Free Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up by Pamela Des Barres, Michael Des Barres

Detective played San Francisco, that loopy city where everybody seemed anesthetized, I stayed home to paint the kitchen pink.
    A few days later I went out to get the mail, and there was a letter addressed to Michael that the record company had kindly forwarded to El Cerrito Place. I examined the obvious girly handwriting with big, fat, loopy vowels, and before I could even hand it over to Michael he grabbed it and dashed down the back stairs. My heart screamed. I stood there, stuck in the kitchen, staring at the dirty dishes until he reappeared, musing out loud, “Isn’t that odd, the envelope was empty.” Mr. Innocence shrugged, and I pushed the rising rancor deep down inside and tamped it flat. I studied his face for a fib and couldn’t admit I saw one.
    We were a unit. Joined at the hip. Hand in glove. Two hearts beating as one, forevermore. I was sewn into his flesh like a brand-new body part, a human IV giving him a fresh, new, squeaky-clean lease on life. My entire well-being was reliant on the look in his eyes.
    I had finally started to face the only time bomb that stood between us: his addiction, which of course had a long, warped stem leading back to his alien childhood. But what could I do about it? Begging and pleading only drove him out of the house, so I tried to hold my nagging tongue while he told me disconcerting tales of boy-woe like he was reciting the alphabet. One Christmas he had been left alone in a crummy hotel room the entire day, and when his parents finally returned, his mom bitterly cut apart her gift to Philip, a carton of cigarettes, with a pair of tiny nail scissors and threw the little pieces in his face, cursing him long and hard. Seven-year-old Michael got nothing. It was rare that his parents were together, and a lot of nights the young Michael slept next to Irene while she frolicked with black jazz musicians, the smell of hash filling the small flat as he tried in vain to fall asleep. On El Cerrito Place he still had insane bouts with the relentless monster insomnia, which I tried to tackle with massage, herbs, spiritual advice, and a lot of pleading to Jesus for some blessed zzz’s for my man.
V
     
    Despite my over-devotion to Michael, I stayed close with my parents, being their adored only child, and watching my daddy fall prisoner to his failing lungs was a poison dart in my already lacerated side. Due to a constant, lung-chewing cough diagnosed as black lung from slaving in the Kentucky coal mines, Daddy had to quit his job. He still drank eight or ten beers a day and played poker with hiscronies but was otherwise a frustrated, bottled-up he-man with nowhere to flaunt his fading energy. He kept coming up with different projects that filled the house, the first of which was a poster of a lovely lake and mountain scene that took up an entire wall. He got dressed in his finest bell-bottomed leisure suit and made Mom take stacks of Polaroids of him with his fishing rod in the backyard until they got the right size photo so he could glue himself onto the massive mural. Whenever anybody came to visit, he would make them study the wall scene until they spotted him sitting on a log, holding his fishing rod over the lake. He roared with laughter every single time, like it was the most clever idea ever dreamed up. Eventually he got a gigantic replica kit of his navy ship that was blown in half during a battle in World War II and spent a couple of years painstakingly putting it together, even though his hands were being wickedly assaulted by arthritis. It was a grand day when he finally attached it to the wall-lake where it floated for a dozen years without being bombed.
    The first Detective record sold enough copies that Swan Song requested another. This one would be produced by a brilliant but stoned-out young British producer, Andy Johns. Why did everyone who worked with Michael have to be so drug oriented? In between taking care of my increasingly bombed fiance and trying to help out my