High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  I said, “Talk me through it,” so he did. And I was off to the fucking races. Daddy’s little girl, all grown up.

  I was happy to be where I was. With my Dad. Doing drugs all day and night. I tried to shoot myself up a few more times, with varying success. Dad wouldn’t prepare syringes for me, and I was scared that the loaded ones I found around the house would be too much for me and cause me to overdose. So I’d try to do part of one, or I’d chicken out midshot and miss my vein. But there were plenty of new, colorful pills to lab-test on myself. Every so often I’d join Dad for the drive in to New York to pick up drugs and supplies at the pharmacy. Otherwise, I just stayed home and partied with Dad and Gen. I had escaped Jeff, and now I lived a much more palatable version of terrible with people I knew and loved.

  Dad and Gen had won custody of Tam. Dad, true to form, had convinced the courts that the situation with Tam was all a big misunderstanding—he and Gen weren’t junkies. They loved their son and wanted nothing more than to provide a good home for him in the fancy Connecticut home that they would soon litter with umpteen needles.

  In Connecticut, they had forged an odd friendship with their next-door neighbors. The Thurlows were a young, friendly, well-rounded, churchgoing family. When I showed up they invited us all to dinner so their young daughter Katie, who had acted in school plays, could meet the TV star next door. It was the night of their son Michael’s first Communion. I showed up several hours late, on downers. I sat next to Katie, laboring over weighty decisions like how to get a fork up to my mouth, but before I could eat much of dinner, I passed out, face-planting in a plate of mashed potatoes. Katie must have been shocked to see this whole new side of Julie Cooper. My dad, for once at a loss, tried to blame my behavior on antibiotics. He needn’t have bothered trying to sustain the charade. That night he left a trench coat at the Thurlows with a bloody tourniquet and prescription pad in the pocket. All I can hope is that the Thurlows dined out for years on their tale of the degenerate neighbors who spoiled their son’s Communion dinner. We owed them that.

  Though Dad’s supply seemed endless, he controlled what Gen and I used. She was his pregnant wife, I was his daughter—could be that he wanted to protect us, but more likely he just relished being the drug master. On April Fools’ Day, Gen and I found a Dilaudid, an opiate stronger than morphine, on the floor, hiding in the carpet behind the door like a little chocolate Easter egg that somehow stayed hidden through all previous hunts. I suspect Dad had dropped it there. He liked to plant little surprises for us to find.

  I snapped the pill in two, and in true Genevieve fashion she snatched half and ran. Who knows what she did with hers, but I immediately shot up the other half. Dilaudid is synthetic heroin that’s given to terminal cancer patients for pain. I felt the instant surge of euphoria and went upstairs to lie down. A few hours later I woke up to hear a commotion downstairs. I came to the top of the stairs, but Dad yelled up for me to stay where I was. Gen had just given birth to my little sister on the couch.

  Bijou was born tiny. It was spring, but snow was falling, and the volunteer ambulance guys who finally showed up had no oxygen and no heat and they were hell drunk. They rushed Bijou to a nearby hospital and she was soon transferred to the Yale–New Haven Newborn Special Care Unit.

  The first time I saw Bijou was in the hospital. She was so small, all wiry arms and legs, hooked up to a million monitors in a special crib. She may have been born into irresponsible, reckless hands, but Bijou was a beautiful, perfect, heavenly light sparkling through the clouds. We loved her—we all loved her immediately, deeply, and relentlessly.

  Dad, Gen, Tam, and I moved to a hotel right near Yale–New Haven to keep vigil on our little jewel. My father was self-righteous about his drug use, but he didn’t want to lose Bijou, and he knew that he had something to hide from the powers that be. When we went to the hospital, Dad hid the track marks on his arms with long-sleeved shirts. But that didn’t cover the track marks on his hands. An old junkie trick is to cover up track marks with a layer of toothpaste, then spread makeup on top. Effective and thrifty. Every day before we went into the special care unit I covered my dad’s tracks for him. They kept the nursery warm for the newborns, and when Dad put on gloves to hold Bijou, he’d start to sweat and the makeup would get gooey under the gloves—it looked like his hands were melting off inside them. I think of those sweaty, goopy, destroyed hands, the hands that held Bijou so gently, the hands that made music, the hands that reflected a life of contradictions and despair.

  There’s a song from the fifties by a band called Lambert, Hendricks & Ross called “Bijou.” I’d sing it to her—ma petite bijou—while I rubbed her tiny feet and tiny legs. Little Bijou— she has triumphed over incredible odds. Her story is her own, but my culpability is part of it. I witnessed the dangers of Genevieve’s pregnancy. I shot up with her. I was there, complicit, the night of Bijou’s birth. My brother Tamerlane was about ten years old. He and I shared a room at the hotel near the hospital, and while I prayed for our sister’s survival from a drug-wrecked birth, I did coke in front of him many times.

  I had no sense of the hypocrisy in how much I loved my two younger siblings and how damaging my actions may have been to them. I watched them endure horrific parenting; I behaved irresponsibly in front of them; and later I would make essentially the same mistakes with my own son. There are people in the world who do these things, and I was one of them. We all survived, but barely.

  Then, out of the blue, Dad decided that I needed to go to rehab. I was taken aback. Excuse me? I need to go to rehab? What about you? But Dad had a point. While he was preoccupied with Bijou, his control of my drugs slackened and my use escalated dramatically. I think Pat McQueeney must have chimed in to persuade Dad to get me help, and he in turn convinced me to go to a psychiatric facility called Silver Hill. It was a country club–like rehab in tony New Canaan that Dad thought was cool because Truman Capote used to go there to dry out. I agreed to go—I’d reached a point where the drugs weren’t fun. I was just stuck in a cycle of needing more and more and I wanted out. Silver Hill didn’t have much experience with drug addiction—I believe I was one of the first cocaine patients they ever had—but they took me in.

  My father came to visit me. It pissed me off that I was in rehab when his habit was worse than mine, though any sensible person could’ve seen that it wasn’t a competition. I said, “You know what? This isn’t fair. You’re as bad off as I am.” I made him check in and join me as a patient. It’s safe to say that neither of us was wholly committed to recovery, but I, at least, was clean. Dad, on the other hand, asked me to pee in a cup for him and hide it in the woods so he could hand them my pee when they drug-tested him. Eventually he just checked himself out. Maybe they caught him swapping pee cups. I don’t know how it went down.

  I met a guy at rehab named Dolfi Aberbach. Like me, he was in for cocaine. He was tall, elegant, and charming. I thought he was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Dolfi and I spent a lot of time talking and becoming close friends. After a couple of weeks, Dolfi signed himself out, which meant he was leaving without completing his rehab, against medical advice. The next day I signed myself out. So much for staying clean. As I left, the staff said, “Say hello to Dolfi.”

  Genevieve came to pick me up in a limo and the first stop was to buy cocktails for two. Because cocktails are an excellent way to celebrate ditching rehab. When we arrived home we did shots of tincture of morphine. Morphine: more celebration. Later that day we took a car into Manhattan to see Dolfi, and I stayed.

  Dolfi and I didn’t even pretend to want to be clean. In Connecticut, at Dad’s, I’d never gotten the hang of needles. Now, in a matter of days, Dolfi taught me to shoot up for real, and we proceeded to shoot outrageous amounts of cocaine together. We were young. We were rich. Money from reruns and/or syndication was accumulating now that Jeff had stopped draining the coffers. We could go anywhere and do anything we wanted. We chose to sit around and shoot coke. Sometimes we drove to
Connecticut to see Bijou and Tam and to partake in Dad’s wares. We’d crouch down in the back of the limo, shooting up all the way. We visited Betsy Asher, my ex-boyfriend’s ex-wife, at her hotel and snuck into the bathroom to do a shot. Coke was all we did day and night.

  Back in L.A., my cousin Patty was getting married, but I didn’t go. Patty had been in a relationship with a cinematographer named Bradford L. May for years. Bradford used to come with Patty to tapings of One Day at a Time, and he had a distinctive, honking laugh. When I watch tapes of the shows, I can still recognize Brad’s funny laugh. Patty and Bradford were domestic, nesting. I went over to their house a lot before I lived with Jeff—before I stopped seeing most of my family—but now there was no way I’d make it to her wedding. I should have been there. I should have been a bridesmaid, but I was too out of it to go through the motions of civilized life.

  Dolfi wasn’t a devil in disguise. Of all people to instruct me in the bad habits that I was already chasing, Dolfi was as sweet and warm a companion as one might find. That was part of the problem. We think of users and dealers as scuzzy people who scam and manipulate, but so many of my drug companions were dear, dear friends, people I enjoyed and loved. It wasn’t a matter of good and evil, black and white. So I kept at it.

  16

  The drugs kept running out and I kept calling Pat McQueeney from New York to ask for more money. Finally, she refused to send me anything but a ticket back to L.A. I moved in with my mother in Tarzana, where my brother Jeff had also landed with his own rampant drug habit. Neither of us was in good enough shape to live on our own. I’d been shooting coke day and night for months. I was painfully thin, and my arms ached. I’d been a human pincushion and the result was clogged veins, dying and collapsed veins. Every morning my mother massaged my arms and legs to restore my circulation.

  One morning when my mom was rubbing my arms she looked up at me and said, “Your eyes look yellow.” By the next morning my skin was yellow too. I had hepatitis B. At St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, I was put in isolation. All attendants and visitors had to wear face masks. Most of the time I was alone, and I lay in the bath amazed at how bright yellow I looked against the white ceramic tub.

  It had only been two months since Bijou was born. In that time I’d been in and out of rehab. I’d had a sweet but drug-infested love affair and come back home. But 1980 wasn’t over yet, and there was more trouble ahead. On June 9, I was at the recording studio where I’d worked with Jeff Sessler, hanging out with my friend Lisette. I received a call from my cousin Nancy. She was sobbing, but she managed to tell me that my cousin Patty had died. I sat there in shock. The memory of that moment breaks my heart every time.

  Patty was six years older than I was, twenty-five, a beautiful girl who always wore a pendant that was the hand of Fatima. Two weeks earlier she had married Bradford, her youth and beauty and their happiness masking her drug problems. I remembered how when we were teens we’d sometimes drive into Hollywood to explore, just peeking into stores or walking down Hollywood Boulevard, staring at the sparkly bits of quartz in the sidewalk. Patty said, “I do believe we’re in the City of Glitter.” The whole world felt like our Oz, our playland, and we spent days with each other just wandering around tripping.

  Patty, who was my companion for years, my happy sidekick in the City of Glitter. She could sing like nobody’s business. She was funny, quirky, my beloved sister, and now she was gone.

  What happened to her could have happened to me on any number of occasions, except that it didn’t. She was at a party and apparently some guys gave her a hotshot, a lethal injection of drugs, so they could take advantage of her. Patty passed out and a friend—a sketchy girl whom we never found after she told her story to the cops—brought Patty back to her apartment, put her on the couch, and went to sleep. When her friend woke up in the morning, Patty was still out cold. The friend left for work, and by the time she came home Patty was dead.

  The last time I had seen Patty was at my house in Laurel Canyon before it burned to the ground. Jeff and I had just gotten together, and things hadn’t soured yet. Patty came over and in the course of the evening she got progressively more fucked up. We were playing a board game, of all things, on a glass coffee table, and Patty was out of it in a sloppy, barbiturate way, bumping into things and slurring her words. It’s best to be in that state when you’re with others in exactly the same boat. When you’re not wasted like that and someone else is, it’s kind of gross. I told Patty to go to bed. I said, “Come on, you’re going to hurt yourself. You’re going to break something. Just go lie down.” But Patty wanted to play and kept knocking things over. It was unattractive. I’ve been that way myself, and I’m sure that people told me to go to bed just as I’d told Patty. But on this particular night I was sharp to her, saying, “Go, I love you, but just go to bed.” Now, after all those years of being so close, I was stuck with that as my last encounter with Patty.

  That night I did anything and everything to remove myself from reality. I stayed at Lisette’s and slept with her and some guy. The next morning I scored a bunch of street Quaaludes (meaning they were fake, not pharmaceutical) and took them. By the time I arrived at Patty’s funeral I was really high. Everyone looked at me as if to say “How could you? How could you show up here like this?” And I thought, How couldn’t I? I’ll never forget the moment I saw Aunt Rosie, from behind, walking into the funeral parlor. She was bent in half, crying. She lost one girl to drugs, and another of her girls was to all appearances on her way to the same grave. I know I added to her pain that day.

  Michelle and Pat McQueeney shuffled me into the back of a limousine and insisted that I wait in the car during Patty’s memorial service.

  After the service, Michelle started telling me I was overdosing and had to go to the hospital. Michelle was always a presence at family events, a voice of reason, a stabilizing force. She was afraid for me, again, always. This time she had black hair for a part in a film and was wearing a Spanish mantilla made of black lace. I was too creeped out by her Addams Family look to defend myself. They took me to have my stomach pumped. I have no memory of that part at all.

  The following weeks were a blur of sex, drugs, whatever I imagined would mask my pain. I was grieving for Patty. I am still to this day.

  Two years after Patty died, Aunt Rosie gave me a framed picture of her, heartbreakingly young, smiling, caught forever in the time when we were so happy and blithe and sure that we could have as much fun as we dared without risking anything. I move that picture around my house, onto my porch, as if to bring Patty with me, a sister-guardian. On the back, in Aunt Rosie’s handwriting, it says:

  Tell me then must I perish—

  Like the flowers that I cherish?

  Nothing remaining of my name?

  Nothing remembered?—oh no!

  I know to all who loved me—

  I’ll always be young!

  The songs I sang will still be sung!

  And there will be flowers;

  And poems;

  And pictures with pretty smiles.

  RAT 2/82

  After Patty died, my brother Jeffrey and I moved in together. It was a cute two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood where our friends came to hang out. Danny Sugarman, Jeffrey, and I shared needles and drugs. Ah, friends and family.

  When I wasn’t using, I was busy with my divorce. I had had Jeff Sessler evicted from the house, all accounts canceled, and all cars repossessed. But Jeff, who had spent as much of my money as he possibly could, countersued. Pat McQueeney had wanted to arrange a prenuptial agreement but I forbade it, saying that Jeff wouldn’t ever hurt me that way. What a trusting, blind fool I was. I’d been under Jeff’s spell when we were married, but now I saw our relationship for what it had been. Jeff was a wannabe. A wannabe producer, a wannabe rock star, a wannabe drug dealer. He saw me, or at least my money, as a ticket to these things. I do think he loved me, but it was a sick, controlling passion that sucked me dry emotional
ly, physically, and financially.

  Ours must have been one of the first high-profile divorces in which a man was asking for alimony from a woman, because it caused quite a stir. We were in the courthouse in Beverly Hills every day and the evening news reported on it every night. Connie Chung was standing outside the courthouse talking about my divorce. It was surreal.

  Weirdly, in spite of our court battle, Jeff and I never behaved like real enemies. We always said hi in court. Yes, he’d been bleeding me dry, but I was bleedable. Yes, he was trying to take me to the cleaners, but he was entitled to alimony under the letter of the law. I didn’t feel hatred for that. I had been in love with Jeff. I was married to the guy. The love didn’t just disappear because it all fell apart. No matter what hidden sides had emerged, he was still the person I had fallen in love with. I don’t believe in cutting people out of my life or erasing experiences. I am who I am by way of where I’ve been. Jeff was a terrible mistake on the road to many terrible mistakes, but he was part of an experience that I refused to regret. I didn’t blame him for who he turned out to be. I just needed to get out, and that’s what I was doing. But the old love made it hard, and the press made it harder. The whole thing took a toll on me. I was already so wrecked physically and emotionally.

  The night before a particularly big day in court, my brother and I stopped by his pill doctor and picked up some Tuinal. We went shopping to buy me a new dress for the occasion, then home to get high. I took a few pills, and then I took more. I wondered how many I’d had. Was this my second round, or had I already had seconds? How many had I taken the first time? It didn’t matter. All I knew was that I wanted to be more high. As what I thought was probably my second round started to kick in, I went into my bedroom to lie down for a moment.