High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  Rosie’s death, every loss hit me so hard. I couldn’t handle grief. I went on a binge that began with shooting up in the bathroom at the funeral home. My brother Tam, now twenty years old, climbed through the bathroom window to get me out. He’d seen far worse.

  Greece. Rosie died in October 1991. I went to Greece with the Mamas & the Papas to play a New Year’s Eve concert. It was a lost week for me. I ended up with a weird Greek flight attendant guy and other strange people, trying to find drugs.

  Home to Pennsylvania. On the road my empty, shattered life was hidden behind the structure and habit of the tour. But when I came home with syringes in my purse, it was clear what had become of me. Mick was on tour, and it was my turn to care for Shane. I’d come to the point in my addiction where at night I’d make a breakfast tray for Shane with juice, cereal, and a pitcher of milk. I’d cover it with Saran Wrap and put it at the foot of his bed so in the morning I wouldn’t have to get up and take care of my kid.

  New York. Then I ran dry. I couldn’t get needles so I was smoking base. I sat on the bedroom floor, scraping my pipes, hoping to collect residue, but when I gave up on that, the next logical move was to go to the city to score. Shane was at school and Mick was on the road. I called the babysitter and arranged for her to pick up Shane at school. I told her I’d be gone for a couple hours at most. I left all the paraphernalia out on the floor and took a limo to a druggie hangout in New York. I fully intended to be back home in several hours, but I stayed in New York all night smoking coke like a crazed fool. I didn’t go home and didn’t pick up the phone. When I finally called home the next afternoon, Mick answered. The sitter had tracked him down wherever he was on tour and he had rushed home to relieve her. Nobody had any idea where I was. Mick was understandably panicked and furious. I’d really done it this time.

  Home again. Mick said that if I was to come home at all, I would have to live by his rules, and that meant no drugs. He said those words, and I spun back in time. I was Julie Cooper again, telling her mother she would only come home if she could live on her own terms. I was Rosie’s niece Laura, promising to make curfew but going out again night after night. I was Laura, the twelve-year-old whose father told her to be sure to sleep at home at least once a week. Mick had the wrong girl. I was not somebody who lived by anyone else’s rules. I never had, and I didn’t see why I should. I called my father, the only person whom I knew would back me up. I told him Mick was trying to control me, that he wouldn’t let me get high. The solution Dad proposed was exactly what he would have done. In fact, he had done it years earlier with Tam. He said, “Take Shane and get out of there.”

  I didn’t always jump off the buildings Dad presented. Instead, I took a bus home. I hadn’t agreed to Mick’s edict, but there was no way he was going to keep me away from my kid. Mick and Shane came to the bus station to pick me up. Just before they arrived, I was in the port-a-san doing a hit of base. I got in the car and Mick just glared at me. When we got home I took the car out and drove around for a couple of hours so I could keep smoking. When I got home Mick was driving up in a friend’s truck. He’d been out looking for me.

  A huge fight ensued. Mick told me I was nothing but a disgusting drug addict. He said, “You’re just like your father. Your son shouldn’t be put through this. It’s not fair to him and it’s not fair to me.” Mick, the most patient man alive, was like a lion protecting his cub. He was very, very angry and he said some really hurtful things. True or not, they hurt like crap.

  I was on defense, saying, “You’re so high and mighty. You’re not perfect either. A couple years ago you were doing the same thing.” But he hadn’t been. Not on the same scale.

  I’m sure Mick also said, “You need help; you can’t keep living like this; you’re going to die.” He was scared. He loved me. Shane was our child. They needed me. He said all that stuff, the stuff that addicts learn to ignore.

  After a while I ran out of arguments and all I could say was, “Fuck you. Fuck you.”

  The next day I set about planning my getaway. Shane and I would escape Mick’s rules and accusations. I called Shane’s school and told them to have him ready, that I was coming to pick him up because Mick had beaten me up. But when I tried to leave for the school, Mick and I fought for the car keys. I kicked him in the balls and he fell to the floor, rolling in pain. He grabbed the phone and called social services to tell them not to let me remove Shane from school. Carol, our landlady, who was also the mother of Mick’s music partner, heard the commotion and came over to mediate. Finally, hours later, I admitted defeat and stomped upstairs. I put a note that said “leave me alone” on the bedroom door.

  I sat on the bedroom floor and smoked more base.

  In the middle of the night I was back in the kitchen smoking. Mick came downstairs and I threw a brush at him and we were at it again. He punched me in the stomach. I called the cops. While I was waiting for them to arrive, I punched myself a bunch of times to make my stomach look worse. When the cops came, I filed a complaint. But then they wanted to arrest Mick, and I wouldn’t let them.

  Shane is the love of my life, and failing to care for him properly meant I wasn’t living. The writing had been on the wall since he was born, from the first moment I turned away from him toward drugs, since I took him with me to a crack house, since I couldn’t wake up to make his breakfast. I couldn’t raise a child as a junkie.

  The next morning found me shooting up in the bathroom after having found an old rig in a shoebox. Shane was pounding on the door, calling, “Mommy! Mommy, come out!” I flashed back half a lifetime to when, as a teenager, I knocked on my father’s door and he said, “Not now darling, Daddy’s shooting up.” Now I was doing the same to my son. I put down the shot I was preparing. Oh God, Shane.

  I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t get high from cocaine no matter how much I put into my system. It was never enough. And there was nothing but more of the same coming. Death was definitely in the next shot. But saving myself had never been reason enough to stop. Shane was four, almost five years old. He was a little guy. He was full of curiosity and joy. As a three-year-old he looked in a bucket of water and said, “Mom, what if there’s a parallel universe under the water? That would be cool.” Once, when we were standing in the bathroom and he was trying to use the big-boy potty he said, “Mom, I cry for the future.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He said, “We don’t know what’s coming. Look what happened to the dinosaurs.” At dinner parties Shane would talk about the planets, the universe, his theories about God. When I was a kid I’d take over a room by tap-dancing in the middle of it. Shane captivated people with his theological discourse. There was just so much he wanted to wonder about and understand.

  That curious, wonderful little being needed me, and I wanted more than anything—anything!—to be his mother. He needed me and I wasn’t there. I was in the bathroom busy with a needle. I was doing what my father had done to my siblings and me. I was perpetuating the cycle of neglect and abuse. And it was certainly abuse. I never left Shane alone or hit him or locked him in a closet or anything like that. That’s not me. But I abused him through my self-absorption. No matter if he saw or understood what was going on, he was affected by the world I showed him, by the emotions, and by what was in the air. I wasn’t a responsible parent. I wasn’t available the way a parent should be. Shane distinctly remembers a before and after in his childhood, divided by when I stopped doing drugs. It shouldn’t be the job of a three-year-old to worry about his mommy.

  There was Shane pounding on that door, and I knew what I was doing to him all too well. I saw that if I wanted to redeem myself and the situation, I had to change. I knew there were sober people in the world, but I had never thought of myself as one of them. I meant to run it out till I died a tragic junkie. But that wasn’t what I wanted for Shane. I had to fix his world, and the only way to do that was for me to quit drugs and to quit them absolutely. I had to quit them forever.

&nbs
p; That night I used up my stash, knowing it was the end, desperate for the last high that would take away the fear and doom that went hand in hand with sobriety. I didn’t know life without drugs. I didn’t know how to be in my life. I grew up with drugs as a buffer between me and everyone and everything else. I relied on that buffer, and I couldn’t conceive of facing each day without it.

  In the morning I got up and dressed Shane for school. That afternoon when Mick approached me about getting help, I told him I would go into treatment. I called Mark Gold, the doctor who had helped my father get clean for a minute of his life and had saved him from jail. I said, “Doc, it’s Mack. I need help. I’m going to lose my kid.”

  Dr. Gold said, “Thank God you’re still alive.” The people who weren’t in my immediate circle had given me up for dead, which, given the circumstances, was a reasonable assumption. There were drugs before and after this call. Maybe even during the call. But for the first time in my life, I was ready.

  I said, “I need to be in rehab by sundown,” excess being the hallmark of the addict. Dr. Gold said that he would call me back.

  Mick went to pick up Shane at school. While he was gone I lay in the bathtub, going into heavy withdrawal from Darvocet. I lay in the bath shaking, alternately hot and cold. I was afraid I was going to die right then and there. The phone rang and it was Doc Gold calling to say, “There’s a place for you at Alina Lodge. It’s for the ‘reluctant to recover.’ ” Doc Gold told me where to go and what to do. I called a car company and arranged to be picked up.

  By the time Mick came home with Shane, I had packed a small bag and was all ready to go. Mick said, “You mean you want to go tonight?” After all the talk about rehab over the last year or so, he couldn’t process that it was actually happening. I was in the limo by nightfall with a bottle of Courvoisier and a pocketful of Xanax.

  I was in detox for two weeks. I had Mick bring me extra clothes and every day I wore a flashy outfit, like tie-dyed harem pants with a matching silk shirt. I’d always been afraid that sobriety would take away the fun, that all the color would go out of my life. So I treated detox like a fashion show. But playing dress-up was a poor substitution for getting high. I called a dealer and had him bring me some cocaine. He delivered it right away. To a detox center. Business is business, I guess.

  I wanted to shoot the cocaine, but of course I didn’t have any gear. So during a nursing shift change I snuck out of my room and found a crash cart that seemed like it might have a syringe. This was a joint psych ward and detox ward, and they knew how desperate their patients could get. The crash cart had impenetrable plastic locks. But somehow, maybe it was the Librium or whatever I was on for withdrawal, I summoned the superhuman strength required to break into the crash cart. I found an IV tube with a needle attached, but there was no syringe. I’d have to make do.

  My roommate was an old hard-core alcoholic with missing teeth and wild, unclean hair. We had a small room with twin beds and a shared bathroom. She had the DTs (delirium tremens). She was crying and hallucinating. I thought she was freaky, but what I was about to do was far worse. I went into the bathroom. I mixed the cocaine with water and cotton and sucked it through the needle into the IV tube. I tied off. With its long tube attached, I put the IV needle into a vein. Then I tried to blow the mixture through the tube into my vein. This did not work. Blood sprayed everywhere. The bathroom was a crime scene, horrifying enough to represent all I’d done, all I’d become. I was bleeding, crying, royally fucked. The incomprehensible demoralization of that moment—I thought the stain of it would quench any future desire to return to drugs. I thought that was the last time I would ever try to use cocaine. For fifteen years it was.

  PART FIVE

  THE ROCK

  24

  It was January of 1992. I was thirty-two. I’d been introduced to drugs at eleven. I’d been heavily using cocaine for thirteen years, except for one clean drunken year in New Jersey. I arrived at Alina Lodge in Blairstown, New Jersey, in a white stretch limo, wearing a multicolored patchwork button-down shirt tucked into suede shorts, with forest green tights and the same black suede snap-up boots that I’d been wearing when I flew to Albany, six months pregnant.

  I had no idea what to expect from the Lodge. I’d been to other rehab programs, but most of them were twenty-eight days long. The Lodge lasted until you were clean and sober and determined to stay that way. I didn’t yet know that smoking wasn’t allowed, but I still puffed away in the car as if it were my last pack of cigarettes. When the driver opened the door, clouds of smoke poured out, and there I stood, in a curtain of smoke, in my outlandish outfit, with open sores on my arms. Oh, they were going to have a field day with me.

  I walked into a great room where, I’d soon learn, all the meals were served. The ceilings were very high. There were long institutional tables surrounded by metal chairs. A pot of flowers attempted to cheer up each table. At the far end of the room was a platform stage with a podium on it. All around the sides of the stage were posters with guidelines for behavior. We weren’t allowed to leave the grounds, to use the telephone, to talk to the opposite sex, nor, damn them, to smoke. There were stark black-and-white signs with slogans like “Live and let live,” “Let go and let God,” and “Think think think.” I saw one that read, simply, “One day at a time,” and I thought, They knew I was coming and they put up a sign for me. What an idiot I was.

  The first order of business was to meet with the eighty-five-year-old founder of the Lodge, Geraldine Owen Delaney. She had her initials, “G.O.D.,” on her license plate, and as soon as she saw me she lit into me: “I don’t care who you think you are. You sit down and shut up. You don’t know anything. You are lower than worm sweat. I wouldn’t wipe my feet on the cleanest part of you. You are a moral leper.” Nobody had ever spoken to me that way. Why did this woman I’d never met before hate me? I didn’t understand. But out of shock, I complied. I shut up. For a few minutes. Then I decided my time-out must be over and started talking again. Mrs. Delaney stood up and pinned a zipper on my jacket. She said, “You don’t know how to listen. You’re too busy trying to figure out what you’re going to say next. Shut. Up.” The approach was called ego deflation, and the idea was to tear down my ego and rebuild me a new and improved sense of self.

  The philosophy at the Lodge was that by using drugs, screwing up our lives, and hurting those around us, we’d relinquished our rights as humans. I had to ask permission to start eating. I had to ask permission to stand up and walk out of a room. I wasn’t supposed to read anything but approved materials. Long hair—mine was down to my elbows—had to be swept into a bun; skirts were to be worn below the knee. And I wasn’t allowed to speak in public spaces—at meetings or meals—for three months so I could learn to hear what others were saying. That’s what the zipper on my jacket signified.

  We communicated through writing. If we had a request, such as wanting razors to shave, we had to write it down and hand it to a staff member. If it was approved, Mrs. Delaney would initial the note, called a “write-it,” and give it back. It was Victorian boarding school meets boot camp.

  The staff also used write-its to communicate with us. One day I received one that said, “Your father is undergoing a liver transplant.” I immediately wrote one back: “Can I call him?” My request was not approved. The response was simply, “We’ll give you another write-it when we know more.”

  I had been on the road with the band for ten years. Before that I’d been on a top-ten TV show for seven years. I had always had total freedom. Now I was completely at the mercy of the staff of this facility. My father was having surgery. Mick was playing guitar for Bruce Springsteen. Shane was in the care of Pat the Boy Nanny, as we called him, and I was about to miss his fifth birthday. I was stuck in rehab missing everything, missing everybody, and feeling sorry for myself. I couldn’t stand it. Finally I wrote a note: “I’m putting in my seventy-two-hour notice.” That was the policy. The contract I signed when I entered the Lodge s
tated that I would give seventy-two hours’ notice if I wanted to leave. I fully intended to go home. But the Lodge kept close contact with the families of its patients. Soon after I wrote that note, and each time I wrote one of the similar ones that followed, I’d get a note back from Mick saying, “Get well, then come home. If you try to come home now, there will be no place for you.” So what could I do? I stayed.

  The only way to achieve more freedom was to earn it back. Soon enough I decided to embrace the opportunity and to follow all the rules.

  Dear Mrs. Delaney, here is a list of the rules I have broken:

  1. I have gone back to bed in the afternoon.

  2. I have showered for longer than three minutes.

  3. I had a nonretractable pen.

  4. I smiled at DL.

  5. I left my closet light on and did not write myself up.

  6. I have gossiped.

  7. I have washed my hair more than once a week.

  As I succumbed to the program, I started to change. I had never been sober for such a prolonged period. The fog had time to clear. It felt like the first time I had been chemically free, away from my junkie lifestyle, and continually educated in a new way of thinking. Gradually, with work, my true self started to emerge. When I told my mom I was being brainwashed, she said, “Good.”

  At the Lodge I finally started to examine the life I had lived and the role drugs had played in it. I covered page after page of loose-leaf paper with confessions: I would do almost anything for drugs. I left my child alone in the middle of the night to go out for drugs. I let strange people live in my home because they had easy access to drugs. I befriended total strangers for no apparent reason, except not to be alone. I stole pills and cocaine from my father and then lied and lied about it. I used openly in front of my brother Tam, who was eight or nine at the time. The lists went on and on.