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

by Des Barres, Pamela

  “I think you’d better move out,” I said, and my voice seemed to be coming from the ceiling.

  Dead silence.

  Actually living, breathing, choking silence filled the room like nuclear waste. Finally I got up off the couch, went to the bedroom, and climbed under the covers. Michael went out the front door with his pockets full of change. He left Nellie behind.

  The party’s over, baby—why don’t we call it a day.

  II

  I’m not saying Michael wasn’t hurting over the situation; it’s just that he had something to take his mind away from the hard, cold, breaking-up facts—a young brunette model. I had to start the withdrawal process while his heart was full of passion for someone else.

  Since it was one of those times when the Des Barres didn’t have a whole lot of dough, we agreed—with a sense of unspoken relief—that he should postpone moving out until our finances grew less bleak. His new solo record, “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” had just come out, and I sat in the appreciative audience when he sang on “American Bandstand,” finally meeting Uncle Dick Clark and shaking his hand. And his acting prospects were picking up—he had already done a very amusing episode of My Sister Sam and was up for a part in a sci-fi thriller—so the arrangement wouldn’t last long. But it was harder than we could have imagined. In the beginning I hated Michael so deeply sometimes that I didn’t know myself and was scared of the volcanic vehemence of my increasingly nasty thoughts. Of course, I still loved him too, even though I was so full of resentment I felt like I had eaten a sixteen-ounce steak after twenty years of living on papayas. It was all very, very confusing. Michael was equally volatile, totally on edge, looking for any excuse to go on the rampage. One evening the tension was so syrupy and thick, I was watching every move and slipped up anyway. Nick was reading a book with his tray balanced precariously on his knee, and when I set a soda pop on the tray it tumbled off and spilled all over the place. Michael exploded with rage and, going off the deep, deep end, grabbed the tray, threw it into the front yard, and stomped it, bleating about the bourgeois household he was forced to live in and how the tray incident represented all that was mundane and trivial in his life. There it was: I was from the San Fernando Valley and he was a blue-blooded aristocrat. Nick was caught in between and started quietly bawling.

  III

  We still hadn’t figured out how to tell Nick about our separation. Such a sensitive child, he surely had been feeling his parents’ strungout friction even though I tried to camouflage it with the upbeat day-to-day trivia of living. But whenever I thought about telling Nick that his dad was moving out, the impending moment made me want to bury my head deep in the Santa Monica sand only ten blocks down the street. Instead I went into therapy.

  My therapist was Aggie, a psychologist around the corner who happened to have done Nick’s astrological chart. She had been pretty accurate about the little bugger’s personality, also telling me the hardest years of Nick’s entire life were upon us all. He was supposed to come out of the nightmarish phase around his twelfth birthday, and since he was only nine and a half, I prayed for strength to deal with it all. And I thought she might be able to deliver some equally helpful insights for me.

  At first I didn’t even think it was necessary to discuss my childhood. I was home free, wasn’t I? After all, I grew up with both parents in the house, had never been psychologically or physically abused, and had always felt mightily loved, in a sane mommy-daddy-child-Valley life-style way. TV dinners on a colorful metal tray. Listening to the Dodgers in the sunny backyard. Bicycles, roller skates, a skate key around my neck on a red string. Hot homemade potato soup on a chilly night. A flowered flannel nightie. My mom had even let me build my doll’s house on top of the TV. When Daddy complained, she made him see how important it was to little Pam. My childhood was idyllic, peaceful, joyous, serene.

  But I found out real quick that the idea I had about my incredibly normal upbringing was straight out of left field. That ball is outta here! When Aggie asked me to recall my childhood memories, what wafted into my mind was a moment in a gloomy foyer, at the bottom of a long flight of stairs. I was looking way, way up, so I must have been a tiny thing about three or four years old. I was calling to my mommy and daddy to stop yelling at each other. My Aunt Bert was trying to comfort me, and I sobbed to her, “Make them stop!! Please make them stop!!” I was surprisingly shaken by the dredged-up image, and Aggie asked what the moment might have represented to me.

  My mom had told me a little tale soon after Daddy died that put her in an entirely different light. It made me realize she was a real live flesh-and-blood woman and not just my mother. Forty years before, she had fallen in love with the gentleman half of a couple in our family. For two whole years they agonized, then finally decided to get their separate divorces and get married. They talked about moving away together, but the gentleman couldn’t bear to leave his children behind. Just when my mom finally got the guts to ask Daddy for a divorce, the female half of the couple told O.C. that she thought her husband was having an affair. Never a thickheaded man, Daddy put two and two real close together, went across town, and beat this guy within an inch of his life. For an entire day and night he led Mom to believe he had actually murdered her lover. (The blatant fact that Daddy had cheated rampantly himself never even entered the sorry picture.) In his rage he told her, “Pam would be better off dead than to be raised by this blankety-blank man,” and soon after, the thwarted lady actually threatened to kill my mother. Terrified, Mommy and her gentleman severed the relationship, and it remained a whispered subject—the Miller family scandal.

  Recently—this is forty years later, remember—this couple came to visit one of my aunties. I noticed that Mom was moody and distant the whole time they were in town. She, of course, couldn’t set foot on the property. She had told me she felt him thinking about her through the years, and this got to me because I’m such a hopeless—oops, hopeful—romantic. So I offered to slip him a note from her, so maybe they could talk on the phone, but she wouldn’t do it. I even went to my aunt’s for a little visit to check him out; he turned out to be a quiet, unassuming man, much smaller than my handsome daddy, and I sat there, sipping iced tea, making non-talk, trying to imagine his tumultuous past with my sweet mom. Alas, he died a short time later, and Mom never had been able to bring herself to contact him. She was quietly miserable for a few months afterward, but because she is strong and stalwart, got on with her life.

  Over time Daddy and Mom slowly rekindled their marriage. She says it actually got better as a result. But what had I gone through? The shadowy little figure at the foot of the stairs? That terrifying moment I remembered from my childhood, wailing in the foyer, must have taken place right about the time my mom and Daddy were going through their own private hell. Every kid has to undergo all kinds of nightmares and come to grips with them later on—or not. Until I met up with Aggie, I had always prided myself in not feeling anger and rage. Voices raised in anger made me want to cower, cringe, say, or do anything just to make them stop. Give in, give up, give way. Take it, take another little piece of my heart now, baby. Just stop yelling! And I would wind up with a man who had a temper the size of Idaho. Me? I’ve always been Miss Goody Two Shoes for real. A perpetual happy face, the bearer—always—of good tidings. But if that was really who I was, then why did my head pound and ache when I kept something inside that I wanted to say to Michael but didn’t for fear of a confrontation? Could my seemingly perfect childhood have anything to do with my newfound put-upon rage?

  Who knows what makes someone the way they are? A whirlwind combination of things, I’m sure. Aggie and I started digging away at the notion that I was a product of Beaver Cleaver’s household or the daughter of Donna Reed. I found out some pretty sad facts years later; that one of my favorite wise and understanding TV dads was a miserable alcoholic, while the family’s adorable, prankish youngsters were locked in their dressing rooms shooting heroin. I once saw the actor who played
Bud on Father Knows Best wearing dirty clothes, ambling down Hollywood Boulevard with matted hair down to his ass, and a long beard. Startled, without thinking, I asked, “Why, Bud! What happened to you??!!!” The filthy look I got put me smack in my place. Growing up on television must have been like walking a tightrope over a den of iniquity.

  Aggie told me we all had a right to our pain and we had to let it out, but the process was slow. Michael stopped getting fabulous dinners made for him every night and went out on his dates with the “other woman” after kissing me good-bye on the forehead. I thought I had grown strong enough to take it but then realized, why should I? There was one tense night when I came across a hidden stack of photographs of a ravishing brunette model in various slinky poses, sultry, sad, begging eyes—long, skinny legs, very small chest, red fingernails. The other woman. Right under my very own bed. Michael’s side, of course. I stood there shaking, studying the face of this person who obviously believed she was in love with my husband. What had he told her about me? How could she do this to another female? Maybe he had told her his marriage was over? In Name Only. Did he buy things for her? Lingerie? Perfume? Take her to romantic dinners, his purple-blue eyes half closed, glazed over with desire? I baked with rage at this amoral Jezebel floozie, trollopchippie-tart who was putting a cheap clown’s hat on my marriage. Michael happened to have been out for the evening, and Nick was already in bed, so I took all the modeling cards, succulent eight-by-tens and lighthearted snaps, and lined them up on the table so he would have to face them when he opened the door. The next morning they had disappeared; Michael made me a lovely cup of coffee and never mentioned the indelicate mistress display. I never mentioned it either, so it went under the rug with acres of other unspoken atrocities with claws.

  Michael soon went back to pretending to be married to me—at least when I was in the room. There were even times when we reverted to our comfortable spouse roles: watching TV, admiring the same cutie-pies up on the big screen, laughing at dinner parties. We never stopped touching, either. Hand-holding, hugs, and kisses are hard to give up. I had gotten a shimmer of reality in therapy and saw that I was still firmly entrenched in that victim mode. But I was determined to take an intergalactic pickax to those cracked, outdated, cream-puff ideals that were holding me back, making me a wimpy, weedy, cowering kiss-butt. (But I would still be a nice, sweet, well-liked person, right? Right? Right?)

  IV

  I paid a fortune to Maria, a fabulous Greek psychic, who told me I would be separated from my husband by August, my book would be a best-seller creating an entire career for me, and that it was good that Nick ate a lot of junk food because it kept him grounded. Somehow this info cheered me up; life wasn’t so bleak after all. I always had the thrilling hope of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, didn’t I? Always on the search for enlightenment, I started classes with Maria to pull out my own hidden abilities. The first thing she had us do was to make out a very specific list of exactly what we wanted in life and expect it all to happen:

  1. I want a totally healthy body from head to toe—now and always.

  2. I want a best-selling book (I’m with the Band) all over the world.

  3. I want a successful and brilliant writing career.

  4. I want my son Nicky to be happy.

  5. I want my husband Michael to be successful and happy.

  6. I want my mother Margaret to be healthy and happy.

  7. I want to own a four-bedroom house with a guest house in Santa Monica.

  8. I want to own my own 1987 T-bird.

  9. I want clear, wrinkle-free facial skin.

  10. I want several million dollars.

  11. I want to find the perfect school for Nicky.

  12. I want to meet Prince. (Oh, why not?)

  13. I want to find the perfect masseuse to massage me at home every week.

  14. I want a firm, tight body.

  15. I want I’m with the Band to be made into a successful film.

  16. I want to clear my mind and be able to meditate successfully.

  17. I want a joyous love relationship.

  18. I want a joyous steamy sexual relationship.

  19. I want my dog Nellie to be happy and stop peeing on the carpet.

  20. I want someone else to pay all my bills every month so I don’t have to think about it.

  What about world peace? A cure for cancer?

  Maria said we are all full of potential psychic wonders, and I did have an amazing experience in class. After meditation we each took a piece of jewelry from the person next to us and were supposed to do a psychic reading on it. As I held the lady’s watch, all kinds of images floated around in my head—I saw a menu, zoomed in on the man holding it, and could tell that he was considering changing the dishes, changing the concept of the restaurant he was standing in. Everything was in disarray; booths were stacked up, light filtered in through smudgy windows. I reported all this in a dreamy voice, and the lady was astounded. She and her husband had just bought a restaurant and were deciding whether or not to keep the menu the way it was or to change it entirely. Maybe I should call Robert Stack and get a job on Unsolved Mysteries. I’ll bet I could even get him to crack a smile. But when I gazed into the crystal ball of my own life, everything was swirling and murky.

  V

  Michael continued to see his model, though with not as much guilty enthusiasm. At one point we decided to be the ultra-modern couple and both go out with other people—have one of those cheesy “open” marriages. It was a brief but très interesting decision. He would get all dressed up for his dates with the other woman, while I pondered how to meet somebody with whom to have my own indiscreet liaison. I was starting to feel my horny womanhood again peeking out from underneath years of cold-shoulder storage and checkered-tablecloth familiarity. Seamed stockings seemed in order, if you know what I mean.

  Patti and I went to see Blue Velvet at a dark afternoon matinee while the boys were in school, and I had a surge of adrenalin peak through me like a flaming transfusion. It reminded me of the night many years before, watching the Who screech through Tommy, just knowing Keith Moon would show up large in my future. “What about Dennis Hopper?” I whispered to Patti as his character writhed around on the floor with that grotesque gas apparatus over his face. She grinned in the gleaming dark and nodded approval. The following Friday night Michael and I got our usual table at Helena’s, and I wasn’t surprised to see Dennis Hopper leaning against the bar when we walked in. He had just started to find himself back on the scene, sophisticated and sober after years of schizzed-out drug madness in the desert. I was wearing all black, skintight, throbbing to find some temptation on the dance floor. I got his attention by humping and bumping to “When Doves Cry,” gave him a wink (so brazen!), and from then on his steel-ball eyes were on me while I table-hopped and cavorted merrily, laughing loudly with half-strangers, sipping expensive wine. I turned the knob all the way up. If Michael noticed what I was up to, he didn’t show it. I think he was thick into his own dramatic world, living out an elegant fantasy of his own. On the way out the door that night, Dennis growled his telephone number in my ear, and I said it over and over to myself driving back home while Michael listened to Al Green. His number must still be carved on my brain somewhere—one of those useless tidbits of information clogging up the think tank.

  When I finally screwed up the nerve to call Dennis, he wasn’t home. His answering machine had my hero Bob Dylan announcing: “The rules of the game have been lodged—it’s only people’s games that you have to dodge.” Leave your message at the beep. Too, too cool.

  Eventually he called back, and I could finally tell Michael that I had a date of my own. I don’t think he believed me. I don’t think he wanted to. He stayed home with Nick while I checked out Dennis Hopper’s art collection. Come up and see my etchings, baby.

  Did I really want to start an affair with the infamous genius freak from Easy Rider? He lived in the wilds of Venice, in the thick of gang shoot-ou
ts and serious danger, behind some pretty thick concrete walls among several classic hunks of arts. Yes, he did show me his incredible art collection, one piece of which cast a certain shadow on the wall that resembled his very own profile. He made gallant, off-kilter chatter, poured me a cup of herbal tea, and we kissed a few times. It felt very strange to kiss someone other than my husband of many years. Then he sat down in front of me on the floor, crotch level, and gave me the best line I’ve ever heard from any man. “I want to worship your pussy,” he said to me. Was it just a statement? Some sort of offer? A simple request? Hmmm. Wasn’t it happening a little too fast? What kind of guy was he, anyway? He knew I was a married woman, so I suppose he was just getting right down to it. I hemmed and hawed, and we made out for a couple hours. While I drove through the Venice war zone on my way back home, I spoke aloud to myself, wondering what I was doing. Could I possibly play the Dating Game? My insides were still raw and bruised, I was trying to flaunt myself too soon, forcing the issue, needing male attention. I was scared shitless but hoping for some passionate heart-rage, just to know I was still capable of feeling it.