered in grime. It took days to get everything clean.

  After we’d been in our new home for a while, I came up pregnant.

  This couldn’t be happening. It shouldn’t be happening. Oh God, how could this be?

  I called Mick from a pay phone at the mall, where I was shopping. There wasn’t much else to do in the mountains. I told Mick that I was pregnant, leaving him to assume it was his. But things between Mick and me weren’t great, given my ongoing addiction. We barely saw each other, and our focus had become caring for our son. Mick said, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?”

  I said, “We can’t have another baby.”

  He said, “I agree.” So I called Sue Blue, who was now Dad’s girlfriend. When I told her that I was pregnant, she understood immediately what had to be done. Sue Blue made arrangements for an abortion. She met me at the Champ—our name for a pied-à-terre Dad kept in midtown New York. We went to the doctor and I had the procedure.

  I loved Shane with all my heart. I simultaneously mourned the life that could have been and felt certain that it should never be. I was confident in the decision, but also tortured by the outcome, as I still am.

  The abortion marked the end of the incest, and afterward the Mamas & the Papas began to unravel, mostly because of how far down Dad and I had slid. We continued to travel worldwide—to Brazil, England, Hong Kong, and so on—but Dad was drinking a lot and getting really fucked up. I’d wash his hair, iron his clothes, and put his makeup on for him. When it was time for the show I’d find him passed out and have to wake him up, drag him to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, and make him pull it together to go onstage. I have no idea how I was able to help him, given my own sorry state.

  Living on the road

  Gave me a great excuse

  For hiding out in hotel rooms

  Seclusions self-induced

  Forget about the outside world

  Just sing and smile and dance

  They won’t know that you’re half dead

  Or bored and in a trance.

  What for me had been the wonder and thrill of performing with the Mamas & the Papas was gone. I was a drugging, singing automaton. As the end neared, the road memories began to blend into a litany—a sordid list of times I used people to get what I wanted, times I tested people’s patience and tolerance, times that were even more painful and humiliating to me than they look on paper. When you’re bottoming out, there is no progression of thoughtfulness and realization. I didn’t think about what I was doing, how it made me feel, or how it affected the people I cared about most. I was doing my best not to feel, not to see the damage, not to live. There is just more and more of the same, until it gives. This is how it gave.

  New York. When traveling long distances it became my ritual to go into New York the night before the flight and stay at my dad’s apartment. I’d always score and stay up all night till flight time.

  Portugal. I went with the band to Portugal and again had sex with my dad. I only knew because he told me.

  Vegas. It was a two-week gig at the Dunes Hotel. I looked up my old drug friends and found out that one of them was using needles. I got him to bring some over to me. During those two weeks I lost about twenty pounds. I hadn’t been that small since before I was pregnant. I was so pleased to be thin again.

  Puerto Rico. We finished a gig in San Juan, but instead of going home I stayed with a couple I’d met. The man was a jazz musician. I missed several planes, and the man raped me while his wife slept. When I finally got to the airport with no ticket, I told the check-in employee that my son had suffered a head injury and I had to be on that plane.

  Miami. There was a show in Miami where I was too high to get to the venue. I spent days in an apartment with people I didn’t really know.

  Atlanta. I never thought I had blackouts during shows until I realized I couldn’t remember the shows we played in Atlanta. We had a show at Chastain Park. Peter Allen, who wrote “Don’t Cry Out Loud” and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” was opening for us, which was an odd lineup. Chastain Park was always a fun gig—backstage there was limitless wine and vodka, anything you might want. But Dad and I got so drunk and high that people booed us and asked for their money back. After the gig people wrote letters to the promoter, saying it was shameful and horrifying to see a father-daughter act where they were too wasted to talk or perform. It was an embarrassment to Chastain Park. We knew we would never be welcome there again.

  Austria. I’ve always had this party trick—I have good leg extension and can kick really high, so I’d kick at people and come just short of their faces. Dad and I were in the hotel bar. I was very drunk, downing grappa and slamming the glass down on the table. I was wearing skinny jeans, a red sweater, and red lizard cowboy boots. I showed my high kick to a German guy at the bar and he said, “I have never seen such a dangerous girl.”

  Aunt Rosie’s funeral. Rosie had been diabetic, with Bell
’s palsy, for years. She suffered a heart attack. Dad and Bijou were visiting us in Pennsylvania when we heard that Rosie was near death. I hadn’t spoken to her in a while and hadn’t seen her in even longer. We tried to fly to L.A. before she passed away, but for anyone who is that deeply into needles and drugs, getting in a car to go to the airport, in time to make a flight, is a difficult undertaking. Many a time I missed three flights in a row. By the time we made it to L.A., it was too late. Rosie was gone. At first Dad, Bijou, and I were staying together in a two-bedroom suite. Then Genevieve arrived and I moved into a hotel room of my own. I met up with Sugar Bear, our old family friend, who hooked me up with coke. Then I was back and forth from Hollywood, getting high and making connections.

  At the funeral, I looked into the open casket and saw Aunt Rosie, with her midthigh-long hair up in its familiar bun, her blue and white bandana keeping it out of her face. But she had shaken off her mortal coil. That wasn’t Rosie. She was gone, and with her went the glue that held the family together. Rosie had been there when Jeffrey and I were parentless and rootless. She was there for me every day on the set of One Day at a Time. She was strong when Patty died. In her later years, Rosie had moved to Venice Beach. Her small apartment on Pacific became a haven for local neglected kids. Every day she made big pots of soup or stew and the ten- and eleven-year-olds whose parents were beach bums or Venice crazies would come to eat and to feel Rosie’s force of love. She did her best to save them—and me.