The year 1976, just before the teen idol thing came together, was busy for me, movie-wise. I shot Skateboard, and then it was off to Israel, of all places. I had been cast in a film produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, called Kid Vengeance, in which I starred with football legend Jim Brown, Lee Van Cleef, Glynnis O’Connor, and John Marley.
Living over there was an exotic experience. Jim Brown’s son, Kevin, and I spent a lot of time together. Once we went exploring in a cave out in the Sinai desert, and we found a skull and bones. It was reported to the police, who came out to investigate, but I’m not sure what happened with it. It was brutally hot during the day out there, so we filmed a lot at night. My nose got broken over there (one of several times in my youth) because one of the extras didn’t pull back his punch during a fight scene. It was fun working with such legendary actors over there even though it was grueling. This was the first time I had ever been out of the country, and it was a memorable place.
One day, late in the afternoon before it was time to shoot, I heard something outside my trailer. My trailer was farthest from the set and closest to the open desert. I think they put me all the way out there because of how loud I would crank my music. Jim Brown got me my first portable stereo while we were on location, and I used that thing to the fullest. But outside my trailer, there was a group of Israelis and some of the Italian crew, all huddled up in a circle. I went out there to see what was going on. Understand, oftentimes during a shoot you get pretty bored. I noticed that they had a broken Coca-Cola bottle that they had crafted into a glass pipe. Curiosity got the best of me. I asked, “What are you doing?” Gesturing with his hands at first, one of them tried explaining in broken English. “Smoking hashish—hash.” As they passed the makeshift pipe around and took hits off of it, flames about five inches long would jump off the pipe. “Here,” one of them said to me, “You try, you try.” These were the crew guys that I worked every day with. I was just fourteen, but I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be cool and hang out with these guys, so I carefully took the pipe when it was passed to me, listened to their directions about when to inhale the trapped smoke, and then I took a big hit. One of them said, “Hold it!” I tried, but I couldn’t. I gagged and exhaled. The world started spinning like a top. I literally fell backward and hit my head on the desert floor. It was like being sucked into some vortex. I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. I could hear the sounds as they all walked away from me, laughing. Well, that went great.
A few days later I was explaining what had happened to Jim Brown’s son, Kevin, who was close to my age. He started laughing and said, “No wonder you felt sick. It was all that tobacco. That’s not the right way to do it.” He and I walked out into the desert away from everybody else’s trailers and the set. Off behind some rocks he pulled out a piece of hash and put it on the sharp tip of a bent safety pin. “This is how you do it,” he explained. He lit the gooey brown blob on the end of the pin, blew it out, and as it was glowing red, he covered it with a piece of glass to trap the smoke. He gave me the makeshift pipe and explained to me how to inhale gradually. Okay, this I kind of liked. This was a mellow high that actually felt good. And I felt a lot cooler than I did when I had arrived in Israel. I now knew how to get high.
After the film wrapped, I was asked to stay on and appear in another film the producers were shooting called God’s Gun, featuring Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance, Sybil Danning, and Richard Boone. The problem was, they weren’t going to start shooting for about two months and I wanted to go home. But that wasn’t going to happen. I think they knew that if I went home to Los Angeles, there was no way I would come back. So they put a lot of pressure on me, paid me more money, and so we decided to stay. We wound up being in Israel for six months. My mom and sister were there the whole time with me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it there. It was just too long. And there were little things. For instance, I loved cheeseburgers. But you can’t get a cheeseburger there because it’s not kosher to mix meat and dairy products. That may not seem like a big deal. But if you’re fifteen years old and you’ve been away from home for months and you miss your friends and you miss your lifestyle back home (and your cheeseburgers), it all adds up. We made the most of the two months we had to kill. We visited all of the historic sites, like the Wailing Wall and many of the religious sites related to Jesus Christ. We were living in Eilat, Israel’s southernmost city, which is a beautiful port and popular resort town on the northern tip of the Red Sea. We would drive to the desert almost every day. At the time, Eilat had just one hotel and this is where I learned how to drive. I had become friends with a French guy, the horse wrangler on location, and he took me water-skiing in Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba. We water-skied near the beautiful beaches and coral reefs. That is, until one day when we were followed by a large shark. That ended the water-skiing.
My mom and I would often go for walks at night in the Sinai desert. One evening something strange happened. We both looked into the sky and saw a strange series of lights flying together, moving stars. “Did you see that, Mom?” She didn’t answer me, but she was staring at the sky and she nodded. I don’t know what it was, but it did not seem of this Earth.
Soon, we’d be back home. Ready for the next adventure. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Israel. The people were very warm and engaging, but six months in any place at that age would have driven me crazy. I was restless and homesick.