High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  And then, after five or six quietly terrifying days passed, there was a pounding on the door, someone saying, “Open up, open up!” Next thing I knew, the door flew open and Big Sal was standing there. Big Sal, my dad’s friend, was an Italian guy who wore a leather blazer and turtleneck and had helmet hair. He was brawny, and now he stood filling up the entire door frame, brandishing a big silver gun. Sal yelled, “She’s coming with me. Give her to me. Give me her shit. I’ll fucking kill you.” He pulled me out the door and, with my clothes and Susan’s fur coat in a ball under his arm, led me to a limo and took me home. As we drove over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, I finally learned where I’d been all that time. Staten Island.

  Kidnapped. It almost seems like it didn’t happen. But I was there. And then it was over, so I let it go.

  Bad things happen when you live the way I was living. Those bad things didn’t affect me as they probably would have someone else—I didn’t have the wherewithal to react properly. My father, as always, somehow had the power to save me—in this case through Big Sal. No matter how unavailable he was, or how he had violated the boundary between fathers and daughters, he did have the instinct to protect me. But I was down the rabbit hole again, my job was on the line, and when he wasn’t saving me, my father was right there with me in the hole, racing me down.

  19

  I was at the edge of self-destruction, but I didn’t know that, and there was nothing to stop me from falling in love. Love and addiction are bitter partners, in a power struggle from the start. But addicts still fall in love, and lovers fall addicted, and their lives converge and carry on, a dark stream meandering its way down.

  The New Mamas & the Papas were rehearsing and recording in New York. We were looking for a new guitar player and Mick Ronson, a brilliant guitarist, who had most famously played for David Bowie, came in to play for us. He brought a young man with him with the stage name Shane Fontayne, but his real name was also Mick. Mick Barakan. The two Micks had a band called the Yanquis. They came into the studio pushing a road case with guitars in it. I looked at Mick Barakan. He had long, black curly hair and was wearing black eyeliner and mascara. He was almost Asian looking (I would later find out that he was half Burmese). I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I thought, That is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my life. How am I gonna get that man? I was in lust from the moment I saw him. Then he opened his mouth. He was British, soft-spoken, warm. Swoon.

  Mick Ronson quickly saw that the New Mamas & the Papas gig wasn’t for him. He had small children whom he didn’t want to leave for long stretches of time. So my father hired my Mick. I said to Dad, “Oh my God, I love that guy, he’s so beautiful.”

  Dad said, “Get him. That’s the man for you.”

  Mick joined the band and started touring with us. He was gentle and funny. I found out that he was married, but that the marriage wasn’t going well. After a while we started spending all of our time together. We’d sit and talk all night … and eventually we didn’t leave the hotel room except to go onstage. Room service carts lined up in the hall outside our room. We were enmeshed. We were in love. Mick called me “my darling Lala” or, less seductively, “the Onion Queen,” because I cooked great onions. He’d write me love notes, even when we were right next to each other. We felt connected.

  I was no stranger to the enraged estranged wife, but Mick’s wife, Karen, put Betsy Asher to shame. She sent me threatening letters with the edges of the paper burnt away. She called my hotel rooms in the middle of the night. Once she showed up at my hotel room and attacked me. There were other people in the room who held her back. I didn’t blame her for being mad, for hating me, for trying to save her marriage. But the attack was really going too far.

  When I first came back from New York my drug use was easy to hide. I thought I could just do a little—because every addict is doomed to travel that particular path of delusion. Not surprisingly, I started using more and more. I came back to One Day at a Time tellingly thin, which probably pleased Alan Rafkin— until it didn’t. Julie had been pregnant on the show and had given birth to twins. (Or she had given birth to a baby who was played by twins. Must I really be held responsible for this kind of information?) I hated wearing the pregnancy belly because, as had been made all too clear, I was already chubby enough. But thanks to the coke, Julie got her pre-baby body back in no time.

  Returning to the show was a second chance, an opportunity for me to redeem myself, and I fully intended to do so, but my actions spoke otherwise. Even though I was under contract only as a recurring character, not as a regular, it soon became hard for people to work with me. I was so thin that they had me wearing fanny pads so I could fit in the wardrobe. They couldn’t do close-up shots of me because my face was too skeletal. Later, on Howard Stern, Alan Rafkin would call my face a road map. And I can only guess how using was affecting my behavior on the set. I was given a warning to remind me that when I signed the contracts for my return to the show, there was a clause that allowed the producers to subject me to a drug test at any given time. It was shape up or ship out.

  A few weeks after I was given the warning at One Day at a Time, I was napping on the couch during lunch hour. Patricia Palmer shook me awake. “Mack, wake up, Mack. We’re going to take you to the doctor for a urinalysis.”

  I’d been given a second chance, and I’d blown it. I’d tried to fix myself, and I’d failed. I didn’t know why I couldn’t do it. It was bewildering and, above all, humiliating. I didn’t really know what sobriety was, but it was starting to seem like something that only made sense for other people.

  I said to Patricia, “If you do it tomorrow, everything will be fine. Can you wait a day?”

  She said, “No, honey, no we can’t.” I told her not to bother and she asked me to leave quietly. I picked up and left. That was it. That was the end. I didn’t see anyone from the show for a long time.

  Being fired the second time was much harder for me, but when I told Mick I’d been fired, he said he was glad because now there wouldn’t be so much money for drugs. Later, Bonnie Franklin would say essentially the same thing—that it seemed like the most responsible thing to do was to stop the paycheck that was funding the drugs. I know she wasn’t the only one at the show who saw it that way. People had no idea what to do. They just wanted me to survive. I thought about Norman Lear, how kind he’d been to me. I knew how disappointed he must have been. My respect and love for him never flagged, but later, years later, after I was clean, whenever I saw Norman, I felt a distance between us that I knew came from umpteen broken promises on my part.

  After I lost my job, I couldn’t find other work. I had been blacklisted in Hollywood again, and this time I wouldn’t have acting work for many years.

  I’d lost my job, but I still had Mick. When Mick quit the New Mamas & the Papas to start working with other musicians, he moved in with me in L.A. We found a beautiful apartment on Norton Avenue in West Hollywood that had belonged to Marlene Dietrich. It was an art deco palace with custom beveled mirrors everywhere. I went to Harvey’s Tropical and bought beautiful original deco rattan furniture—authentic versions of the knockoffs I’d shipped to the New Jersey house I had shared with Spanky. Mick and I had a great time together. We laughed a lot. We had close friends like Randy and Suzi VanWarmer. Randy was a Nashville songwriter—he wrote and sang “Just When I Needed You Most.” He and Suzi were funny and quirky. The four of us had great chemistry.

  Mick had a hard time with the domestic aspect of our lives from the start. He’s an organized, neat person who was accustomed to living a clean, ordered life. I, on the other hand, was a total slob. I grew up with let-it-fall-where-it-may chaos, and I brought that philosophy to every aspect of my life. Without acting work, I was living beyond my Mamas & the Papas income and my bank account dried up fast. I charged all our food on credit cards at Arrow Market, the specialty market near our house, and ran up huge balances.

  There were weird people coming and going at all hou
rs, and under-the-influence arguments and crises. Once, I had been up for many days. Mick and I made love, then I started freaking out, telling Mick I was in love with our friend, a coke dealer. As I told him this I interrupted myself. “Your hair looks blue,” I told him. Mick started freaking out that he was going to lose me. He put me in the shower to “wash the love back into me.”

  Mick, beautiful Mick, Mick who was the great love of my life, Mick was infinitely kind and patient and forgiving. Mick knew I’d been fired. He knew about the drugs, the constant use and oblivion. But Mick had no idea what was now going on between me and my father. For all the hundreds of ways and hundreds of reasons we would never be able to be together forever, I alone knew that I had crossed a line that people don’t cross, and it made me different, and it made it impossible for me to have an honest, real relationship. I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me. I had to destroy my relationship with Mick for the same reasons I had to destroy myself. It was impossible to live with who I was.

  When my father and I went through rehab together, the headline on the cover of People called us “John and Mackenzie Phillips,” as if we were married. It made me uncomfortable. It was wrong; it hit too close to home.

  This is what happened; there is no other way to explain it: one night after a Mamas & the Papas gig, a night like any other drug-drenched post-performance night at any hotel in any city, I woke up in my father’s hotel room with my pants down at my ankles. I woke up, in that state, with no memory of how I’d gotten there or what had happened the night before. Had I been so wasted that I undressed myself? Had my father touched me? I didn’t know the truth, and I was scared to find out. My father was asleep on the bed next to me. A girl who grew up pulling at her father’s pants leg, waiting for him, longing for him. A man who had no boundaries, who knew no rules, whose own pleasure was his highest priority in life. I went to my room, showered, and called Mick wherever he was on tour to tell him I loved him.

  It was a night that I wanted to purge from memory, but instead that night became one of many nights. Waking up in Dad’s room with my pants around my ankles became regular. Not normal, never normal, but regular. Every night after we performed I would go over to my father’s hotel room and ask for Placidyl, a strong sedative that we were into. Dad would pull out his drug bag—I called it his “Bagdad”—which was full of pills and powders and paraphernalia. He’d go through an act, pretending he didn’t know what he might find in his bottomless bag. “What have we here?” he’d ask, rooting through the bag with a devious smile while I waited for my fix.

  No matter how long Dad pretended to search, he always found exactly two “greenies,” the big Placidyl pills that promised us a night of oblivion. Placidyl was a downer prescribed to people for insomnia that came in the form of a liquigel. Before I swallowed the pills, I’d poke holes in them with safety pins so the high would come on faster. Almost immediately after I took a pill a chemical odor would rise from my skin. Then came euphoria, a kind of high where I could feel the air that my body was displacing. I knew I was in “the window,” the twenty-minute period before walking and talking became nearly impossible. Placidyl made us happy zombies. It also caused blackouts. Every single time I took it there was a period of the night that was completely obliterated from my memory. And this was a welcome side effect, because then … then there were the moments of awareness that I was having sex with my father.

  Why did I keep coming back? The idea was as repulsive and wrong to me as it would be to anyone. But I can’t exactly say my father repeatedly raped me. Nor can I say that I wanted or intended to have sex with him. I returned to his room for more pills with the knowledge of what might happen. I wasn’t unconscious while we had sex. But it was never a tangible desire or deliberate decision that took place in the present moment. It was always a fact that only emerged after it had happened. I kept waking up in my father’s room, indisposed, with the sickening knowledge that what took place wasn’t just a recurring bad dream. It was a series of twisted, blurry memories that I had no desire to see by the light of day.

  20

  Years passed after I left One Day at a Time and continued on the road with the New Mamas & the Papas. Every junkie’s story has this in common: there are periods of time when the drugs just win. After the seduction of that first high, after the honeymoon when drugs enhance a functioning life—after all that comes submission and demolition. My life went on, but I wasn’t living it. Days whirled by in a jerky blur like a malfunctioning carnival ride.

  Not long after I got fired, Mick landed a gig with a popular local cowpunk band called Lone Justice. This was a real break for him. He saw a chance at success and a real career. When Mick joined Lone Justice I became a liability. Here he was, a young, gorgeous, talented up-and-coming guitar player. I was recognizable, visible, and very fucked up. If he took me out with him, who knew what I was going to do. I might be ridiculously drunk and inappropriate. I might fall over, pass out. I was so over the top. So Mick would go out and ask me not to come along. Seven years earlier I’d left Peter Asher because I felt that he treated me like a piece of furniture. It was demoralizing. Mick was different. Mick was dedicated to me, but he was also careful about his life, professionally and personally. Even when he used cocaine, it was never completely out of control. When he decided to stop, he stopped, and it was over. Mick put up with plenty of crap from me over the years. He was always loving, a truly decent human being, loyal beyond what anyone would hope for or expect. Through all that, he also tried to preserve his career and himself. We both saw the life we could have had, and it was incredible, but neither of us was in good enough shape to live it.

  We weren’t exactly formally broken up, but Mick started building a separate life and I was really upset. Now I see that he was protecting himself, but at the time I was pissed and hurt. I dealt with the rejection by getting and staying high, far and beyond what Mick knew I was doing.

  In the spring of 1986, we left Marlene Dietrich’s beautiful apartment. We would have had to move even if we hadn’t separated—someone had bought the building. I packed up all my stuff and went to stay with my friend Amanda three miles away. Not long after we moved out, I saw the handcrafted built-ins, the etched mirrored walls, the closets from the thirties, all of it, sitting out on the curb, left for garbage. The guy who bought the building had gutted it. It was heart-wrenching to see the priceless fixings of the life Mick and I had shared uprooted and discarded, a blatant symbol of what we had lost.

  My friend Amanda was also my drug dealer. Staying with her meant I never had to leave the house. I holed up and shot coke day and night. At some point I traded her my TV for cocaine. Then I realized I hadn’t had my period for a while. Amanda thought she might be pregnant. I was almost certain that I was. We stood in front of the mirror with our shirts up, looking at our bellies. It was time to venture out of the apartment.

  I always hated going to the gynecologist. I’d wear sunglasses during the exams, like a little child who hides behind her fingers, believing that if she can’t see you, you can’t see her. But on this visit, there wasn’t time for shyness. The doctor did an ultrasound, and there it was. A tiny blip on the screen. A little heartbeat. I was pregnant. I’d been through an abortion, a miscarriage. I knew, as before, that I was in no shape to be a mother. But this time was different. I fell in love with that blip.

  When we came home from the doctor, I called my on-again, off-again boyfriend Mick. I said, “This child is going to be born. This little person is ours.” I was pregnant, and I wanted to have the baby.

  A few weeks later I went for another ultrasound, this time with Mick. He was now busy with Lone Justice and our relationship was by no means solid, but from the very start he made it clear that he wanted to be a good father to this baby.

  When we got in the examining room, I said, “Don’t tell us the sex, just tell us if it’s healthy.” The doctor took his first look at the monitor and said, “Oh my God, look at that penis!�
�� Couldn’t he have said “Look at that adorable arm”? But we were elated. This was the baby. This was the one. My little man. I loved him before he was born.

  And yet that didn’t stop me from doing coke. With guilt and shame and terrible determination, I shot cocaine throughout my pregnancy. That in itself is a testament to the evil power of drugs, but the power of drugs is a given. The real questions are how far an individual goes, and why, and what, if anything, gives her the power to stop. Those were questions I wouldn’t be able to answer for a long time.

  I moved to a sweet apartment on Crescent Heights in Hollywood. I was living alone now, with Amanda and other drug dealer friends within a mile radius. In no time that charming apartment became a slum. You couldn’t see the floor. It was littered with clothes, pizza boxes, and empty vodka bottles.

  In November of 1986, around my twenty-seventh birthday, the New Mamas & the Papas had a three-week gig at a hotel in Las Vegas called the Four Queens. I was six months pregnant and this was to be my last gig before the baby. When I arrived in Vegas I went to a doctor, pretending to be sick just so I could steal a needle from him. Back in those days it was hard for your average junkie to get ahold of needles. Now, because of AIDS, needles are more available, but back in the day you’d use the same rig for months, sharpening the needle on a pack of matches. Those dull needles were nasty and left terrible scars. I stole needles from doctors many times before and after that.

  I told people terrible lies to get them to sell me coke. Amanda, my dealer friend, was under the impression that I’d stopped shooting up when I got pregnant. Somehow, for her, that was a line that made selling coke to her pregnant friend okay. She flew up to visit me at the Four Queens and of course she brought a supply of coke to sell me. What are friends for? But hours later, when she found a bent spoon I had accidentally left in the bathroom, she was furious. She turned around and went straight back to L.A.