Slipping past the cameramen yelling “Mackenzie, Mackenzie,” I ducked into the car with Owen, Bijou, and the Narconon guy. Three short miles and I was home. I went to the back of the house and crawled into Josh and Lisa’s bed as if they were my parents, the ones who would protect me and keep me safe.
As soon as I told Josh what had happened, he started collecting all the drugs that were in the house and throwing them into his briefcase.
I said, “You’ve got to get me some cocaine and some heroin right now.”
He said, “You’ve got to go to rehab.” I knew he was right, and I was going, but not yet. I needed one more shot. Josh took his briefcase, full of drugs, and carried it out to his car. Then he came back into the house, past the Narconon director, past Bijou, her assistant, and Owen. He walked into the bedroom and gave me a bag of coke. He refused to give me heroin. The bad day was about to get worse.
I went upstairs to my bathroom and shot up until the bag was empty, but I wasn’t high enough. I went downstairs, ignoring the growing retinue of people in the living room, to get more coke. Back and forth I went, every twenty minutes, getting another last bag of coke from Josh and bringing it up to the safety of my bathroom. I had just been arrested for carrying drugs, and now I was bingeing while my loved ones waited for me to agree to go to rehab.
Finally, I came out of my bathroom to find that everyone had assembled in my bedroom. In addition to Bijou, Owen, and Jeff Lukas from Narconon, there was now Lee, my friend Grainger—a family friend who has a child with Michelle—and Shane, my Shane, holding a bouquet of tuberoses, my favorite flowers.
They said, “It’s time to go, Mack.” Bijou had gotten us a flight leaving that day.
I said, “Fine. Let’s go. Right now.” I knew it was over. I was going to rehab. But still, even then, I wanted to do as much coke as I could before I left. Like having a sundae before starting a diet. But much worse.
So although I said “Right now,” I had a different definition of that than a sober person. I had run out of syringes upstairs, so I excused myself and went downstairs to get some of my diabetic dog’s syringes. I went into the kitchen and rifled through the drawer where I kept his supplies. I grabbed a ten-pack of dog syringes, then turned to see my son standing there looking at me. Shane.
I put the syringes back, closed the drawer, and said, “Okay, let’s go.”
32
One of the first letters I wrote from Narconon was to Patricia Palmer, the onetime executive producer of One Day at a Time. She was the one who had woken me up and told me they wanted to do a urine test. And she was the one who had fired me from the show for the last time. Patricia had sent a note to my house in L.A. saying, “I’m sending you a big hug. Can you feel it?” Now I wrote back to her. I asked her to tell Bonnie, Val, and Pat Harrington that I knew I had put them in an uncomfortable position … once again. I asked her to apologize on my behalf and to let them know that I was working hard to change my life.
A reply came sooner than I expected. Patricia wrote something like, “I remember watching you wait for your dad to come to the show. I understood your need to be with him and to have his approval. When I lost my father it was difficult for me and I turned to what I know—hard work and doing what’s expected. You did exactly the same thing. You turned to what you know.”
Afterward, I heard from Pat Harrington, and Bonnie sent me a funny picture of the two of us from some event for TV moms and the people who played their kids. In the shot it looked like we were kissing on the lips. She wrote, “Thought you’d enjoy seeing our lesbian love kiss. Ha, ha. Love, Bonnie.” I didn’t hear from Val, but I understood. I know her. After my arrest, the press had swarmed around these people, unpleasantly, I suspect, but all their words were full of unwavering love and support. Valerie said, “We love Mack. She’s a light. We just love her.” I know, no matter how much time passes before we speak again, that she feels that way. If I was the black sheep of that otherwise functional family, they never stopped loving me and hoping I would come back to the fold.
I threw myself into rehabilitation with the same zeal I had had for shooting cocaine. The Lodge believed in stripping you down to worthlessness and then rebuilding your ego. Various rehab programs I had done always taught that I was powerless over drugs and alcohol. I know these approaches work for many addicts—they worked for me for years—but ultimately they were almost an excuse not to fight so hard. Narconon had a different philosophy. It was a simple, practical, unemotional approach to healing and growing. Instead of relinquishing my power, I now reclaimed my will, I fed and nurtured it, I decided to rely on it. If my father had left me with unanswered questions. I would find the answers within myself. At Narconon I learned to use my own strength to make good choices.
It’s not that I don’t believe in God, but there are a million ways to get to the top of the mountain. Yes, there is a higher power. Yes, I pray for help. But for me, succumbing to powerlessness means behaving instinctively, and if I followed my instincts then every time I encountered difficulty in my life, I’d get high.
Alina Lodge saved my life, no question, but there were issues left unresolved. Maybe that’s always true—once you’re formed, there are some fundamental elements you can never reshape—but the fact stood that I had relapsed, so by definition it wasn’t a real recovery. Certainly my complacency was in part to blame, but maybe what I’d also gotten wrong was that I couldn’t throw away who I was to be clean. It sounds corny, but what I realized at Narconon was that I could still be my quirky left-of-center self without doing drugs.
It wasn’t just my cowboy boots and my tight jeans that I’d left behind at the Lodge. The real problem was that being the Superwoman I learned to be in sobriety didn’t leave room for me to be as adrift and lost as I was when my father died. I wasn’t prepared when the monster stirred.
There wasn’t one single reason that I relapsed. Would my father’s death alone have awakened the monster? Did I seek out cosmetic surgery to dull the pain of losing him? Or was it a perfect storm of prescription pain medications and a hard emotional time? All I know is that I needed to find my way away from the drugs, this time without feeling like I was trying to be someone I was not.
At Narconon I was allowed to listen to my iPod. During breaks and free time I plugged myself in to Shane’s music. My friend Lee likes to say that Shane got all the talent of my father without the darkness. He is a brilliant singer, songwriter, and musician. Shane has recorded a couple hundred songs with his father. When I listened to his sweet voice it gave me strength to know that I was on the path—home to my son.
After three months at Narconon, Shane picked me up from the airport. He had moved back home to take care of his mother. He brought me back to my house, to the scene of my downfall. Josh and Lisa were gone. While I was at Narconon, with my court date looming, I’d been terrified that the court would discover that drug dealers were still in my house. I tried to impress this upon Josh and Lisa. If they didn’t leave, I risked losing everything. They were still in their mellow heroin scene—they just thought I was being mean and cruel. I loved them, but I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice my whole world for their convenience. It took awhile to convince them I was serious—I was on probation and wouldn’t set foot in my own house while they were still there—but they finally found an apartment on the beach and moved out.
I was home. I was clean. The monster was dormant, comatose, and I was safe, but never again complacent. I knew, intellectually, that this was good. I wasn’t scared, as I had been coming out of Alina Lodge. I had confronted my past in a whole new way, and I no longer had to ignore the video loop of times past. It had no power over me anymore. But I still felt tentative, as if a blindfold that had long been on my eyes had been removed and, eager as I was to see again, the sun was too bright and the assault of color and movement—and life!—was overwhelming. The challenge was not how to get through each day without drugs. The challenge was how to live. I didn’t emerge from so many year
s of active addiction and drug abuse without some battle scars: The old habits of a drug-warped lifestyle. The dysfunctional personality that led me to do drugs in the first place. And a pair of scarred, pocked forearms I still went to great lengths to hide from everyone.
It may sound melodramatic, but from where I stood, the world as it was seemed complicated. People, dogs, cleaning the house, doing laundry. Little things felt big. A junkie scrapes by, exerting the least possible amount of effort. After so many years of that life, of going to bed at four in the morning one day and starting your day at four in the morning the next, it’s hard to adjust. Eliminating drugs doesn’t change that you were that person, living that life. Nothing changes overnight. For a while it feels strange to just be alive.
Bijou and Owen had cleared all the old needles out of my bedroom and bathroom (the last “bad trash”). And Shane had tried to clean up. But in the months I was away my once clean house had fallen into disrepair. I had to face the bedroom that had become my shooting gallery, the garage that was crowded with Josh and Lisa’s abandoned boxes, the driveway that held their broken-down car. The garden was overgrown. The pool needed repair. There were dishes in the sink. There was dog shit and trash everywhere. My house was destroyed. And the damage wasn’t just superficial. Poor Max, my beloved but diabetic and very high-maintenance pug, was half dead.
Ten days after I came home from rehab was Christmas Eve. Bijou wanted the whole family together, and Bijou is a force, so all five kids—Jeffrey, me, Chynna, Tamerlane, and Bijou—gathered with husbands and wives and children and significant others at Bijou and her boyfriend Danny’s house. It was the first time in I don’t know how long that all five kids were together. The next day, Christmas Day, we all met at a Chinese restaurant in West L.A. and all three moms—my mother, Michelle, and Genevieve—were together with their families.
I can’t think of a better way to come home from rehab. I was met by nothing but love and support. A chorus of voices saying, “We’re so proud of you, you look amazing, we love you.”
It was also my chance to apologize. When I was a young addict, I did whatever it took to get drugs. I lied to people. I was late. I was manipulative and self-righteous. When I relapsed, I tried not to hurt anyone. My father took others down with him—wives, girlfriends, me. I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I withdrew. I barely left the house.
But now, in daylight, I saw the pain I’d caused. There were the castmates I’d let down by getting arrested when I should have been taping the Rachael Ray show with them.
There was my mother. On top of worrying about me, the publicity surrounding my arrest had been hard on her. The news spread through her assisted living community like wildfire, and my poor mother locked herself in her apartment for a couple days to avoid the stares and whispers.
There was the rest of my family, all of whom had been profoundly worried about me. At some point Bijou had said to Danny, “My sister’s gonna die and I’m going to flip out. Don’t touch me, don’t tell me everything’s going to be okay, because it won’t be okay. Just leave me alone. Don’t try to comfort me. I’m not going to be okay.” To have someone I love so much tell me she was expecting me to die was a strange and painful thing to hear. As I said, when I was arrested, I didn’t feel like a criminal because my crime was committed in the privacy of my own bedroom, but if crime is inflicting pain and suffering on others, then I was guilty. I had hurt the people who mattered most.
Most of all there was Shane, who deserved a sane, constant mother, and who had faced my very public arrest, though when I asked if he’d been embarrassed in front of his friends, he dismissed me, saying, “My friends are your friends. They love you.”
My father damaged the people around him. He failed to see how all our lives were entwined. My father, my mother, Jeffrey, me, Michelle, Chynna, Genevieve, Tam, Bijou, Cass, Owen, Denny, Spanky, Rosie, Nancy, Patty, Sue, and on and on. Lives are connected, and we cause one another joy and pain. We love one another. We carry one another. We create and destroy one another. Drugs manipulate these relationships. The actions of someone whose life is drugs aren’t a fair portrait of who she is and how she intends to treat those most important to her. That is why I try to let go of anger, bitterness, spite, grudges—these distance us from the people we love. I forgave my father, and now it was my turn to ask for forgiveness.
That Christmas I saw that the relief of having me back was greater than the pain of enduring my behavior. What could be a stronger force to keep me clean? And it was Christmas. I sat back and looked around me. There were candles everywhere, beautiful food, and a Christmas tree with tons of presents under it. Chynna sang songs from her soon-to-be-released Christian album. Shane played guitar and sang for everyone. The whole family jammed together. All those years of hosting Christmas were behind me. Bijou had found her path. She had turned from a wild child into one of the most stable people I know. She would soon get engaged. It was time to pass the torch.
My relationship with Wyatt died a quiet death. We were both clean, but we lived far away from each other and had no time or place to remeet and rediscover each other as clean companions. I still love him, because I never stop, but it was over.
As my drug-free days added up, I started to notice something. The drugs had left my system, but with them, amazingly, miraculously, unbelievably, had gone the physical pain. The racking, constant pain that had thrust me toward painkillers as a means of survival. Now I could jump out of bed, chase the dogs around the house, dance for hours on end. Shane said, “The fact that you don’t have physical pain astounds me.” He reminded me that just moving used to make me cry out in pain. He used to have to help me get up. He said, “How did you manifest this miracle?”
But was it a miracle? Or did I create the pain in order to justify my behavior? Was I that mentally fucked up? Or was it a sorry, sad coping mechanism? I don’t know. All I know is that I am now drug free and pain free, and I am certain that there was a correlation between my addiction and my pain.
Several months after I came home, I got a call from a pharmacy. The guy on the phone told me it was time to refill my prescription for Soma, a muscle relaxant I had abused. I said, “Please take me off your list. I don’t take medication of any kind.”
The pharmacy rep said, “You have to refill. If you don’t refill I’ll be fired.”
I was surprised to hear such a forceful sales pitch for a prescription medication. I said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to refill my prescription.”
He said, “Please. Just thirty pills. I’ll lose my job! I have a family to support.” Now I was getting pissed. Who was this guy, the devil?
I said, “Leave me alone. If I take those drugs I’ll die.”
He said, “If you don’t take them, I’ll die!” And that’s when I hung up. If this was the job he was hired to do, then I didn’t care if he was fired.
When I was a young addict, I had lived in squalor. But during my relapse, when I was getting high as an adult, my house was spotless. Cocaine makes you clean obsessively. I had so much energy that I’d do the floors in my room every day. I ran loads of laundry ceaselessly. Now that I was clean, I didn’t have that kind of energy anymore, but I still had dear Max, a sick, blind, and often-incontinent dog. The thought of my increasingly filthy bedroom weighed on me, the daunting reminder that I didn’t have it together, that chaos was encroaching, that I might not ever manage to clean that goddamn room. But one day I just did it. I woke up in the morning, went out, and bought cleaning supplies. I vacuumed and mopped the floors. I scrubbed the bathroom on my hands and knees. I swept out the laundry room and cleaned the kitchen. Such a simple day, a small accomplishment, but once it was done, I felt much better. It was only a step, but every decision in the direction of the rest of my life made me feel stronger. My life skills were starting to reemerge.
Now I was ready, but for what? My life on drugs had a built-in purpose: to do more drugs. Now the holes in my life made themselves apparent. My bank a
ccount was drained from the drugs, the rehab, the lawyer. My relationships were damaged. My father was gone. I had dug a huge, deep ditch and it was going to take several years to get out of it.
• • •
I’m nearly fifty. I’m watching my son become a man. And for the first time I’m starting to see that the old ideas I have about myself don’t have to be true forever. I thought I couldn’t clean my house. I thought I couldn’t drive a stick shift. I thought I would always carry the ghost of my father on my back. I thought I could never stay clean.
And so it is that I’m getting back into the swing. When I first got home from Narconon, every morning I woke up and thought, Oh, man, this is hard. Now when I wake up, I pause, expecting to feel the weight of the day descend on me, but it doesn’t. Relieved, I stand up, relishing my newfound lightness. I feed the dogs, I make my coffee, I sing bits of the Neil Young song “Old Man”: “Old man look at my life / I’m a lot like you were.” I’m back to being the mom who takes care of the house. I cook for my son; he cooks for me.
My support comes from friends and family: Owen, Lee, Shane, my mother, my brothers and sisters, my friends from Narconon. I attend an ongoing recovery program. My spiritual practice reaffirms everything that I know about myself.
I visit my mother once a week in assisted living. When she left her three-bedroom house in the Valley and moved to a one-bedroom apartment, she brought her house-size collection of holiday decorations with her. As every holiday passes we put up and take down the appropriate ornaments: the candles, cupids, Easter egg tree, fake mini-Christmas trees, Santas. And nearly every time I visit she has inadvertently managed to switch her TV to closed-caption subtitles, with no volume. I fix it for her, then we go down to the dining room, sit with her lady friends, order dinner, hang out, and laugh. It was unexpectedly hard on her when I was away at Narconon, so now we both slow down to enjoy our time together as mother and daughter.
High On Arrival Page 27