High On Arrival (28 page)

I said being a junkie was excellent because when you first start, the drugs enhance reality, and it’s cool and enlightening and appealing. But over time the drugs take over reality until they create your reality for you. They own you. That’s when you’ve crossed over, and if you’re using needles, it’s guaranteed to happen. Anyone who picks up a needle isn’t a recreational drug user.

My doctor had prescribed Opana, an opiate twice as strong as OxyContin, for my pain. On top of that, I’d started shooting cocaine. Every time I went to my rock doc to get my prescriptions renewed, I worried that he would do labs—drawing blood from me—and he or the nurse would see my junkie arms. But for some deluded reason I didn’t anticipate his reaction when I mentioned in a conversational, “Isn’t
he
fucked up?” way that my boyfriend Wyatt was back in detox in Florida for OxyContin. The doctor said, “Oh, in that case we’re going to do a urine on you today.” I sat in stunned silence. A urine test for drugs. I had shot cocaine just before I walked in the door. I was done for.

I peed in the cup—what else could I do? Moments later, the doctor came in and said, “Your test shows positive for cocaine.”

I said, “That’s impossible! I haven’t used cocaine in fifteen years.” I was a middle-aged mother, indignant and outraged.

He said, “I’m going to give you your prescription, but if this comes back positive from the lab, we’re going to have to talk.” Those rock docs. Always game to fill one last prescription.

I left the doctor’s office and went to the pharmacy to fill my prescription. But I knew what the lab results for my urine test would show. Even this doctor was semi-ethical enough to stop prescribing Opana after I tested positive for coke. After this round of pills ran out, what was I going to do?

Josh and Lisa smoked heroin all the time. It’s called chasing the dragon. You put tar heroin in foil, light a flame under it, and with a straw, you suck up the smoke, chasing it down the foil. When I was down to two Opana and facing a gruesome withdrawal, a lightbulb went on in my head. Heroin. If I smoked heroin, I wouldn’t go through withdrawal. Plus, it would take care of the pain. A perfect solution. If you are out of your fucking mind.

Lisa gave me a tutorial in how to chase the dragon and I smoked heroin for a couple weeks. The heroin erased any and all pain, physical, emotional, imaginary. It brought abject euphoria. It was an amazing high. When Wyatt next came to visit, we smoked heroin together. But then he found an old needle on the floor in my bedroom and said, “We should shoot this stuff. That’ll be a better high.” I had no plans to shoot tar, and when Wyatt suggested it, I wanted to and didn’t want to at the same time. I knew that if we shot heroin, we’d be crossing into extremely dangerous territory. Even my faithful drug dealers never used needles. Wyatt and I discussed it, and you’d think that pausing to reconsider would lead anyone to decide,
No, this is a bad idea
. But I just thought,
What the fuck? At this point what the fuck do I have to lose?

Wyatt and I shot heroin for the first time together.

I went first, and the feeling was so intense I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t speak I was so high. But that didn’t stop me. I don’t blame Wyatt—I’m sure I would have figured it out eventually—but from that moment, things got bad fast. Wyatt left, and I had endless access to heroin. I started FedExing it to Wyatt, and night after night we stayed on the phone for eight to ten hours, shooting up together.

Once I started, once my brain experienced the engineered pleasure of opiates in my bloodstream, it did not want that feeling to go away. Ever. If I went too long between shots, I immediately started to feel like shit—pissed, tired, ravenous for more. Withdrawal was so intensely unpleasant, such a direct contrast to the intense euphoria, that it would’ve compelled me to keep using even if I’d wanted to quit. Which I didn’t.

Nonetheless, heroin was not my perfect drug. It made me too fucked up to do anything but sit in a blissed-out daze. I liked to do stuff, to talk, to hang out, to keep the house in order, to feel like I was living some kind of life. Then it occurred to me.
Wait a minute—if I mix coke and heroin together, it’ll wake me up and put me down at the same time.
When I started speed-balling, there was no turning back.

I can’t blame my relapse on my father, nor can I blame it on his death. I was a mother, a sister, a daughter, a homeowner. I’d been trying to be everything to everyone. I came out of the Lodge trying to be Superwoman. I took on infinite responsibilities but forgot who I was and what I needed. I ignored the video loop of my past, that haunted reminder that I was still afraid, in denial, unable to face parts of my life. I tried to fold myself like a square of origami paper into as many different shapes as I could. For all the years of my sobriety I had been the matriarch of the family. Christmas and Thanksgiving were at my house. I always made a huge turkey and served Martinelli sparkling apple juice. I’m twenty years older than Bijou and I was the one she talked to about boys, sex, life. She called me if she was upset about a boyfriend, or needed help running lines for an audition, or needed a last-minute dog-sitter. I was available to her day and night, like a mother. I was the rock.

Then my father died, and it rained hard, and the rock turned out not to be a rock after all. It was a square of gray paper, folded into the shape of a rock. When it rained, the rock all but disintegrated. I was just a thin, folded paper pretending to be a person.

I lied to everyone for a long time. My brother, who had seen everything before, accused me of getting high. He said, “I’ve lost my respect for you as a human being.” I told him he was crazy and an asshole. At least denying it meant that I still felt some shame, some guilt about what I was doing. But pretty soon even that went away, and eventually I was like, “Yeah, I’m not sober, but I’m not going to get sober. Sober’s boring. I’m not going to do it.”

Bijou had once teased me with drugs. When she saw that what she had thought was impossible was now a reality, she was vehemently determined to stop me. But I wouldn’t listen. I said, “Fuck you, I’m fine, go away.” I changed my cell phone rings for Bijou and Mick to a loud alarm that blared
Danger, danger, danger!
The phone would ring and I wouldn’t answer it. They were no longer my beloved sister and my old friend. Now all they were was a threat to my happy needle time.

The only person I never pushed away or wanted to go away was Shane. I had gone to great lengths to explain to Shane that he came from a long line of addicts and alcoholics. His decision to pick up a hard drug could change his life forever. I had taken such pride in raising a son in a dry house. Now it wasn’t a dry house by any definition. I channeled my shame into pulling myself together as best I could for Shane, but the shame was infinite. I buried the excess the same way I did everything and everyone else.

I upheld other responsibilities, minimally. For instance, I made myself visit my mother, who had moved into assisted living and needed me. When I first came back from living in New York with Wyatt, I had stayed with her in her house—the same condo where I’d grown up. We had an amazing time during the day together, even though come nighttime I was upstairs in my old childhood bedroom, shooting up nonstop.

My mother had been taking care of herself for a long time, but when I visited, I cooked for her and gave her insulin injections (and stole her syringes). She could let go a little, so she did. Once I left, Mom fell apart. Over a three-week period she went from being competent and refined to a disoriented and frightened person. Jeffrey and I decided she would do better in an assisted living facility, and she did. Now she dressed for dinner every night, in diamonds and pristine St. John Knits and matching bags and shoes. Her makeup was always perfect. It was as if she’d returned to her finishing school, to the Club of the Three Wise Monkeys. I saw her as often as possible and she believed me when I said that I was clean.

Genevieve, always bonkers, had her own past and her own advice for me. She didn’t share her daughter Bijou’s concern. Instead, she came to my door one day when I was using. She said, “You know, your brothers and sisters are worried about you.” I thought I knew what was coming next. She was going to tell me they all loved me and I needed to get help. But no. In the high-pitched voice that Bijou imitates hilariously, Genevieve continued: “Maybe you should lie and tell them you’re sober. It will make them feel better. Then they can stop bugging you and you can do whatever you want.” Leave it to Genevieve.

On Christmas Eve of 2006 it dawned on me that I had no Christmas presents for anybody in my family. It’s true that I’ve always been a last-minute Christmas shopper, but I love Christmas. My mother had always made it a special time. Every year she had a fifteen-foot white-flocked Christmas tree, first with Lenny, then with Chuck. As children, Jeffrey and I left out cookies and milk for Santa. My mother would go down, break the cookies, and leave some crumbs. Every year she’d sneak into our rooms and leave us new robes, pajamas, and slippers. We’d wake up Christmas morning, put on our Christmas PJs, go downstairs, and tear into the gifts.

I loved researching what Shane wanted, loved picking presents, loved wrapping them. Mick would come over in the morning so the two of us could creep into Shane’s room and wake him up together. I remember watching him unwrap presents, smiling an impossibly huge grin. There were always far too many presents: instruments, books, every video game on the planet. We all loved it.

Mom had passed the Christmas torch to me. I always bought a nine-foot tree, moving furniture around to accommodate it, and played corny Christmas music from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. After Mick and I had our morning with Shane, the whole family would gather at my house. As we opened presents, the music would be playing (“Not Perry Como again!”), the coffee would be brewing, and I had bagels, toast, and Marmite to sustain us through the present exchange.

After the presents, Mick and Shane would go to Mick’s house so Shane could have Christmas with his family on Mick’s side. At my house the cooking would start. My mother and I always made the turkey, and we’d spend all day cooking, watching football, setting a beautiful table for sixteen with china and silver. In addition to family, I always took in strays. Christmas was an open house for anyone who didn’t have a place to go, like my homeless friend and sometime garage resident, Greg. For a time my friends Steven, a musician, and his wife, Marion, a painter—wonderful people I’d known for thirty years—joined the motley crew living at my house and enjoyed the Christmas festivities. It was always a lively cast of characters.

But for the last couple years I’d stopped hosting Christmas. And this year I had done nothing. I hadn’t bought a single present. I didn’t have the strength.

Now Christmas was upon me. Everyone was coming over to my house the next day, and I had nothing to give them. I thought,
Holy fuck, what am I going to do?
So at three in the morning on Christmas Eve I went to a drugstore to do my Christmas shopping. I was thinking to myself,
You are in so much trouble on so many levels,
when a song came on the store’s sound system. It was “California Dreamin’.”

Dad’s songs are ubiquitous. It’s inevitable that I hear them, but it seems that ever since he passed away, at crucial moments in my life, when I’m in despair, bereft, he appears—on the radio or on TV—as if to say,
I’m here for you. With you. Finally.
After all those years of waiting for my father, now that he is gone, I don’t have to wait anymore. But I’ll stop short of saying that it gives me true comfort. Dad left a huge hole in the family when he died. I’d much rather be waiting for him alive than accompanied by whatever spirit I feel.

Still, on Christmas Eve in the drugstore, “California Dreamin’ “ felt like a message from my dad. He was trying to say, “I know what you’re going through, and I’m here, and I’m sorry.”

I said, “Thanks Dad, I know. I know, man, I know.”

I hurried through the store, buying Chia Pets, candy, candles, phone cards. I must have spent four hundred dollars in CVS that night. Merry fucking Christmas.

30

One day Josh and Lisa had to go out of town on business. I was left alone in the house with the dogs, shooting up. This wasn’t a casual matter of shooting dope every once in a while. I was injecting myself every fifteen to twenty minutes unless I was asleep. That was just what I did.

Shortly after Josh and Lisa left, I did a shot. I woke up later—how much later I don’t know—on the floor with a table on top of me. This had happened before. I’d shoot up, pass out, come crashing down, and wake up on the floor with a needle in my arm. More than once I woke up slumped on the toilet with a needle sticking out of my foot. The syringe had dropped out of my hand before I could do the shot and stuck where it fell. I’d pull it out of my foot and stick it in my arm.

Left on my own, I’d stay up for three days straight, then sleep for the next three. Most junkies wake up when they start to go through withdrawal, but I often couldn’t get up to deal with preparing a shot. I’d fall back asleep and another day would go by. I’d enter withdrawal in my sleep and wake up the next day, drenched in sweat. The sheets would be soaked. The dogs would be wet from sleeping next to me. Three days into withdrawal, a heroin junkie is horribly sick, and I got there all the time, with the spoon, syringes, and drugs resting on the table two feet away. It was a form of self-punishment.

This time I woke up and slowly crawled out from under the table. I shuffled around, looking for my glasses. I hadn’t been able to get it together to order new contact lenses, so I’d been wearing reading glasses for months. I had at least thirty pairs of reading glasses, but, inevitably, the pair I found had a missing lens or a broken ear thingie. With blurry half-vision, I felt my way to do the shot.

When I was done, I dropped the used syringe into a cup and looked around the room. There were fifty or sixty syringes in cups lined up on the floor like soldiers. There was blood on the ceiling, and one of my dogs was licking drops of fresh blood off the floor. Dirty dishes had accumulated on all surfaces. I was starting to feel better and it was time to clean.

I brought a Rubbermaid tub up from the kitchen, filled it with crusty dishes, and brought it back downstairs. I took the cardboard boxes that I’d filled with used syringes out of the bathtub Jacuzzi that I now used as a trash can. There were hundreds and hundreds of syringes in those boxes. I sealed them shut, wrapping silver duct tape around and around the boxes. I wrote “biohazard” all over the boxes with a black Sharpie pen. This was what I called my “bad trash.” The last thing I wanted was for a trash guy to grab a bag or a box and prick himself with a needle. So I drove to a dumpster five miles away and pitched my load of bad trash in.

I came home from the dump and did another shot. Then the paranoia hit me. Extreme paranoia is universal with cocaine. Even if I told myself that there was nobody in the house, nobody in the shower, nobody in the closet, nobody at the window, the minute the drug hit my bloodstream,
bam!
There was someone in the closet, someone in the trees, someone looking for me, someone trying to get me. When I was on the road with the Mamas & the Papas, I’d be in my hotel room shooting coke, and I’d spend half the time lying on the floor, looking through the crack under the door for hours. Even if I was on the fortieth floor of a hotel, I’d still think there was someone right outside my window. Shitloads of drugs will do that to you. Reality is warped. You can’t even believe the notes your sober self left for your high self, the sticky notes pasted everywhere to remind you that it’s just a psychotic fantasy. As soon as you’re high, the notes are just part of the conspiracy.

Now I turned off all the lights in my house and crept around, looking out every window. I got the binoculars to see if anyone was in the trees. I lived in silent darkness like a maniac for the ten long days that Josh and Lisa were gone. That emptiness, the loneliness—it was like the days I spent in my father’s flat on Glebe Place, forgotten by my dad and losing my grip on reality. When Josh and Lisa came home, I was happy as a puppy, thrilled to be safe at last. With my best friends and drug dealers.

Money was a growing concern. The heroin I bought from Josh and Lisa was far cheaper than the prescription pills I’d been buying, but now I was doing a couple hundred dollars’ worth a day, plus an eighth of coke. So when I got invited by some rich guy to be flown first class to his huge birthday party and paid five thousand dollars to schmooze with the other celebs and guests, I accepted.

Of course I missed my plane. And the next plane. When I finally got to the party, the first person I saw was Peter Asher. Peter was in his sixties by then, but he looked the same to me, with his bright red hair and black glasses. He and his old music partner Gordon had gotten back together to do a tour. As part of that, they’d been invited to this party.

I was late as fuck, and now that I’d arrived I was supposed to circulate and meet all the guests, and then sit down at my assigned seat a table away from Peter. Instead, I sat down right next to him to talk.

Peter was the one who got away. I don’t know how else to say it. I know I was only eighteen, and we were living a wild life, and I spontaneously dumped him to marry Jeff Sessler on a cocaine-fueled impulse. It wasn’t exactly Romeo and Juliet. But when we talked, it was like there was nobody else at the table. I asked after his wife and daughter, but I soon dropped the small talk. I said, “So what’s going on with you? What’s your relationship with Wende like?”

He said, “It’s really good. We’ve been together a long time. We have our lifestyle,” and so on and so forth.

Cutting to the chase, I said, “Well, do you fuck around?”

He said, “Look, I know what you’re getting at. I’ll put it this way—whether I fuck around or not is beside the point. I can’t with you because it would mean way too much. I don’t think I’d be able to have just a fling with you.” And that was that. Once we got past that matter it was a great night. Our conversation flowed as it always had. We had known each other so well once upon a time.

Peter and I made plans to have breakfast together the next morning, but I was late. Forty-five minutes late, to be exact, because I’d been up all night shooting up. I found Peter waiting with Gordon in the conference room, where breakfast was set out. We all had planes to catch.

The night before, Peter had asked me, “Do you still get high?”

I had said, “I do now,” and he had looked concerned. Peter could see that I was in trouble. Now, when I walked back to my room, Peter came with me.

He followed me through the door and said, “Look. I don’t think that you are meant to do drugs. There aren’t many people I would say that about. I have liberal views on drugs. But I just don’t think that this is good for you.” Then he kissed me. It was electric. I started crying.

He said, “I loved you so much, and I’m so worried about you.” We were in a cheesy bittersweet romance movie, but it was my life and he had no idea how bad it was. I turned away to the window. He stayed at the door. I looked back. He blew me a kiss. And then he left. I sat on the windowsill and cried my eyes out for love and missed opportunities and my wasted, lost life.

• • •

As a junkie, I purged my life of most obligations, but when Val and I were invited to present an award at the TV Land Awards in 2008, I decided it sounded fun. Before we left, I preloaded a couple shots and brought them with me in my bag. I looked like shit, but I convinced myself I was pulling it off. We were backstage, waiting for our turn to present, and I slipped into the bathroom to shoot a speedball. Suddenly I heard Valerie’s voice. She was knocking on the door, saying, “Mack, Mack, it’s time. We have to go onstage.” I wiped the blood off my arm and hurried out of the bathroom. Val looked at me and I thought,
Oh God. She knows.

What I was no longer hiding from my family was now impossible to hide from my friends. Valerie, Peter, these were the people who’d known me the first time around. That life had passed, but now here they were again, and here I was with a needle in my arm. I had never expected to pass this way again. I was an adult. I’d had the experience of living a drug-free life, and yet I was making the same mistakes all over again. How did it happen? I’d been sober so long that I’d grown complacent. I thought I didn’t need to actively fight my addiction. But in the last couple of years things had fallen so far so fast that I didn’t know if I could ever come back. My relationships were crumbling. I was lying to my son. My dog Max was dying. I missed my father and was full of regret about his life and death. I loathed myself. The only way out was the cheap way out—making all feeling go away.

When I landed back in L.A. after seeing Peter, I called Josh and Lisa from the limo. I said, “Make sure you have some dark for me.” Dark is the tar heroin I used. Arriving at my house, I ran in the door and straight to the office with my hand out. They gave me coke and heroin and I went right upstairs to start all over again.