by Nancy Bacon
One of my favorite drinking buddies was Errol Flynn. He drank hard and hearty and didn’t apologize for it one whit. ‘You know, little one,’ he sighed. ‘After thirty years of debauchery I’ve drank enough booze to destroy a dozen healthy livers, smoked enough nicotine and marijuana to pollute Des Moines and had enough sex to make the Marquis de Sade look like a virgin!’
Rod Taylor was a very heavy drinker, capable of putting away huge amounts of liquor almost nightly. Shecky Greene, Phil Foster, William Holden, Allan Sherman, Richard Burton, Laurence Harvey, Jack Carter, John Wayne, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin and many, many more acquaintances of mine were all on intimate terms with the bottle and most of them died an alcohol-related death.
Booze seemed to enhance the brilliance of my writer pals, Jim Henaghan, Robert Ruark, Richard Condon, John Huston, Clair Huffaker, Hemingway, Saroyan and Fitzgerald—literary giants and legendary drunks.
In Rome, I sat with King Farouk on many different occasions and watched him polish off two full bottles of wine with his meal, then drink a fifth of cognac with his after-dinner expresso. Henaghan had arranged for us to have a private audience with the Pope and when we entered the Vatican, we walked right straight into a bar. At the end of the foyer was a small area where wine and drinks were being served, in case a visitor needed some liquid courage before facing His Holiness, one supposes.
Back home in the States in 1961 at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, Camelot, the sexual revolution, ERA, draft dodgers and drug permissiveness, I was to witness firsthand the devastation of alcohol and drug addiction.
Many friends of mine did not make it to the seventies, dying in some drug or alcohol related death, their brilliant careers screeching to a sudden halt long before they should have.
When I was in the deepest depths of my despair, I knew that alcoholism was not new, but recognizing it as a serious disease rather than a minor character flaw, was relatively new. I feel that had the public known in the golden era of Hollywood what they know now about alcoholism, we would have had many of our brightest stars for much longer.
In the seventies, Alcoholics Anonymous had the highest success rate in treating the insidious disease, but they still could not cure everyone. AA teaches what they call Higher Power, i.e. God. If you turn your life over to Jesus Christ, they say, you will be saved from the demons and live happily ever after. AA tells an alcoholic to simply put their faith in God, give Him their burdens and they will forever be cured of this life-threatening disease.
If that was all there was to it, then why hadn’t it worked for me? Why couldn’t I have kicked my addiction alone, just me and God, on any one of those horrendous days or nights when I was literally on my knees, sick and puking, half dead, and begging God for help?
It couldn’t work, of course, because alcoholism is a disease, not a religious or moral issue. How can an addict believe that God will help him if he doesn’t believe in God? How can he have faith when all hope is gone? Perhaps he doesn’t believe in Higher Power at all. Maybe he is an atheist or an agnostic. Does this mean, then, that if an alcoholic does not believe in God he will never be cured? What of the hundreds of clergymen who suffer with alcoholism? They would have a direct line to God, it would seem, and yet they cannot heal themselves of this fatal disease.
I swam through the seventies on a river of wine and vodka. By the eighties, I’d stopping drinking wine. Now, it was just vodka… and more of it.
snake pit
Jarring, unfamiliar sounds awakened me. I opened my eyes, confused by the activity in the large room, the strange odors and noises, the brightly-glaring overhead lights that made my pounding head ache even more.
I lay on a cot, one threadbare blanket thrown over me, a caseless pillow beneath my head. The bars on both sides of the cot were locked into place, giving me a convict’s view of the room and the hallway outside an open door. Stringy-haired, dull-eyed patients shuffled past in paper slippers and tattered hospital robes with the word COUNTY stenciled across the back. Many had black eyes, swollen mouths, missing teeth, bandaged heads and broken arms or legs.
My gaze swept the interior of the room and I saw several other women in identical cots. Some were strapped down with wide leather bands that buckled around their wrists and ankles, holding them spread-eagled, the locked cuffs secured to either side of the cot. Others sat quietly, blank-faced, rocking gently back and forth or moaning softly.
It was eerie, chilling. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, hoping that when I opened them I would be home in my own bed with only the dull ache of a hangover that I had come to expect on each waking morning. This couldn’t be real. It had to be some horrible nightmare.
Screaming, cursing and violent sobbing shattered any illusions about where I was. I watched four policemen and two doctors drag a woman into the room and dump her onto the cot next to mine. Deftly, they strapped her down, holding her writhing body as still as possible while a nurse injected her. Then they left her there, still screaming obscenities, her face contorted with madness, until the sedative took effect.
It was a horrifying scene but one that I was to witness many more times during my stay in the Los Angeles County Hospital where I was a patient in the drunk ward. The blazing overhead lights were never turned off and the door never closed. The nurses were all stone-faced, icy-eyed, showing no compassion for the tortured souls who were their charges. They had seen too much of that kind of misery and it no longer moved them.
I lay flat on my back in the narrow cot, my brain churning, afraid to ask what day it was. Afraid to admit where I was. What I was. But I knew: I was a drunk in a drunk tank.
Dear God, what had happened to me? I had had it all. Success, wealth, beauty, an abundance of love and a dazzling life style that had been the envy of all. I dined with royalty, made love to movie stars, hobnobbed with presidents and lived the good life for twenty-five years.
My daughter had been attended by a live-in nanny and my closets were filled to over-flowing with designer originals. I had so many diamonds and other precious gems that friends feared I would become a target of jewel thieves. My furs outnumbered the days in a week and I slumbered without a care upon a round king-size bed with custom satin sheets.
Then I went through six agonizing years of surgery. I couldn’t work, couldn’t cope.
Now I had nothing. I wanted to die: Just end it all. The pain, the horror of living life as an addict. If there had been a weapon available, and if I had had the strength, I would have killed myself at that moment. But I was too exhausted to move. My limbs seemed paralyzed and my brain was sluggish, my thoughts confused. I knew I didn’t really want to die but I was scared to death of living.
I also knew if I continued to drink, I would have no choice. And I still wasn’t sure I was ready to give up booze. I could not imagine a life without alcohol. Hell, I couldn’t imagine a day, an hour, without alcohol. Face the real world without a buzz on? Unthinkable! Deal with the stress of everyday life without a buffer of booze to cushion the hard knocks? No way.
A piercing shriek caused me to jump a foot off the cot. I held my breath, trying not to look as another crazed addict was being strapped down across the room from me. The stench of urine, feces and vomit assaulted my nostrils and I shuddered, burrowing my face in the pillow. I gagged, wanting to throw up, but my stomach was empty, my mouth bone-dry, and I could only tremble in agony as hard, hurting cramps ripped through me. Where the hell was that buffer of booze now that I needed it? Jesus, I was dying for a drink!
I wasn’t able to stand up until the next day, then I barely made it down the hallway to the pay telephone. I called Chris Casanova, my live-in lover (a boy, really, fifteen years my junior), even though I wasn’t sure he’d be there. There were too many missing weeks in my fragmented mind.
Chris answered the phone, drunk as usual, and told me that I had been depressed for weeks, that I had drifted in and out of consciousness, going on crying jags that lasted for hours, calling
all my friends (those who would still speak to me) and begging them to help me, to please take me to a detox center, a rehabilitation program, anything that might save me from my desperate addiction to alcohol.
The reason I was in the hospital, Chris explained, was because I had suffered a seizure. We were watching TV, drinking as usual, and the next second I was on the floor, jerking spasmodically, my eyes rolled back in my head with only the whites showing. My tongue lolled, spittle foamed at my mouth and Chris was certain I was in the throes of death.
He quickly called the paramedics who arrived in time to revive me—then Chris and I had calmly finished off a bottle of vodka. He said he couldn’t remember when my friends took me to the hospital, but thought it must have been several days ago, maybe even a week.
As Chris told the story, I began to shake, trembling so badly that a nurse standing nearby quickly shoved a chair under me just as my knees buckled. I was put back to bed and sedated.
I awoke again at three in the morning with a blinding headache, my mouth as dry as sand. The lights blazed unrelentingly. The restless snores, grunts and groans of the other patients grated on my raw nerves like fingernails across a blackboard.
I wanted to go home and be with Chris, feel his arms around me and know that I was safe. And I never wanted to see another bottle of vodka again as long as I lived.
I checked myself out the next day and Chris picked me up. I smelled strong liquor on his breath when he kissed me and I tasted it and wanted more. But I was through with booze forever. I really meant it.
darkness
When we got home, I tried. I really did try so damned hard. But there was Chris, sipping a tall, cool one. And there was me, sick as hell, shaking apart, knowing that all I had to do to stop the pain was to walk into the kitchen and pour myself a drink. Chris, happily smashed by this time, delighted in having his drinking buddy home again. He was so loving, so solicitous as he held me close and sighed, ‘God, honey, I can’t stand to see you suffering like this. I love you too much. All you need is a couple of stiff drinks and you’ll be just fine. Come on, baby, have one with me. I won’t let you have anymore. I promise.’
I stared at the drink he held out, at the beads of moisture that sweated on the glass like teardrops, at the bright yellow lemon wedge that floated on top of the ice cubes. I reached for the glass, my hands shaking so badly I couldn’t hold it. Chris took my hand in his, gently tipping the glass to my lips. I swallowed until it was empty.
The very next day I was back to a fifth and a half of vodka and two weeks later I suffered another seizure. Again, the Paramedics came. Again, I was hospitalized, this time at USC Medical Center in Torrance. It was a grim repeat of Los Angeles County Hospital. The same humiliation, self-disgust, guilt and the sheer mental and physical agony of withdrawal.
This time when I was released I didn’t even try to pretend. I knew what I needed. When Chris picked me up we drove straight to the nearest liquor store and drank a pint of vodka between us, there in the parking lot, before starting the long drive back to our apartment in the San Fernando Valley.
Everyone knew we were alcoholics and we had each been fired from our jobs weeks ago, we lived on unemployment and money borrowed from his parents. We became reclusive, leaving our apartment only to walk my dog, Shaunti, and to drive to the liquor store. But it soon became a real bore walking the dog, waiting for her to sniff everything in sight before doing her business. It took too long. So we combined the two activities.
Shaunti was included when we went to the liquor store and I would walk her while Chris went inside for our daily purchase. The three of us became more neurotic as the weeks passed and even the dog began to pick up the bad vibes and unhealthy atmosphere. My fourteen-year-old cat, which I had raised from a kitten, sensed the decay and ran away. My best friend of seventeen years dropped me like nuclear waste, refusing even to answer the many letters I wrote her, begging for help. I was estranged from my daughter due to terrible things I said and did while drinking. It literally broke my heart, causing me to become even more isolated from the world.
No one wanted anything to do with Chris or me and we didn’t give a good Goddamn. But me and Chris didn’t need anybody. We just wanted to be alone with our old pal, Smirnoff.
A handful of friends stood by me in spite of it all. They tried so hard and I, God forgive me, lied to every one of them. I took advantage of their love, promising them that I was getting help, I was attending AA meetings. But that was my brain on booze and I couldn’t stop.
The morning was still dark, cold and rainy as I grasped the edge of the kitchen sink and vomited into the garbage disposal, the sour bile from last night’s vodka causing my body to shudder with convulsions. Blood from strained vessels in my throat, broken from the hard, dry heaves that racked me, speckled the sink. My forehead was clammy with icy sweat, my legs trembling so badly I could barely stand and more than once I sank to my knees, pressing my face against the cold porcelain of the sink. Fluid streamed from my eyes and nose and the steady pulsating in my temples matched the heavy, hurting pounding of my heart.
I raised my hands to wipe my face and saw large magenta bruises on my forearms, the result of alcohol poisoning running rampant in my system. My entire body was covered with bruises in every shade from the darkest purple to the palest yellow as they passed through the stages of healing.
I was never without at least a dozen or more bruises. Hardly a day went by when I did not trip over the furniture, bounce off the walls or doorways, or just simply fall down in a drunken heap sprawling over whatever object may have been on the floor. My equilibrium was shot, making it impossible for me to even walk around my apartment without holding onto something for support. I fell so often and suffered so many injuries and yet I never felt them. Nor could I remember later, seeing the cuts and scabs, how they had gotten there.
As I made my way into the bathroom I felt a pain in my inner thigh and looked down to see a large, nasty burn. I vaguely remembered it from a few nights previous. I had nodded off with a cigarette in my hand, burning a hole deep into my flesh before the intense pain finally jarred me out of my stupor. I had smeared butter on it and forgotten it. Now it was a flaming infection that oozed purulence and sent shooting pains through my groin and down my right leg. I stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, staring at the pus-dripping sore, at my bloated, discolored body with the dehydrated skin stretched as taut as a drum.
I am five feet three inches tall and have always been rather vain about my perfect size six figure. I was dubbed ‘The Face’ by local photographers and voted ‘The Girl I’d Like Most To Photograph’ by the entire foreign press. I easily walked away with the crown at every beauty contest I entered.
Now I ballooned up to the size of a baby blimp, one-hundred-and-eighty-five pounds of ugly fat from a steady diet of vodka mixed with sugary soft drinks. Empty calories that settled on my small frame all but obscured me. My once-oval, fine-featured face was now the size of a basketball. My bright green eyes were dead-gray, opaque, hidden in folds of fat. The capillaries in my nose and cheeks were red and broken, and my hair was dry and brittle thin.
I was no longer Nancy Bacon, successful writer, former model, well-adjusted single parent, a woman content with her life and who had fulfilled all her dreams and fantasies. I was a caricature of the pathetic old lush, the skid row bag lady with milky eyes, a red nose and big, bloated belly. Quickly, I pulled a nightgown over my head, hiding the wretched reflection in the mirror.
It was four-thirty in the morning, Thanksgiving Day, 1986. I was cold sober for the first time in over a year. Sober, sick and scared to death. I had to have a drink or I knew I would die. Just shake and jerk apart in a million pieces and die. There was nothing alcoholic in the apartment. No perfume. No cough syrup. No shaving lotion. Chris and I had long since consumed those desperate antidotes. I began to panic. Our morning liquor store did not open for another hour and a half and my stomach knotted wi
th cramps just knowing I’d have to wait.
I sat on the sofa, watching TV, but my full attention was on the clock above the TV. I swallowed three Valium, wanting so damn bad to believe that they would stop the shakes and unfrazzled my jumping nerves. I prayed aloud, with tears streaming down my face, beseeching God to please help me, please drive the demons from my brain, please, please not let me take that first drink of the day.
An hour later I popped my last Valium and still I shook so badly I had to wrap my arms around myself and hold on tight to stop the spasms. The Valium did not come through for me and neither did God.
At five-forty-five I stood in a line of winos and bums, waiting for the liquor store to open. The store was in a very rough, seedy neighborhood, a slum, where it was not uncommon to see gangs of Latino youths rolling the drunks for what little they could find.
I always took Shaunti with me on those early morning vodka runs and I covered myself completely in shapeless caftans, head scarves and big, dark glasses. In spite of my dreadful condition I was still embarrassed to shuffle along in a line of smelly drunks, shivering in the pre-dawn chill, dying a little inside with each step that took me closer to the door. I was often the object of curious stares, sly, knowing glances that filled me with apprehension. People always stared at me, but in the past, it had been with appreciation, approval and envy.
A rude, bony elbow in my back prompted me along and I stumbled inside the liquor store, tears stinging behind my dark glasses. Humiliation was a new emotion for me but one that I was to become all too familiar with.
Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations festooned the streets and store windows as I drove quickly back to my safe neighborhood. My hands shook so badly by this time that it took me a full ten minutes to get inside my apartment. Tears of frustration blurred my vision. Sweat poured off me even though it was cold and raining. My breath came in short, heavy gasps, a tight lump in my throat almost choking me and my heart began to palpitate wildly. Terror filled me. I saw myself dying right there on the front door step while I tried to make my useless muscles respond to one simple command: the lock.