Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir

by Jamie Brickhouse

  Come out of your half-dreamed dream …

  Mama Jean suddenly awoke and brightened as if a spotlight shone on her. “Jean!” She pointed to herself. “That’s me!” It made me think of the time when Hugh Jackman called her name from the stage, and like a schoolgirl she told me, “He called my name! He said, ‘Jean’!” I fought back tears.

  She remained alert for the doctor’s visit. When the handsome neurologist hit her knee with a rubber hammer to check her reflexes, he discovered that her reflexes worked just fine. As she blurted, “God damn it!” she punched him in the stomach.

  He reared back, blinked, and with with a nervous chuckle said, “Wow. I’ve never had a patient do that before.”

  Dad replied with pride, “You’ve never met Jean Brickhouse.”

  Diagnosis: not good. She had Lewy body dementia, or LBD. This type of dementia causes paranoia, agitation, and wild hallucinations. Check. Patients also often experience repeated falls. Check. Problems with spatial perception. Check. Fluctuating cognition with great variations in attention and alertness from day to day and hour to hour. Check. Visual hallucinations of people or animals. Check.

  Like alcoholism, it is progressive. Unlike alcoholism, there is no way to arrest it. A person could live with it for five to seven years, each week, each day, getting just a little bit—or a lot—worse.

  Her decline seemed to play out like a blossoming flower filmed in time-lapse photography. But in reverse. Michahaze went back to Beaumont with me for Thanksgiving. It was our first Beaumont Thanksgiving since the time I had “shit in the nest” when we went to Mexico instead. Michahaze barely recognized her. She sat slumped over in a wheelchair in a front window of the nursing home. Her hands were balled up in arthritic fists (the physical toll of LBD at work). Dad sat next to her with his ubiquitous pile of newspapers, looking up every now and then to rub her shoulder or pat her hand and read aloud the kind of item from the paper that used to spark her interest. “How are you, honey? Can I get you anything?” No response. This had become his morning routine, his life. Jeffrey would relieve him at noon to feed her lunch. Then one or both of them would be back at dinner. My brother Ronny rarely visited. Not because he didn’t care, but, as he said, “Man, I just can’t look at Mama that way.”

  When Michahaze saw her, he looked stricken. Borrowing Dad’s signature look, I glanced at him with my brows raised and eyes popped.

  Dad left and we wheeled her back to her room. I played music from her playlist. “Listen, Mom. It’s Hugh Jackman.” He was singing “I Go to Rio” from The Boy from Oz. Nothing. Her eyes remained firmly closed, as if she didn’t want to open them to the life she was living. Her hair had patches of gray and had been ineptly combed by Dad. Her beauty operator had offered to come to her and do her hair, but Dad refused, as he refused to let her friends visit. Echoing Ronny, he said, “I don’t want anyone to see her this way.”

  Her food arrived. Michahaze and I looked at the puréed brown and orange sludge and screwed up our faces. Then I threw on a false expression of good cheer for her unseeing eyes. “Look, Mom! It’s lunch.” She refused the first few bites. (Dad and Jeffrey said that with each day it was increasingly difficult to get her to eat.) Suddenly she started taking bite after bite. I cheered her on. “Yes! You like that, don’t you? Doesn’t that taste good?”

  Eyes still closed, she shook her head emphatically left to right, “Uh-uh. Uh-uh!” She’d always told me, “Never shit a shitter.”

  When it was time to go, a nurse came in with a giant cherry picker to lift her dead weight out of the chair. When she hit the bed, her eyes popped open like a giant doll come to life. She looked at me, then Michahaze.

  “Michael?”

  “Hi, Jean.”

  “Yes, Mom! It’s Michael. He came here just to see you.”

  “Well, I’m impressed.” That’s what she’d told me after she first met Michahaze at the Royalton.

  “Michael flew all the way from New York.”

  “Why anyone would want to come to this godforsaken place is beyond me.” Does she mean the nursing home or Beaumont?

  During that Thanksgiving visit I paid back Dad the loan she had given Michahaze and me for the down payment on the apartment, in case he needed extra money for her care. How ironic that I was back home for Thanksgiving and had settled my debt, but she was oblivious to both. As I sat in the study contemplating this, Dad walked in carrying a bottle of wine. He stopped in front of me. “In the morning I pray to St. Mary. In the afternoon I pray to St. Anthony. And in the evening”—he held up the bottle and pointed to the brand name on the label—“I pray to St. Genevieve.”

  I laughed, but thought of Genevieve the alcoholic. That’s not a good omen.

  He poured himself a glass and we sat in silence. After he finished it, he got up to leave the room, but stopped midway and gave me his signature look. After a beat he said, “I want my life back.”

  It wasn’t a completely thankless Thanksgiving. As powerless as I felt to stop Mama Jean from disappearing, I didn’t indulge in a glass of Genevieve—saint or sinner—to try to escape that feeling. For that, and not much else, I was thankful.

  THIRTY

  Driver’s Seat (Reprise)

  “Hi, Dave. It’s Miss Lawson.”

  “Hey, kiddo. How are you doing?”

  “Not good.” There’s that deceptively understated term. I was talking on my BlackBerry to Dave, my rehab counselor from Michael’s House, as I walked home from one of my weekly sessions with my analyst, Anthony. I needed to talk to Dave. I’d seen him the previous month when he was in town to visit family and friends. Dave, Michahaze, and I went to see Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, her one-woman Broadway show about growing up in Hollywood and her battles with drugs and alcohol. It was a perfect choice to see with my rehab case manager, a show by a woman in recovery who was also the daughter of the man who was the second person to call me an alcoholic, Eddie Fisher. I’d told Dave what was going on with Mama Jean, and he told me that his colon cancer had returned after being in remission for a couple of years. I confessed my relapses to him and that I was finally on my way to being sober a year. “Sounds like you’re the one in remission now,” he had said with a wink.

  Now, on the phone, he asked, “What’s wrong?” in that tell-Mama-all-about-it tone I knew and loved so well. It was barely two weeks since I had returned from Thanksgiving in Texas, and I had just made the decision that I would return the next day.

  “My mother. My dad just moved her to hospice. She’s dying.”

  “Oh, kiddo, I’m so sorry.”

  Days after I left Beaumont she stopped eating, refusing even liquids. By Friday, December 10, Dad had called to tell me that they were moving her to hospice. I prayed on the plane ride home for God to take her, because if her remaining gown days were going to be spent catatonic in a wheelchair, well … Despite that prayer, I was blindsided by the news. We chose hospice rather than bringing her home. We decided that the image of her dying in her bedroom, where she’d spent so much of her time, would be too much of a stain on our memories.

  For the next five days I debated when I should return. I talked to people I knew who’d had experience with hospice: Liz’s partner, Karen; a sober friend who was a hospice worker; and various others in the hospice set. What a fun set to be in. When I told them that she was refusing food, they all said, “Go now.” Then I heard the news that CBS was canceling her beloved soap, As the World Turns. That was the final sign I needed.

  When I told Dad I was coming home, he said with odd perkiness, “Good! Come on, but you may be down here cooling your heels for a while.” He was still in denial, or maybe he was still in hope.

  When I stopped blathering to Dave on the phone, I asked, “So how are you?”

  “Well, kid, I just started hospice at home today.”

  I stopped walking. “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. Shit. The cancer spread, and it’s inoperable.”

  “I don’t know what to
say.”

  “There’s nothing to say. That’s why I came last month. To see my family and those whom I care about. People like you.”

  “Oh, Dave. You have to know that you made such a huge difference in my life and getting sober. You must know that.”

  “I do. The good thing about going this way is that I’ve had time to say good-bye and close up shop.”

  I wish I could have that with Mama Jean.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours later I was in Beaumont standing next to her deathbed at the antiseptic hospice. Dad sat in a chair next to her bed with his arm outstretched to hold her hand as he read a magazine. A carpet of newspapers was spread at his feet. “Look, honey. It’s Jamie-poo.”

  She lay flat on her back, a morphine drip next to the bed. She turned her head to me. Her eyes were open. “Hi, Mom. I’m here.” She blinked her eyes and smiled at me in the way that a baby does, and you want to believe that the baby knows and understands you. She may not have known and understood me then, but she had for most of my life.

  Four days later the call came in the middle of the night, when calls like that are supposed to come. Minutes later Dad, Jeffrey, and I piled into Mama Jean’s Cadillac. I drove, but my sitting in that seat didn’t feel right.

  The deathbed scene was as slow and steady as the morphine drip by her bed but without any pain relief.

  It’s hard to say who needed Mama Jean most. Certainly Dad would be left with the biggest void. “Who’s gonna tell me what to do?” he said. Jeffrey had had a tumultuous relationship with her. He and Mama Jean had come to a kind of mutual peace and respect for each other in that year of living together. When she got sick, he, alongside Dad, had done everything possible to help take care of her. But Ronny may have needed her the most. A loner all his life—he definitely “marched to a different drummer,” as Mama Jean said—he talked to her about everything, from his roofing business to his Neil Diamond obsession to his adventures at tittie bars in Houston.

  We stood around her bed speechless as her heave-sigh breaths dominated and hushed us. Hours later, we collectively held our breaths as hers came further apart. Each long pause in between fooled us into thinking that every breath was her last. We’d start to let go of our breaths, let go of our tears, let go. But then she’d breathe again. This edge-of-the-cliff breathing—hers and ours—must have gone on for an hour. “Oh, God, she’s gone.” Tears would start, and then another of her long exhales would fill the room. Not yet! “She’s still with us. She’s still here.”

  Finally, she took her last breath. The room was silent and airless. I know the exact time of the moment, because when it happened I instinctively sent Michahaze an e-mail from my BlackBerry. My friend Smith had dubbed her Mama Jean after witnessing her Auntie Mame side that night at the Teatro ZinZanni in San Francisco. But I never called her that myself. Not until I sent the e-mail to Michahaze: “1:14 PM. Mama Jean is dead.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Dad and I sat across from each other at his desk as we wrote her obit. We had planned the funeral right down to what she would wear. “Your mother was so excited because we were going to have our Christmas party again this year. She was going to wear the red St. John Knits gown with the rhinestone buttons down the middle.” We buried her in that dress.

  The obit read: “A force of nature, Jean Brickhouse was known to all for her dynamic personality, irreverent sense of humor, generosity and deep appreciation of family and friends.” We chronicled the list of achievements—Chi Omega, American Real Estate Million-Dollar Producer, top producer and Chairman’s Club at her brokerage firm—all of which I knew well. Except for one: president of Jefferson County Council on Alcoholism.

  I shot Dad his signature look. He mirrored the look from across the desk as he said, “Your mother liked to say I was an alcoholic, but I’m not.”

  “No, you’re not. But she hit the jackpot with me.”

  The obit ran with a photo of her flashing her thousand-watt smile, from that night when Smith dubbed her Mama Jean. She was “decorated” for the evening. A beauty mark is affixed to her left cheek like Peggy Lee’s, and a red feather boa is wrapped around her neck. Showtime!

  * * *

  When she died, I was two weeks away from finally having a year sober. Through it all, not once did I need to drink.

  Not at her deathbed.

  Not on the drive in her Cadillac to view her body, supine, dressed in the red St. John Knits gown, and looking as if at any second she would turn and tell me, “There are only two kinds of sex.”

  Not at the funeral, where her casket lay at the steps of St. Anne’s altar, where she and Dad knelt to get married, where I knelt for my First Communion.

  Not at the Flamingo Road open house after the funeral for “Jean’s Last Christmas Party,” which was decorated last-minute by me because after thirteen years of decorating that house, I knew where she wanted every last ornament placed, right down to the Venetian-glass Wise Men on the mantel.

  Not during any of those times did I need to drink. But more significantly, I didn’t have the desire to drink. I had her to thank for that.

  Five months before she died, I had my last moment with her lucid. It was on that July 30 birthday visit in the geriatric hospital in Houston when I had shown up with a Hugh Jackman photo, my newly reddened hair, and seven months of sobriety. It was my first time seeing her after she had gone haywire, after she stopped being Mama Jean. I wasn’t even sure if she knew me.

  When it was time to leave, Dad said that I should kind of drift out of sight rather than say good-bye. He and Jeffrey slipped away first. I stood alone with her in the unforgiving glare of the hall’s ugly fluorescent lights. I hugged her and turned away from her vacant eyes without saying good-bye.

  As my mind tried to erase what I had just seen—a madwoman in my mother’s body wearing a worn, pink nightgown, no makeup, and a crushed hairdo—she clamped my forearm in a vise grip.

  I turned around and she stood glaring at me. The look on her face was a mix of teeth-baring anger and fear, the same look she wore the night she declared, “You don’t know what love is.” She was furious with me and about to let me have it. She kept one hand gripped on my arm and released the other to point her index finger at me in accusation. “You’ve been drinking.” The nail polish was chipped.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not.” I wasn’t. I never did reschedule that December 29 drinks date.

  “You better not be.”

  “Remember, Mom? That’s all behind us. You took care of that. I have you to thank.” With seven months sober again, I was treading water through the critical period. Who would blame me if I drank over Mama Jean losing her mind?

  But there was another way to look at it.

  God damn it! If you can’t stay sober for yourself, do it for her.

  I looked her straight in the eye. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”

  She stared at me warily before she accepted what I said. “Okay.” She raised her finger at me in a warning halt. “But promise me. Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  She froze in that position: eyes narrowed, jaw set, finger raised. Resolute.

  The anemic wash of the fluorescent lights seemed to fade away. I saw her again as I always knew her. She was no longer without makeup and unmanicured hands, no longer wearing a nightgown that needed changing. And her hair wasn’t a crushed bouffant. Instead, she was bathed in the glow of a warm spotlight, dressed in her Christmas-red St. John Knits gown, face on, with superbly manicured nails, hair done to perfection: camera-ready. It was the last time she was Mama Jean. The last time she was in the driver’s seat.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Destiny (Reprise)

  It is said that the things an alcoholic loses during the throes of drinking start to come back in sobriety. We’re not talking about material items like a wrecked car, a diamond ring, or a Persian-lamb coat so much as
big-picture things like dignity, hope, self-respect, family life, job. At nearly three years sober, not only had those things come back to me, but they came back improved.

  December 7, 2011, was the gayest day of my life—and I didn’t go near a cock that wasn’t my own. It was gray and drizzly outside, and everything that went on inside was beautiful. It was almost two years to the date since Mama Jean had died and three weeks shy of my third sober anniversary. I went to an auction of the estate castoffs of Joan Crawford—mostly flea-bitten—in the morning and a preview of Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels at Christie’s in the afternoon, with a life-changing lunch in between.

  I’d perused the online catalog of the Crawford auction to consider what I wanted to bid on: her 1969 Golden Globe Award (too expensive), a set of silver-plate escargot dishes (forget it, my grocer never carried snails), a Margaret D. H. Keane painting (Keane paintings had gone from a joke to collectible kitsch) of one giant, sad eye with a single tear (now we’re talking), and various fur coats and stoles (bingo!).

  I’d never been to an auction before. When I signed up at the counter, I admitted to the clerk, “This is my first time at the rodeo.” My reference to a line Faye Dunaway says as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest sailed over her head. I was registered as Bidder 134 and given a kelly-green plastic paddle with the corresponding number.

  When I bid for the first time on the big-eyed Keane portrait, I displayed my gaucherie by throwing paddle number 134 high in the air like a first-grader begging his teacher to call on him. I quickly saw that the other poker-faced bidders merely flicked their wrists to raise their paddle from resting position to just under their chin. The eagle-eyed auctioneeress, who looked more like a Realtor with her bubble of blond hair and reading glasses, had no problem spotting all serious bids. But I worried that I’d have a Lucy moment and scratch my nose and mistakenly bid and win the Golden Globe Award, which went for $25,000.

  When the furs came up for auction, I was ready for action. The petite fur coats and jackets would be fun to have, but I couldn’t wear them. I’m a practical gal. Lot number 1157 was the one that seemed just right. It was a six-and-a-half-foot-long, chestnut-brown, ranch-mink scarf. It was finished with long tail fringes that looked like sinister, glamorous fur fingers. I could see it draped around my neck, dramatically cascading down the front of my coat, the fur fingers wiggling in the cold air. “Nothing keeps you warmer than fur,” I could hear Mama Jean saying. I had to have it.