His thick, dark voice was instantly familiar even though I hadn’t heard it in thirty-one years. The only other time I had been in touch with him, was when he wanted to borrow a hundred dollars, but all that was via email. I had tracked him down on Facebook the week before, because I wanted to know if it was okay to use his real name in the book I’d just finished about the time I moved to L.A. in 1977. I still hadn’t decided whether it would be a memoir or a novel. Jay, my lawyer husband, thought I needed the rights– either way.
Biff was in Vegas, living in a room in Mike Callie’s house. He was the guy who used to own the Laugh Stop in Newport Beach. Mike said Biff was drunk most of the time, with a hip replacement and two knee replacements, and that he’d been burned pretty badly when he fell down drunk and was hit by a car.
When he said that, I clutched hard and felt like crying for the split second it took to remember he had hit me, and it had been more than once. But in the split second before that, I thought about what an incredible specimen he had been in his youth. How could it be that this Play Girl centerfold was an old man? Mike said he used a cane. Oh well, I thought, karma. So I had called him, and now he was calling me back. I wanted to know, once and for all, what happened, what really happened, not just what I remembered happening.
That day my phone rang, I’d been crossing the street in Beverly Hills on my way to a haircut that was part of getting ready for The Arbonne convention in Vegas, and hopefully, a stop to see Biff and get his signature. But first, I wanted to ask him why he hit me, and I wanted to know who told what to the police. “It was a very small world,” he said. “Everybody knew what everyone else was doing.” Evidently, I thought, except for me. Everyone knew except for me. “I guess a lot of women were obsessed with you,” I said.
“You were,” he said, “You said I represented your dark side.”
“Would you say that all the stuff with the strike made you feel so bad you hit me?”
“Nah,” he said. “That was chemicals. My white period.”
Hmmm. I wonder. “All I know,” I said to him, “Is that any time before that era and any time since then, I never would have let anyone hit me, so I know cocaine can make you crazy.” But I didn’t feel that excused anything.
A few days later, as I got in my car to drive to Vegas, the Arbonne convention and a stop to see Biff. My husband said, “Don’t engage with him. Don’t try to fix him.” Then he handed me the life story release he’d drafted. He had no need to worry. There was no fixing Biff Manard.