Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (32 page)

It took me almost a year to finish them off, and what a year it was! At its end, I was down to nothing but liquor and cooking wine!

I’d consumed enough of those French wines at my Casa de Claudia parties that people believed my cover story—that I’d drunk them out of spite with my friends because no one would give me a fair price. And like all good lies it was partly true. But I kept some parties in the dungeon private. Invitation only, just one name on the guest list. I fooled everyone. Except my mom. When she senses I’m hiding something, she’s like a German shepherd. She doesn’t stop until she’s sniffed out the lie and worked me into a corner.

“How did your party go last night, Claudia? Oh, you didn’t have a party? But you must have had one this week? No?”

Next thing I knew she was standing at my front door, cell phone in hand, recycling bin beside her, its lid flipped back to reveal a full load of bottles, clusters of glass necks and bottoms sticking out at every angle—my collection of shame.

But the monster was my partner in crime now, and she thinks fast.

“What? My gardener forgets to wheel the bin out for three weeks, and suddenly I’m a drunk? If anyone has the right to be indignant it’s me. What are you doing going through my trash?”

I invited her inside to make up. I had to keep her sweet, because I was flat broke and she was lending me money to help me hobble along with my mortgage. I managed to keep the house a little longer by convincing my mom that more work would come, but she was always badgering me about whether I had a job. I knew her charity couldn’t last much longer.

We had some tea. I was conciliatory. I told her that I understood how she could have made the mistake, but I’d appreciate it if she could keep her paranoid musings to herself.

She let the matter drop, but I knew it was a close call. After that I started hiding my empties inside a cabinet-model Victrola that movie photographer Robert Zuckerman had given me for my birthday. I used to play 1920s His Master’s Voice records on it, while inside its belly it kept Its Mistress’s Secrets. But secrets have a way of creeping to the surface. One day while my assistant Holly was helping me choose the last of my personal belongings to sell, she caught sight of the Victrola.

“What about this old thing?” she asked. “Any special reason you want to keep it?”

She tilted it to test its weight, and her question was answered by a muffled orchestra of teetering glass.

I came clean about my drinking problem; Holly was so understanding. She agreed to help me and, for starters, bought a latch and big brass lock for the cellar door, which she proceeded to secure with military efficiency. She locked it down and took the key with her. The next day, after finishing a bottle of cooking sherry that I’d tucked away in the kitchen cupboard, I had a great idea.

What the fuck am I doing drinking cooking sherry? Is this where I am now? Maybe I should go sit on the sidewalk and drink out of a paper bag. Maybe I should drink proper wine like normal people, or not drink at all. Right. I don’t have any money, and I can’t get into my cellar, so the only option is to just stop drinking.

I was glad that Holly had agreed to help me. This was progress. As Sun Tzu says, know yourself and know your enemy and in a thousand battles you’ll never be defeated.

Ten minutes later I was standing in my dungeon drinking a Château Lafite Rothschild straight out of the bottle, crowbar in hand, the brass lock hanging from a splintered door. There’s always another option.

My normal morning started with dry heaves. The previous night’s wine was no longer in my stomach, but my body kept trying to cast it out, and like a bad exorcist it failed every time. I’d be left exhausted, my muscles aching from the effort.

I was still getting offers for small roles in movies that my friends were making. There was never any real money on the table, but I took the jobs anyway, because I needed to keep busy and I needed to put on a good show to ensure my mom’s continued investment in my life.

I knew she had the money. She’d married a multimillionaire and continued to earn her own income as an interior decorator. My mother is an impossibly generous woman. She’s always helped her children out, but this time I was taking enormous advantage of her. I’d told her my mortgage payments were slightly higher than they actually were—to make sure I had enough money to drink on. Don’t get me wrong; I was working hard to stay sober between binges. I just never wanted to be caught dry. That was an unthinkable possibility.

And I expanded the development of my detox schedule. I’d have scheduled binges, orderly hangovers, and well-planned detoxes, arriving on set or at auditions disguised as my alter ego: happy, funny Claudia. It must be the German in me; I had the whole routine down to stopwatch precision. I was a highly functioning alcoholic, killing myself with utmost efficiency.

A binge would last anywhere from one to three days, and it would usually take me up to a week to recover.

By the time I’d finished off the last of the French collection (and nearly finished myself in the process) I was starting to behave erratically. I’d usually crave alcohol when I was PMS-ing, and when I satisfied the urge it supercharged my emotional irritability.

That’s when the monster came a-knockin’, and she had another great idea.

You’re very touchy of late, and your mom’s becoming suspicious. You need to ramp things up to make sure she keeps helping us. Now’s not the time for little lies—they’re the ones that catch you out. You need to drop the A-bomb, a nice big lie that’ll keep the wheels turning for a long time.

I rang up my mom in tears. Through heartbroken sobs I told her I’d had a bad pap smear. What’s more, I could never have children. Even worse, they were going to have to perform some kind of operation on me to cut out the cancer. The other end of the phone was silent for several seconds and then a flood of pity and emotional sympathy followed. Mission accomplished.

I was so fucking clever. That’s the addict’s brain at work. It convinces you that you’re not out of control, that your insane decisions are perfectly logical. It’s not a big-picture state of mind. You’re so busy covering all the angles, looking after all the little details, that you have no perspective, no idea of just how strange you seem to the people who love you.

It took my mom all of twenty minutes to penetrate my carefully constructed fortress of deception. I forgot she knew that my friend Trish and I shared the same gynecologist. She called Trish, asked for my doctor’s number, and got him on the phone. The doctor said he couldn’t share any patient information, but my mom countered with a whole “I’m so worried about my daughter, she won’t talk to me, I think she might be dying” routine, which led to the doctor basically implying that I was fine.

She appeared on my doorstep like an angry Valkyrie; the “for sale” sign went up in my yard the following week.

I figured this was it, that I’d finally hit rock bottom. I’d been found out, my mom knew that I was a fucked-up drunk, and I knew that after that stunt she’d never completely trust me again. One part humiliation, two parts mortification, one part depression—the Stone Cold Sober cocktail. It was time to clean up my act. I wasn’t going to add alcohol to that emotional mixed drink. I needed change. Now I couldn’t
wait
for the house to sell—it had come to feel like a giant coffin.

To help pass the time, I’d fill out alcohol tests in the backs of magazines and read up on alcohol addiction. Sun Tzu was right; I knew myself but not the enemy, and that wouldn’t win me jack shit. For instance . . .

DEAR ABBY ALCOHOLIC TEST

Do you wonder if you’re an alcoholic? Try answering the following questions. If you answer positively to more than three, consider seeking professional advice.

1.
Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but lasted only a couple of days?

A: Never. I’m five days into a week of sobriety right now. Wait. Does drinking after 5 p.m. count?

2.
Do you wish people would stop nagging you about your drinking?

A: No one is nagging me. (They just gossip behind my back.)

3.
Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another hoping that would keep you from getting drunk?

A: Nope, I’m a wino, period.

4.
Have you had a drink in the morning during the past year?

A: Does a mimosa with friends count? Then yes.

5.
Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble?

A: Not really (those bastards!).

6.
Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year?

A: Does sleeping with strangers and passing out at 8 p.m. count as a problem?

7.
Has your drinking caused you trouble at home?

A: Nope, I live alone.

8.
Do you ever try to get extra drinks at a party because you did not get enough to drink?

A: I’m usually the one throwing the party, so I can drink as much as I want.

9.
Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking any time you want, even though you keep getting drunk?

A: I don’t really get drunk, just happy . . . a lot.

10.
Have you missed days at work because of the drinking?

A: What work? I’m an actress!

11.
Do you have blackouts?

A: Not that I can recall . . .

12.
Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you did not drink?

A: Yes. I would be thinner.

13.
Have you ever embarrassed yourself or someone else when drinking?

A: Possibly. Probably. Alright already—yes!

14.
Do you drink every day?

A: Nearly. Mostly. Always.

Then at the bottom of the page I’d write things to crack myself up, like: “FUCK! THAT WAS EXHAUSTING. I NEED A DRINK!”

I was still running from myself and the reality of my disease. On the set of
Babylon 5
we played practical jokes on each other all the time. Now I was becoming a big joke and I couldn’t even see it. I wasn’t working, but if an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, then I was at least keeping someone well occupied. When I was working fourteen-hour days on a TV series I never thought about drinking, and when I got home I’d never drink because I was too busy learning my lines for the next day. Now I had oceans of time filled with tiny islands of distraction, but those were slowly sinking as even the freebie jobs started drying up. I reached out for the bottle again, despite my promises to myself. I was too far gone to just stop.

I was sick of the Hollywood youth game, sick of the superficiality of the whole industry, and yet I found that I couldn’t wander too far from the phone. It was like some kind of underworld torture—chained to a stool beside an eternally silent phone, wine glass in hand, waiting for it to ring. That fucking phone was cursed. Each day it refused to ring, I’d feel that I was aging a year, slowly transforming into a crone. If only the phone would ring, the curse would be broken.

And then one day it did. It was computer animation studio boss Andrew Dymond, who I’d met a few years before at a convention in London. I was telling him my tales of woe (but not of drunkenness) when he said to me, “Well, I’m putting together a really low-budget sci-fi comedy over here. How would you like to come over and star in it?”

I was stunned, so overwhelmed with happiness that for a moment I was speechless. I think Andrew took my silence as lack of interest.

“Look, before you say anything, let me tell you the name of the character—Belinda Blowhard.”

Brilliant. I told him that if he could get me SAG scale there was a good chance I’d be interested. Inside I was the dazzled heroine of a bad romantic comedy proclaiming, “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!”