Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness

by Mary Forsberg Weiland;Larkin Warren

  The next stop on the juvie tour was my cell. My roommate was sweet-faced and very pregnant. I had never met a pregnant teenager before and had to stop myself from staring. I was shown around and given a rundown of the rules. My mother and I were always looking at model homes and attending real estate open houses; this felt a little like that. I pictured myself purchasing the property. Our suite consisted of a metal desk and two steel beds. The mattresses, no more than an inch thick, were covered in plastic. My bed hovered just above the floor. That smell of feet had made its way into the room.

  The open-house fantasy was shattered as I was led into the community bathroom. The words community and bathroom should never be linked together. The first section was a wall of stalls—the stall dividers only stood a few feet tall. In fact, they were even in height with the toilets. I would be hip-to-hip with anyone else using the facility, and anyone who wanted to get a closer look could easily do it. I vowed never to step foot into the bathroom again, no matter what. I don’t do well in a one-ply-toilet-paper situation. This is why you will never find me camping. Well, that and snakes.

  I was taken back to my cell and my roommate offered me a magazine. Cosmopolitan magazine. Another first for me—I’d never seen it before. I was amazed at the way those women looked, with wild hair and breasts popping out of their dresses. In that moment, if someone had told me that within a few years I would grace those very pages, I would’ve laughed in her face.

  Ms. Hospitality came to escort me back into the main room near the holding tanks, where I was asked a laundry list of questions, not unlike the ones Phyllis had asked: Are you on drugs? Are you pregnant? Have you ever tried to commit suicide? My “yes” to that last one opened up a barrage of other questions related to my mood and mental health. They got me with this one: “How are you feeling right now?” Are you kidding me? I had been dropped on my head by a crazy man, I had just been naked and somewhat fondled by a woman I’d never before seen in my life. I was wearing a Styrofoam bra, I was trying to figure out how I was going to avoid the community bathroom in the foreseeable future, and oh, yeah, I was in jail. So, no, I was not feeling well. My circumstances were depressing. I felt no joy, and I said so. This got me an instant reservation in the suicide tank, a metal-and-concrete room where I was stripped of all my nice new institutional clothes and given a scratchy gray army-style blanket. And then the door closed.

  I stood there naked, stunned, and totally alone. Besides my naked self, the only other things in the room were a metal toilet and another thin plastic mattress. There was a small round hole in the door, and I tried desperately to get the attention of anyone in earshot to tell them that this was a massive mistake. No one responded, although I suspected I was being watched. I was clearly stuck there for the night.

  It made no sense to me, this notion that the way to keep someone from feeling suicidal was to remove every piece of clothing and whatever remained of her dignity—what, did they think I was capable of killing myself with the socks? Now I really was suicidal. I was so disgusted and couldn’t bear to touch anything in the cell. I wrapped the horrible blanket around me and sat on the mattress, dangling my feet over the side but making sure they didn’t touch the ground. I began to think of all the ways I actually could hurt myself and came up with the following courses of action: I could bang my head against the metal toilet; I could dive headfirst off the bed onto the concrete; I could use the blanket to scratch myself to death; I could hold my breath until I passed out; I could use the plastic mattress to suffocate myself. My least favorite possibility: I could drown myself in the toilet. It was my second night in a row with little or no sleep. And people wonder why I’m crazy.

  The next morning, a caseworker came to speak with me. In spite of being tired, dirty, cold, hungry, and demoralized, I summoned enough energy to somehow convince him I was just fine. I got my uniform back and was allowed to return to the general population. I am proud to report that my new homies were impressed. I was thirteen and being held for assault with a deadly weapon. This was the big time.

  I had to take some state-mandated tests to see where I placed in school; when I passed them all, I was told I could go watch TV. All the other kids around me had been given a book and some schoolwork assignment—I had a chili cheese dog and All My Children. I put my feet up on a chair and began to enjoy my stay.

  Meanwhile, my mother was frantic. From what the cops had told her, she’d been under the impression that they were just going to scare me a little—drive me past juvenile hall and then bring me home. After my behavior the previous few months, this sounded like a plan she could live with. But clearly, the plan went horribly wrong. Later that day, after I had already been processed in, she received an urgent phone call from a man who was handling my case. “Please come and get your daughter. She doesn’t belong here.” He kept his voice hushed throughout the entire conversation as though he didn’t want to be overheard, and then in an even quieter yet more insistent whisper, he said, “I could get in trouble for doing this, but please come and get her. I’ll let you get her.”

  When Mom finally arrived, wild-eyed and obviously not having slept, my reaction was to do a Bob—just pick her up and throw her. How could she let some asshole have me arrested? I gave her the silent treatment all the way out to the car and then started hollering.

  “I don’t want to go home with you,” I announced. “I want to go to a hospital.” I was gratified by her protests and the horrified look on her face. “Just take me to a hospital.”

  My request had a certain logic—to me. In a hospital, I could stay in bed. Food would be brought to me and I wouldn’t have to stand in the free-lunch line to get it. I could wear a gown and not worry about what my classmates thought of my clothes. I wouldn’t have to help Mom with her daycare kids, I wouldn’t have to watch her interact with her boyfriend. More than anything, I didn’t want to spend another day being me. “In fact, take me to a mental hospital.”

  “All right,” she said. “I will.”

  I look back at that woman and that little girl, and I ache now for them. How lost they were.

  I rested my head on the passenger’s-side window, and my mother kept her eyes only on the road as we drove to the county hospital in San Diego. I remember nothing of the building’s exterior; the minute we walked in, I had goose bumps. The Japanese call it “chicken skin” I call it intuition. The building was huge and freezing, even the air felt gray and old. If I’d had the energy, I would’ve made a dash for the door. But the black cloud was in charge. I imagine that a homeless person living under a freeway overpass lacks inspiration and some get-up-and-go, too; living with constant racket, whether it’s in your mind or under the freeway, separates you from your body and separates you from the world. This ugly building seemed as good a place as any to hold up the white flag of surrender.

  Without speaking, my mother and I kept on walking, right up to the reception desk, where she signed in. We sat down and waited to be called. There wasn’t anything to say. We were still mother and daughter and loved each other, but we had terrified each other; we had betrayed each other. She’s supposed to be the grown-up, I thought. Why didn’t she protect me? I know now she was asking herself the same question.

  We may have brought in with us the only silence in that building. The ambient noise coming down the various hallways was deafening. I’d always been under the impression that crazy people were drugged-up in their beds, but no, here they were, walking around in regular clothes, howling and shouting and laughing. I was never a fan of horror movies; now I was in one.

  Our number was very close to being called when a blond woman dressed in a draped and tattered Stevie Nicks–esque outfit suddenly appeared. At first, you could only hear her boots—high-heeled boots—the rhythmic, echoed clacking sound of her footsteps on the hard floor made me feel like a tourist in a disease museum. When she opened her mouth, the intensity of her words and the way she delivered them was beyond frightening. She wasn’t screaming, b
ut you could hear the insistent desperation in her voice as she asked for her medication. “I need my medication,” she said to the women behind the desk. “I need my medication. I need my medication.” Then she half-turned and opened it up to the room at large. “I need my medication!”

  For the first time in nearly seventy-two hours, a glimmering in my mind warned me that being here, giving up, giving in, was maybe not such a good idea. My mother sat up straight in her chair and grabbed my arm; I looked at her, she looked at me. It was as though we’d both been in some kind of zombie state. And then Mom said the two words for which I will be grateful for the rest of my life: “Walk fast.”

  We sprinted for the parking lot, then raced out of it in record time, relieved to look back only once and see that there were no white-jacketed men coming after us. It was a mess, and we were battered. But we weren’t broken. Somehow, we would figure it out.

  We took the long way to get there, as many families do. But even now, at times of stress or upheaval, all either of us has to say is “I need my medication!” and the laughter starts to roll.

  THREE

  “be a model or just look like one!”

  After the first big manic episode of my life, I have to admit that for a while, I looked back on it with a certain amount of affection. Yes, there were some frightening moments: the handcuffs, the lack of privacy, the cold-metal reality of the suicide tank, and the level of anger I felt toward both Bad Bob and my mother. That anger worked just like jet fuel—it literally blew me out of my home and into the justice system, even if only for thirty-six hours.

  On the other hand (I’m good at looking at the other hand), it was an adventure, a walk on the wild side. It had serious risks, but it also had a couple of rewards: for one, it got rid of Bad Bob, who was never seen around our house again; for another, I was the center of attention, especially my mother’s. All that time I was so busy telling her I didn’t need her—until the day I discovered that I did.

  And the image of that young pregnant teen stayed with me for a very long time. I often wonder what happened to that girl and to her child.

  When I was very tiny, my mom took me to a photo studio to have baby pictures taken. When she returned to pick them up, she was surprised to see that one had been blown up, framed, and put on display. There it was, my very first modeling job. It would be about fourteen years until my next one.

  I didn’t think of myself as pretty, and for a long time, I wasn’t. I had huge lips on a little face, crooked teeth, and big feet. I wasn’t tall, I wasn’t short—if I thought of my appearance at all, it was average, especially compared to the blond, blue-eyed standard of beauty of the popular girls at my school. I cringe now whenever I hear a model or actress talk about how difficult it was to grow up different (too skinny, too tall, too other), because I’ve learned that even the most confident, cool-acting kids are sometimes shaky inside—awkward, about to be found out. Doesn’t everyone have a story about being that solitary teenager who basically held up the wall at a dance or a party? And addicts always speak of having felt like outsiders long before they ever used anything to help them feel better. And honestly, who wants to hear “poor me” from a model?

  In any case, worries about what I looked like weren’t at the top of my list—I was too busy trying to hustle my way somewhere. I didn’t know where, just somewhere else. And I knew that money was central to getting there. I was never a job snob. I cleaned yachts at the Glorietta Bay Yacht Club, I cleaned bathrooms at the public restroom facility on the bay where the boats were docked, I helped my mother clean the doctors’ offices where she worked. God bless housekeepers (and I bless them, too), but even now, I’ve never seen a kitchen or a closet that I couldn’t make better, especially if I’ve got a caffeine source. Call it OCD, call it ADHD, call it a defiant echo of Scarlett O’Hara’s “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” Work works for me.

  When I was fourteen, I began hearing ads on the radio for the Barbizon Modeling School. I had no conception of actually being a model—my mother didn’t have fashion magazines around our house (my brief glimpse at Cosmo in juvie was actually kind of horrifying), I had never been to a fashion show, and I wouldn’t have known a supermodel from a shrimp fork. But Barbizon’s ads talked about teaching poise and etiquette, about confidence, assurance, and self-improvement. These were powerful buzzwords to me—I was eager to learn anything that would help me be a success at something.

  Barbizon had an office in San Diego (I learned later that they have offices all over the country—and more than two hundred locations today). I begged Mom to take me there so we could find out more. Finally she said okay.

  Barbizon’s San Diego location was on the far end of the Fashion Valley Mall. JC Penney was at the other end. Fashion Valley wasn’t a frequent destination for me and my mother, so it took us about a half hour to get our bearings. But when we walked through those doors, everything changed. The woman in charge, Candice Westbrook, was petite, with a short blond bob and direct blue eyes. I was never good at guessing ages (when you’re a kid, the world is divided into three parts: other kids, grown-ups, and old people), but I think Candy might’ve been forty when we first met. She reached out to shake my hand (I don’t think, until that moment, any adult had ever shaken my hand), and at that moment, she became a friend for life to both my mother and me. There was no way we could’ve known that then—all we heard was “fifteen hundred dollars’ tuition” and “She’s going to need braces.” Well, that’s the end of that, I thought, and the look on my mother’s face said the same thing. “Wait a minute,” Candice said. “I think maybe I can help.”

  She told us she saw something in me. Something in my bones or in my face. I had no idea what she was talking about. But I certainly saw something in her—a way of speaking: direct, straightforward, with something warmer and kinder just beneath it. I immediately trusted her, and so did Mom. A payment plan was negotiated—basically, she loaned us the tuition. Not long afterward, I had a mouthful of braces. Candy helped me get a part-time job at the San Diego Zoo, as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. The costume was big and hot: I felt as though I’d wrapped blankets around my body and head, then tried to breathe while the summer sun beat down and parents took pictures of me standing with their awestricken little kids. For fifteen dollars an hour (which went toward my braces) and a free lunch, it was a good job and a fine alternative to cleaning bathrooms.

  I know there are families, and kids, who get the “I’m going to make you rich, I’m going to make you famous” pitch from modeling “schools” and “agencies” everywhere, in exchange for a big check and a signature on a dotted line. That is never what Candy, or Barbizon, said to me or my mother. We were not hustled. What we were offered was an opportunity—access to information and instruction, to be better, to go forward and out into the world in a way that didn’t seem otherwise available to me. “I want you to know that this is okay with me,” my mother told me. “As long as you’re willing to work for it. Nobody ever let me do the kind of things that I ever wanted to do. But now, you—if you’re willing to work for it, I want you to try.”

  Every Saturday morning for six months, I took the bus to Barbizon for a four-hour class with six other girls. We worked on everything from applying makeup (not clown makeup, but look-a-little-better-than-you-normally-do makeup) to walking across a room without falling over our own feet. How to speak to one person, how to speak in front of a classroom of twenty-five. How to stand, stand still, and stand up straight. How to smooth your skirt under your butt when you sit, so that a cold folding chair doesn’t surprise you. Where your hands go when you’re talking to someone (hint: not in, on, or near your mouth). How to smile. How not to laugh at someone, but laugh with them. Manners: Please, thank you, excuse me, no, thank you, I don’t care for seconds. That last one was hard. The more the teen hormones kicked in, the curvier I got. Cleavage not so much, but the hips, the ancestral Latina hips—it was clear early on that my heritage was go
ing to fight me pound for pound.

  Candy introduced me to a photographer in San Diego who agreed to take my pictures. We shot on the beach in Coronado. I was able to calm my nerves by focusing on the professional makeup artist who was working on my face—this was a first, and I was fascinated. When I looked in the mirror afterward, I couldn’t believe Mary Forsberg was looking back at me. That was the first time I remember thinking, I might be pretty. Even with braces and crooked lips, maybe I had potential.

  I don’t know if Barbizon actually made me more confident or taught me how to convince people that I was. Whatever the case, with my mother’s trust and Candy’s guidance, I slowly began to move into the world of my Hotel del Coronado fantasy.

  Barbizon holds its annual “Model of the Year” competition in a different city each year, and each regional school chooses which of its students to bring. The year Candy took me, it was in Washington, D.C. I had never been east before—except for the disastrous trip to Tacoma, I’d never been out of San Diego—and I was excited, nervous, and scared. I knew I would fall off the runway or, worse, walk straight off the end of it. I had to do some serious slimming down, too, and my wardrobe needed adjusting, since shorts and flip-flops were not an option. “Why can’t I wear what I want in between competition events?” I asked.

  “Because it’s just not a good look, Mary,” Candy said. “The whole idea is to impress and intimidate the competition when you’re off the stage as well as when you’re on it.” That had never occurred to me (I’m glad it occurred to Candy, since the Texas girls brought their A game). The flight was exciting, the images outside the car window were amazing as we rushed from the airport to the hotel, but it was hard to register the details, since everything went past like a video on fast-forward. Although I’d spent time in between homes at motels, I’d never been in a real hotel—the one in D.C. loomed at least twenty stories into the sky. I stared, gaped, and gawked so much I wouldn’t have been surprised if the soundtrack to the Beverly Hillbillies started playing in the background. When I saw some Girl Scouts standing next to a table piled high with boxes of cookies, I loosened up a little. Candy saw my eyes grow to the size of Thin Mints, and she bought some. “For later,” she cautioned. “Once the competition is over, you can eat nine boxes if you want.”