“How did your party go last night, Claudia? Oh, you didn’t have a party? But you must have had one this week? No?”
Next thing I knew she was standing at my front door, cell phone in hand, recycling bin beside her, its lid flipped back to reveal a full load of bottles, clusters of glass necks and bottoms sticking out at every angle—my collection of shame.
But the monster was my partner in crime now, and she thinks fast.
“What? My gardener forgets to wheel the bin out for three weeks, and suddenly I’m a drunk? If anyone has the right to be indignant it’s me. What are you doing going through my trash?”
I invited her inside to make up. I had to keep her sweet, because I was flat broke and she was lending me money to help me hobble along with my mortgage. I managed to keep the house a little longer by convincing my mom that more work would come, but she was always badgering me about whether I had a job. I knew her charity couldn’t last much longer.
We had some tea. I was conciliatory. I told her that I understood how she could have made the mistake, but I’d appreciate it if she could keep her paranoid musings to herself.
She let the matter drop, but I knew it was a close call. After that I started hiding my empties inside a cabinet-model Victrola that movie photographer Robert Zuckerman had given me for my birthday. I used to play 1920s His Master’s Voice records on it, while inside its belly it kept Its Mistress’s Secrets. But secrets have a way of creeping to the surface. One day while my assistant Holly was helping me choose the last of my personal belongings to sell, she caught sight of the Victrola.
“What about this old thing?” she asked. “Any special reason you want to keep it?”
She tilted it to test its weight, and her question was answered by a muffled orchestra of teetering glass.
I came clean about my drinking problem; Holly was so understanding. She agreed to help me and, for starters, bought a latch and big brass lock for the cellar door, which she proceeded to secure with military efficiency. She locked it down and took the key with her. The next day, after finishing a bottle of cooking sherry that I’d tucked away in the kitchen cupboard, I had a great idea.
What the fuck am I doing drinking cooking sherry? Is this where I am now? Maybe I should go sit on the sidewalk and drink out of a paper bag. Maybe I should drink proper wine like normal people, or not drink at all. Right. I don’t have any money, and I can’t get into my cellar, so the only option is to just stop drinking.
I was glad that Holly had agreed to help me. This was progress. As Sun Tzu says, know yourself and know your enemy and in a thousand battles you’ll never be defeated.
Ten minutes later I was standing in my dungeon drinking a Château Lafite Rothschild straight out of the bottle, crowbar in hand, the brass lock hanging from a splintered door. There’s always another option.
My normal morning started with dry heaves. The previous night’s wine was no longer in my stomach, but my body kept trying to cast it out, and like a bad exorcist it failed every time. I’d be left exhausted, my muscles aching from the effort.
I was still getting offers for small roles in movies that my friends were making. There was never any real money on the table, but I took the jobs anyway, because I needed to keep busy and I needed to put on a good show to ensure my mom’s continued investment in my life.
I knew she had the money. She’d married a multimillionaire and continued to earn her own income as an interior decorator. My mother is an impossibly generous woman. She’s always helped her children out, but this time I was taking enormous advantage of her. I’d told her my mortgage payments were slightly higher than they actually were—to make sure I had enough money to drink on. Don’t get me wrong; I was working hard to stay sober between binges. I just never wanted to be caught dry. That was an unthinkable possibility.
And I expanded the development of my detox schedule. I’d have scheduled binges, orderly hangovers, and well-planned detoxes, arriving on set or at auditions disguised as my alter ego: happy, funny Claudia. It must be the German in me; I had the whole routine down to stopwatch precision. I was a highly functioning alcoholic, killing myself with utmost efficiency.
A binge would last anywhere from one to three days, and it would usually take me up to a week to recover.
By the time I’d finished off the last of the French collection (and nearly finished myself in the process) I was starting to behave erratically. I’d usually crave alcohol when I was PMS-ing, and when I satisfied the urge it supercharged my emotional irritability.
That’s when the monster came a-knockin’, and she had another great idea.
You’re very touchy of late, and your mom’s becoming suspicious. You need to ramp things up to make sure she keeps helping us. Now’s not the time for little lies—they’re the ones that catch you out. You need to drop the A-bomb, a nice big lie that’ll keep the wheels turning for a long time.
I rang up my mom in tears. Through heartbroken sobs I told her I’d had a bad pap smear. What’s more, I could never have children. Even worse, they were going to have to perform some kind of operation on me to cut out the cancer. The other end of the phone was silent for several seconds and then a flood of pity and emotional sympathy followed. Mission accomplished.
I was so fucking clever. That’s the addict’s brain at work. It convinces you that you’re not out of control, that your insane decisions are perfectly logical. It’s not a big-picture state of mind. You’re so busy covering all the angles, looking after all the little details, that you have no perspective, no idea of just how strange you seem to the people who love you.
It took my mom all of twenty minutes to penetrate my carefully constructed fortress of deception. I forgot she knew that my friend Trish and I shared the same gynecologist. She called Trish, asked for my doctor’s number, and got him on the phone. The doctor said he couldn’t share any patient information, but my mom countered with a whole “I’m so worried about my daughter, she won’t talk to me, I think she might be dying” routine, which led to the doctor basically implying that I was fine.
She appeared on my doorstep like an angry Valkyrie; the “for sale” sign went up in my yard the following week.
I figured this was it, that I’d finally hit rock bottom. I’d been found out, my mom knew that I was a fucked-up drunk, and I knew that after that stunt she’d never completely trust me again. One part humiliation, two parts mortification, one part depression—the Stone Cold Sober cocktail. It was time to clean up my act. I wasn’t going to add alcohol to that emotional mixed drink. I needed change. Now I couldn’t wait for the house to sell—it had come to feel like a giant coffin.
To help pass the time, I’d fill out alcohol tests in the backs of magazines and read up on alcohol addiction. Sun Tzu was right; I knew myself but not the enemy, and that wouldn’t win me jack shit. For instance . . .
DEAR ABBY ALCOHOLIC TEST
Do you wonder if you’re an alcoholic? Try answering the following questions. If you answer positively to more than three, consider seeking professional advice.
1. Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but lasted only a couple of days?
A: Never. I’m five days into a week of sobriety right now. Wait. Does drinking after 5 p.m. count?
2. Do you wish people would stop nagging you about your drinking?
A: No one is nagging me. (They just gossip behind my back.)
3. Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another hoping that would keep you from getting drunk?
A: Nope, I’m a wino, period.
4. Have you had a drink in the morning during the past year?
A: Does a mimosa with friends count? Then yes.
5. Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble?
A: Not really (those bastards!).
6. Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year?
A: Does sleeping with strangers and passing out at 8 p.m. count as a problem?
A: Nope, I live alone.
8. Do you ever try to get extra drinks at a party because you did not get enough to drink?
A: I’m usually the one throwing the party, so I can drink as much as I want.
9. Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking any time you want, even though you keep getting drunk?
A: I don’t really get drunk, just happy . . . a lot.
10. Have you missed days at work because of the drinking?
A: What work? I’m an actress!
11. Do you have blackouts?
A: Not that I can recall . . .
12. Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you did not drink?
A: Yes. I would be thinner.
13. Have you ever embarrassed yourself or someone else when drinking?
A: Possibly. Probably. Alright already—yes!
14. Do you drink every day?
A: Nearly. Mostly. Always.
Then at the bottom of the page I’d write things to crack myself up, like: “FUCK! THAT WAS EXHAUSTING. I NEED A DRINK!”
I was still running from myself and the reality of my disease. On the set of Babylon 5 we played practical jokes on each other all the time. Now I was becoming a big joke and I couldn’t even see it. I wasn’t working, but if an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, then I was at least keeping someone well occupied. When I was working fourteen-hour days on a TV series I never thought about drinking, and when I got home I’d never drink because I was too busy learning my lines for the next day. Now I had oceans of time filled with tiny islands of distraction, but those were slowly sinking as even the freebie jobs started drying up. I reached out for the bottle again, despite my promises to myself. I was too far gone to just stop.
I was sick of the Hollywood youth game, sick of the superficiality of the whole industry, and yet I found that I couldn’t wander too far from the phone. It was like some kind of underworld torture—chained to a stool beside an eternally silent phone, wine glass in hand, waiting for it to ring. That fucking phone was cursed. Each day it refused to ring, I’d feel that I was aging a year, slowly transforming into a crone. If only the phone would ring, the curse would be broken.
And then one day it did. It was computer animation studio boss Andrew Dymond, who I’d met a few years before at a convention in London. I was telling him my tales of woe (but not of drunkenness) when he said to me, “Well, I’m putting together a really low-budget sci-fi comedy over here. How would you like to come over and star in it?”
I was stunned, so overwhelmed with happiness that for a moment I was speechless. I think Andrew took my silence as lack of interest.
“Look, before you say anything, let me tell you the name of the character—Belinda Blowhard.”
Brilliant. I told him that if he could get me SAG scale there was a good chance I’d be interested. Inside I was the dazzled heroine of a bad romantic comedy proclaiming, “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!”
This was just the change I needed: A new country, a new starring role, a new sci-fi series, and comedy to boot! This was saving grace in action. With change comes hope.
I arranged to rent out my house short-term while my step father kept trying to make a sale. I was happy to let him manage it. After struggling to keep the house for so long, the finality of losing it was all too depressing, and I didn’t want to risk doing anything that might jeopardize my new job.
Unfortunately, the carefully executed system of binge-suffer-detox was not working as efficiently as it once had. I needed to sober up, but first I needed one last round of drinks before the bar closed. By then I only had bottles of cheap sherry and vodka in the cupboard. I could walk clear of the fallout of a wine binge within a week, but a binge on vodka was akin to a death sentence. Yet there was nothing else to drink, so I figured I’d dice with death and keep my fingers crossed. I crashed and burned big-time, and as I sat on my tiled kitchen floor, wasted and leaning up against my seafoam-green cupboards, I estimated that it would take me at least two to three weeks to pull clear of the vodka aftershock.
And then I remembered that I was due to visit my mom in Napa. I had already booked the flight.
You have to go. She’ll become suspicious if you pull out at the last minute. You can pull it off. Have another drink. That’s the world’s best hangover cure.
Shit! Mom was having a ladies’ luncheon and had made a big deal about my attending. Forget the silent phone—that was lightweight torment. Sitting through a rich women’s tea party while detoxing, that was a fate express-shipped straight from the deepest pits of the inferno right to my door.
But the monster was right. I couldn’t risk losing her support, not this close to starting my new life. I needed my mom to help prop me up until I could stand on my own again.
There was still a glass of vodka left in one of the bottles. I threw it down my throat and felt better at once. My nerves steadied; I could do it. That was it, my last drink. I was going to dry out. I’d white-knuckled it before and I could do it again. The women’s tea party was a bullet that I meant to dodge.
I couldn’t fuck up this visit at my mom’s, not after the last one. That had been a disaster of epic proportions.
On that occasion I thought I’d gone in prepared. I knew I was prone to drinking at my parents’ house. Family gatherings are always hot-buttons for me, so to avoid the awkward conversation when they noticed their booze slipping away at an alarming rate I supplemented my consumption with vodka that I’d smuggled in concealed in water bottles. I’ve never really liked hard liquor, but I needed something to numb me out.
My mom has given me a tremendous amount of love and support over the years, and yet she can be a very judgmental person. I’m no pushover, but all it took was one comment from her about my weight or my career to send me running for the bottle. I never felt that I was good enough in her eyes. I wasn’t thin enough or pretty enough or with the right guy or rich or famous enough. She wanted her children to be perfect physical specimens with perfect jobs, complete with perfect little families of their own. I guess it was a kind of German-clockwork fantasy, efficient little dolls popping out of the right window at the right time to hit the right bell, everything running smoothly. Add to that my sensitive nature and there was very little anyone could say that was critical without triggering me to drink.
We’d been sitting around the dinner table, my mom, my stepdad, and his son. I was slicing up my lamb chop, happily munching away, when my stepbrother asked if it was any good. I picked up a piece and fed it to him with no sensual motive in mind; I just wanted him to try some. I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my ankle and turned to see my mom’s narrowed eyes staring at me. She’d kicked me under the table.
“Stop that!”
I just smiled and kept on eating but inside the monster had been awakened and was already formulating what it considered an appropriate revenge. When we all went to bed I went and knocked on my stepbrother’s door, and I seduced him.
He was my stepfather’s adult adopted son, so there were no blood ties, and I didn’t break any laws, but just the same, it showed just how poor my judgment was. It turned out that he was an alcoholic, too, so we understood each other just fine. We combined our hidden stash of booze and partied on into the wee hours of the morning.
In the morning, after the shit storm had passed, I realized that I had an ear infection, which ruled out flying back to L.A. I was already legally deaf in one ear from an infection I had when I was a kid, so I was terrified of damaging my hearing even more.
My stepbrother offered to drive me to L.A., but my mom and stepdad commanded him to stay put and told me to get on the plane. Now it was his turn to stage a revolt.
“Screw this. I’m driving Claudia.”
He was living in their guesthouse, and they were employing him to landscape their garden.
“If you’re not here for work tomorrow then don’t bother coming back.”
So alcoholic stepbrother moved in, along with his wart-nosed mongrel called Pepsi. The party continued (stepbrother had some money set aside). I’ve never hated an animal in my life, not even Lucy, who tried to eat my face for lunch, but for the one exception of Pepsi. Whenever I’d go out she’d shit on my floor and chew my furniture. A collection of valuable Native American antiques that I’d been planning to sell ended up as Pepsi chew toys. Maybe she was the jealous type?
In a bout of sobriety I saw the stupidity of it, the rift this situation was opening up between my mother and me. Her marriage was under stress as long as it continued. So I told stepbrother the party was over and sent him and Pepsi on their way. He went back to doing what he did best—growing medicinal pot.
On the next visit to my mom’s house I was determined not to fuck up again. I was a rock. I was on the goddamn stairway to teetotaler’s heaven.
And now it’s four o’clock on the morning after the tea party, and my mom’s there for me again. She stands over me as I hang over a toilet bowl in her house, riding the last wave of a protracted vomiting fit.
The bullet I’d hoped to dodge had hit me right between the eyes. I drank a whole lot one night after an argument with my stepdad, and the next morning I was really sick. I decided to put myself on a forced detox, hoping I would snap out of it, but instead my body went into shock from the sudden alcohol deprivation. The upside was that I missed the tea party; the downside was that I suffered one of the toughest detoxes of my life. I hadn’t realized just how badly I’d poisoned myself. I lost motor functions and part of my vision. I didn’t know that by stopping cold turkey I was damaging both my body and my brain.
Babylon Confidential Page 17