The reason I bought three was that the salesman was rude to me. I found out years later from the same guy that “The reason I didn’t help you was because you pulled up in an old beat-up Volkswagen, and you parked in the bus stop. You were in a bus stop, Chuck, and you got out of your car wearing cutoffs and a tank top, and you looked like you couldn’t see. I wasn’t being rude to you; I was afraid of you!” So I showed them; I bought three!
The drugs hadn’t really hurt me yet except in my relationships. After seeing each other for a while, Paula and I got married in 1970 and had a baby, but she just couldn’t take it anymore. On our honeymoon, I was stoned and fell asleep. Paula spent her honeymoon abandoned in a Palm Springs hotel suite. When I woke up, I got high and cheated on her. Then she thought I was going to kill myself or hurt the baby. And I’m totally oblivious to this. She ended up having an affair with one of our road managers, and she leaves me.
My next wife, Julia, and I started our marriage with a heroin honeymoon in 1976. We turned into recluses and had all our food delivered from Greenblatt’s Delicatessen on Sunset Boulevard. Our day consisted of scoring heroin from dealers, going to the bank for more cash, and snorting until it knocked us out. It took me years to understand that if you’re going to be with someone, it’s give-and-take, a two-way street. I was being a young rock star and not being faithful. That marriage ended. Secretly I was scared. I felt alone and beyond help.
Drugs led to all kinds of problems. Some dealers once shot through the walls of my house in Los Angeles when I was inside. They wanted me to pay my drug debts. I remember terrible fights—one with Janis Joplin where I called her an ugly slut. She was a nice, sweet person and was one of many musicians I knew who died defeated, tortured deaths.
I don’t know why I stayed alive. I used dirty needles. Four people were beaten to death with baseball bats at an upscale heroin shooting gallery in Laurel Canyon. Centering on porn-film legend John Holmes it became known as the Wonderland Murders. The carnage happened in the very place I was spending most of my evenings at the time—except that murderous one. Once I almost drove my whole family into the canyon as we headed down Mulholland Drive in our little red Volkswagen. I had popped some downers before we left home and blacked out. At the last minute, Julia slammed on the brakes. I almost bled to death after demolishing my car on a Sunset Boulevard streetlamp. I cracked my head open, collapsed a lung, and mangled my body. The firefighters had to cut me out from that automobile.
With musicians I knew toppling like ten pins, death was very close up, and I thought about suicide and attempted it as well. Once I hung myself with a belt in the closet of a shabby motel room, only a rusty overhead pipe collapsed and saved me. Another time I walked directly in front of a moving bus on purpose. Compared to facing my probation officer with another dirty drug test, it seemed like a good alternative. I overdosed routinely. Other druggies had to beat me back to life after one overdose, subsequent to which my body was black-and-blue from the neck down.
One time I remember I went to see my business manager, who had connections with some doctors. When I walked in, I didn’t even realize it, but I weighed 142 pounds—and I’m well over six feet tall. He took me directly to this therapist, this high-end guy in Beverly Hills, who said, “Hey, we’re putting him in the hospital, a lockdown nut ward.” I was falling apart! The wear and tear of the drugs and the emotional give-and-take was getting to me. I was feeling all the feelings, but I wasn’t caring. Kind of a drug-induced depression. I felt my feelings but my response was “I don’t give a shit.”
When I started seeing the people that were in the hospital with me, that really had problems—young people my age, old people who had real mental problems—I had a moment of clarity and said, “This isn’t the way to live, Chuck. Straighten yourself out.” My father came to pick me up and said, “I want you to live with me,” which I did. Paula had taken all the cars, so I went and bought another Mercedes.
Now I started going out every night. I really wasn’t a club guy, but I became one. The Rainbow, the Roxy—I became one of those guys. I found that I drank more than normal guys, so I was drunk every night. I started getting arrested. The police were actually quite nice to me. I became the town drunk, but the town was Los Angeles! They’d see me pull out of the Rainbow and they’d have a cop right there. The cop would say, “Chuck”—he’d know my name—“don’t turn left, go right.” And I’d turn left, and they’d take me in.
Eventually I lost everything and ended up living in a cardboard box near skid row in L.A., shunned and a goner. When I was forty-nine, I was cornered by circumstance. I needed a way to be sprung from jail, and all the rehabs refused me. My only option was another detox. Dr. Michael Myers, who had detoxed me many times, devised a new plan. “Forget detoxing,” he said. He said I needed long-term care, and he got me into a last-chance drug rehab facility called Cri-Help in North Hollywood. I didn’t believe I could quit. The desire to die and end it ate away at my soul.
I needed a supportive friend and found one in Mike Finnigan, who had been a professional musician his entire life, having done studio work with Jimi Hendrix, Rod Stewart, and many others. He toured with Crosby, Stills & Nash for twenty years. A recovering alcoholic himself, Mike came to visit me often at Cri-Help. I told him I couldn’t take my life anymore and asked him what I should do.
His advice was simple: “Chuck, I’ve never seen anyone but God help a junkie like you. Maybe you should try prayer.”
A few days after he said that, I got down on my knees in my room. What I prayed was for God to either let me die or to give me one minute of peace from the obsession and sickness that was tearing me apart body and soul. That’s when the agony broke inside me. I was able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time after weeks of sheer misery, and when I woke up, I knew I had been given a gift. I had a chance, some window had opened, because I felt willing to go through that day before me. I surrendered my soul. I remember the clear thought I had: “If I am so willing to die, why not be willing to live?”
Once I surrendered, I was so drained I couldn’t lift myself off the bed. Yet I felt free from all the fear, anger, and rage that had beset me. I saw that the demons chasing me were nothing compared to the heroin hell I had chosen for more than twenty years. I went from feeling weak, desperate, and dying to saved. That’s the only way I can explain the beginning of what was for me a miracle. I got a fresh start on life. It was an epiphany, and it was set in motion by the act of prayer.
I try to help others overcome their habits today. After receiving the gift of sobriety, I want to share it with others. I wanted to share it with Mark, who had lived with me in an abandoned building. I helped get him cleaned up and found him a billeting at a recovery center in L.A. He lasted five months before he went back to jail on a heroin possession charge. I know that even a few years clean and sober at the end would be better than a die-hard junkie could imagine. It can be that way for Mark and others like him. I think of Mark as me. I cannot give up on any addict, because I know you can make it if you are willing to go the distance. It may sound simpleminded, but if you are willing to change everything, everything changes. That reality has penetrated my soul.
Now I spend much of my time working with recovery programs. I also perform at ten benefits a year to raise money for recovery and sober-living houses. Sometimes a rock-and-roll manager offers to pay me to go out on the road and watch over a druggie singer. Most of the time I try to help but don’t want to be paid. Helping others who suffer from this terrible disease is my favorite work. I’m not a Holy Roller or selling anything. I’m on a spiritual quest to be the best person I can be, knowing that peace in this life will come to me as I strive towards that goal.
As someone who had a lifetime of abuse, I can only see my success with my struggle today as a long, long process. Considering how long I used drugs, you could say I am a recovery baby. I’ve taken ugly shortcuts and wrong paths so much in my life that it’s a fight to keep the proper
focus. I still need treatment on a daily basis.
To be in recovery is to participate in a living miracle. Rarely does anyone address the fact that addicts really pay the consequences of their actions. We are often dismissed for having made a choice to do something bad. And we are not asking you to forget what we did or for a break. We change our whole lives—from top to bottom—more than most people do or even consider. I think addicts are taking more abuse than anyone could wreak on them for their mistakes—I’m thinking of people who claim that alcoholics get off easy in the moral dilemma by crying, “Mea culpa.” I would like to silence these people and get them to see the facts, because the alcoholic or drug addict does pay a huge price.
“I drank too much,” said Donald Westerhazy.
“We all drank too much,” said Lucinda Merrill.
“It must have been the wine,” said Helen
Westerhazy. “I drank too much of that claret.”
—John Cheever, “The Swimmer”
Mariette Hartley
(actor)
* * *
ABOVE ALL, I ADMIRE Mariette Hartley for her bracing, forthright honesty. This fine actress has had the courage to face in her life the anguish of an unhappy background. Mariette has spoken out so eloquently in her writing, to recovery groups, and in prisons. She talks about how she went from dark to light. How she overcame the tyranny of outward appearances that whipped a girl into shape, requiring of her impassiveness, restraint, and “the stiff upper lip.”
She has told and shown others who have been abused that when the child and creative self are crimped and crippled by an environment, it is possible as an adult to widen one’s circumference and regenerate fully. Mariette is known to many for helping reclaim individuals who are abused as well as addicted—reclaim them from placidity and despair.
Although I interviewed Mariette in Los Angeles where she lives, this lovely woman’s formation was in New England, where harsh winters and lush summers epitomize the life cycle. An old regional term is “to hive away,” meaning to close the shutters on the outside world and to recede into self. The feminist literary critic Tillie Olsen wrote about the silences, harmful, anguished ones to which creative women have been especially prone: “The unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being but cannot.”
Mariette has struggled with the silence of extreme denial, and is!
I come from a highly creative community: Westport/Weston, Connecticut, before it was gentrified and made fancy. Before Banana Republic … B.B.R.! I grew up in the forties. It was a very artistic, hard-drinking, alcoholic community. I didn’t know of many families that didn’t drink, and those that didn’t were boring, so I never wanted to go over to their houses. Drinking was a desirable life-style that books, movies, and advertising romanticized. Getting blotto on the 5:31 [commuter train] was the source of myriad New Yorker cartoons.
I was kind of a typical kid living in the waters of extraordinary dysfunction without being aware of it until much later on. It’s like being a fish and being used to where you’re living. Until you jump out of the tank, you don’t really get to look at how muddy the water is. I have a brother, a wonderful brother, Tony, fifteen months younger than me, and I had two parents who fell down a lot. Martinis were the thing, and my father was caught in the morass of that. Absolutely stuck.
In those days, that’s what everybody did. They drank their lunches, and you’d sober up if you could in the club car coming back home. Dad’s drinking began a slow but steady escalation when he began the Westport–New York commute around 1946. As I look back on it, I guess Dad was pretty high every time he came home from the city. Advertising men were not only famed for their martini lunch, they were also notorious for infiltrating the bar on the 5:31, the commuter special, the traveling cocktail lounge. And we would come and meet my father singing “here come my Daddy now” in our little Dr. Dentons, in the old Buick. It was like missing two people, because Mother by this time would have started drinking. She was a buddy drinker. And of course, we weren’t aware of any of this. It was just not part of our vocabulary.
My brother and I used to sit at the top of the stairs in this wonderful farmhouse we used to live in, and people would arrive at the famous Hartley parties. My dad made the best martinis in town, and I’d watch people gradually fall over as the night wore on. It was a daily occurrence. Not necessarily with my parents, but with guests that would come. I remember watching a woman just fall over completely backwards once. Watching my father fall off … slide off of a sofa as we were watching television. He had delirium tremens and was foaming at the mouth. It became a devastating rescue a great deal of the time. And again, I didn’t understand what it was, which is why education is so important for me now.
It wasn’t until much, much later when I started working in the mental health community that I realized that both of my parents were mentally ill, and that alcohol was their way of handling that. My father was a manic-depressive who was painting horrible manic-depressive paintings before he died. My mother was either the same as my dad or clinically depressed—I was never quite sure. When you are the child of two alcoholics who are also mentally ill, you’re defending against their defense. It’s a quagmire. So much of my recovery has been posing the question “What is the reality and what is the fantasy?”
Breakfasts were odd for me because it was always as if nothing had happened the night before, so I hadn’t seen my mother curled up in the forsythia bushes the night before. I hadn’t carried her home or helped her into the house. I hadn’t seen what I had seen: the rages, the fights. I didn’t know what a blackout was. I just knew you didn’t talk. In the unconscious, it was a blackout. And I grew up believing their mythology, which was a mythology of silence: “Don’t tell.” Blackouts were big in my family, particularly with my mother. Nothing was ever discussed. The family started disintegrating even more when I was in high school.
I started drinking when I was fourteen because my boyfriend drank. He was also an alcoholic, or alcohol dependent—I can’t really call him an alcoholic unless he calls himself that. Because I had so much shame and guilt, which I felt on some level I was born with. I had sexual feelings at an early age. I describe myself as a ripe peach in a family of dried up bananas. There was this feeling I was the juicy one, and an outsider. I had these feelings and didn’t know where to put them, and my mother greeted me with this extraordinary silence. In that silence, there is this sense of extraordinary shame. Not only do I have these feelings, but I’m leading little boys down the block into hell! … “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.” I think what my mother ultimately tried to do—and she said this—this is a very Waspy thing, I think, because they drank: She was drinking with me one night, heavily, and she said, “You know, the only way I thought I could control you was through guilt.” What does that leave a little child with but that “my feelings and needs are too big, I’m too tall, I’m too everything.” If I was going to be sexual during high school, which was something I was kind of being pushed into, the only way I could do it was to drink. You see, I couldn’t deal with the shame. Also, it kind of loosened me up and I had less resistance. I was incredibly resistant.
An example of my denying my physical body and my internal wounds was when I was nineteen and involved in an abusive relationship, and had jumped from the frying pan to the fire. I was a married teenager, doing the play St. Joan. I’d just come back from the library where I’d written down her whole trial for witchcraft and heresy. I’d copied it word-for-word. It had taken days. We had written the piece for CBS. My husband and I were driving in the car and he started to hit me, and I could see his hand coming at me. In order to avoid the hit—and this is how my brain was and how it had been trained—I jumped out of the car. We were going thirty miles an hour! My whole right side hit the curb, yet it never occurred to me to get help or see a doctor. It wasn’t talked about. This seems an astonishing reflex to me now.
When I tested pregnant, it was Chris
tmas Eve, and again I was working. I was on tour here in Los Angeles. My mother said to me, “Well, you’re going for an abortion, aren’t you?” And I wanted that child. I was devastated. It may have turned out for the best, whoever knows? But all I said was, “Well, I hadn’t planned on that.”
Christmas Eve I was still performing. We went down to Mexico, had the abortion on a kitchen table, came back, and had Christmas dinner with my aunt and uncle in Pasadena, and it was never mentioned. And I went on stage that night! You can see how thoroughly I learned not to tell family secrets, not to reveal. I’m working on a one-woman show, and it’s like “How can I say these things without blame? But it’s not to blame, it’s like painting.” In my father’s terms, we painted ourselves with guardedness. Even the wonderful things in my growing up had an edge of negativity of judgment. And the big voice in my head wasn’t my dad’s. He was mushy and adored me—there was that whole wonderful, unspoken feeling that he and I got each other creatively. It was my mother’s, without understanding. So often those people who don’t give us what we need, it’s from their limitation rather than ours. But when you’re the fish in this tank asking for food or whatever growing up, you don’t know that.
We children know not to ask for things, not to tell people directly what we wanted or needed because someone, usually my mother, would have a terrible reaction. My brother would come home from a fair or the park, and he would have ice cream all over his mouth. She would get physically ill. There was a sense of physical messiness being sin.
The Harder They Fall Page 16