After losing the court case, I fell down the rabbit hole. I didn’t have much experience of life outside of The Cure. It had defined my whole existence thus far and, truth be told, the band was more of a family to me than my actual one.
I had been married a little while and some other awful stuff had happened. We had lost a child, a daughter, due to complications during her birth. The day of her birth our original doctor who was going to deliver her was not available and a stand-in took over. Unfortunately, he was fresh out of medical school and didn’t have that much experience yet. Consequently, when an unusual situation occurred during the birth, the wrong decisions were made, and our daughter suffered a severe loss of oxygen for several minutes—enough to ensure that she would only live for about two weeks.
It was the most horrible two weeks of my life. I sat in the neonatal intensive care unit praying for a miracle that would somehow give us our daughter’s life back. It wasn’t to be. When we had exhausted every test and explored every option, we took her home to Dartmoor, where she passed away after a couple of days. After losing Camille India, it felt like nothing would ever be right again. It would have been easy to fall into the morass of misery and pity, but within a few months Lydia became pregnant again. We had been given another chance and had a beautiful son we named Gray.
Unfortunately, that spelled the end of the marriage. Something was not right. I wasn’t sure if it ever was. To be fair, I had married Lydia at my lowest point, and I was not thinking very clearly when I met her. I hadn’t wanted a relationship with another person so much as someone to manage my life for me, which was then spiraling out of control. I dumped my emotional baggage on her and abdicated all responsibility. Lydia came from a pretty dysfunctional background herself, so our union was recipe for disaster.
After the trial and the death of our daughter, we decided to leave England and relocate to Southern California. I had always been happy there. I had fond memories of being there as young single man with The Cure, so I thought it would help to go someplace where I’d felt contented.
Two weeks after Lydia left with Gray in November 1994, I found myself on a plane to Los Angeles. I’d stayed behind to tie up some loose ends, but I soon discovered that running away to another country was not enough to keep us married. The day I landed in Los Angeles and arrived at our new apartment in West Hollywood, Lydia informed me she wanted a divorce. She wouldn’t let me stay with her and Gray, so I left and went to see my friend Gary who lived close by.
For the next six months I rattled around various friends’ houses in Hollywood (thank you, Gary, Beth, Chris, and Tara) while I tried to put my life back in some kind of order. I was now separated, and like most men in my situation I had occasional visits with my son, which were the highlight of my existence.
One of the universal truths of alcoholism is that in order to be recovered you have to reach the bottom, the point at which you feel you can fall no further. In 1995 I had most certainly reached bottom.
I had no band, no wife, no place to live of my own, and only about 25 percent of my income to live on. The judge had ordered that I allocate 75 percent to pay off my trial costs and legal fees. I was really quite depressed, and while I was technically clean and sober, I was fucking miserable.
Everything that had gone before had to be destroyed if I was to rebuild my life and become a stronger and better person. I was to spend the next few years reinventing myself and renewing the part of me that had been burned out by the events of the past decade.
On reflection, I could easily have ended up in the stupid club, as I like to call it, of musicians and artists who die too young as a result of drugs, drinking, or other misadventures. It’s plain to me now why that happens. You are thrust into a world that resembles normal existence in name only. This usually happens at a young age when the brain is still developing, but because you have no experience of dealing with the world, the pitfalls become more dangerous. It suits the music business, because it’s easier for the money men to control you when you’re in this unreal world. I’m immensely lucky that I made it out in one piece and with most of my marbles intact.
It took me a long time to realize that the other world I’d lived in for so long wasn’t coming back. It was a slow process of learning how to deal with the messy, problematic stuff of life and not the hollow glamour world of rock and roll. I had to get to grips with the fact that I wasn’t special, that we are all the same people in the end, and that we are all on a journey to discover something. Peace and compassion for my fellow humans was the way forward. To get there I had to go all the way back to the reasons I started making music in the first place. It seems obvious now, but sometimes you lose sight of the forest for the trees.
My old ideas and thought processes had to be burned up in the cauldron of experience to find out who I was, what I believed in, and, most importantly, what I was going to do about it. I learned that I had to stop fighting everyone and everything if I was ever going to find any kind of peace. At first this was a hard lesson to learn. I had to embrace the truth right in front of my face. I needed to let go. Absolutely.
I studied a lot in those years, reading constantly. I talked to as many people as I could. One of the things I loved about California was that in the early part of the twentieth century it had been a place where various utopian communities had started, and that always intrigued me. My hard punk roots might have spat on that, but I always maintained that under the hardness of the punk movement was a search for meaning out of no meaning, kind of like a Zen koan. Whatever it was, I hoped to find it in California.
On May 1, 1995, I was so fed up with everything that I went to my friend Keith and asked, “Where’s a place with nothing, no buildings, no people, nothing! I need to get out of here or I’ll just go mad!”
He thought for a moment and a smile slowly crept across his face. “Death Valley! Ever been there?”
“Nope.”
“Well there’s nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, out there. No people, no buildings, no telephone poles even. You might as well be on another planet.”
Why not, I thought. I could do no worse.
So I left Los Angeles. I drove out the next day through the dust bowls of Lancaster and Palmdale, forgotten places full of forgotten people, places where you can’t remember your name. I spent the night in Mojave in a seedy 1970s motel listening to the sound of large trucks racing through the desert night and my own thoughts rattling around in the orange plastic hotel room after a dinner of chicken fried steak (snake?). The threadbare carpet on the floor matched the sandpaper-like towels for luxury. The ancient AC unit humming in the window groaned to itself in the desert dust. It was the sort of place where, unless you had no choice, you wouldn’t want to spend more than a few hours by yourself, because it would make you even more depressed.
I poked my head outside the door and spied a soda machine and icemaker across the parking lot. I decided to get a Coke and watch some crap on the TV, which was covered in a brown wood veneer. The hot, dry air outside reminded me of the first time I’d come to California in 1981, a magical time I’d never forgotten. The people and places, and especially the weather, had made a lasting impression on me. I’d found nothing like it in Europe in my admittedly small experience of the world thus far. Although I had been to New York, New York had felt more like a movie, like London on steroids; it was grimy and dirty and smelled like urine. With a few notable exceptions, most of the people seemed slightly deranged. The Californians I had met were much more to my liking. But that utopia-like feeling was long gone by the time I arrived. Everything had fallen apart since that golden moment in time. I had no band, no wife, one dead child and another whose presence had been denied me, no money, and no future to speak of.
I was sober, but my life was still shit. I was 5,000 miles from home, and it never felt farther away than it did that night in the Mojave Desert. What had I got to lose that I hadn’t lost already?
I put the coins in the machine slot, pushed the plastic bar, and listened for the thud of the plastic bottle of brown foaming sugar water to tell me my drink was served. I filled the little scratched plastic ice bucket with ice from the hissing machine next to the soda dispenser and turned to go back to the room. Balancing the ice bucket and Coke in one hand, I slid the key into the lock and turned it to open the door and leave behind the hot desert night, returning to the smell of cleaning fluids and tobacco smoke.
Sitting on the orange nylon bedspread, I watched as the TV showed another evangelist telling me how I was going to hell unless I sent him money. I didn’t need him to tell me that; I already knew what hell was like. Eventually I turned the TV off with the sticky plastic remote, washed my hands and face in the chipped sink, got between the prickly nylon sheets, and went to bed, but sleep didn’t come. Tossing and turning and feeling utterly dehydrated, I slept fitfully. My head was a mess of emotions I couldn’t even put a name to. I just knew I had to keep going and find something other than this horrible mess my life had become.
The next day came peeking fierce and bright through the peeling, rubber-backed curtains, throwing shapes on the scuffed walls of my room. I put the coffee maker on and showered in the bathroom and dried with the thin scratchy towel the hotel had provided. I put my clothes on and took a glug of the tasteless brew that had bubbled out into the Styrofoam cup. It tasted like the dusty desert itself. Perhaps I could get a better cup of joe along the road somewhere.
I ventured out into the glaring brightness and put on my shades out of necessity rather than vanity. I slid behind the wheel of my rented car and gunned the engine a couple of times, satisfied that it was all working. I pulled out onto the blacktop and pointed the car into another day. I had done one thing right for myself since I’d arrived in California: I had learned to drive and passed my test. I had the freedom to go where I wanted. At least that felt good.
The scorching sun was already rising up and splintering the day with its sharp rays as I cruised along the highway toward my destination: Death Valley. The heat shimmered in the distance on the one road that crosses the desert floor. At 282 feet below sea level, it is the lowest, hottest, and driest place in North America, and a good facsimile of hell, as the record temperature in the aptly named Furnace Creek was a mind-melting 134 degrees. The hottest place on earth.
I felt I’d either burn up or explode. A strange phenomenon occurred: as I drove across the dusty floor, I felt my mind let go of all the pain and resentments of the past few months, and a smidgen of light squeezed back into my soul. I allowed myself to luxuriate in this freedom, the pressure easing as the miles sped by. I put the car in cruise mode and folded my feet underneath me on the seat. There were no other cars at all that I could see, and with just a flick of the wheel I could steer the car and imagine I was sitting on a magic carpet as I rode through the desert. I wound the window down a little to feel the scorching air, and it seemed like I was being purified in this crucible. I listened to the rubber of the car tires peeling along the highway and, with the turning of the wheels, a minimalistic mantra was set in motion. I allowed myself to be taken into its new heart. Why not, I thought?
Suddenly, the car made a loud sound and I realized very quickly that I had left the road some way back and was now careening across the desert floor in between the Joshua trees and the scrub. I put my feet down, applied the brake gingerly, and stopped right there with dust flying up all around my car. Thankfully, nothing was broken, and the road was but a few feet away.
I steered the car slowly back onto the highway. There was no need to look left or right, as there was no one around for miles, but reflexively I did it anyway. You never know. And in that instant I realized that I had never really known anything. At that moment in time, I felt as if I had no past and no future, only the present moment with the hot desert sun and the scorched highway stretched out before me, beckoning me onward to an unknown destination.
That second day I made it into Death Valley proper and drove all the way down below sea level to the desert floor. To say that there is nothing in Death Valley is not quite correct. It had plenty of beautiful things to look at, none of which were made by man, apart from the road I drove on, a two-lane blacktop that dropped off into sandy desert dust at the edges.
Lost in thought, I drove a few more hours and arrived at the Furnace Creek Inn. It was quite a sight after traveling through the park’s desolation. I pulled up and went in to get a drink and ask about a room for the night.
“All sold out today, sir,” the clerk said.
I found this hard to believe, considering where we were, but in this oasis was a surprisingly green golf course, so I accepted it must be so. When I spied the Harley-Davidson motorcycles lined up outside, I smiled a little. Hell’s Angels were staying at a luxury resort? America was full of contradictions.
I inquired at the hotel desk if there was anything else nearby.
“Stovepipe Wells.”
“Where is that?”
“It’s about half an hour back down the road, but you gotta get there soon as they give out rooms on a first-come first-served basis at dusk.”
I jumped back in my car and headed back the way I’d come. I vaguely recalled passing through Stovepipe Wells about twenty-five miles back: a collection of small buildings clustered around the highway being the only indication that something else other than me was out there.
I got to Stovepipe Wells in about half an hour and drove into the lot by the sign that said “Room Registration.” The sun was hanging a little lower in the sky, but it was still in the upper nineties outside, the air a dry crackle. A few other desert-weary travelers were waiting on the bench by the door, including an old man. The only available space to sit was next to him on the bench. So I sat down beside him and we introduced ourselves. The door opened for the registration, and we all lined up like we were in a soup line in the Great Depression. It was a timeless place where my thoughts floated in and out, a jumble of images and feelings.
I signed in and got my key and went to my room, which had a small fridge that never really got cold, no TV or phone. I went for a walk to check out what one did for dinner in Stovepipe Wells. I was completely alone out there, and I could feel my head begin to clear from the everyday tumult and chaos of Los Angeles and my disintegrating marriage and life. The desert seemed to be working its ancient magic on me.
I noticed they had a dining room, and it was really the only choice, so I walked up the steps and into the room. It was a rustic and wooden-beamed place serving hearty country cuisine. I ate a solitary dinner.
Afterward on the bench outside I encountered the old guy whom I had met at registration, and this was where everything changed forever for me.
The old man and I started talking. It turned out he was from San Francisco and his wife had recently died, so he’d come out to the desert to explore somewhere he had never been before. He didn’t want to end his days just “rotting at home.” He asked me where I was from, with my accent and all, and I gave him the long and the short of it, telling it all and holding nothing back. Calmly, he listened without saying a word, just smiling and nodding at the appropriate times. Eventually my torrent of resentments and self-loathing stopped, and then the strangest thing happened. He stood up, shook my hand and placed his hand on my head very briefly, and said, “It’s going to be all right, son. I have a long drive tomorrow. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m hitting the hay. Good night.”
I looked at the clock on the wall outside when he was gone and realized we had spent an hour together with me doing most of the talking. I felt light-headed and strange, almost drunk, but I hadn’t had a drop to drink. Carefully measuring my steps, I went for a walk. I walked to the edge of the grounds as if I were walking on a tightrope. In the hot evening air I removed all of my clothes except for my shorts so I could feel the dry wind on my flesh. It felt better without clothes. I looked up and saw the whole sky, all of the moon and stars in a flash of eternity above me, around me, part of me. I stumbled half-naked back to my room and collapsed on the bed. I slept fitfully that night in a fevered sweat, tossing and turning throughout the hours, zoning in on the tick of the clock or fragments of songs or thoughts in my head, tapping the bed in rhythmic cadences and mantras. I eventually crashed out, and some hours later I woke to see the first glow of the sun’s rays coming through the blinds.
My mouth was dry and swollen. I felt drained like the comedown from an acid trip. What had happened to me? I tried to piece together the previous evening’s events, but they seemed strangely out of focus. I couldn’t even bring to mind the face of the man I had spent an hour talking to the night before. Weird. But there was something else. A lightness and excitement I hadn’t felt for many years. I opened the door to the room and immediately a blinding light filled the doorframe. Gradually my eyes grew accustomed to it and I sensed things had changed.
I gathered my things together and walked across to the dining room, where I breakfasted on eggs and coffee and got ready to drive back along the 190, as I had promised myself I would go to see Zabriskie Point.
The day before I had not thought about going there—I had been so miserable and helpless. But I felt much better, as if the kundalini had shot up my spine and out the top of my head. An hour later, passing through Furnace Creek again, I stopped to use the pay telephone and call my friend Tara back in Los Angeles, with whom I’d been staying. She had been very worried that I was going to die in the desert when I had taken off three days ago. But I wasn’t dead. In fact, I had to tell her how alive I now felt.
I made it to Zabriskie Point that day and looked out over its vast, moon-like landscape. Maybe philosopher Michel Foucault had had the same experience as me in the desert and it wasn’t acid, but the place, that had given him that tremendous trip? I could feel a change taking place. I was no longer a melancholic drifter. I felt alive again, and all the beauty of nature that surrounded me in Death Valley helped heal me.
I called Tara again later that day. “I think I’m ready to come home,” I said into the receiver. “I’m feeling much better.”
I could hear her hopeful sigh at the other end of the line.
I got into the car and headed back to Los Angeles. As I turned onto the 15 and civilization I felt very strongly that I had found a type of freedom from my old self. I could feel the difference. It was palpable.
The next day I met Cindy.
I hadn’t thought of being with anyone else since my separation from Lydia. I had been a lonely ghost, wandering the boulevards and avenues of the City of Angels. Occasionally I had been able to spend time with my son, Gray, who was now living with his mother in Venice Beach in a house on the canals. It was never enough, so some nights I would walk the canal paths hoping to get a glimpse of him playing in the garden, but mostly I had wandered alone. I would sit on the roof of a friend’s condo and read books, and I would walk. I had walked for miles around the west side of Los Angeles. In the morning and afternoons, most of the side streets were empty of people. It had suited me to not have to interact with anybody. Occasionally dogs would spring out of their boredom to snap and growl at me, but mostly I had walked unmolested, wrapped in my own thoughts as I carefully negotiated the neighborhood sidewalks, great slabs of smashed pavement seemingly flung on the street like broken tombstones.
Some evenings when I sensed I should give Tara a break I would force myself to go to a bar or café to observe people and try to be part of the human race again. It didn’t work, and I ended up more resentful than ever seeing the happy smiling faces of the people. Seeing young couples obviously in love was especially irritating.
So I was a little apprehensive the day after I returned from the desert when Tara said, “My friend Cindy will be coming over this afternoon. You should meet her. I think you have a lot in common.”
Cindy turned up that afternoon and we talked, and within a week we met up and went on a date. A date! My first in years and years. Then the most amazing thing happened: we fell in love.
I often think about that time and how it came to pass, and I feel sure that one of the reasons that our relationship and marriage were destined to work was the fact that Cindy met Lol the man as opposed to Lol the guy in The Cure.
I had been stripped of all of the accoutrements of rock-and-roll-dom, so to speak, and the person she met and fell in love with was the real me. That’s not to say that you can’t be a real person and be in a band, but it tends to make people approach you in a different way than they would with others, and that changes the relationship and what both parties expect out of the situation.
I know that this is one reason why Robert and Mary’s relationship has lasted so long, because she knew him way before he was Robert Smith the rock superstar. She knew him when he was just Robert Smith the boy in our class at school.
I didn’t have anything to wow or impress Cindy with when she met me other than the person she saw before her, so she got the real me, and that’s who she fell in love with. She also was at a point in her life where authenticity was very important to her, and she wasn’t going to settle for something facile or fake.
With the love that I had found, I started to turn things in my life around. First I needed to find a place to live, as I had been living with my friends Chris and Tara during the week, and with my other friends Gary and Beth on weekends. I needed to give them a break. I had been their house guest for about half a year and they needed their lives back.
Just before I met Cindy, I had put a deposit down on a small place in Brentwood that I was due to move into in about a month, but meeting her had changed those plans, and we moved together almost immediately into our own place on the west side of Los Angeles. It felt like a happy and creative place and a good atmosphere in which to bring up my son Gray in order to minimize the disruption he had already faced in his young life. I was determined that he would have the most consistent childhood I could provide. I had seen a number of my friends, especially musician friends, have terrible marriages and child-rearing arrangements, and I didn’t want to put my child through that. It was not his fault his mother and I couldn’t make our marriage work. He deserved the best upbringing I could give him. I had very strong feelings about this.
Of course, when you get divorced, there are two sides to be considered, and Lydia felt that she wanted to leave Los Angeles and move to a small town in Idaho called Hailey.
I was none too keen on this, as I most certainly wanted to keep Gray in Los Angeles near me. I felt it was important that his father be available to him, unlike my own father.
Unfortunately, my lawyer informed me that “if she has a job to go to and a support system in Idaho, the judge will let her take Gray with her. You can pay me a lot more money just to find out that he’s going anyway.”
I’d already been through the wringer once with the court system and wasn’t in a hurry to do it again. My lawyer suggested I ask for a six-month review of Gray’s situation, and if he was suffering in any way, we could petition the court again. It wasn’t ideal, but then again, nothing in a divorce ever is.
The next few years were difficult ones for Cindy and me because the court case and my divorce had left me without much in the bank, and so we struggled to keep our heads above water. I had to sell a few things just to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Although it sounds like a cliché, they were some of the happiest years for us as a newly married couple, as every hurdle that we overcame seemed so much more amazing than if we had been in a better financial position. We also learned to value each other for who we were as people, not what we had done in our lives. I think it made our marriage that much stronger.
The years from 1996 to 1999 were filled mostly with the mundane and beautiful parade of events that pass for “normal” life, and I became accustomed to my new permanent home in Los Angeles. In 1999, at age eight, Gray returned to Los Angeles from Idaho, and I became a stay-at-home dad. I took our son to school and generally did all of the things that he needed a parent to do. I am grateful beyond words that I was given the time and situation to do that, because today I have a strong relationship with my son, unlike the one I had with his grandfather. We spent his boyhood years together, and that was a blessing I know was not given to a lot of working musicians.
Of course, that meant I was no longer a working musician. Sometimes little projects would come my way, but up until Gray’s teen years I tried not to go out of town or on the road. I had seen the damage it had caused in other families. Unlike my father, I was involved in our son’s life and always available to be a chaperone for school trips and things like that. I am so grateful that it worked out that way. Maybe that’s what was given to me in the Mojave Desert: the ability to break the chain of family dysfunction and be a real father. The true measure of a man.