Girl Walks Out of a Bar (20 page)

part three.

Your bottom is where you stop digging.

16

After Dr. Landry left my room at Gracie
Square, I stared at the ceiling and waited for the nurses to lead me through the pre-Librium drill. The pain of withdrawal was God-awfully worse than anything I'd ever heard about. In movies, junkies often lie on metal cots in stark, cold rooms, sweating and shaking through a swift montage: “addict sweats . . . addict rolls over . . . addict shakes . . . addict thrashes . . . addict moans . . . and then addict peacefully sleeps and wakes up tired but somehow new.” But real-world withdrawal takes a lot longer and tortures the body in very specific ways.

My starkest memory of this process was not the physical part, but the mental. Even though my head felt as if it had been slammed onto a bed of tiny nails that shot hundreds of stabbing pricks across my skull and neck, the only thing my mind could focus on was how badly I needed to drink. Pain. Need drink. Pain. Need drink. It was a continuous loop in my brain.

When I moved even slightly, waves of pain spread through my body straight to my toes, popping up at every pit stop along the way. Lifting my arm to massage my head or trying to move
my legs to put my feet on the floor led to enormous aches and hot stabs of pain. Once my hand finally reached my head, even the lightest pressure of my fingers into my scalp made me wince.

The nausea was profound. I wouldn't have been surprised to puke up my liver or some other vital organ that had decided, “Fuck this. I'm outta here.” After a few rounds of dry heaves over the toilet, I realized that my stomach had nothing left to reject, so from then on I dry heaved in bed where it felt less uncomfortable and disgusting.

For months already I'd been waking up soaked in sweat with full-body tremors, so the constant shakes and sweating were the least surprising aspects of withdrawal. Withdrawal was like my usual thrashing misery, but on steroids. The agony of it all made me cry until I thought I'd run out of tears.

Need drink. Need drink. Pain. Need drink. Need drink. This was the dominant drumbeat. But before long, it became “MAKE IT STOP! GIVE ME THE FUCKING LIBRIUM! MAKE IT STOP! GIVE ME THE FUCKING LIBRIUM!”

All I knew about Librium was what I had read somwhere—that it might have been the “little yellow pill,” Mick Jagger sings about in “Mother's Little Helper.” What I didn't know was that it was the first benzodiazepine, a class of psychoactive drugs. Had I known that a benzo is a sedative and a kissing cousin of Valium, I might have been more game to take it the previous night. In detox, the Librium was meant to knock me out and downgrade the drama of withdrawal from a knife fight to a screaming match; the process would still suck, but no one was going out in a body bag.

But between me and the Librium stood the staff physician and the blood test I had refused the night before.

While the Asian nurses on the fifth floor were charged with leading me to meals, taking my blood pressure all day
long, and keeping my contraband locked away, the detox nurses from the third floor were responsible for all things addiction.

A nurse named Ashley from detox appeared in my room. Younger than the other nurses, she was tall and thin with a head of bad blonde highlights topped by a three-inch, brown yarmulke of root growth.

“Hey, Lisa. You ready to go see the doctor?” she asked, snapping her gum at the end of each sentence. As miserable as I was, I immediately knew that I liked her. I could picture her standing outside the facility, chain-smoking Virginia Slims with other nurses her age and swapping stories of hard-partying weekends and tattooed boyfriends on Long Island. I hoped that she wasn't headed for a spot on one of these beds.

Leaning against both Ashley and the hallway wall, I wobbled slowly to the elevator. I noticed the same two patients I'd seen when I arrived the night before, a woman and a man, both Asian. They wore the same clothes as the night before and separately walked laps around the floor. The woman appeared to be in her mid-twenties and was very thin. She wore brown sweatpants and a white t-shirt with a butterfly embroidered on it. Her flip-flops were the kind that people wear in the shower at the gym—no thong between the toes, just a thick white and blue striped plastic band across the front of the foot. She walked slightly bent over, hands clasped behind her back, head bowed—like a speed skater on Thorazine.

The man was more animated. Older, maybe in his mid-forties, he wore expensive-looking pajamas and sturdy leather sandals. I wondered if his loftier clothing indicated that he was signed on for a longer stay. While the woman took almost catatonic lap after lap without stopping, the man seemed to want to take in every bit of information he could and share his thoughts on all of it. His voice boomed judgmental commentary and
commands to no one in particular: “TOWELS SHOULD
NOT
BE ON THE FLOOR!” and “PUT AWAY THAT MOP!” Every time he passed my room I braced myself for some kind of nutty wrath directed at me.

During each lap, he checked the pay phone for change. I wanted to tell him, “no one carries money here,” but I didn't think it would stop him, and I also didn't want his undivided attention. I tried to convince myself that he was harmless (why else would the staff let him walk around like that?), but he scared me. Sometimes he would stop to study something on the floor, and in those moments he reminded me of a Scotland Yard detective, maybe conducting an investigation of a strangling.

Outside the nurses' station, there was a large white erasable board that displayed the day's schedule and the nurses' assignments. The pacing man approached the board and called out the list of duties. “Wake up and breakfast. Nurse LILLIAN?” He shouted. “Medication and examinations. Nurse EMILY?” He seemed surprised and annoyed by what he read, as if someone had assigned tasks without first consulting him. The first few times he shouted his announcements I found it funny. But then it went on for days and nobody stopped him. It became maddening.

The people who paced, the chatterers, the catatonics, the screamers—this crowd made me feel fixable by comparison. How utterly normal I thought I appeared, just some worn-out corporate raider who needed a recharge. But I knew that if there had been a bottle of vodka anywhere in that building, I would have happily broken all rules to get my hands on it. That was one of the many thoughts I kept to myself.

Eventually, Ashley and I made it to the doctor's office on the detox floor. Time seemed to move slowly when there was no drink in my hand, so the three-minute journey seemed like
a long one. The simple act of walking now felt like trying to run on an underwater treadmill, and I couldn't even navigate a straight line without a person and a wall to hold me up. In the doctor's office I began to feel as if I might pass out, but fortunately I was able to fall into a chair before that happened. PAIN, PAIN, PAIN! NEED DRINK, NEED DRINK, NEED DRINK! The loop continued.

Dr. Stanley, the detox unit physician, was young, with dark hair, pale white skin, and shiny red cheeks that looked as if they'd just been pinched. He didn't greet Ashley and he barely looked at me. He had a snotty, petulant affect that, along with his pallid skin, made him seem like an evil Eddie Munster. I figured that his detox doctor friends were taking spa treatments with the celebrity drunks at Promises in Malibu while he'd been exiled here, to some shitty little detox/nuthouse hybrid in the middle of the dirty city.

“OK, let's take a look at you,” he grumbled. By then I was slumped like a rag doll in the chair next to his desk. There was no examination table or array of pharmaceutical products, just a lot of sharp, metal objects on a small stand. As he set up the needle to draw my blood, I pulled my arm out of my sleeve like a junkie waiting to be shot up.

“Give me your arm,” Dr. Stanley said. He strapped the rubber band around my upper arm and limbered me up by bending me at the elbow a few times. Then he glanced along my arm for a usable vein and settled on one far too soon. With careless roughness, he started jabbing the needle into my arm. After three awful, unsuccessful stabs, I exploded in tears. “Stop it!” I screamed. “You're HURTING me.”

“Your veins aren't good. They roll,” he said.

“My veins are fine!” I wasn't an intravenous drug user, after all. “I've had blood drawn a million times. Stop it!”

“It's going to have to come out of your hand.”
My hand? What the fuck? What kind of sadist draws blood from your hand?
Then he jabbed the needle into the back of my left hand, and I shrieked.

“WHAT THE FUCK!!” I shouted. Did he hit a nerve? Searing pain began at the stab site and radiated out to each fingertip.

“OWWW!” I screamed. And then I started sobbing—really deep, heaving sobbing, and I showed no sign of stopping. It was as if that needle had signaled all my pain to spout at once. The needle had pierced some deep well of agony, and I just let it gush. Dr. Stanley didn't react to my hysterics as he marked the vial and reorganized his implements of torture.

It took me a few minutes to calm down. Ashley waited patiently, and after my heaving subsided, she acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, “Ready to go?” she chirped. Then she gave my back a quick rub as she helped me up from the chair.

“Yeah. I really can't wait for the Librium.”

“Oh, not yet,” she said. “We have to go downstairs for your chest x-ray first.” I let out a long sigh. Under normal circumstances, the prospect of having my lungs examined would have terrified me because when I drank and used, I lit cigarettes like a tag team. If someone asked me if I smoked, I would have said, “Only when I drink.” That was the same as saying, “Every waking hour.”

But I didn't care about their finding lung cancer at that point. I would have done anything to get Librium into my body. My legs buckled as if I were in a moonwalk at a kid's fair. I held on to Ashley's elbow.

Gracie Square's lower level was also dimly lit and dank smelling. About eight detox patients stood in line for x-rays,
men and women of all ages. This morning's crop, I thought. Everyone had been outfitted with the heavy silver aprons. They looked like a team of dueling knights waiting to be called for a match at the Medieval Times restaurant. A team of exhausted, out of shape, and generally wrecked fifth-string knights. Why the hell did the nurses make us all wear hot, heavy aprons while we waited in line? And why did this place own so many lead-proof aprons? Why didn't they use their money for bottled water and anything else that might actually make us feel
good
?

Looking like one of the sandwich board people on the streets of New York, I was overheating underneath my sweater, so I started to cry again. No one reacted to my open weeping. A few of the other patients looked at me, but no one said a word. How is it they all seemed so calm through such an awful process? Drugged? Maybe some of them were repeat visitors, accustomed to the routine.
Shit
, I thought.
I really don't want to get used to this routine.

After the chest x-ray, I was cleared for dosing. Because I ate with the Asian patients, I would be taking my meds when they took theirs. While I waited, I daydreamed about the idea of having “meds” doled out to me in a rehab. Something about it felt kind of edgy. Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and me.

When we returned to the fifth floor, Ashley handed me off to nurse Jane, and we approached a small window behind which a tiny Asian woman with thinning black hair and narrow, rectangular glasses sat next to a huge collection of metal drawers, all loaded with medications. “Dr. Landry says you have to take Librium and also Lexapro because you're depressed,” Jane said.

“Great,” I said. At that point I would have chewed shards of dirty glass if it meant relief. The more drugs, the better.

Because I wasn't drinking, I wondered if this time the antidepressant would have a chance of working. Was depression
my real problem? I kept hearing that I was depressed. But this was New York, who wasn't depressed? I was sure as hell going to be depressed when I went home and couldn't drink. But if Lexapro fixed my depression, would that make it easier for me to not drink? I'd never before connected my depression with my drinking; would this place put a stop to both? But then who would I be?

A dose of Librium was a tiny yellow capsule that didn't look like it would deliver much of a punch. I wrinkled my nose while inspecting it, and then tossed the Librium and the round, white Lexapro tablet to the back of my throat and washed them down with water from a Dixie cup.

After I'd been interrogated, stabbed, scanned, and medicated, it was time for lunch. I sat at the emptiest round table I could find, sliding down the curve of the pink plastic chair. Two nurses worked the lunch crowd. One stood next to a metal cart full of covered meal trays and shouted the names written on each one. Patients would raise their hands, and the other nurse would deliver their lunches.

With my elbows on the table and my head in my hands, I heard a nurse call out, “SMITH!” I half raised my hand in what might have looked like a Nazi salute, and the nurse placed a tray in front of me. When I lifted the lid off the plate, I saw something that might have been a piece of turkey. It was April, but that gray slab looked like something left over from Thanksgiving. Next to it sat a pile of mashed potatoes that managed to be both lumpy and runny. A pile of yellow-green string beans bathing in a greasy substance served as the vegetable. No way I'm eating this garbage, I thought. I pictured myself at the Bloomingdale's that was about to open in SoHo. Thanks to rehab, I'd be heading into that fitting room with my arms loaded with pairs of teeny jeans.