Carlisle - Lips unsealed: a memoir

FOR MUCH OF my life, I felt like my fate was determined before I stepped into a recording studio, sang a song, or even thought about the Go-Goslong before I joined Hollywoods punk scene in the mid-1970s.

When I was twelve years old, I was a mixed-up, restless little girl living in Thousand Oaks, a working-class area in Los Angeless West San Fernando Valley. My stepdad had a drinking problem, my mom was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I was teased as being fat and stupid. I was neither, but at that age, the facts didnt matter. I hated my life and wanted something better.

I came home one day from a friends house holding a book that seemed like it might help me change my life. I hid it under my sweatshirt and went straight to my bedroom. I felt a tingle of excitement as I slipped it out and looked at the cover: The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey. I read bits and pieces, and although I understood very little of the authors rant against Christianity, I focused on terms like exorcism, evil, and black magic, thinking I could find out how to cast spells and take control of my life.

This wasnt the first book Id read on the subject, but it got me in the mood to finally try to cast a spell. I slid a box out from under my bed and removed the contents I had assembled earlier: brewed tea leaves, oak twigs, string, and a candle. I arranged them in front of me as Id seen in a different book. I chanted some words and called on the invisible powers of the universe to give my life the excitement I felt it lacked and everything else I wanted.

What did I want?

I asked myself that question for most of my life. As a kid, I wanted out of my house, a place of much torment and trouble. The punk scene became my refuge, my safe haven, the forgiving, understanding world where I could be anything I wantedin my case, a rock star. After I became a rock star, I still didnt know what I wanted. Finally, many years later, I began to realize I had been asking the wrong question.

It was actually one night in 2005 when I finally came clean with myself, when I asked what it was I needed, not what I wanted. I had gone to London for business, but spent three straight days locked in my hotel room, doing cocaine. I went on the biggest binge of my life, which is saying something considering I had used, boozed, and abused for thirty years. When I looked at my eyes in the mirror, I didnt see anyone looking back at me. The lights were out. I was gone.

It scared meyet I didnt stop until I had an extraordinarily frightening out-of-body experience where I saw myself overdosing and being found dead in the hotel room. I saw the whole thing happen, and I knew that if I kept doing coke, I was going to die.

At that moment I shut my eyes, and when I opened them again I made the decision I had put off for much too long. I opened myself up to life. I appreciated the good, faced the bad, and began to find the things I needed.

Now, four and a half years later, the bad days are behind me but not forgotten. They made me who I am todaya far better, healthier, smarter, more open and loving person than I ever thought was possible. Im someone who lived her dream against the odds of any of it happening, and yet I never doubted it.

Who knows, maybe it was the spells I cast back when I was a little girl. Whatever it was, its been a pretty remarkable ride. Im writing this book at age fifty, a milestone that seems like the right time to look back, hopefully with some perspective, insight, and wisdom at my career, marriage, sobriety, and efforts to connect with a higher power.

I dont know that people make complete albums anymore. But when I was growing up, and early in my career with the Go-Gos, artists tried to put together a collection of songs that made sense as a whole. You listened to a record cut by cut, hoping every song was great but generally discovering that some songs were better than others, some were great, and some were so bad they should have been left in the studio. At the end, there was some sort of aha moment when you got the work in its entirety.

If it was any good, it stayed with you, made you think, and in the best of all worlds it offered inspiration and hope. I feel that way about my life thus far. It may not be everyones cup of tea, but most of the cuts have been pretty good, and some even great. They worked for mea little girl who thought she cast a spell that created the rest of her life, and then turned into a woman who realized the real magic had been there the whole time.

AT EIGHTEEN, I worked at the Hilton Hotels Corporation, photocopying papers for eight hours a day. When I wasnt doing that, I was ordering toilet paper for hundreds of hotels. I was bored out of my mind. Making matters worse, I had the worlds most hideous boss. He looked for reasons to call me into his office and chew me out. Most people wouldve quit, but I didnt care. Besides needing the money, I knew I wasnt going to be there long. I was going to be a rock star.

I was absolutely certain of it.

I had always been like that: someone who dreamed big and believed those dreams could come true if I kept at them.

I probably inherited that from my mom. Raised in Hollywood, Joanne Thompson was the eldest of two children of Roy, a plant manager at the General Motors facility in Van Nuys, and Ruth, a homemaker whose head-turning beauty and dramatic flair had inspired her as a younger woman to pursue movie stardom. When those dreams didnt pan out, she turned into an obsessive fan who read all the gossip magazines and took her daughter to movie premieres where they ogled the stars walking the red carpet.

Like my grandmother, my mother was drop-dead gorgeous. Photos of her as a senior at Hollywood High show a redhead with a great figure and big, lively eyes. She was a knockout. I think she could have had a shot at a career in front of the camera if shed had ambition in that direction. By her own admission, though, she was too nave and shortsighted. She didnt have a plan.

I didnt think about what I wanted to do, my mother once told me when I asked how she had envisioned her life going after high school, adding that she saw herself as Debbie Reynolds and thought everything would be, or should be, happy, happy, happy.

Then I got married, she continued, and I found reality.

Actually, she found Harold Carlisle, a James Dean look-alike whom she met while still a high school student. He was her dose of reality. He worked at a gas station near the school. Though he was twenty years older than her, she fell in love with him.

I was so stupid, she told me. He was a bum.

They married right after she graduated and on August 17, 1958, less than nine months after she accepted her diploma, she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Belinda. Cest moi! I arrived in the world via special delivery, otherwise known as a C-section. According to my mom, I was too large for her to push out naturally. Apparently size was an issue for me from day one.

Two years later, my mom gave birth to a boy, Butch; and two years after him, she had my sister Hope.

Even now she doesnt talk much about those early years. From the little she has revealed, she was in over her head as both a wife and a new mother. Shes described it as a time when she learned the tricks of the trade. Translation: Barely out of her teens, she was juggling three small children in a cramped Hollywood apartment, making do without much money, and trying to figure out life with a much older man.