“Janelle,” he said with his hands on my face. “You’re talking nonsense.”
I was speaking in tongues, my mouth moving against my will. As he paced and begged, I faced the corner of the wall and began hitting my head harder and talking, and then I was sitting in a kitchen chair I had towed to the middle of the garage, smoking. He sat behind me with tears and concern, trying to give me space. Our border collie whined from the crate. Mac let the dog out, fed him his breakfast, and, I imagine, patted him on the head. He returned, handed me another smoke, and crouched down to watch me. Right in front of me. I saw terror. In his big brown eyes I saw terror. He watched me silently and waited.
Over time, I moved a little closer to him, to the ground, spoke in a language the people understand.
• • •
I was not fired. I was placed on mental health leave.
From our motel in Sacramento, Mac suggested we go home. “It’s a half-mile away, Janelle. We can’t afford to stay here.” He was puffy-faced and had put on a few pounds. He wore a huge camo jacket with pockets everywhere. We had bought it two years before at an army surplus store. He hid liquor bottles in it when he returned to our motel room from the grocery store. He believed they should be hidden, even from strangers, and even though they were legal.
“No, we can’t go home. Somebody will find us.”
“Who, Janelle? Who will find us?”
We just need to stay here in this motel room with towels shoved under the door because I think I see feet. I’m 90 percent sure I see feet. Those are definitely feet. How do you not see them?
“Fine, we can run home for clothes,” I said. “I can do it. I’ll do it. I’ll run home for clothes. I can do it. Don’t come with me. I want to go alone.” I saw him as a liability. If we had to do something as dangerous as drive across town and enter our home, I needed to do it myself. I was the only one I trusted.
Back in our house, the big one on the lake where we had brought Rocketship Rock-On home in his blue pastel smocked bubble, I decided we could stay for a few days, so I called Ben, the cocaine-delivery guy, and told him we had relocated. He brought me more.
But there was too much blood in my nose to do another line and my heart was doing something strange and I wasn’t entirely sure I could feel my feet, so I asked Mac to Google “heart attack from cocaine.” He yelled from the other room, “Does your chest hurt?”
I could tell by his voice he was scared, and if he was scared, he might block me from doing more drugs, so I yelled, “No,” and then he yelled, “Are your fingers tingling?”
And I didn’t think so, so I yelled back, “No, baby!” And at first I enjoyed the “possibly overdosing” attention, but then it turned on me. I just wanted to do more, so I told him “never mind” and asked him to come back and told him all the racing heartbeats were gone.
I’m okay. Bring me a straw and the baggie after I rinse my nose to wash out the blood. Bring it to me on the couch because I cannot stand. Bring me a cocktail to slow my heart. Tilt the straw because I cannot lift my head. Bring me my pills because I’m getting dizzy. If I don’t take the Effexor I get very dizzy. Has it been two days already?
I staggered up the stairs after the Effexor kicked in and I could walk again to do a line off our wall mirror, which was lying flat on my bed now. When I got to the top stair and turned toward my bedroom, I heard it: “You are going to die if you do another line.” I thought it was God. No, I knew it was God, and I knew it was true. It was a voice that rose clear and clean from the thick mud in my mind. It boomed.
It roared, and when it came, I knew it was not from me, and I didn’t want to die.
8
Nothing Left to Hide Now
That morning, instead of walking into the bedroom, I turned around and went back downstairs, leaving half of our last baggie of cocaine untouched. This was an act I had never accomplished before that very moment. I had voluntarily faced the beginnings of detox. I knew then it must have been God.
“I’m done, Mac. I’m going to die if I do more,” I said. I paced the kitchen and then filled a beer stein with Captain Morgan, capping it off with flat Coke, readying myself for the feverish craving already crawling up the floor into my feet. It would get worse before it got better, but I had endured the withdrawal before. I had done it countless times before.
But this time, I had no desire to continue. I could not continue. I recoiled from the drug as if it were a food that had just poisoned me. My body rejected it on a visceral level.
Mac was still wearing his camouflage jacket, after all these days, and in our warm house. His black curls were wild, flat on one side, and his eyes were deep in amused skepticism.
“You don’t have to stop, Mac. I don’t care. Finish the bag. It’s right upstairs.”
“No, it’s cool. I don’t need more.”
Weirdo, I thought.
He approached me in a motion I feared preceded a hug, a touch I knew would set my skin burning hotter than it already burned. He often wanted to touch me when all I wanted was to disappear into the black alone—the black of cocaine, of alcohol, of sleep. It didn’t matter what it was, I simply did not want him close. I wanted him to get the hell away from me until I felt some control again.
“I have to call my mom,” I said, sidestepping him and grabbing cigarettes and the house phone on my way to the backyard. I looked out over the fake lake and then squinted at the pulsating numbers on the phone, knowing my eyes were amphetamine eyes. I pressed each number with stupidly measured focus. She answered immediately.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, cracked.
“Hi, Janelle.” Her voice was thick with worry, a tone I would have called “overly dramatic.”
“I need help. You have got to help me. I’m addicted to cocaine.”
I thought she would cry or yell or pass out in shattering surprise, but she said, “I’ve been waiting for this call.”
Strange, I thought, since I had been so sly.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. “Do not move.” She arrived thirty minutes later with a furrowed brow and stood in the kitchen looking at Mac and me, in the awkward awareness of a lie just brought to the surface. Nothing left to hide now, so I took huge early-morning swigs from my stein and smoked the cigarettes I used to hide from her.
I fell finally into a deep sleep, and that evening, when I could sit still again, I sat on the couch with my laptop and began searching for the rehab that would cure me. Mac and my mother looked at me with irritating severity from across the living room.
“God, why are you two so serious? None of this is that big of a deal.” I wished they’d both settle down.
“Not a big deal?” My mother appeared incredulous. “You just told us you were about to die from cocaine.”
“I know, but—whatever. You guys are making me nervous. I don’t know why everybody’s gotta be so fucking dramatic.”
“Why don’t you just find a rehab you like?” My mother looked at Mac for support, but he looked at me, and I typed “Northern California rehabs” into Google.
I had two stipulations for a treatment center: First, it couldn’t be part of that coffee-drinking cult. Second, it couldn’t be one of those God places. It was quite thoughtful of God to speak to me in a mental lightning bolt, but I had no need for a relationship with the man. Besides, I had one with Him once, and look where that got me.
I found a rehab near the ocean in Northern California among the redwoods and hippies. It boasted science-based therapy, and on our way there the very next evening (the intake specialist told my mother, “Come now before she changes her mind”), Mac and I stopped at Nordstrom and one of those import stores where white people buy drapes, couches, Italian sodas, and small statues of Ganesh.
At Nordstrom, I bought a pair of leather tennis shoes, perhaps as some sort of consolation prize, or because I had no closed-toed shoes even though it was March and had been raining for weeks. Every day, I wore a long skirt and flip-flops, possibly with a sweatshirt, m
ostly due to all the weight I gained after starting the medications that were supposed to heal me but only made me fat.
At the import store, we bought a silk and cotton blanket with elephants embroidered along the edges to decorate the potentially drab rehab bed (nobody wants that!) and a tiny Buddha statue, to represent my new life of spiritual greatness. I packed a journal to record my transformation, pictures of Ava, Rocket, and Mac, a copy of Emily Dickinson’s collected poetry, pajamas, and my flowing, ripped skirts.
Sure, I had lost my job, children, dignity, health, mind, and respect as an unfit drug-addicted mother, and was on my way to an institution hoping to save me from myself, but what occurred to me was that I needed $80 Nikes and a throw blanket.
Mac and I drove quietly through the rain. We were headed for the coast again, but for different reasons. This time we sat in a bath of misery and hope rather than excitement, a sort of determined agony that comes when you’ve reached the end of a long catastrophe, or think you have—and it all feels urgent and heavy and new. We listened to live Grateful Dead, the same songs my father sent me on cassette when I was a little girl, which I replayed for hours on my boom box. I wondered if they allowed music in rehab. I should have brought some, I thought. If I were to bring music, I would have brought the bands I grew up on: the Rolling Stones, the Dead, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. Some Janis Joplin, perhaps.
When “Ripple” came on, I glanced at Mac and thought about him—my old friend sitting there, driving me through the rain—and how it had been a long time since I watched him chase unruly chickens, since we shot pool in dive bars, since M-Y-Q and the almost homeless man with the kitten who ate brewer’s yeast.
When Jerry sang, “If your cup is full, may it be again…,” I thought, Alright, is this going to be when my cup gets full again? It was almost too sad to think about, his tunes, his black-tar humanity. I wished we had gone in the daylight. My mind drifted to the goodbye I would soon face, and the time I said goodbye to Mac that Saturday morning while he stumbled onto that goddamn bus with all those goddamn bright-eyed students, and how we were so much sicker now. I had thought we couldn’t possibly get worse than that day, and yet, here we are.
Well, here I am. I suspected it was mostly me.
“I can’t believe the shit we’ve done, Mac,” I said. “What happened to us?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. I wished he’d say more, but he never said more. If I had looked harder at his eyes I probably would have seen they were damp with tears.
“I don’t want to live that way again,” I said.
“Me either.” He smiled at me while I kicked off my shoes and reclined the seat, put my feet on the dash, and lit a cigarette. We had traveled the road to hell, but we had done it together.
I heard Jerry sing “If I knew the way, I would take you home,” and I had to hear it again, because I’ve always thought it was the most beautiful lyric ever written. How simple the thought, how true, to want to lead with love, back home, into safety, but having no idea where to even begin.
I reached down and skipped the song back.
Mac was the only one who knew the whole truth, of me, of my life. Insane nights in motel rooms. Beating heads. Speaking in tongues. Broken tears and the homeless guy who asked us if we would please take him back to his spot under the overpass. “You frighten me,” he had said. That one night when Mac knelt for hours naked in the bedroom doorway, to “guard” us from intruders (in our minds). He explained, “Well, if someone opens the door, they’ll see me here and turn around.” I laughed, telling him it was a really shit plan.
Since the day we met seven years before, we had never spent more than a few days apart. Even when I lived alone in that 1940s house, we always somehow ended up back in each other’s arms. We were friends, I guess. We were always good friends.
Beginning that night, I would live thirty days without my friend, and my beautiful Ava, and my baby Rocket.
My boy. My sweet boy who was going to fix me up. The pregnancy that was going to straighten me out for good. I thought about the day I found out I was pregnant, the day I found out he was a boy, the day I brought him home. I thought of the ringlets that bounced under his chin, the way his knuckles dimpled and his tiny perfect hands held dolls and hammers in that endless toddler fascination, and I thought about his silence. He barely said a word, except “no” and “mama.” He was so quiet, a hushed angel with giant blue eyes who toddled around, smiled, climbed things, cuddled, and laughed, until he was gone. I thought of the morning my mother took them and the way I let them go.
I am here now. It won’t be in vain.
I couldn’t stop looking at Mac while we drove, as if I wanted to burn his image into my mind. I wondered if I should say something, but I couldn’t think of anything, so I kept staring until he smiled again, his face small and childlike with the same heavy yearning eyes, offering still a thousand years of love and adoration. I looked away, partly in disgust, in that old familiar repulsion, because he loved me unquestioningly. I threw my weight against him because I had nowhere to lean, because he was there and I loved him, but why did he stay with me? I thought it was all he could do, all he knew how to do, some weakness, some sad routine he developed over the years because he couldn’t find a better one.
I didn’t think it was a choice he’d made, or some gift, some beautiful generosity of spirit he was born with. It seemed more like blind devotion—weak and frail—to love a woman like me.
Yet I hated myself for abusing his love. I wanted him to stand up to me. I wanted him to fight me. I wanted him to shove me back or scream in my face or walk out or fuck somebody else. Anything. But the second I thought he was pushing back, or walking away, I panicked and begged him not to leave. In therapy, they told me this was “borderline.”
But he never did any of that. He simply stuck around and asked me to stay too. He stuck around and drank and took drugs with me even though he almost always responded to my first request with: “No, this is a bad idea,” and “Janelle, let’s just go home.” He stuck around while I begged and pleaded for one more baggie even though the night had already gone horribly sour, and we were stuck in a stranger’s house downtown with blabbering idiots on a four-day drug run. He stuck around the next day while I paced the house, barefoot in a ripped skirt over bleeding scabs, and he stuck around when I told him I hated him and that he had ruined my life. He stuck around even when our children were gone. He stuck around waiting. For me to get healed.
“I’m going to miss you, Mac.” I closed my eyes when I said it and looked away.
“Don’t cheat on me in rehab,” he said, smirking.
“Who the fuck would I cheat on you with?”
“I don’t know. Some dude.” His jealousy made me smile.
“I love you,” I said. “Everything is going to change, Mac. It has to.”
“I know, Janelle. Okay,” he said, but I wondered if he believed me.
“If I knew the way, I would take you home,” Mac sang along this time, not mentioning that I had started the song over, to hear that line again.
I wanted to hear Jerry sing it. And I wanted to believe him.
• • •
In the rehab parking lot under the drizzly rain, I refused to cry. Instead, I held on to Mac too long. He felt giant in my arms, like pure rock warmth, and I couldn’t believe I was leaving him. I wondered if I had even noticed that warmth before.
I regretted coming to this place immediately. I wanted to get back in the car and head out with Mac, anywhere. Like we used to.
Almost as if he knew I was about to bolt, a lively redheaded man in his early twenties came bouncing out the front door to retrieve me. He shook our hands with the enthusiasm of zealots trying to sell religion on a doorstep, then merrily picked up my bags. Mac stood shifting back and forth, looking at me from under his downturned face, watching, waiting for a cue how to behave.
I mumbled an encouraging platitude and realized it was time, so Mac and I hugged
again and kissed. I watched him back out of the parking spot, waving to me out the window. My guts turned into lonely disgust, as if the reality of my life were unfolding in that moment, when the last of my family drove down a hill without me.
The bouncing man reappeared, and I observed that he was wearing cargo shorts and flip-flops. He appeared too young to be escorting people into their new lives. I seriously doubted his qualifications and wished he’d talk less—or better yet, stop talking entirely. Nothing is more nauseating to a drug addict facing clean living than a joyful person already there.
To make matters worse, his name was Brent. Of course it fucking is, I thought. I bet you also drink soy lattes and wear those shoes that look like feet. I wondered if I was going to have to see him every day, and, if so, whether or not anybody would notice if I killed him.
Once inside, he led me to a small room for the beginning of the “intake process,” which involved him and some equally elated young woman relieving me of my cell phone and face toner (it had alcohol in it and could be consumed) and requesting that I get naked to make sure I didn’t have any drugs duct-taped to my body. Luckily, only the woman was there for the strip-down part. I wondered if she was also going to make me bend over and cough to check my asshole for heroin. I had seen that in the movies.
Jesus, these people are serious. Who the fuck would drink face toner? I wondered if perhaps I wasn’t as sick as I formerly imagined.
After the body search, which did not involve my anal cavity, they led me to the office of a somber man with white hair who appeared to be in his fifties. He wore a striped, collared short-sleeved shirt and khakis. His desk and office seemed very official, with diplomas hanging on the wall in frames and tasteful plants by the window. When he said hello and began perusing a file, he struck me as a middle-management type, the kind of person who was always trying to prove his worth. He asked about when I had last used drugs, which medications I was on, and whether or not I was having suicidal thoughts.
I'm Just Happy to Be Here Page 11