High On Arrival (31 page)

Now I was ready, but for what? My life on drugs had a built-in purpose: to do more drugs. Now the holes in my life made themselves apparent. My bank account was drained from the drugs, the rehab, the lawyer. My relationships were damaged. My father was gone. I had dug a huge, deep ditch and it was going to take several years to get out of it.

• • •

I’m nearly fifty. I’m watching my son become a man. And for the first time I’m starting to see that the old ideas I have about myself don’t have to be true forever. I thought I couldn’t clean my house. I thought I couldn’t drive a stick shift. I thought I would always carry the ghost of my father on my back. I thought I could never stay clean.

And so it is that I’m getting back into the swing. When I first got home from Narconon, every morning I woke up and thought,
Oh, man, this is hard
. Now when I wake up, I pause, expecting to feel the weight of the day descend on me, but it doesn’t. Relieved, I stand up, relishing my newfound lightness. I feed the dogs, I make my coffee, I sing bits of the Neil Young song “Old Man”: “Old man look at my life / I’m a lot like you were.” I’m back to being the mom who takes care of the house. I cook for my son; he cooks for me.

My support comes from friends and family: Owen, Lee, Shane, my mother, my brothers and sisters, my friends from Narconon. I attend an ongoing recovery program. My spiritual practice reaffirms everything that I know about myself.

I visit my mother once a week in assisted living. When she left her three-bedroom house in the Valley and moved to a one-bedroom apartment, she brought her house-size collection of holiday decorations with her. As every holiday passes we put up and take down the appropriate ornaments: the candles, cupids, Easter egg tree, fake mini-Christmas trees, Santas. And nearly every time I visit she has inadvertently managed to switch her TV to closed-caption subtitles, with no volume. I fix it for her, then we go down to the dining room, sit with her lady friends, order dinner, hang out, and laugh. It was unexpectedly hard on her when I was away at Narconon, so now we both slow down to enjoy our time together as mother and daughter.

Through all the years and both our struggles, my mother never stopped being my mother. We were so close, always, no matter what, but once she stopped drinking, our relationship reverted to what it was meant to be. Through my years of recovery and abstinence, though my raising Shane, she was a constant, beloved presence, a wacky, perfect grandma who picked Shane up at school and took him to McDonald’s. Now, as she ages, our roles are reversed and in many ways I’m a support for her. But at the same time I need her. My mom’s belief in me helps me believe in myself.

Work is slow—and by slow I mean nonexistent. I’m not surprised. This isn’t my first rodeo, and I’m all too aware that getting busted at LAX isn’t exactly a résumé-builder. People need to get used to me, to see me doing well, to learn to trust me again. It takes time. I can’t force it. I can only make an example of myself—to myself and to other people. I try to be a force for good. Maybe not on a daily basis, but in how I conduct myself and what I do.

I’m clean and it shows. The other day I was in a phone store buying a new cell phone charger when a woman came up to me. I hadn’t seen her since back in the days of Rodney Bingenheimer’s when I was fourteen. She’d borrowed my platform boots one day and returned them a year later. As we spoke in the phone store she told me that she was sober and asked how I was doing. I said, “I’m ten months back.” She looked me right in the eye and said, “I can tell that you’re done.”

I appeared on the reality show
Celebrity Rehab,
and a psychic came to talk to the group. She took one look at me and said, “You—of all the people here—you’re finished with drugs.”

At Bijou’s Christmas Eve bash I saw my longtime friend Courtney. She said, “I’ve never seen someone ten days out of rehab so composed, so clearly on a path that works.” Shane has told me more than once, “It’s so great to have you back. Your body and your mind are here with me.” I know what is in my heart and mind, but it is comforting and affirming to hear it from both new people and people who’ve known me forever.

I don’t look like a boy anymore. I was a skinny, cadaverous creature for so long, and whenever I gained weight and started to feel like a woman, I panicked. I was so focused on size zero. But I’m a grown woman, and I’ve started to feel comfortable having a woman’s body. Many years ago I wrote,

There is a woman

She lives inside of me

Although I love the child I be

There is a woman who lives inside of me

I saw myself as a child, not a fully formed being. But I finally feel formed. Not complete, maybe never complete, but formed. I am at home in my body for the first time, loving to be the woman that I am.

Because the jobs aren’t exactly rolling in these days, I spend a lot of time sitting on my front porch. I love my neighborhood and my neighbors—the people from the veterinary clinic who walk this route with their patients, the toddler next door who likes to visit my dogs, my sober friend who has two pugs. I chat with all who pass—isn’t that what front porches are for? And when the street is quiet I can sit for hours out there, watching the familiar, changing world.

I don’t feel like an addict. I don’t fight an urge to use drugs. My monster is a quiet sleeper. But I don’t ever forget who I am. As for what will become of me, well, my needs are simple. I am and always will be Shane’s parent, and that is all I really want. To be a good mother and sister and friend. To live in my house, stay drug-free, take care of my family, my dogs, myself. To work in my chosen profession. To be humble and happy in the precious life I nearly lost so many times. I am amazed to be alive, and I am wildly in love with this great life.

AFTERWORD

MACK

My earliest memory is of my father. I was wearing a diaper and nothing else. My dad motioned to me. I wobbled over to him and he put a daisy in my belly button. Later, when I was about four years old, I was on a private plane with the Mamas & the Papas and, at my father’s behest, the pilot did a nosedive that made us all go weightless. Everyone else was strapped in, but I was on my dad’s lap. For maybe half a minute I floated in the air while the Mamas & the Papas tossed me back and forth. I wish all the subsequent memories were innocent flower-child bucolics.

If my father set out to raise a drug addict, he did everything right. He modeled the behavior; he introduced and encouraged drugs; he was unavailable and then abusive. He was a friend but not a father. He was compelling but not safe.

I was desperate to be close to my father, and that informed everything I did. Everything. When you want someone to love you badly enough, you do what he does, you say what he says. You imitate to flatter. For instance: I have never, ever heard my son swear. I’m sure he does swear around his friends, and I’ve been cursing around my kid for as long as I can remember. But when I asked him, “Why have I never heard you say the word ‘fuck’?” he said, “I’m just not a swearing-in-front-of-the-parents kind of guy.” Shane doesn’t imitate me. He’s not trying to be close to me, because he already is. He can have me for anything, for whatever he needs: emotional support, advice, affection. He knows he doesn’t have to do anything to get me. I’m there. I didn’t feel that way about my father.

When I look back on it, I see that the hero worship I had for my father led to the incest, and that the incest went hand in hand with the drug-induced oblivion that helped me survive it. My father was responsible for his behavior, but I don’t want him reviled for it. It has passed. I’m still here, and I’m a good parent and friend, sister and daughter. I see myself as blessed and lucky, not just by virtue of still being alive, but because of all the good and bad that has shaped me. I have to work to steer clear of anesthetizing my pain, but alongside and in spite of that pain I am hardwired to love the life I was given and the one I am still creating.

It was, as I’ve said, a hard decision to reveal the sordid side of my relationship with my father. But these are the complex, painful, heart-wrenching truths that infiltrate lives, many lives, not just mine. I can’t be the only one. And I needed to tell that part of the story because I wanted to earn the right to talk about forgiveness.

That moment I had in the hospital at my father’s deathbed, the moment when I forgave him, was one of the most important moments of my life. Although I went on to relapse, I firmly believe that if I hadn’t had that opportunity, I might not have made it. Fathers die, usually before their children. It can be hard to forgive, because along with sexual abuse come other abuses—physical, emotional. Sometimes stuff can’t be forgiven. But what I found was that without forgiveness you end up in the same cage you were in when you were suffering the abuse. I didn’t forgive my father for his benefit, although I know it brought him comfort. I did it because it was genuine. But I also did it because he was dying and if we had never spoken of it again, it would have been almost impossible for me to put it to rest. That is what I want to say to those who relate to my experience: Forgiveness is not to give the other person peace. Forgiveness is for you. Take the opportunity.

When Dad died I thought that was it. I was free. I thought his death would be the changing force. At last my life would blossom and change. What I see clearly now is that it wasn’t my father’s existence that kept me stuck. It was me and how I dealt with what came up in my life. The letter Patricia Palmer wrote reminded me that when my father died I went to what I knew: self-destruction. But it’s not like I thought,
Oh, I’m self-destructing
. It took years to realize that my way of dealing with life was going to kill me. I wasn’t free. I was still trapped in me. I wish I’d learned that before he passed away.

When I was still adjusting my eyes to the real world, I went to San Francisco to see a movie of Bijou’s,
Wake,
premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose. I stayed at my brother Jeffrey’s house, with him, his wife, and their cute dogs and kids.

Jeffrey was such a fuckup as a kid. He was constantly getting into trouble. But he has made a good life for himself. His wife, Gail, works on the cutting edge of breast cancer research. They now have three kids and a beautiful home in San Carlos. He meditates six hours a day. I’m not being cruel when I say that you never would have expected that from the Jeffrey I knew and loved as a child. He doesn’t speak much about those years we spent with Dad. They were painful for him. But Jeffrey is proof and reminder that the past is over and that we can all rise above it.

My relationship with my brother had been strained during my relapse. We hadn’t spent any time alone together since I’d been arrested. Now we took the time to sit and talk, to meditate together. It was nice. We were everything to each other growing up. We’re both middle-aged now. I wasn’t afraid to look right at him, right into his eyes. I wasn’t hiding anything anymore.

My brother Tam said that if he had been publicly humiliated as I was at my arrest, he would never leave his apartment again. It’s true that at first I thought,
There’s no way I can come back from this. I could be going to jail. How am I going to do this?
How am I going to face people on the street?
You just do it. If you have a sense of humor about it, you can make other people laugh about it too. I feel brave about going out into the world and owning who I am. If I let the past define me, I would live in shame and regret. Instead, like my brother Jeffrey, I live in what is happening. I’m finally free of the negative effects of my past.

Telling all of this, out loud, in print, for the public, makes it real and permanent. Admissions and anecdotes, apologies and explanations, love and forgiveness. I’m not the feel-no-evil monkey. I’m not boxing anything away. I’ve filled in the gaps between the harsh lines of the index someone might make of my life so far. And somewhere along the way, I started thinking about the people in a dark room with a needle and a spoon, about a world full of people who have been sexually abused, who have had things done to them and who have done things that they regret. We are a huge community. I can’t fix anyone else, but I can say,
I’ve been there. I get it. You’re not alone. There’s more, and there’s reason to fight for it.

The biggest reason I have is my son, Shane. I know Shane won’t live with me forever. He came home for me, not for him, and soon he will leave to live his life. Shane and I laugh, wondering how many moms know every word to every Nine Inch Nails song, how many would go to a Slipknot concert and jump into the mosh pit with their sons. I’m glad that Shane and I can be idiots together, and my gratitude for the care and company he gives me without reservation is beyond words. But I am absolutely not just his friend. He has plenty of friends. And I don’t want him to take care of me—at least not until I’m old and helpless. I am his mother and I want that to be our dynamic, even as he builds his own separate life.

Anything can happen, but at this writing Shane is twenty-two and the genetic proclivity for addiction seems to have skipped a generation. Besides, Shane tends to face things head-on. He doesn’t hide from reality as I did. We are different, and I know he’ll handle life’s vicissitudes in his own way. I regret much of what he witnessed, but Shane does have a healthy fear of the monster that may sleep within him. Moreover, I have great faith in his strength and wisdom. I hope and believe he will steer clear of drugs forever.

My dear pug, Max, didn’t have a long life. He was sick for years, and we finally had to put him down. I thought that Shane would be stoic about Max. He was so practical, saying, “The time is right. It needs to be done.” I left the vet’s office before they did the deed—I couldn’t bear to watch Max go—and Shane stayed to be with him, along with Lee, my ex-boyfriend who remained a close friend, caring for Max and Freddie as if they were his own. When Shane came out of the vet’s office his eyes were bright red. He was weeping. In a way I was glad to see it, only because it meant that he wasn’t so busy trying to protect me that he didn’t let himself be vulnerable.

Shane said, “Mom, you really need to come see him.” So the two of us went back into the clinic. Shane and I sat with Max’s body for a while. My son put his hand on Max’s head and said, “I’m sorry, little boy. I didn’t like you, but I really loved you.”

I looked down at old Max. He wasn’t in that broken body anymore. Maybe he was hanging out with my father somewhere. Maybe he’d bite old Dad on the shin for me.

After we said good-bye to Max, I told Shane a story about how when he was little, his hermit crabs died, and he had such a hard time letting go that he kept them in a Ziploc bag in the kitchen for three years. Shane laughed when I told that story. He put his arms around me and said, “Mom, we’re going to be okay.”

I grew up in a kind of dark fairy tale. I lived in a mansion. I was in movies and on television. My father was a rock star. I lived out other people’s dreams. Maybe that’s why it feels like it all happened to someone else, like there’s a fog of unreality between what I lived and who I am. Or maybe that’s the merciful lobotomy of years of drug use. Either way, only now do I feel like I’m a real person. There are psychological clichés that I’ve collected over the years: We’re the product of our environment. We’re the sum of our experiences. We need to live in the present. Those concepts accumulated in my head, but saying them and believing they should be true for me didn’t make them a reality in my life. My description of my own healthy psyche has been around for years. At last I’m living the health and happiness that I always described but never experienced. I’m living my life instead of watching it happen. I’m free.