The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(104)

All that, and my scholarship to Pepperdine was locked in! So I was really in cruise control. Dad and Ron knew that I was willing to work cheap, so they wrote me a funny role in Grand Theft Auto.

I turned eighteen a couple of months before I graduated from high school. As he had with Ron, Dad honored this birthday as another kind of graduation, to adulthood and financial independence. The money that had been stashed away for me by Mom and Dad (and the Jackie Coogan Law) wasn’t as big as Ron’s, but it was still a significant chunk of change.

I had already splurged at age sixteen and a half on my first car, a copper-colored 1975 AMC Pacer. My friends razzed me about buying a soap bubble on wheels, but hey, I thought that all that glass looked space-age cool. I was an idiot. Without air-conditioning, in the Southern California sun, the car’s interior became hot as blue blazes. The four-cylinder engine was too small for my tastes, lacking the giddyap teenage drivers require. The only saving grace? The hand-operated emergency brake located to the right of the driver’s seat. I learned from the stunt drivers on Eat My Dust! how to use it as a tool for screech-’n’-slide halts, a skill I showed off while making donuts in the student parking lot at Burroughs. I drove my Pacer into the ground in less than a year. I traded it in for a Pontiac Firebird. The dealer spotted me $500 for the old car, or one-sixth of what I had spent on it in the first place.

This gives you an idea of my maturity level at that time. Life was a baked joyride. I experienced just one minor hiccup: Pepperdine revoked my scholarship when they realized they had made a mistake—it was supposed to be a needs-based tuition award, and I clearly had the means to pay my own way. I was a little pissed off, as I had done nothing to mislead the school, but the matter was easily resolved. The university still guaranteed me a place in its Class of 1981, as long as I whipped out my checkbook and paid them a few hundred bucks per semester.

I also got to hang with Ron at Dodger Stadium. One nice thing that he did with his Happy Days money was get season tickets. I bought in with him, so we spent a lot of quality time at the ballpark, enjoying the Steve Garvey–Davey Lopes–Ron Cey lineup. The nights that he was tied up with work or busy with Cheryl, Ron would flip me his ticket and I’d take a beer-drinking buddy with me.

About this time, I discovered cocaine. My weed connection came up to me one day during my senior year at Burroughs and said, “Hey, you wanna try some blow?” Count me in!

At first, I experienced only the upside of the drug. The reason that people get hooked on coke is the quick joy it brings. The first couple of lines opened up a magical window of creativity for me. I was a writer, and suddenly I had a ton of ideas, every one of them the most brilliant ever! I put pen to paper to capture them all: storylines for scripts, novels, articles. Whereas before I’d had difficulty getting started on any given project, my chemically enhanced brain was unencumbered by inhibition.

The catch is that this window of euphoria inevitably slams shut. And when it does, it slams hard, with your head caught between the sash and the sill. You go from unstoppable force to self-doubting loser. And the only way to alleviate this comedown is to do another couple of lines.

Let’s see, pot, booze, coke—not the ideal path for Clint College. It was a very slippery slope, and I was throwing down the Crisco. But the wheels didn’t fall off right away. I had a few years of using without serious consequences, probably due to a combination of a youthful constitution and an equally youthful na?veté.

Still, my drug use did not escape the notice of my favorite teachers and coaches. While my grades held up and I never missed a deadline for the school paper, I smelled like bongwater and was a poster boy for Visine. Merle Stone, a social studies teacher and my old JV-football coach, flagged me one day as I was leaving class and asked me, gently but point-blank, “Why do you show up stoned all the time, Clint?” I told Coach I didn’t know what he was talking about. Graduation was around the corner and my ticket was punched to Pepperdine, so I feared no repercussions, and Mr. Stone never pressed the matter.

A year after I graduated, Ron paid a visit to Burroughs High for an event. To his surprise, Mrs. Trempe, my wise and beloved journalism teacher, cornered him and asked for a word in private. She expressed her concern about the direction in which my life was headed.

Ron has told me that he blames himself for not being more aware of the extent of my drug and alcohol intake, and for not doing more to save me from my own twisted judgment. I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s ridiculous. He has nothing to be sorry for. He was giving me jobs when no one else was, for God’s sake! I was the one who chose to become a toxic Peter Pan, unwilling to grow up.

Maybe things had come too easily for me. Even when the regular acting work stopped, I still had my childhood-acting money and my Pepperdine opportunity. While my friends were all grinding senior year and fretting about college admissions and next steps, I was kicking back and blazing up.

I was on good behavior for Grand Theft Auto, though. That movie was a blessing to me in more ways than one. I was in hot water with my baseball coach over an article I wrote for the Smoke Signal that critiqued the team’s performance. We had been a great team my junior year, a playoff team. But then our best players graduated, and in my senior year, we sucked. Halfway through the season, I said so, in writing. I didn’t have a byline on the article because my name was listed on the masthead as the paper’s sports editor. Our coach called a team meeting and angrily declared that the article was yellow journalism because it had no credited author and certain information had clearly been leaked, such as the fact that our defense was averaging an error an inning. (This hardly constituted a leak; anyone who kept a scorecard could have figured out that stat.)