Party Girl

by Anna David

  For once, Tommy doesn’t smile. He stops walking and steps in front of me so that we’re standing face to face. “Spirituality doesn’t always have to do with religion,” he says.

  I know what he’s doing. I know that sober people are obsessed with everyone else believing in God—even though they called it a “higher power” so as not to put off people who weren’t Catholic or whatever—and Tommy is going to try to do the God hard-sell on me.

  “Absolutely,” I say and hope that’s the end of the conversation and we can just walk back to the rehab in peace.

  “Going to the beach and staring at the ocean can be spiritual,” he says, standing perfectly still. “Going to a pet store and getting on your hands and knees and playing with puppies can be spiritual. Going on a walk and smelling flowers can be spiritual.”

  For a straight guy, Tommy is pretty dramatic, and something about his heartfelt spirituality lecture makes me smile. I have to admit that sitting on a beach, playing with puppies, and smelling flowers sounds pretty damn nice. And I can’t remember the last time I did any of those things.

  Group that afternoon isn’t all that different from group the day before, but this time the person who speaks gets to decide who talks next. I sit there picking my cuticles, feeling fairly safe that I’m doing a decent job of remaining mostly invisible. And I’m glad for it once the meeting gets going and I start hearing the bullshit coming out of people’s mouths. A “pink cloud” is apparently a space you get in when you’re sober and everything seems so good that you have to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming, and roughly half the Pledges residents claim to be there. I can’t for the life of me figure out why everyone is claiming something so ridiculous—it’s not like they’re being graded on their rehab behavior and performance. They’re probably all actors, I think. Like everyone else in L.A.

  Finally it’s the hot guy’s turn to speak. After introducing himself as “Justin, alcoholic,” he says, “I have to be honest—I’m really not feeling all this pink cloud shit.” He pushes his hair out of his eyes, and I basically fall in love with him on the spot, for both his cheekbones as much as the fact that he seems like the only honest one in the room. “I miss using with every pore in my body. I fucking hate being sober. It just feels so…unnatural for me.”

  “That’s just your disease talking to you,” Tommy says.

  I expect Justin to snap that diseases don’t talk, and that most people don’t believe all this alcoholism-is-a-disease crap, anyway, but he actually nods.

  “I know it is, and I know this feeling will pass because it did the other day, but I guess I’m just…pissed off that I’m an alcoholic, a drug addict, whatever. It just doesn’t seem fair that my friends can party and not end up in here with all you crazies.”

  Even though I expect people to be offended, everyone nods and laughs and Robin even claps. She’s probably trying to sleep with him, I reason. But I can’t begin to explain what’s going on with the rest of them. They know they’re crazy and find it funny? People who know they’re crazy should be seriously alarmed and not amused, I decide. Even Justin starts laughing, and I find myself incredibly confused by his behavior. He seems so cool, but maybe he’s just as weird as everyone else. I mean, why is he looking so damn cheerful when he just shared about how pissed off he is?

  Just as I’m deciding that Justin may not be worth my adoration, I hear him say my name. I’m simultaneously shocked, flattered, and horrified but try to remain cool.

  “I’m Amelia, and I’m a drug addict,” I start and pause for them all to say my name in unison like they’re students in some sort of special ed class. My fear of speaking suddenly evaporates and I feel annoyed and angry and unable to be fake like the rest of them. “And, well, I think this fucking sucks, too. I don’t understand why I’m here.” To my horror, I start to cry and suddenly realize I can’t stop. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I say through wracking sobs. “I wasn’t supposed to end up here. I’m from a good family. I should have known better.” I end this dramatically, with a heaving sob, and the gay guy—Peter—pats my back as I cry. When I look up, I realize they’re all just staring at me in silence.

  “Amelia,” Tommy says gently. “Pick someone else to share.”

  Tears continue to stream down my face as I point to Hawaiian Tropic.

  “I’m Robin and I’m an alcoholic,” she says. And then she turns to face me. “And Amelia, can I just thank you so much for your share? It was like the most honest, beautiful thing in the world. I so exactly felt that way when I came in here, so thanks so much for reminding me of why I’m so grateful to be here.”

  Part of me wants to remind Robin that she’s been here like a week so thinking back to when she came in couldn’t have been that much of a stretch, but at the same time I feel something sort of unleash in my heart, and for a split second I wonder if maybe I am in the right place. If this ditzy, fake-titted sometime bikini model felt like this a week ago and she’s now clapping her hands at being called crazy, maybe there’s a chance that I can learn from these people and not always be miserable.

  Joel shares and then Tommy announces that it’s time to wrap up group. He looks at me. “Before we end, I’d like to thank you, Amelia, for your honesty.”

  I’m starting to feel almost embarrassed by all this attention—something I’d never known was possible.

  “This disease takes people from jail and people from Yale,” Tommy continues and he looks me directly in the eye. “And it’s not your fault. Do cancer patients beat themselves up for getting sick?” He’s clearly on some kind of a roll because he then adds, “Remember, your disease takes on all kinds of forms, and telling you that you’re a piece of shit because you’re sitting in a folding chair in a rehab is just one of those.”

  I smile at Tommy. Maybe there’s something to this disease thing. Or maybe just hearing that people from Yale end up in rehab, too, makes me feel better.

  We end the group by holding hands and saying the serenity prayer, which I’d only heard before I came here at the beginning of a Sinead O’Connor song. I have to admit I find it far more comforting than any of the prayers I used to have to say at temple. But it also has the added advantage of not being in Hebrew.

  As I reach down to pick up my cigarettes, Robin walks over to me and gives me a hug.

  “Thank you so much,” she says as she holds me.

  “Thank you,” I say back to her and mean it, surprising myself for not immediately trying to disentangle.

  “I love you,” she says, and I don’t even flinch. In just a few days, I’ve noticed that people in rehab announce their love for each other more often than honeymooners. “Thanks for passing the Equal,” someone might say at a coffee table, “I love you.” Or, “Your share was awesome—I love you.” But this was the first time anyone here has said it to me.

  And then the most shocking thing of all happens.

  “I love you, too,” I say, and even though I only say it because I feel like I have to, as soon as it’s out of my mouth I realize that I feel better than I have in months.

  15

  I’m not sure when rehab starts to seem like the most normal place in the world because it seems to happen without my being remotely aware of it. One minute I’m horrified by my roommate—a black middle-aged woman from Vegas who shouts in her sleep and leaves after three days, when she decides that she can still smoke crack “casually”—and the next I’m helping to set the table for dinner and not even remotely repulsed while listening to Joel talk about how he hasn’t had sex in three months. The days and nights at Pledges are so spectacularly consistent—every meal, group, and outing happens at the exact same time each day—and after a few days, I realize what a relief it is to have someone telling me where to go and what to do. I even find myself using their ridiculous vocabulary words myself—this, too, seems to have seeped into my system completely subconsciously—and feeling, for the first time since I can remember, happy. Even the revelati
on that there are two Pledges facilities—one in Malibu, with the horse stables and movie stars, and this one, which is one-sixteenth of the price and thus lovingly referred to as “Ghetto Pledges” by its residents—seems kind of hilarious.

  Okay, I’ll admit that having a beautiful specimen like Justin around helps. After group the day that I shared about hating everyone and everything, he asked me if I wanted to go on a walk. We walked and smoked and bonded about absolutely everything. He’s from the Palisades and went to USC but, details aside, we’ve been living nearly parallel existences. Before he’d gotten into using coke, Justin had been a screenwriter and producer and was dying to get back in the business. We took turns telling each other that our respective businesses would surely want us back once we were clean and sober. And before I knew it, Justin was my best rehab friend. I always made sure to keep my obsessive crush on him on the down-low—Tommy had warned us extensively about what happens when people substitute their drug of choice for sex and had all but begged us to ignore our sex drive for the month we were in treatment. I was shocked to discover that, despite the way I’ve been living the past two decades or so, I’m something of a rule follower.

  One day when Justin and I are wrangling everyone for group, Tommy leads a newbie down the driveway toward the basketball court. Unlike the previous new people, however, who all seemed to walk in with their heads hanging low and their clothes drooping off their skinny frames, this one wore stiletto heels, spandex pants, and a leopard-print tight tank—sartorial decisions that seemed all the more shocking because she’s pushing her mid-forties. With a jolt, I realize the leopard-printed spandex wonder is Vera, my go-to dealer before I found Alex.

  “Vera!” I shriek as I rush over to give her a hug. She gazes at me quizzically and a little freaked out. Tommy looks from me to her.

  “Oh, you know each other?” Tommy asks excitedly. The man gets excited about anything that he thinks might help someone stay sober.

  “Yes, I—” I’m about to launch into the whole story about how I met Vera at a party in the Hills, where she gave me free coke all night—but she winks knowingly at me and I shut up. I’ve been here for a few weeks so I know that we can confess our most horrific sins in rehab and never get in trouble—I’d literally listened to Peter, the gay titterer who turned out to be really cool, talk about having male prostitutes shoot heroin up his ass in bathhouses—but Vera clearly didn’t know that yet.

  “Yes, we know each other from temple,” Vera says, reasonably convincingly. Tommy looks absolutely delighted and just a bit confused, seeing as I’d explained to him that I hadn’t seen the inside of a religious establishment in over a decade.

  “People from temple,” I say, feeling a little bit better about the lie because surely if I did go to temple in L.A., someone there could have referred me to Vera. Rehab hammers home this idea that we have to be “rigorously honest” and “we’re as sick as our secrets,” so lately I’ve been extremely uncomfortable with anything even close to a lie.

  Despite Vera’s external confidence, deafeningly loud outfit, and overall smooth demeanor, I can see in her eyes that she’s basically terrified. They make a big deal at Pledges about “getting out of yourself” and “being of service to other people” and while at first I thought that was a scam to get us to do all the dishes and clean toilets and stuff so that they didn’t have to hire actual housekeepers, I’ve been surprised to discover that doing things for other people actually feels good. If I’m cleaning or helping out someone who just got here and is as freaked out as I was when I came in, I’m not thinking about the fact that I’d become a cocaine addict who ended up in rehab at thirty. And somehow, when I went back to thinking about that later, it didn’t seem so depressing anymore.

  “We still have a few minutes left before group,” I say to Tommy. “Why don’t Vera and I take a walk and I’ll give her the lay of the land?”

  Tommy nods and smiles and Vera looks relieved as I take one of her spandexed arms and lead her in the direction of where Tommy took me the day we discussed my spirituality. Before Pledges, I’d never say something like “lay of the land”—not only was it a cliché, but it also sounded incredibly lame—yet something about being here had helped me not be so hard on myself.

  “Look, this place is great, it’s just a little overwhelming at first,” I say to Vera as I light two cigarettes and hand one to her. “I think I was in shock my first few days. The only thing that gave me any comfort at all was that Tommy would say things to me like, ‘When you first come here, it’s so different from anything you’ve done before, it’s like walking on the moon.’ That helped me realize that it was normal to feel completely confused and overwhelmed.”

  Vera smokes the cigarette furiously and gazes out at the Venice Boulevard traffic. “That’s cool and everything, but I’m really just here to stay out of jail.”

  “Oh, you got busted?” I ask and Vera nods. Two other dealers here, both guys, had been busted and were trying to get the judge to reduce their sentences by completing thirty-day treatment programs. But both of them had come to really like staying sober. It was cute to see bad guys melt and become good.

  “Look, if you don’t mind, can you not tell everyone you used to buy from me?” Vera asks.

  “They’re not going to care,” I say. “It’s a really nonjudgmental place.”

  “I’m just really trying to keep everything on the down-low,” she says and I smile because I’ve learned that reasoning with an alcoholic or addict—all of whom seem to be a bit paranoid, self-obsessed, and insecure, myself included—can be futile.

  “No problem,” I say. For just a split second, I fondly recall the pink Post-It notes that she used to wrap her grams in.

  “I don’t know if I should be here,” she suddenly says, her eyes darting from the rehab to the street, as if she’s weighing the possibility of literally running off. A guy named Jack did it the other day—checked in and then, in the middle of introducing himself to the other residents, ran away and took off in his truck—and I’ve learned that we can’t stop people from leaving if they want to. Tommy says that rehab isn’t for the people who need it but the people who want it—a bit of wisdom I opt not to share with Vera at this particular juncture.

  “Why don’t you stick around for a day and see how you like it?” I ask. “Then, if you still think it doesn’t feel like the right place, you can do something about it tomorrow.”

  Vera nods and I pat myself on the back for taking the logic I’d heard Tommy use on Peter when Peter was swearing he’d die if he didn’t go out and get a hit of crystal meth right then.

  I throw my arm around Vera and start leading her back to the Pledges gate, marveling at the fact that I’m clutching a spandexed former drug dealer, grinning like a maniac.

  Later that night, we residents get invited to a mini auditorium around the back of the Pledges property, where the alumni—people who got sober here—come by for meetings. The alumni meetings happen around here pretty much 24-7 and once you “graduate,” you’re encouraged to go to as many as you want. Being able to mix with all of them once a week sort of feels like getting invited to the adults’ table after an entire childhood of sitting only with the other kids.

  According to Tommy, finding a sponsor and going through the steps outlined in the Pledges book is a fairly rigorous process that involves making lists of people we resent and apologizing to them. The alumni agree to show us how to do this so they can “be of service” and get out of their own problems, and the idea is that one day we become sponsors ourselves. I’m supposed to be looking for “someone who has what I want” but since the one thing I really want now is sobriety and all the alumni seem to have that, I’m not exactly sure what criteria I’m supposed to be using.

  “I like the look of Mustache,” Justin whispers to me as people shuffle in for group. We’re in full-on sponsor shopping mode and he’s tilting his head in the direction of a good-looking, lean guy with an ironic handlebar mustache.
Mustache looks like he’s a little on the depressed side, but I smile at Justin enthusiastically.

  “Just promise me you won’t let his facial hair philosophies influence you,” I whisper and Justin shakes his head and crosses his heart. Although Justin could shave the hair on his head into a mustache shape and still look hot, his permanent five o’clock shadow is too much of a gift to the female race to be messed with.

  A pixieish girl with short brown hair sits down next to Mustache and I immediately decide that she’s going to be my sponsor. And then I’m just as quickly stricken with the fear that she’s not going to be available or is going to say no because she doesn’t like the look of me or because Vera and Robin and all the other girls are going to also ask her and she’s going to be overwhelmed. But I also know that’s unlikely. Although Tommy has hammered home how important it is that we all get sponsors, most of the people here don’t seem to be in that much of a hurry.

  I watch Pixie Girl throughout the meeting. She doesn’t share but she smiles a lot, and when the meeting is over I rush up to her and ask her to be my sponsor. She nods and smiles. “By the way,” she says, as she gives me a hug, “my name is Rachel, drug of choice heroin. And I have five and a half years.”

  “And I’m Amelia,” I say, shaking her hand even though we’ve just hugged. “Cocaine fiend. Twenty-one days.” This kind of introduction is standard around rehab. Since almost no one comes in just for alcohol abuse anymore—we only have Stan, the guy I met on my first day—identifying yourself by your drug of choice and how long you’re sober can help clarify a lot. You can kind of tell what drugs people do sometimes—the meth people are jittery and blink a lot, the cokeheads tend to have the kind of manic energy that makes them seem like they’re still on it, and the junkies tend to be mellow and live in Silver-lake or Los Feliz—but we all mix well together, even if our drugs didn’t.