Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir

by Jamie Brickhouse

  I’d go for days, even a few weeks, not drinking and silently counting days at sober meetings. I never stopped going to the meetings. My plan was that once I reached ninety days, I’d then admit I had relapsed. I couldn’t go through the shame of publicly counting days again.

  But I couldn’t reach ninety days.

  I was able to keep it from Michahaze. I was drinking secretly, hiding my vodka in the closet and taking sips while he was in the shower. Or I’d go out to the street on the pretense of smoking a cigarette but dash to the bar across the street and quickly suck down two vodkas on the rocks. I’d stash a bottle in the kitchen while I cooked. But I was always careful not to get drunk. When you’ve become the kind of drinker who drinks to get out of control, controlled drinking is no fun. And my God, the amount of work to control and hide it was exhausting. I felt like an actor playing identical twins with ten-second costume changes.

  I never reached the level of drinking that had landed me in Palm Springs, but it was merely a matter of time before I did. I knew I had to stop. I was dog-paddling through the fifth stage of alcoholism: relapse.

  Alcoholism has to be one of the only diseases with shame attached. People often say that if you have a disease such as cancer, you treat it. But I think that a disease such as anorexia is a better analogy. Like anorexics, alcoholics don’t want to believe they have a disease. Both are diseases in which the afflicted keeps drinking the poison—literally, in the case of drunks—the very thing that will kill them. The anorexic looks in the mirror and sees a fat person. Logically, she knows that she must eat to survive. So what does she do? She starves herself and hopes it will make her better. The alcoholic, once he begins to realize that alcohol is a huge cause of his problems, drinks more, hoping that the problems will go away, hoping he can recapture the bliss that booze used to bring. But each drink deepens the problems and creates brand-new ones. Alcoholism is a madness all its own.

  No one knew I had relapsed. Not Michahaze. Not my sober mentor. Not my analyst. And certainly not Mama Jean. No, ma’am!

  It stung deeper every time I heard or saw Mama Jean telling the story of my near destruction, as she was telling it to Stella on that celebratory day. I turned my gaze away from her and Stella. Johnny, the comely bartender who always worked our parties and knew I wasn’t drinking (and I wasn’t drinking that day), was making a sweep of the room. He cut his eyes at the empty drink in my hand. “Another?”

  “Yes, Johnny.” And then, loudly, as I handed him the empty glass: “Another Dinah Shore, please.”

  I looked back across the room. Stella had ended Mama Jean’s story by pulling in another guest to join them. Thank God.

  When will she stop telling my story? I thought, not understanding that it was just as much her story to tell.

  And what’s wrong with her hair?

  TWENTY-NINE

  Gown Days (Reprise)

  “Elderly! Do I look elderly to you?!” Mama Jean said through the phone to me. At seventy-three she didn’t look elderly, but she was starting to act elderly. She was referring to the anonymous description of her in the police blotter of the Beaumont newspaper that described her as such. Seven months before the New York brunch (about the same time as my first relapse), she had pulled up at the Bridge Studio in her brand-new, sporty, red Cadillac CTS. When she and Dad weren’t on cruises or trips to Europe funded by her nest egg from her career as a stockbroker, she was playing contract bridge and racking up trophies at tournaments all over Texas and Louisiana. She honed her game at the Bridge Studio downtown, which was housed in a no-frills, cheap, corrugated-metal building. These ladies played competitive duplicate bridge, as opposed to the more social form of bridge known as playing a rubber that the country-club ladies enjoyed. No rubbers for the hard-core Bridge Studio ladies. They went “bareback.”

  Lucky for her other bridge partners, Mama Jean was always early, otherwise they could have met (somewhat) untimely deaths. On this particular day, when she arrived, she didn’t stop in the lot. She plowed through the flimsy metal wall of the building, swiftly pushing aside eight tables of four settings each for the luncheon bridge game and creating a paper rainstorm. The aftermath seemed staged: the red Cadillac sat parked on the industrial carpet as if displayed in a motor showroom, but with the decorative touch of two playing cards and one “Tally-ho!” score sheet artfully fanned behind the red, white, and blue Texas license plate. Ready or not, here comes Mama!

  Mama Jean was unscathed—not a hair out of place—and the car could be fixed.

  “Did you scream louder when you crashed the car or when you read that report?” I asked her. It was a rhetorical question.

  My mind played a collage of the classic images I have of Mama Jean: the glass curtain of a car window disappearing into the door to reveal her behind the steering wheel of a succession of ever-grander cars—a silver-blue, 1960s Chrysler; that white, 1972 Mercury Marquis; a slightly used, 1976, lime-green Lincoln Mark IV with oval opera windows; a 1978, silver Ford LTD with maroon interior; the navy-blue Pontiac Bonneville with matching landau top; and, after the money came in, a succession of Cadillacs that made her queen of the road. Her high-heeled, lead foot always knew the fastest route, the best roads to take, and how to avoid a speeding ticket (or get it fixed, if she got one). For her to lose control over anything—for her to lose control period—was unfathomable to me.

  The Bridge Studio incident came in the middle of a pileup of increasingly lunatic mishaps to which any drunk could have laid claim. A year before the car crash she’d had knee surgery. For a month after the surgery she was batshit crazy, having wild hallucinations, thinking her nightmares were reality, falling out of bed repeatedly, imagining Dad was having sex in hotel lobbies with other women. “It’s like we’re down in The Snake Pit with Olivia de Havilland,” Dad told me over the phone, referring to the classic horror film about life in a nuthouse.

  More devastating than the Cadillac crash was the financial crash of 2008. Despite rumblings of the coming storm, despite Dad’s urging her to move the money she still had tied up at her former stock-brokerage firm, she didn’t. Unlike the Bridge Studio incident, in which the only thing lost was her pride, a small fortune was lost. All of her years clawing to write her own ticket were wiped away in an instant. If a traumatic event can jump-start a latent illness, then the recession of 2008 did it for her.

  When I came home for Christmas that year, I felt as if our roles were reversed, that I was now in charge. Smarting from the recession, Mama Jean and Dad decided not to have their grand Christmas party, which was by then a twenty-year tradition. No ten-foot artificial tree twinkled with a thousand lights and a thirteen-year collection of BOHs (balls of honor) from Michahaze with the Scarlett O’Hara doll from Dad in the center. Only the living-room fireplace was decked. The garlands of golden fruit hung on either side of the mantel, upon which three Venetian-glass Wise Men marched in single file bearing gifts.

  Since I didn’t have any investments, I was untouched by the financial crash. Here was a chance not to even the score, but to at least make up for the Tobacco Leaf china Christmas. I felt as if my whole life had been a losing proposition in which I tried and failed to prove that I loved her as much as she loved me. I still dreamed of being able to give her as much as she had given me, to somehow even the score.

  I got to be Santa that year. She was no longer buying expensive St. John Knits, such as the red, rhinestone-studded gown she liked to wear at her Christmas parties, but the more casual Chico’s. I gave her a catalog and told her to pick out whatever outfits she wanted. To watch her open all of those Chico’s boxes filled with everything she loved because she had chosen it (not one Tobacco Leaf rabbit in the bunch) was to watch on Christmas Day the kid I would never have. It may not have been the happiest Christmas, but for me it was one of the most satisfying.

  And I was sober. I had about seventeen secret sober days under my belt. While I was still in Beaumont, a past playmate (the sexual kind, not the Romper Room
kind) texted me from New York and asked if I wanted to meet for a drink at ‘21.’ “How about Monday the 29th at six-thirty?” he wrote. I’d be back in New York by then.

  I stared at the text. Say no. Say no. Oh, but it was ‘21.’ Old-school glamour with its bar of wingback chairs in front of a roaring fire. Where Mama Jean and Dad had that hundred-dollar lunch. Joan Crawford’s former perch. Where Mr. Parker and I once had a glorious four-hour, three-hundred-dollar lunch drinking Joan Crawfords (100-proof Smirnoff vodka on the rocks). And now a date over martinis and the promise of sex afterward. The invitation mixed all the ingredients of the cocktail I always craved: booze, glamour, Old Hollywood, and sex.

  Go to ‘21’ and not drink. Then why go? I didn’t respond for a couple of days. He wrote back, Did you get my text?

  You know, I thought, I only have a few days sober; why not go enjoy myself and then restart my day count?

  Remember Rio? I didn’t.

  I wrote back, Yes. ‘21’ on Monday at six-thirty sounds lovely. But I didn’t send it immediately. I cradled the BlackBerry in my hand and stared at what I had written. I had that old edge-of-the-high-diving-board feeling. After a few minutes I closed my eyes and jumped. Send.

  I wasn’t going to drink until the date, but on the plane ride back to New York the flight attendant asked me if I wanted a cocktail. Without hesitation I answered in the plural: “Two gins and one tonic, please.” If I am going to drink tomorrow, why not drink today?

  That Monday at the office I was giddy with anticipation thinking of that Beefeater martini, dry, up, with a twist, that would touch my lips in a few hours. It was dead at the office, as the week between Christmas and New Year’s always is. My staff was still away, so I was the skeleton crew. I remembered that a Miró exhibit was at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), just a block from my office.

  Why not have a nice lady’s lunch at the MoMA café and see the exhibit? Why not have a couple of glasses of white wine with lunch since I’m going to be drinking tonight anyway? Why not? I forgot that “Why not?” was the question that so often led to my undoing.

  The entrance to MoMA was jammed with a line of puffy-parka-ed, fanny-packed Christmas tourists that extended all the way to the street. A vat of liquid Drano couldn’t unclog that mess. No, thank you. The white wine wasn’t meant to be.

  I grabbed a sandwich and went back to the office. Better to arrive fresh and dry to ‘21.’ That martini would taste so much better without the residue of white wine.

  When I got back to my office, a text from my playmate said that he was sick and had to cancel. He was so sorry.

  And I was so relieved.

  I looked up at the office ceiling. It was an icky Styrofoam-esque drop ceiling like Manuel Antonio’s in Paterson, New Jersey. I thought of the orange-and-black bowl Michahaze had bought for me in Palm Springs. To the untrained eye the bowl was merely an exquisite example of Czechoslovakian art deco glass circa 1931. To the educated it was a beautiful reminder of my rehabilitation.

  I realized that I had the choice of perception. I could either shrug off the cancellation and the aborted MoMA lunch as mere detours to my date with a drink, or I could see them as roadblocks and receive them as a sign. Still looking at the ugly drop ceiling and thinking of the beautiful bowl that sat on our dining table, I said out loud, “Uncle! I give up! I’ll take this as a sign.” From God? My higher power? Mama Jean? What does it matter? What mattered was that I took it as a sign.

  The next day I went to a meeting and announced that I had two days sober and started working my way back to full-time sobriety.

  * * *

  “Call me as soon as you get this message,” my brother Jeffrey said on my voice mail. “She’s had another wreck in the Cadillac.” After financial difficulties of his own, Jeffrey had temporarily left New York and moved in with Mama Jean and Dad just before the Bridge Studio incident. Jeffrey had become her chauffeur to keep her from sitting in the driver’s seat as much as possible. But one day she wanted to go to the beauty parlor. Immediately. Jeffrey wasn’t ready and asked her to give him five minutes. She wouldn’t. She drove herself to the beauty parlor and backed into a light post. That wasn’t the worst part. She drove there sans pants. Her priorities are still in order, but the execution is misfiring.

  After Jeffrey finished telling me the story, he said, “You have no idea. I’ve watched her unravel day by day.” His voice cracked. “She can’t even dress herself. Something’s got to be done.” When she started screwing up her hair appointments and thought it was okay to show up in New York having done her own hair, we should have rushed her to the hospital. Everything at which she had been expert—cars, money, and hair—she could no longer handle.

  Two months after the pantless drive to the beauty parlor, she went haywire. She saw intruders in the living room. Instead of calling the police, she faced them down and told them to get out. I knew this move. Once we were on a crowded subway in New York. When the train came to the next stop, two bruisers—black men in skullcaps—started to get on. She pointed her finger at them and shouted, “Y’all can’t get on here!” They didn’t. I can still see their shocked faces. I looked at her with bug-eyed reproach. She defended herself: “I didn’t say that because they’re black. I said that because there’s no room.” When the intruders in her house refused to obey her, she went into the other room and called the police. There were no intruders in the house.

  By the time Dad and Jeffrey got home, she was seeing babies that didn’t exist, believing that her worst nightmares were true, talking to herself. Dad and Jeffrey had to hospitalize her in a geriatric-care unit in Houston so that doctors could try to figure out what the hell was going wrong.

  As soon as I could, I jumped on a plane to Texas. This was my chance to come to her rescue. I flew down to visit on her Leo birthday, July 30. I didn’t bring an extravagant gift: just a card, a framed beefcake photo of Hugh Jackman, and my newly brightened, copper-red hair (thanks to an expensive visit to the colorist). I also brought seven months of sobriety.

  However hard I tried to prepare for the worst, I kept harboring fantasies that I would somehow master the code and bring her back. Jeffrey warned me that she might not know me. I nodded yes, but part of me didn’t believe that was possible.

  Dad made a great fanfare over my arrival when he brought me to her in the visiting room. She was having a gown day, as all of her days had been that month. My presence didn’t have the joyous effect for which Dad had hoped. There was no hug for dear life. No “I’ve missed you so much.” Or even “Where the hell have you been?” She had that lost look of which I had seen glimpses during her last visit to New York—the weekend of the celebratory brunch. Worse, she was totally out of it and hallucinating like someone tripping on acid. She wept when she saw Dad, telling him that she thought he’d been killed in a grisly car wreck.

  And her hair … I don’t even want to talk about her hair. A drink was starting to look good. Scratch that. A drink was starting to feel necessary. Who could blame me?

  I’m not sure if Mama Jean even knew me. At one point she smiled and told me that with my pretty red hair I reminded her of … And then she trailed off. All that she said that day lacked the one thing she had never lacked: conviction.

  Actually, not all that she said lacked conviction. As we said good-bye—a moment that will stay with me forever—her parting words chilled me with fear and warmed me with love, giving me a strength I didn’t know I had.

  * * *

  The following September (nine months sober; I’d passed the seven-month itch) I was in the passenger seat of Mama Jean’s red Cadillac. Jeffrey was in the driver’s seat. In the back sat Dad holding Mama Jean’s hand. We were on our way to see a neurologist in Houston whom Jeffrey had found, so we could finally get some answers.

  By this time she had been moved from the geriatric-care unit to a traditional nursing home in Beaumont. The hallucinations and agitation had dissipated, but she was in partial shutdown with her eyes
closed most of the time. When they were open, she’d respond to us with childlike giddiness. It wasn’t that she didn’t know us. She didn’t even ask who we were. If we were strangers to her, she didn’t bother to wonder why we were in her room.

  But there were sparks of pure Mama Jean. While Jeffrey and I were feeding her (she now had to be fed with a bib around her neck, her meals puréed like baby food), two male staff members banged some trays outside. She had always been sensitive to loud noises, but she no longer knew how to shut out background noises. She turned away from Jeffrey and me and yelled out to the hall, “Hey, fellows! Y’all want a blow job?”

  She turned back to us with a giggle and then back to the hall. “Well, you’re not getting one in here!” Then back to us: “Uh-uh! I’m not putting that thing in my mouth. No, ma’am!”

  I brought a playlist of her music that included the Burt Bacharach songs she used to play on the hi-fi when she still sewed. The music brought her back to us in flashes. As “More,” her and Dad’s song, played, she’d sway and hum along, pointing in the direction of the speaker and saying, “Listen to that beat. I’m telling you, that’s good music.” Puccini’s La Bohème: “Mimi’s aria has to be my favorite.” “High Flying, Adored” from Evita rekindled memories of seeing the show on Broadway with Dad when she lived in New York while she was training to be a stockbroker. “My Best Girl” from Mame was just for me.

  On the drive to the neurologist’s appointment I played her music. You would never have known that the Cadillac had been driven through a wall. It had been expertly repaired and was as good as new. Why can’t any of us repair Mama Jean?

  She slept most of the way, but just as we were approaching the doctor’s office, the song “Jean” (from the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) filled the car:

  Jean, Jean, you’re young and alive