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

part of his profound life-altering message. He sat up on the platform, an eighty-year-old white-haired Indian man wearing some pretty classy duds—no orange robes for him, no cloud of camouflaging incense—and reminded us that “the speaker is only up on this platform for practical purposes,” just so he could be seen and heard. He didn’t consider himself above anybody. We were all one. Hmm. When he said, “The thinker
is
the thought,” did he mean, we
are
what we think? Or we create the world around us and what happens to us by thinking certain thoughts? “The observer
is
the observed,” he said. Did that mean we
are
what we see? We create what we see? Or we see what we
are
if we look real hard? I was a sincere seeker under the oak trees and wanted to transform myself instantaneously.
    My heart was full of cosmic hope when Michael said he would go with me to see Krishnamurti the following weekend. I just knew that with his awesome brain power he would grasp the message totally and take the first joyous step on his spiritual path. We sat cross-legged in the beautiful oak grove together, blissing out, and after Krishnamurti’s talk, consumed lots of brown rice and broccoli with other hungry, humble seekers in perfect tranquility. We bought tapes of the lectures and some deep inspirational books:
You Are the World, Think on These Things
.
    The next night Michael went out to see Bad Company at the Forum and didn’t come home for two days. I dried my puffy eyes and wrote another song about the pain of loving an escape artist.
He takes you to the edge
But he leaves you standing there
How can you follow a shadow
Through the exit door to nowhere?
    I felt alone, I felt betrayed. I was so concerned about the rotting of Michael’s liver, I never thought too much about other women, even though there was this one horrible, scrawny public-relations bitch who hung around, condescending to me like I was just another airy-fairy, girly-girl. She had short, manlike hair, paper-thin slit-lips, and—scariest to me—piles of cocaine. In my lowest white-powder nightmares I pictured Michael teetering, dancing gleefully in the darkness, with jibbering ghouls all around him, leading him to his final resting place, three sheets to the wind.
III
     
    Screw the slit-lipped PR dog!! Glory of ultimate glories, I was finally going to get married! Michael’s transatlantic divorce came through, and we started making wedding plans. My parents were relieved and ecstatic. Even though they had been supportive and loving, it had been hard for them to accept that their daughter was living openly in sin.
    My daddy was on oxygen most of the time, and his weight kept climbing up and plunging down due to the monstrous selection of pills he had to drop all day long. My mom even had to set the alarm in the dead of night to slip him a couple of capsules. But despite his gnawing discomfort, he wanted to give me away on the big day. He rented a deluxe cream-colored tux with flared trousers and invited his best pal Ruben in from Mexico.
    Nobody had the dough to toss a sock-’em-rock-’em wingding, so I asked my friend Catherine if we could do the deed in the glorious green of her Laurel Canyon backyard. As soon as she said yes, Mom started making her special teriyaki chicken wings for two-hundred freaks. My parents also bought the champagne and a vast array of fresh flowers that my dear friend Michele Myer picked up downtown at 4 A.M . Punch bowls, chairs, tables, and an actual bower to stand under during the ceremony were rented. Catherine recommended a Unitarian preacher that we hired for fifty bucks, and I rewrote the marriage dialogue to suit a modern couple. I kept “love and honor” but deleted the word “obey”—and no
man
and wife for us! The nerve! After looking at some artless new gowns, I came to my senses and found my wedding dress for six dollars at the Aardvark on Melrose Avenue, a little girl’s antique communion frock from the twenties