around his waist, “That’s AWOL, man. You get two years in prison for that kind of shit, man!”
He shoved me through the door to my room and in the early morning light I could see Glen and a girl with matted hair asleep in my bed. I crawled into the bathtub and conked out.
I would say by the time we left New York, except for the thieves, pimps and rip-off artists, only twenty people remembered we were even there. One of them was Bill Graham who said, “I’ll never let those faggots on one of my stages.” The other nineteen were the high kings and queens of cult taste and pop culture. We had paid them some dues in New York, and they would remember us the next time around.
The morning we left New York Billy overslept. It was a Sunday, and we had to catch the eight o’clock flight. Shep had given Billy strict orders for us not to miss that plane, otherwise we’d have to drive all the way. I was still half asleep, throwing up my morning phlegm, when we piled into a station wagon and rushed to the airport. Even as we ran through the airlines terminal to the gate we could see the plane pulling off to taxi down the runway. Billy ran after it, pushing people aside, screaming through the window, “You goddamn son-of-a-bitch fucking plane! You eat shit!” He beat on the glass doors and almost cried out of frustration.
Two of New York City’s men in blue pointed out that it was Sunday morning, and arrested us for creating a riot and using foul language in public. They held us for five hours in a Queens station house until Shep came down and got us.
Billy, thank God, was fired.
CHAPTER 9
By July of 1968 — a short ten months after it all started — the band was $100,000 in debt, most of it passed in bad checks for plane tickets and hotel bills around the country. We had practically no money at all, not even the twenty-dollar-a-week allowance that Shep and Joey had paid to us from their own pockets. They were legally responsible for the $100,000 debt, and Shep was still trying to keep us out on the road and pay for the rent on the John Phillip Law house in Los Angeles.
We ran out of gas, dollars, and inspiration in the midwest. We landed, for want of a better place to land, on Jefferson Street in Detroit, where there was an abundance of sleazy hotels to live in. We became experts at deceit and pilferage to survive. We rifled groupis’ handbags while Mike Bruce fucked them and walked out on checks in restaurants. We could only stay in a hotel until they asked us to pay our bill, then we had to skip out. I felt no guilt. It was me or them.
Sneaking out on hotels became our specialty, and that’s not easy when you look like a convention of half- drowned rats. We developed all sorts of techniques, leaving the rooms, one by one every hour, moving luggage through windows, dressing in layers and layers until we could undress in the van around the corner. By the time the last person was sneaking out of a hotel the first would have checked into our next one down the block.
Detroit was a hot little hole that summer. I had developed a chronic cough, and I don’t think I took two deep breaths that whole summer. I sweated away July and August in a darkened hotel room with a bottle of scotch at my side. My parents were sending me a five-dollar-a-week allowance — when they could find me.
The girl, groupies, and boys kept coming. I didn’t think twice about whether or not it was a strange way to be spending my twenty-first summer. After I sat in the hotel for two weeks, day and night, Neal began to hassle me about staying in so much. It was unlike me not to want to party, and he was right. He said he had met two classy girls who were invited over — not for a drunken brawl — but for conversation and drinks. I told him I wasn’t interested in tea luncheons, but Neal obviously wasn’t going anywhere without the rest of us to back him up, and after he complained and whined awhile he said, “Listen, one of these chicks is a tap dancer. A topless tap dancer.”
He found my soft spot. I was dying to learn how to tap dance, and Neal knew it. Ever since I realized that if Jesus Christ were human he’d walk like Fred Astaire, I wanted to take dancing lessons. Besides, it would have looked great on stage if in the middle of one of our songs I broke into a little tap dance. But topless? What was a topless tap dancer? I had to go and see.
The topless tap dancer was Cindy Lang, a dreamy eighteen-year-old with enormous brown eyes that blinked cowlike as she took in all ninety-eight pounds of me. I took in all one hundred pounds of her, and I instantly felt goofy and uncomfortable. She was so beautiful I was intimidated. It was lie getting a blind date with Raquel Welch. Her hair, shiny and dark brown with the sheen of fur, streamed down to her ass. She was tanned and velvety, her nose was delicate aristocratic slope. She greeted us at the door of a tiny wooden house just south of Detroit. Inside it was immaculate, decorated with antiques that instantly gave me the horrors. I looked around at Neal and Glen and Dennis and wondered which one of us would be the first to break something.
The four of us carried on in our typical way. Neal bopped Glen over the head and Glen punched Dennis in the ribs. It must have looked like the Three Stooges came to tea. I couldn’t bring myself to sit down, everything looked so fluffed and orderly. We walked back and forth in front of each other stepping on our toes. For the first fifteen minutes conversation consisted of “Excuse me,” “Pardon me,” “That’s all right,” “Don’t mention it.”
Finally all of us sat down on an old sofa and it broke underneath us. Nobody laughed. Cindy glared at us like we were a bunch of baboons. The only time I spoke to Cindy Lang the entire evening I asked her about topless tap dancing and found out, much to her amusement, that she was nothing of the sort. She was entering her freshman year in a local art school, a native Detroit girl (like me) and the daughter of a police captain.
The next day, suffering from a terminal case of “shys,” I sent Michael Bruce to Cindy’s house dressed in a bathing suit to ask Cindy if she wanted to take a swim at our hotel. Michael in a bathing suit was always good bait. When Cindy got to our hotel she was furious that we didn’t have a pool; I thought it was incidental. She agreed to have lunch with me anyway.
I had received my $5 from Phoenix that morning and felt flushed until, Cindy ordered a fish dinner that came to $3.50. I ordered a Coke. I didn’t want to tell her how poor I was. I wanted her to think I was a famous rock star.
Two restless days went by after our aborted swim and lunch date. I didn’t dare call her because I couldn’t suggest doing anything except sitting in a dark hotel room with five other people watching mosquitoes. Finally the hall phone rang at my hotel and it was Cindy. She was calling to invite me to an all-night motorcycle movie, and before I could even tell her I couldn’t afford the admission, she said she would pay for it because she knew I was broke.
What a romantic time! We told each other our astrological signs (neither one of us believed in them) and spent the night in a dark theater that smelled of urine, pretending to watch the motorcycle movies, and drank two pints of Southern Comfort. At two in the morning an old man rang a little hand bell and asked that everybody move to one side of the thaeter so he could mop the urine off the floors.
I didn’t want to spend the night in the theater, but taking Cindy to bed was a major problem. Cindy, as it turned out, didn’t live in the house filled with antiques where we met her, but at home with her mother and policeman father. There were at least five of us in my hotel room, and it took me a full day of making deals and cajoling (I paid Neal one dollar to get out) to arrange to have my room empty at eleven o’clock the next night.
Getting Cindy there without making it look like we were on a time schedule took real finesse. When we arrived there were still some stragglers laying around on the beds and I had to round them all up and get them out while Cindy stood in the hallway and watched.
It took me half an hour to get up the courage to kiss her, and by the time we laid down on the bed people started barging back into the room. Cindy lay there looking at the ceiling, choking back laughter as I begged Glen and Dennis “Not yet! Not yet! Five more minutes!” I hadn’t even taken my shoes off in two hours.
Our early romance was pure Shakespearean tragedy. Cindy and I had been dating for three weeks, and she had never seen me perform. We had a gig coming up in the beginning of August and I wanted to be terrific for her. I had a pair of pink suede high-heeled shoes, with a broken strap that needed fixing, that I wore with a pink velvet suit that my mother had made for me and shipped to Detroit. I wore a white ruffled shirt underneath it and I looked like a wafer. The night before the show Cindy took my shoes home to have them fixed, and I gave her my favorite necklace, a combination of rhinestone and big orange balls, to wear to the show.
Cindy thought the necklace was hideous, and hid it in the toe of my pink shoe on her way out of her parents’ house going to the club to see the show. She gave the pink shoes to a roadie who brought them backstage to me.
