No Lifeguard on Duty

by Janice Dickinson

  I called Patti Hansen, who was dating Keith Richards, and told her about meeting Mick. “He’s very fucking hot,” I said, stating the obvious. “What’s the story with Jerry?” Jerry Hall, that is.

  “She’s been busting his balls to get married,” she said. “But they’re not married, are they?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “You’re a big girl, Janice. And Mick’s a big boy. Do what you have to do.”

  It was getting late and I showered and looked for something to wear. Models never have anything to wear. I found some striped leggings and a baggy silk shirt and a purple suede sash, and I looked in the full-length mirror and thought, Shit! I look like Captain Hook!

  But it was seven already—too late to change. So I hurried out to the hotel entrance just as a long black limousine pulled up. There was Angelica Huston, stepping out and coming over to hug me; we’d met in New York a few times, at Studio 54 and on the social circuit. Jack Nicholson followed her out and approached with that Cheshire cat smile. “Jack,” she said, “this is Janice—Janice Dickinson. I’m not sure you’ve met.”

  Jack shook my hand warmly. “Janice. Big fan here. Nice to meet you.” What an actor! I felt like slapping him. I felt like turning to Angelica and saying, “Oh, Jack and I already know each other. We fucked in New York.” (And Angelica, if you’re reading this, I am so sorry!)

  Instead, I smiled and looked Jack dead in the eye. “It’s really nice to meet you, too.”

  Turns out we were sharing a limo. We’d all been comped tickets to the Stones concert. En route, Jack nodded his head attentively and made small talk, asking me about my career. I played right along, Little Miss Innocent, and I found it disarmingly easy. Maybe I had a natural aptitude for acting. The next time Steven Spielberg called, I remember thinking, I should pull myself together and go see the man.

  When we got to the amphitheater, we were taken in through the back. Mick was waiting for us in his dressing room. The moment we walked though the door he took my head between his hands, put his big lips on my big lips, and gave me a loud smack. Our mouths were like two oversized electrical hookups, made for each other.

  “You call that a kiss?” I asked. I grabbed his shaggy head, jammed my tongue down his throat, and pinned him to the wall. When I finally let him come up for air, he looked at me, impressed. “That was a promising start, Janice. Very promising.”

  “I’ve never kissed anyone with bigger lips than mine,” I said.

  But suddenly it was showtime, and Mick had to run off. We went to find our seats, and I ran into Lou Adler and his partner, Elmer. “You bastards,” I said. “I met Jagger at your club last night. He wants to fuck me.”

  “You lucky girl,” Lou said.

  And Elmer said, “Do you want to fuck him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Liar.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Lou said. “Sleep with the man. You’ll have stories for your grandchildren.”

  So I did. We went back to the Sunset Marquis after the concert, Mick and I, and we fucked all night. The man was indefatigable. (I love that word.) He was pure energy—kind of spooky, to tell you the truth. I woke up the next day feeling like I’d been through a war. And I wasn’t sure I’d won, either. And then I got my goddamn period, which put a damper on the morning festivities.

  Mick had to leave early in the afternoon. He had a business meeting. That’s what he told me, anyway. Maybe he was just looking for a girl who wasn’t bleeding. He comped me two tickets for that night’s concert, too—I could pick them up at the door, he said—then set four hundred dollars on the night table next to my side of the bed. “Here you go,” he said. “Buy yourself a pretty frock.”

  Oh, man! How could he? But he was gone before I knew it.

  For the next six months, Mick became my new daddy. He was away much of the time, just like the rat bastard. And he wasn’t particularly nice to me when he was around, which definitely made me feel right at home. But he had a lot of energy in bed. And that made up for a great deal.

  “I love you,” he told me once. “You’re built just like a little boy.”

  “You’re sick,” I said.

  “Yes, I am,” he said. And he was off again.

  The thing is, he was Mick Jagger. He could have had anyone, and he did. But he wanted me. Wanted me. And I was still hungry for that. That meant I couldn’t be so bad, right? I mean, Hello? Do we detect a pattern here? Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger. Not exactly settling for second best, was I?

  Yeah—okay. I know. I see it now. But I’m not alone in this. We’re all looking for validation. We all want to be wanted. Some of us are just more desperate than others.

  By the end of those six months, though, I found I liked Keith better than Mick. Not that way, of course—Keith was with Patti, and she was a friend of mine. But he was more fun to be around. He was probably nicer to me than he was to Patti.

  “Why is Mick so mean to me?” I asked Keith one drunken night. He and Patti and I were hanging out at their place, on 5th Avenue and 16th Street.

  “Men are always mean to the women they sleep with,” he said.

  “Are you mean to Patti?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But don’t let that get out. I’ve got a reputation to worry about.”

  We drank some more, did some more coke, and before I knew it we were singing.

  “You’ve got a nice voice, Janice,” Keith said. He was obviously out of his mind.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “No, really,” he insisted, sliding off the couch to the floor. “Talent like that—you shouldn’t let it go to waste.”

  Didn’t I say somewhere that we believe what we want to believe? Well, I wanted to believe. And that’s how it happened. Two months later I’m in a recording studio, preparing a demo. Keith was on one guitar. Ron Wood on another. John Oates of Hall & Oates was on a third. Some session guy was on drums, looking frankly overwhelmed to be playing with those three. And then there was me, little me, doing my own inimitable version of “In the Boom Boom Room.” They all thought I was great. John Belushi showed up in the middle of the session, and he said I was great. Who was I to question the judgment of these brilliant, distinguished gentlemen—paragons of honesty and refined good taste?

  After we wrapped for the day, Belushi asked me what I was doing later. I thought he was going to ask me to sleep with him.

  “Nothing,” I said, wary.

  “Why don’t you come by the studio,” he said. “Watch us tape the show.”

  So I went. Hung out, laughed at Belushi and Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray, who has always struck me as one of the spookiest funny men alive. There’s something indescribably dark about him.

  “How are you, Bill?” I asked.

  Bill looked at me in that special way he has, like he can see clear through to your soul. “Janice,” he said, “there are certain portions of my mind which are best left undisturbed.”

  Aykroyd came over to say hello. We’d met before. He’d been trying to set me up with his brother, Peter. “Did my brother call you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “He’s shy,” he said. “I’ll tell him again.”

  “I’ll be waiting by the phone,” I said.

  “I’d call you myself,” he said. “but I’m happily married. However, I would be thrilled if you mailed me some nude pictures of yourself. But please send them here, to the studio. I’d hate for my wife to find them. She’d probably fall in love with you and leave me.”

  Then the taping was over and Belushi came by and asked if I’d drive to Memphis with him.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I want to dance on Elvis’s grave.”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” I said. “Aren’t there any local dead guys you want to dance on?”

  “I bet you’d go if I was Mick Jagger,” he said, all pouty. But he was just horsing around. He was always saying, “You know Mick Jagger. You fucked Mick Jagger! My God, Mick Jagger
! If he asked me to sleep with him, I’d probably say yes.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re on. Let’s go to Memphis.”

  “Great,” he said. “But we have to stop in Atlantic City first.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Janice,” he said, “you ask a lot of questions. That’s okay when you’re four years old and everything in the world is new and strange, but—at your age—it’s very unbecoming.”

  I don’t know whether there was any method to his madness, but he certainly had a strange sense of style. First, we went to Rent-a-Wreck for a car. I have no idea why he wanted a heap when he could have afforded a limo, and I knew better than to ask. Then we stopped at a 7-Eleven for two cases of Bud Tall Boys. It had to be Bud Tall Boys. Belushi almost fell apart when he heard they were out, but an enterprising clerk found two cases in back—and got an autograph for his efforts.

  “Do you know who this is?” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders.

  “No sir,” the clerk said. He was holding on to the autograph as if his life depended on it.

  “This is Janice Dickinson,” Belushi said. “She’s seen Mick Jagger naked.”

  We went out to the car and got in. Then he noticed the pay phone, and he just sat there and stared.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “You think I should call Darlanne?” Darlanne Fluegel was an actress who’d been in Conan the Barbarian. I guess John had a thing for women in loincloths.

  “John, you’re married.”

  “Says who!?” he snarled, pouting again. He backed out fast, tires squealing, and we raced over to Tower Records. It was all an act, of course. He was in fine spirits. He filled a shopping cart with tunes and paid for them with Aykroyd’s credit card. I knew better than to ask about that, too.

  “This is the fucking life!” John said as we pulled away. All the windows were open, and the music was blaring. “By the time we get to Atlantic City, I want to know everything about you, Janice. And don’t leave anything out, because if you do, I’ll know.” I laughed. “I’m not joking,” he said. “By the time this trip is over I want to know you better than I know the side of my hand.”

  “The side of your hand?”

  “Yeah. Everybody says the back of their hand, but I don’t know the back of my hand all that well. The side of my hand—well, I’m on intimate terms with the side of my hand.”

  You know that old joke, “But enough about me; what do you think of me?” Well, Belushi was the exact opposite. He refused to talk about himself. All the way to Atlantic City, he pelted me with questions. The more personal, the better. And he seemed genuinely interested. He considered every answer carefully.

  “You know, Janice,” he said toward the end of the ride. “I’m not a therapist, though I’ve played one on TV. And stop me if I’m out of line. But I think you’re pretty fucked up about men.”

  “No! Me? How can you say a thing like that?”

  He looked over at me and smiled that old John Belushi smile. He’d had a few Tall Boys by then and was feeling very little pain. “You ever read any Sigmund Freud?”

  “Just the Cliff Notes,” I said.

  “Well, Freud had this theory, see. And I’ll try to keep it simple—seeing how you’re a model and all. But it goes something like this. Most of us have something in our past—our distant past, like with our parents, say—that didn’t work out too good. And what we do, see, is we spend the rest of our lives playing that same fucking tune over and over again, with more and more people, in one relationship after another, thinking we might just get it right some day. You follow?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Every idiot understands the repetition compulsion.”

  He looked at me in disbelief. “You have read Freud!”

  “Not really. I went to see a shrink years ago. We talked about all that, but I didn’t really understand it. Maybe you can explain it to me.”

  He took a beat, reached for another Tall Boy. “Okay,” he said, popping the can. “But, like, you know—stop me if I’m being an asshole.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I will.”

  “Promise?” he asked.

  “I promise.”

  He had a sip of beer and launched in. “This shit with your father, Janice. What a fucking monster. Telling you you’d never amount to anything. Don’t you see what it’s doing to you?”

  “What?”

  “You keep falling for guys who make you feel like you don’t amount to anything.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. And you think, ‘I’m going to show this bastard that I’m a great girl. I’m going to show him how wonderful I am.’ And of course that’ll never work, see? Because it isn’t about any of those assholes. It’s about you; it’s about what happened to you. They’re just assholes. Unfortunately, they’re the assholes you happen to be attracted to, because they remind you of your father. That’s why you need to work on the dynamic, babe. That’s why I’m here, Janice. Tonight. With you. To tell you that your life would be a lot easier if you were attracted to nice homely fat guys—guys like me.”

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “This love shit. Pretty hard to figure out, isn’t it?”

  I nodded again. Joking aside, I was pretty floored by what he’d just said.

  “Why don’t you roll another joint?” he suggested. I rolled another joint. Or half a joint. It was the last of the pot. The exit for Atlantic City was just ahead. He took it. I lit the joint and passed it to him without taking a hit. I still didn’t like pot. It made me hungry and paranoid. Not a pretty picture, especially in brightly lit fast-food joints.

  “By the way, what I just told you—don’t lose any sleep over it,” he said. He was still holding the smoke in his lungs. “Everyone I know is deeply fucked up.” He exhaled loudly. “Like with me there are things about myself I understand so well, but I can’t do a damn thing about them. Because that’s one part of me—the intellectual part. John Belushi the Thinker. But the other part, the emotional part of me—well, that John’s a fucking train wreck. And those two guys are constantly at war.”

  “So I’m two Janices?” I asked. “Is that it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And tonight I’m gonna fuck them both.”

  The reason we stopped in Atlantic City was to see Frank Gorshin, a comedian friend of John’s. We were already late, and as we were hurrying through the casino someone recognized John and he was mobbed by fans. He was pretty gracious about it. He signed autographs and cracked jokes and kept telling everyone that he loved Atlantic City. “They’ve got the best hookers in the world here,” he told them now, putting his arm around me. “Look at this girl. Where else in the world can you get a girl like this for a hundred bucks? I will be doing things with this girl in about an hour that are still illegal in the southern part of this country. So—synchronize your watches, amigos—at ten sharp I want all of you to close your eyes and picture me and this girl, naked and grunting.”

  Gorshin was just wrapping the first half of his second set. We went backstage and John introduced me and we chatted a while, but Gorshin had to go back out, and we told him we’d come by after the show. John wanted to watch the show, but he really needed to get stoned again, and he was out of pot.

  “Do you know anyone in Atlantic City?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  So we went out to the casino and he cupped his hands over his mouth, right there near the blackjack tables, and hollered at the top of his voice, “ANYONE HERE GOT ANY POT!?”

  It got people’s attention. Some people snickered.

  “You there, sir,” John said. He was pointing at this skinny long-haired guy at one of the blackjack tables. “You look like a pothead from way back. You got anything?” The guy shook his head. “So you’re not a pothead. You’re a card-counter; you just look like a pothead to confuse the pit boss. Anybody else got any pot? Anybody at all
?”

  We had quite an audience at this point. A man in a suit approached. “Can I help you, sir?” he asked John.

  “If you’ve got pot on you, yes you can. Absolutely.”

  “I’m Detective Bensink,” the man said. “I’m with vice.”

  “That’s very funny,” John said.

  “Would you please come with me, Mr. Belushi.”

  “He was just kidding!” I piped up. “We’re practicing a sketch for the show.”

  “That’s right,” John said, catching on. “It’s called, Got any pot? I’d be happy to walk you through it.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said. And we followed him outside, though none too happily.

  “Where are you parked?” he asked.

  John pointed at the wreck across the lot. “I have some dynamite shit at home,” the detective said. “I’ll pull round. Just follow me. My wife is a big fan.”

  His wife practically fainted when John walked through the door. She couldn’t believe it. John Belushi! In her home! They pulled out the Polaroid and I took some pictures and John signed autographs for assorted nieces and nephews.

  Then we got to the stash. Tons of stuff. Shoe boxes full of it. They had bags of sinsemilla that rivaled anything John had smoked in a year. “Here, take some,” the detective was foisting it on us an hour later, as we went on our way. “Really. I insist. There’s plenty more in the Evidence Room. And thanks for making my wife’s day. It’s her birthday tomorrow. Now I don’t have to buy her anything.”

  We were too stoned to go to Memphis, so we drove back to New York, getting in at the crack of dawn. He dropped me at my place. “Thanks,” I said. “I mean it.”

  “It was a good time,” he said, looking solemn. “And it hurts. Because I know that’s all I am to you. A good time.” He couldn’t stop with the jokes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re a good time. But I’m actually thinking about what we talked about last night.”

  “Refresh my memory,” he said.

  “You’ve inspired me.” I said. “I’m breaking things off with Jagger.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Really.”