High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  Aunt Rosie said, “We don’t want him here. Don’t you dare tell him.” It amazed and infuriated me that people could let this personal stuff get in the way of a mother and a son. I wasn’t a parent yet, but I knew what my father meant to Dini. She was born on a reservation in Oklahoma. She saw the world in plain terms. It didn’t matter how fucked up her son was, he was her life. I understood that my family had lost respect for my father. He deserved that. But nothing could justify depriving him and his mother of their last good-bye.

  The decision to contact Dad was thorny enough, but finding him was nearly impossible. Once again I went into overdrive, dialing every number I knew and saying, “His mother’s dying. You have to help me find him.” Finally, before I had to call Mick Jagger again, I found Dad in New York. I said, “Look, Dad, Dini’s in the hospital and I think you should come.” Dad and I were both drug fiends, but at this point he was broke and I had money to burn. I bought him and Genevieve first-class plane tickets and met them at the airport in a stretch limo.

  I don’t know how long it had been since my father and his mother had seen each other, but when I picked him up at the airport, Dad was a mess. My father grew up with a father who was a mean drunk. My grandfather spent days, nights, years drinking bottle after bottle of Four Roses bourbon in the locked cellar while his wife, my grandmother Dini, carried the weight of the family on her shoulders. As damaged as my father was, his mother had been his salvation. My family was against me bringing him to the hospital, but a man as tortured and complicated and fucked up as my dad was—this moment was deeply important to him. I couldn’t let it go by. We went straight from the airport to Dini’s bedside.

  When we arrived, Dini wasn’t conscious. Dad, kneeling at her side, was still almost as tall as I was. He said, “Mom, Mom.”

  When my father spoke, my grandmother came to. She opened her eyes and said, “My boy, Johnny, my boy,” then let her lids fall again. It was clear to me that this woman had been waiting to see her son. Gen was being a drama queen, as always. She said, “Oh, Dini, Dini!”

  Dad looked at her and said, “Shut the fuck up, Gen. Get out of here.” Gen left the room and Dad put his head down next to his mother and stroked her hand. He stayed with her that way for a good long while. It was a tender scene. How could anyone be angry enough to deprive these two of that moment? I could never be that angry.

  Dini died shortly after we left the room. It was January 20, 1980.

  About a month later Alan Horn, the head of the production company, called me and Pat McQueeney into his office. I didn’t know what the meeting was about—maybe to renegotiate my contract or to say “Good job, kid.” I knew that ratings had skyrocketed since my return from suspension.

  Alan fired me.

  I was shocked. This may be equally shocking to those I worked with, but I didn’t know I was creating a problem. I knew I was doing drugs. I knew I was late every single day. But I was under the impression that my performance wasn’t suffering.

  If I’d been older and wiser, maybe I’d have gotten the message when Alan Rafkin had custom coffee cups made for everyone. Mine showed me running and had excuses written all over it: The traffic was bad; My alarm didn’t go off; I got lost. (He tactfully excluded I used gonorrhea eyedrops and I had a miscarriage.) I should have seen the writing on the cup—I had run out of excuses.

  I always found energy for the show. I always got it up for my performance before the studio audience, but that wasn’t enough. My exhaustion showed at rehearsals and between takes. I wasn’t a positive presence. And my drug use had taken a toll on my appearance. I was painfully thin and my skin was terrible—acne exacerbated by malnutrition. It was increasingly difficult for them to shoot me. Skinny wasn’t joke material for Schneider anymore. For as long as I can remember, little old ladies have come up to me on the street and said, “I’m praying for you, dear. I’ve been praying for you since you were a little girl.” People who used to watch the show tell me they tuned in to see how fucked up I was, how skinny I could get. They saw that I was disappearing, body and soul.

  On True Hollywood Story, Alan Rafkin recalled what happened from his perspective: “I had been told that the next time she came in unable to perform I was to call and they would send her to a doctor for a drug test and proceed from there. On March 3, 1980, she came in clinging to a wall. She sat in the makeup chair making no sense. She failed the drug test. Within hours she was fired.”

  I was the last to know how fucked up I was. Clearly there was a time when things got out of control and it was obvious to everyone but me. I don’t remember being mean or rude, but I do remember being defensive, saying, “I’m fine. What are you guys talking about? Everything’s okay.” I’m sure I was out of it, apologetic, defensive, making excuses, justifying. The show, all its employees, the ratings, the money it earned—it all relied on me, and I was the thin and thinner embodiment of unreliability. There was a lot at stake, and I was a loose cannon. But I don’t think stabilizing the show was the only reason they fired me. Everyone knew I was in trouble. Firing me was their attempt to help me.

  I felt like my family was kicking me out of the house for dropping a fork. Obviously what I was doing was much more destructive and unprofessional than dropping a fork, but that’s as close as I can come to how it felt—the people I loved were giving up on me way before I’d given up on myself. Nonetheless, I treated the firing as if it was something as trivial as losing my phone book. I loved the idea of being on the show, but it had fallen into my lap. So much had been handed to me that for all I knew, life would go on like that. Everything would be okay. I had no idea how many bridges I had burned and no idea what I had lost. The show had been the most stable, constant part of my life for six years that began when I was still an eager teenager full of energy and promise. Now I was a different person, and though I didn’t know it yet, I had squandered my best opportunity.

  I think they wrote Julie out of the show by having her run away. I can’t be sure—it’s not like I celebrated being fired by having viewing parties to watch the show go on without me— but I believe that Julie ran out on her husband, and it was about time for me to do the same.

  Jeff was waiting for me in the parking structure when I came out of the meeting. I climbed into the car and said, “That’s it. I’m fired.” We went straight to the dealer’s house.

  When I was fired from One Day at a Time, I didn’t realize what I had. I thought, Fuck them. I’ll get another job. But I’d already dug my grave. Drugs were expensive and my paycheck was gone, but I had no luck getting work. I’d hear about jobs that sounded right for me, but nobody could get me an appointment for an audition. Word was out in the industry that I was unreliable, and nobody wanted to hire me. I was blacklisted. And they were right. I was completely out of control. And we were running out of cash. Work had been a stabilizing force, and once it was gone, my life began to crumble. Now that I wasn’t leaving for work every day, I was home. Home in the marriage that had begun with a flameout of destruction and ruin. Home with Jeff, the man whose own mother had warned me against him.

  In the beginning Jeff was cocky and confident, which was attractive until it veered into excess. We had an amazing sex life, but now that wasn’t enough for him. We’d have threesomes and I’d have to watch him fuck other women. To watch the man I loved have sex with other people was painful, and to see him take glee in my sadness was heartbreaking.

  When I still had a job, Jeff had started to become controlling and possessive. When I went to work I had to take my pager so he could reach me at all times. Even so, I’d come home to an interrogation: Where have you been? Who did you talk to? Who was that guy? He was afraid of losing me.

  Now that I was home, he grew more threatening. I had known women who were abused by men, and now I saw how it happened. My attentive, doting husband was becoming one of those men. I don’t know if his abusiveness was triggered by marriage, money, drugs, or all three, but suddenly he was no longer the silly, lovin
g man I’d married and I was a prisoner. If I stood up, Jeff wanted to know where I was going. If he didn’t want me to leave, he’d say, “You’re not going. Sit down.” He told me, “If you leave me, you leave with half a face.” He slept with his hand under my thigh. He didn’t let me see anyone he didn’t want me to see. My family was worried about me—so they fell into the category of people he didn’t want me to see.

  By the time I realized what was happening, my relationship had blown up in my face. Our home grew increasingly violent. Jeff threw me down the stairs. I kicked him in the balls. We got into a huge fight on a night when Jeff’s father and his girlfriend were staying at our house. I called to his dad to help me but the man wouldn’t help. I never liked that man.

  Jeff was out of control, doing crazy drug stuff, spending all my money, fucking other girls in front of me. One night I woke to find him shaking my shoulder. As I opened my eyes, he asked me to sign a blank check. I rolled over and socked him in the nose. It wasn’t the money, though he was bleeding me dry, it was the inhumanity. I’m not a violent person, but I had never had anyone try to put me under his thumb like that. It came really close to breaking my spirit. I put up a front, pretending that everything was fine, but I was falling apart. I lost all sense of myself. I was a walking skeleton. A zombie. I felt soul-sick.

  It all came to a head one weekend. Jeffrey and I had bought a huge amount of cocaine that he was planning to sell at a profit. Soon he was hoovering it up, while insisting that I not use the “merchandise,” which I did anyway. Maybe all druggies have this battle, trying to turn their passion for drugs into a business, wheeling and dealing, stealing and cheating themselves, resenting one another for diminishing the supply. Whatever the case, between our two out-of-control selves, we ended up doing all of the cocaine that we had planned to sell.

  Jeff said, “Go to McQueeney’s and get a check.” He wanted me to get money from my manager, Pat McQueeney, so we could pay our dealers for the coke. It’s one of those moments I see from above, as if someone described it to me, but nobody else was there. I was wearing red overalls, a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, and sneakers. I gave Jeff a kiss and got into my car. This was my chance, the first time he’d let me leave the house alone in weeks and weeks. I was about to save my own life. I beeped the horn twice on the way down the hill, like I always did. I glanced over my shoulder at the house. Many times I had stayed up all night and become delusional at that house. I never went back.

  I drove straight to Pat McQueeney’s office, burst through the door, and told her, “I’m half dead, so unless you want to finish me off, file for divorce right now.”

  I was broken, distraught, lost. From the outside the marriage may have seemed doomed from the start, but I had been too wrapped up in it to see that. Since I had sacrificed Peter, I had to believe that Jeff was the love of my life.

  Running away took all my strength, but once I made the break, I did everything I could to make sure it was permanent. In seven months of marriage I had lost seven hundred thousand dollars, much of it to drugs and Jeff’s spending. My bank account was drained, my house was gone, and I knew that if nothing changed I’d be destitute, drug-addicted, and married to an asshole. I told Pat to cut Jeff off, and to repossess his car and everything he had that I had bought.

  Jeff was going to be mighty pissed. I had to get out of L.A. I called the person who, in my twisted mind, represented safety: my father. I knew my father wouldn’t say I told you so. I knew he wouldn’t judge me. I had pushed the rape aside. It didn’t matter in this moment. I knew that this was one of those times when Dad would come to my rescue, and he did. He said, “You’re coming to New York. Go to the airport, there’s a prepaid ticket waiting for you.”

  I arrived at the airport, and there was no ticket. And the flight he’d told me to take was full. I should have put it together that Dad couldn’t afford a plane ticket, didn’t even have the wherewithal to arrange one. Countless times throughout my life, he’d promised me plane tickets. I always arrived at the airport expecting them to be there, and they never were. I had only myself and my stubborn willingness to believe in him to blame. I whipped out my trusty credit card and got on the next flight.

  When I arrived in New York there was no one there to pick me up. I waited a long time, hours, trying in vain to reach Dad. This, if anything, was the message my father sent me over and over again in the hours I spent waiting for him, wanting his attention, craving his love: I love you. I will rescue you. Don’t count on me.

  15

  I’d been with Jeff for half a year, and during that time I’d lost Peter, my house, my grandmother, my job, and, it seemed, my soul. A fire had swept across my life and left only ashes. But the worst was far from over.

  After I’d been waiting for hours at the airport in New York, a driver finally showed up and took me to Connecticut, where Dad and Gen were now living. Let’s see, what was new with them: Gen was hugely pregnant with her second child, and Dad was hooked on heroin. He was working some scam where he brought blank prescription pads to a pharmacy on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and in return they gave him boxes and boxes of narcotics and syringes, which he’d turn around and sell or trade to street dealers for heroin or cocaine. My father was no longer a stoner musician, or even just a flat-out addict. No, Dad was too smart for that mundanity. He was trafficking drugs, big-time. All hell was about to break loose in that house, but regardless of the drugs, my dad, the loss of Dini—the next cloud to shadow me was brought on by nothing but my own fucked-up, warped self.

  In my dad’s Connecticut house there were loaded syringes hidden everywhere. When you’re a needle freak, there’s comfort in knowing that next time you need a shot, there will be one ready and waiting for you. Besides, I think Dad had to hide them from Genevieve. My dad was at least half a foot taller than anyone else who might come into the house. And so in that beautiful old house he kept them stored on top of bookshelves, balanced on top of window ledges and door frames, stashed out of sight above the refrigerator. Syringes were stowed anywhere normal-size people couldn’t see them.

  Never one to shy away from dispensing fatherly advice, Dad kept telling me that shooting coke was a better high. He said it was like being smacked in the face with a cocaine truck. I’d never shot up before, but the line of fear that I’d drawn at using needles was fading. A better high … that sounded good. Yes! A better high was what I wanted, and I wanted it more than anything. I wanted it so much, in fact, that I couldn’t quite remember what was so bad about needles. There’s a natural progression in anything you do. As you become comfortable at a certain level, the next level becomes more accessible. This is a good thing, say, if you’re skiing. As your skill increases, the expert hills don’t look so steep. But after two years of smoking freebase, I found myself at the unfortunate juncture where shooting up was just skiing down a slightly steeper hill, and I was ready.

  As a child my father’s boundless world had been fun and carefree, like the song “Down the Beach,” which he wrote about Michelle: Things are cooler in my castle … everything is stoned and groovy … I went from being attracted to the liberal ease of it all to being attracted to the dark danger of it. As my dad went down an alternative path, he didn’t lose his appeal. I just switched to what he was doing. Nobody grows up thinking, I want to be a junkie, but in a weird way I did. I wanted to be whatever it took to fit in with my dad, his friends, and his life.

  Where does a girl turn for help when she doesn’t know how to shoot up coke? Daddy. To be fair, once I finally wanted to try it, my father was a little reluctant. After all, it wasn’t exactly teaching your kid to drive a car. But eventually there we were, in the master bathroom. With a look of anticipation, Dad put some coke in a spoon, poured some distilled water into a syringe, and squirt it into the spoon. Then he flipped the syringe over and used the plunger to mix the powder and water. He tore the cotton tip off a Q-tip and dropped it into the solution to filter out impurities. He pulled the liquid thro
ugh the cotton into the syringe, flicked it, and we were ready. He had on half glasses, the reading glasses he wore to see close up. I put my right arm out. He tied me off. He was squinting, trying to see the vein, but when he pushed the needle through my skin he missed. It’s common to miss; maybe I was holding my arm at an odd angle, maybe my vein rolled, maybe, just maybe, he was nervous to be shooting up his own child—but whatever the case, he missed. I was pissed off. I knew that missed veins caused scarring. I’d seen my father’s arms, covered with dark track marks and thick with white scar tissue. Dad, maybe a little bit relieved, said, “I’m not doing it again. Forget it.”

  I went back to my room with one of his loaded syringes. I wanted to shoot up in my ankle because I didn’t want to ruin my arms. I timidly poked myself a couple times, but I had no idea what I was doing. Then my father walked in. He took in the scene: I was on the floor in an awkward crouch. The needle was tentatively aimed at my ankle. I’d forgotten to make a tourniquet. He said, “Aw, honey. You’re not doing it right. But I’m not going to do it.”