June–July 1972
“Marshall told me there isn’t a place for me on the tour.” I was pouting as I stretched out on the chaise longue. Mick and I were sitting by the pool at the new house I’d rented for him and Keith. He’d been gone for a few months, jetting from San Francisco to New York before taking Bianca and Jade on a three-week holiday to Bali. Keith and Anita had left LA, too, entering a Swiss drug clinic together. Keith told me later that the staff put him to sleep for three days and “changed” his blood—to get rid of the heroin—in exchange for nice, clean, fresh blood. It sounded like Dracula’s clinic to me, but when I met him at the LA airport in May, he looked fabulous—his face was bright, skin clear, hair spiky with a cool bleach-blond streak. He wore a fitted black suit jacket with clean, pressed jeans, and his swagger was gone, replaced with an aristocratic stroll, embellished by the use of a cane. Whoa, I thought, he’s kind of cute. That thought had never occurred to me before. Keith really wasn’t my type.
“Don’t worry, Chris,” Mick said as he ate a spoonful of yogurt with honey swirled on top. He’d been taking really good care of himself in the weeks before the tour, eating healthy food, exercising, getting more sleep.
I sighed, sinking deeper into the comfy chaise longue.
Mick took another spoonful of yogurt and looked at me with understanding eyes. “You never know when you’ll be needed,” he said. “Trust me.”
“Chris! It’s Mick.”
“Mick! How’s the tour? How was the show? Are you okay?” I had so many questions to ask. It just killed me to think of the Stones touring around America and I was all alone, stuck in Los Angeles by myself. I had plenty of little odds and ends to clean up: phone calls to return, bills to pay, getting Mick and Keith’s rental house in shape to be returned to its owner. But while the Stones were happily gallivanting all over the country, I felt like the unwanted child left at home to take care of the thankless jobs, sweeping up the memories of all the good times we’d had.
“Yeah, everything’s great,” Mick said, brushing aside my questions and getting right down to business. “Look, Ossie Clark is sending a package from London. He’s designed some more stage outfits for me. The package is addressed to you and it’s scheduled to arrive tomorrow at the Los Angeles airport. I want you to collect it at customs.”
“Okay!” I said, already reaching for my purse. “Where do you want me to send them?”
“I don’t want you to send them. I want you to bring them to Chicago.”
“Really?” My heart was beating like crazy.
“You wanted to come on tour, didn’t you?” he said, with that sly hint of mischief in his voice. I knew what he was thinking. See Chris? I found a way to get you here.
I flew into O’Hare airport the next day, June 19, 1972, and took a taxi to the International Amphitheater. With my precious all-access backstage pass, which Mick had given me during the Southern California part of the tour, and the even more valuable box of costumes tucked under my arm, I went straight to Mick’s dressing room. Steve, the makeup artist, was fussing over Mick, applying eye shadow and mascara.
“Hey, Chris, you made it!” Mick said, standing up to give me a big hug. I proudly held out the box, happy that Mick was glad to see me, happy to be in Chicago, happy to feel part of the gang again.
“Any problems?” Mick asked as he opened the box and took out each of the soft one-piece jumpsuits, looking them over to make sure they were perfect. They were all basically the same cut, designed to be skin tight, made from velveteen, velour, and satin in shades of purple, lavender, pink, blue, white, turquoise, and dark blue, some studded with sequins, others framed with fringe, all stunning, all utterly and completely Mick Jagger. Holding each costume in front of him, he checked his image in the mirror as he turned this way and that, looking at me to see if I approved. Mick loved the way those suits stretched across his abdomen, clung to his little butt, and accentuated the bulge in his crotch. He was “definable”—that’s how I’d put it—with every muscle and tendon, every crack and indentation, every protrusion and protuberance showing, leaving little to the imagination.
“What d’ya think?” he asked as he handed the jumpsuits to Steve to hang up.
“They’re fabulous,” I gushed, knowing that’s what he wanted to hear, but to tell the truth, I thought Mick should mix it up a little bit with his stage clothes. Why not a great pair of pants and a frilly top or even a funky suit?
I left Mick to finish his makeup and walked around the backstage area, searching for Astrid and Bill. Astrid and I got to know each other when she arrived with Bill for the Exile on Main street recording sessions. At first I was wary of her, having heard that she could be demanding, but when she realized that I would do everything I could to make her and Bill comfortable—including moving them from a three-star hotel to the swanky Beverly Wilshire, a real feat because the hotel was overbooked—she warmed up to me. By the time the tour began several months later, we’d become close friends.
When I walked into the hospitality room of Chicago’s International Amphitheater, Astrid broke off her conversation with one of the road crew and walked over to give me a kiss on both cheeks.
“Chris. You made it. I was glad when Mick told us you were coming.” Astrid was not one to show her emotions, and her Swedish accent drew even more attention to her cool demeanor. “Come, let’s go and get a drink before the show starts.” Although Astrid seemed somewhat aloof and standoffish, once I got used to her, I knew how to read her moods. I told her once that when I first met her, I thought she was stuck up.
“Yes, everyone thinks that, I guess,” she said, pouting a little. “Even knowing that, it’s very hard for me to change. I grew up feeling as if I were in a glass house and my emotions were there for everybody to see. It became an obsession of mine not to show any emotion. I was so afraid—afraid to be alone and afraid of people. But I can’t express that, and so I hide my insecurities.”
Like a lot of us, I thought.
Moments before the band went on stage, Bill came into the hospitality room and gave me a big hug. Charlie Watts walked in right behind him.
“Welcome back, Chris,” Charlie said with a big grin. Charlie was the quiet one, a chiseled, craggy-faced jazz musician who formed, or so I imagined, the granite foundation underneath the rocky cliffs of the Rolling Stones. While I was chatting with Charlie, Keith walked past and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. Minutes later they all left to go onstage and Astrid went to her usual place at the sound mixing board in the middle of the audience. I was sitting at a table in the hospitality room, just about to go into the ladies’ room for another big hit of cocaine before the show, when Robert Frank took a Polaroid of me. I still have that photograph and although it’s badly faded, every time I look at it I remember how I felt at that moment, just a few hours after arriving in Chicago. Exhilarated. Ecstatic.
When the Stones started the show with “Brown Sugar,” a song Mick had written about African American model and singer Marsha Hunt (who bore his first and her only child, Karis), I joined Astrid at the sound mixing board where we listened to the whole set from beginning to end. One of my favorite songs was “Midnight Rambler”; I got such a kick out of the way Mick snapped his belt at the floor, and the stage lights flashed brighter with each crack of the belt. Raunchy, raw, rude—no wonder the Stones have so often been called the greatest rock band ever. I closed my eyes and felt the vibrations, the boom-boom-booming of the bass and the drums almost like a second heart beating inside me. I felt—alive. God, it was good to be back with the music.
After the show I jumped into Bill and Astrid’s limo and drove with them to the Playboy mansion, where they were staying along with the rest of the band. We spent two sleepless nights there, hanging out most of the time in Keith’s room drinking and snorting coke. I remember laughing hysterically when Bobby Keyes snapped an amyl nitrate under a waiter’s nose, and he started spinning like a top, trying like mad to keep the crystal glasses full of red wine, Tequila Sunrises, and straight whiskey from crashing to the ground. The tray and the waiter toppled over, and Keith immediately rushed over to help the poor guy to his feet.
“Sorry, man,” Keith said, gently putting his hand on the waiter’s shoulder in an attempt to make him feel like he was part of the fun and not just the butt of the joke. That’s one of the reasons I loved Keith: he looked like he’d bite your head off but, paradoxically, he was extraordinarily sensitive to other people’s feelings. Within minutes, it seemed, the mess was cleaned up, and the drinks redelivered.
Every so often I’d wander down to the lower level of the house where the swimming pool and game rooms were located. Mick and I played Pac-Man and watched, just barely stifling our giggles, as Hugh Hefner floated around in the indoor pool with his bunnies surrounding him on all sides.
Stevie Wonder and his band—the opening act for the tour—arrived sometime later that first night, and we all sat around in the main room listening to him play—Mick, Keith, Charlie, Bill, Hugh Hefner, the bunnies, Astrid, and me.
By the second day in Chicago, I found a job on the tour. I was standing near the stairs that led to the stage, waiting for the band to go on, when Alan Dunn, the tour manager and one of the Stones’ most trusted employees, approached me.
“I want you to collect all the old ladies at the beginning of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ ” Alan said, “and get them to the limousines so we can leave as soon as the band comes off the stage.”
“Okay,” I said, happy to have something legitimate to do. From that night on, my main responsibility at the shows was to round up the women—Astrid, varied and assorted girlfriends, and, sometimes, Bianca, Anita, Shirley Watts, and Rose Taylor—from their various places in the audience, at the sound board, in the dressing rooms, or the hospitality room, and get them into the limos before the show was over. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was the second to last song (third to last if the Stones did an encore, which was rare), giving us plenty of time to get backstage and into the waiting limos. Even today, that song makes me want to jump up and head for the door.
Totally exhausted from those two raucous days in Chicago, we flew to Kansas City for a more subdued show and a few good hours of sleep, then off to Texas, with an overnight in Dallas, two shows in Fort Worth, and a show in Houston.
“You’re coming with us, Chris,” Mick announced in Chicago, and that was all it took to get me a seat on the Stones’ chartered jet, a commercial-sized plane reconfigured for comfort, with seats arranged to face each other and plenty of space to walk around. I thought it was the height of luxury until a year later when the Starship appeared, a plush tour plane with a TV, video library, electronic organ, full bar, bedroom, and shower.
That first day I wasn’t sure where to sit. I didn’t want to take anyone’s favorite seat, so I waited until Astrid and Bill called me over to a seat toward the front. For the first few days, I sat in the front with Astrid and Bill, Gary Stromberg the public relations guy (who always had a prophylactic filled to bursting with cocaine, making him the ideal seat mate), Larry the Doctor, Peter Rudge the tour manager, Alan Dunn the Stones’ right-hand man, Jo Bergman, manager of the Stones’ London office, and two bodyguards who had once been FBI agents. Soon enough, though, I discovered another great seat next to Keith and Mick at the very back of the plane next to the US map that showed all the cities we’d be visiting on the tour. That map was a well-used resource, giving us all a reference point for where we’d been, where we were, and where we were going.
Keith, Mick, and Bobby Keyes liked the back of the plane and Bobby (like Gary Stromberg up front) always had plenty of drugs to share. No matter where I was sitting, though, as soon as the plane took off, I’d wander around visiting with people. I spent hardly any time in my seat on those flights.
Dallas. I was resting in my hotel room in Dallas when the phone rang.
“Hey, Chris, it’s Keith.” Keith always spoke in a monotone, never giving away his emotional state. “Can you come down to my room for a few minutes?”
“Sure.” Keith didn’t ask for much, so when he did, I jumped. Being on tour meant always being ready and willing to “do something” for Mick or Keith—collect their dirty laundry after the show and deliver it to their room the next morning, search out phone numbers for long-lost friends, fly from St. Louis to New York City to get Mick’s favorite camera fixed, call room service (“and tell them to hurry up with my dinner”), or, most commonly, “Come down to my room and hang out with me for a while, okay?”
Keith’s hotel rooms always had the same look—scarves thrown over the lamps, imparting a red, pink, creamy, or tie-dyed glow, a layer of smoke like fog hanging overhead, ashtrays overflowing with cigarettes, whiskey bottles on the dressers and empties in the wastebaskets, television on with the sound turned down, shades drawn.
“Come on in,” he said. I sat in a chair and he flopped down on the sofa.
“Hey, look, I need you to go to LA today and get some supplies.” I knew what he meant by “supplies.” He handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number.
“I called the guy, so he knows you’re coming. Meet with him tonight and then bring the package back tomorrow. I’ll give you money for taxis and expenses, and somebody will get your plane tickets organized.”
Keith looked at me, his head tilted sideways. “Okay?” Like—okay, I’m asking you to run drugs, you okay with that?
It never occurred to me to say no.
When I got on the plane, I felt immediate culture shock. There I was sitting with men in business suits and mothers with babies in a crowded commercial airplane in an assigned seat, allowed to get up only when the seat belt sign was off, having to listen to people walking up and down the aisle telling me what I could and couldn’t do. I got haughty with the stewardess, which actually surprised me a little. I’d spent only five days on a private plane and I already had an attitude.
I called the drug dealer from my LA apartment. He gave me an address and told me to meet him at 9:00 p.m. I decided to drive my car rather than risk taking a taxi to a drug dealer’s house, but the farther away I got from my comfort zone of the West Hollywood–Beverly Hills area into an unknown part of LA, the more anxious I felt. It was dark. I was alone with what I assumed was a lot of money (I never looked in that envelope), meeting a drug dealer on his turf. What the hell was I doing?
The house was dark. I knocked on the door and the porch light went on. I was under the spotlight and someone, I knew, was looking at me. The door opened. “Come in,” he said.
“Hi,” I said with a big smile. “I’m Chris.” I sure was out of my league.
“Have you got the money?”
I gave him the envelope and he gave me a package the size of a paperback book. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was—hash, cocaine, heroin?—but I hoped it was coke. I knew it had to be good stuff or Keith wouldn’t have sent me all the way to LA to get it. I have no idea how much money I handed over, figuring that if I didn’t look, I didn’t know, and if I didn’t know, I’d be okay.
I wanted to push my foot down on the accelerator and get the hell out of there, but I drove back to my apartment very slowly, very carefully, looking maybe a hundred times in the rearview mirror. The next day I arrived at the LA airport with the drugs in my purse—there was no security check back then—got on the plane to Houston where somebody was waiting for me at the airport, and went straight back to the hotel. The Stones were getting into the camper that was transporting them to the show at Hofheinz Pavilion, and Keith waved me over.
“Hey, Chris, come with us!” he shouted. I got special treatment that day—hardly anyone ever got to ride with the Stones to the shows. I felt safe; nobody could touch me now that I was back in the thick of things with the Stones.
Somewhere around Dallas I started sleeping with Mick. It was no big deal. We were good friends and we trusted each other, so it seemed like the natural thing to do. For all those months we spent together in LA, Mick always treated me like a sister, someone he trusted and felt comfortable confiding in. We acted more like two children rollicking around and acting silly than two grown-ups who were sexually attracted to each other.
Given Mick’s appetite for women, I really don’t know why he didn’t come on to me before the tour began. Maybe it was because I was in a live-in relationship with Jon Taplin, who I met through Pattie and George at the Bangladesh concert and who was working in LA with the Band and Bob Dylan. Or maybe Mick didn’t make a move because he didn’t want to ruin our friendship, although that hadn’t stopped him in other cases.
One sultry evening in Dallas, when we all had a day off, I was in my hotel room getting ready to go to a downtown club with photographer Annie Leibovitz and a few other people from the tour. The phone rang just as I was headed out the door.
“Chris. What are you doing?” Mick asked.
I told him about the plans for the evening and asked if he wanted to come along.
“No,” he said, very matter-of-factly, “but why don’t you come up to my suite?” I heard something in the tone of his voice that made me realize he had sex on his mind.
“Okay,” I said, feeling a little anxious. I was definitely attracted to Mick, and he’d always treated me with respect. I’d even call him “gentlemanly.” But did I want to mess things up by sleeping with him? Oh, what the hell, I thought. Why not? It just seemed like the natural thing to do.
Sleeping with Mick didn’t really change our relationship at all. I never ever thought there was anything more to it than sex. Every so often he’d call me in my room or grab me after a show, and we’d go back to his room, but I don’t think I ever spent the night. It just was what it was, for that moment and that period of time. Mostly we laughed. I didn’t have any romantic fantasies about the future, and I never once, not ever, thought, Boy, I’d sure like to be Mick’s girlfriend. No, being Mick’s girlfriend would have been too much work. He was just too unpredictable, too unfaithful, too—well, just too much.
It was a simple relationship. Mick liked to spend time with me, I loved the attention, and sleeping with him strengthened the trust between us. I’d bet that most of the women who worked for Mick had slept with him. If there had been a job description for being employed by the Stones back then, I’m pretty sure it would have included a proviso that went something like this: Sleep with Mick whenever he asks.
Mobile. Tuscaloosa. Nashville. By the time we got to Nashville, we were dead tired. The Stones had played to over 240,000 people in seventeen cities in less than three weeks. We were all, it seemed, losing weight from the drugs and lack of sleep. Gary Stromberg had lost over thirty pounds and Marshall more than twenty pounds. I was down to about ninety pounds. The drugs had a lot to do with it. Most of the time we’d skip meals without even realizing it, snacking on carrots and celery sticks before or after the show. The constant squabbling was also a calorie burner. The tour managers and organizers—Peter Rudge, Alan Dunn, and Jo Bergman—were fed up with all the Stones’ “friends” hanging around and getting in the way. Running a tour is a difficult business because you’re always moving, always packing, always changing cities and hotel rooms. Extra people—“friends” with no reason for being there and no work responsibilities—are extra weight. It’s expensive to cart people around from one city to the next, and the tour staff knew it was way beyond time to trim the fat.
And, of course, there was jealousy. There’s always jealousy around famous people because everyone wants to be close to the inner circle, and that circle means something only if it’s tight and closed. When people get pushed out of the circle, they get pissed off. When someone with a legitimate job is working fifteen hours a day doing all the logistical work and a “friend” like me is hanging around the hospitality room munching on celery sticks, joking with the roadies, and getting high on alcohol, coke, pot, or pills, patience begins to wear thin.
After Nashville we had a six-day break before the next show in Washington, DC, but I was done, finished, kaput. I spent several days with Bill and Astrid in Memphis at the home of Duck Dunn, bass player for Booker T. and the MG’s, and it seemed like the first time since Chicago that we were able to take a deep breath. I knew I was part of the “fat” that needed to be trimmed, and even though Mick and Keith came to my defense on several occasions, I didn’t have a good reason for staying on the tour. I hated having no set purpose or routine, and with all the in-fighting and gossiping, not to mention all the drugs I was doing, I was getting really depressed. Better to quit now, I thought, before I’m kicked out—my usual pattern of flight before fight. I packed my bags—trying Bill Wyman’s strategy of packing clothes flat with tissue in between—and, much to Astrid’s dismay, flew back home to LA.
I’d just been home one day—July 4, Independence Day—when Keith called from Washington, DC.
“Why aren’t you here?” he asked.
I had to think about that for a few seconds, and then I stumbled my way through an explanation. “Well, I really don’t think I need to be there,” I said. “I don’t have anything essential to do, and it’s pretty obvious that certain people don’t want me around anymore.”
“Fuck them. It’s our tour. Fuck what they think—I think you need to be here. I’ll give you things to do. Fuck them.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I want you to come back,” Keith said. And I thought, Shit. If Keith wants me there, maybe I should go. Keith once gave me what I thought at the time was the greatest of all compliments. He told me that I could drink like one of the guys. It was hard to keep up with Keith, and he seemed to appreciate those of us who didn’t know when to call it a night. Still, a lot of people fell by the wayside trying to match Keith drink for drink and drug for drug. I watched Bobby Keyes hanging in there with Keith, getting more and more fucked up, and there were lots of others, including myself, who thought we could handle the drugs and who ended up in bad shape or dead.
“All right,” I said after a moment.
“Don’t worry about anything,” he said, “we’ll cover all your costs.” Later I found out that Keith, Mick, and Bill and Astrid paid for all my expenses for the rest of the tour.
Norfolk. Charlotte. Knoxville. St. Louis. Akron. Indianapolis. Detroit.
In Detroit all hell broke loose again after one of Keith’s friends got in a fight with one of the bodyguards, prompting a closed-door meeting about who needed to go and who could stay. After the meeting Astrid told me that when my name came up as someone who should go, Keith refused to back down. “Chris isn’t even a question,” he said. “The tour isn’t paying for her, we are.”
So I got to stay to the bitter end.
Toronto, Montreal, Boston. Logan Airport was fogged in, and riots had broken out in Boston’s Puerto Rican ghetto, with looting and firebombing and rock flinging, so we ended up landing in Warwick, Rhode Island. The airport was tiny, with a makeshift customs counter outside a hangar. A few policemen, whom we assumed were there for our protection, were nearby. We couldn’t leave the airport until we cleared customs, and as we were waiting for the paperwork to be completed, a photographer wandered among us, shooting pictures. Mick asked him to leave, very politely, I thought, and when the guy refused, Peter Rudge approached the police and asked for their assistance in removing the photographer. But the cops weren’t listening.
Keith was already in a bad mood because we’d had to sit on the tarmac in Montreal earlier that day while mechanics worked on some engine problem, and then we got diverted from Logan Airport to Bumfuck, Rhode Island, and we still had thirty miles to go before we could unload all our shit at Boston Garden and start the show. When the photographer kept taking pictures after Mick asked him in such a nice way to stop, Keith got upset. When he walked over to Keith and stood directly in front of him, his camera raised to shoot, Keith lost it. He swung at the guy, who started screaming in a high-pitched voice, “He hit me, he hit me,” and in seconds police were swarming all over the place.
As the cops marched toward Keith, he very calmly handed me his brown leather bag. I knew what was in that worn old leather bag. It was filled with drugs. Keith carried it with him everywhere he went.
“Take this,” he said, his lips barely moving. I took the bag and tried to play it cool, moving a few steps away from Keith. My heart was pounding, thinking that maybe the police had seen the handoff, or that the fucking photographer would suddenly yell out, “She’s got his drugs!” And that would be the end of me.
When the police grabbed Keith, Mick got really pissed off. “What the fuck are you doing, man,” Mick yelled, his neck jutting forward, veins throbbing. “He hasn’t done anything. What the fuck is going on here?” So Mick was arrested. Bobby Keyes got all riled up about the cops hauling off Mick and Keith, so they arrested him. Realizing that he couldn’t let Keith and Mick go to jail by themselves, Peter Rudge started shouting at the cops so they would arrest him, and he got taken away, too.
Meanwhile, the rest of us stood around wondering what the hell had just happened. We finally got through customs and climbed into a school bus that took us to the arena, where the promoter told us the crowd was getting uneasy, and if the Stones didn’t get out of jail soon, he was afraid there would be a riot. With Boston’s entire police force occupied by the firebombings in the city, that was bad news. The promoter called the mayor, who came to the arena and assured the audience that the Stones would be there soon, and public transportation would be available to everyone who needed it. All the while I held on tight to Keith’s bag.
When Mick, Keith, and the rest of them finally showed up for the concert, it was 12:45 in the morning, more than three hours after Stevie Wonder had finished his opening act. Keith had some kind of radar thing going, because he homed in on me within seconds after the limos dropped them off backstage. I had the bag in my hand, waiting for him.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, reaching for the bag with a huge shit-eating grin. “I’m fine now, just fine.”
“There’s going to be some kind of sex thing on the plane,” Astrid whispered. We were in the backseat of the limo on the way to the Philadelphia airport for a short flight to Pittsburgh. Then on to the final three shows in New York City.
“What kind of sex thing?” I said. Bill’s twelve-year-old son Stephen was traveling with us.
“I don’t know, but rumors are flying,” Astrid said, tight lipped. “I heard they’re going to film it.”
The orgy in the back of the plane on the ninety-minute flight from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was—what’s the word? “Debauched” comes to mind, but I think “sad” sums it up best. Just before we left Philadelphia, three young women boarded the plane and disappeared into the back section with Willie the Luggage Man and Larry the Doctor. The curtain dividing the airplane into two sections was drawn, but from the sound of things we all knew exactly what was going on. People were laughing hysterically, hooting and hollering, and somebody was using bongos to slap out a jungle beat.
I was sitting up front with Astrid, Bill, Stephen, and several others who couldn’t stomach the idea of it all. Maybe twenty minutes after we left Philadelphia, Gary Stromberg came through the curtain and sat down next to me. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, which might have been true.
“Man, they’re all screwing back there,” he said.
“Who?”
“The doc and the baggage guy and the three girls.” Gary shook his head as if to dislodge the memory. “Man, this is too weird. Twisted. They’re staging the whole thing for the film.” Robert Frank was shooting a documentary of the tour, later titled Cocksucker Blues. It was never officially released by the Stones.
We all sat there, waiting for it to end. Bill kept pointing out the window, trying to distract Stephen. Astrid chattered away, talking about absolutely nothing. She’d seen a lot of outrageous behavior being around the Stones, but her dismayed expression told me this was way beyond anything she’d witnessed in the past. I felt tense and angry. I had watched girls throw themselves at the Stones and other musicians many times before, but this felt different. They were using the girls, treating them with absolute disregard. My anger turned to tears that welled up in my eyes. Gary pretended to sleep, his shoulders hunched up around his ears as if he could drown out the sudden peals of laughter, the clapping and whooping, and the constant beat of the bongo drum.
The plane finally landed, and people came spilling through the curtain. I concentrated on putting all my stuff in my bag, checking my seat to make sure I’d left nothing behind, my head bowed down, waiting for the plane to clear out.
“I hope you don’t think bad of me.” I looked up to see a young woman with a tear-streaked face. I remembered talking to her right before the show. She had that dazed look shared by so many of the girls who hung out at the backstage door—a blurry-eyed stare filled with loneliness and a longing for connection.
I didn’t know what to say. Her makeup was smudged, her lower lip was trembling, and her eyes searched mine for understanding. Before I could respond, she was running down the aisle and out the door. I heard that the Stones paid for the girls’ plane fare back to Philadelphia.
New York was awful. Mick, Keith, and Charlie were staying at the Carlyle, Bill and Astrid were at the St. Regis, I can’t remember where Mick Taylor stayed, but the rest of us were holed up at a cheap hotel opposite Madison Square Garden. Stevie Wonder and his band and most of the roadies were staying there, too. My room was dark and smelled like musty old carpet.
For the first time since I had joined the tour in Chicago, I was separated from my friends. I knew that the Stones couldn’t afford to pay for all of us to stay at the expensive hotels, and it made sense that they’d put us up right across from the Garden, but I couldn’t bear being cut off from the band. The fact that Mick, Keith, or Bill and Astrid didn’t offer to pay for my room at one of their hotels made sense, I guess, since it was their money, after all, but it still hurt my feelings and bruised my fragile ego. Separated from my friends and in the same hotel as the tour staff, I felt as if I had been abandoned again. But I was all messed up on drugs and not thinking straight at all.
I hung out at the hotel with some of the musicians in Stevie’s band and a cameraman named Danny. Danny was about my age, stick thin, with a long mustache and a great personality.
On our night off before the final four shows at the Garden, I visited Danny in his room. The TV was on with the sound turned down. He was lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. Danny liked heroin, and he was always high. Everybody on the tour worried about him. He was one of those people who tried to keep up with Keith and eventually failed. I heard he went sailing and died at sea.
“What’s it like to shoot up?” I asked him. For some reason, I was enthralled with the idea of shooting up. It was kind of like climbing Mt. Everest after you’d conquered all the lesser mountains. As the tour wore on, and I spent more time with Keith and Bobby Keyes, who were shooting up heroin, I began to romanticize the whole idea of having track marks. It was the ritual that intrigued me, the flame, the tying off, the needle in the vein, watching the red blood mix with the brownish liquid. It wasn’t so much about getting high but more the mystery and death-defying adventure of the whole routine that fascinated me.
Keith was my role model. I saw him as a true rebel who didn’t seem to have a care in the world and didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought about him. That rebelliousness, that “fuck you” attitude enthralled me.
I wanted to be like that, too. I was tired, depressed, and worn out from all the emotional entanglements of the tour, the backbiting, the competition for attention, the need to always prove that I was “necessary.” I had spent my whole life doing what people wanted me to do, thinking about their needs before my own, putting everyone else first. I was sick of always following the rules. I wanted on some deep level to tell the world to fuck off. Maybe it was the fact that Keith had shown me, through his reckless, even foolhardy behavior, how to be my own person, go with my needs, wants, and desires, and not give a shit what anyone else thought.
“What’s it like to shoot up?” Danny repeated my question. “It’s fantastic. The most fantastic feeling in the world.”
“I want to shoot up,” I said.
“No way. You don’t want to do that, Chris.”
“Why not? You do.”
Danny was totally coherent. Somehow he always stayed in control. “Look at me. I’m totally addicted to this drug, I can’t live without it. I’m not going to help you get like that.”
“I just want to know what it’s like. I just want the experience of shooting up. Just once.” He tried to talk me out of it. Most drug addicts would say, “Cool, let’s get high.” But not Danny.
I kept after him. Finally, he made a deal with me.
“First, you have to go up and get clean syringes from Dr. Larry,” he said. “Second, you have to promise me that if you really like it, you’ll never do it again. And I mean that.”
“I promise.”
Larry agreed to give me some syringes; he thought they were for Danny.
“So, Chris,” Danny said with a sigh, “do you want to shoot up heroin or coke?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Coke,” I said.
“Okay, Chris.” Another sigh. I knew Danny was afraid that I’d get hooked like he did, but I reassured him again that it was just this once, I just wanted to try it, and then I’d never do it again. I lay down on one of the double beds and put my feet up against the wall. Somehow that seemed to steady me.
“Give me your arm,” he said, gently. He tied my arm off with a scarf, right above the elbow, to make the veins protrude.
“Squeeze your hand,” he said. Oh, this is just like giving blood, I thought. I have really good veins. I’ve always been proud of them.
He put the needle in, pulled out the back of the syringe to draw in some blood, waited while the cocaine mixed with the blood, pushed the mixture back into my vein, and flipped off the tubing.
Comfort. Calm. Happiness. Bliss. It all swept over me.
“Whoa,” I whispered.
“Are you okay?”
“Amazing,” I said.
Later he asked me if I liked it.
I nodded my head and smiled. “Yeah, I liked it. It was amazing.” A moment passed. “But I’ll never do it again.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” And I never did. But I felt initiated, having put another notch in my belt of rock-and-roll experiences. I had a track mark on my arm. I’d taken it all the way and now I was free. Like Keith, I could tell the rest of the world to fuck off.