I told you about my friend Tommy, whom I haven't been in touch with for a long while and that I had suspected that he was involved in drugs. Did I tell you that? Tommy yeah, the boys Nick and Tom who yeah, you know, and he -- oh, yeah. No, he -- you know he was you know, we wrote that song together and he was getting an album and everything and I noticed that his personality was changing and I you know, my song was going to be in the album and then it wasn't and our communications were very strange and one time I said, Tommy, you know, I think it's drugs, could it be drugs? And he didn't answer me and I thought, well, this is, you know, intrusive of me. We're friends, it's not right for me to tell him what to do and what not to do. But I'm finding communication is not whatever is going on between us is making a fool out of me. You know. And we talked a long while I knew it was some kind of strain. They were really pushing him hard, these people who had contracted him, and they wanted more songs and they were changing things around.
And then some while after that I had got a call from his friend Nick in New York who asked if I had been in touch with Tommy, that he had talked to Tommy and Tommy was talking strange. And I said, would it be drugs and he said he didn't think it was. You know. But it was like a breakdown of
some sort and that Tommy's parents had come out here and then back to New York or whatever, and then at Christmas time I had got a card from the parents, you know, and they had entertained Denny and I when we were back there and they're basically very nice people and they care a lot for me, and for Tommy. And so I had got this card that said they were out in the valley, temporary, in a temporary home out here, they'd said on the card. And I didn't send them a card because I thought times were very difficult for me then, economically, and I was worried about work, and I thought I can't take on a problem right now and I think there's a problem here. You know. And I don't know what it is but I but then I would sometimes feel guilty and I would try to get a phone number on them and I couldn't. I could have written them but I felt I didn't want to do that. You know, I didn't want to put anything in writing about about don't know why, I just didn't want to. And so and then I would try to reach Tommy and I would get, you know, a very strange well, he's not here answer. And a person who wouldn't know and I would ask will I leave a message. And so finally I called his girl friend and she apparently didn't live there any more but a guy that did knew her and I said will you tell her that I'm trying to I would like I would like to know about how Tommy is, where Tommy is. And he said, well, I'll
have her call you; and she did and about a week later Tommy called and he was very cheerful and hi, he said, and I hear you're interested in talking to me, well, fine, everything is good with me, how is it with you, and he was really up and everything and I said fine; and I didn't say I just wanted to know that you were fine; and we talked for a little while.
So yesterday morning I was here and his mother called I had gotten a call the other day, I was out and the phone number didnt tell me if she was in town or what? And I called back and there was no answer.
So I was on the phone yesterday and when I got off the service said Mrs. Johnson called and she said it's an emergency. And so I called her back and she said, Oh, Charles, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know why I'm even calling you but I'm just in a state. And this morning, she said, it was like the word from God, she said, call Charles. And she said, My Tommy's a drug addict. I just don't know what to do. And we've bought him cars and we've tried to help him, we've come out here and we're not rich people and we're trying to help him and he won't be helped and he hates us and he, you know, we take him to church and and, Charles, there's it's just, he's on speed and I don't know what to do, what to do and his
album is coming out and everything like that.
And I said, well, you've called the right place. You know.This is what you do. You have to forget it. You have to drop it. You have to forget it and you you can't forget it but you have to start taking care of yourself. And I was able to direct her attention to Al-Anon; and she's very responsive and open, both she and her husband I'll see in Al-Anon many couples, middle aged couples who will come in and not really relate because they just have this terrible problem of a child, sometimes a child who is thirty years old who is drugging and its like it's another person and they don't know who it is in their family. You know. And so that's what I talked to her for a long while and then I did a lot of calling to find out where there were meetings in her neighborhood because I couldn't get to her for a couple of days. You know. I can't do anything until next week.
But anyway I was really glad she called and I think she's primed to want -- everyone has been telling her to release and she hasn't known how. And she seemed responsive, both of them, to want to go to meetings, and whatever. And I guess Tommy is really having a hard time denying that he is having a hard time and being you know, he's a very dear person. And he loves them so much and I mean he was always on the phone to them and talking to me about them and wanting them to retire and come out here and live and everything. Well, now he is exploiting them and mistreating them and abusing them. It's a total personality change and so it was, you know I felt grateful that I could I mean, six months at Christmas and even before I didn't know anything very much about Al-Anon. I couldn't have, you know, wouldn't have known what to do. But. It was nice to be able as I say I felt their desperation.It was nice to be able to tell them some things that might help, that had helped me in my relationship with an addict, an alcoholic. Well, not when they're making money and and see, apparently and this is, I don't know, he was of course people are never forced to but you see he he was even in that atmosphere he was, you know, he knew he didn't do those kind of things. But when he got this album -- you see he was going to work with me and everything -- he was so full of me and then I began to notice that that wasn't the case any more and I think these people -- they are the top people who had Elton John and I mean, discovered certain major people and they create you know, he was Tommy Johnson, and then they changed his name to Tommy Dark or Jimmy Rock. You know. And they change you, they make you look different. And he had done this whole album, that's what they bought and when he
recorded it they decided they wanted a different thing entirely. They scrapped everything and started all over and told him what to write. Now, you know, he wasn't he was you know, he didn't want to do that. He was counseling me, he was saying, you know, you got to play ball sometimes and maybe that's what I should have done in my career and he wanted to get into a successful position so he could give me money to make movies, was some of the things he was talking about. So I think he got very disoriented, very, you know, I think they are very powerful. They were paying him, you know, a thousand dollars a week and telling him to write twenty songs and controlling him you know, it was a real control thing.
And so I don't know that the parents could especially if the people who own him, the record company or whatever, don't want him committed, you know, he's okay as far as they're concerned maybe. You know.And but even these are some of the things that she's been considering, and she's been trying, you know, thinking that that's what you can do. Because she wants to save him and that's not what you can do in Al-Anon. You could perhaps commit somebody