CHAPTER 13

MOTHER

When you look in the sky at a shining star, Listen to your heart and know who you are, And I’ll always be your mother. —“MOTHER” (WRITTEN BY LITA FORD)

AFTER THE NORTHRIDGE QUAKE I WAS REALLY DONE WITH LIVING IN CALIFORNIA. I agreed when my husband decided to search for a new place to call home. We just didn’t know where. He wanted to get out of the United States. We traded in my black Corvette for a pickup truck. We had a shell put on the back of the truck so we could actually sleep in it if we needed to. The next day we got in the pickup truck as soon as the Black album was finished and we started driving north. My beloved LA faded into the rearview mirror.

The plan was to drive north, then hang a left and come back down south. We went up through Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. We ate junk food and camped in RV parks; chipmunks nested under the hood for a few hundred miles. One night I ran out of the tent and into the woods to evacuate the latest terrible meal; when I got back to the tent, I realized I had stepped in my own shit. I was not in my element.

We made our way almost up to the Canadian border, and then turned around and headed toward Washington and Oregon. The chipmunks stayed with us until we got into Redwood, California. Unbelievable. We drove back down the West Coast and digested all these places we had seen. Did we want to live in any of them? We went through all the free Homes & Land magazines we had collected, and my husband decided upon a house in Lincoln City, Oregon, that was unfinished but worth good money if we fixed it up. He thought we could make a profit, so we decided to fly back to Lincoln City. It was beautiful: so green and peaceful. We got a hotel for the night and planned to explore the town the next day.

The following day we walked around Lincoln City, and it was the most gorgeous place. The air smelled sweet and so clean compared to LA. It looked like a painting, with all the pine trees leading right up to the ocean. We decided to move there. What I didn’t know was that it rained for the rest of the year, nonstop!

We rented out my beloved Angeles Crest house. I really didn’t like the idea of someone else living in my home, but we needed the money so we rented it to a group of musicians. I never met them. I never imagined that I was leaving this house for good, though. In the back of my mind, I always thought we would come back to it. I was wrong about that too. Soon we put all the money I had left into the Lincoln City house. I was getting sucked in deeper and deeper, my freedom increasingly caged.

IN OREGON I spent most of my days and nights by myself. I’d walk the cold beaches alone and eat dinner alone while sitting in a stinky rental unit with my dogs. It was a brutal move for me.

We had been living in Oregon for a few months when I heard that Joan Jett was playing at a club a hundred miles from Lincoln City.

“Let’s go see Joan Jett play,” I said. “I just want to see her and say hello to her.”

We made the drive, and when we got there, I walked backstage to see Joan for the first time in fifteen years. She saw me, and I hugged her, but she didn’t hug me back. As I tried to catch up with her, Joan looked over my shoulder and began talking to the person behind me. I was being ignored, and it pissed me off. I was hurt because I expected more of a greeting from her. But there was something deeper too, as if her coldness was confirming a fear I was unwilling to admit to myself: my old life, particularly my musical passion, was fading further and further out of reach.

I looked at my husband and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

We walked to the front of the house to wait for the show to start. We waited and waited, and then we heard she wasn’t going on until 11:30. We had come a little early because I was hoping to hang with Joan, so now we had three hours to kill. We had some wine and got buzzed, further darkening my mood. I said to my husband, “If we eat, we will sober up enough to drive the hundred miles home.” I ordered a burrito covered in sour cream, guacamole, and cheese. It was a big, juicy, messy burrito. But there was one problem; there weren’t any knives or forks. I was dressed nicely and had my hair and makeup done.

I didn’t want to get messy, so I asked the waitress for a knife and fork. She said, “There’s some plastic utensils on that table over there.”

I looked, but there weren’t any knives. But I noticed the server was holding a bread knife in her hand. Perfect.

I asked her, “Can I use your bread knife?”

She said, “No. You can’t use this.”

“Please. I’ll just cut up my burrito and give it right back to you.”

Somehow words must have gotten turned around or misunderstood, because she answered by calling me a bitch. I sat there confused for about five minutes as my blood started to boil.

“Bitch?” I kept saying. “She thinks I’m a bitch? If she wants a bitch, she’s got one now.”

Just then she walked past our table. I picked up the entire plate of burrito, sour cream, guacamole, cheese, and salsa and flung it onto the back of her neck. It splattered on the wall and in her hair. She started to cry.

My husband had ordered a plate of nachos with the works on them: chicken, sour cream, cheese, jalapeños, and so on. I asked him, “Are you gonna eat those?”

He said, “Well, I guess not.” So I picked up the plate, stood up, and looked around the room.

Everyone in the restaurant yelled at me: “NO!”

I looked back, replied “Yes!,” then threw the nachos against the wall. As the nachos exploded, we sat back down and looked at each other.

My husband said, “Well, I guess we’d better leave now.”

“I guess so,” I agreed.

“Hold on to the back of my jeans and don’t let go.”

“Okay,” I said.

I never saw Joan’s show, though I don’t think I missed much. And yet that still goes down as one of my favorite nights in Oregon. That should tell you how much fun Oregon was for me. My only “rock-and-roll moment” involved a burrito.

YEAH, I HATED living in Lincoln City. First of all, it seemed that the day we first saw the town was one of the only days of the year it didn’t rain. When we moved there, the clouds rolled in and never fucking parted. Second, I was realizing more and more just how unhappy I was becoming. I stopped listening to music completely. I didn’t feel in control of my life. I was growing resentful of my marriage, because it had taken me away from the people and things I had known all my life and loved the most.

To occupy myself, we bought two horses. Unfortunately I couldn’t ride often because it rained constantly, but I would go down to the stables and groom them. When there was a rare decent day, I would go for long horseback rides. My favorite horse was an Arabian named Ziggy. He was like a hot rod: fast as fuck. I loved Ziggy. Our other horse was Bonnie, an Appaloosa; she had a giant tumor on the side of her leg. We had the tumor removed and tested for cancer. Turns out the horse didn’t have cancer, but she did kick me and almost broke my knee once, so I didn’t ride her after that. My horses were my distraction because I missed my California home so much.

The decision was made to have kids. I had been on birth control for more than eighteen years before this, and as soon as I went off the pill, I developed a cyst in my uterus. Every time I had sex it was painful. I saw the doctor and she told me the cyst was the size of a grapefruit, and I would have to slowly wean myself off the pills, which worked, thankfully. Once I was off the pills, however, I still wasn’t getting pregnant. My depression deepened.

AFTER THREE MONTHS of living in Oregon, it was announced we were moving to Florida. That sounded okay by me. Anything to get out of that dreary place. The one thing that bothered me about leaving was having to sell my horses. I’m not one to purchase an animal and then walk away from it. When I have an animal, it’s for life, so leaving Ziggy and Bonnie behind was difficult. When we sold them at a livestock auction, I had to ride the horses when they came for bidding. As soon as they announced Bonnie was a “kid-friendly” horse, she promptly slammed me against the wall. Fucking mares. It was as if she was saying, Get the hell out of town.

We drove to the Southeast in two twenty-six-foot-long trucks, one towing a Porsche and the other hauling a Cadillac. We had left Lincoln City immediately after packing up the truck, at one A.M., not exactly an ideal time to begin a cross-country trip. We got lost in Portland, about a hundred miles inland from Lincoln City. We finally found the freeway at dawn. I was getting tired, but we didn’t stop.

“I’m towing a twenty-six-foot truck full of stuff, with a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, and I’m falling asleep. I need to stop to sleep,” I said into the walkie-talkie. Nope. Apparently we needed to get to Florida by a certain time or another buyer would get to the house we had our eye on before us.

I was livid. But I shut up and kept following my husband.

Once we were in Panama City Beach, Florida, we got the project house and building began again. Two weeks later, in October 1995, Hurricane Opal hit and ripped the roof off and scooped out the sand from underneath the foundation. The ocean came through the windows since it was a beachfront property. The National Guard declared the city a disaster area. Septic tanks, pools, and downed electrical wires were all over the place. My neighbor found one of my dog’s squeakie toys five blocks from our house. Even the road was gone. The house was largely destroyed, but we got money from the insurance company to rebuild. The total damages from Hurricane Opal were over $5 billion and it hit the East Coast hard.

As terrible as it was, that natural disaster was the perfect welcome to my life in Florida. Unfortunately, unlike Opal, my personal storm didn’t blow over in a day. In the years that followed, I would be swept further from the things that made me who I am: Lita Ford.

Within every hurricane, though, they say there’s an “eye” at the center, a place of peace amid the chaos swirling around. Finding it would be my lifeline.

TWO AND A half years of marriage went by, and I couldn’t get pregnant. I researched female fertility, seeking a solution. I went so far as to have my amalgam dental fillings—old fillings can contain mercury—taken out of my teeth, hoping that was the answer. I still didn’t get pregnant, and, after years of trying, I figured I never would have a child, and anyway, I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do. Kids don’t come with a manual, and they don’t have six strings. You can’t hit pause or mute, and there’s no standby switch. Yet for some reason, children seemed to be drawn to me throughout my life. I always would take time to talk to kids and hang out with them whenever they were around. I felt like we could relate to each other somehow; maybe it’s true that rock and rollers are kids who never saw much point in “growing up.” But as for being a mother myself, by the summer of 1996 I eventually figured it just wasn’t in the cards.

Then for some reason I kept needing to pee while we were at Disney World that September. I avoided one particular ride with a steep, sudden drop—I didn’t know why; it just didn’t seem like a good idea. Later that night, we went out to eat with our old real-estate agents, Vicki and Denis, who were visiting from Oregon. The Indian food made me sick, which never happens. At three o’clock in the morning, I sat up in bed. I didn’t feel so good. It hit me in a flash—I was pregnant. I knew it. I didn’t have to take a test. I just knew.

When I went home and took that pregnancy test, sure enough, it was positive. Oh my God, my parents are both gone. How can I raise a child without the help of my parents? I had no real family members close by or friends who could help me. No one to talk to.

By the grace of God, my neighbors on either side of me, Lynne and Kelly, happened to both become pregnant as well, and the three of us drew close. It was like we had the same milkman. We all took long walks on the beach every day and supported one another through the process. I read a lot of books on pregnancy and how to be a great mother. I set a high bar for myself: I wanted to be just like my mom. This was my main priority. For the first time since I left music, I had a focus. I did everything the doctor told me to do during the pregnancy. I didn’t drink liquor or any caffeine; I religiously took prenatal vitamins.

During my pregnancy I actually saw what my baby would look like as a toddler—a beautiful boy—in a dream. He was so clear to me: blond with blue eyes, a beautiful face, and light skin. When he was a toddler, he looked exactly as I saw him in my dream.

I HAD NO complications until the last trimester, when I started bleeding. The doctors couldn’t figure out where the blood was coming from, so they put me on bed rest and told me to lie low for the last three months. At this time I was thirty-eight, which is a little on the older side to be having your first child. But I had heard that older parents make better parents, and that was true in my case. I was meant to be a mom when I was thirty-eight, no sooner.

Around that time, I received a phone call from my aunt Rosetta, my mother’s oldest sister, from Italy, and she really wanted me to come and see her. She lived in the heart of Rome. The city had built up around their tiny apartment. The language barrier was so thick between us that without a translator, I couldn’t understand what the problem was and why the rush to all of a sudden go see her. She was sad I couldn’t fly because of my pregnancy. Soon after that phone call, I was devastated when she passed during the last trimester of my pregnancy. Then I understood. If I had known she was sick, I would have gone to Rome anyway, despite the bleeding.

I went into labor with James on May 13, my wedding anniversary. When the time came, I started bleeding badly and I got really scared. One of my husband’s workers drove me to the hospital, which was on the other side of town. I sat on a black towel all the way there, humiliated that I was sharing this experience with a stranger.

I was in labor for twelve hours, and I went to sleep until the doctor came in and said, “You are not dilating. We are going to have to cut you.”

“A C-section?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“No,” I said. “I want to do it naturally.”

“You are bleeding. You can lose the baby now if we don’t take him out right away.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I agreed to the C-section. The doctor took me into another room to prep me for surgery. They put a sheet over me and prepped an epidural; I was completely numb from the waist down as the doctor began to cut me open. Then I felt the weight of the baby lifting off my chest. Suddenly I could breathe, which I hadn’t been able to do for months prior. James was screaming, as any healthy baby does.

The doctor said, “Man, he is loud!”

He was so fucking loud that I thought, Oh God, another lead singer! I fell in love instantly.

JAMES LENARD GILLETTE was born on May 13, 1997. A Taurus. He weighed six pounds, ten ounces. I gave him his middle name in honor of my father—the grandfather he would never get to meet. I was sad Dad wasn’t there to see his grandson enter the family. When James came into my life, I finally understood the meaning of true, unconditional love. He was my one and only focus. My reason for being. After three long, dark years, a ray of love and happiness now lit up my life.

I would sing “Sweet Baby James” by James Taylor as I held him in my arms every night. “There is a young cowboy who lives on the range . . . Rock-a-bye, sweet baby James.” He would always fall asleep in my arms while I sang. I hadn’t known it, but I had been waiting thirty-eight years to meet my sweet baby James.

James changed my life. I took him everywhere with me. I bought a jogging stroller and immediately got to work discovering what it means to be a mother. We went to the zoo. We watched all the children’s TV shows together. I never once fed him jarred baby food, only the fresh-cooked food I put in a food processor, with no preservatives or formula. I consistently tried to meet the standard my parents had set.

Damn if I wasn’t proud too! And so when People magazine asked to include James in an article along with Richie Sambora and Heather Locklear’s child, I got excited about the idea of introducing the world to this beautiful boy—after all, he was rock royalty, the son of the “Queen of Heavy Metal.” However, the decision was made to decline the request. My universe quickly shrank back to just James and me.

When James was about nine months old, we moved again. I was exhausted with building and moving. I thought, Can’t we just buy a house and move in? I don’t want to build another house. Well, soon we were moving into our new home on the bay in Panama City in 1998. I would stand in the kitchen of our new house and hold James while singing to him. I had no real friends nearby, and of course no family members close by.

I WAS STILL holding on to bits and pieces of my music career, trying to maintain connections I wanted to keep. Dina Weisman was representing me as a manager for certain things that would come up. My old guitar tech, Tom Perme, was her boyfriend. Dina was my friend and I trusted her: I had known her since the beginning of my solo career. We met in the women’s bathroom in the Long Beach Arena when I asked if anyone had a pair of pliers because I was trying to pull up my jeans, which were very tight. I had put them on by lying on the bed and sucking in my gut, but the bathroom at the arena didn’t have a bed so there was no way I could zip them back up without a pair of pliers. She put a pair of pliers in my hand and said, “I do. How many girls do you know who carry a pair of pliers in their purse?”

“Really? What do you do?”

“Your guitar tech is my boyfriend.” We remained friends for many years after that. It was Dina who gave me my first bottle of black nail polish. I had never seen it before.

I had Dina arrange a meeting with Kenny Laguna and Joan Jett in 1998 because I wanted to write a song with Joan. Kenny ended up coming out to Panama City, but he didn’t bring Joan with him like Dina and I were expecting. We went out to dinner, but it ended up becoming a nonmeeting because Joan wasn’t there. There was no resolution and nothing came out of it except Kenny saying that he thought it was a good idea. There were no efforts made on his behalf or ours. I don’t think he wanted to work with us, and we didn’t want to work with him. We didn’t trust him.

After the meeting, he left, and I didn’t hear from him again until about six months later when, early in 1999, Kenny arranged a conference call with me, Joan, Cherie Currie, and Sandy West to discuss the possibility of putting the Runaways back together. Joan hadn’t had a hit record in a while, and Kenny was also Cherie’s manager at this point.

In the week leading up to the conference call, I had spoken to Sandy and Cherie but not to Joan. I was wary of talking with Joan after she’d given me the brush-off at the Portland gig. The phone rang. It was Kenny, who had Cherie on the line as well. They dialed in Sandy. Cherie was overly nice and friendly. Sandy was happy and her usual self, and I told them about having James.

Joan was the last person to get dialed in. I was expecting her to be happy to hear from everyone after so many years. But when she came on the phone, she sounded like someone had just woken her up from a stone-cold sleep and shoved the phone in her face. It didn’t seem like she knew who she was talking to, or that she had even been prepped for this call. She didn’t say hello to anyone or ask how anyone was; she seemed miserable to me. I thought to myself, Whoa, this is not gonna happen. I apologized to everyone. “I’m so sorry, but I have to hang up now.”

Cherie said, “No, no, no, Lita! Please don’t hang up!”

Sandy chimed in, “Joan’s just tired.”

“If that’s tired, then I definitely don’t want any part of this. I’m sorry, but I can’t do this.” I hung up, and that was the end of the conference call. I don’t know what had happened in the twenty years since the Runaways days, but this was not the same Joan I once knew. I was disgusted with her attitude. That’s what did it for me.

In the Runaways, Joan and I had never argued, and when we parted ways, I had a lot of respect for her, like a sister. Perhaps Kenny looked at it as a competition, although I was never out to compete with Joan. I wonder if he saw me as a threat even though Joan and I have two completely different audiences.

In the days that followed the conference call, I got a call from Sandy, who was trying to convince me to get back together again. I told her, “Why don’t you move on with your life, Sandy? You’re so talented. You’re Sandy West. You could join anybody’s band. It doesn’t have to be the Runaways.”

Cherie also called and tried to convince me. I used the excuse of just having James, and I also knew the music scene was fucked up, so I told her that I wasn’t going to do it.

Regardless, 1999 was not the right time to release a Runaways album or have a Runaways tour. If we couldn’t be respectful of one another over a simple conference call, we would not have made it through one day of rehearsal, let alone an entire tour.

MEANWHILE THE YEARS slipped by.

By the time we moved out of Florida in 2001, we owned an apartment complex, a whole bunch of smaller houses, and two waterfront properties. I remember the year well because of the lead-up to the year 2000. My household was obsessed with Y2K fears: nuclear war, financial meltdown, planes falling from the sky, collapse of civilization, and so on. Insanity. Supplies began appearing: massive amounts of powdered eggs, condensed milk, wheat, beans, rice, flour, sugar, tampons, mouthwash, toothpaste, water jugs that stacked up to the ceiling; a $20,000 generator; hundreds of ten-pound buckets with food ingredients in them. It didn’t end there. We had stocked up on shavers, antibiotics, and medicine. It invaded my space and consciousness such that I started to believe it too. We were going to die! My baby was going to die! A countdown-to-Y2K digital clock was installed in the home office. Every time I walked by the room, I could see the seconds ticking away on that damn clock.

The night before Y2K I was convinced we wouldn’t wake up the next morning. Our house had been so wound-up the entire year! I was so scared. I snuck away to bed silently, crawling into the bottom bunk in the guest room with baby James. As crazy as it sounds, I pinned baby James against the wall with my body in case I could protect him from the nuclear blast.

Much to my surprise, the next morning we all woke up. I looked at baby James. He was sleeping. I looked at my arms. They were still there. I opened the drapes. Nothing was burned. I got up and went into the office to look at the clock that was counting down to the apocalypse. It was past Y2K by a few hours. I turned on the TV and nothing was blown up. The news showed Times Square and people who went to parties, like any New Year’s celebration.

I was so fucking angry. We ate freeze-dried food for years to come. Which sucked.

I GREW CONCERNED about James being an only child. I wanted to have another baby so if anything ever happened to me, my children would have each other. But I was already forty-two. I had been seeing a doctor who was the same age and had just had a child herself. The doctor told me, “It is very rare, and you most likely will never get pregnant at this age. Do you want some fertility pills?”

“No,” I said. “Shit, I don’t want quintuplets. If it is meant to be, it will be.”

“Give it three months and if nothing happens, come back and we’ll see what other options are available,” the doctor said.

At the end of the three months, I took a pregnancy test: it was positive. It took me years to get pregnant with James. I was in disbelief because of my age; I would be forty-two years old and delivering my second child.

Rocco was born on June 27, 2001. A Cancer. He weighed seven pounds, two ounces. I saw Rocco in my dreams just as I’d seen James years before. He was a little darker than his older brother, with brown eyes, brown hair, and olive skin. Sure enough, that is exactly what he looked like when he came out of me. “Like my mother,” I said the first time I held him. He lit up my life. Once again, I wished my parents could be there to see these two miracles, but I knew they were watching from somewhere. James was such a great big brother. He would help me with diapers, baby clothes, and anything else I asked for. They were the loves of my life. It seemed my life was complete with these two beautiful boys.

And then my husband announced we were moving yet again. This time to an island in the Caribbean. He went ahead of us, leaving me to take care of a newborn, a four-year-old, and a blind dachshund (my beloved Chili Dog). We sold all ten of our properties, including the house we lived in. One day the furniture was emptied out. I looked at my two little sons, and I had no choice but to follow him. I didn’t want to go, but there was no way I was going to take my sons away from their father. Before we moved, everything we owned was put into storage lockers, including all my guitars, except one electric and one acoustic.

We had just three suitcases as we boarded the plane for the islands on August 16, 2001. The anniversary of my mother’s death. A bad sign.