Hella Nation - Evan Wright [139]
According to Eva Dollard, she warned her son, “No matter what he asks, you don’t answer any questions.” Dollard remembers standing with friends on the playground when his dad, dressed in shabby clothes and an orange reflector vest, approached. “I told the other kids I didn’t know him—he was a crazy drunk.”
That was the last time Dollard saw his father. He died within a year, at age forty-five, of cirrhosis of the liver. “I was chewed up by guilt for treating him like that,” Dollard says. “I stopped believing in God, and felt guiltier because my mom was this big Catholic. I seriously believed I must be some kind of psychopath.”
In addition to her faith, Eva possessed a commitment to liberalism that was once almost a birthright of working-class Catholics. “My mother had this belief in, like, the nobility of being poor and the eternal fight for social justice,” he says.
No one was more touched by Eva’s faith than her eldest child, Ann, eight years older than Pat. Ann’s involvement in activism would, strangely enough, put her on a fairy-tale ascent into the highest reaches of the American social strata. In 1976, a year after graduating from high school, Ann took a job as an extra in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, which was being filmed at a nearby hospital. During a break, Ann chatted up one of the film’s stars, Jane Fonda. The conversation resulted in Ann’s taking a job with Fonda’s husband Tom Hayden’s Campaign for Economic Democracy, then with César Chávez’s United Farm Workers of America. Her work inevitably took her deeper into Hollywood’s activist-entertainment circles. By the early eighties, Ann had found her professional niche as a junior agent at Leading Artists Agency. Her activism continued, particularly in the nuclear-freeze movement, which led to an intimate friendship with Robert Kennedy, Jr., who says, “Ann was one of my closest friends. She was extremely smart and extremely forceful and was absolutely committed to progressive issues, a vision of social justice for America.”
In the Dollard family, no one was closer to Pat than Ann. Kennedy recalls, “Ann would bring Pat to whatever she was doing. Pat idolized her, and she adored him.” Through his middle-school years, Dollard followed his older sister to marches and fund-raisers and spent weekends canvassing door-to-door for her.
But he was also beginning to follow in his father’s footsteps. Dollard had become a blackout drinker by age fifteen. Nevertheless, with the help of his parish priest, he won a scholarship to a Jesuit prep school. The priests nicknamed him “Nemesis.” He was the smart-ass who debated them about religion based on his extensive readings of South American-born writer Carlos Castaneda, and the kid who, when asked to do a book report on Colombia, brought in a live pot plant as a visual aid. Dollard claims he was nearly thrown out after being implicated in a plot to put LSD in the priests’ drinking water. By his junior year, Dollard had discovered L.A.’s punk scene, which only accelerated his drinking. “I remember being in honors algebra, drunk out of my mind every fucking day.”
Yet Dollard believed fate held something grand in store for him. Some nights he would take a girlfriend drunken-driving in the hills above Los Angeles, and when she would scream, “Slow down! You’re going to kill us!” he would say, “Maybe you’ll die. But not me. I can’t die. I have a destiny.” At seventeen, believing he was onto that destiny, he dropped out of high school to become a rock star. “I didn’t play an instrument, and I couldn’t sing,” he says, “but I thought I could make it on ego and mouth.”
He formed a band but admits, “I was too loaded to ever get up onstage.” His most memorable performance would be at another band’s show: the time he cracked his skull stage-diving at a Black Flag concert, then stayed in the mosh pit slamming for hours, despite later requiring twelve stitches. “I remember coming out covered in blood and everyone telling me how cool I looked,” says Dollard. “That was as far