Neon Angel

by Cherie Currie

  When the doctor came in to check on me, I asked him if it was a boy or a girl.

  He shook his head without really meeting my gaze and said, “I don’t know. I didn’t look.”

  Maybe he was trying to be kind. Maybe he didn’t want me to know. I knew for certain that a part of me was gone along with my unborn child. I’d lost some vital part of myself in that hospital, and I felt instinctively that I would never get it back.

  My father and Marie visited. Grandma and Aunt Evie, too. But Scott didn’t. He didn’t even call the house to see how it went.

  When I made it back home, I stayed in bed for a few days, thinking it all over. I started to suspect that Scott wouldn’t keep his word about paying for the abortion, and it turned out that I was right.

  Chapter 20

  Too Many Creeps

  I was standing alone in Aunt Evie’s backyard later that evening. I was still unable to get the day’s events in the recording studio out of my mind. I’d missed a few days recording because I was recovering from my abortion. When I returned that morning, I discovered that Joan had recorded lead vocals on a number of tracks that I was supposed to sing. The one that hurt the most was the album’s title track, “Queens of Noise.” Billy Bizeau of the Quick had written that song specifically for me. Now I would only be singing on five songs out of the twelve on the album. What would I do onstage while these songs were being performed? I was scared that the others were using this opportunity to push me out of the band altogether. Of course, they denied it, but following my first day back at work, it sure felt that way.

  It was chilly out there, with the crisp February air all around me. For once, it was quiet. Ever since we all moved into Aunt Evie’s tiny house, privacy had become a rare commodity. In the gloom I rummaged around in my purse, trying to find something. If this had been the old house, I could have flicked a switch, and the backyard would have been bathed in the effervescent glow of at least a dozen lights: the underwater lights would have made the swimming pool glow and shimmer. But all of that was gone now. It belonged to someone else, some other family, some other life. I thought about my mother. Far, far away, she was living in some mansion with Wolfgang. I was sure they had a pool, maybe a dozen pools. Hell, maybe they had their own private stretch of the ocean. She was over there in Indonesia with Wolfgang and my brother, doing whatever it is that people in Indonesia do. I wondered if she thought about Marie and me.

  I stood there in the dark, rummaging through my purse, my sense of frustration growing. I wondered what my brother looked like now. Amazingly, it had been almost a year since he’d left. He’d be taller, maybe even taller than me. I wondered how old he’d be the next time I saw him. Probably as old as I was now. The thought made my head swim. I looked up, but there were no stars tonight. No shimmering pool. Nothing—just plain, bare concrete and the chirp of crickets.

  “I thought I heard you come in . . .”

  “Jesus!” I spun around to see Marie standing behind me, almost totally shrouded in darkness. “You scared the crap out of me!”

  “Sorry . . .”

  Marie came closer, and we just stood there for a few moments taking in the unimpressive panorama. After a while Marie asked, “How did it go? Did you have a good recording session?”

  I shrugged. “They all hate me,” I told her quietly.

  “That bad, huh?” Marie laughed a sad, little laugh and then we lapsed into silence again. There was no rush for words. Sometimes Marie and I could communicate without saying a word. I knew that my twin could sense that I was hurting inside.

  “Your friends . . . they’ve been asking for you at the Sugar Shack. They wanted to know if you’ve gotten too famous to talk to them anymore.”

  I laughed. “No, I’m just busy, you know that. I’ll stop by next week, I guess. How is everybody?”

  “Fine. Everyone’s good. I, uh . . . well, I don’t think that I’ll be going to the Sugar Shack much anymore.”

  “Oh yeah? Why not?”

  Marie shrugged sadly. “Too many creeps.”

  “Creeps? At the Shack?”

  I was surprised to hear that. Of course the Shack had its fair share of bozos and losers . . . what place didn’t? But Moose and Ken, the guys who ran the place, did a pretty good job of keeping the real creeps out.

  “Well . . . you know how it is,” she said hesitantly. “Everybody knows who you are. They know I’m your twin. Every asshole and his brother in the Valley seem to be in there these days, all wanting to hit on the Cherry Bomb’s sister. Some of them . . . well, they’re really scary, Cherie. I mean it—you gotta be careful the next time you’re over there.”

  Marie lapsed into silence. I didn’t say a word. I waited for her to continue, and when she did, it was in a wistful, sad voice. “They see you up there onstage. Acting like . . . well, acting the way you do. They think you’re really like that. They even think I’m like that. This one creep . . . he . . . he even attacked me.”

  “What?”

  “It was nothing. I mean—he was drunk. The bouncers threw him out. It was okay.”

  I turned and looked at Marie. With everything that had been going on with me, I hadn’t had the time to really consider what my notoriety with the Runaways was doing to my sister. Once upon a time I was the wallflower; I grew up feeling that I couldn’t hold a candle to Marie’s personality. I was always hovering nervously in the background, looking on jealously as Marie went on dates and hung out with the popular kids. But these days Marie obviously felt the same way I once felt. I knew that she had to quit school when I joined the Runaways. Too much attention, too much jealousy. Since then, she’d gained some weight. There was a sadness in her eyes that I’d never seen before. She was working at a fast-food place called the Pup ’n’ Taco over on Vanowen Boulevard to help the family with grocery money, which would be an okay job for any other sixteen-year-old . . . but not when your twin sister is one of the Runaways . . . .

  Marie had never mentioned it, but Paul once told me that one bunch of guys drove for miles just so they could jeer at her through the drive-in window. He told me that she was totally humiliated, and that she was sobbing when she told him about it. She made him swear not to tell me.

  “There was this one guy at the Shack,” Marie told me. “He seemed really cool. He was just hanging out with me, and he seemed totally normal. He didn’t talk about you at all. Honestly, I didn’t even think he knew who you were. But then all of a sudden he’s asking me all kinds of stuff . . . all about you. He wanted to know your shoe size, and your bra size, and your fucking hat size. Turns out he’s another damn lunatic. He told me he has pictures of you, and articles about you, all over his bedroom wall. Isn’t that sick, Cherie?”

  I shuddered, and for a moment I thought about my bedroom in the old house. All of the pictures of Bowie on the walls. I was about to say something, when Marie dropped a bombshell.

  “Anyway, he told me that he’s in love with you, but since he’d never get the chance to be with you, he figured that I would do just fine.”

  “Oh my God. What did you do?”

  “What do you think I did? I told him to go fuck himself.”

  I could hear her anger, her resentment. It was directed at me, as if somehow I were responsible for every crazy who bought one of my records and then decided to go stalk my sister. I didn’t know what to say anymore. I felt helpless.

  “After that, I stopped going to the Shack for a while. Like I said: too many creeps.”

  There was a long silence. An uncomfortable one. It was at moments like these when I guess neither of us really wanted to be attuned to what the other was thinking. I started rummaging around in my purse again, mumbling “Goddammit!” when I still couldn’t find what I was looking for.

  “You looking for these?”

  I looked at Marie’s outstretched hand, and in the semidarkness I could see that she was holding my vial of quaaludes. It was a strange feeling, a vague embarrassment, like somebody had just walked
in on me while I was using the bathroom. I shrugged, and nonchalantly said thanks. I reached for the pills, but Marie didn’t hand them over. She was peering at the label, as if she had never seen a bottle of quaaludes before. I started to get mad.

  “I found them on the floor,” Marie said. “Lucky for you! If Grandma had found them, she would have had a conniption!”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “Grandma’s so old-fashioned. Can you give them back, please?”

  Marie held the bottle to her chest. “Are you doing a lot of these?” Something in the way she asked it really bothered me. All of a sudden she was acting like my mother.

  “They’re ludes, Marie, for Chrissakes. You’re acting like you found some heroin or something. Calm down! They’re just tranquilizers.”

  “I know what they are.”

  “Yeah, you do know. You’ve done plenty of them yourself, remember?”

  She couldn’t deny that. She did them; her friends did them . . . she had no right to get judgmental about this. I stretched out my hand for the pills. “Give me a break, Marie,” I said, slow and deliberately. “I have a handle on it. Now hand them over.”

  “How many do you do?”

  “Jesus Christ! A couple a day, at the most. You’re acting like I’m a coke fiend or something! I just need something to help me wind down at the end of the day, okay?”

  “Just like Dad, huh?”

  That comment hit like a slap to the face. “No,” I said coldly, “not in the slightest.”

  Marie looked at me with that superior I-know-what’s-best expression that made me want to strangle her. I knew that she was worried, but I still didn’t think she had any right to be giving me this speech. “I guess that explains it,” she said, with a little smirk on her lips.

  “What?”

  “Why our room is always a mess. Why you haven’t done any of your chores.”

  “Marie! I’m getting really, really pissed off right now. I’m in the middle of recording an album. I’m busy—you have no idea of what’s going on in my day-to-day life, okay? So don’t even—”

  “You weren’t this irresponsible when you were recording the first album!”

  “Come on!” I snapped. “What the fuck, Marie? How can you stand there and give me this speech?” I’d thought that my sister was way hipper than this. I thought that she understood!

  “You were never this irritable either!” she added.

  We stared at each other. I didn’t look away; I put my eyes right on hers and held her gaze. She was the first to look away. “I’m just worried about you, is all,” she said finally. “Look, I’m sorry . . . I guess I don’t understand everything that’s going on with you. But I do know that you’re my sister, and I love you and I worry about you. That’s all.”

  I could see tears welling in her eyes now, and I felt them forming in my own eyes as well. We’d always been connected like that. “You’re so pale,” she said, “and you’re starting to get dark circles under your eyes. You’re my sister, and I love you, okay? It’s my job to worry!”

  She hugged me tightly, and I hugged her back. We stood there in the darkness, holding on to each other for dear life. My mother and my brother were gone. Sometimes it felt like my father was slipping away from between my fingers, so it was good to hold on to Marie. To know that she was still there. All of the anger was forgotten. A part of me never wanted to loosen my grip on her.

  “I love you, too, Marie,” I told her, feeling my tears squishing against her cheek. We stayed like that for a moment. “Now,” I whispered after a while, “can I please have the pills back?”

  A few days later. It was midnight, and I was sitting with Joan outside of Brothers Studio smoking a cigarette. It had been a rough day. We spent an entire evening trying to get the bass line for “I Love Playin’ with Fire” down. The fun was totally gone; it was just hack, hack, hack. Mostly we spent our time getting drunk and making fun of each other. A strange kind of cabin fever had taken hold of us. All of the excitement had drained from the songs as we played them again, again, again until Kim and Earle decided that we’d nailed it. All of the inspiration and the energy of the first album had gone. Queens of Noise was beginning to feel like the Runaways on autopilot.

  “Joan,” I said as I stubbed out my cigarette, “what would you say if I told you I thought we should all take a break for a while?”

  Joan gave me a funny look. “I’d say you were nuts. Why?”

  “Man . . . I dunno. I just don’t think I can handle the pace.”

  “The pace?” Joan shook her head. “The pace is part of the fun, Cherie! You know that.”

  “But I’m not having fun! I miss my family. I really miss spending time with them. With everything that’s going on . . . I just feel like they need me. Like I need them. Didn’t you miss your home when we were out on tour?”

  There was a long silence as Joan considered that one.

  “Look, Cherie, I guess we come from different worlds. I never had a fancy house in Encino like you did. We had to scrape for everything, all our lives. I mean, yeah, I guess I missed my mom, my brother and sister sometimes. But home? There’s not that much about it worth missing.”

  I pulled out another cigarette, looked at it for a long time, and then put it back. I had to record vocals later. I needed to pace myself. “I really think that it would be good for all of us to take a break. Everybody’s on edge. I just think we all need to take some time to cool off before the next album comes out.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Joan said. I could hear anger creeping into her voice. “We’re on the way up, Cherie! You can’t just take a break when you’re a new band, just on the rise. That’s insane! It’s instant death. We’ve worked so hard—if we did that, we’d be over. Finished!”

  I knew that what Joan said made perfect sense. I just really wished that it didn’t.

  When I looked into Joan’s eyes, I saw someone who was getting severely pissed off. I saw something else in there, too—a glimmer of fear. When it came right down to it, Joan was the backbone of the group. Sure, there were others who could shout louder, who could stomp their feet harder, but Joan had that certain something that set her apart from the rest of us. I guess she had that elusive “rock-and-roll authority” that Kim was always carrying on about.

  “What about . . . what about if I took a break? You can sing my songs for a couple of shows. I’m just so . . . so—”

  “Don’t give me that crap!” she said. “Whether you like it or not—whether we like it or not—the Runaways is all five of us, okay? Even with just one of us missing, we don’t have a band anymore. Don’t you understand?”

  The bottom line was that I was beginning to think I couldn’t handle the responsibility anymore.

  “You can yell and scream and deny it all you want,” Joan said coolly, “but if you flake on the Runaways, you know that you’re going to fuck it up for all of us. You’ll kill the band. It’ll be over.”

  “What about my family?” I pleaded. “I have to think about them! I’ve barely seen them in the past year . . .”

  “And what about us?” Joan countered. “The Runaways are a family, too. Who sat by your side in the hospital when you were sick, Cherie? I didn’t see your fucking family doing that! Your parents weren’t there. Your sister wasn’t there. It was me.”

  That silenced me. I remembered the feeling I had when I woke up from the anesthesia and saw that Joan was sitting by my bedside, softly holding my hand. I knew that by far Joan was the closest friend I have ever had. After all, she was one of only five people in the world who could truly understand some of the crazy stuff I was going through right then. I thought of all of the good times, of all of the laughter we had on the first tour. I knew that I couldn’t do this to her. I couldn’t let her down. It simply was not an option. I started to nod my head, and I said, “I’m sorry. Man, I’m just tired. I’m stressed. I’m not going to flake.”

  “I know.” Joan put her arm around me, and held me close.
“We’re making history here,” she said. “Nobody said this was going to be easy. Just remember you can talk to me anytime. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Joan stood, and stretched. She looked at her watch. “Fuck. It’s almost twelve-thirty. Let’s go see if Jackie has figured out her bass line yet.”

  “Sure . . .”

  I got up and Joan opened the door to the building. I smiled at her, and we walked back inside. I could hear the music echoing down the corridor already. I wanted to feel good, I wanted to feel okay, but it was getting harder and harder. I was tired and worried. Once the album was done, we would be back on the road. Then, if Kim got his way, we’d be right back in the studio cutting our next record. I didn’t know when it was going to stop. All I could do was keep showing up, and hope for the best. Who knew, maybe things would change once the second album was done. At the moment it felt as if things couldn’t get any worse, at least . . .

  Chapter 21

  Live in Japan

  Once the Queens of Noise had been completed, we were put back out on the road immediately to do our second U.S. tour. This time around the venues were bigger, and we flew everywhere. We did huge sold-out shows, and had the likes of Cheap Trick and Tom Petty as our opening acts. When we’d pull into town, we’d hear our songs blasting from the local stations: Mercury was really pushing the album. As well as the glamour of flying around the country and playing big shows, there was also the other side of it all: the quiet moments after the shows, like the time we’d spend washing our stage clothes with Woolite in hotel bathrooms. It was Lita who’d taught us how to do that. Until she intervened, we had been wearing the same sweaty jumpsuits and stage clothes for the entire tour.

  No sooner had we wrapped up the second U.S. tour than it seemed we were about to leave on our first Japanese tour.