(part 228) MY TROUBLED MIND

Hollywood California, it even sounds romantic when you say it. My whole life had been about the town, the place, the concept.

The dream machine, a place where childhood obsessions of stardom and fame were acceptable, even preferable. That magical place known all around the world as Hollywood, city of stars.

I had always been one of those wide eyed children with a vision. Had always thought of myself as part of the mystique. It was my home as far back as I could remember.

I'd gone to grade school in Laurel Canyon in the 50's, before we went to Arizona. The Wonderland Ave. School at the corner of Lookout Mountain Dr. and Wonderland Ave.

I had always felt the pull of electricity from the city below at Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Heights, where Googy's and Schwab's drugstore were.

I loved the town in a way I cannot put into words. It was just as much a part of me as breathing, and when I wasn't there I always knew I would be...eventually.

* * *

I drove south for a long time, down 101 to L.A. I plotted in my head a story to tell to someone, anyone, about why I needed to be there. Carol Paulus? Lois Johnston? Someone I hadn't met yet?

I would find a way, a place, like I always had. One more time, one more try, one more run in that town...my town...my world.

I don't remember with any accuracy where I landed at first, but I know that I did find a way and a place to put myself. I had learned long ago to conform to the needs of others to get what I wanted.

I was a human chameleon, always changing colors to fit into my current surroundings, while privately planning my next move.

Wherever I landed was immaterial, in many ways, to me. The fact that I knew I could sleep there and go there, was the point.

I would cultivate, as I always had, a series of places where I was welcomed, or allowed to enter and leave as I chose.

If a problem arose, and it always did, I would leave and go to one of the other places. It was just something I'd learned to do over the years.

I was a gigolo as much anything else. It had been that ability which had kept me going through thick and thin in this town.

To me it was no more than a tool I used to get by, to keep going. The point was always the music, the rest was just a means to an end.

I was callous as hell in a lot of ways, and this was one of those ways. Like a dope fiend or drunk, the whole point was to get what you needed, so I was like that.

I had a tape deck set up at Lois Johnston's for awhile, and Carol Paulus had a tape recorder at her place, so I used them. I had a lot of tapes at Carol's, a lot of years worth of work.

I'd listen to my own music and try and figure out why I had never been accepted. Try to learn by listening over and over, what the missing component was.

Ultimately I'd just get pissed off and frustrated, saying, "Those stupid assholes in the music business just never got it. It was there," I thought, "they just never heard it."

Every day I'd roam around trying to meet people to use, trying to expand my world into something that finally made sense, that worked. Women who wanted me around, and would buy me a microphone as a gift, or an amplifier, or a box of recording tape.

I was one big manipulating mass of self-need that thrived on the thought of accomplishing that which I had never accomplished, namely, to be recognized and accepted for my work. To finally be treated fairly by an industry and town that I'd poured most of my life into since 1963.

Somewhere in my troubled mind I was conjuring up, for the thousandth time, the outcome of a dream...my dream, one with a happy ending.

(part 227) CHILDREN WITH DREAMS

For me, music had always been the way I'd defined myself in and to the world. The music was just something that happened inside me, even when I wasn't paying attention to it. It would create itself and then force me to listen to it.

Like an excited child running around the yard playing, it existed as a thing no matter what I did. The joining of the expression of music, to the business of music, was the bastardization of the process.

It had become mangled by the havoc wreaked on it by the devious nature of the music business and creation for profit and loss.

It had ceased to be an expression of itself and had become a slave to the fickle nature of a fool's choice of commercialism; "fuck the music if it don't sell!"

This god-awful crap hole had been my home, both drunk and sober, for over twenty years by 1984, and had beat me into a form of submission that I despised.

I had become addicted to the process of twisting creation into a designated design put forth by the whims of idiots, assholes, and Billboard's top 100.

I had succumbed to the belief that things like Grammy Awards represented the entire strata of music's value and true worth.

This diabolical self-inflicted blindness and deafness was in charge of my entire psyche where music was concerned, by this point. I could not detach the one from the other.

It was a sickness I had acquired as a teenager, and had, over time, honed into a razor sharp blade that I had finally plunged into my own heart and soul.

The very thing that had lifted me up into the heavens had now broken my wings and sent me hurling to the hard earth. It had cast me into darkness and had left me there alone.

That is where I was in 84, alone. Try as I might to engage anyone, such as DJ, I could not. She tried to get me to move up to Northern California and stay with her, but I could not.

I even drove up there to her place with the intention of staying, but after no more than a few hours burst into tears, saying, "I can't do it, I just don't know how anymore."

I put what little I had back into my car and drove away leaving her there to wonder at this strange person called- Bobby Jameson.

I stared at my eyes in the rearview mirror and cried for miles, unsure of where I was going and what I would do.

But true to my addictive nature I returned to Los Angeles, the world's capitol for the slaughter of children with dreams.

I did not know what to do or where I belonged. L.A. was all I knew. For me it had been my life as well as my death. For me it was home, even though I had no home there...It was the town.

(part 226) ANOTHER MOMENT

artwork by Phil Bongiorno

I SHATTERED MYSELF
RUNNING AT
THE WALL
OF MY OWN
CONFLICT
HURLING MY SOUL
AGAINST THE WORLD

MY EAR DRUMS
BURSTING LIKE
TOY BALLOONS
PRICKED BY A PIN
BELLOWING
AT THE MADNESS
WHICH IS ME

I CREATE
FROM THE INSIDE
OF MY OWN DISASTER
WHIRLING
ON AND ON
IN A NEVER ENDING FIT
OF ANGLES AND LIGHT

ADDICTED
TO MY OWN PAIN
AS A MEANS
BY WHICH
TO SURVIVE IT
TO COEXIST
WITH MISERY

RUNNING
ON DEAD FEET
CRUSHED BONES
SLAPPING AGAINST
THE PAVEMENT
I ENDURE
THE PAIN

ENDURE
THE DARK
WITHOUT THE SUN
LIVE ON
AGAINST THE ODDS
BREATHE IN
ANOTHER STEP

STAY STRONG
IN THE COLD AIR
NEVER WITHER
REACH OUT
TO ANOTHER DAY
ANOTHER LIFE
ANOTHER MOMENT

Bobby Jameson Oct 24, 2009

(part 225) "JUST NOT RIGHT NOW."

My mother, me, and Dj in Shell Beach California 1983-84

There were people who believed I was headed for a disaster, that being, of course, that I would get loaded. I worried that they might know something I didn't at that point.

I did not have enough time sober, back then, to dispute the possibility with much conviction. All I had was a stubborn streak a mile wide that refused to get drunk on any given day.

It helped that they thought I would, because I relished proving them wrong. I could just picture them running off at the mouth in a meeting, or at coffee, saying, "Well, did you hear about Bobby Jameson?"

Thinking about it convinced me more than ever not to give them the satisfaction of fulfilling their Goddamn prophecy.

It was my one great success, I believed. Bobby Jameson, sober and clean no matter what. Meaner than shit and angry at the world, I vowed I would die before I ever got loaded.

The Doc Holiday of AA and NA. I would not fold in the face of a crisis, any crisis. I took on all comers, and come they did.

The advice givers, the God freaks, the false prophets of a reason to slip, as they called it. I knew I was doing the best I could no matter what they said or thought. I knew that in my gut and in my heart.

I had found sobriety in the cesspool of my life, and it proved a far more reliable asset than the tinker-toy version they talked about.

I chalked it up to experience. My experience versus theirs. Mine was honed in hell; too many of them had been light weights, so recovery for them was easier, smoother, more appetizing.

Sobriety for Bobby Jameson was like reassembling a completely shattered individual...it was just gonna be that way...it was just gonna take more time...more work.

At times my opinion counted; when others saw their own failings with regards to someone they had sponsored or guided, they'd say quietly, "Send em to Bobby Jameson, he knows all about living sober through disaster."

That was about the only time I got credit for anything with most of them...when they needed me to tell the truth to someone they'd been feeding pablum to.

Otherwise I was just looked upon as someone who couldn't, or wouldn't, let go of my anger and resentments. I was the poster boy for who not to be like.

In 1983-84 I got involved with a girl from Northern California who stopped into a few Southern California meetings when visiting her father in L.A.

Her name was, DJ, and she was a good chick. She seemed undaunted by my moods and angry rhetoric about how sobriety was not going too good for me.

We used to go to Harley Davidson shops in various places and look at the bikes and buy t-shirts. I played her some of my music, and she would push me gently back toward it, telling me I had a gift.

"Yeah, well that gift is trying to kill me, so I don't know what to do with it," I told her,

"Well you just have to keep trying, Bobby, you are a talented human, and you can't escape it no matter where you run to."

I knew she was right, but I was not ready to entertain any more attempts to make use of it at that point, so I would nod my head and say, "Yeah, I know, and someday I'll start again and see what happens, just not right now."

(part 224) THE ROAD AHEAD

It's not that the situation with Gary was so different from things that happen to other people, it was what it did to me personally that makes it stand out in my life.

I had already found it difficult to trust people, because each time I did, something bad usually resulted in the end.

Gary was just a guy I knew from the program. It never occurred to me that I had anything to fear from him.

But after what happened, I found myself even more wary, sizing up each person I encountered. Not in a positive way, but looking at that them as potential foes.

I moved out of the house in Culver City and once again took up the old practice of living here and there, but never anywhere for very long.

I spent God-awful amounts of time driving around in my car with no particular destination, just cruising the Southern California streets alone.

I would drop into xxx book stores and peep shows on a regular basis and sink ever lower on the scale of self worth and personal dignity.

My outlook on life had deteriorated into a self-imposed exile from the human race and any kind of normal routine.

It felt very reminiscent of my life loaded, not in the sense of what I did, but how I felt about it...in a word, bleak.

I stayed with the tool-selling job as long as I could, for money, but eventually quit out of frustration. I was good at the job, but a lot of what I sold was crap.

Because of this, I found it hard to lie to some farmer in Indiana about the quality of what I was trying to get him to buy. I had a phone name, Cole Parker, and a lot of those guys trusted me.

One day a man in the midwest said, "Well, Cole, do you think this is a good buy?" I knew it was garbage, so I told him, "No, it's junk, don't buy it." I knew then I was through selling tools.

I made jewelry, sold jewelry, painted houses occasionally, worked for contractors when I could, bought stuff and sold it. Whatever I could do I did at one time or another to keep going.

What I couldn't do was get and keep a regular job, or have a relationship that was stable with another human being.

My past, and all that went with it, would eventually explode inside me and wreak general havoc with any normal setting I might have been attempting to engage in.

This was as painful and confusing as anything I have ever had to deal with. There was no way to know when it would happen, just the knowledge that it would happen sooner rather than later.

Various people, mostly women, tried to fix me along the way, but without success. I was fighting my own demons and locked in a desperate battle to stay alive and sober.

The rock bottom nature of my dilemma was slowly, cruelly, and clearly making itself ever more known to me. The dream of a good life with things to be grateful for dimmed to a bare flicker.

I was an outcast among outcasts. A man alone in his own desperate quest for salvation. The future loomed ahead, promising, I feared, more of the same.

The recognition of that possibility, probably saved my life as well as my sobriety, because it forced me to accept, however grudgingly, that the best I might achieve was to simply survive each new calamity.

(part 223) WHAT HAPPENED GARY?

Me in 1983

The aftermath of the attack in the kitchen left me feeling like Gary's prison "bitch." It took some doing for me to resolve it in my own mind. I'd met him through one of my sponsors in AA, Bobby E., and he was Gary's sponsor too.

Gary and I had known each other awhile, and we liked each other, so it was hard to make sense out of the episode. What had really happened? I didn't know for sure, but suspected, and still do, that he was getting loaded.

There is no way of knowing this, other than guessing about it, but it would explain, in part, the outrageous behavior that seemingly came out of nowhere. Anyway, it made sense to me at the time to incorporate the possibility that he was not clean.

I went and talked to Bobby E., who had once sponsored both of us, but was no longer my sponsor, and asked him if he knew what had happened and what was going on with Gary. He said he had heard about it, but didn't have all the details.

I laid it out for him, but got no real definitive answer from his feedback, other than Gary had been grappling with some problems of his own.

I told Bobby E., that I wanted to kill Gary because of what he had done to me. I said I had to set it straight in my own mind.

Bobby E., who came from the streets like me and Gary, understood my position and feelings, but asked if I was prepared to spend a long time in prison and ruin my own life over it.

He asked if I could live with the mental and emotional consequences of killing someone, even if they deserved it for doing what Gary had done to me. I told him I didn't know, but I would seriously think about it.

I left feeling the same way as I had before talking to Bobby E. My problem was that I felt ashamed that Gary bashed my head in and I had done nothing about it. I didn't try to defend myself. I had just taken it.

For me, this was a serious problem. It made me want to seek revenge by getting even, but getting even would put me in jeopardy of losing my freedom, and could possibly be something I couldn't live with, which could cause me to lose my sobriety, the only thing I had of real value.

I reasoned, and it took a couple of months, as I recall, that what had happened was not a fight, it had been an unwarranted assault with a deadly weapon. I was half asleep, partially dressed, in my own kitchen with a friend, I thought, when he went off and attacked me with a blunt instrument.

For me, this gave context to my difficulty in regards to the shame I felt for not fighting back at the time. This was extremely important, because it explained to me why I did not defend myself.

I further reasoned that Gary was in a world of shit himself and was going to have to cope with what he had done to me. Sometime later I ran into him at an NA meeting and got to ask him, "What happened Gary? What the fuck was that about?"

He looked me straight in the eye, half smiling, and said, "I don't know, I just went goofy."

I remember staring back at him, trying to think of some way to answer, but couldn't. It was the last time I ever saw him. A few years later I got an anonymous phone call and the person said, "I thought you'd want to know that Gary was found dead in his own bed, he bled to death internally."

To this day I still do not know what actually caused Gary to do what he did. When I heard he was dead I said, "OK, thanks for letting me know."

After that I thought, "What goes around comes around, and in Gary's case it killed him..." What I have recently come to believe is that Gary may have been using steroids, but again I have no way of knowing for sure.