High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  • • •

  As a junkie, I purged my life of most obligations, but when Val and I were invited to present an award at the TV Land Awards in 2008, I decided it sounded fun. Before we left, I preloaded a couple shots and brought them with me in my bag. I looked like shit, but I convinced myself I was pulling it off. We were backstage, waiting for our turn to present, and I slipped into the bathroom to shoot a speedball. Suddenly I heard Valerie’s voice. She was knocking on the door, saying, “Mack, Mack, it’s time. We have to go onstage.” I wiped the blood off my arm and hurried out of the bathroom. Val looked at me and I thought, Oh God. She knows.

  What I was no longer hiding from my family was now impossible to hide from my friends. Valerie, Peter, these were the people who’d known me the first time around. That life had passed, but now here they were again, and here I was with a needle in my arm. I had never expected to pass this way again. I was an adult. I’d had the experience of living a drug-free life, and yet I was making the same mistakes all over again. How did it happen? I’d been sober so long that I’d grown complacent. I thought I didn’t need to actively fight my addiction. But in the last couple of years things had fallen so far so fast that I didn’t know if I could ever come back. My relationships were crumbling. I was lying to my son. My dog Max was dying. I missed my father and was full of regret about his life and death. I loathed myself. The only way out was the cheap way out—making all feeling go away.

  When I landed back in L.A. after seeing Peter, I called Josh and Lisa from the limo. I said, “Make sure you have some dark for me.” Dark is the tar heroin I used. Arriving at my house, I ran in the door and straight to the office with my hand out. They gave me coke and heroin and I went right upstairs to start all over again.

  31

  I was in the worst shape of my life. There were only two possible endings: death or sobriety, and the smart money was on death.

  At first I had shot up in my big closet, hiding what I was doing from the people, the dogs, the furniture, myself. Then I moved to the bathroom, because that was easy to clean. But I felt vulnerable in the bathroom, so I went back to the closet for a while. Finally, I moved to the vanity in my bedroom—the one that fell on me while Josh and Lisa were out of town. A sweet little wooden rocking chair lived next to the vanity, and that was my place. I sat there day after day. It was not the most comfortable place to sit, much less to sit and shoot and slump and sleep for hours and days and weeks. But many and long were the nights I spent in that chair, that incidental armless rocking chair that was made for some other house, some other woman, some other life.

  The chair had no arms to prop me up, so when I nodded out I’d slump sideways in the chair. One time I slept that way for sixteen hours. I was in that chair for so long that when I woke up, my body was stuck in the slump. I was crooked and couldn’t straighten myself. I didn’t stand up straight for three weeks.

  Wyatt had gotten sober. I didn’t want him to visit because I knew it would jeopardize his sobriety, so instead we talked on the phone every day. We watched movies together as long-distance date nights. Wyatt was terrified that I was going to die. He wanted to chase Josh and Lisa away with a shotgun. Mick knew something was terribly wrong, and he backed off. I know now that he was trying to protect himself. Bijou was militant about rehab. She’d say, “I know you’re using. Show me your arms.”

  I just said, “I’m not going to dignify that request.” I tried to convince everyone that though I wasn’t sober, I wasn’t doing anything bad. I know Shane, more than anyone, wanted to believe that I was okay, but to look at me was to know that I was in bad shape. I could feel the walls—the family—closing in on me. I tried to go cold turkey more than once, but it never worked. I got so sick that I started using again. I was lost. I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I hoped I’d stay alive long enough to change, but I couldn’t imagine how it would happen. It seemed too complicated. It was easier to do nothing.

  Waking up in the morning, barely able to walk because I needed to be high. Thinking, Oh my God, I am so fucked. Creaking out of bed: This is bad, I’m dying, why am I doing this, what is the matter with me? Making my way to the chair, because the only way to rid myself of the self-loathing and fear was to do a shot, but this, I promised myself, would be the last shot, the one that would make me feel better enough to change, to fix everything, to stop. Doing the shot: I’m so fucked, I’m so fucked, then the drug hit my bloodstream and … Oh, it’s not so bad. I’m not that fucked. It’s going to be okay.

  The needle keeps the demons at bay. You want to function? If your body is addicted to drugs, the easiest, best way to function, the only way you can see to get through the day, is to never come down. And there is no way to be objective, to decide that suffering withdrawal, the physical and mental illness of withdrawal, is better than being hooked for life. Because when you’re in that scene, there is no objectivity.

  The fun part was over, because it never lasts, because there is no fair battle between reality and the drugs that enhance it. Drugs always win. They beat me, as they had before, and the spoils they claimed were my will, my spirit, my values, my valuables, my relationships, my safety, my body and soul, and, almost, my life.

  • • •

  Salvation came in the form of my worst nightmare come true. It started with something harmless: a request to tape the Rachael Ray show that would air on September 10, 2008. Apparently, One Day at a Time was Rachael Ray’s favorite show. For her fortieth birthday the cast of One Day at a Time was going to surprise her, appearing on a re-creation of the show’s set. All my former costars were going, and I didn’t want to miss it.

  In the couple of years I’d been shooting up, I’d had many appearances that required me to be on TV, traveling from here to there. A year earlier I’d appeared on the Today show for a One Day at a Time reunion celebrating the publication of Val’s book. I flew to New York with my two-day supply of drugs without incident. Making it to the airport in time for the plane was a challenge, but otherwise, being a jet-setting junkie wasn’t a big deal. I always brought my drugs and my needles, did the show, and came back home without incident. When I agreed to appear on Rachael Ray, I truly didn’t see any risk.

  The day before the trip, I was in my room, trying to figure out what to wear on the air. Josh came upstairs and into my room with a little package for me. It had four grams of cocaine and one and a half grams of heroin. He said, “Look, Laura, make sure you take the foil off the heroin. It won’t set off the alarm, but if you get wanded they’ll find it.”

  My flight was early the next morning and I was running late, as always. I did a little of Josh’s package while the limo waited out front. Then I stuffed the rest of the drugs in the pocket of my pants. I was wearing an amazing new pair of pants. They were cotton pants with a beautiful dragon embroidered on one leg. The other leg had a cargo pocket with a buckle. I put some cash in the pocket along with the drugs and hurried into the car.

  On the way to LAX I was on the phone with a guy at the Rachael Ray show, doing a standard pre-interview to give them an idea of what sort of stuff I might talk about the next day. He said, “Thanks, Mackenzie, this is going to be great,” and we hung up. I chatted and joked with the limo driver, and we soon arrived at the airport.

  At the airport, I checked my bag and got in line for security. I made a couple phone calls and chatted with the people next to me in line. Then I went through the metal detector and it beeped. I said, “I don’t have anything in my pockets.” I knew the foil—which, contrary to Josh’s instructions, I’d left wrapped around the heroin—wouldn’t set off the metal detector. I didn’t think of the metal buckle on my cargo pants. The security monitor asked me to go through again. The alarm went off again.

  The guard waved me into the corral for people who were going to get wanded. I stood there thinking, Wow, I’m really in trouble here. Fuck. I put my hand in the pocket and felt the bag of drugs. A tiny bag of destruction. I turned the bag over in my fingers.
The package was so small, so seemingly harmless. It wasn’t a gun. It wasn’t intended to harm anyone. But this was it. This was going to be my downfall. This small bag that I needed to live.

  Glancing around nervously, I slipped the cash and the drugs out of the pocket. I put the cash back in and put the drugs in my waistband, senselessly, hopelessly.

  A female security guard gestured me forward. I stood rigid and silent on the footprint marks on the floor. For all the horror I had created in my life, this was the nightmare that I feared more than anything. I knew what getting caught meant. I’d seen it happen to my father. It changed everything, and I didn’t think I wanted anything to change. But time was marching forward. The next sequence of events had been planned and executed a million times, all over the world, a routine as familiar as setting a mouse trap, catching the mouse, disposing of it. A small, unpleasant task, memorable but not significant. Unless you’re the mouse. And now I was the mouse.

  As the wand passed over my underwear, it beeped. I had no plan. I couldn’t think. I said, “I have a buckle on my underwear.” It was obviously a lie.

  The security guard said, “I have to do my job.”

  I panicked. I was beyond panicked. I lost it. I started saying, “Please don’t bust me. Please don’t bust me. I’m someone’s mother. My son doesn’t know.” I was quietly begging. Begging, I thought, for my life.

  She said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Phillips. Please go over there and sit down.” She waved me toward the chair where you’re supposed to take off your shoes. I took a few steps in that direction and was standing in front of the chair when I felt the package drop from the band of my underwear down through my pants leg. It landed on the floor. I put my foot on it. Now I was stuck. I couldn’t walk away and leave the drugs on the floor. How in hell was I going to get out of this without being taken away in handcuffs?

  The nice security people had receded, back to their task of separating the criminals from the travelers. In their place stepped six cops, including a giant woman. She got in my face, yelling, “You’re gonna get honest with us. Are you holding? Are you gonna tell us the truth?”

  The giant woman ordered me to sit down. I was terrified. Without lifting my foot off the drugs, I turned and sat. The woman pointed to my foot. The corner of the package was sticking out. There, for anyone to see, was a bag of cocaine. It was time to face reality.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m holding,” I said. I cannot express the deep fear and dread that I felt. I was powerless, about to be shuttled through the system like the criminal that I was. But it was hard to feel like a criminal when I only did drugs in the privacy of my bedroom. When—in my selfish view—the only person I was actively destroying was myself. “Please, please, please don’t arrest me.”

  The overprivileged celebrity brat in me hoped I would get away with it. One time when Tatum O’Neal and I were coming home from a party, she was driving behind me on the Pacific Coast Highway at four in the morning. I got pulled over, and Tatum pulled up behind me. The cop informed me that I had been driving too slowly. I had a two-gram vial of coke burning a hole in my jeans pocket.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Officer. I’m on my way to Tatum’s house. She’s in the car behind me.”

  It was not long after I’d been arrested with enough Quaaludes in my system to “kill a horse.” He glanced back at her car and said, “You’ve had enough trouble. I’m not going to add to it. Go a little faster, but not too fast.” I must have been let off the hook like that at least a dozen times in my youth. I drove without a driver’s license for ten years. With the exception of that one infamous arrest, the cops always just told me to go home.

  When I was an adult, on tour with the Mamas & the Papas, I was stopped by U.S. Customs in Amsterdam. They were going through our stuff when a young customs officer unzipped my Carlos Falchi phone book and pulled out a block of hash the size of a cookie. He looked at me, then down at the hash. He slid it back in, zipped my book shut, and sent me on my way.

  After all those free passes, all those blind eyes, I felt immune, and part of me still believed that I could get out of anything, that if I was just polite and friendly enough, they would let me go. But at LAX that late summer day, I’d finally stepped over the line.

  The giant woman cop stooped down to pick up the bag of drugs. She said, “We’re not going to arrest you. We just want to talk to you.” She walked me over to another cop. This one—a Latin-American woman—had a sweet, warm manner. She said, “I’m really sorry, Ms. Phillips. You have the right to remain silent.” She cuffed me behind my back.

  Busted.

  • • •

  As they drove me to the airport police lockup, as they moved me to a police station they called Prospect for processing, as they locked my handcuffs to a bench, as the passing cops stared at me, as my kind cops decided to take me to a farther, safer police station, one close to my house, as we sat jammed in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I just kept weeping: “Shane, Shane, Shane, I’m sorry, Shane.”

  The drive took forever as the cops tried to find a jail for me. I’d been crying in the back of the police car, crying for what seemed like hours, getting sicker by the minute as the drugs left my system, when I looked over at the Latin-American woman cop. She had tears in her eyes. Finally, when we checked into the Van Nuys station, the cops who had escorted me on that long ride from the airport were ready to leave. The woman cop came to my cell and said, “I want to thank you for being respectful and cooperative.” I said, “Thank you for being so kind.”

  At the Van Nuys police station they strip-searched me. I had hidden my arms from everyone except Wyatt for two years. I never descended the stairs of my house wearing anything less than full-length sleeves. There were open sores all over my forearms, bug sores from picking at the coke bugs I hallucinated crawling on me—junkie pox, we call them. There were black dead veins on each arm.

  As instructed, I took off every article of clothing, turned around, and spread my cheeks in front of two female cops. I said, “Please don’t look at my arms.”

  The cops didn’t respond to that. One of them just said, “Sweetie, I’ve been watching you for years. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to make sure you’re safe and nobody’s going to bother you.”

  As a cop was photographing the evidence—my drugs—he told me, “You’re number two on TMZ. Dr. Dre beat you out.” Someone had alerted the tabloids. The news was out. There were fifty photographers waiting outside the jail. That morning I had woken up in my bed. I was on my way to surprise Rachael Ray. Now I was in police custody facing drug charges and a media storm. I worried that Shane would find out where I was and what had happened through the press. I thought about Bonnie, Val, and Pat, in New York for what was supposed to be a fun reunion, having to deal with another mess that Mack had made. Twenty-five years later and I was putting them in the exact same position. The cop swiveled his computer to show me the TMZ website. There it was, “Mackenzie Phillips Busted.” Above it I saw the top story. Dr. Dre’s son had died. A father was suffering, I was sure. I looked away from the computer screen.

  Now I was in custody. The handcuffs came off and I was led to a cell. In it there was a Naugahyde cot with a plastic pillow. Beside it, a toilet with no lid. And there were bars. It crossed my mind that this would make a good jail set. And then it crossed my mind that any jail would probably make a good jail set. But this wasn’t a set and I wasn’t acting. I was actually behind bars. And if I still doubted it—or maybe it enhanced the feeling of playacting—I was soon offered the standard phone call, the chance to get a family member or friend to come pay my bail. I declined. This was really happening, and it would be my undoing. I hoped I would die that day and never have to see anybody ever again.

  A few hours later a cop came to my cell and said, “Ms. Phillips, someone’s here to see you.”

  I was led to a room with a glass booth and a phone or speaker. Bijou was there, looking spectacularly Bijou. Her perfect blond ringlets were up in a cli
p. She wore a yellow tank top and blue jeans. She was like a ray of sun shining into a cave. Bijou saw that I was holding a carton of milk and a burrito and said, “Look at your jail food!” Then she observed, “Mack, you’re in jail.”

  I shook my burrito at her. “I know!”

  She said, “You have to go to rehab.”

  I said, “You can’t manipulate me! Fuck you!” I couldn’t conceive of the future. I was starting to get sick and in that moment all I knew was that I needed to get out of there and I needed drugs. I shook my burrito at her again. “You can’t make me go to rehab!” If she wanted me to promise to go to rehab, well, I guessed I would just stay right where I was.

  I went back to my cell and fell asleep. The next day when Bijou came back to see me, all my cockiness and burrito shaking were gone. I staggered out to the visiting room. Withdrawal was kicking in and it was brutal. Bijou started weeping. I leaned on the counter and groaned, “Fuck you.”

  Bijou said, “I can’t take this anymore. I’m bailing you out. Shane says I’m weak and I should leave you in jail, but I’m bailing you out. You have to go to Narconon.” She had flown in the director of Narconon Louisiana. He was waiting with Owen in the car outside—Owen, who for the last several years had felt me disappearing and known that I was suffering, but who had always believed me and insisted to my family that I wasn’t messed up, I wasn’t this, I wasn’t that. She thinks she was naive, but I think she wanted to believe the good. Owen is the best friend a girl could ask for. She loved me no matter what. I didn’t purposely play on her naïveté, but my priorities were screwed-up enough that I let her defend my lies.

  Now that I was so sick, leaving with Bijou and Owen seemed like my best option. There were drugs in my house that would make me better. I said, “Fine, I’ll come, but I want to go home and see my dogs before I go away.” I had to get to my drugs, and I didn’t care if the director of Narconon had to wait while I did them. He was welcome to sleep on my couch.