High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  Apparently, my new boyfriend Mark, a beautiful Spanish boy, arrived some time later and asked where I was. He came into my room and found me unconscious on my bed. My cigarette was burning a hole in the blanket. I wasn’t breathing. When they tried to rouse me, my head flopped like a rag doll. Mark and Jeffrey called the paramedics. I know it sounds like a movie cliché, but I remember floating above the scene of the paramedics working to save me. I saw my brother and friends gathered around in tears. For a moment I felt like I had a choice to either go back or die. Next thing I knew I woke up in the ICU. I was released later the next day, and I was high again within hours.

  I had overdosed, and I had nearly died, but so much other shit was going down that nobody made a big deal about my near-death experience, including me. We all attributed it to the stress of the divorce. We didn’t connect it to Patty’s death. We didn’t see that I had been right behind her. I don’t remember feeling scared for myself, scared of death, or scared that it would happen again. The truth is, I was doing everything I could to make sure I never felt anything at all.

  It had been a year of marriage and divorce; rehabilitation and self-destruction; birth and death; love, drama, and pain. Something had to happen to pull us out of the tornado that had sucked me, Jeffrey, Patty, Bijou, Tam, Genevieve, and Dad into its vortex. And it did. In July, nearly a year after I married Jeff and everything went downhill, Dad was arrested for trafficking narcotics. His mother was dead. His niece was dead. His three-month-old daughter’s health was still compromised. Dad had been injecting himself with cocaine every twenty minutes for a year. And now he was facing forty-five years in prison. We were all scared and upset—even Dad, who had treated my arrest at eighteen as a rite of passage. Now he changed his tune.

  It wasn’t exactly a wakeup call—nobody said, “Wow, what we’ve been doing is really, really unhealthy and wrong. We need to clean up our acts.” But nobody wanted Dad to go to jail for forty-five years. Dad and his lawyers started jockeying to change the charges and reduce the sentence. He immediately went into rehab, which would show the court that he was repentant and reformed. Then he called me and asked me to come into treatment. He thought it would look good on his record if he was not only trying to clean up his own act but also helping his own daughter with her vices.

  I was using and living like a pig with my brother. When I wasn’t getting high with someone or trying to get cash or pulling myself together for a court date, I was sleeping or watching General Hospital. It was the summer of Luke and Laura on the run. I stayed in bed for days on end. Empty tequila bottles and pizza boxes littered the floor. When Dad called to ask me to come into treatment, I laughed at the suggestion and went on my merry way.

  Days later Dad called again and I heard something different in his voice. He needed me. This time it was Dad who was calling me for help, and I would do anything to keep him out of jail. Anything. I arrived in New Jersey and for once Dad was actually there to meet me at the airport. The storm of that year—the drugs and helter-skelter and tragedy—was over. We were going to get better, and we were going to do it together. That, at least, was the image we wanted to present.

  PART FOUR

  PAPA’S NEW MAMA

  17

  My father was on trial for conspiracy to distribute narcotics. The potential for that forty-five-year sentence motivated him to get clean as nothing before ever had. Together with his doctor, Mark Gold, Dad hatched a plan designed to land him the most lenient sentence possible. He would first have a very public and zealous rehabilitation and then take a very public and convincing stance against drugs. He would be reformed, and the world would know it. As part of the plan, Dad and Dr. Gold thought that if I stood by his side, equally reformed, it would look like he had spearheaded the recovery of his whole family.

  Dad was the center of the family, of our lives. If orbiting around him meant going to rehab, then there was no question I would do it. I became a day patient at Fair Oaks Hospital in New Jersey. For six weeks I went there every morning for group counseling. At that time Fair Oaks kept drug addicts and alcoholics apart. We went through treatment separately; we even ate separately. I’d look over at the alcoholics in the dining room and think, You wimps. I know it’s warped, but I had junkie pride. The alcoholics were lightweights, soft-core. They didn’t know what a good high or a bad addiction was. We had the best and worst of it. We’d been on the world’s scariest roller coaster, while they’d only ridden the kiddie rides. That roller coaster, in a junkie’s fucked worldview, was the whole point.

  Here’s my favorite part: for some reason the well-intentioned doctors at Fair Oaks Hospital decided that it was perfectly fine for us drug addicts to continue to drink alcohol. Because alcohol wasn’t our drug of choice. Well, that was handy.

  I became friends with a girl named Sue Blue who was working for my dad. Sue Blue was and is a wonderful photographer. She and my father had met in the Hamptons when he was walking down the street with Mick Jagger. Sue Blue asked to photograph them, and she and Dad became friendly. She was talkative and opinionated, but sweet. Before I met her, Dad told me I would be friends with her forever. Sue Blue walked into the kitchen, a New York girl with fuzzy hair and big glasses, and the minute she opened her mouth I got it. Dad was right. We would be friends forever.

  After a long day in drug treatment, Sue Blue and I would drive around in her car and drink wine. In the evenings I’d come home to the “Big House,” a huge house that my father had rented in New Providence, New Jersey. Living there were my dad, Genevieve, Jeffrey, Tamerlane, Bijou, and I, and three counselors from Fair Oaks to keep an eye on us.

  Soon enough Dad, Genevieve, and I discovered that booze helped fill the hole that cocaine (for me and Gen) and heroin (for Dad) had left. But the hole was deep, so it took a lot of booze to fill it. Most of the time we were all drunk off our asses. Even our in-house counselors drank. Because they were drug treatment counselors, so they didn’t have a problem either.

  Still, even with the infusion of alcohol, I was cleaner than I’d been in a very long time. I’d been taking pills so consistently that when I took my birth control pill, I found myself waiting for it to kick in. Nonetheless, I was proud of having stopped. Backstage at a Stones show, I was in the dressing room and Keith Richards came up to me carrying a mirror with a pile of cocaine on it. He said, “Can you say no to this?”

  I took a deep breath and blew that mountain of cocaine into his face. It was one of my shining moments.

  The three years we spent in New Jersey was the first time I really felt like I was part of a big, warm family that wasn’t going anywhere. There were dogs and cats and a boisterous group of people who gathered on stools around the big island in the kitchen. Dad made breakfast every morning: scrambled eggs and fried bologna or pancakes and sausage. Chynna and her little friend Dilyn came to visit. They went to ballet classes and put on shows for all of us. We played basketball in the driveway. There were all kinds of noise and play that made it feel like a big family home. It was closer to normal than my living situation had ever been since we left Virginia.

  Though Genevieve’s mother had come from South Africa to care for Gen’s kids, I often spent time with Bijou, who was a little angel. I’d feed her, change her diaper, take her places, play with her for hours. Tam was going to Catholic school and was supposed to wear a tie every day, so he’d come down for breakfast with crazy rumpled hair and his tie on crooked. He was brilliant—he subscribed to the Wall Street Journal at age nine— but he was no Alex P. Keaton. He was a wild and beautiful spirit, a firecracker crashing around dangerously, hurtling across the room and plowing into you at high speed, running, jumping, building forts, and wrestling with the dogs. But the minute Bijou entered his radius, he’d calm down, stroke her cheek gently, and kiss her sweet head.

  There were still some indications that this wasn’t exactly The Brady Bunch. There were clear gaps in the parenting. One day Sue Blue and I came home to find Bijou in the den on her blanke
t, cheerfully chewing on a pack of Marlboros. She must have had sixteen cigarettes in her mouth. I gently worked them out of her mouth and scavenged out the remaining bits. I can still see that pack on the floor, torn and surrounded by bits of saliva-covered tobacco. No wonder Bijou turned out to be a smoker.

  Genevieve was a wild card. She was drinking like the rest of us, but she was not what one would call a happy drunk. I can’t pretend to know what was going through Genevieve’s head when it came to her children. The only time I saw her express something resembling concern or regret for introducing them to a world of instability and drugs was once when I was sitting by the fireplace in the library at the Big House. Genevieve came into the room, said, “It’s your fault that Bijou’s retarded,” and kicked me as hard as she could in the small of my back with her cowboy boot. I flew across the room and lay sprawled on the floor. Genevieve walked out of the room.

  As anyone who has met, seen, or heard Bijou knows, she grew up to be as smart, beautiful, and talented as she promised to be from day one. I imagine Genevieve was referring to the fact that she and I had shot up together while she was pregnant with Bijou. If violence and aggression were her way of confronting those painful memories or expressing guilt and regret, it didn’t surprise me. Genevieve was an unstable woman who did heartless, abusive things while on drugs, but thankfully in later years she got clean and developed a great relationship with both her kids.

  After I finished my six-week outpatient treatment at Fair Oaks, I became a counselor on the adolescent ward of the hospital, helping to evaluate the kids who came in with psychological, drug, or alcohol problems. Dad was also “recovered,” and the two of us manned a cocaine hotline. When people called I tried to talk them into treatment, explaining that they didn’t have to live that way—there was a way out and this was it.

  Dad and I started doing a lot of antidrug publicity. We shared the cover of People magazine for an article about kicking our drug habit. We appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, The Tonight Show with John Davidson as the guest host, and The Phil Donahue Show. We traveled all over the country to appear on local TV shows and to speak at schools. The media ate it up. We were photographed together going here, going there, flaunting our new, cleaned-up selves. What a heartwarming story of shared recovery.

  At times the public exposure became discomforting. It was so personal. Phil Donahue got my father to show his arms to the camera. Dad’s arms were a crime scene of black lines and cavernous scars—every one seemed a twisted testament of debauchery and self-torture. It was telling too much, showing too much. I pulled Dad’s sleeves back down, saying, “Leave him alone. Don’t do that to him.” We were already discussing our problems with the world. Wasn’t that enough? But for the most part I did whatever Dad and Dr. Gold asked me to do. This was the first time my father had asked me to help him. He needed me—and that was all I needed.

  My father’s trial was still ahead, but he was already planning for life after his sentencing, and, tellingly, he didn’t plan on being a volunteer antidrug counselor and publicist forever. There were a lot of us in that house, and someone needed to finance the happy commune. Dad saw the press surrounding us and wanted to strike while the iron was hot. His idea wasn’t exactly inspired, but it was promising. He would put the Mamas & the Papas back together.

  There was a big market for reunion tours at the time. The Turtles, the Association, Gary Puckett—all pop bands—were capitalizing on it. There was state-fair work across the country, international markets, Vegas. If you could swallow your pride enough to accept the label “revival act” and realize that the second time around was never going to match the first, then the money could be pretty good. But putting the group back together wasn’t exactly easy. He couldn’t raise Mama Cass (Cass Elliot) from the dead, and Michelle had moved on. She was in Los Angeles, an elegant Beverly Hills lady with a flourishing career as an actor. There was no way she’d come back. As soon as Dad started talking about how he’d reconstitute the group, I said, “Not without me, you’re not.” I’d always dreamed of being a musician. Here was a way to be with my father, to make music, and to earn a much-needed paycheck.

  Pat McQueeney was against my joining Dad in his new group. She said, “You need to be in L.A. You need to be auditioning.” McQueeney was a force to be reckoned with. A tall, beautiful woman from a cultured, horsey Connecticut family, Pat knew the industry inside and out. She could get anyone in Hollywood on the phone. She was the one who promoted me, protected me, and did damage control … a lot of damage control. But it wasn’t all business. After all these years, Pat was like a mother to me. And she hated my father. In part she felt that his spectacularly bad influence undid all her hard work, but she also saw him as simply a bad parent. She believed— not unreasonably—that if he hadn’t been around, my life would never have spiraled out of control. Dad, on the other hand, felt threatened by Pat, and the quiet power struggle between them finally culminated in Dad telling me to fire her. He said, “She’s so uptight and straitlaced—how could she possibly understand you? She’s holding you back.”

  Pat was my advocate. She’d invested years in me and my career. But my father told me to fire her, so I fired her. If he’d asked me to walk into a burning building, I would have done it. The look on her face when I told her our professional relationship was over haunted me for years, and even in that moment a part of me knew that what I was doing was a mistake. I would spend years missing her and all she did for me, and all she was to me. But with Pat gone, there was nothing and nobody to stop me from joining the New Mamas & the Papas.

  When I was seven or eight, I snuck into the recording studio that was hidden behind a wall panel in Dad and Michelle’s house at 783 Bel Air Road. The Mamas & the Papas were recording the vocals for the title song on their album People Like Us. When they sang four-part harmony perfectly in tune, there was an overtone that was its own voice. They called that magical fifth voice Harvey. Now I hid behind a huge, freestanding sound baffle and sang along with the four of them, “People like us, so much in love.” When they listened to the playback the mike had picked up my little voice, and it wasn’t exactly Harvey. One of the sound guys said, “Hey, what’s that?”

  Dad listened for a moment, then started tossing aside the huge paisley pillows in the vocal booth, saying, “Where are you?” I peeked over the sound baffle and was promptly banished.

  Now I was going to be part of the scene I had eavesdropped on throughout my childhood. I would be singing Michelle’s parts, the parts of my ex-stepmother. With me on board, Dad next called his fellow former Papa, Denny Doherty. Denny was freezing his nuts off in Canada. He had nothing better to do, so he flew down to New Jersey with his very pregnant wife, Jeanette, to join us in the Big House. That made three of us.

  Then Dad tapped Spanky McFarlane, the lead singer of Spanky and Our Gang, to sing most of Cass’s parts. Spanky is a bigger girl with a powerhouse of a voice. When I went with Dad to pick her up at the airport, she walked off the plane wearing a red beret with multicolored feathers sprouting out of it, a rainbow of eye shadow, and a voluminous red cape. I thought, Wow, who the heck is this? Spanky and her kids moved into the Big House too. The New Mamas & the Papas was assembled.

  With a full house, we set about re-creating the sound of the Mamas & the Papas. We rented a rehearsal space above a bar called the Bunch o’ Grapes and started having long, boozy rehearsals. For all the hard-core partying and incompetent parenting, when it came to his music, my father was a taskmaster. He demanded perfection. We rehearsed our parts over and over, singing for hours every day. We tried to be faithful to the original arrangements of the songs, but nobody was as young as they used to be. With age comes decreased vocal range, so for some songs we had to lower the key. We wrote new songs, worked out arrangements, and, with our longtime friend Marsia, designed a wardrobe for the group. Days passed in which we never left our rehearsal space—Bunch o’ Grapes sent food and beers up at regular intervals. We had everything we neede
d.

  When the time came for my father’s sentencing, our whole crazy family came to court: me, Genevieve, Tam, Bijou, Gen’s mother Audrey, Jeffrey, Spanky, Denny, Dr. Gold, and all the counselors. It was a dramatic show of support. Dad stood up before the assembled and said, “I’m the head of this family, and they all look to me to show them the next thing to do. For all these years I’ve been showing them the wrong next thing to do. I need to stay out of prison so, for the first time, I can show them the right next thing to do.” The publicity blitz Dad had orchestrated between his arrest and his sentencing paid off. Out of a possible forty-five years, Dad was sentenced to thirty days in a federal work farm. When they handed down the sentence, Genevieve screamed “John! John! Oh, John! Yay!” a little too loudly. But she couldn’t have been drunk in court … Well, who knows? We were all so happy that we had a party that night at the Big House, the likes of which the court might have been disconcerted to see. But we didn’t use drugs.

  It soon came time for Dad to serve his time. Entertainment Tonight was at the house to film the good-bye as we took him to jail. They set up their gear in our courtyard very early in the morning. Dad and I got into the car, and the cameras watched us as we drove away.

  On the way to jail, Dad asked to stop at a bar for one last drink. We pulled over, had a vodka and orange juice, then got back on the road. But the next time we saw a bar he wanted to pull over again. We stopped at three different bars. Dad got shit-faced on his way to prison. Thirty days later, I came to pick him up and we got equally shitfaced on the way home.