(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."

* * *

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.

(part 115) CAROL, COMA, AND BRAIN DAMAGE

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Carol Paulus and me

I'd been in a coma for some 38 hours when I came to, and found it nearly impossible to speak. My ability to think was impaired, and the massive anxiety I felt was indescribable. I saw my mother's face looking down at me and heard her voice say how incredibly relieved she was.

The specific reason for her genuine relief, other than the obvious, I found out later, was because she'd been told by the doctors that I probably wouldn't come out of the coma, and if I did I would be severely brain damaged as a result of the lack of oxygen.

Then the hospital room came alive with various doctors and nurses all scrambling around my bed, turning off alarms and buzzers, and reading data from various monitoring devices I was attached to. It seemed no one expected me to wake up, let alone be able to say anything coherent, after coming out of a coma.

What I remember clearly is how pissed off I was that I was still alive. I was crying and kept repeating, "Why am I still alive? I don't want to be here." The anger I felt when I first came out of the coma has never left or dissipated to the present day. To put it simply, I woke up pissed off and just stayed that way.

This is not all that mysterious if you calculate that the brain begins to be damaged after 5 to 15 minutes without oxygen. I'd been without oxygen to the brain for ten times that long, so the fact that I could do anything was of some considerable interest to the staff at UCLA.

After the room cleared, I tried with great difficulty to talk to my mother. As my blurred vision began to clear slightly, I looked at the walls of my room and they appeared to be moving. It wasn't the kind of movement you'd see from dizziness, or an hallucination, it was distinctly different than that.

More like a million little wheels turning all at the same time, like it was alive. I tried my best to convey this phenomenon to my mother, but putting the words together was extremely tedious. She was trying hard to get what I was saying, but it was difficult for her, because the trauma she had gone through was so overwhelming.

At one point, another patient was moved into the room next to mine, and there was a considerable commotion out in the hall. We couldn't see anything, but my mother wondered what the disturbance had been about. I tried to tell her an unconscious girl had been put in the next room.

My mother looked at me, and appeared confused. "How do you know that?" she asked, "I can see it, I said, and again she looked confused saying, "Well how could you see that, there's a wall there?" I can see through it," I said, "I can see her. It's a blond girl"

My mother looked at me like I was nuts. "Really, I can see her. Go look and see if that's what it is," I pleaded. My mother somewhat reluctantly went out of the room to find out what had happened and to see for herself what she could. When she came back, she had somewhat of an amazed look on her face.

"That's exactly what it was," she said, "A blond girl, who's in a coma like you were. They put her in the room next to this one." "I told you I could see it," I groaned, "I told you that's what it was."

* * *

I had been found at the house on St. Ives Drive by a woman named Carol Paulus a couple of hours after I'd taken the overdose. I'd known Carol since 1966, and had lived with her at different times since then. She'd been aware of my mood and knew, too, that I had talked about and acted upon suicidal thoughts and feelings in the past.

For years she had watched me go up and down in my life depending on what was going right or wrong. On the particular day that I committed suicide, she had, for whatever reason tried to contact me without success. Acting on a feeling, she later said, she went to Gavin's house to see if I was OK. Coincidently she had found the door to the house unlocked and had gone inside where she discovered me unconscious.

After calling the paramedics, she rode in the back of the ambulance with me en route to the hospital. Along the way the driver turned off the siren and lights and slowed to the speed of traffic. Alarmed, Carol asked him what he was doing and he responded, "He's arrested." Not knowing for sure what that meant Carol asked him, "What does that mean?" He answered, "He's arrested, he's dead."

This is Carol Paulus's version of what happened next. "I felt a power come over me that said, he's not dead," which she reacted to by yelling orders at the driver and assistant, who both followed without question. "You turn on the siren and lights and go to UCLA." She then turned to the assistant and said, "And you, punch him in the chest or whatever you do and keep doing it until we get to the hospital," which he did without question.

When they arrived at UCLA emergency I was found to have the most minimal brain wave possible, and still measure, and was admitted imediately.

(part 114) THE ROUND TABLE AND THE LITTLE GRAY MAN

I found myself seated at a round table. There were numerous other people seated there as well. They were dressed in white robes, and all of them had long hair and beards. They were all men, there were no women.

I could see nothing beyond the area of the table. I was asked questions about my intentions, and what I had been trying to do by killing myself.

I was told I had to make a choice whether to acquire money and fame, or be of some real use to the world. I was not dead, because there was no such thing as death. I had to choose one or the other. My choice was to be of some real use to the world.

Instantly I was shifted from where I had been into the presence of what I have learned to refer to as "the little gray man." He was about 3 feet tall and did not speak, but communicated with me directly, as in mental telepathy. His skin was gray, his hair was gray, and his clothes were gray and tattered looking. He looked kind of like E.T., except this was ten years before that movie was made.

His attitude toward me was almost matter of fact. He seemed a bit irritated that he had to be there dealing with me because I had committed suicide. His position clearly was there was no such thing as death, so my actions in killing myself were absurd, because I couldn't die anyway.

According to him I would just be in some sort of holding pattern until I was willing to confront whatever it was I killed myself over. He then telepathically asked for my response, which was, if that were the case I was ready to go back and deal with the problems I'd committed suicide over.

Immediately we were transferred into what I will describe as a tunnel-like place. It was well lit, but there were no lights. The walls looked exactly like beige stucco, and were curved into the ceiling. It was not a small place, nor was it extremely large, and it ran as far as I could see in either direction.

The floor was like translucent marble and light emanated up through it in a steady pleasant glow. Not bright light, just enough to see clearly by. As I surveyed the surroundings we started moving forward and going deeper into the tunnel. We were not walking or riding on anything, and the floor was not moving like a conveyor belt, we were just in motion.

We started quite slowly but picked up speed as we continued moving forward through the tunnel. I noticed other tunnels on either side branching off in other directions.

I watched the other tunnels go by for a bit, and looked to "the little gray man" for some sort of explanation as to their existence or importance to our voyage. What he did, knowing I was asking a question of him, was to overtly and emphatically turn his head one way and then the other indicating, "No," as his response.

As we continued on, I began seeing incredibly colored glass balls that just seemed to hang in the air unsupported by anything. They were the most brilliant colors I had ever seen. Not bright, but brilliant. An emerald green, ruby red, sapphire blue, and yellow that were otherwise inexplicable. These globes were mostly the size of a basket ball and appeared periodically as we kept moving.

We were now traveling at an unbelievable rate of speed through the tunnel. I felt calm and assured. There was no sense of fear or anything negative. I was completely comfortable and relaxed.

The speed continued to increase, and I could not make out anything, except "the little gray man" standing beside me. I looked forward again just in time to see us penetrate what seemed like a wall or veil.

* * *

I sat bolt upright in bed at UCLA's intensive care unit. All kinds of beepers and buzzers went off, and I had no idea where I was. I could barely see, but managed to make out the misty figure of what turned out to be my mother, whose face had a look of shock cut into it.

I started crying and blurted out from a place of deep sadness, "I'm an eagle, and they want me to be a sparrow; eagles can't be sparrows." I was crying because I was still alive.

The pain of coming back into consciousness on the planet I had left was the most excruciating pain I had ever felt in my life. It was like hitting a brick wall at two hundred miles an hour. I cried myself back into life, my God-awful life.

(part 113) PILLS

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I tried hard to see past where I was, weeks after the altercation with Cohen, but it was no good. It was just another time where money, or more succinctly, not having any, was the major problem in my life.

I had never had any money and now here I was again without a penny. I felt once more like a second class citizen who couldn't pay his rent. The problem had dogged me all my life and had never improved at all.

No matter how many records I made, or songs I wrote, I never made more than a hundred dollars a week, and even that was impossible for me to keep going. I grew up with nothing and I still had nothing.

As a kid, part of my dream was to become a star, and make a lot of money, and buy my mother a nice house. In reality, I barely spoke to my mother and couldn't buy shit. In my eyes I was a complete failure. I had given it my best shot, and it had gone nowhere. By 1972 I was well known as a loser, with a penchant for trouble, and overall I was seen as a bad bet.

I sat on the couch at Gavin's and there was nobody else around. I drank a beer and popped a couple of pills, while looking through notebooks of hand-written lyrics. I had tried for years to create things of value, both musically and lyrically, and although I'd improved, whatever I did always ended up the same way. Bottom line, I was just as far from my goals as I'd ever been, maybe further.

As I sat there reading and thinking, I looked over at four bottles of pills I had on the coffee table. My bed was that couch, so it wasn't unusual for the pill bottles to be there. They were all new prescriptions, given to me by Dr. Ferguson at Edgemont Hospital.

There were four bottles. Thirty pills per bottle. 10 milligram vallium, chloral hydrate, elavil, and triavil. In total, a hundred and twenty pills. I looked at the bottles for a long time, and picked each one up and read the label. The doctor's name, my name, the contents, and what they were used for.

I lit a cigarette and walked over to the sliding glass doors and stared out at the city. I could make out various landmarks here and there, and knew where everything was on Sunset Blvd. below.

I recalled the events in my life for the past eight years, and how they had all turned out. The opportunities and the failures littered the Strip from one end to the other.

I could see the Continental Hotel roof from where I stood, and remembered how it felt looking down at the ground from the eleventh story ledge. I remembered the sheriff's officers pulling me over the wall, and how I'd felt as the they dragged me to safety.

It was like a movie in my head, replaying over and over in vivid detail. The not knowing what I would have done if left to make my own decision that day. But now, at this very moment, I knew for the first time what my decision would have been. I knew that I had wanted to die, and I now believed that it had been the right decision but had not been carried out.

As I stood at the window, I vowed that this time would be different, and that I would succeed in killing myself. "I don't want to do this anymore," I said out loud, "it feels like shit." A sense of excitement ran through me as I realized I had just made the ultimate decision once again.

I walked back over to the coffee table in front of the couch and sat down. I went through the pages of hand-written lyrics again, and selected four of them, which I laid out on the table in a nice neat row. I picked up the four pill bottles and emptied their contents into a pile in front of me. "Man," I said, "that's a lot of pills."

I stood up and walked into the kitchen and got the biggest glass I could find and filled it with vodka and water. I walked back into the living room and sat down staring at the pile of pills on the coffee table in front of me. I asked myself what I was doing and said, "I'm going to kill myself."

I heard the sound of my own voice saying, "I'm going to kill myself." I asked if that's what I really wanted to do and said, "Yes! "I'm tired of being alive and feeling like shit all the time. I'm tired of watching everything go wrong. Everything always goes wrong."

I looked down at the pile again, and started picking up pills and putting them in my mouth. A few at a time, and then take a drink and swallow them. Pick up some more, put them in my mouth, and take another drink, etc.

I started thinking how Goddamn hard it was to take this many pills and get them all down. I just kept at it. Pick some up and shove um into my mouth, take a drink and swallow. Over and over and over, until the pile was gone.

I stood up and walked around a bit, thinking about what I had just done. Doing it was different than thinking about it. Now I'd really done it, and all of a sudden I wondered if I'd made a mistake. I began to panic, but then said out loud, "No, it's OK! I meant to do this. It's OK! I did it on purpose."

I calmed right down, and walked over to the big sliding glass doors again that opened onto a long wooden deck along the back of the house that overlooked the Sunset Strip. I took one last look at my city. The city that had beat me to death, literally.

I started talking out loud. I said, "God, I took enough pills to kill me. You know it and I know it." It wasn't unusual for me to talk to God. I'd been doing it for a long time. I had believed at one time that He had been with me, back when I'd first started with Tony Alamo.

I had always felt peculiar as a child, as if I were destined for something out of the ordinary. I had believed God picked me for something, and that what I did with music was part of it. But as the years passed, I watched my belief shatter too many times in calamity after calamity.

Now in the living room at Gavin's, I continued talking to God. I was angry. I felt as though He'd abandoned me, and this was my moment of challenging Him. My own decision of personal crucifixion.

"If I die I guess it doesn't matter. If I don't, it will be because you won't let me die. It will mean there is something you want me to do. It's now in your hands, I quit." With that, I walked back to the couch and sat down. I felt the warmth of the sunlight on the back of my head and shoulders.

I looked at the pages I had placed on the table. I picked up the pill bottles and lined them up in a little row like tin soldiers and stared at them for awhile. I arranged everything the way I wanted and then leaned back into the couch and waited. I recall just before blacking out that I felt like I was enveloped by a wave of peace.

(part 112) THE BOTTOM: WHERE I BELONGED...

Herbie Cohen

The Troubadour was never the same for me after that night with Danny. Every time I went in there, I remembered vividly the look on his face as he quietly walked by me and out of my life. I still went there, because it was close enough to walk to, but I never felt comfortable again.

One night I ran into Herbie Cohen there, and went over to say hello to him. I'd never gone anywhere socially with Herb, except when I met him years earlier at his house with Zappa, so it was kind of unusual to encounter him in that setting.

We stood in a corner of the bar, and talked a little about music and the business. I asked him if anything was going on as far as my stuff was concerned and he said, "No."

I'd been writing songs for Arizona Music, which he and his brother were running, for about five months, and couldn't really understand why nothing had been accomplished, other than me putting a lot of finished music into it which I asked him about.

He seemed irritated by my question, and told me to back off a little. He acted like I was his office boy, and I wasn't willing to accept the way he was treating me, so I told him so.

Herbie had a reputation as a New York street fighter, which I was aware of, but I had a reputation as a Los Angeles street fighter and bar brawler, and I don't think he thought much of it at the time.

He acted as if I were a Hollywood pussie who couldn't fight, and that's how he treated me. This of course played directly into my constant problems with various record business executives and producers throughout the past. It had become a major sticking point in my personality, and I was not willing to take any shit from the likes of Herbie Cohen.

It didn't occur to me at that moment that Herbie and his brother were the ones paying me each week, so I said something to him that really pissed him off. It was nothing overt like, "Fuck off" or "Fuck you," just something that for whatever reason pissed him off.

Out of nowhere, Herbie turned on me. He tried to kick me in the balls while I stood in front of him. I was surprised by this, and knew instinctively that he'd attempted, but failed, to do some real damage to me.

I turned my body sideways, and grabbed my beer bottle off the bar by the neck. I held it up at shoulder level hissing, "What the fuck are you doin' Herbie? Why'd you try to kick me in the balls?"

Knowing he had blown his surprise attack, Cohen looked at me with that "let's get it on" look that I'd seen plenty of times before. "Come on Herbie," I said, "You wanna fuck with me?" I waved the beer bottle in his face, and watched his eyes follow it in my hand.

By this time Herbie's original opinion of me had shifted, and it was obvious by the concerned look on his face. That old "crazy fuckin Jameson" shit came over me, and I was ready to go to war. "Come on Cohen, you fuckin' punk ass mother fucker. I'll kill ya you son of a bitch."

Herbie glared at me in anger and I glared back. We stood there a moment, and then he just turned away and walked out the door. I don't remember what I did, probably stayed there and got drunk.

Whatever happened that night had far reaching consequences in my life. The end result was that the Cohen Brothers quit paying me my weekly salary and I began to panic.

I went to their office in Hollywood, but Herbie wouldn't talk to me. Martin said there was nothing he could do, because Herbie told him not to pay me. I left, feeling like my world was again crumbling, and that old feeling of "now what do I do" swept over me like a tidal wave.

One day everything was fine, and a day later everything was fucked up. I hadn't started the fight with Herbie, but I must have gotten to him in a way that he was unwilling to excuse or forget, because his form of revenge was swift and deadly in my world.

As usual, I had no money saved, and nothing else going on. I retreated to Gavin's house, or some other place, and got loaded. I always got loaded when I didn't know what to do.

The weeks went by, and I sank deeper and deeper into an abyss of fear and depression. I couldn't pay my rent and even though Gavin and Ron didn't pressure me, I felt bad that I couldn't cover my own end.

I'd sit at the piano and play songs, and write new ones, but no matter how hard I tried, I felt like life, my life, was not worth continuing. I was dog tired of the endless problems and always being broke. I was tired of always being in the position to have to kiss someone's ass or watch my world collapse.

It was 1972, and I had been doing this kind of bullshit since 1964, and nothing ever seemed to change. I'd get up for a while, and then go straight to the bottom again, as if that were my natural place to reside. At the bottom. "Maybe it was," I thought, "Maybe I just needed to accept it. Accept that the bottom was where I belonged."