Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (5 page)

A couple of hours later, they released me to my mother’s custody only on her pledge to get me to a therapist. They gave her the name
and number of someone who could see me as soon as possible. What had just happened?

It took my mother and me a very long time to actually talk about this event in any linear way; it was simply too surreal. Between us, even now, we cannot come up with an itemized list of who did what and when: what the people at my school said when they called her, what she said to them or me, what I said, what came next. It was a horrible, blurry time that hurt us both. And now that I know what it is to have children, to nurse them through illnesses and feel every pain they feel, I don’t know how my mother got through it without collapsing on the ER floor.

I do remember going to the therapist afterward. I do remember sitting in a swivel chair and swiveling, swiveling, swiveling. He had a kind of blank face and glasses; he sounded like the grown-ups in
Peanuts
cartoons, whose words basically come out as
Waa waaa waaa waaa waaa
. I didn’t want to tell him all my private feelings and thoughts and dreams—I wanted only for him to tell me how to not have them. This is going nowhere, I thought. Why should I come here if you’re not going to tell me what’s wrong with me and how I can make myself feel better? What good are you, anyway?

Bipolar disorder
—a biochemical mood disorder in the brain, which is more familiarly known as “manic depression”—often begins to show itself when the hormone storm of adolescence kicks in, although it’s often not diagnosed until much later. Sometimes it’s not diagnosed correctly, and when medications are prescribed, it might not be the right combination. Gain ten pounds, lose ten pounds, and the medicine has to change. Have a baby, bury a parent, miss
your flight, lose your job, and the stress makes it all go sideways again. Focus, says a coach. Shape up, says a parent. Get yourself an alarm clock.

There’s a lot of controversy about diagnosing kids with bipolar disorder. And what kid wants to be “diagnosed” anyway? You may also have every good reason to be angry at your parents, to genuinely be too tired to drag yourself out of bed in the morning, and be either giddy or painfully self-conscious at a party. Isn’t that just the way adolescence goes? Or is that mental illness?

Had my parents not divorced, had there not been all the resultant chaos, had I not inherited a complicated set of genes, had I never taken a drink or a joint, would everything that happened to me have happened anyway? Is bipolar disorder what I was experiencing when I swallowed a box of Benadryl or wandered through an old hotel’s beautiful lobby? There’s no way to know. And hindsight, of course, is twenty-twenty. But back then, there was one fact not in dispute: I was a mess.

One night—I was not yet fourteen—I was finally given the green light to a total meltdown by a man my mother was dating; let’s call him Bob. Bad Bob. I didn’t like Bad Bob much; he wasn’t good enough for my mother. A navy helicopter mechanic, he was something of a control freak. But he had a black Corvette, which he let me drive once. I almost drove it into the Burger King by the bay. As cool as the car was, I knew he’d only let me drive it to get to her (why else would you let a rude thirteen-year-old get behind the wheel of your black Corvette?).

This particular night, they’d just come back from Imperial Beach, then famous for being a rowdy surfer-biker hangout (HBO’s series
John from Cincinnati
was filmed there). Bad Bob was so drunk that
how he made it home without killing my mother or getting an escort from one of San Diego’s finest still baffles me.

Chances are I was listening to Metallica in my room when they got home. Not two minutes in the door, Bad Bob yelled something at me—ordering me to turn it down, probably. I yelled something back, at which point he swooped in, picked me up, and lifted me as high as he could over his head; when his sweaty arms couldn’t take it anymore, he simply dropped me.

If a full-grown man raises a dinner plate above his head (seven, maybe eight feet high, depending on how tall he is, and Bad Bob was feeling pretty tall) and then drops it, odds are the plate breaks. I instinctively put my arms out in front of me to keep from landing on my head. The shock of the physical pain made me see stars, but the fear that he’d do it again was worse. In an adrenalized rush, I somehow got to my feet and ran. He cornered me in the kitchen. My heart was pounding—I was sweating, sobbing, and in pain. He took a single step in my direction and I grabbed the first thing I could reach for protection—a large knife from the butcher block. Waving it at him and screaming, I backed him up just far enough to get myself to the front door, flew through it and down the alley. Once I realized I was actually out of the house, I dropped the knife and ran some more. I was that idiot girl in the horror movie who drops the knife and runs hysterically down a gravel road, crying, hurting, being chased by a lunatic. And barefoot. If you ever find yourself running for your life barefoot on gravel, just give up. Dead or alive, your feet will thank you.

This particular gravel road was only two blocks from Coronado Hospital. My entrance was far from casual. I don’t know if late-shift hospital ER staff are hard to jolt or if this was just the end of a long
night for them, but no one found it odd that a young girl was running barefoot and screaming for help. Not five minutes behind me, my mother came running in as well.

The ER provided no safety and no hope of shelter that night; I was released to go home with the diagnosis of a “hurt arm.” Home was the last place I wanted to be, and I had no intention of going there. Once outside the hospital, I told my mother so. Defeated, she took me to one of my girlfriend’s, where I spent the night. The next morning, we rode to school on her bike. Now this truly
was
a criminal act—“doubling,” or riding a bike with someone on your handlebars, is ticket-worthy in Coronado.

All through first period, my head ached, my stomach roiled, and my arm was killing me. I couldn’t believe that Bob or any other man would be allowed to drop a kid headfirst onto the floor and not have to pay the consequences. The first chance I got, I went to the school office in search of my guidance counselor.

Her office was in a tiny room just behind the secretary’s desk, with a big old-fashioned wooden desk and chair. From my first day at that school, there was something about this woman that made me believe I could trust her. She was small and quiet, she actually seemed to be listening to me, and when she finally spoke, it was in a soft voice that reassured me that I’d done the right thing to come to her. Actually telling an adult released some kind of pressure valve inside me; I went back to class feeling like I could breathe. And then the police arrived.

It turns out that they’d been called to my mother’s house the night before, after my speedy exit; they’d instructed Bad Bob to leave the house and not come back. So there was police report number one. My guidance counselor’s call to them was police report number two.

When she called me out of class and we walked back down to her office, the counselor explained that she was required by state law to call the police whenever a student reported a case of abuse. All they wanted, the policemen said, was to hear my side of the story. After they listened to my account of what happened, they sent me back to class and went off to track down Bob and my mother.

As expected, Bob had a completely different story to tell. His version had me chasing him with a knife, threatening to slice him up. He couldn’t imagine why I would do such a thing, he told them, and my arm injury resulted not from any harm he had done, but only from his trying to defend himself. My mom couldn’t tell them anything for sure, she hadn’t actually seen what happened; she’d been in the bathroom, heard the yelling, heard the door slam, came into the living room, and realized I’d taken off down the road.

My seventh-grade history class was in the library when the two uniformed police officers came back to school, walked into the library, called my name, and escorted me out to their car. Before they opened the car door, they turned me around and handcuffed me, in full view of anybody who happened to be looking out the school windows. The charge, they said, was assault with a deadly weapon. I was shocked, yet on some level it made sense: This was my mother’s way of getting back at me for drinking, for getting stoned, for being rude and disrespectful, and a general pain in the ass. It’s not as though she didn’t warn me. It didn’t occur to me to panic. There was even something funny about it—the police station was just across the street from the school. Handcuffed in the back of the car, I was about to go for a big ride of barely a block.

Once at the station, I was told to sit and wait. I asked to use the restroom and had to be escorted by a female police officer. Still in
handcuffs, I struggled to get my jeans and underwear off in front of her. I was horrified; I hadn’t peed in front of anyone since I was three years old.

When we came out, a policeman actually said to me, “Okay, now we’re going downtown.” To juvenile hall. That’s when it hit me: This is not a joke. As we rode over the bridge I caught yet another glimpse of the suicide hotline sign.

At juvie, I was led into the building, uncuffed, and taken to what I was told was the holding tank for girls. The smell was foul, like feet. Unwashed feet that had been trapped sockless in sneakers for weeks. The main room was configured in the shape of a circle, with the desks in the middle and the boys’ and girls’ holding tanks on either side. Light filtered in from dirty windows. There were overhead lights, too, the fluorescent ones that blink and buzz if they’re about to burn out. My arm hurt, my chest hurt, but I knew I had to get a grip or I’d simply hurl myself to the floor and start kicking. Then I had a bizarre movie moment, when I glanced across to the boys’ holding tank and caught a glimpse of one of my cousins. I had no clue, then or now, what that was about.

The women who worked the holding tanks were very kind to me. They told me I was the youngest girl there. While they were processing the paperwork, somebody gave me a couple of Creamsicles. Food always helps reduce anxiety. My relief was short-lived, though, since a few minutes later a matron took me from the holding tank and into another room, warehouselike, with extremely high ceilings and giant plastic bins against the walls. These held clothes: shoes, shorts, undergarments. I was asked my size, and told to pick out a white button-down top, royal blue gym shorts, socks, generic Keds-looking white tennis shoes, giant white panties, and a bra that
looked and felt as though it were made from Styrofoam cups. Then I was ordered to grab a towel and follow my tour guide, Ms. Hospitality, to the showers.

The true moment of humiliation was the pat-down—in my memory, it was a grab-down, although there was no cavity search, the only thing she skipped. No one but my mother had ever touched me. I had never even kissed a boy, had my hand held, or been seen in anything less than a bathing suit on the beach, and even that had been rare. She sat in a metal foldable chair, silent and impassive, and carefully watched me as I undressed and stepped into the shower. Showers are meant to be relaxing—this was the most unrelaxed I had ever been in my life.

The next stop on the juvie tour was my cell. My roommate was sweet-faced and very pregnant. I had never met a pregnant teenager before and had to stop myself from staring. I was shown around and given a rundown of the rules. My mother and I were always looking at model homes and attending real estate open houses; this felt a little like that. I pictured myself purchasing the property. Our suite consisted of a metal desk and two steel beds. The mattresses, no more than an inch thick, were covered in plastic. My bed hovered just above the floor. That smell of feet had made its way into the room.

The open-house fantasy was shattered as I was led into the community bathroom. The words
community
and
bathroom
should never be linked together. The first section was a wall of stalls—the stall dividers only stood a few feet tall. In fact, they were even in height with the toilets. I would be hip-to-hip with anyone else using the facility, and anyone who wanted to get a closer look could easily do it. I vowed never to step foot into the bathroom again, no matter
what. I don’t do well in a one-ply-toilet-paper situation. This is why you will never find me camping. Well, that and snakes.

I was taken back to my cell and my roommate offered me a magazine.
Cosmopolitan
magazine. Another first for me—I’d never seen it before. I was amazed at the way those women looked, with wild hair and breasts popping out of their dresses. In that moment, if someone had told me that within a few years I would grace those very pages, I would’ve laughed in her face.

Ms. Hospitality came to escort me back into the main room near the holding tanks, where I was asked a laundry list of questions, not unlike the ones Phyllis had asked: Are you on drugs? Are you pregnant? Have you ever tried to commit suicide? My “yes” to that last one opened up a barrage of other questions related to my mood and mental health. They got me with this one: “How are you feeling right now?” Are you
kidding
me? I had been dropped on my head by a crazy man, I had just been naked and somewhat fondled by a woman I’d never before seen in my life. I was wearing a Styrofoam bra, I was trying to figure out how I was going to avoid the community bathroom in the foreseeable future, and oh, yeah, I was in jail. So, no, I was not feeling well. My circumstances were depressing. I felt no joy, and I said so. This got me an instant reservation in the suicide tank, a metal-and-concrete room where I was stripped of all my nice new institutional clothes and given a scratchy gray army-style blanket. And then the door closed.

I stood there naked, stunned, and totally alone. Besides my naked self, the only other things in the room were a metal toilet and another thin plastic mattress. There was a small round hole in the door, and I tried desperately to get the attention of anyone in earshot to tell them that this was a massive mistake. No one responded,
although I suspected I was being watched. I was clearly stuck there for the night.