I’d quit hanging out with meth dealers, crack addicts, and abusers. I lived in a safe neighborhood. But I still felt exposed and vulnerable. A relaxing evening at home was a life-threatening situation. I felt like a sitting duck with no one to protect me. It was the last straw.
•••
It was time to get serious. Time to disengage. I couldn’t afford to mourn sunsets, campfires, kittens, balloon rides, relationships, or any of that shit. A stray cat had been coming by my apartment every day, waiting at the glass patio door for me to let him in and nap with me. One day he stopped coming and I took it as a sign. (In lieu of angelic voices, I put my faith in the whims of a fickle feline.) The fewer tethers binding me, the better off I’d be. When the time came, there could be no backward scramble, no last-minute clinging to life. I was systematically poisoning myself. At some point, the damage would be irreversible. I had to consider quality of life. Pancreatitis? Cirrhosis? Fuck that. I’d take toxicity, alcohol poisoning, or a good old-fashioned stroke—something quick and deadly. The sicker I got, the more committed I became.
It could not be called enjoyable, yet there was a morbid fascination to it. Facial bloat, jaundiced complexion, yellow eyes, excessive bruising, and signs of malnutrition and anemia all but screamed, I make shit happen. Maybe not hit records or blockbuster film scripts, but systematic defilement was its own twisted achievement. Snuffing out life was the new empowerment.
I discovered that my blood no longer coagulated when a nosebleed almost sent me to the hospital. Vegas was so dry that light nosebleeds were common. One day, a trickle progressed to a full-on stream that lasted twenty-four hours before abating. A similar situation arose when I suffered a vaginal laceration—same lack of coagulation, yet quite a bit more blood. My injury was the result of drunken enthusiasm and one unfortunate miscalculation, when Chuck’s hips moved east and mine went west, and well…another fucking perforation. The pain was brief but intense (for both of us), and though Chuck was soon fine, I was bleeding. Not heavily at first, but the rate at which it increased could arguably be called alarming. I refused to go to the ER, having yet to pay off three previous visits—one kidney infection, two bouts of alcohol poisoning. I wasn’t in the mood for another lecture. (“Keep this up and it’ll kill you,” the doctor had snarled. That’s the point, I’d thought to myself, you fucking dick.) But after going through every towel in Chuck’s house, I finally gave in. Wrapping the last bath towel around me like diaper, secured with a bathrobe strap, I pulled my baggiest sweatpants over it and went the ER like that. When I couldn’t describe the situation to the head nurse’s liking, she followed me into the bathroom, took one look, and ran back out, barking, “This one’s next!” Her final question before they wheeled me off was posed very gently. “How many were there, hon?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were raped, right? What did they use, a bottle? Hairbrush?”
“Good God!” I gasped, envisioning poor Chuck, in the waiting room, getting arrested. “That’s not what happened, I swear it!”
When the doctor tried to examine me, I screamed as loud as I ever had and damn near kicked him in the head. While we waited for the nurse to return with pain meds, I asked the doctor how rare this situation was. “Do other women get torn inside, just from having sex?”
“It’s uncommon,” he said, “but not unheard of. Some people have thinner skin than others.” He paused, then, “You have some of the thinnest skin I’ve ever seen, actually.”
It was the last thing I heard before the Demerol hit.
•••
When Christine came to visit, I gave (what I thought was) an Oscar-worthy performance of hiding the truth of my condition. We shopped, dined, and laughed as much as we always had. Back in LA, she called my parents in tears, begging them to help. My parents made their own calls, including one to Joe, who agreed to be part of an intervention should they have one. My parents’ priest talked them out of it. He said our relationship was such that they had no leverage to force me into rehab.
He wasn’t wrong about that. What my parents didn’t know was that I wanted to go. What prevented me? Twenty thousand in credit card debt, mounting medical bills, and monthly rent. My parents couldn’t cover any of that and there was no one else to ask. Why burden them with the scope of it? Wired into my brain as a kid—right or wrong, it is simply a fact—was the belief that things like bodily injury, incontinence, bad haircuts, and behaviors outside the framework of a typical Norman Rockwell portrait deserved condemnation and punishment. I’d been dragged down the sidewalk by my wrist as a kid for my insufficient (toddler-level) bladder strength. Twenty-five years later, no way would I reveal a mess of this magnitude to my parents. Besides, thanks to Christine they had some idea. That they did nothing, validating my silence.
In their own way, my parents were respecting my boundaries. They had no experience with addiction, nor could they scale the walls I’d built. They put their faith in God and hoped for the best. I put my faith in the bottle and hoped for the worst. Each of us were doing what we thought was right. And Joe was busy with his own life.
In desperation, I sold everything I had left, letting go of a $10,000 golden island fox fur for fifteen cents on the dollar. I got half that for the Mustang, barely making a dent in my debt. Adding insult to injury, the buyers asked how it was I knew the car’s previous owner. (I’d mentioned Joe’s name in the ad hoping to attract more offers.) Their disbelief was palpable, as if an icon like him would associate with the yellow, bloated urchin before them.
I stopped mentioning Joe’s name altogether after a similar incident at work. A coworker happened to have a friend who had a friend who knew him. When she fact-checked my claim, word came back that I was a harmless, obsessed fan. “She was never my girlfriend,” Joe said.
It knocked me to my knees. It negated everything I had left—a handful of memories I now couldn’t share or speak about freely. Joe refused to be associated with me. I was gross and he was an Eagle. That was life, black and white…another tether released.
•••
Then I got fired. The speech my manager gave me was eerily similar to the one from Sugar’s ten years earlier (when I’d relapsed briefly on speed, days after being hired): We like you a lot. Come back when you get your shit together.
I moved to Cheetahs, a mid-range club where my dwindling income took another hit. A string of short-term roommates, one of whom robbed my medicine cabinet of a low-dose Xanax prescription, offset my expenses. When half the pills were stolen, it set me back a bit. It would take months to stockpile that amount again.
Homelessness became a lurking threat, which was never part of the plan. Chuck already had boarders; there was no room left at his inn. Nor could I live with my parents (couldn’t or wouldn’t—it wasn’t happening). I had a panic attack realizing my income might give out before my body did. I made despondent calls to Austin, scaring the hell out of old friends. I even called my parents (to talk, not move in), but my slurred, repetitive speech didn’t go over well. Dad withdrew for self-protection in light of my impending death. It came across as disinterest, but I didn’t blame him. My mother was more pointed with a smart, sane request—please don’t call when you’re drinking—but since I was never not drinking, what I heard was please don’t call us.
In some ways, losing touch was a relief. Our time to bond had come and gone and we had not done it well. I could finally stop pining for a relationship that didn’t exist and my parents could finally relax…as if awaiting a call from the morgue was some kind of vacation for them.
We had always seen things so differently.
I was a hypersensitive child, easily hurt and attuned to stress. Born with a nervous system that went to eleven, there was nothing I could do about it then. I felt every emotion in the room, especially my mom’s fear, anger, and depression, and I didn’t know any better than to blame myself. I was not resilie
nt. I faked it, like any savvy kid.
I wasn’t what my parents signed up for. I was complicated—more than they understood or had the resources to deal with. At five, I pondered the nature of God, appalled to hear He saw everything and would follow me around forever. I didn’t have the words then, but it felt horribly intrusive. Anyway, it wasn’t God’s approval I craved but my mother’s. My childhood memories are filled with that singular desire. To do or be whatever she needed to make her love me. Which she did, I am certain, despite that I couldn’t feel it. At three, I was awash in panic that my connect-the-dots drawing made no discernible image. I had yet to learn my numbers, but my older sister already knew which digit came after which. Distraught, I was convinced she’d get all Mom’s love, and there would be none left over. It was different with Dad, but he was spread thin. I didn’t know my numbers, but I knew who ruled the house we lived in.
My folks had more kids than they had time for and didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I did and grew resentful. As a survival mechanism, I shut down inside, unaware that in detaching from pain, I would lose touch with joy and therein plant the seeds of my alcoholism.
My first drink changed everything, reconnecting me with my birthright: confidence, connection, contentment—all three in a single shot. I had a drinking problem at fifteen for a reason—without it I was an emotional wreck, my turmoil interpreted as arrogance. The day my mother slapped me and I hit her back, I walked away completely disconnected. Hers was the first tether to snap and that one never came back.
The strongest tether was my youngest sister, a freshman in college in Austin. Instead of being there for her, I was dying in a desert three states over. In February of 1997 I went to visit, adding to her burdens with my blatant deterioration. I had a violent vomiting attack in a downtown bar on her birthday. She didn’t shame or scorn me, but the look on her face said everything. I’d horrified my most cherished person. Her tether didn’t snap, but I knew that when it did, I’d wrap that one around my neck.
Back in Vegas, I fell apart in a quickening of sorts, incapable of collecting my mail. The mailman quit delivering it—thoughtfully, when you think about it (months later I discovered he’d told the post office I was dead, so “thoughtful” may not be entirely accurate). To some I seemed brain-damaged (the question had been debated) and certain behaviors supported the argument…like the time I stepped in front of a moving car for no apparent reason. On a residential street, the driver wasn’t coming at me all that fast, slowing, in fact, as she approached a stop sign half a block up. All I recall is being impatient to cross, then getting hit straight on. The poor woman was far more upset than I was, helping me to my feet, insisting she drive me to the hospital. I slapped her hands away and told her to leave me alone. Instead of remorseful for making her hit me, I was furious she hadn’t finished me off.
•••
The debasement of those final months is difficult to detail. Some I don’t recall, some I wish I didn’t, and the rest would be redundant. I didn’t expect to live through it, especially with my sanity intact—no one expected that—because around that time something happened in my brain, something broke. Something snapped.
I experienced episodes each morning, like night terrors that crept up on me as I woke. As soon as I’d come to, I’d succumb to impending doom, visions I knew to be wholly untrue that felt one hundred percent real. Awake and lucid, overcome with fear and dread, I would be convinced I was alone in a battlefield foxhole, seconds away from slaughter. I’d howl into my pillow, eyes rolled back, begging for help that never came, then pray to die quickly, for God to please, please, kill me. Within an hour, the horror would fade. It felt like a lifetime every goddamn day.
One morning I woke up in Chuck’s bed, where I frequently slept. His presence cushioned my morning terrors, as did Mutt, his cat, curled around my head. That day, I emerged from sleep in a physically traumatic state. Extreme pain in every cell, like nothing I’d ever felt—muscles, flesh, bones, brain, and each individual hair in howling, tortured agony. As with the foxhole visions, I thought, I will never be able to describe this. I didn’t know that pain like that existed.
Unlike me, Chuck had a habit of jumping out of bed, into the shower, and off to work. This time, he stopped up short. “Something’s wrong. What is it?” I couldn’t answer because my vocal chords were frozen. Then my motor skills went, and that’s how I spent the day—mute and paralyzed, in excruciating pain. Chuck couldn’t miss work or he’d be fired. I refused a ride to the hospital through grunts and eye movements. He left not knowing if I’d be alive when he returned.
I vomited thirteen times over the next three hours, pure toxic bile into a trash bin near the bed. The effort was harrowing, over and over again, so intense I thought I’d die from it. If not that, then toxicity, delirium tremens, or God only knew. Something awful was raging inside me, a battle to the death, and I felt strangely neutral about it. First, there was a feeling of accomplishment. I’d formed a plan and seen it through, taken control of the situation, and killed myself like I’d meant to. Well, almost.
Waiting to see what would happen, I had a lot of time to think. My first question was, Why am I not more excited? My mind chewed long and hard on that. Eventually, it dawned on me that suicide, methodical or otherwise, wasn’t how I was meant to leave this planet. That wasn’t how life was played. Quitting midstream was cheating. It was weak and negated every forward move I’d made. I’d known it all along. I’d simply refused to face it.
The clincher came midafternoon, while I pondered reincarnation. If life was a place to learn, grow, and overcome challenges, I’d be reborn with the exact same problems, except I’d have to go through high school again. I began reevaluating everything (having nothing better to do, unable still to speak or move): all my reasons for checking out (incalculable) and as many as I could fathom not to (the high school thing, mostly). The entire time, I hovered in limbo waiting for a sign. Where were my angels? Those guiding, soothing voices telling me what to do? Marry him; clean the house; don’t worry; play twenty-six!
I’m at death’s door, dammit. Don’t leave the biggest decision of my life up to me!
Who, then? After twenty-nine years of deferring, avoiding, and refusing to take a stand, cowering in fear and inaction, I’d paved the road to this dead end. Only I could turn it around. My life was, literally, up to me. Choosing not to decide was still a choice (if Rush could be believed) and one that hadn’t worked too well for me. I’d hit the wall, and on it was the question: Life or death, honey…pick one. I knew what I had to do, and though I did it grudgingly, I vowed that if I were alive tomorrow, I’d get help quitting drinking.
I’d been checking my pulse regularly. An hour after my silent vow, for the first time all day, it dropped under two hundred beats per minute. That’s when I knew I was going to live.
Dream On
Easier said than done. Two days later and fifteen pounds lighter, I shuffled into the corner store for cigarettes and kept going till I hit the wine refrigerator. My legs were weak and trembly, my sense of balance off. Staying upright was a crapshoot; I’d made it that far on autopilot. The shelves were fully stocked, their tidy, spring-loaded rows filled with the antidote to my life. I tried not to collapse on the Frito display. Instead, I collapsed inward. Torn between desperation to kill the pain and knowledge of where it would lead, I had a mini meltdown. It made me do the strangest thing.
I pivoted. Barreling for the door, literally stumbling to my car, I fell inside, slammed the door, and burst into sobs. My body weighed a thousand pounds; my heart was an empty hole. My head exploded on a loop, over and over and over. I had never felt so wretched. So cannibalized and laid bare.
I was four blocks from Chuck’s house, a doable distance. At the halfway mark was a pub, where my hands yanked the wheel a hard right. I whipped into the lot, slammed the brakes, and threw gearshift in park. Hysterical again, sobbing a
nd thrashing, I pounded the steering wheel, roof, and dashboard. When my arms gave out and my fists seared with pain, I dropped them to my lap, then wailed to the heavens. Do something! Help me! My way isn’t working! A calm came over me, instantly. I pulled out and drove to Chuck’s.
I called him at work. “I need a drink,” I choked out. “It’s too hard. I can’t bear it and I don’t know what to do.”
“Try to think of something else,” he crooned.
“There is nothing else,” I screamed. “There is nothing else!”
I slammed the phone down and fell to the floor, unable to prop myself up any longer. I buckled under the weight of defying my deepest (albeit utterly fucked-up) instincts. What I knew right then was one thing: I would stay put if it killed me. If it meant clinging to filthy strands of dog-hair-covered carpet for the rest of that day, I would not budge. I would not move, I would not leave that goddamn house. I turned my back on the familiar and stepped into the abyss.
That night I called a dancer friend, a girl I’d once partied with. She’d sobered up in AA two years earlier and had been “saving me a seat” since. Nadia was a petite, sultry, dark-haired beauty of Russian descent, with a dry sense of humor and a Rock of Gibraltar countenance. Out of town when I called, she directed me to a meeting to attend on my own. I barely spoke to anyone there. What they said made no sense. It was gibberish and I despised them for it. What did “humility” have to do with anything? I’m dying here, people!
I went back every other day or so. I had nowhere else to go.
They were a wildly eclectic group of strangers who cared nothing about who I was or what I could do for them. I was scum—the ultimate loser, by any definition—and those freaks, fifteen in all, embraced me without question. They didn’t push me to do, or be, anything specific. They seemed to think I was the confused one and said other things suggesting I deserved a better life than the one I’d created. I didn’t have the heart to set them straight. Their attitude was Hang tight, dear. It’ll all make sense soon. We’ll show you how to fix the broken stuff (and besides, we’ve probably seen worse).
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