Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (35 page)

After being so sick for so long, I knew it would take my body a long time to forget the experience. It’s like being forced to chain-smoke cigarettes until you turn green and throw up. You don’t want another cigarette. You don’t even want to think about smoking. That’s how it was with the monster and me. We’d broken up. She was like a persistent ex-lover who keeps on calling, wanting to get back together, but I wasn’t taking her calls. As far as I was concerned we had nothing more to say to one another.

It would take four more months before I worked out that I’d underestimated my disease and that I was dealing with something that was less like a persistent ex and more like a stalker who was willing to take me hostage to make her point.

The year is 3034. We have medically suppressed our emotions to stop illogical thoughts from interfering with our decisions.

—Captain Belinda Blowhard

Starhyke
was great fun—it was like a Benny Hill movie set in outer space. Aliens called Reptids release a weapon that unshackles the passions of the crew of the dreadnought
Nemesis
, producing unintended consequences. And in the strange way that art mirrors life, I was playing a robotically sober character who struggles to control her unleashed desires.

I’ve always put acting before addiction, even at the worst of times, and now that I was working I had my armor back. It was slightly tarnished and dented, but it was mine and I was strong again. The monster wisely kept her distance.

The show had a great cast. Jeremy Bulloch, who played Boba Fett in the original
Star
Wars
movies, was hilarious. And I got on famously with Suanne Braun, who had played the goddess Hathor in
Stargate SG-1
, and with Rachel Grant, who is an actress and an expert in Filipino martial arts. Everyone was very talented and enthusiastic.

It was a low-budget production. The food cost one pound per day per person, and boy, could you tell. Mystery-meat glop was the main course, and you couldn’t get a salad to save your life. But I knew I was in safe hands when it came to alcohol. Andrew Dymond, the director, and the majority of the crew didn’t drink, and when I went to the pub to socialize after work no one had a problem with my drinking Diet Coke.

At one point Andrew had some difficulties with the actors depicting the more intimate scenes. He asked me if I wanted to direct, and I jumped at the chance. Andrew directed the CGI and more technical scenes in the adjoining studio, and we developed a method for working in tandem that effectively allowed us to complete shooting on the entire first season. It was a great experience for me. I’d act in one scene and then jump over to the set next door to direct another.

In the storyline, Belinda Blowhard was battling the alien Reptids but failing to maintain control of her impulses, which was great fodder for comedy. By the time
Starhyke
production was coming to an end I could sense my inner monster was working on her own ultimate weapon. I’d have to do a better job of managing my passions than Belinda did. It was one thing to play a slapstick role and another thing to live it. I would not allow my life to become a farce.

When my monster did strike again I realized, too late, that I’d been preparing for the wrong kind of battle. I’d been expecting a frontal assault, something I could resist and perhaps overcome. In the meantime, the monster had been tunneling beneath the fortress walls, preparing a sneak attack.

It started with the affair I was having with one of the show’s executive producers. He was a very nice guy who’d lent me his flat in Bath while we were shooting the show. He was also a wine enthusiast. I figured that we had something in common, although I bet that no matter how much he knew, he wasn’t as enthusiastic about wine as I was. One day he invited me out to dinner, and I accepted, knowing there would be really, really good wine there and that he would offer it to me. That’s when the monster started whispering.

Claudia, you haven’t touched a drop in four months. You’re not an alcoholic, not even close. And this is an opportunity to prove to yourself that you’re not addicted. Just drink small quantities of the best stuff. Trust me, it’ll be okay.

I made an attempt to push the voice away, just for form’s sake. It knew it had me. It had already slipped past my defenses. It waited until I was sitting opposite my date and had seen just how good the wine was going to be.

Claudia. It’d be a shame to let half of a bottle like that go to waste. Have a little drink. You’ll stay on top of it this time.

And I did. For about a week. By the time you realize you’ve been pushed off the wagon it’s too late. You’re sitting on your ass choking on dust while life trundles off without you. The insidiousness of the disease makes you honestly believe that if you can stay sober for a few months then you are most definitely not an alcoholic and can therefore drink when you want to.

Sober for six months, drunk for a week, two weeks to recover. Sober for three months, drunk for five days, a week to recover. It’s a repetitive cycle, like that of Sisyphus, in the Greek myth, forever pushing that stupid rock up the hill only to have it roll down once it gets to the top.

When
Starhyke
ended I needed to find another job to earn a permanent work permit in the UK, so Andrew Dymond did me a favor and hired me as a receptionist and tea girl at his CG company.

“Hello, is that Lightworx Media? Can you advise me how to get more renderable data into my texture maps?”

“I have no bloody clue. I just serve the tea.”

Needless to say, I wasn’t well suited to the job, so I did us both a favor and quit. I sobered up, moved back to London, and rented a room in a friend’s flat. If I needed to work to stay in the UK, then it would be as an actress. My inner voice, the same one that had given me the confidence to move to L.A. when I was a kid, was back and giving the monster a run for her money.

Trusting in myself paid off again when I was introduced to a fantastic agent named Roxane Vacca by my friend Hilary Saltzman.

Roxane entered my life like a shining messenger of the gods, a letter in one hand stating she represented me and in the other a contract for a BBC series called
Broken News
. I’d booked a great job right out of the gate. I had enough documentation for my work visa, and I could stay in the UK. It felt just like when I landed Joan Green as an agent. Good representation is everything.

In the meantime, my stepfather had found a buyer for my home in L.A. and made me a million-dollar profit to boot, which made me feel much better about the loss of my house.

I was winning the battle for my new life. I was happy and confident. So why the fuck was I still stuck in a cycle of binging and detox? I started to see that I didn’t have an off button even when I was happy and my life seemed problem-free. When I was at a party I just wanted to keep on drinking and drinking. At dinners I wanted champagne, then wine, then a glass of port, and then another glass of port. I couldn’t have just one glass of wine, and I certainly never left half a bottle on the counter. I would see half-finished bottles of white wine in people’s fridges and wonder how the heck they did that. I’d find myself staring at people’s home bars, recalling the day when I’d stocked my own bar and never took a drop from it except to make other people’s drinks at parties.

I realized then that this was more than a matter of will or of emotional highs and lows. I
always
wanted a drink. I thought about drinking all the time. If I didn’t have a drink in my hand I’d be planning on how long it would be and what I’d have to do in order to be reunited with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. I had a full-blown, full-time addiction. For the first time in five years I was able to see myself clearly; I was able to admit that I was an alcoholic.

Since I hit the UK I’d been jumping around like a grasshopper, moving more than fourteen times in four years to temporary homes in Bath, Winterbourne Down, the Ladbroke Grove and Westminster areas of London, and many other locations. I was done with moving, but I just couldn’t find the right place to hang my hat. The last time I’d been settled was in my home in L.A. where everything went to hell, so now I figured I’d make myself a hard target.

Then I had a series of accidents that forced me to slow down. I was walking around the streets of London, property guide in hand, looking for a place to buy with the proceeds from the sale of my L.A. home when I got hit by a guy on a Vespa. No major damage, just a sprained ankle, a chink in the armor so to speak. A few days later I made the mistake of going out in a pair of three-inch heels. The place I was living in had the steepest fucking stairs I’d ever seen in my life, and just as I was about to take the first step down, the injured ankle gave way, turning me around so that I fell backward down the entire flight of stairs, bumping the edge of every step as I went. It was like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, except instead of getting up and brushing myself off while everyone laughed, I found I couldn’t get up and that there was a baseball-sized lump bulging out from the back of my neck. I fished out my cell phone, only to discover that I didn’t know the UK emergency number. I’m dialing 911, and no one’s answering. Eventually one of my roommates found me and took me to the hospital. It turned out that it was a neck fracture. They put me in a neck brace, went over my X-rays, and then sent me on my way.

Alcoholics always overanalyze every minute detail of an incident in the hope of gleaning some insight that will help in the fight against the enemy. You’re like a military commander staring down at a map, studying the terrain.

So were the accidents just accidents, or were they my body’s way of slowing me down, of letting me know that I needed to stop moving and put down roots before things got really bad? Or was it the monster knocking me out of commission so that I’d be forced to sit still, grow impatient, and have a drink? My previous home had been a mixed blessing. I’d loved it, but it had also been a place of suffering and misery. Should I be looking for my own place? Would it make things better or worse?

You see how you can turn into a raving lunatic? You’re at war with yourself, you can’t trust yourself, you second-guess every thought and impulse. In short, life sucks.

I trusted my instincts and stumbled across the perfect place, a cute little flat in Notting Hill, and when I saw it I thought, “This is it. This is the place where I can make things right.”

I’d finished work on
Broken News
, and there was nothing else in the pipeline, but I knew just the trick to deal with the out-of-work blues—remodeling.

I was back in my element. I could redo the flat and make it look exactly how I wanted. I had some money left over to allow me to live comfortably and fund my pet project. I started building closets and tearing down walls.

And I had another project that kept me busy—devising systems of alcohol regulation to manage my problem. I lived next to a charming pub and I made a rule that this was the only pub I was permitted to drink in and that I’d only be allowed one drink per visit. I never kept wine in the house, so if I had a dinner party I would make the guests take the half-empty bottles home with them. The wagon might have been teetering along on broken wheels, dragging its load behind it, but at least it was going.