by Amy Dresner
“Yeah… uh… that’s not really accurate. I was five years sober when I had my first seizure.”
“When?”
“At thirty-three.”
“You drink now?”
“No.”
“How long?”
“Seventeen months.”
“So, like year and half.”
“Yes.”
“Where you live?”
“With friends.” The girls in sober living are my friends now, so it’s not completely inaccurate.
“With friends? You are not teenager anymore.”
“Thank you. I’m aware of that, and so is my Botox doctor.”
“Why you not have salary?” she asks, looking at my paperwork.
“I’m a freelance writer. I just wrote a television pilot. Also, I’m still getting on my feet after a divorce… I’m not really sure what this has to do with my depression.”
“Your ex-husband don’t give you money?”
“No. Long story.”
“You have mood swings?”
“Sometimes, but not so much anymore.”
“You try Depakote?”
“I’m epileptic. Of course I’ve tried Depakote. I’ve been on everything. Depakote didn’t work for me, particularly the thirty-pound weight gain part.”
“You are young, pretty… I don’t understand why you need Prozac.”
“Yes… youth and beauty completely cancel out any biologically based depression,” I say. Look at all the happy, well-adjusted models, I think.
“You’ve seen psychiatrist before?”
“Only every single one of merit here in Los Angeles, Paris, London, San Francisco, and Boston over the last twenty-plus years.”
“You don’t seem stable.”
“Why would you say that? I’m more stable than I’ve ever been. I’m sober. I’m working. I exercise. I’m not engaging in any compulsive or self-destructive behavior.”
“You seem high to me.”
I frowned. “I’m just feeling good today,” I say.
“Why you have disability?”
“Because I have a long-standing history of mental illness, suicide attempts, and epilepsy,” I tell her. You would have gleaned that from this interview if you hadn’t been so concerned about my remarkably youthful demeanor or lack of salaried work, you cunt, I think.
“They have many new medication now for depression: Brintellix, Viibryd… .”
“That’s fantastic, but why fix it if it ain’t broke?”
“Okay. I not change your medication right now.” She pulls out a pad and scribbles on it. “I write you a prescription for Prozac.”
She hands me the scrip. “I see you in three months. Good luck to you.”
“You don’t need luck if you’re good,” I say as I walk out the door.
“Good luck to you” is like “God bless you.” It can be both a warm sentiment and a condescending way of saying “Fuck you.” After I get back to the sober living, I notice that I am wearing one of my standard holey T-shirts and that I have a bit of toothpaste in my hair, which might not have contributed to the best first impression. Still, I am aghast at her prying into my financials and her assumptions about my epilepsy. I’ve spent enough time in psychiatrists’ offices to take stock of all the things she neglected to do. She never took a real mental health history. She never asked for a list of my prior medications or the records from my previous psychiatrists. She couldn’t have been less interested in my suicide attempts or multiple psych ward visits. What she told me ran contradictory to the diagnoses of every neurologist I’ve had in the last fourteen years. On top of all that, she insulted me and minimized the hard work I’ve done to get sober and stay in recovery. That’s a proud seventeen months sober, while recovering from a divorce, a nervous breakdown, and a relapse. So, how am I doing? I’m doing fucking fantastic. Fuck you, lady.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Another day on the chain gang. Yeehaw. I’m still not sure what all the lasso hand gestures or dog whistles that the crew bosses use mean, but I’m getting some of my Spanish back. I was bilingual when I was two, living briefly with my mother in Mexico, and although I’ve forgotten most of what I knew, I still understand it pretty well—much more than I can speak. In fact, I actually understand more than I’d like to some days. For instance (if my piss-poor Spanish serves me), “Coco” gives the best happy endings at the Thai massage joint on Vermont. And Cheetahs is awesome because even if you’re there for two hours, you never see the same girl twice. Also, I think chichinitas means “big tits.” (Obviously, they were not referring to me.)
While we are sweeping, we see a guy wake up naked and drunk under a freeway overpass. Everybody thinks it’s hysterical except me. They point and take pictures and holler. The guy runs off.
“He’s an alcoholic, you guys. It’s not funny. It’s sad,” I say to nobody in particular.
“Oh… that’s right, you were a waste case too, huh?” one of the guys says.
I don’t bother answering. I don’t have the energy for a debate about the true nature of addiction or how it’s not an issue of morals and willpower. Also, I need to fit in, not stand out. I have nothing to prove here.
There’s a super-cute guy on my crew today. He’s slender with a headful of perfect dark hair and a smile that could give you arrhythmia. Of course, he’s gay. I was hoping I was wrong about that, but as soon as he said he was in “fashion” I thought, “Yeah, definitely not on my team.” He’s there for a DUI. What’s new? We agree to become friends on Facebook, but he asks me not to tag him in anything “related to this shit.” His Facebook feed is full of red carpet events, fashion shows, and pictures of the beautiful people and the pseudo-famous. I get it. He’s using “discretion,” trying to be “professional.” I wish I could manage that, but instead, I comically flaunt my newly acquired criminality on Facebook. I’m not proud of what happened, but I also refuse to be ashamed. Shit happens. And if you can’t laugh at it… how else can you get through it?
Mr. Fashion promises to introduce me to all these people who will help my writing career, but we both know he’s lying. We will never speak again. He doesn’t want to remember me because he doesn’t want to remember any of this.
At lunch at Yoshinoya, he goes outside to make work calls, pretending to colleagues that he’s on a “business trip.” The rest of the crew is watching what I will admit are pretty impressive videos of a girls’ banana eating contest.
“Hey can you do that, guera?” one of them asks me, laughing.
“Leave me out of this, guys.”
I get up to throw away my lunch stuff, and I hear them carrying on.
“That can’t be real, bro. If that shit’s real, I’ll marry that girl.”
I don’t seem to be able to get any recovery in SLAA, and my behavior is escalating. Just like with drugs, you develop a tolerance, and you have to up the stakes: fuck more people in weirder ways, in more outrageous locations. I’ve had sex with a different guy each day of the week. I’ve fucked two guys in one night. I’ve fucked guys in parking lots. I’ve fucked guys with their girlfriends. I’ve created a little stable of men that I have sex with when the urge hits me. And the urge hits me a lot.
Now I’m no longer just having sex with people I’m attracted to. I’ve started having sex with anyone: people I’m repulsed by, people who intrigue me, people who irritate me, people I know, people I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I just need the validation and to lose myself for those few brief moments. Because of that, I always have my eyes closed. I don’t want to see them—these people that I’m using who are using me.
Despite my physical sobriety from drugs, I am far from “emotionally sober.” I feel extremely out of control, and I’m aware that my sex addiction is the newest incarnation of my alcoholism. Instead of drinking and drugging my feelings away, I’m sexualizing them all now: fear, sadness, anxiety, boredom. Any feeling I’m overwhelmed by or just don’t want to handle gets fucked away—
including the feeling that I’ve just transferred my compulsion to get high to a compulsion to get laid. I’m still sick; it’s just a new sick.
In my desperation, I decide to try SAA, which stands for Sex Addicts Anonymous. I’d heard it was more “hard-core” (whatever that means) and that there was actually more recovery there.
I find a meeting online. Of course it’s in a church, which makes it all the more creepy. I walk into the small, dim room. There is a circle of chairs. It is twelve men and me. They are all quite welcoming, but I still feel very anxious and uncomfortable. As soon as the meeting starts, I begin to cry. Perfect. One woman finally comes to their fucking meeting, and she bawls through the first half of it. Good job, Amy.
The men share openly and honestly, trying to be respectful of my presence while not inhibiting the honesty of the meeting. I appreciate that. Most of them are porn addicts who can’t stop jacking off to the Internet for hours and hours at a time. It’s affecting their work, marriages, relationships. The rest of the guys talk about prostitutes… how they love the seediness of hookers or the shadiness of Craigslist encounters. I don’t relate. What I do relate to, however, are the feelings of shame and the incredible loneliness that every single person in that room expresses.
After the meeting, I canvas all my sex addict friends (98 percent of whom are men) and learn that, in all of Los Angeles, there is but one all-women SAA meeting. It’s on a Wednesday night in Santa Monica. I decide to give it a shot.
I’ve never been particularly fond of women’s meetings. There is either too much crying or too much clapping. I’m not down with yays and hugs. I’ve also heard that other women find me “intimidating” and “terrifying,” but what they’re seeing is just my defensive façade because I feel intimidated and terrified. Granted, in my very early stints of sobriety, I was powered by rage and heavy black eyeliner, and I’d be chain-smoking and stomping around in my vintage furs. I’d like to believe I’ve mellowed with time. Plus, I think my extended time in the sober living sorority has softened me a bit.
This meeting is in the conference room of a posh high-rise in Santa Monica. The leader is a woman who’s probably a few years older than me, but looks exhausted, dry—like somebody left her in the oven too long. Though she’s been in the “fellowship” for many years, she still seems pretty fucked up, if her very recent stories are any indication.
The group is a small one—maybe seven of us total—and two are newcomers, who refrain from sharing. I had expected to feel more comfortable around all women. And, though they, like me, were sex addicts seeking validation and love in all the wrong places, I do not feel at ease among them.
“Do you want to share?” the leader asks me.
There is a strange, almost reverent vibe in the air, which makes me uncomfortable and seems wildly at odds with the nature of this compulsion. Why all this weird prudish bullshit? Aren’t these the same women who are blowing strangers in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble?
“Sure. Fuck it,” I say. Because I’m so ill at ease, I can feel that I’m going to be more shocking and vulgar than necessary. Oh, God, here I go…
I talk about how Tinder is “like Domino’s delivery for dick” and how I “boned” a thirty-year-old newcomer in my car two days prior. There is not a snippet of laughter—not even nods of identification. Immediately, I sense that my using “bone” as a verb is seen as juvenile and disrespectful in light of how painful and powerful they see this compulsion. When I finally finish my filthy, Kinisonesque rant, the leader says awkwardly, “Well, thanks for sharing all that, Amy. Keep coming back.” I never did. I knew I needed help, but I also knew these ladies were too stuffy and square to be my sober pussy posse, if you will.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I’ve been going to this small noon AA meeting on the second floor of an infamous Sunset metal bar, the Rainbow Bar and Grill. I never drank there. Generally speaking, I tried not to drink in public because a) I tended to black out; b) booze always made me naked and violent; and c) I tended to black out. When I wasn’t drinking or using by myself, I didn’t really go out, because people alternately bored or scared me. So, no, I didn’t go out a lot.
When you walk into the Rainbow Bar and Grill, you can see why it would be a lush’s paradise. It’s dark, even during the day. There’s a fireplace. The fake plants are covered in dust and God knows what else, lending even more eeriness to the time capsule element of the place. The wood-paneled walls are covered with candid photos of famous musicians: Axl Rose, Lemmy, Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Vince Neil, Robert Plant…you name it. The place smells cozy but sleazy, like a cabin they used to shoot porn in. The lower dining room is a sea of cheap red vinyl booths and a floral maroon carpet that stinks of spilled well drinks and decades of stale cigarette smoke, all stamped down by the stacked-heel boots of rockers and the patent-leather stilettos of groupies.
The room where the meeting is held is decorated like an old ship, with nautical paraphernalia: compasses and old gauges, weird plaques and the like. I’m guessing it’s where everybody went to do coke back in the day, because the guaranteed chirp of the new guy is inevitably: “I used to do so much blow up here, man. Weird to be in an AA meeting in the old stomping grounds…”
I notice a new guy in the corner: dark hair and a lush beard, which he strokes seductively. He’s wearing sunglasses. Inside. Fucking douche. I hope he’s either high or crying, because the remaining option is poseur dickwad extraordinaire. It’s probably that last one, because he’s reclining, feet up, in heavy black boots, resting on the railing. It’s a very confident pose, and he looks kind of short, so I immediately wonder what he’s so arrogant about.
“Hi, I’m Xander, and I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Xander,” the room answers in unison.
“What kind of fucking name is Xander?” I whisper to nobody in particular. “Like a new artificial sweetener or some alien god out of Scientology.”
Xander goes on, rather poetically, to share about his emotional enmeshment with his mother, how he was her surrogate spouse. Bingo. I had the exact same thing with my dad. And from that moment on, I know something awful and untoward and magical is going to happen between us. Yes, trauma bonding, the instant intimacy and Super Glue of alcoholics.
Turns out Xander is Italian, from the Midwest. Carried his mommy issues all the way out here from the Heartland. And if that’s not bad enough, he’s only thirty years old. I mean, Jesus, I have vintage T-shirts older than this guy. Of course, the cherry on the cake is that he’s a “newcomer” with only seven months clean. This will be a bloodbath. Fucking count me in.
After the meeting, I’m standing on the Rainbow patio, which is furnished with cheap green plastic chairs and strung with colored Christmas lights twelve months a year. I’m aggressively sucking on my vape pipe, a ridiculous Doctor Who screwdriver–like contraption when Xander comes swaggering out.
“You’re very…Serpico, aren’t you?” I say.
“Oh, why, thank you.”
“How did you know it was a compliment?”
“I chose to take it that way. Life is all about perception.”
I nod my head slowly. He doesn’t break eye contact.
“I related to your share,” I tell him. “I was… my dad’s… emotional wife.”
He smiles and cocks his head flirtatiously.
I look at him and laugh. “This is a terrible idea… whatever this is.”
“Oh, it’s a horrible idea, and it has to happen.”
I get home from the meeting, and Terry isn’t home. I know she had court today—a big custody hearing. I’d sent her a text wishing her good luck. A few hours later, I sent another asking how it went. No answer. I call her cell. It goes directly to voice mail.
I call the house manager, Mariana.
“Have you talked to Terry in the last few hours? She hasn’t returned my texts.”
“Yeah. I’m at Cedars with her right now.”
“What? Why?”
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“She had a rough day in court.”
“Oh, fuck. Should I come down there?”
“No, no. They’re releasing her soon. I’m bringing her home.”
Terry had lost the hearing to get custody of her kids back, and she totally flipped out. She went straight from the courthouse to the liquor store, bought a pint, and got shit-faced. She then went over to some guy’s place—and passed out in the bushes. That’s where the guy found her—face-planted, ass up, skirt ripped, court blazer covered in vomit. Like any good alcoholic, even after almost a year sober, she gave herself alcohol poisoning the first time out. After hours of dry heaving, her fuck friend had taken her to the hospital. She’ll be fine… as long as her ex-husband and the court don’t find out.
Mariana doesn’t throw Terry out for relapsing, but Terry decides it’s time to move out anyway. She has to get out of sober living and into a child-friendly environment if she ever hopes to see her kids without some weird court monitor taking exhaustive notes of every little thing she feeds them, every word she utters, and every move she makes.
I’m sorry to see her go. We’ve shared a room for almost a year, and despite being almost polar opposites, we have gotten along spectacularly. We have sort of pulled each other a tiny bit toward the other’s orbit. Maybe I have become a little more maternal… cleaner… better about going to the gym? She’s become a little sluttier and more foul-mouthed and learned to take herself less seriously.
Upside is I have the room to myself for a while. It’s a minor reprieve. I still have the same shitty single bed, but at least I can retreat into my room and have… what’s it called again?… oh, yeah… privacy. Still, I’ll have another roomie in no time. Mariana’s house is always full, as most women’s sober livings are horribly regimented, overpriced, and overpopulated. That’s how you make money: pack as many junkies into a room as possible—even if you have to stack ’em up like slaves on a cargo ship.
It’s only three weeks before my new bunkmate arrives. Elizabeth is in her early thirties, an Amazon at nearly five feet ten inches, and very pretty, but her overzealous use of Botox and fillers makes her look like a cross between a porcelain doll and the Joker. She speaks in a breathy whisper, acts stupid, and smiles when she’s upset. All façade. I’m the exact opposite. This should be interesting.