Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir

by Jamie Brickhouse

  Every day wasn’t a question of would I be hungover, but to what debilitating degree? If the degree was major, I’d call in sick and have a gown day.

  After one of those gown days I was sitting at my desk, paralyzed by an overwhelming to-do list that had piled up. I was praying that a guillotine would relieve me of my head and its throbbing pain when Jo Ann walked into my office. I sat up and tried to perkify myself. “Hey! What’s up?”

  Jo Ann didn’t smile and didn’t sit down. She stood at the edge of my desk and peered down at me over the reading glasses she had chained around her neck. “Jamie, I’m not your boss—”

  “Sorry I missed yesterday. How was the meeting?”

  “Listen to me. I’m not your boss and I can’t tell you what to do—”

  “What are you talking about? I was out sick. I mean, I’m sorry but—”

  “Let me finish. I hope you’re feeling better, but you’ve been out a lot lately, and now that Liz is”—Jo Ann closed her eyes, searching for the word—“out, the CEO has started to notice. When I showed up to yesterday’s meeting without you, he asked where you were. ‘Out sick,’ I said. ‘Again?’ ‘Apparently.’” She gave me what must have been the same Who knows? shrug of her shoulders she had given the CEO. She paused and glared at me over her glasses before adding, “‘Not good,’ he said. ‘Not good.’”

  Not good is almost British in its understatement because it always means more than “bad.” It means “disastrous,” “calamitous,” “critical condition.” I tried to rationalize the phrase as “not great,” “slightly marginal,” “could be better.” I was deluded.

  “Uh-huh. Well, thanks so much for telling me. I appreciate that. I promise I won’t miss another meeting.”

  She sat down. “Jamie, dearie,” she said with a nervous chuckle to try to lighten the moment. “I used to have a colleague who drank so much every night that he had to drink at lunch to steady his nerves the next day, the hangovers were so bad.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He didn’t always make it to lunch because he didn’t always make it to work.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m just saying that you’d better be on the lookout.”

  “Thanks, Jo Ann. Thanks for that.”

  * * *

  When I had gown days, they were usually precipitated by a dressing drink. A dressing drink used to be the cocktail or two I drank while getting ready to go out for the evening. It had morphed into the drink or two I had while I got ready for work in the morning after Michahaze had left for work. I didn’t drink every morning, but I needed to. When I lost the battle, it meant drinking a couple of vodka screwdrivers. By the time I left for work, the crispy, crunchy feeling and penetrating self-loathing had temporarily lifted and I walked with a spring in my step.

  But I liked the mornings when I lost the battle completely. If after two dressing drinks the self-loathing hadn’t evaporated and the routine barfing hadn’t relieved my physical malaise, I’d tell myself that tomorrow is another day, wave the white flag in complete surrender, and call in sick.

  It was a tremendous relief.

  Then I’d pour a tall vodka on the rocks in an iced-tea glass, abandoning the pretense of fruit juice. I’d place the untouched drink on the nightstand, not even taking a sip until everything was in place. I’d close the louvers on the tall window shutters and block out the day. I’d undress. I’d unmake the bed. Then I’d slip between the sheets, my head slightly propped up on the pillows. I’d pick up the drink with both shaking hands and hold it up like a chalice. I’d take a long, deep gulp and allow myself to luxuriate in the sensation of the booze sliding down my throat, making me warm, pulling me down into oblivion. At last I could enjoy the drink without worry or fear that someone might see me. I was at one with the drink. The annoying sounds of the city ten floors below, coming more alive as the day blossomed, faded with each sip until I started to feel myself slipping, slipping … Ahh.

  * * *

  I never saw Liz again, and the “I’m still funny” cell-phone conversation was the last time I spoke to her. She died in early April 2006. I was able to pull it together for her one last time, long enough to write her obituary with Jo Ann. “She could make an ordinary editorial meeting into a stand-up comedy act” was Jo Ann’s quote for the obit.

  At the funeral I was a wreck, shaking and hyperventilating with sobs in a rear pew at St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church on Park Avenue. Michahaze was by my side, holding my hand. Jo Ann was behind me clinching my shoulder. Liz was in front of the altar in a casket.

  At the post-funeral reception I made a point of waving around my can of club soda in front of my colleagues. After two of those, I gave up and switched to a Bloody Mary. As I moved in a fog through the mourners, I spotted a striking, spindly older woman with spiky silver hair and Lucille Ball–blue eyes. Aunt Joan. I took a sip of my Bloody Mary and walked past her without introducing myself. She was drinking a ginger ale and wearing a beautiful fur coat.

  * * *

  Two weeks after Liz’s death I returned to the office after one of my solo lunches. I had started to frequent the Irish pubs that lined Third Avenue. With their day laborers clutching the sports section of the New York Post, eyes glued to the wall-mounted TV stuck on ESPN, and drinking beer with a shot of whiskey—boilermakers!—I was certain that no one would ever think of finding me there. My version of a witness protection program. I sat in the back with a lunch of three or four vodka tonics and a shepherd’s pie on the side. After I had amassed a pile of red swizzle drink straws, I surreptitiously pushed them off the table onto the floor on the off chance that anyone I knew did arrive.

  When I returned from lunch, there was a message waiting for me. The CEO wanted to see me in his office to discuss a press release. Not good. Not good.

  With a heavy heart and sudden LBD, I walked into his office. It was four-thirty, the witching hour of Dr. Connolly’s call. Even though I knew what was coming, I sat there stunned. I only caught fragments of what he said:

  “We appreciate the service you’ve given to this company …

  “But there have been mounting complaints …

  “I know that Liz spoke to you before she got sick …

  “… mounting complaints …

  “It’s best if you leave the company …

  “… mounting complaints …

  “The announcement will be made tomorrow…”

  By five o’clock I was sitting on a barstool at Mesa de España alone. The regulars hadn’t arrived yet. I was the opening act.

  But out of the corner of my eye I saw the reflection of my doppelgänger. His bloated, red face hovered above the backlit bottles in the mirror that lined the rear of the bar. I turned away, and the bartender silently slid a cocktail napkin across the bar. With shaky hands hidden at my side, my head poised for the trained-seal act, I said the only thing I knew how to say at that moment: “Beefeater martini, dry, up, with a twist. Please.” Then I realized that the reflection in the mirror was mine.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Dangerous When Wet

  Joan Crawford made suicide glamorous. In Humoresque she plays an alcoholic socialite in love with John Garfield, a concert violinist whose star rises as she sinks. She’s listening to him play Franz Waxman’s “Tristan Fantasy,” broadcast live on the radio. She’s dressed for the evening in a black, sequined gown by Adrian, but she’s not going anywhere. She pours glass after giant crystal glass of Scotch and replays every moment of her dissolute past, convincing herself that she’s no good. Each thought drives her away from Garfield’s haunting music and toward the ocean outside, just beyond her terrace. She sees her reflected image in the glass door of the terrace, floating over the racing sea as she throws back another drink. The sea is calling. She stumbles toward the ocean, and under a moonlit sky the sparkles of her gown become one with the glistening whitecaps as the sea claims her.

  Even though I knew the end, I always hoped that she would change her mind,
realize that she was good.

  I spent every day of those last few months of drinking obsessed with suicide—it was the last thought when I passed out at night and the first thought when I came to in the morning—but I didn’t have the guts to do it. I kept hoping for divine defenestration, some magical force to pull me from bed and throw me out of the tenth-floor window, or maybe I’d walk in front of a bus and make it look like an accident. Then I’d think of Mama Jean, and Michahaze and Dad. I couldn’t do that to them. Myself, yes, but not to them.

  When I found myself watching Joan’s suicide waltz over and over and pouring myself tumbler after tumbler of booze on the rocks along with her, I thought, I think I get it. I understand how she feels. Just like Genevieve.

  Genevieve. That friend of Mama Jean’s who shot herself. I could hear Mama Jean saying, “She was an alcoholic. A bad alcoholic.” I barely remember Genevieve, but what she did haunted the rest of my childhood. Every time I passed her house, I imagined her last day on this earth. I saw her in her bedroom upstairs in the dark of day, the only light from a bedside chinoiserie lamp and the morning sun bleeding through the corners of the closed shutters. She sits on the bed in a quilted, powder-blue robe, crying and downing a gin on the rocks, as a Smith & Wesson waits on the nightstand. After draining that heavy crystal glass with both hands, she sits erect, pulls herself together, and takes a deep breath. Then she swallows the Smith & Wesson.

  I didn’t understand how Mama Jean must have felt about Genevieve until I got my own Genevieve in Paul Rosenfield. Paul was an author with whom I had worked early in my career. I adored Paul. He wrote a book about his adventures with the old guard of Hollywood. Though a good book, it didn’t light any fires, and he was always a little sad that he didn’t have a boyfriend. He disappeared for a while. When he resurfaced, he told me over a lunch of salad and copious Bloody Marys what had happened to him. He’d taken an overdose of pills. He felt that he was all used up.

  “I’d hit the Peggy Lee ‘Is That All There Is?’ wall,” he said. “Unlike her, I was ready for that ‘final disappointment.’” I looked at him, uncomprehending. He explained further. “I felt that I was … I don’t know … done.” Done dropped onto the table like a dead pigeon from a ledge.

  He was about forty-two and I was twenty-six when he told me that. I couldn’t understand how anyone as talented and beloved as he was could sink to that point. But all that was behind him, he told me. He said that he was much better after a few weeks in the nuthouse.

  “Thank God,” I told him as I raised a glass. “Stick around. I know we’ll be friends for life.”

  The next day I sent him a book as a gift with a note that said:

  Dear Paul: We’ll meet again. Don’t know where. Don’t know when. But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.

  Kiss, kiss, Jamie

  I didn’t hear from him again until he mailed my note back to me barely a year later. He had written in the margin:

  Jamie, You couldn’t have known how prescient your words were. Love, Paul

  By the time I received the note, he was dead. The second overdose took.

  * * *

  In those last months of my nearly intravenous drinking, I came to understand how Joan, Genevieve, and Paul felt. I no longer needed to watch that scene from Humoresque. I was living it. I spent each day replaying every scene of my dissolute life—sans gown by Adrian and John Garfield playing “Tristan Fantasy.” I had been fired from a job that represented the pinnacle of my career. I was a laughingstock among those former colleagues and in the industry. Even though I had landed a new job immediately after being fired, I couldn’t enjoy the satisfaction of saving face, so deep in the depression of booze was I. I had been destined for great things and reached marginal at best. And the good things got all drunk up. I was nothing but a lush—a “positively” diseased one at that. My looks—what looks I’d had—were gone.

  “You disgust me” was my daily affirmation to the red, bloated face in the medicine-chest mirror. “No. Really. You disgust me.” Every day that I couldn’t get out of bed—and there were more of those days than not, near the end—I lay there with the shutters closed and the covers pulled, until I passed out from a few tumblers of vodka. I didn’t have the ocean beckoning to me from a terrace, but it called to me in a recurring dream I had on those dark mornings.

  I’m on a ship. It’s night, and I awake from a drunken slumber. I’m still intoxicated and feel as if the room were spinning. I put one foot on the floor. Then the other. I immediately lose my bearings and fall and slide across the room into a corner. My head is spinning. I slump in the corner of the room. I’m dizzy. The room seems lopsided. It is lopsided. I stare across the room, blinking my half-shut eyes. I place my hands on the walls and slowly pull myself up. My crotch is wet. Did I piss myself? I stand. My feet are wet. I look down and see that I’m standing in a small puddle of water. When my blurred vision comes into one-eyed focus, I see a stream flowing toward me. My eye follows the oncoming stream across the room to the opposite corner, where there is a shut door, a door I somehow know I can’t open and walk out of. I see water bubbling under the door. I am powerless to move. The water begins to flow toward me, but in slow motion, and I awake in a panic.

  I always woke before drowning.

  * * *

  The morning I decided to take the plunge wasn’t so different from any of those other mornings. It wasn’t premeditated. It was a sunny, clear, crisp late-September day—as deceptively beautiful as a 9/11 morning—with a nip of fall in the air. It was a workday and I came to after Michahaze was long gone. The night before had been the usual routine: a few martinis after work, a couple of gin and tonics at home, wine with dinner, a bourbon on the rocks, plus several more, a couple of Ambien. Nighty night.

  I had started taking Ambien for three reasons: to stop drinking as much by bringing on sleep sooner, to lessen the crush of the hangovers, and to insure an uninterrupted night of sleep. Once I started taking the pills (over time the one pill became one and a half, then two, then two and a half), three things started happening: I’d pound more drinks faster before I fell asleep, the hangovers become worse because a residual Ambien wooze was on top of the liquor every morning, and I never wanted the sleep to end. What I loved most about Ambien was the awareness of being put to sleep. It was like the moment before a movie begins in a theater. You’re aware that the lights are swiftly dimming as the room goes to black. Then the screen lights up and the movie plays. Only with Ambien the movie never plays.

  On that morning I had overslept as usual, but I was slowly moving through the miasma of my daily hangover to get ready. Will I or won’t I? (Throw up, that is.) I will. I did. I lay on the bed to recover as the city ten floors below continued to come to life with honks and bus farts and the sounds of another day starting without me.

  Don’t drink.

  But a drink would stop me feeling so sick from feeling so sick. The cycle was vicious.

  I drank.

  When I came out of the shower, the half-drunk screwdriver was waiting for me on the toilet. I finished it and made myself another. The second “dressing drink” would either put a spring in my step, like Fresca on a jockstrap (to paraphrase a classic Joan Rivers joke), or it would make my bed beg me to return. I was half-dressed when I finished the second drink. The bed was begging.

  My only intention was to sleep another hour. I shot Debbie, my boss, an e-mail with the bogus excuse that I would be late after an author breakfast, then removed my half an outfit, poured a tall vodka on the rocks, unmade the bed, closed the shutters, and jumped in. I couldn’t call in sick again, since in four months on the job I had already racked up enough sick days for a cancer patient.

  When I came to, it was after lunch. Shit! I looked at the time on the clock in disbelief. Then I checked my watch. Same time, which was the wrong time. I threw open the shutters. I looked at my e-mail.

  Debbie had responded to my author-breakfast excuse with “Again???” Appare
ntly, I had had breakfast with that author a scant three weeks prior.

  Busted! I thought. Not just caught, but smashed, broken, unfixable. Busted.

  I poured another vodka on the rocks. I dashed around the apartment in circles, picking up and throwing down my shirt, rereading Debbie’s e-mail, rechecking the clock—frantic, rudderless.

  “I can’t keep doing this. I just … I can’t,” I said out loud, my hands nearly crushing my head like an egg.

  I looked at the mirror and stared hard into the eyes of a ghost, or was it the picture of Dorian Gray (the one he keeps in the attic)? I wanted to join Joan in the ocean. Genevieve was waiting for me in the bedroom. And I finally understood Paul.

  “I’m done,” I said, nose-to-nose with myself in the mirror. “Done.”

  The ocean wasn’t a terrace away. I didn’t own a gun. I’d have to take Paul’s way out. I didn’t let myself think about Mama Jean or Michael or Dad. I didn’t let myself think. I was operating on vodka and a mountain of self-loathing.

  Then I got hold of myself. I poured another vodka on the rocks. I brought it into the bedroom and set it on the nightstand. I closed the shutters again. I stood next to my bed in the dark of day like Genevieve. I emptied what was left in the Ambien bottle into one hand. I stared down at the blue pills as if they were the deep end of a pool, like the times when I was a kid too terrified to jump off the high dive into the water below. I did what I did in those days. I forced myself by not thinking about anything but what I had to do. Just jump. All you have to do is jump. I closed my eyes, cupped my hand over my mouth, tilted my head back, let the pills slide down my throat, took a big gulp of vodka, and “jumped.”

  I sank into bed and pulled the covers up as the sounds of traffic and life ten floors below drifted away.

  Part III

  Palm Springs Follies (2006)

  Starting here, starting now, honey, everything’s coming up roses!

  —Mama Rose from Gypsy (lyrics by Stephen Sondheim)