MONDAY, MARCH 2, 2009

(part 134) LIKE DOC HOLLIDAY

It was a toss-up as to who was more to blame for most of my trouble: Me, for doing what I did, or those who had screwed me into becoming the way I was. Some of both, I reckoned. I knew in my gut that I would have been a lot different if someone had actually been fair with me, but such was not the case, so I'd taken that to the max with piss-poor reactions to the perceived injustice. It would've made sense if I could have gotten some real help along the way, but I never did. I just kept surviving each crisis and then adding to the growing pile of sad and humiliating experiences.

In the music business, unless you're making money or making it for someone else, you're treated like a piece of meat. It's kind of like being a whore; when you're in demand they treat you good, but if demand falls off you're pushed out the back door like yesterday's news. That was me, yesterday's news, and in the minds of some, no news at all. I hadn't been in demand for some time, but I had the irritating habit of refusing to go away quietly. In my mind I was still Bobby Jameson and that meant something, good or bad. I was hard to ignore.

As a kid I always felt like I was someone. Not just another kid on the block, but someone that something was going to happen to, and then everybody would finally get it. In 1964 that had happened and everybody did get it, including me. When you actually live in that sort of environment it's not so easy to walk away from it and go back into obscurity. This was my problem, I was being told by a bunch of assholes to go away and become nobody again and I just simply refused. Right or wrong, I could never go back to where I'd come from and had no plans to try.

When I got out of Camarillo, I learned for the first time that the hospital had tried to get my mother to commit me and she'd refused. The thing that really got to me was how hard some people tried to get rid of me, no matter what they had to do to achieve it. It was one thing to get arrested for acting like an asshole, but a whole other level to be committed to a state hospital for it. It scared me in a brand new way and it proved to be another deadly piece of my ever accumulating personality puzzle. As I fought to understand myself I always ended up in the same place, "If I hadn't got fucked so many times I wouldn't be acting like this."

It didn't matter who agreed with me or not, then or now. This is what I believed and it was the driving force behind everything I thought and did. It never seemed to occur to anyone, who possibly owed me money, that when you're as broke as I always was, anything would have helped. That is why I always took seriously the issue of being paid. It wasn't because I was hungry for as much money as I could get my hands on, it was about paying my rent and being able to eat. It always pissed me off that those people never gave it a second thought when I was out on the street looking for a bed to sleep in or a cheap meal at Cantors or Ben Franks.

It was my history, my look, and so called talent, to whatever degree, that I used to stay alive. I could always find ladies who wanted me around, or someone who thought they could make money off me. Even though I was mostly broke and homeless, there were times when I made it appear that I was doing better than I was. Some girl's car, some other girls apartment, and yet another girl's money. When you put them all on the table at the same time, it looked pretty good from the outside, but in reality I was little more than a cheap hustler in a lot of ways. It's survival. It's what you learn on the streets if you want to stick around and not get forced out.

I'd finally made it all the way up to "taboo". "That guy's fucking nuts," was the prevailing sentiment on the streets in LA. I made my position known at that point, with all the warmth of Doc Holliday, that if you wanted to bad mouth me, I'd get into it with you right then and there, and wouldn't give a rat's ass about where we were, or who you were, I'd ceased caring. I'd degenerated into a hair-trigger has-been with a fancy for "Let's get crazy and do some damage," while smiling at you like I was having a good time. I no longer planned on scaling buildings or towers for attention; my new version of "Fuck you" was in-your-face street fighting mentality, which I'd honed to a fine art through years of misery and my own survival instinct.