High On Arrival (26 page)

During this time I was invited to perform in a production of Eve Ensler’s
Vagina Monologues
in L.A. The producer asked if I had any ideas for women to perform with me. I knew not to suggest Valerie—she would never say the word “cunt.” I suggested Michelle, and she signed on. We did the show together every night for a month. Our dressing tables were right next to each other. Our makeup was done side by side. We were onstage together for the whole performance. Michelle was always a presence in my life. Over the years we talked on the phone and spent time together with the family, at dinner parties, going to premieres, but now it was amazing for me to sit with her as two adult women, to have the opportunity to become girlfriends.

One day I asked her to teach me how to dress like a lady. I wasn’t a slob, but I had always been a bit of a tomboy, wearing boots and jeans. Michelle took me to Beverly Hills and had me buy stockings and garters and ladylike dresses. More than thirty years earlier she’d been like a mother to me, spoiling me with Beverly Hills finery, and now we were dressing me for an entirely different stage of life.

The age difference between us was not great, but any woman can learn a lot from Michelle. She is beautiful, ballsy, and bright. She raised a wonderful daughter. She is the last surviving member of the Mamas & the Papas. Years ago, when the band briefly threw her out, she said, “I’ll bury you all,” and she did, and I was not surprised. Michelle is a force of nature. She endures. I, on the other hand, was, underneath it all, weightless and exposed, soon to fall prey to an unexpected wind.

For so many years I thought I was meant for a junkie life. That was who I was. It was just live it and do it and screw it. When I got sober I learned not to think that way anymore. I was in the world; I was functional; I thrived. The moment that my father and I had in the hospital—when I told him he was no longer the ruler of my emotions—that moment was important. I’ve never been good at defending myself. I turn my anger inward or act out with drugs. But I did it. I stood up for myself. I assumed my power and said good-bye. It was the closure that pointed to a future life of sober joy.

But for all the healing, for all the stability, for all the trappings of a functional life, I wasn’t the pillar of sobriety that I appeared to be and that I thought I was. My father was gone, but the monster, the sleeping addict within me, was yawning and stretching.

28

When I first went to Alina Lodge, I noticed that clean, sober graduates of the program would visit and sit with the program’s founder, Mrs. Delaney, at her big table. I thought,
One day I’m going to sit at that table with my car keys and my purse—the accessories of a sober life—and I’ll have lunch with her.
It came to pass. Day after day of not doing drugs. Week after week of not wanting drugs. Month after month of not even thinking about drugs. Year after year of living a normal life. I lunched with Mrs. Delaney. She became my friend. I joined the Lodge’s board of trustees. Eventually I celebrated being sober for ten years.

I had reentered the world, rebuilt my life, rewired my brain, and even though I still went to support groups, I had a life in which I stopped thinking of myself as an addict. The past faded. The idea that there were people in dark rooms shooting cocaine became foreign. Who would do that? Why would anyone want to live like that? It was disgusting. I wasn’t that kind of person, and it was hard to imagine I ever had been that kind of person. I could never be there again. I was so sure that the monster inside me was dead and gone. But that complacency, that arrogance would be my downfall.

Back in 1999, when I was on hiatus from
So Weird,
I’d had cosmetic eye surgery. I’d always thought that one of my eyes looked like a puffball compared to the other. It was particularly obvious to me when I saw myself on
Hollywood Squares
at age eighteen. Now the asymmetry was compounded by age. I had my upper and lower eyelids done, and I was happy with the results. I was a working actor, and staying youthful was part of the job. Along with the surgery came pain medication. I took it as prescribed. At the appropriate time, I stopped using it. No problem.

A couple years later, not long after Dad died, I decided that I wanted to have liposuction on my thighs. And I figured that while I was doing it I might as well get my breasts done. The thigh and breast surgeries were for me. Nobody was having trouble photographing me, but I wanted to stem the tide of aging.

I delayed the surgery for a week to play for charity on the quiz show
The Weakest Link.
I was playing for Children of the Night, a charity that helps child prostitutes get off the streets. I knew firsthand how quickly and easily a kid might find herself willing to do anything for drugs. During the years I was clean and sober, I spoke all over the country to thousands of people about addiction. My focus wasn’t just the addicts but their family, friends, and colleagues. Obviously, my father would never have considered warning me about drugs. But all those other people who cared about me, worried about me, and wanted to help me—and there were many of them—had no idea how to intervene. I told my story to thousands of people. I talked about the signs of addiction. I did anything and everything I could think of to help those who might be as lost as I had been.

Now I was fighting for street kids, and I was on a roll. When the nutty English host-lady of
The Weakest Link
chided me about my “checkered past,” I said, “That’s all different now.” The audience cheered. In a dramatic contrast to the fucked-up eighteen-year-old who couldn’t do a spelling test on
David Letterman
, I answered all the questions right until everyone had been eliminated except me and one other girl. I lost on the last question. I was the weakest link. Good-bye.

The silicone breast implants were more painful than I expected. I was bruised purple. It was agonizing. The sleepy monster opened an eye. I think about that moment when I made the decision to have the surgery, and I wonder what was really going on. Cosmetic surgery is painful. It usually requires narcotic pain medication. But I had long before lost my right to take pain medication. Had my ability to handle the medications they gave me for eye surgery made me think I could do it? Or did the eye surgery make me want to have more surgery so I could get more pills? I don’t know the answer. But it soon became a chicken-and-egg question, one I couldn’t answer and one I hope I won’t have to face again. The fucked-up result was that my doctor, a family friend, gave me Thorazine, Demerol, Vicodin, Xanax, and Valium.

Mick came over to see Shane. He took one look at me and said, “You’re high.”

I said, “I’m in pain.”

He said, “I’ve known you forever. You are high.” I was on opiates, and Mick could see that I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t getting out of bed. I wasn’t happy. When I ran out of medication, I was sick.

My beautiful little sister Bijou was twenty-two. She had been a crazy wild-child in New York, dancing on tables, allegedly almost cutting off the tip of someone’s finger with a cigar cutter, fake raping someone with a dildo on the dance floor. She was on Page Six of the
Post
several times a week. I knew why she acted out—born into madness and raised by wolves—and I spent hours and days talking her through various dramas. She looked to me as a mother, or a big sister at the very least. Now she was a hot model, dating a guy named James, still living a high life, but not such a wild one.

Knowing that I was on pills for pain, Bijou teased me, offering me ecstasy, saying, “Come on, roll with me.”

I said, “No, I don’t do that stuff.”

• • •

I assumed that the pain from surgery would diminish, I’d stop taking pills, and I’d resume my life. Instead, I started having unbelievable pain in my neck, my lower back, and my joints. I’ve always had problems with my spine—I had scoliosis as a teenager and wore a back brace for two years. But this was different. My knees, wrists, hips, every joint was on fire.

I went to doctor after doctor and was diagnosed with brain vasculitis, lupus, carpal tunnel, scoliosis. All of the above.

I was desperate for relief. James and Bijou were into a pill called Norco, which was like Vicodin but much stronger. James had huge bottles of them. I arranged to get one, but when I went over to pick it up, Bijou tried to intervene. She’d invited someone sober to confront me about taking Norco. I was the stable one. I was the one she could count on. For all her teasing and trying to get me to party with her, Bijou wanted, needed me to stay sober. But my enormous pain was my excuse and I stood by it.

At first I had real pain and used pain medication exactly as it was prescribed to me. But the monster was stirring. In rehab they tell you that if you ever use a drug again you’ll immediately be right back where you left off. I know people who may be clean—but if they go out and use, they are on their knees within a week. That’s what you see on TV too. It wasn’t the case for me. The pain pills I was taking for the surgeries were so strong that my addict drive kicked in. By the time I switched to Norco, I was already on the path to hell. But I still functioned really well for years—until I didn’t.

When I finally started the inevitable slide, my family noticed right away. In January of 2005 I went to the Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of
The Jacket,
a movie I was in starring Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley. I had a martini at the screening. Then Bijou and I walked the red carpet together, doing our thing. The next day I got a text from her. She said, “I know you’re drinking. I smelled it on your breath. You have to stop. You’re going to die.”

Back home Owen told Bijou that I was wearing the Fentanyl Patch, the same narcotic that had been Dad’s drug of choice. We’d all lost Dad. This was more than Bijou could take. She came over to my house and went apeshit. She burst through the door, yelling, “You can’t do this. What’s wrong with you? You can’t be on this medication.”

People were talking about me. Mack was taking pills. Mack was drinking. Mack was using narcotics. I was pissed. I had legitimate pain—nobody seemed to get that. The pain was intense, and the doctors were saying to me, “Just imagine if you weren’t on painkillers. How could you function?” My doctors wrote me multiple prescriptions for the same pills and told me to fill them at different pharmacies. My doctors put me on so much Fentanyl that it’s amazing I didn’t go into a coma. These are what they call “rock docs,” doctors who are essentially legal dealers. You don’t actually have to be in pain to get prescriptions from them. But I was. I was in so much pain that I had to walk with a cane. I tried acupuncture, a shaman herbalist, kinesiology, irradiology. I truly thought I was going to end up in a wheelchair. I didn’t see any way out, and now the people I loved were trying to take away the only relief I had.

At the same time, though I’d forgotten it, I was an addict at heart, now and forever. Feeling pressured and being angry and in denial came with the territory.

It wasn’t just the pain meds that awakened the monster and caused my relapse. My father’s death should have provided closure. Instead, it came bundled with new issues and new anger. First, the secrecy. We were never allowed to talk about his illness. He’d gotten a liver transplant, and the fact that he had been using and drinking ever since he got the new liver was a family secret. Dad was not a stupid man. He was brilliant. But he had chosen this horrible death. How could he think that with someone else’s liver in him he could continue to drink the way he did and not die? Fuck him. I was heartbroken and pissed off. But the official story was that he died of heart failure. Well, sure. We all die of heart failure.

When he was alive, I couldn’t talk about Dad’s illness at recovery meetings, so I’d tapered off my attendance. Now that he was dead, I couldn’t talk about my anger and pain, and holding it in was impossible. So I stopped going altogether. And after a while, it was,
Okay, I’m out of the program. I’m already doing OxyContin. Why not do cocaine?

My father’s death also stirred unresolved issues. There was always a component of my sobriety that had to do with my father, an unacknowledged desire to show him that I could live a different life than the one he modeled for me, to prove to him that he too could do it, to save him. Dad never bought it, not for a minute. When he died, although it was far from so, it was almost like I had one less reason to be clean. I’d gotten sober to flip Dad off. Staying sober was a fuck-you to him. Now he was dead and I was using to flip him off again. In a world of logic and perspective, my son Shane is more than enough reason to stay sober, but the loss of my father threw me far and away from reason.

There was more. Someone close to me, let’s call her M., had confided in me before Dad died. Knowing that he had abused me, she told me that he had done similarly inappropriate things to her when she was quite young. The idea that Dad had taken advantage of a teenager was horrifying. What happened between us was something I thought I had processed, but when I imagined the same thing happening to someone I loved, it seemed far worse. It made him into a real monster.

The fact that the same behavior seemed criminal to me when practiced on another was in itself a matter for the self-esteem police, but after Dad died it got even more twisted. M. came to me and said, “I have something I need to talk to you about. My husband has been bugging me to set the record straight. I’m sorry, but all that stuff I said about your father—I made it up.” M. told me that she had lied because she wanted to be closer to me. My jaw hit my chest. He was gone. The man was dead. She had made me see him as a real monster. Now he had died falsely convicted. In my eyes. If she was telling the truth. My world was spinning, full of needs and questions. I played the Stevie Nicks song “I Miss You” over and over.

Well I miss you now

I have so many questions

About love and about pain

About strained relationships

About fame as only he could explain it to me

Seems like yesterday

I think about how much I

Wish that you were here with me now

The invisible girl that was my name

She walks in and walks out

And I’m sorry now

I’m sorry now

Although we’d made our peace, the overarching feeling was that I needed answers that only my father could give, and now he never would.

I was an angry half orphan. I was wrecked, physically and mentally. I didn’t think I had a future. The monster was awake, and it was hungry, and I was fucked.