Chapter Eight 9 страница

Saturday Night Live. John died at the Chateau Marmont. He'd been up too many days, too many nights, which he used to do regularly. Too many nights and too much weight to carry. Maybe it was the coming off dope, the slow resurfacing of buried impulses or feelings. I don't know. But when I went back to Paris to finish Emotional Rescue at Pathe Marconi, again with Lil, my finger was on the hair trigger, metaphorically speaking. My reactions were certainly quicker, and my anger too. There are times when my blood gets heated and I get irate. A red curtain falls before my eyes, and I'm going to do anything. It's a horrific thing. I hate the person who puts me in that position where force comes up. You're almost more scared of yourself than you are of whoever it is on the other side. Because you know that you've gone to the point of no return and you could do anything, you could kill, just like that, and then have to wake up and say, "What happened?" "Well, you ripped his throat out." When it has happened to me, I'm scared of myself. It may be something to do with getting used to taking beatings when I was a kid, being the smallest guy in the class. It's certainly a very old thing. My security man and friend Gary Schultz was there with me once in a nightclub in Paris, and this little French fucker was really being obnoxious. He was just out of it. And I was with Lil, bless her heart. He was trying to pull a number on Lil, and I just went, "What did you say?" "What?" And I had a wineglass with a long stem. I cracked off the base so I had the stem. And I put him down. I had him on his knees with the stem of this wineglass at his throat. And I’m hoping I'm not going to crush the bowl of the glass because right now, I've got the advantage. Because he was with a whole lot of friends, I was dealing with not just him but his buddies, so it was just a matter of being really overdramatic. "Take him away." And they did; otherwise his mates would have done us all. The blade should be used to play for time only, the shooter to make sure you get your point across sometimes. But you've got to be convincing. For example--in one incident I remember from this period--when you're trying to get a cab in Paris and you're a foreigner. There's twenty cabs in the line all just waiting there doing nothing. So you go to the first one, and he'll send you to the one behind, and then he'll send you to the front again. And then you realize, oh, business isn't important, then, you just want to fuck with people, and that's where you can start to growl objectionably, kick up some sand. It's their idea of fun just to piss around with foreigners, and I've seen them do it to old ladies too. I'd been through that enough. I put the blade to one of them and said, "You're taking me." Only later did I realize they're even worse to French people from the provinces. It was in Paris that I realized I had finally said good-bye to heroin. I went to dinner in Paris a year or so later with Wonder Woman Lynda Carter and Mick and some others. I don't know why Mick did this. He's weird this way. He said, "Come with me to the Bois de Boulogne. I'm going to meet this guy." Mick thought he was getting cocaine. So we did the deal in the park, the party broke up and we went home. And the bag was full of heroin, not coke. Typical Mick Jagger. He didn't know. Mick, this ain't coke, man. And I looked at it, this great big beautiful bag of smack. And it was raining outside the apartment in Rue Saint-Honore. I looked at it, I admit I took a gram out and put it in a little packet, and then I just tossed the rest onto the street. And that's when I figured that I was really no longer a junkie. Even though I'd been basically off the stuff for two or three years, the fact that I could do that meant I was out of its power.

Things went beyond any point of return with Anita when her young boyfriend blew his brains out in our house, on the bed. I was three thousand miles away, in Paris making a record, but Marlon was there and he heard Anita screaming and then saw her running down the stairs covered in blood. The boy had shot himself in the face, playing Russian roulette, the story goes. I had met him. He was this crazy little kid, aged seventeen, Anita's boyfriend. I said to her, listen, baby, I'm leaving, we're over, we're finished, but this is not the guy for you. And he proved it. The reason she went with this guy, who was an absolute prick, was, I think, to piss me off. By then, I wasn't actually living with her anyway. I would pop up to get my crap out of there, or come to see Marlon. I saw the guy once, playing with Marlon, when I came back, and I warned him off, and he certainly resented that. And I said to Anita, dump this fucker, but I didn't mean it that way.

Marlon:

The movie The Deer Hunter was recently out. And there's the Russian roulette scene, and that's what he was doing, he was playing Russian roulette. Very dark. He was about seventeen. He kept telling me--a really nasty kid--he kept saying he was going to shoot Keith, and that upset me, so I was kind of relieved when he shot himself. I remember the date, July 20, 1979, vividly because it was the tenth anniversary of the moon landing. I remember he was only around for a few months, but Anita was being very self-destructive. This was the time Keith was off with Lil, so Anita was like, right, I'm gonna show him, get her own back so to speak. So she flaunted him quite blatantly; Keith met him, actually. I was watching the anniversary of the lunar landings and I heard one pop. It didn't really sound like a bang or anything, it was a pop. And then Anita comes running down the stairs, covered in blood, screaming. I went, my God, Jesus Christ. I had to have a little peek, so I did go up and saw all this brain matter all over the walls. And then the cops came pretty damn quickly. Larry Sessler, one of the Sessler boys, was there to sort it all out, and the next morning I left. I went to Paris and met Keith. And poor Anita had to stay and deal with that. There were all these stories in the press at the time saying that she was a witch, that people were having Black Sabbaths. They were saying all sorts of things. It literally was just bad luck. I don't think he intended to shoot himself, really, just an idiot of seventeen who was stoned, angry, playing with a pistol. Anita didn't recognize it as a shot, but she turned round and heard this gargling noise, she said. She saw there was blood coming from his mouth and her first instinct was to pick up the gun and put it on the desk, so it had her fingerprints all over it. One bullet in the chamber, one bullet in the mouth, and that's it; it wasn't like it was fully loaded. But then we had to move out of that house quite sharpish. Anita was in the papers every day and had to hide in a hotel in New York.

When the cops found out, they wanted first to question me, but I was in Paris. Hey, damn good shot with a Smith & Wesson from Paris. And Anita? I was going to make sure she didn't go to jail when they lost interest in me. It was a miracle how that case just disappeared. I believe it was to do with the fact that the gun was traced back to the police, bought in some gun market in the parking lot of a police station. Suddenly it wasn't an issue. The case was put down as suicide. The boy's parents tried to bring a case for corruption of a minor, which didn't stick. So Anita moved to New York, to the Alray Hotel, and began a different kind of existence. That was the final curtain for me and Anita, apart from trips to see the children. It was the end. Thanks for the memories, girl.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14