Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up

by Des Barres, Pamela

  V

  Big, new weighty worries were waxing as the old year, 1986, was waning. My dear friend, Shelly—Michele Myer—was suffering insurmountably with the Big C. My brilliant, stubborn, longtime girlfriend had always cursed her mammoth bosom and hated doctors due to her truly prudish Catholic school upbringing, so had put off getting a breast lump checked out, and now the disease had spread to her spine. She was banging weakly on heaven’s door. Shelly had been the black lamb in an alcoholic family, striking out the only way she knew how—through music, shoving her way up through the rock ranks slowly but surely until she booked the coolest local clubs, discovering incredible bands and making almost no money for her dedicated inspiration. She was the first person to book Van Halen, and the Go-Go’s, among so many others, but still didn’t have a darntootin’ dime to call her own.

  Michael and I decided to put together a benefit for Michele and called out all the dogs. We rented the Roxy, and there were lines around the block to see the Knack, a few of Motley Crüe, re-formed Chequered Past featuring Michael and Steve Jones and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols, Charlie Sexton, Dweezil Zappa (in his first appearance), some of the Go-Go’s, and a heavy-duty jam session dedicated to the “den mother of rock and roll,” featuring our new pal Bruce Willis on harmonica. At the close of the show Michael crooned to Shelly, “Mee-shell, my belle,” and the whole place cheered while she silently bawled, so sweetly grateful to be acknowledged. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS came through with a hefty donation, as did David Lee Roth and Ronnie James Dio. At least she didn’t feel beholden and skint while she suffered and swigged liquid morphine to curtail her ever-expanding pain.

  After the benefit Michael went to that other balmy coast to cavort with Donnie on the set, where he had started to rule with an overwrought iron thumb, and Michele stayed with Nick and me for a few days in Santa Monica. Her most surprising comfort came from the person she had loved more than life, almost all her life: Chris Hillman. She liked to say that her rock-and-roll obsession had been all his fault. Her favorite band had been the Byrds and then the Flying Burrito Brothers. I met her in 1969 at a Burrito session at A&M Records. She announced herself as “the original Burrito fan,” and I let her have the all-important credit. Shelly had always underestimated herself profoundly or got severely angry about not getting the respect from the rock mutts she thought she deserved. In the old days Mr. Hillman had often ignored her desperate adoration at his gigs, sometimes just being downright mean. I had kept in touch with my first love through the years, kept track of his various musical projects, and had noticed a gradual change in his bravado attitude, so was not dumbfounded by his response to Michele’s illness. “I’ll come see her tomorrow,” he announced, and we prepared for his arrival. Shelly camped out on the couch (she was almost to the point of immobility) dressed in her most colorful oriental robe. She had lost almost all of her hair and was on a constant search for the perfect turban. We found her a bright yellow one with gold thread running through it, and she was ready to greet Mr. Hillman.

  The knight in shining armor arrived wearing tight faded jeans, carrying a bunch of flowers, and brought the house down. He spent hours with Shelly handing her such a luminous hunk of light that she felt that the whole, hard trip had been worthwhile. Then he decided to make me feel good, too. While I was making tea for us in the kitchen, he came up behind me, encircling my waist with his big arms. “I’m really proud of what you’re doing for Michele. You’re a good girl, Pamela.” Do you ever fall out of love with your very first heartthrob? I stammered, I held his hands, I looked into his bright blue eyes and yearned for yesterday’s busted-up teen dreams. When it was time to go Chris hugged Shelly tight and promised to see her soon, and I walked him to his car. I thanked him for lifting Shelly’s heart. We stood in the driveway looking at each other the way I dreamed about when I was too young to know better, too far gone to care. “I’ve always loved you,” he said. Then Prince Charming roared off in his 4x4, leaving me standing in a dewpond of ancient, unrequited desire.

  VI

  Shelly finally had to move back to her hometown, San Francisco, to be with her sister, and I made a couple trips north to bask in her sorrowful company and try to boost her morale. On my first trip her sister Claire lent me her bomb of a car, and I loaded Shelly and her wheelchair into the wreck for her last sojourn into the wilderness. We went straight to Haight-Ashbury, where we had lunch at an old hippie diner and found two like-new three-ring Beatle binders for twenty-five bucks each. We scored heavy and she was wearily ecstatic. She slept for hours and hours afterward, missing a show that she had circled twice in the TV listings, while I sat beside her and listened to her troubled, aching sleep. That night, attempting to find Mr. Sandman in Claire’s water bed, I cried for Shelly and her bare, thwarted life full of self-inflicted burdens. She despised her giant breasts, looking forward to the day she could afford a reduction; she cursed her family, the nuns, the record industry that wouldn’t recognize her potential. And even though she had a razor-sharp one-liner mind and a hidden sweet heart that came out in her “Auntie Shelly” mode with Nicky, she complained constantly about her lot in life, “Why am I alive?,” her constant bitter query. I had always chastised her about shoving so much negativity into her atmosphere, but she thought I was nuts. I tried to drag her to Science of Mind, but she told me she had enough religious input from Catholic school. Still, she had her glorious moments. I remember one of my favorite Michele Myer quotes: “We know our limits—and there are none.” If only she had believed it.

  By my second trip she had weakened dramatically. While the game shows droned, she lay under her blankets like a gasping fish out of water—every breath labored and tight, clutching her ever-present bottle of liquid morphine, even in sleep. She had me go through all her collected, precious papers: autographs of heroes, shots of her with David Lee Roth, John Entwistle of the Who, the Go-Go’s, the coveted piece in the L.A. Times that called her “the den mother to the L.A. rock scene.” I read it aloud to her: “Myer’s job doesn’t end with the last encore of the night. She’s a rock and roll Mother Goose, chaperoning out-of-town bands, baby-sitting for rock rookies and protecting her charges from the sharks that feed on naive young rock stars. ‘Michele has a lot of heart,’ said Peter Case from the Plimsouls. ‘When we were really down and out, she’d take us out to dinner and make sure we were OK. She’s always gone out of her way to take care of us.’ Another local rocker adds: ‘She has kept people alive. Who knows how many times she’s propped up some kid backstage and said, ‘Do you know who you are? Let’s talk about it before you go out and die in the street.’ ” She smiled thinly and said she never knew who the “local rocker” was that gave her such celebrated credit.

  She gave me her treasured Bruce Lee puppet to give to Nick, and I wept, trying not to let her hear me. I made her promise to contact me after she reached “the happy hunting ground,” as she called it. She attempted to be funny, but it hurt too bad. I told her to look out for the big light, and thanked God the drugs kept her knocked out most of the time while I sat there feeling hideously inept and inadequate. I felt for Claire, who had become a constant nursemaid, exhausted and red-eyed. We talked while Michele slept. She wanted to know who her sister was, who she had turned into after she left the miserable, chaotic family nest and headed for Hollywood. She read the Times article, she looked at the photos of her feisty older sister with Eddie Van Halen, Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick, Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys (her very first lover). Claire sighed and told me Michele had always been headstrong. A mild understatement. Nothing or nobody ever kept Michele Myer out of a room she wanted to enter. She prided herself on “crashing” any event that didn’t have her name on the guest list, and she never failed.

  I left San Francisco knowing I would never see Michele again. She died three weeks later, and I closed my eyes tight and asked Gram Parsons to welcome his number-one fan into rock-and-roll heaven with open arms. Nick was crushed. He still has the Br
uce Lee puppet in a place of honor, next to the goldfish that has lived way longer than we ever thought it would.

  April 6—My darling Shelly went to the happy hunting ground today. Good-bye sweet angel-woman. I love you so. I cried and dazed around, called Claire a couple times, prayed and spoke to Michele on her way. I know she’s floating free of her battered body, God bless her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I

  The drama in my frazzled life felt thick and full like a spidersac brewing a ball of black-widows—and with the terrifying loss of Shelly, the decision to have dermabrasion on my teen-picked skin, Nicky’s shadowy sadness, and the looming book tour coming up, it took me awhile to realize those incessant walks Michael took with our dumb dog, Nellie, and the mounds of dimes and quarters all over the place meant big trouble.

  When I finally decided I could no longer deal with the fraud my marriage had become, I felt like my heart would burst and poison my quaking guts if I didn’t ask those awful questions: Where do you go every night? Are you seeing someone else? Is there another woman? Are you having an affair? Do you love somebody else? Do you still love me? I knew he was at it again, because my intuition never fails me. I had previously ignored the small, still voice screeching and howling, battering at my inner eardrums until it finally weakened, flopped around aimlessly, and faded away. Did you hear something? No? Hmm, I could have sworn I heard something. . . .

  To make the entire typical horror show even more god-awful, I had just had the dermabrasion and was red, goopy, and scabbed with Vaseline-dripping bandages hanging off my miserable, sore face. I kept thinking I could keep it all inside until I looked and felt a little better, but once the jig was up, I had to get it out in the open. I had pieced together all the nightmarish cheating facts, and they were haunting me as I thrashed around the house, pacing, rehashing events, looking just like a Stephen King hell-hag. Is there another woman?

  Nicky was at my mom’s, and Michael was out walking Nellie for the fourth time that evening. I knew he was going to the pay phone on the corner to call her, because up until about three months earlier he never went near the poor dog. At first I was eyebrow-raised and pleased that he began to give a shit about the mutt, but it slowly began to fade as I realized he didn’t take much notice of her until he decided she needed a little fresh air. Are you having an affair? One afternoon I had followed a short ways behind them, my heart slamming hard, ka-bump, ka-bump, ka-BUMP, just to see Nellie struggling on her leash to frolic while Michael chatted away on the public phone. I felt like Mrs. Columbo on acid. I had also started to see large piles of coins littering the tabletops, and for a man who used to throw his spare change in the gutter, this was indeed an oddity. The phone rang more often, and I got several hang-ups a day. Hello. Hello! Hello? Hello!!?! So rude. Are you seeing someone else?

  I waited silently on the fake Deco couch that we were paying off on our Broadway card, listening for Nellie’s delighted yapping. She was always happy to see me. She didn’t care if I looked like one of the walking dead. I was petrified, shaking, but determined to confront my errant titled husband. I knew he would deny any accusations because he always did, even when faced with clean, straight-ahead facts, but I had a newfound resolve this time around. I was a stronger person, a stronger woman, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that I wrote I’m with the Band. Tampering with my past, studying it, reliving it, delving soul-first into all that stuff—turning it into a viable, buyable piece of rock-and-roll history gave me some balls. What is the female equivalent of balls, anyway? It gave me some ovaries? Fallopian tubes? I finally had some mammary glands?

  Even in this precarious, vulnerable position, I sat there on the couch like a cross-legged Indian squaw ready to do battle. I was about to slit open my love-pump and expose that squealing baby girl, and the pain was unutterable. Pondering all that had brought me to this heart-wrenching, heart-pounding moment, I waited for my husband of thirteen years to get home from spewing gooey love words to another woman. Do you love somebody else? Do you still love me?

  By the time he got home a few minutes later, I had balanced myself, ready to ask that first big question. Where do you go every night? He unleashed the dumb dog, popped on the TV to watch the news, and got comfortable in his leather recliner across from me. “So, how did Nellie like her walk?” Not quite. “Want a cup of tea?” Nope. I was pissed but still in the adoring-wife mode where I still held myself hostage. Confrontation is wicked for me. Especially when the doll-house is about to be squashed underfoot. “Where do you go every night?” He didn’t answer, so I posed it to him again. He had gradually built up to about five nights a week and was getting pretty blatant: squirting on the Opium, sucking in those dramatic chiseled cheeks, making a mad dash for the door.

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Stevie,” he said in a strange voice, “I’ve been going to a lot of AA meetings.” He looked everywhere but at my aching face. “I’ve just needed to get out of the house.”

  We circled the question for awhile until I had him in a hole the size of the Hollywood Bowl. “Michael, I’m not asking if you’re seeing somebody else, I’m telling you I KNOW you are.” I was letting my intuition shine, speaking my mind—even though I felt like lying down in a dark room for a year—glory hallelujah. He was caught so cold that his scoffing and protests were weakling attempts to get me off the track and then he just shrugged, exhausted, and gave up the fiction. One of those unspoken agonies passed between us; the air chilled, the sun went down, the curtain closed, and the sorrow was transcendental. I had demanded the truth for the first time. I wanted to get down to the splintered bone no matter how many wounds I would have to lick later. I had always nodded enthusiastically when he skirted and sideslipped the truth, not really wanting to know. I had begged his forgiveness when I caught him scarlet-handed, put hazy walls in front of the facts, looked the other way, turned the other cheek to avoid the raw certainty. He had always ended the dalliance when I started asking questions, but I could tell by the crumpled misery, the cave of his shoulders, the bed of thorns in his deep blue eyes, that this time it was going to be different.

  II

  Michael’s head had become a woebegone burden, weighing fifty tons and hanging close to the floor when he finally admitted to having another affair. He couldn’t look at me and I didn’t blame him. How about your wife busting you for one more adultery while her whole head looked like it had been eaten by a garbage disposal?

  I loved this fucker, even at this ignominious moment. Even now I felt his pain like it pumped through my own arteries. “Who is it? When and where did you meet this bitch?” I asked, wishing I looked beautiful. It just happened, and it just happened to have happened at Helena’s. Big shocker. I didn’t want to, but I cried, the salt biting into my scabs. “I know about the phone calls on the corner.” Oh, how he hated to admit he had been that obvious. “She hangs up on me five times a day,” I went on. He grimaced, he fidgeted. Here came the humdinger. “How about when I called you in Palm Springs on our fucking anniversary and there was a ‘do not disturb’ on the line? Hmm? The very place we went for our honeymoon. How about that?” I yelled, sounding like something roasting on a spit. I shouted that his lust-crave for me had gotten up and split, probably a long time ago. And guess what? My desire for him had been flattened paperthin like a run-over cat by his lack of desire for me. Had he ever thought of that? It took two not to tango, remember? I was boiling mad and frozen to the spot, while Michael decided to get up and pace.

  “We’ve been together so many years, Pamela, desire fades, we know each other too well.” Age-old breakup words—the mystery train gone way, way down that old railroad track. A speck in the distance.

  Too much troubled water under the bridge? Too many blemishes blatant in the morning light before the chance came to daub them with Blasco cover cream? Too much sameness? Everyday, dull, ordinary life-pain? From me, too much veiled desperation disguised as overpowering love, perhaps, a cloak of pink, humid op
pression that made Michael shrink, flail, go out on yet another crazed escape binge seeking a cool, hot-tempered model bitch to give him a hard time while I sat home wearing my Goody Two Shoes grin, writing out checks to California Edison, Group W Cable, and Sparkletts water?

  Still, I kept pushing. On that awful night I had to know: Did he love this home-wrecking bitch and/or did he still love me?

  In the past when I made it clear to Michael that he had better stop seeing a certain little miss adulteress, he would comply willingly, almost happy to be found out because he had the perfect excuse to put an end to the fling. I wasn’t even sure what I hoped for this time. A sub-sleeping part of me wanted him to refute me, so we could somehow move on. I’m sure he didn’t really want to hear one more sodden ultimatum from me, either. Still, I expected him to say, “Don’t worry, honey, it’s over,” or “I’ll never see her again.” Then it dawned on me like the Age of Aquarius that this might actually be IT. “Do you love this amoral piglet?” I peeped, attempting to shield my sore face from his answer. Of course he said, “No,” but I didn’t believe him. I had come to know his lying voice well, even though at times I ignored it entirely in favor of keeping at least a piece of the peace, the tranquillity of fiction.

  He looked at the wall and said, “I can’t stop seeing her now.” A knuckle sandwich straight in the kisser. What the fuck did “now” mean?

  “Do you still love me?” The sound of my thin, whiny voice in my own ears made my flesh crawl like termites had infested and were about to reach the heart chakra. Michael looked at the floor. “I will always love you.” It came out like a crucified whimper while I sat there like a lump of redundant flesh—weak, worn out, and hollow—the Indian squaw that had been prepared to hurl her brave’s own arrows, transmuting into an ordinary trodden-down, cheated-on wife. After the longest, quietest time in the universe went by, as my heart sagged and my face throbbed, I asked what we were going to do. He suggested I allow him to continue to see this girl until the time came when he might be finished with her.