One Train Later: A Memoir (23 page)

One house up from me lives a tough-guy actor. No one around here likes him. Middle-aged with a paunch and a surly demeanor, he yells at the mailman and seems to be permanently pissed off, probably doesn't get enough parts. He confronts me out on the dirt one day and snarls, "You play guitar?" "Yeah," I say, watching a blue jay out of the corner of my eye. "Whydonya come over and teach me." "Okay." "How much?" "Five dollars." "Come up in half an hour," he says. The blue jay disappears through a window into my house. Half an hour later I trot up to his front porch and ring the bell. We spend an hour together: I teach him a few beginner's chords as he frets about my putting an orange juice down without a coaster. He's an asshole, but I take the five dollars and am glad to get it. A day later I meet a girl who is a friend of Della's, a gifted songwriter by the name of Robin Lane. Robin has sung with Neil Young and Stephen Stills, and her dad, Ken Lane, is the piano player for Dean Martin and the Rat Pack. He is also the composer of Dino's greatest hit, "Everybody Loves Somebody." I start hanging out with Robin, seduced by the songs that seem to pour out of her. I meet her friends, and the two of us become embroiled.

Within a week of my getting a new girlfriend, my house is taken away, the car gets repossessed, and I bury the blue jay. I move in with Robin and her mother and, almost without realizing it, I am in the San Fernando Valley and another life. I sink into the California sunlight, the smell of oranges, and the sound of guitars. Robin's friends crowd around me, and everything is about music. I don't leave L.A., go home, or return to the grey, rainy streets of London, the moldy basement flat, the gas fire, the bands, pubs, bars, and guitar shops of my former life.

The heat of the sun, penetrates the surface of my skin, papaya juice trickles down my throat, the scent of exotic night flowers fills my head, the proximity of Mexico puts a spell on me, and under this glow the call of safety and security fades. I don't feel compelled to return to the familiar, to pick up where I left off, or struggle on up the ladder. I am out west.

But after a successful five years in London, culminating with the period in the Animals, I have plummeted to rock bottom. I have no money, no car, and nowhere to live except the house of my girlfriend's mother. And this begins my forty days in the desert, which turns into five years in about five minutes.

The bluntness of this situation is softened by having a girlfriend and being surrounded by people who are all possessed by music. Something inside me has snapped, but though I feel compelled to withdraw from the world of bands, to do something else, I can't stay away from music, which remains the force in my life. As if staying faithful to a faint signal-like a man rowing to a distant shore guided by a star-I make one decision. I know that music is the way and that I have to go deeper with it, to study and play in private without the distraction of being in a band. I marry Robin, enroll in college, begin studying classical guitar, take in all the music I can, and scrape by with some minimum-wage teaching gigs. These conditions don't make for much of a marriage, and within two years Robin and I separate. I continue on in college and for a while enjoy it, but I question academia.

I survive on sixty to a hundred dollars a month and don't care much, as I have no responsibilities other than practicing the guitar. I survive by teaching when I can at a little guitar shop out at the west end of the valley. Most of the time it is excruciating, with only the odd student sparking my interest. Some of them know that I was in the Animals, but I tend to keep quiet about it. At four in the afternoon, with a heavy sense of irony and long shadows dogging my steps, I walk over the road to the Robin's Nest, where I drink some tea, read a book, and try to remember who I am.

Three years pass and I begin to feel like I'm living on borrowed time. My life is without momentum, and the only time I feel forward motion is when I'm practicing. I begin to feel sick inside. I don't belong here but, driven to finish what I started, I slog on. I drive an ancient Cadillac with retread tires and no windows, buy gas for twenty-two cents a gallon, move to a new house every few months, and use fake names to get a telephone account. For a while I live in a small apartment building under the Hollywood sign. At night it strobes through the window as if taunting me while I practice Bach. This apartment building is seething with marijuana plants-all the occupants have them growing in their apartments. The landlord is a grumpy old guy of about seventy who knocks fiercely on your apartment door and demands his monthly rent as he steps across the threshold. Somehow he misses the giant green plants that, like "Audrey II" in Little Shop of Horrors, grace every cheesy apartment.

My interest in Buddhism, and Zen in particular, continues and I begin getting up at four-thirty every morning to go to a zendo, where I sit in meditation for a few hours and grapple with a koan. This period of my life is akin to the training of a monk, enduring poverty and surviving on almost nothing but rice. Practicing is everything, and I work up to ten hours a day. Despite the rigors of this existence, I retain a sense about myself, not one of cheery confidence but the grim inner conviction that the path is leading in the right direction even though I can barely see it.

Although Robin and I have split, I continue to interact with the crowd of musicians I first got to know through her. In this crowd and also on the brink of a failed marriage is a stunning girl by the name of Kate, who has recently returned to Los Angeles. I met her before and was immediately attracted to her, but she was married and so was I. But now within the parameters of the incestuous set and her fading marriage, we fall in together.

For a while we have an empathetic relationship, and for the first time I experience the feeling of being with someone I believe I could spend the rest of my life with. She is the one. We lie in bed and talk all night about every possible subject while I covertly record everything on a cassette tape recorder and then play it back in the car the next day, much to her cringing embarrassment. Somehow we swing into a zone that feels as if it has always been there. Kate is not bothered by my material poverty, and for a moment I also forget it as we groove together. But there is a shadow in the form of her husband, who is still around and pressure is on her to make her marriage work. It reaches a point where she feels it necessary to give it one more try.

On New Year's Eve, the night of my birthday, knowing that she is returning to her husband, we are at a friend's house as if for the last time together. We drink champagne and toast each other; she leans over a kitchen counter to pull a cracker apart with me; our eyes meet and, knowing that I'm losing her, it feels like a knife is slicing through my gut. It's over and it seems to symbolize the end of everything in L.A. for me. The evening comes to an end and, feeling suicidal and slightly drunk, I return to Hancock Park, where I live in a stable at the back of Fatty Arbuckle's old Hollywood villa. As the clock strikes midnight I stare at an empty bed and, like a ghost, open a letter from my mother.

In the morning I get up and make a small cup of green tea on the singlering gas burner and stare through the window across the vast expanse of lawn to the white Mediterranean-style villa. At the other end of the grass the owners lean back in their chairs, laugh, and clink glasses to the New Year. A girl student knocks at the door. She is here for a lesson. We sit down and in some sort defiant and desperate attempt to have spirit, I give her the best possible guitar lesson I can. She is a sweet girl and she raises her head from the guitar at the end of our session and says, "You're great." At that point I find it hard to contain myself-her remark like a candle flame in a cave mirrors my fragility and I feel like wailing like a baby who has lost his mother. She leaves-I pick up my guitar, hit a chord, and put it down. Kate's gone, four years have passed since I arrived here, and now like a page in a book on Zen, I am a brushmarked circle, a zero.

I begin to experience an unshakable depression, an emotional landscape that becomes so black that I can find literally no reason to get out of bed in the morning. The will to survive-to push forward-becomes a thin thread, a few remaining routines that I pass through as if wearing a blindfold.

A few weeks later one of my few students brings an old guitar to a lesson and offers to sell it to me. It's a battered '61 Fender Telecaster. I don't really want one but when I start to play it something stirs within me, comes back like a memory as if reminding me of a self I had forgotten. It shakes me and I ask him to leave it with me. That night I take it home to try it out for a few hours and find that I can't stop playing it; this guitar sparks something in me and I have to have it. I call the kid the next morning and tell him it's a deal. I start practicing, and something comes back, begins again, pushes toward the world. This new energy is sustained a few weeks later when I get the chance to join a local band. I start playing guitar solos again, look forward to the group sessions, begin thinking up guitar parts. This activity has the effect of renewal; the old Telecaster has a fantastic tone, and I play like a man possessed.

Through a friend of Kate's I still see from time to time, I meet up with Tim Rose, a well-known singer who has had a hit with a song called "Morning Dew." Tim is also down on his luck, but we hit it off and he uses the band I have just joined as his backing group. We start playing around L.A., and within a short while I am back into the group thing.

One night we go to see a band at the Troubadour, and after the show I leave on my own. As I cross the road I see an orange VW. I recognize it as Kate's car. I feel a jolt and decide to wait for her, leaning on the car and staring across the street at the neon sign of the Troubadour. A few minutes later she exits the club. With a big smile on my face, I watch her cross the street and wait for her to come up to me and throw her arms around me, but instead she walks right past me, unlocks the door, and tells me to please get off the car. Typical of her otherworldly sense of spatial perception, this is par for the course. "Kate, it's me," I sigh, and laugh. She stares myopically through the L.A. mist-the last scene in Casablanca. "Oh, my God," she murmurs, and comes over. We embrace, and somewhere violins play.

From that dime-size moment everything begins to unfold as if by magic. The attempt to repair her marriage has failed, she is free, and this time there doesn't seem to be any question that we will he together. I want to scream, "I love this woman!" She makes me strong and I am ready to take the bullet between my teeth.

I begin living with Kate in her little house in Echo Park. With three rooms and a roof like a Japanese temple, it is a romantic setting; every night we lie in bed listening to the scrabbling sound of raccoons as they climb across the roof. I get a Saturday-night gig playing in East L.A. at the El Dorado bar and compound that with my other new band, more gigs, and college. Everything begins to move forward again. The only ironic little shadow in all of this is that yet another admirer of Kate's now begins to threaten me. We begin getting phone calls from him in which he describes the weapons he has and how he is waiting where I can't see him.

And then I know that I am done with this part of my life and that it is time to return to the U.K. I have the guitar, the girl, a gun aimed at my head, and a future like a freshly wiped plate. We finish up our do-it-yourself divorces, Kate sitting on the steps of City Hall at eight A.M. with a typewriter on her knees minutes before we both go in front of the judge to get divorced from partners with identical first names. I pack up my stuff-which takes nearly three minutes-and with a loan from my dad book two seats on British Air. I am twenty-nine.

BOOK TWO

Ten

On a pissing cold day in November 1973 we lurch across a runway at Heathrow Airport. My family, whom I haven't seen in five years, all turn up to meet us. It's a loving, hugging moment, although I notice that in the intervening years everyone seems to have shrunk. We have decided in advance to spend the first two weeks in England with them in Bournemouth while we get oriented. As we drive south from Heathrow with the watery sun softly illuminating the ploughed fields and rolling green of Hampshire, I am excited to be back even though the road ahead looks like a screen with no movie. I have been away from London for what has amounted to onetwentieth of a century: no letters, no message in a bottle, no birds with words concealed in rings. Hello, remember me, the guitarist? Yes, still playing.... I was wondering ... I'm entering the unknown with a secondhand guitar and a flaxen-haired muse at my side; the architecture of the future, like a ripped Polaroid, will have to be pieced together with fragments of old relationships and whatever guitar skills I have.

The reality of stepping into the adult world begins to pervade my musician's mind. I feel the weight of it, and my excitement turns into anxiety, pushing me farther down into the backseat of the car. Then I hear my mum telling Kate that the wooded area we are now passing through-so familiar to me-is the New Forest, although in fact it was planted a thousand years ago by William the Conqueror, and that she and my dad have not been abroad since the war because they've been too busy, and what sandwiches does she like? I hoot like a maniac in the backseat: England-bloody England.