(part 142) BOBBY JAMESON: THE HUMAN SIDESHOW

I remember the sun shining through the window of the apartment as I picked up the telephone to make a call. I managed to get someone from NBC, or CBS, news on the line, and told them who I was.

It was odd, because they knew exactly who I was from the Pacific Theater Tower incident, and Continental Hotel coverage. They seemed surprised that I called them, and asked why?

"I thought I'd call and let you know I was going up again," I said. There was a noticeable pause. "Whatta you mean you're going up again?" the voice asked.

"I mean I'm gonna go up on another building," I said. "Wha, when?" came the response. "As soon as I get off the phone with you," I replied. The voice became more excited, "Where, what building, why?" I cut them off, "The Continental Hotel," I said, "The Continental Hotel on Sunset."

I hung up the phone and walked to the door. I'd calculated the amount of time it would take me to get to the Continental, so I moved quickly.

Heading for the hotel, I wondered if whoever I'd talked to would call the police and tell them what I'd said. "Shit," I thought, "they want the story more they they want to save my ass, or get me arrested; they won't call, they'll wait awhile before they do that."

I don't remember if I drove, walked, or took a cab, but I do remember getting there and looking for sheriff's cars and not seeing any. I just walked in the front door, as I had before, and got on the elevator. "It's odd doing this again," I thought,"very odd indeed."

I hit the button for the roof and pool area, and the elevator started its journey upward. I stared at the floor, thinking, "This is some crazy shit, man, this is some crazy-ass shit you're doing." "Fuck em!" I said out loud, "Fuck em all!"

The doors to the elevator slid open, and I paused, waiting to see if anyone was there before I got off. Nothing. The coast was clear.

I halfway expected the police, or security, to be waiting for me when I came out of the elevator, but no one was there. I went to the top of the hotel this time, not the floor below, like before. Instead of the back of the building, I was on the front side, overlooking Sunset Blvd.

From where I stood I could look straight down on the the driveway and entrance below, and see what was going on. In a while I noticed a flurry of cars and other vehicles begin to congregate below. I kept watching them, and soon the sheriff's black and whites began showing up.

As the adrenaline began surging through me, I moved to the outer edge of the roof, knowing no one would come out there and risk their life to get me. I was not suicidal or depressed. I had no vision of ending it all, or thinking I would be helped. I was there purely to fuck with the entire world at that point.

I had been stripped of any belief that I had the power to fix my situation. To the contrary, I knew I couldn't. This action was based on my absolute feeling of powerlessness. This was the only thing I knew for sure I could control, at least in the sense that I could cause the world around me to respond. Everyone I'd asked to help me had refused, so this act of defiance was a response to them.

Rightly or wrongly this decision, in my mind, was a way of taking control of something, of anything. When a human being is left with the belief that their life cannot be controlled by them in a positive way, then that human being will seek and devise other means of action to create a sense of power in their own existence, no matter how wrong that means may be.

This was Bobby Jameson's dilemma and choice on this particular day. I was well-known at that point for doing what I was doing. I just chose to do it again because I knew how. I couldn't resolve my problems in a constructive way, so I chose to assert myself negatively.

I am not saying, even minimally, that this was a worthy choice whatsoever. I am explaining, as best I can, the dynamics of both the predicament I faced, as a cause, and the choice I made of how to deal with it.

Powerlessness, at a certain point, can be lethal when a person feels hopeless enough, so in defense of myself, this act was more positive than the alternative, suicide. I eliminated the alternative of suicide by creating a false alternative to focus on, the building.

I turned, just as a number of bodies appeared on the roof. Standing on the very edge, I greeted them, "How's it going gentleman?" I asked sarcastically. They stared at me like I was the craziest bastard they'd ever seen.

There we were. Me on the very edge of the building, and them staring at me looking completely baffled as to what to do with the situation.

I, in my own weird way, smiled at them, knowing I was in full control. That moment was frozen in time, and only came to life again, when the sound of the first helicopter shattered the mesmerizing silence.

(part 141) MY NOW OF THEN

STORY TELLING
HELLING DAYS
LOST INSIDE
THE QUANTUM MAZE
OF THINGS REVERSED
BY PLASTIC PEN
THIS MY NOW
MY NOW OF THEN

TECHNICOLOR
STREAMING SLIDES
OF PHYSICS FOUNTAIN
FROM ALL SIDES
CRAWLING THROUGH
THE SCREAMING PAST
SHATTERED STILL
LIKE BROKEN GLASS

TIME UNDONE
IN WRITTEN WORD
SENTENCES
OF WHISPERS HEARD
I ALIVE TO DIE AGAIN
THIS MY NOW
MY NOW OF THEN

ECHOES FALL
LIKE DYING STARS
FINGERS TOUCH
TOMORROW'S SCARS
I ALONE
CAN NOT PRETEND
THAT THIS MY NOW
IS NOT LIKE THEN

Robert Parker Jameson

(part 140) A THING NOT UNDERSTANDABLE

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As I write these most recent of posts, it may appear that I am rehashing old information. I am endeavoring, through repetition, to make clear the nature of the thing called insanity, or madness, not merely as words to utter or write, but as real terms, for the purpose of acknowledging and clarifying concretely, the actual aspects of mental and emotional disease, whether organic or substance-induced.

The nature of the insanity I became engulfed in, had as it's basis, an unceasing repetition of subject matter. I, for whatever reason, could not change the subject, not unlike a phonograph record that sticks in a certain spot each time it's played.

The term obsession, or preoccupation, refers to repetition as the very heart or nature of itself. To be doomed to always ask the same set of questions, led to an unchanging set of answers, no matter how many times those questions were asked.

As time passed, I became lost in the futility of attempting, unsuccessfully, to write not only my history, but my fate as well, on the head of a pin. Bluntly stated, I could not get off it. It is said that in heaven there are many mansions, but in the realm of the insane, there is but a single mansion with an infinite number of rooms, all of which are identical.

Repetition was life on the razor's edge and the force that annihilated me. In my life, the problems stayed exactly the same, year after year. And thus my solutions, which always failed, were repetitious as well. This is the mental illness labyrinth, out of which I could not escape.

The circular reality started and ended in exactly the place it had begun. I ran from it, and found I had run into it instead, trapping myself in a hall of mirrors, where reflections were only reflections of still more reflections.

Where had I gone? I could not find myself at that point. I walked through my life on a treadmill, expending myself completely, without moving an inch. As if in a dream, I ran but never got to where I was running, or away from that from which I ran.

I always found myself in exactly the same place with exactly the same feelings. I had lost all perspective. I obliterated myself with drugs and alcohol because I could not stand what had happened to me, and I falsely believed I had no power to change it.

I begged lawyers and publishers, managers and producers, each time I had the chance, to help me, but without exception, I was told it wasn't a large enough sum of money to bother with. This was akin to being told you weren't pretty enough to rape.

I recall the hideous feelings attached to being asked to accept such soul-numbing bullshit. I was made to feel like a starving man on the street, and when I reached down to retrieve a crust of bread dropped by one of the elite, was scolded for having the audacity not to return it to them.

As you read this, you may be saying, "OK, we got it, you were crazy," but you don't "got it." You have no idea what I'm leading up to, or why I'm making and remaking this point.

As I write, I remember, and as I remember, I have, to some degree, to relive those days and what they were like. I am once more temporarily trapped in the pathetic madness and pain of my own thinking. Each room I occupied, the furniture, the odor, the pictures on the wall, and me, lost as lost can be.

I am not repeating. I am drawing you a map. A detailed description of the clear and concise inability of a human being to simply drop it and walk away. I could not drop it.

It was nailed to my soul. It does not matter what you think or what you would have done, it is about what I did because I had to and didn't know why.

I stood alone in the living room of Carol's apartment. I'd run her off while in a drunken rage and for three days snorted cocaine and drank non-stop.

I did not sleep but a few hours during that time. I was more like a machine than a person, as I calculated and recalculated the past, present, and future.

Like a top spinning in perpetual motion, I wound myself up into a frenzy of flat-out revenge-oriented insanity. It had occurred to me, in that room, that the most insane thing I could possibly do was to go back on the ledge of the Continental Hyatt House.

I sat on a chair, amused by the thought, "Goddamn, Bob, that's fucking crazy," I said out loud. The more I dissmissed the thought, the stronger it became.

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I was torn, on the one hand, to refuse it a place in my head, yet, on the other, to relish, in a demented way, the bizarre nature of even thinking it, let alone truly considering it.

It was brilliant, I thought, in it's absolute ruthlessness of reason. So extraordinary a concept that it's absurdity was also it's very beauty as a thing not understandable.

(part 139) "OK I'M CRAZY"

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As a kid, fame to me was the obvious answer to everything. I had no money, I didn't know how to do anything except sing, and I wasn't planning on an extended education.

If I could make a record, I believed it would be a hit, so for me that was my path, to get someone to record me. This may sound foolish to some, but no more that a poor black kid believing that an NBA or NFL career would solve his problems. In the mind of any young dreamer this was powerful stuff--"to believe."

With this in mind, you can possibly understand, not only the importance of this belief, but the framework this belief was cast in. I had a talent and that talent was my life's answer.

This wasn't a vague belief or secret little dream with me, this was an up front, end of story, concrete decision-making arrangement. I quit high school to pursue it, and didn't consider anything else, ever.

At 17, I was already worried that my time might come and go if I didn't put everything I had into it. By 18, I made my first record, "Let's Surf," and by 19, I made my second record with Tony Alamo, which was a hit, "I'm So Lonely."

My dream worked, except for the part about getting paid. It had never occurred to me that I wouldn't get paid, back when I was dreaming about all of this. Looking back on it now, I wish I had thought about not getting paid, then I could have incorporated it into my entire dream at the time.

Being young is a powerful thing, and I accomplished a lot early on. But because I didn't know how ruthless life could be, I left out key parts to my request of the "Dream Machine." This is the folly of the young and impatient, which the older and more devious among us prey on.

In my case the older and more devious came in the form of one Tony Alamo. Tony made me famous alright, and he also kept me broke. My once perfect Hollywood dream was to become my long-term and deadly Hollywood nightmare.

These thoughts, and others like them, were what I ended up dwelling on to the point of madness. The young kid with a dream, and the ensuing repetitive rape of that kid by fast talking con men. It haunted me day in and day out for years.

Those whose only talent was to package and sell the dreams and hard work of others, and then pocket any and all of the gains, would become my sole obsession of scorn in the end.

This illness of greed, which I encountered almost without exception from the beginning in the music business, was the single most damaging aspect of my life next to addiction.

What I was left with in the end, was a version of semi-fame, co-created as a result of those one sided arrangements with no money. The continuing rationale for this, by the so called producers and packagers was, "If it wasn't for me no one would know who you are," as if being merely "known" would pay your rent and feed you. I was known alright, but I couldn't even afford to be alive so I could be "known."

Had I never made a record and just worked a regular job, I would have made more money than I did making records, even if it had been a shit job at a car wash or as a busboy. To realize this was true, over and over in my mind, gave rise to the most intense form of anger I could possibly imagine.

Over the eleven years, from 1963 to 1974, I literally drowned in the facts of what my personal reality in the record and publishing business had been.

To view these people in public, and to repeatedly come in contact with them, knowing how they truly operated, drove me into a place of darkness where I could not live without losing my mind.

I drank and used drugs to obliterate myself, and in the end I turned on myself, as well as them, in an explosion of threats and exhibitions of unbridled rage.

After years of trying to force-fit this sick logic into my head, and failing, I went crazy. Piece by piece, this dehumanizing form of slave labor imposed upon me by the likes of Tony Alamo, Andrew Oldham, Randy Wood and Abe Sommers, Ken Handler, Steve Clark, the Cohen Brothers, and others, along with the companies they represented in one form or another, finally pushed me into despair and gave birth to a madman seeking to even the score.

So I was famous, or more accurately, infamous. It was the one thing I knew I owned for sure. Bad, good, or indifferent, I possessed it, as it surely possessed me.

The more I had raged in public, the more cover I created for those bastards to hide behind. They sat back and watched me self-destruct, and then pointed to it saying, "He's nuts, he's only got himself to blame," as if they had nothing to do with it.

I could not stand it. "OK", I thought, "I'm fucking crazy, so what can I do to really piss these assholes off that is really fucking crazy?"

(part 138) FAME AT ANY PRICE

Because the damage to my ankle was so massive, walking without pain was impossible. My desire to be off the crutches, drove me to endure a level of misery, similar I would suppose, to standing on an ice pick with each step.

There was no way to do this without the aid of a mixture of alcohol and pills. My personal demand on myself to walk, only made worse the mental and emotional problems I suffered from, because of the extreme amount of substances I required to tolerate the pain.

I'd managed to get off the heroin, but clung to the pills and booze like my life depended on it. Any thought of quitting that practice seemed absurd to me at the time and was never considered.

I received no treatment of any kind for the myriad of challenges I was faced with. I was still getting a small check each month from ATD, (aid to the totally disabled) from the State Of California, but would soon face the world flat broke again, when cut off.

After some time in Arizona, I suddenly, and without warning, just up and left, as was my practice. Another snap decision that would again prove to be life altering.

In my mind, Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, was home, whether they wanted me or not. Hollywood and Bobby Jameson were like two lovers that didn't get along, but had great sex. We always took each other back, no matter how bad the last fight may have been.

Once there, I spent some time at Carol's, and in the house of Donald Lively, a multi-millionaire drunken coke-head from Dallas, who didn't think I was that bad because he was worse off than I was. Don once rented a Learjet for an afternoon, and convinced me to come along.

Somewhere during the flight he offered the pilot $500. to pull the "stick" back, causing the plane to go virtually straight up for a number of seconds. That was his idea of a good time. He later drowned in his own bathtub in Dallas under suspicious circumstances.

Prior to Don Lively's demise, I spent a lot of time in his house getting loaded on cocaine, pills, and booze, while writing songs and trying to reinvent myself for the hundredth time.

Around town I'd earned a reputation as the jumper, and this monicker, hung on me by various well wishers, was something I accepted, because it was not only true in a macabre way, but came with an odd type of recognition.

For an egocentric nut case like me, that kind of notoriety fit right in to my now twisted sense of pride and humor. Something like, "I may be crazy, but you know who I am."

Truth being told, I'd become more famous for climbing up on buildings and jumping off the tower, than I was for being a recording artist or song writer, at least in L.A.

Unfortunately, I was not capable of distinguishing one kind of fame from another, and did not understand the ever more grim state of being I lived in. To me it was all fame. I didn't seem to care for what, as long as I was famous, which proved to be the most insidious of all my weaknesses.

What I needed was some serious psychiatric help and physical therapy, coupled with a stable environment, but what I received was next to nothing.

What I did have, was my own set of rules, or lack thereof, designed for the purpose of catapulting me into the public eye and keeping me there at any cost. I was a lost madman on a continual ride down, with a one way ticket to calamity.

Looking back, there was absolutely no attempt to retrieve the human being known as Bobby Jameson. To the contrary, there existed kind of a cheerleading atmosphere, by some, to glorify my antics as something other than what they were, tragic.

I was guilty more than anyone of promoting such an idea, mostly out of an inability to be honest with myself about the true nature of my insanity, and the reluctance of others to intervene.

Once again, I was loose on the streets of Hollywood spinning wildly out of control. My single quest in life was to beat into the minds of those around me, and those who watched from a distance, the belief I possessed, regarding what I was owed and the wrongs done to me by the music industry.

Driven by my emotions, and aided by drugs and alcohol, I was winding myself up for another insane assault on the world at large. When the damage done is left untreated, then the original damage will be compounded by each successive damaging event.

This was me. A damaged person, untreated, who was incapable of not damaging myself further. In my world, it was like re-breaking a broken window. All that could be achieved was to break the glass into ever smaller bits and pieces, and then go to work destroying the framework the window once occupied.

(part 137) PUZZLE MAN

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I was a puzzle. A bunch of different experiential pieces that were totally dissimilar to the experiences of those in the world around me. Pieces by themselves, unassembled, which did not portray in any cohesive way a picture of my collective self.

These pieces were in a box in my head, and they just sat there. Occasionally a new piece was added to the box, confusing further any clear notion of what the pieces would represent, should they ever be joined together forming a single character.

A human set of fragments, strewn across the filthy floor of my own house of demons. Cascading emotions and super charged flashbacks flowing in an endless array of deadly memories through my mind and body.

To see me sitting almost perfectly still you would not have guessed that I was engulfed in the kind of turmoil I was in. I would have appeared at ease to any onlooker, even comfortable, while in truth I was not even present.

The shades and textures of a human being are created and changed over time by all that they have been and now are. The social continuity of a culture is born out of the collective similarities of everyday experience.

But when you have a human being, whose experience is totally dissimilar to the experiences of those around him, then the one will be different than the many, and will find it difficult to assimilate or integrate into the world around him.

I could not integrate myself into the world around me. I stood outside like a beggar at the window, hiding the pieces of myself from your view, afraid of what you'd think. In Tucson, I was a nobody on crutches. In Hollywood I was thought of as crazy, but I was still Bobby Jameson.

This was my catch-22 reality. Mentally, I was neither in Tucson nor Hollywood. I was hopelessly split somewhere between them. Always wanting to leave where I was to get to where I thought I should be, and once there, would question my own presence.

As I sat in my wheelchair in the living room of my mother's house, I looked down at my left arm and stared at the needle marks. I looked at my mother, seemingly unaware, of the tragedy all around her. My brother Quentin, nodding out from drugs on the couch and all the while the TV chattering in the background.

In this surreal setting, I knew something had to change. I was broken and loaded on smack and booze in a goddamn wheelchair in Arizona going nowhere. As my eyes traveled over this scene, I knew then the heroin had to go, and I had to get out of there. I vowed to myself that I would pull it together and fight my way back.

After some months, my casts were cut off while having two metal pins removed from my ankle that had worked themselves loose. My left leg, from the thigh down to the calf, was emaciated from no movement for over half a year. It looked like the leg of someone who'd spent time in a prison camp.

The first time I put weight on it without a cast, the pain was unbearable. But with the aid of alcohol and pills I finally got to where I could tolerate it. I was slowly but surely piecing myself back together like frankenstein.

I was a wreckage, posing as a human being. Where once I'd had a clear picture of myself and my purpose, I was now fragmented into so many pieces, it was hard to know what I'd become or where I was headed. Again, I was like a fully assembled puzzle that someone had picked up and dropped on the floor.

I had only a vague sense of what I was doing. In reality I was wandering around as a damaged group rather than a whole human being. Unaware of the truly splintered nature of my psyche, I continued to grope, unsuccessfully, for anything resembling a normal life.