by Laura Clery
Soon enough, a psychiatrist was prescribing him anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills. In the back of his mind, he knew that he didn’t have the ability to take this kind of medication safely. He knew, but he also needed the pain and bad feelings to stop. There was another way to do this, but he couldn’t remember it. He just needed to be able to work. He could tackle his deeper issues later on, right? He just needed to get this music cue out to Hans, now.
Before he knew it, he had relapsed. He was abusing the medication. One day, I was working in the kitchen and Stephen was in the bathroom. I heard the faint rattling of a pill bottle. Immediately, I understood what was going on.
He was going completely insane, and I didn’t know what to do about it. He wouldn’t listen to me anymore. He would take his bike out at three in the morning to “get some French fries at Swingers” and come back completely bloody and fucked up. There was one morning that I was leaving for an important shoot. We were shooting a pilot that I wrote. This was big for me! As I grabbed my keys, Stephen began to smash his head into the door, threatening to kill himself if I left. It was such a fucked-up time. I was scared. I pulled him into the car with me and dropped him off at the emergency room, not knowing whether he would be dead or alive when I got back. I knew I couldn’t help him. Addiction is something that you can only pull yourself out of. It’s the only way.
I called Kristal and told her what was happening. I knew that I couldn’t be around him if he was using. With Stephen’s sobriety gone, I immediately knew that my sobriety was at risk too. Though I never stopped loving him, I couldn’t be with an active addict, and I didn’t sign up to take this sort of abuse. It wouldn’t be long before his addiction would transfer onto me. I started looking for an apartment to move into alone.
I didn’t tell him anything because of how emotionally unstable he was. He was threatening to kill himself. After hearing that so often in my past from Damon, the threat felt very real to me. I didn’t feel safe telling him I was leaving, but I found a small place in Venice and contacted them to rent it.
The day before I had planned to leave, Stephen came home, panicked and out of breath and fucked up. Completely fucked up. But behind his eyes there was a glimmer of him. He wasn’t completely gone, I could tell.
He spoke rapidly. “I’m done. I’m done. I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. I heard a voice and it told me to stop and I have to stop. I have to stop.” He ran into the bathroom, took his bottle of Xanax and flushed all the pills down the toilet. Which by the way, you’re not supposed to do. It’s bad for the ocean. Sorry, fishies.
Maybe he subconsciously knew that I was leaving. I’m not sure. We got into bed that night, and he was shaking and twitching and sweating. He looked so sick, like he was on the verge of something really bad. He was staring at the ceiling completely terrified, flinching every so often. I didn’t know what he was seeing. He took my hand. “There’s dark clouds all around me. I’m scared, Laura.”
I was so scared. I got out of bed and called a friend in the program. Frantically I told her that Stephen had thrown all his Xanax away and was seeing things and shaking. She said that he was going through withdrawal.
Stephen had been abusing Xanax, and this particular drug forces your body to depend on it. If you quit cold turkey, you can have a seizure and die. You have to medically detox from it, especially from the amount Stephen was taking. I looked over to him, the twitching was getting worse. His heart was racing. I took his hand and led him to my car and sped to the hospital.
I was terrified that Stephen could have a seizure at any minute. What if he had one in the car while I was driving? What would I do? I couldn’t even think. We got to the emergency room and saw a doctor who didn’t understand addiction at all. He looked at us like Stephen was the scum of the earth. “Why can’t you control how much you take? What is wrong with you?”
I was enraged, and Stephen wasn’t even coherent.
“He needs help. He’s sick.” My voice was shaking with anger.
“He had a prescription. Just FOLLOW it.” This doctor was a piece of work.
“Please, just help us,” I said, trying my hardest not to punch this guy’s eyes out.
The doctor glared at us both and said, “I’ll be back.”
Where was he going, to take a fucking smoke break?!
Stephen couldn’t speak, but I could tell he was scared for his life. He was barely coherent but I could see him in there, trying to fight his way through this. Suddenly his back arched, his fists clenched, his body seized up completely. He had gone into a full-on seizure, shaking and jerking so hard he almost fell off the table. He turned blue.
I screamed as loud as I could for someone to get in here NOW. Stephen went stiff. The doctors and nurses raced in the room and put the defibrillator on his chest.
I was screaming. I couldn’t stop screaming. Two nurses grabbed my arms. “You need to leave, ma’am.”
“No! No!” I yelled.
The doctor rubbed together the sides of the defibrillator. “CLEAR!” I watched Stephen’s chest arch with the electric current as I was torn from the room.
They put me in an empty waiting room down the hall.
I begged and cried, but they wouldn’t let me out. I couldn’t stop picturing Stephen’s stiff body and blue face. I thought he was dead. I paced and paced, every minute felt like an hour. I was terrified that I had lost him. After twenty minutes a nurse came in the room.
“We stabilized him, but he needs to medically detox immediately. You have to take him to a rehabilitation center right now.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“We’ve given him some anti-seizure medication, so he should be fine for a bit, but you need to go right away.”
Wait, I had to drive him? In my car, which was not equipped with emergency medical equipment or personnel? How were we going to make it there?
I must have pulled out my phone and called some rehab centers, but at that point, I was on autopilot. My hands and feet were moving without me. I wasn’t in my body. I found a rehab center in Tarzana that would take Stephen, and I got him in the car. He was so out of it, he didn’t recognize me. I started the car, but I was so petrified he was going to have another seizure. I was so afraid he was going to die in the car, but I just drove. I had to get him there.
We made it there without incident, and he went straight into the medical detox program for thirty days.
I stayed in our two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica for those thirty days. I talked to his mom every day about how he was doing. I went to visit him when visitors were allowed, but I still kept my plan to move into that Venice apartment. The thing is, I didn’t know if he was going to stay sober after he got out of this program. A medical detox safely brings you back to sobriety, but it was up to Stephen to stay that way. I didn’t know who he was going to be when he came out of this. He needed to get sober and get better, and I couldn’t be responsible for that. No one could get him sober except him.
At the end of the thirty days, I went to pick him up. He looked like himself again. He told me that he didn’t feel ready to be out in the world, so he had decided to go to an all-male rehab facility. I smiled, because that showed me he had a lot of willingness to get better. He knew that he had been inches away from death, and he saw everything he had to lose. He was timid and kind, and a lot closer to the Stephen I knew before, but the scars from the past months were still there. I hadn’t forgotten how he treated me.
I dropped him off at the rehab facility and went back to our apartment. He started on the 12 Steps again. Fifteen days after he began rehab, family and friends were invited to visit, and I went to see him in his room. After he had updated me on all the new friends he’d made, I knew I had to tell him something. This was the reason for my visit.
“Stephen, I’m going to move out of the apartment for a while.” I looked down at the table. This was so hard. Stephen looked deeply into my eyes and nodded, looking like he felt all the pain he ha
d ever caused me. Finally I met his gaze. “I don’t want a divorce. I just think we need some distance so you can work on your sobriety, and I can focus on me.”
“I understand.” He tried not to show any regret or sadness, but I could see his disappointment in himself.
There I was, separating from my husband while he was sick in rehab. It felt complicated, because one of the tenets of my sobriety is to forgive, to see people as sick and doing their best rather than as evil. But all that didn’t change the fact that I did not trust Stephen. It didn’t mean that I had to sit and take the abuse when he turned into a monster. True, he wasn’t himself when he was using, but that didn’t change the fact that he was dishonest and verbally abusive. I knew Stephen was a good man. But I also needed to be sure that the drugs were gone.
After his second rehab program ended, I moved into the small apartment in Venice under a three-month lease. Stephen moved back into our apartment and worked through the 12 Steps.
I kept working and stayed as busy as I could.
When Stephen got to Step Eight, making amends, it had turned to autumn. He flew to Chicago for a day to see my parents. He had the cab drop him off at a flower shop near my childhood home, where he picked up a bouquet for my mom and planned to walk the rest of the way. Then, just like in the movies, a clap of thunder rang out and it started raining.
“A sprinkle never hurt anyone.”
With that cue, it started POURING. Stephen was instantly drenched, and the flowers looked like they’d gone ten rounds with a kangaroo. He knocked on my parents’ door and my mother opened it, completely surprised to see a wet man in a drenched suit.
“Erm. Hello.” Stephen waved awkwardly.
“I’ll get you a towel.” My mom rushed from the door, leaving Stephen to stand next to my dad uncomfortably.
My dad clapped him on the back. “Went for a swim, huh? Not very good weather for that. Weird decision to make.”
“Do you mind if we all sit down together? I’d like to read something to you both.”
My parents glanced at each other. My mom handed him the towel and led him to the living room couch.
Stephen pulled a soggy letter out from his pocket. He carefully peeled it open and drew a shaky breath, sitting on the long floral couch right where I used to watch infomercials every night as a child until I fell asleep. He read his amends to them.
My parents both stared at him. They weren’t used to apologies or direct, earnest communication. Or people who were willing to change. My mom felt the urge to fill the silence. “Ummmm. That’s really nice.”
Stephen continued, “Please, I want to work to make this better.”
“You’re still wet, let me—let me get you a new towel.” My mom rushed to the linen closet.
Abandoned, my dad tapped his heel awkwardly. Then he pointed to Stephen’s arms. “You been going to the gym?”
My mother was aware of what had been going on. I had told her about the pills and how mean he had gotten. But my dad . . . it was all news to him, and deep emotional confrontations aren’t really his forte.
“Um, not so much recently.”
“You know, when I go to the gym I listen to an iPod. I play some Nirvana, a little Beatles . . . you know, the greats. That just makes the whole experience better. And then—wham bam—you’ve run a mile! Good stuff, those iPods.” My dad then got up and joined my mother over near the towel closet.
Ultimately, they could really see the effort that Stephen was putting in. After all, he didn’t just make a phone call to apologize. He flew all the way there, walked for miles in the rain, and flew back the next day. It was the perfect triumph of a great effort, bad planning, and some lousy luck.
In AA, they say that you have to be willing to go to any lengths to complete the steps. I could see that he was willing. I was living on my own in the Venice apartment when one day, I got a call from him.
“Hello, Laura.”
“How’s it going?”
He cleared his throat. “If you’re free tonight, I’d like to—if you don’t mind, I think it would be nice if—can I take you out on a date tonight?”
“Okay.”
He took me out that night to this cute diner in between our houses. We started to laugh again. At the end of the date, he took me straight home. A few days later:
“Can I take you out again tonight?”
“Café Gratitude?”
“Let’s do it.”
That night we arrived at the restaurant, and right as we got seated a chipper server came up to us. “Hi, my name’s Jeffrey, and I’ll be your server today. What makes you happy?”
Stephen and I looked at each other awkwardly. I forgot that the servers ask you a cheesy (but still vegan) question every time you eat there. I’m all for gratitude, but tonight I wasn’t in the mood.
“Butts.”
Stephen smiled at Jeffrey. “Yes. For me as well: butts.”
We started over slowly. We dated again. Eventually, he asked me to move back in with him. Once I trusted him completely, I did.
I believe that people can change. If they have the willingness, if they see a need within themselves, they can reach down within and change. I hate when people use the phrase “you are who you are” as an excuse to let themselves be less than the person they could be. Stephen did a really thorough inventory on himself and made one of the most difficult changes possible. He hit bottom and got better because he wanted to live. I could see it in his actions and I could feel it.
Remember when I had my relapse at six months of sobriety? That was when I learned that I had to put my sobriety before everything else. That struggle gave me the courage to get my own place and have space from Stephen. It doesn’t mean I didn’t love him dearly through all of it. I never stopped loving him, but I knew that I had to put my sobriety first. I had to have faith that if we were meant to be together, we would be. It was either trust the universe, or stay with Stephen and enable his addiction. If I had just been okay with everything he was doing, he would have just kept doing it. In the end, I believe it made him stronger and he is a better man than the one I met at that party. He’s kinder, more compassionate, more loving. He truly appreciates every day that he is alive, and that’s a wonderful way to live.
It was a bit past our second anniversary when we finally looked around our Santa Monica apartment and decided we couldn’t be there anymore. The whole space was filled with bad memories. The fighting, the abuse, and the lies all took place here. We weren’t in that place anymore mentally, so why should we be there physically? We decided to move out and start over, fresh.
We found a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, next to Frank Zappa’s old house. Joni Mitchell was down the street. It had this sweet 1960s Laurel Canyon vibe. Our neighbor across the street was this seventy-five-year-old gay hippie who would always have these massive, crazy parties. Stephen and I had a window on the second story of our house that looked out onto the street . . . and honestly, sometimes it was better than watching TV. The neighbor would blast heavy metal in the morning and sometimes have busloads of little people trekking inside to his parties. We saw so many of his young boyfriends coming in and out of the house. It became our favorite thing to guess what the drama was between him and the twenty-five-year-old blond hottie, or if he was going to make it last with the thirty-year-old swoopy-haired one. It was the best when they would have actual yelling matches, so we could finally hear the dialogue.
“You have my cat, man! It’s not your cat, give me back my cat!!” yelled the swoopy-haired guy from the front driveway.
“You’re not getting the cat!” Our neighbor yelling from his house.
“Well I’m not leaving until you give me the cat!” Then he threw his bag down onto the ground.
Okay, so many questions. We really needed more on this couple. With both of us standing at our second-story window, I turned to Stephen: “Popcorn?”
“Oh, that would be good. I think we’ll be here awhile. Don
’t you?”
I smiled. “I do.”
CHAPTER 10
Maggie: Cat
The story of Maggie begins on my third date with Stephen. I casually mentioned to him how much I loved cats, because that is textbook how to get a guy. Stephen looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Then let’s get one.”
“Um. What?”
“Let’s go rescue a cat. Why not?”
“You want to rescue a cat?”
“Come on, Laura. Let’s go.”
The next day we headed over to the animal shelter in Compton. There was this tiny gray cat in a cage, small as my palm. He was so friendly and loving, and he immediately got into my hand and started purring.
“Stephen, look at this one.”
“Awwwww.” Stephen came over and scratched the kitten’s head. “I love him. Let’s take him home.”
“NOPE,” a voice said.
We looked up to see a stressed-out-looking woman with her hands on her hips. “That one is part of a set. You take him, then you take his sister. The black-and-white one. No one is separating them.”
“What black-and-white one?”
She pointed to the farthest corner of the cage. Half shrouded in darkness and half burrowed underneath cardboard shavings was a terrified-looking calico kitten. I tried to reach for her, but she didn’t budge from her spot. Okay!
I turned to Stephen. “Well, I guess we need to get this one to get the gray one.”
Stephen looked nervous. “Um. Two cats? How much would you be coming over to see them and pet them and such—”
“You know what,” the lady continued, “those two came in twenty minutes ago. You don’t even have to fill anything out. Just take them.”
Oh my God, how easy! “We can just take them, Stephen!”
Stephen feigned enthusiasm pretty well. “I heard! How . . . brilliant.”