(part 121) ROLLING STONE ARTICLE AND PICTURE

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Oct 26, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone


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Oct 26, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone

The reason I look so pissed off in this picture is that I had been pronounced dead twice with only months separating the events.

(part 120) MANIPULATING THE WORLD

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Oct 26, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone which contains an article and picture of me

When you are mentally, emotionally, and physically sick, as I surely had become at that point, you will do anything to justify getting what you want.

I'd found that the threat of suicide, coupled with actual attempts, was a powerful tool of manipulation that I could use on others to get my own way. I could and did get drugs from doctors and was able to get others to do things for me that they otherwise would not have done.

In the broken mind of an addicted person, such as myself, the justification for what I wanted was as clear to me as anything could be.

Because I was willing to die, everything thing else seemed petty, so demanding things from others became a habitual tendency for me. Whenever someone began to show signs of balking, I would apply the threat of suicide as pressure to accomplish my goals.

Upon leaving Edgemont Hospital, I convinced my mother to pay the first and last month's rent on an apartment in West Hollywood on Havenhurst Dr., between Fountain Ave. and Sunset Blvd.

Carol Paulus lived in the same building so she was able to get the landlord to rent it to me, which would not have happened had he known what was coming.

Almost immediately, Rolling Stone Magazine showed up to do an interview with me, which shortly thereafter appeared in the magazine as an article.

Along with a couple of pictures, the article attempted to describe my complaints about my own career and it's failings, as well as highlighting current projects, my resentment toward the record industry, and those who I believed had treated me unfairly.

Once again my ego was reinforced, and my desire to remain in the public eye fulfilled as a result of the article. This might have been viewed as a positive step, in the near term, but overall it just helped to fuel my warped perspective of Bobby Jameson and his relationship to the world at large.

Without rhyme or reason I attempted, after a short time, to gas myself to death in the new apartment. I don't really believe I thought I would die as a result of that act. I just view it now as a sick attempt on my part to manipulate the world around me.

The landlord, Morey, who had treated me with respect, was horrified at this turn of events and evicted me immediately. Once again I was homeless and on the street. I would occasionally sneak into the building at night and stay at Carol's for as long as I could, but in reality I had no place to go.

Around this time, I became involved with a prominent couple who shall remain nameless for reasons which will become obvious.

During an all night binge on cocaine and booze at the couple's home, the husband took an overdose of barbiturates. Because of the amount of alcohol and cocaine in his system, he fell into a coma during the night. I awoke in the morning on their bed, where we'd all passed out the night before, to his cold lifeless body.

His wife was on the telephone frantically talking to someone when the police and ambulance showed up. At the time, I took the position, at the wife's urging, that I had just gotten there within the last half hour after being contacted by telephone regarding the current emergency in progress.

She and I then drove by car to UCLA Hospital where her husband, who had been transported by ambulance, was pronounced dead by the attending physician.

In another one of my questionable decisions during this period, I moved into that house for a short time with the wife of the man who had died.

(part 119) THE DICHOTOMY OF THINKING

From 1972 Rolling Stone article/ unused pictures

Emotional and behavioral problems had already become an issue because of my drug and alcohol abuse. To then have suffered a second drug overdose, resulting in another coma, was like throwing gasoline on an open fire.

My ability to respond to the world around me was tending toward overly emotional reactions to everyday situations. Without warning I could become belligerent and was now prone to violent outbursts for little or no reason.

Because L.A. County General Hospital served so many people, they moved you through their system a lot faster. In other words, you didn't linger in intensive care the way I had in UCLA, because they always needed the room for another patient. The difference between waking up in UCLA and USC was night and day. In UCLA you felt the difference by the amount of attention given you; in USC you just felt abandoned.

As soon as I physically could, I was out on the street, probably signing myself out AMA again. I had not been prepared for the bizarre religious preaching from an over zealous staff member I encountered. Her beliefs about my sins, and willingness to impose them on me, outweighed my need for medical attention.

Because these two suicidal incidents happened in such close proximity to one another, I was basically a walking open wound psychologically speaking. Emotionally explosive and highly combative, anger, for me, became the last outpost of self-protection in a psyche that felt unwanted, unnecessary, and broken. My opinion was, quite simply, that it was me against the world.

At that point, the only place I'd felt safe had been Edgemont Hospital, where I was taken following the first incident on the Continental Hotel. I convinced my mother, who'd returned to L.A. by then, to put me there so I could have time to gather my senses and figure out what to do.

Edgemont, being a private hospital, had to be paid for, so she ended up with that burden. I stayed there for 2 or 3 months and it may have saved my life.

During the time at Edgemont, different publications, such as Record World Magazine, ran stories about my battles with the industry and sanity. On one hand I was self-destructive, on the other, I was being talked and written about. This dichotomy led me to a deep split within the framework of my own thinking.

I was destroying myself for sure, but as a result, I was center stage to some degree. For someone who believed there was no such thing as bad publicity, it became darkly apparent that the attention I was getting was feeding my sick ego and spurring me on to successive fiascos of self-annihilation. I spent a lot of time thinking about new and more dramatic ways to keep myself in the public eye.

While in Edgemont, one of the female staff members kept needling me about a pen and ink drawing I had done. I had done many. She seemed overly obsessed with her version of the meaning of my drawing, and would not relinquish her theory no matter what I said.

This continued for over an hour and resulted in an angry response from me. I punched a basketball size hole in a wire mesh security window at the nurses cage door, and blood splattered the area from a gash in my right forearm. I remember staring at the nurse, as she stood in shocked silence with her mouth hanging open. I said, "You happy now?"

I had silenced her badgering and that was all I really cared about. As a result, the hospital called an emergency staff meeting to review the incident and it's cause, at which I was required to be present.

Dr. Wayne, the head of the hospital, told me I could not act out in such a manner or I would be thrown out of the hospital. I said in response, "So I'm in the nut house for being crazy and you're going to throw me out of the hospital because I acted crazy?"

Dr. Wayne replied saying, "I'm not throwing you out of the hospital, but if you do anything like this again, you will be asked to leave." "OK," I said, "I got it. It won't happen again, I promise." I was serious. I didn't want to get thrown out. It was the only place on earth where I felt safe.

(part 118) COMA # TWO: L.A. GENERAL

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L.A. County Hospital

I have no real memory of what I was doing back then, but know at some point I went to stay with Carol Paulus for awhile, something I continued to do periodically for years, for a couple of reasons.

I had nowhere else to go, and Carol was better than most at dealing with me in the state I was in. Again, I have almost no recollection of what I was doing after getting out of the hospital, which probably means I was extremely loaded.

The constant intake of both drugs and alcohol into my already weakened system was sure to have made a bad situation worse. My mother had gone back to San Jose and I assume she was getting information from Carol as to my whereabouts and condition.

Nothing had improved in my life and that's the one thing I am sure of. Each destructive episode lent itself, in part, to the cause of the next debacle, which I seemed incapable of preventing or avoiding.

By the end of the summer of 1972, I believe, I found myself once again in the Park Sunset motel/hotel, across the street from the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Blvd., where I'd started my suicidal journey sometime earlier.

It was now months after I'd overdosed at Gavin Murrell's house and I again found myself isolated and alone. Fueled by nonstop drinking and lack of sleep, I continued to obsess over my past and current negative belief that life for me was no more than a series of failures.

I had thirteen 3-grain tuinol capsules that I'd stolen from Carol's apartment. These are powerful barbiturates used for sleeping, and are extremely lethal when taken in sufficient quantities and mixed with alcohol. I swallowed all of them along with a fifth of scotch. I was found unconscious in my bathroom at the Park Sunset, after falling into a coma.

Once again, it was Carol Paulus who found me, and who called the paramedics. I was taken by ambulance to USC Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles, rather than UCLA in Westwood.

L.A. General, as it was known, was where everybody went who couldn't afford a choice. It was a huge place and packed to the rafters with indigent and poor. In this second attempt on my own life, I was just another person carted into the bowels of L.A. General like so many others that day.

Although it's an incredibly gloomy place, it was still a damn good hospital if you overdose and are in a coma. This time there were no round tables and men in robes, no little gray man, or anything else. This time there was only blackness.

I came back to consciousness in a huge open ward with beds shoved into every possible open space available. It was stark and poorly lit. It seemed to stretch on forever, with bed after bed containing ill and distressed human beings.

Every kind of person imaginable was represented in that ward. As for me, I was just another one of the poor unfortunates who'd found my way there via my own actions and piss-poor choices.

I knew then that I was not doing too well with this suicide business, but I was winning the battle of how to slowly, or perhaps quickly, destroy myself piece by piece. As I lay there, trying to focus my vision, I felt utterly alone and completely worthless.

About that time a black nurse approached me after noticing I was conscious. She had a nice face, and smiled at me, asking how I felt? I couldn't really respond very well to her question, because I was so groggy from the beating I'd taken with a second overdose.

I stared up at her through blurry eyes and tried to speak but have no certain memory of what I said to her, possibly something about killing myself. All of a sudden, this seemingly pleasant lady's entire personality changed, and she began preaching in Bible verses to me.

She was now emphatically saying I had sinned against God Himself, because I had tried to kill myself, and that I had to repent then and there, in front of her, or my soul would be punished for all eternity in hell. "Fuck my soul," I yelled at her, "and fuck God too."

I was suddenly far more alert than I'd been and angrily reacting to her religious views. I freaked out and screamed at her to get the fuck away from me.

As had happened at UCLA, the area quickly filled with hospital orderlies who tried to determine what was wrong. Since I was yelling when they arrived, "Get this crazy bitch outta here," they decided I was the problem and tied me to the bed with 4 cloth restraints, and left me there freaking out.

Completely demoralized and exhausted by the event, I finally cried myself to sleep still tied to the bed.

(part 117) CIGARETTE AND THE PSYCH WARD

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UCLA psychiatric

I was placed in the psychiatric ward at UCLA following the cigarette episode. After being shot-up with a ton of valium, I was not much trouble to anyone for awhile. You would have thought that the shot they gave me was far more likely to do harm than a single cigarette, but that's what they did, and neither one of those things killed me.

After being put into the psych ward, the battle of the cigarette raged on. I told the doctor that none of this would have happened if they'd just let me have a cigarette, which was true. On the other hand, he had the hospital rules, regulations, and medical opinions to contend with.

The hospital continued to stand its ground on the issue of the cigarette, while I maintained the whole thing was dumb and could have been avoided. My position, I felt, was somewhat bolstered by the fact that the cigarette hadn't had any adverse effect on me, but the drama resulting from not letting me smoke had gotten me locked up and shot full of drugs.

As the sedative effects of the shot began to wear off over the next few hours, I decided that being locked up in the nut-ward was not acceptable to me. In light of why it had happened, I asked to speak to the doctor. I told him I didn't think I deserved to be there any longer, and asked him to let me out, which he refused to do.

I went on to tell him that the hospital's position was the cause of me being there, and that the cigarette hadn't hurt me, so why were they continuing to hold me in the nut ward when it was obvious that they'd been wrong?

"you made too big a deal about it," I said, but the doctor would not admit to any mistakes on the part of the hospital, which continued to frustrate me.

I felt at the time like I was in jail for wanting a cigarette, but the hospital felt like I needed to stay in the psych ward for observation. The doctor went on to say, "After this particular episode, and your behavior, the staff doesn't feel comfortable with you being in the hospital unless you are here in the psychiatric facility."

"Then discharge me," I said, staring at him. The doctor looked at me and replied, "I don't think I can do that, Mr. Jameson. You need to be in the hospital, and where you are currently is the best place for you." "Well I don't wanna be here anymore," I answered back, "So let me out."

The doctor watched me carefully at this point to see how agitated I was going to become. Knowing this, I did not allow myself to escalate my demand too far, for fear of having someone run up and give me another shot. I was emphatic, but not overly aggressive. I repeated myself saying, "I want to leave this hospital."

The doctor finally responded by saying, "If you're dead set on leaving, Mr. Jameson, then it will be against medical advice, because the hospital's position is that you need attention which we are prepared to offer you."

"Well I don't want any more attention from this place," I said, "I wanna leave." Looking very frustrated the doctor said, "You'll have to sign and AMA before I can legally release you."

"What's an AMA?" I asked. "It's a form that says you are leaving the hospital against the medical advice of the staff. You'll have to sign it before I can allow you to leave, because of the hospital's liability should anything happen to you." "OK," I said, "I'll sign it."

With that, I was given my clothes and escorted out of the psychiatric facility and wished good luck. I have no recollection at all as to where I went or what I did after signing myself out of UCLA.

I would imagine that I went to the closest place I could find and got a drink. My mother had probably gone to a motel to get some sleep, and was unaware of any of this. By the time she got back to the UCLA I was gone. I can only now imagine how she must have felt.

(part 116) THE CIGARETTE

The symptoms of brain damage appeared immediately in my behavior while in the hospital. The day after I came out of the coma, I asked for a cigarette, which I was told I couldn't have because it might kill me in the condition I was in.

This observation by staff was ridiculous to me because I had just attempted taking my own life. I laughed sarcastically at whoever it was who told me that, saying, "I don't care if it kills me, I was trying to kill myself anyway."

The battle of wills had begun in earnest and I was determined to smoke. My poor mother was caught in the middle of this fight and tried to reason with me unsuccessfully. "I want a Goddamn cigarette and I don't care what it does to me."

With that, I began ripping out the intravenous needles and tubes from my arms and lunged out of bed and into the hallway, as the sound of beepers and buzzers filled the air.

The area quickly filled up with doctors and staff, who attempted to corral and calm me. My single focus at that moment was a cigarette, and no amount of coaxing could dissuade me from my mission.

As I became more and more agitated, I took off down the hallway wearing only a hospital gown. I marched through the corridor, with my ass hanging out, yelling, "I want a Goddamn cigarette."

Finally, security showed up, and I was now being approached by uniformed guards who were still some distance away. They began gesturing with their hands for me to calm down, and attempted to flank me with several staff members.

As they moved in on me, I grabbed a glass I.V. bottle off a rolling stand and threw it down the hall at them. The glass shattered through the hallway and the group stopped in disbelief, looking at the glass and then back at me.

I turned away, and headed down another hall, ending up in what appeared to be an auditorium. There were long and heavy drapes hanging at the sides of the windows, so I grabbed one and yanked it down to the floor. From it, I removed a very large curtain hook, used for hanging the drapes on rods.

It looked somewhat like a big fish hook, and I held the sharp end to my wrist yelling, "Stop, Goddamn it, or I'm gonna shove this fucker in my wrist and rip out my veins." They all stopped! "All I want is a Goddamn cigarette, man. I just want a cigarette," I said.

I stood there with the curtain hook dug into my wrist and dared them to come at me again. They all milled about in a tight little crowd, when somebody finally moved forward with a lit cigarette. "OK, Bobby, here's a cigarette, now try and calm down."

I motioned the person forward with the cigarette and took it from their hand. I dropped the hook on the floor, after taking a couple of long drags, and sat down on a folding chair in front of the auditorium stage.

I sat there quietly taking in the smoke, as a staff member approached me with a syringe full of sedative, plunging it into my arm. I offered no resistance at that point and muttered, "All I wanted was a cigarette."

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There are at least two primary ways of observing my actions, which I have just conveyed to you here. (1) I was an ungrateful, obnoxious asshole, which is true, and (2), I was damaged at that point, in such a way, as to not have the capacity to self regulate my behavior.

Inappropriate emotional outbursts of anger, coupled with pronounced swearing and changes in personality are hallmark symptoms of brain cell damage caused by Anoxia and Hypoxia, which simply stated, is what occurs when the brain is deprived of oxygen for too long.

In my case, that had taken place prior to this event. Some brain cells start dying within 5 minutes in an anoxic or hypoxic environment. I was in such an environment for as much as two hours before reaching UCLA.