FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2009

(part 108) MANIPULATING THE WORLD


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. just below 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 to highlight my resentment toward the record industry and those in it who I believed had treated me unfairly. Mostly as I recall I probably just seemed crazy. I don't have a copy of the article and have not read it in years. The cover picture I have posted is, I believe, the right issue.

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 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 that apartment. I don't really believe I thought I would die as a result of that act. I just see 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, and once again I was homeless and on the street. I would occasionally sneak into the building at night and stay at Carol's for awhile, but in reality I had no place to go. During 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, which because of the amount of alcohol and cocaine in his system, put him in a coma during the night. I awoke the next morning on the 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 drove by car to UCLA Hospital where her husband, 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 deceased.