Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (44 page)

Instead of running anywhere, I called the ASAP program and brought Nick’s Aunt Ariana along to scope the joint. It looked like a little boardinghouse—not at all foreboding or medical, but sort of homey, kooky, comfortable. Since it was a twelve-step program, drugs were used as a last resort, and a lot of emphasis was placed on staying clean and sober. Of course, Nick had never been near drink or drugs, but an AA concept certainly couldn’t hurt, considering Nick’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies and possible genetic overload. Nutty-looking teenagers with Led Zeppelin T-shirts ate lunch in the cafeteria or played Ping-Pong on the patio. I saw a stream of pubescents troop off to group therapy behind a giant white-haired man with several earrings in each ear. There was a well-stocked arts-and-crafts room where, hopefully, Nick would create a few masterpieces. Some of the kids were actually laughing.

One of the counselors, Betty, empathized with my indecision, and told me to call her husband, Dallas Taylor, for more information. Dallas Taylor. He used to play drums with Crosby, Stills and Nash, and I remembered him as a massive drugged-out mess. Now he was serving his fellow freaks by counseling kids in trouble. What a small world! For once I didn’t feel so much like an alien adrift among the tight-assed, white-frocked stern-burns. Maybe these were cool people who might really understand.

On the way back to the car I cried on Ariana’s shoulder as she told me how the place felt good to her. “They help people in there. They care, and they’re strong. They won’t give up,” she said, trying to soothe my heavy, thousand-pound heart. Could I be strong enough to send Nick away? Superwoman never had such a ferocious battle to wage. When we got back home, I bent down to pick up some shoes that Nick had kept neglecting to take to his room and pulled my back out. Pain screeched up my spine and I fell into a heap. As Ariana helped me to bed, her look implied that I should take this as a sign. The gargantuan problem had manifested in physical form. There was no time to waste.

Michael remembered Dallas from AA meetings, and together we met him at Patrick’s Road House, where over uneaten eggs we poured out all our parental woes. Nick would be the youngest patient there, but ASAP had helped kids his age before. There would be one-on-one therapy with a guy called Tony, group therapy, family therapy, twelve-step meetings, and school. As we talked, an unspoken
conviction passed between Michael and me like an electric current. Dallas encouraged us to start immediately. “It’s such a difficult decision, if you mull it over too much, you’ll talk yourselves right out of it.” So finally, sorrowfully, we made the plans with Dallas’s firm but gentle guidance. “You can’t tell Nick he’s going until the last minute. He might run, he’ll feel betrayed, he’ll beg and plead, he’ll tear you up with guilt. But be strong,” he told us over and over. “You’re doing the right thing.”

On the chosen day our friend Ron Zimmerman arrived at eight to help Michael take Nick to ASAP. We had no idea how Nick was going to react, but I was certain I wouldn’t be in any shape to drive over the hill. I will always be grateful to Ron. He had been through a similar troubled childhood, saw the desperate need for assistance, and gallantly came to our rescue. I had already packed the bag Nick would take to the hospital: jammies, toothpaste, sets of clothes, books, a comb, a brush, shampoo (plastic containers only—no wristslitting glass allowed—this concept alone sent panicky pangs shuddering through me), a family photo, a shot of our three cats. I bawled the whole time. I was sifting through his precious possessions, my little boy’s things. He was so shy, so emotionally young, so dependent on me. He liked only certain foods, he liked to sleep with the light on. Would he be able to sleep at
all
in strange surroundings? With strange kids? Would he die of starvation? He was so shy he couldn’t even order an ice cream cone. How would he deal with the rowdy cafeteria full of problem children? How would he keep the knots out of his hair? I felt like I was in a coma, underwater. Michael and I had spent the night in sleepless misery, huddled together on the couch while the TV droned, the clock ticking unmercifully toward tomorrow.

Eight-thirty came, the designated time to tell him. Bloodshot eyes, acid cups of coffee, Nick unknowingly gathering books, eating Rice Krispies. Lost in agony, I went to the bathroom to wash my face and I heard Nick scream, “No!! NO!!” I came rushing back out to see Nick’s horrified, uncomprehending face, “Mom! Mom! Don’t send me away! I won’t go, I refuse! How could you do this to me, you hate me!!! I’ll behave, I’ll do everything you ask!! Please, please,
please
, don’t send me away!!” He ran to his room, slammed the door—no way to lock it. He would have to be carried out. Michael and I looked at each other, horrified. How could this be happening? Ron and Michael wrestled him, kicking, screaming, pleading to the car. I trembled for Nicky, my sweet unhappy boy, thankful in my pangridden
state for Michael’s stone-solid inner strength, so noble. On the way out the door, Nick shot me a beseeching look of supreme, betrayed outrage, and trying not to break down until he was out the door, I told him I loved him. I’m sure he didn’t believe me. I wept from an area of my being that I hadn’t even contemplated since September 30, 1978, the day Nick came howling out of my womb. I was moaning like an animal, baying at the moon—my baby taken from me.

June 4, 1990—It was the second hardest day in my life, right next to the day my dad took his last pathetic breath.

Michael called in a monotone shock state to tell me about the miserable ride, the check-in nightmare, and the pain in his heart. We cried, we told each other we were doing the right thing. My mom was equally in torment, almost uncomprehending the need for such an act. Once again she kept her faith in me and in my decision.

I had one more session with Ariana before she went back to Las Vegas.

“I am a young Indian girl tending to a birth in which the mother dies. Care of the newborn falls to me, and I am devoted to the baby, I bond with it, love it totally. When the father of the child returns from a long battle, I am forced to give him the toddler, and I go into a very deep depression.” Ariana asked me to see myself at the end of the lifetime, spinning back, spiraling through nontime. “I am a wise woman, soothsayer, story-teller. I never married. I sit in a circle with other Indian women and tell my stories, lessons, teaching them. One story I told and retold was about how I had to give up the baby, and how it taught me to let go of someone I loved for their higher good. Letting go with love.”

I was stupefied from the decision to take Nick to ASAP. I spent the next few days wandering around Nick’s room, perusing his baby photo albums, sitting and stewing about that terrible Monday morning (Monday, Monday—can’t trust that day) and the difficult weeks to come. When Jimmy Thrill called, I was mucked up in guilt and depression, my heart light-years away from the carefree promise of romance. But that Friday night one of my favorite off-kilter bands, the Havalinas, were playing. And maybe I was finally learning not to torture myself by dwelling too hard on the pointed-corner facts, because I started putting on my mascara.

I moseyed around the Palace, adrift in my nearsightedness, too vain to strap on my eyewear, squinting into the smoke for a glimpse of my blond date. When you meet someone at a club, is it classified as a actual date, I wonder? After a few minutes of skittering nerves, Jimmy slink-strutted over to me as an unexpected geyser erupted in my center, and we watched the band together. Despite the inner lava, I danced and grooved, attempting flirty nonchalance, feeling his young heat next to me, not wanting to look at him too hard at the same time wanting to stare. How old was he, anyway? And how much did it matter? Upstairs at a small band party, I sat on Jimmy’s lap, leaning into him lightly, laughing with Lynn and Dan, feeling pretty and fetching, starlit and warm-blooded, but every so often warding off images of my little boy in chains like they were blows.

I liked the way Jimmy could start up a conversation with anybody, so quick to smile, openhearted, open-minded but slightly secretive, like he knew something wild that nobody else could even fathom. We felt each other out, finding common ground. He was going to Japan next week with his band. Oh, I took my son to Japan. Be sure to see the giant Buddha, the mile of rock-and-roll bands with KISS makeup and two-foot pompadours. I took my son to Japan. My son, my darling son. I thought of him innocently eating Chicken McNuggets with his grandma, thinking he would be going to school on Monday. . . . Oh God, grant me the courage to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can . . .

Jimmy kissed me that night—once, leaving me momentarily faint and startled by the depth of the tingle, the echo of his lips. The crazy boiling of my blood just wouldn’t stop. Jimmy Thrill was giving me a fever. What do you know? Expect the unexpected—one of my favorite truisms. He walked me to my car, where we stood for a long time. I pushed his platinum locks, shining white in the moonlight, away from questioning hazel eyes. What was in there for me?

We weren’t allowed to call Nick for the first few days and had to rely on the counselors to tell us how it was going. We called every hour for the first few days, begging for a crumb of news. The first night he was away I didn’t think I would make it.

The first week he sat in on the required sessions without speaking—surly, detached, enraged, determined to prove he had been put in there by mistake. He was “restrained” more than once, strapped
to a table, given pills to calm him down. He was so stubborn, given a choice he would opt for the hardest treatment. What was he trying to prove? Should we take him out? Go on like before? Try to cope? Desperate, I called Jaid, and she told me horror stories about Drew at ASAP. “You have to trust them, they know what they’re doing.” I worried about Nick’s spirit being broken, like the taming of a beautiful bucking bronco—a heavy saddle where freedom used to be. I hurt all over like my soul had been fried in crude oil.

Nick called me on the hospital pay phone, but I wasn’t allowed to answer. Ten, twenty times a day the phone would ring with a collect call from the operator that I had to refuse. It was unbearable. Dallas told us to keep our answering machines on all the time. We all needed to detach a bit, said Tony, Nick’s new therapist with the white crew cut and all the earrings.

Let go with love.

Did a life-affirming turning point really loom around the corner? The first time we could talk to or see Nick was at that first group family meeting. I was gasping for breath, hanging onto a window ledge, but as we filed into the big room with several other sets of beleaguered parents and their angry, confused offspring, as corny as it sounds, I realized I was not alone. As Michael and I nervously sat down in the large circle of chairs, anxiously awaiting Nick’s appearance, Betty came up to us. “Nick is refusing to come to group. He doesn’t want to see you.” As our hopeful faces collapsed into putty muddles, she went on, “It’s normal. Most of the kids feel betrayed and are out to make their parents feel guilty, so don’t worry about it. He’ll come around.” Normal. That was encouraging, wasn’t it?

Family group meetings followed the twelve-step model: Each of us introduced ourselves and announced our problem of choice. “Eddie, alcoholic, twelve days sober.” Applause. “Marie, Eddie’s mother, drug addict, four years and three months.” Applause. “Sandra, family problems.” “I’m Tom, Sandra’s step father.” Smiles, nods, understanding. We sat through the meeting, blankly observing the agony and healing of others, wrapped up in parental pain like no other. Very famous celebrities and their daughters dressed in black became just like the former jailbird junkie and his adopted, tattooed juvenile delinquent son in ASAP for the third time. An old-time rock hero wept for his thirteen-year-old daughter who smuggled in some acid and went AWOL the night before. The outer-world differences between us dissolved, ceased to exist. We could all learn from the festering of another’s open wounds. Take a licking but keep on ticking.

We left without seeing Nick at all that day, dejected, yet slightly encouraged by the compassion and insight of some of the other parents. “Wonderful things are happening for Shannon here. She hadn’t looked us in the eye for two and a half years until yesterday.” “Peter didn’t speak to a soul in this place for three weeks, and now they tell me he’s talking too much at group. They can’t shut him up!” One counselor told me I would lose the feelings of grief and guilt after about ten days. “And don’t feel guilty because you feel some relief!” she warned me. “I’m sure you deserve it.”

We, of course, hoped for an easy explanation for Nick’s behavior, a psychological name tag to hang on the problem, a diagnosis at last, but it wasn’t forthcoming. Nick’s uncanny intelligence was hiding some deep-rooted, scary stuff that would take time to discover. We would have to be patient.

At the next meeting, Wednesday night, Nick trudged past us to a chair as far away as he could get and wouldn’t look at us, and when it came time for him to say his name, he refused. There was my little blond boy, disheveled, unkempt, miserable, betrayed, and lost on the other side of the room. And I couldn’t run to him, shelter him under my mama’s wing, take him away from his pain. He had to face it himself, find something inside himself to love, or maybe he never would. This was his chance, our chance, right here and now. Tony told us that Nick had actually started to speak a few tentative mumblings at group and a possible friendship seemed to be forming with one of his roommates. He also admitted that Nick despised and feared him and wished he were dead. Most of the kids did at first. Tony was quite a fearsome-looking dude—heavy-set, about six feet four inches, white crew cut, red face, many, many earrings in each ear—a zero-bullshit, hard-as-nails, in-your-face kind of guy. Sometimes he even scared me, and he pissed Michael off, but I knew Nick wouldn’t be able to do what he had done so many times before—he wouldn’t be able to wrap Tony around his cute li’l finger. No way.