My mom didn’t understand just how bad it was for me. “Can’t you clean yourself up? Take a shower and come down to the party. It will do you good to talk to people.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“So, you’re not coming down to the party then?”
When the party was over, my mother returned to my side and watched me throw up bile. She was angry and confused, tears in her eyes. I was shaking like a leaf, hallucinating and crying. Shame and guilt aplenty, there was no shred of dignity to try to recover. I couldn’t even stand up; I was stuck on all fours like a baby.
“Claudia, I’ve had enough. I called Holly. She’s flying up, and we’re taking you to rehab. I’ve booked you in.”
I looked up from the bowl, clinging to it so I wouldn’t fall in. I had no fight left in me, no tricks up my sleeve. I could only manage one word: “Okay.”
It was that easy. I was desperate.
My mom went back to bed. I doubt she slept a wink. When the fit passed I managed to get up and limp down to the kitchen. You can’t sleep when you’re detoxing. You’re a human ant farm, busy little critters rushing around your body and mind driving you slowly crazy until you have to drink to make them stop.
I found an unfinished bottle of decent champagne and grabbed some chilled orange juice from the fridge. This would be my last drink. Seriously. The last one. So it might as well be a good one. I needed the drink to steady my nerves. I was determined that if I had to go into rehab, then I was going to drive myself, and I would drive myself out as well—out to the airport and off to my new job in merry England.
I mixed a killer mimosa and looked out the window at the view of my parents’ vineyards as I waited for the dawn. And I prayed. I prayed that God would heal me, that this really would be my last drink, that I could be set free from the cycle that was destroying not only me but my family.
The drive to the treatment center was a silent one. Holly and my mom sat in the back seat. All my energy was focused on shutting out the voice in my head telling me to turn the car around. Holly tried making conversation with my mom, who’d started mumbling away, mostly to herself, trying to understand how I’d ended up like this.
“You’re so beautiful, Claudia, so beautiful. Why do you want to do this to yourself?” And then she’d ask Holly, “Why doesn’t someone just make Claudia stop drinking?”
She couldn’t understand what I was going through. She thought I was weak. She thought that someone other than me might have been able to stop me. Holly didn’t tell her about the splintered cellar door and the crowbar and the French wines.
I said nothing. I was preparing for my latest role as a rehab junkie. I already knew what a rehab center looked like. I’d starred in Clean and Sober. It would be grimy, with dusty old couches and smoke-filled rooms. There’d be a Morgan Freeman guy, the supervisor who comes down hard on you when you’re tempted to relapse.
I was more than a little surprised when we pulled up to the swanky Bayside Marin rehabilitation center, a beautiful complex surrounded by majestic views. This was a far cry from the cellblock I’d been expecting.
I filled out the paperwork, peed into a cup, had blood drawn, and got a tour on the way to my private room. Someone asked me if I preferred tai chi or yoga in the morning before my organic whole-food breakfast. Fuck. I realized that, far from a place of last resort, this was in fact a resort.
“Mom, how much is this place costing?”
“Thirty thousand dollars, so you’d better get better.”
I knew the tests would come back clean. I metabolize alcohol fast, and aside from the mimosa I hadn’t had anything in my system for a few days. Perhaps Keith Richards and I share some DNA, I don’t know, but my hunch was right. The tests came back clean, and I was pleased as punch to tell my mom to let my stepdad know that I was an alcoholic, plain and simple, that I wasn’t on drugs, and that in future he could just shut the hell up when it came to making pronouncements about my health.
Sensible Claudia went in there with the best of intentions. I had a job. I’d always dreamed of living in London. This was a chance to fix things with my family, to prove myself to them, to get good and healthy again. I might even regain some semblance of sanity.
But the addict’s brain is wily. It’s got more tricks up its sleeves than MacGyver with a Swiss Army knife. Claudia’s plan was perfectly sensible, but somewhere in the back of my mind the monster had been making preparations for a jailbreak from the Rikers Island of rehab centers. Now all we had to do was escape from a day spa. I was an actress, a pretty good one if I do say so myself. Mere mortals would fall before my batting eyelids and proclamations of sobriety. I had played addicts; these rehab guys wouldn’t stand a chance.
I set up in my room, which was decorated entirely with the same shade of orange they use at Burger King, then headed off to do my downward-facing dogs and breathing exercises with the yoga teacher.
We’d meet once a day for group therapy around a kitchen table, talk about our feelings, and then have our meals. There was no one-on-one therapy except for a one-time psychiatric evaluation when we first went in.
They should have screened educational movies. Some footage of black, bloated livers would probably have done me a world of good. At the very least they should have shown Clean and Sober. At least it had something to do with why we were there. Instead, they screened feel-good Disney teen movies.
The food was good, but they had a no-sugar policy, which created problems. You’re a heroin addict, what the fuck do you care if someone slips you a Hershey bar? Sugar doesn’t trigger addiction, or if it does then it’s one of a thousand things that, taken to excess, can tip the scales in the wrong direction. Sex, eating, arguments, walking past a liquor store, being in a car accident, having a miscarriage, getting dumped, having a dog rip your face off, needing a cigarette, someone dying, moving house, and, if you really want to get finicky about the whole fucking thing, sure, eating a Hershey bar could do it, but it’s at the bottom of a very long list, right above too many cups of coffee.
The people who came to speak to us had between five and twenty years of sobriety, and none of them believed in anything except the AA system. You had to accept that you were an addict for life, repent to God, and surrender. That was the only choice—abstinence and daily or weekly meetings for the rest of your life. I wondered how atheists got sober. Or what if you were a Hindu? Do their gods manage alcoholism?
The shitty thing was that one girl was a bulimic alcoholic, I was just your plain, garden-variety alcoholic, another was a heroin addict, and another was a crystal-meth addict. Beam me up, Scotty; it just made no sense.
The problems of a hard-core heroin addict are not the same as those of someone with an eating disorder or an alcoholic. Your problems are not their problems. A doctor wouldn’t treat a cold, flu, and pneumonia all in the same way. The diseases might seem similar—they’re all respiratory diseases—but distinguishing between them and treating each appropriately can make the difference between life and death. It seemed to me that the bulimics needed their own group, to talk about body issues or if they’d been sexually assaulted. They don’t need to be hearing about the drinking problem of a thirty-eight-year-old actress with career anxiety.
There was an anorexic-alcoholic woman who kept weeping and saying, “I just want a pepperoncini martini at night. What’s so wrong with that?” She must have weighed seventy pounds. She couldn’t stop drinking, and that made her feel that she didn’t deserve to eat. She had a handsome, healthy-looking husband who’d come and visit her on family days. He’d hold her frail body while she wept from a mixture of shame and withdrawal.
There was this one gal who clearly had once been a real beauty but now was missing teeth from crystal meth use. Her skin was as rough and pockmarked as a pineapple. She couldn’t have been older than thirty-five but she looked fifty-five. One night she just climbed over the fence and walked to the nearest 7-Eleven. She came back from the other side with
presents, her pockets loaded with candy, a sugar messiah reeking of beer and cigarettes.
I stashed my candy bars in my room along with some cookies I’d found hidden in the kitchen. If the sugar bug hit, then I was set. And if it turned out that rehab was more like prison than I thought, then I had a stash of currency at hand to buy whatever I needed.
Sometimes the lesser of two evils is a good thing. All human beings are addicts to their biology. If we don’t eat and breathe we get into serious trouble. Sometimes it’s a matter of choosing one addiction over another. Go to an AA meeting. There’s no shortage of smoking, and everyone’s eating copious amounts of sugar. Some of those guys are forty years sober.
The meth addict had a husband and kids who would come to visit, and my guess was that her $30,000 hadn’t come as easily as mine. Addiction possesses you. It takes you over. She’d lost her identity as a mother and wife, and however much she wanted it back, she couldn’t even stop herself from escaping rehab to get a smoke and a drink. How long would it be before she went back to the addictions she really craved?
After a few days, I felt great. They didn’t have to give me Librium, Valium, or any of the other drugs used to cope with alcohol withdrawal, because I completed most of the detox on my own. I started looking better; after a few days I was back to my old self. I signed up to go to the gym, but since they didn’t have one at the center they had to bus us to the nearest one, which was located next door to a liquor store. There’s some clear thinking for you. Now and again someone would come in to see who was working out, but there was nothing to stop me from strolling next door when they weren’t looking. I stood in front of the window and looked past the display of beer and spirits to the wine rack. I didn’t go in. I thought of the face of that young woman, her teeth gone, her skin all messed up. Then I thought of my mom. She’d be able to tell if I’d reoffended, and I couldn’t risk losing her again. Did I really want to be Iris from Clean & Sober?
It’s easy for many alcoholics to resist temptation in the first weeks after going sober. That high can last anywhere up to three months, but then the brain starts to crave what it has been missing, and the trench warfare begins again. And each time you relapse it gets worse. The body can’t go without its bad medicine. If I had been in rehab three months sober instead of three days, I’d have been the one sneaking back in, reeking of beer and cigarettes.
So I checked that the coast was clear, headed back to the treadmill, and stayed another week—a total of two in all—before I convinced myself that I was ready to leave.
Here’s how that happened.
There was this smug psychiatrist who did a personal evaluation of me during the second week. First, she told me I was highly sensitive. No shit; a grown woman who cries when her mommy tells her to lose weight. You bet I was highly sensitive. Then she told me I was antisocial.
“Antisocial? You wouldn’t say that if you’d been to one of my dinner parties.”
“I think you’re in denial about the seriousness of your disease.”
“If I didn’t think it was serious then why am I here?”
“I don’t know. Why are you here?”
It was like waving a red flag at a bull.
“You’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t be here at all.”
I walked out of there shaking my head.
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. Answering my questions with questions? That’s the best she’s got?
What does she know? She doesn’t know you. You’ve just hit a bump in the road.
The monster was right. I’d hit a whole string of them: the men in my life, the house, Lucy, and, worst of all, my failed career.
Sure, it’s been a bumpy ride, but now you’re clean, you’re sober. You’ve got a new job waiting. Why the fuck are you wasting your time in rehab?
And it didn’t help that rehab was boring. Rehab was about to beat my New Year’s Eve at Charlton Heston’s house as the single most boring time of my life. Chuck put on a kilt and made his guests eat Scottish food while sitting through the three-and-a-half-hour uncut version of Khartoum. It takes a lot to beat that.
I set about manipulating the staff.
“I have to go to England and start a new life. I need to make calls and find a place to live and coordinate being on a TV series.”
In no time at all I had my cell phone and computer access. Then I went into my counselor’s office and sat down opposite him.
“Thanks for the two weeks. I feel terrific, but I think I’m done here.”
“Why do you think that?”
More circular questions.
“Because I don’t want to blow the chance to go to the UK and star in a series. It’s not going to wait for me, and if I stay here and miss out then I definitely will start drinking again.”
“Well, legally, we can’t keep you here . . .”
“Oh. Fine. Well, if I’m not staying the whole thirty days I’d like to renegotiate the bill.”
That was it. I was out of there.
I went home and started packing. It didn’t matter that the monster kept pushing me toward the bottle. I didn’t need a drink. I didn’t need rehab. I was going to England, baby! Travel has always had that effect on me. I felt that if I could just get far enough away from my problems I’d be able to start fresh. No one knows you in a new country. The weight of expectation is gone. It’s an appealing idea and, as I said before, as with all good lies there’s some truth to it. But you can never escape yourself. You’re always there, looking back at yourself in the mirror; and when you’re dry the face you see there never looks quite right. It always looks like it could do with a good, stiff drink.
GOD SAVE BELINDA BLOWHARD
Moving to England felt like something of a homecoming. I’ve always been an Anglophile; it has to do with leaving Connecticut—its landscape and historical buildings—at a young age to move into tract housing in California. I’d learned to thrive in the new world, but my heart always yearned for the trappings of the old, and in that sense England was a cornucopia of distractions.
I’d arrived just in time to experience London in spring. There wasn’t a raincloud in the sky, and buildings that predated Columbus’s discovery of America were a dime a dozen. The British Museum became my second home; I soaked in the beauty of the antiquities that England had looted from around the world when they had ruled so much of it.
Old things make me happy, and now I was living in the heart of one of the great old cities of the world. Good old Claudia was back. I’d left that broken, needy excuse for a Claudia back in the land of the free and the home of the brave, a place where I could be neither free nor brave. In England I was the master of my destiny, riding the wagon of sobriety, whip in hand, driving its horses onward to a new and more promising horizon.
It had occurred to me that the UK wasn’t exactly the perfect country of choice for an alcoholic. After all, drinking is a national pastime. And I love pubs. I knew that was going to be an issue. I jokingly pondered moving to Saudi Arabia. It’d be much harder to get a drink, but, knowing me, I’d manage somehow and instead of getting stone cold sober I’d just end up getting stoned, literally.
So since the Middle East wasn’t an option, and I sure as hell wasn’t going back to my life in L.A., I decided that London would either make or break me. It was the battleground where the fight for the new Claudia would take place, and so far I was kicking ass and taking names. I was confident and filled with hope. I was so grateful to have another chance that minor temptations seemed like daisies in a field; I paid them no notice, flattening them as I passed.
After being so sick for so long, I knew it would take my body a long time to forget the experience. It’s like being forced to chain-smoke cigarettes until you turn green and throw up. You don’t want another cigarette. You don’t even want to think about smoking. That’s how it was with the monster and me. We’d broken up. She was like a persistent ex-lover who keeps on calling, wanting to get back together, but I wasn’t
taking her calls. As far as I was concerned we had nothing more to say to one another.
It would take four more months before I worked out that I’d underestimated my disease and that I was dealing with something that was less like a persistent ex and more like a stalker who was willing to take me hostage to make her point.
The year is 3034. We have medically suppressed our emotions to stop illogical thoughts from interfering with our decisions.
—Captain Belinda Blowhard
Starhyke was great fun—it was like a Benny Hill movie set in outer space. Aliens called Reptids release a weapon that unshackles the passions of the crew of the dreadnought Nemesis, producing unintended consequences. And in the strange way that art mirrors life, I was playing a robotically sober character who struggles to control her unleashed desires.
I’ve always put acting before addiction, even at the worst of times, and now that I was working I had my armor back. It was slightly tarnished and dented, but it was mine and I was strong again. The monster wisely kept her distance.
The show had a great cast. Jeremy Bulloch, who played Boba Fett in the original Star Wars movies, was hilarious. And I got on famously with Suanne Braun, who had played the goddess Hathor in Stargate SG-1, and with Rachel Grant, who is an actress and an expert in Filipino martial arts. Everyone was very talented and enthusiastic.
It was a low-budget production. The food cost one pound per day per person, and boy, could you tell. Mystery-meat glop was the main course, and you couldn’t get a salad to save your life. But I knew I was in safe hands when it came to alcohol. Andrew Dymond, the director, and the majority of the crew didn’t drink, and when I went to the pub to socialize after work no one had a problem with my drinking Diet Coke.
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