Authors: Mackenzie Phillips
High On Arrival (22 page)
After a while I ran out of arguments and all I could say was, “Fuck you. Fuck you.”
The next day I set about planning my getaway. Shane and I would escape Mick’s rules and accusations. I called Shane’s school and told them to have him ready, that I was coming to pick him up because Mick had beaten me up. But when I tried to leave for the school, Mick and I fought for the car keys. I kicked him in the balls and he fell to the floor, rolling in pain. He grabbed the phone and called social services to tell them not to let me remove Shane from school. Carol, our landlady, who was also the mother of Mick’s music partner, heard the commotion and came over to mediate. Finally, hours later, I admitted defeat and stomped upstairs. I put a note that said “leave me alone” on the bedroom door.
I sat on the bedroom floor and smoked more base.
In the middle of the night I was back in the kitchen smoking. Mick came downstairs and I threw a brush at him and we were at it again. He punched me in the stomach. I called the cops. While I was waiting for them to arrive, I punched myself a bunch of times to make my stomach look worse. When the cops came, I filed a complaint. But then they wanted to arrest Mick, and I wouldn’t let them.
Shane is the love of my life, and failing to care for him properly meant I wasn’t living. The writing had been on the wall since he was born, from the first moment I turned away from him toward drugs, since I took him with me to a crack house, since I couldn’t wake up to make his breakfast. I couldn’t raise a child as a junkie.
The next morning found me shooting up in the bathroom after having found an old rig in a shoebox. Shane was pounding on the door, calling, “Mommy! Mommy, come out!” I flashed back half a lifetime to when, as a teenager, I knocked on my father’s door and he said, “Not now darling, Daddy’s shooting up.” Now I was doing the same to my son. I put down the shot I was preparing.
Oh God, Shane.
I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t get high from cocaine no matter how much I put into my system. It was never enough. And there was nothing but more of the same coming. Death was definitely in the next shot. But saving myself had never been reason enough to stop. Shane was four, almost five years old. He was a little guy. He was full of curiosity and joy. As a three-year-old he looked in a bucket of water and said, “Mom, what if there’s a parallel universe under the water? That would be cool.” Once, when we were standing in the bathroom and he was trying to use the big-boy potty he said, “Mom, I cry for the future.”
“Why?” I asked.
He said, “We don’t know what’s coming. Look what happened to the dinosaurs.” At dinner parties Shane would talk about the planets, the universe, his theories about God. When I was a kid I’d take over a room by tap-dancing in the middle of it. Shane captivated people with his theological discourse. There was just so much he wanted to wonder about and understand.
That curious, wonderful little being needed me, and I wanted more than anything—anything!—to be his mother. He needed me and I wasn’t there. I was in the bathroom busy with a needle. I was doing what my father had done to my siblings and me. I was perpetuating the cycle of neglect and abuse. And it was certainly abuse. I never left Shane alone or hit him or locked him in a closet or anything like that. That’s not me. But I abused him through my self-absorption. No matter if he saw or understood what was going on, he was affected by the world I showed him, by the emotions, and by what was in the air. I wasn’t a responsible parent. I wasn’t available the way a parent should be. Shane distinctly remembers a before and after in his childhood, divided by when I stopped doing drugs. It shouldn’t be the job of a three-year-old to worry about his mommy.
There was Shane pounding on that door, and I knew what I was doing to him all too well. I saw that if I wanted to redeem myself and the situation, I had to change. I knew there were sober people in the world, but I had never thought of myself as one of them. I meant to run it out till I died a tragic junkie. But that wasn’t what I wanted for Shane. I had to fix his world, and the only way to do that was for me to quit drugs and to quit them absolutely. I had to quit them forever.
That night I used up my stash, knowing it was the end, desperate for the last high that would take away the fear and doom that went hand in hand with sobriety. I didn’t know life without drugs. I didn’t know how to be in my life. I grew up with drugs as a buffer between me and everyone and everything else. I relied on that buffer, and I couldn’t conceive of facing each day without it.
In the morning I got up and dressed Shane for school. That afternoon when Mick approached me about getting help, I told him I would go into treatment. I called Mark Gold, the doctor who had helped my father get clean for a minute of his life and had saved him from jail. I said, “Doc, it’s Mack. I need help. I’m going to lose my kid.”
Dr. Gold said, “Thank God you’re still alive.” The people who weren’t in my immediate circle had given me up for dead, which, given the circumstances, was a reasonable assumption. There were drugs before and after this call. Maybe even during the call. But for the first time in my life, I was ready.
I said, “I need to be in rehab by sundown,” excess being the hallmark of the addict. Dr. Gold said that he would call me back.
Mick went to pick up Shane at school. While he was gone I lay in the bathtub, going into heavy withdrawal from Darvocet. I lay in the bath shaking, alternately hot and cold. I was afraid I was going to die right then and there. The phone rang and it was Doc Gold calling to say, “There’s a place for you at Alina Lodge. It’s for the ‘reluctant to recover.’ ” Doc Gold told me where to go and what to do. I called a car company and arranged to be picked up.
By the time Mick came home with Shane, I had packed a small bag and was all ready to go. Mick said, “You mean you want to go tonight?” After all the talk about rehab over the last year or so, he couldn’t process that it was actually happening. I was in the limo by nightfall with a bottle of Courvoisier and a pocketful of Xanax.
I was in detox for two weeks. I had Mick bring me extra clothes and every day I wore a flashy outfit, like tie-dyed harem pants with a matching silk shirt. I’d always been afraid that sobriety would take away the fun, that all the color would go out of my life. So I treated detox like a fashion show. But playing dress-up was a poor substitution for getting high. I called a dealer and had him bring me some cocaine. He delivered it right away.
To a detox center.
Business is business, I guess.
I wanted to shoot the cocaine, but of course I didn’t have any gear. So during a nursing shift change I snuck out of my room and found a crash cart that seemed like it might have a syringe. This was a joint psych ward and detox ward, and they knew how desperate their patients could get. The crash cart had impenetrable plastic locks. But somehow, maybe it was the Librium or whatever I was on for withdrawal, I summoned the superhuman strength required to break into the crash cart. I found an IV tube with a needle attached, but there was no syringe. I’d have to make do.
My roommate was an old hard-core alcoholic with missing teeth and wild, unclean hair. We had a small room with twin beds and a shared bathroom. She had the DTs (delirium tremens). She was crying and hallucinating. I thought she was freaky, but what I was about to do was far worse. I went into the bathroom. I mixed the cocaine with water and cotton and sucked it through the needle into the IV tube. I tied off. With its long tube attached, I put the IV needle into a vein. Then I tried to blow the mixture through the tube into my vein. This did not work. Blood sprayed everywhere. The bathroom was a crime scene, horrifying enough to represent all I’d done, all I’d become. I was bleeding, crying, royally fucked. The incomprehensible demoralization of that moment—I thought the stain of it would quench any future desire to return to drugs. I thought that was the last time I would ever try to use cocaine. For fifteen years it was.
It was January of 1992. I was thirty-two. I’d been introduced to drugs at eleven. I’d been heavily using cocaine for thirteen years, except for one clean drunken year in New Jersey. I arrived at Alina Lodge in Blairstown, New Jersey, in a white stretch limo, wearing a multicolored patchwork button-down shirt tucked into suede shorts, with forest green tights and the same black suede snap-up boots that I’d been wearing when I flew to Albany, six months pregnant.
I had no idea what to expect from the Lodge. I’d been to other rehab programs, but most of them were twenty-eight days long. The Lodge lasted until you were clean and sober and determined to stay that way. I didn’t yet know that smoking wasn’t allowed, but I still puffed away in the car as if it were my last pack of cigarettes. When the driver opened the door, clouds of smoke poured out, and there I stood, in a curtain of smoke, in my outlandish outfit, with open sores on my arms. Oh, they were going to have a field day with me.
I walked into a great room where, I’d soon learn, all the meals were served. The ceilings were very high. There were long institutional tables surrounded by metal chairs. A pot of flowers attempted to cheer up each table. At the far end of the room was a platform stage with a podium on it. All around the sides of the stage were posters with guidelines for behavior. We weren’t allowed to leave the grounds, to use the telephone, to talk to the opposite sex, nor, damn them, to smoke. There were stark black-and-white signs with slogans like “Live and let live,” “Let go and let God,” and “Think think think.” I saw one that read, simply, “One day at a time,” and I thought,
They knew I was coming and they put up a sign for me.
What an idiot I was.
The first order of business was to meet with the eighty-five-year-old founder of the Lodge, Geraldine Owen Delaney. She had her initials, “G.O.D.,” on her license plate, and as soon as she saw me she lit into me: “I don’t care who you think you are. You sit down and shut up. You don’t know anything. You are lower than worm sweat. I wouldn’t wipe my feet on the cleanest part of you. You are a moral leper.” Nobody had ever spoken to me that way. Why did this woman I’d never met before hate me? I didn’t understand. But out of shock, I complied. I shut up. For a few minutes. Then I decided my time-out must be over and started talking again. Mrs. Delaney stood up and pinned a zipper on my jacket. She said, “You don’t know how to listen. You’re too busy trying to figure out what you’re going to say next. Shut. Up.” The approach was called ego deflation, and the idea was to tear down my ego and rebuild me a new and improved sense of self.
The philosophy at the Lodge was that by using drugs, screwing up our lives, and hurting those around us, we’d relinquished our rights as humans. I had to ask permission to start eating. I had to ask permission to stand up and walk out of a room. I wasn’t supposed to read anything but approved materials. Long hair—mine was down to my elbows—had to be swept into a bun; skirts were to be worn below the knee. And I wasn’t allowed to speak in public spaces—at meetings or meals—for three months so I could learn to hear what others were saying. That’s what the zipper on my jacket signified.
We communicated through writing. If we had a request, such as wanting razors to shave, we had to write it down and hand it to a staff member. If it was approved, Mrs. Delaney would initial the note, called a “write-it,” and give it back. It was Victorian boarding school meets boot camp.
The staff also used write-its to communicate with us. One day I received one that said, “Your father is undergoing a liver transplant.” I immediately wrote one back: “Can I call him?” My request was not approved. The response was simply, “We’ll give you another write-it when we know more.”
I had been on the road with the band for ten years. Before that I’d been on a top-ten TV show for seven years. I had always had total freedom. Now I was completely at the mercy of the staff of this facility. My father was having surgery. Mick was playing guitar for Bruce Springsteen. Shane was in the care of Pat the Boy Nanny, as we called him, and I was about to miss his fifth birthday. I was stuck in rehab missing everything, missing everybody, and feeling sorry for myself. I couldn’t stand it. Finally I wrote a note: “I’m putting in my seventy-two-hour notice.” That was the policy. The contract I signed when I entered the Lodge stated that I would give seventy-two hours’ notice if I wanted to leave. I fully intended to go home. But the Lodge kept close contact with the families of its patients. Soon after I wrote that note, and each time I wrote one of the similar ones that followed, I’d get a note back from Mick saying, “Get well, then come home. If you try to come home now, there will be no place for you.” So what could I do? I stayed.
The only way to achieve more freedom was to earn it back. Soon enough I decided to embrace the opportunity and to follow all the rules.
Dear Mrs. Delaney, here is a list of the rules I have broken:
1. I have gone back to bed in the afternoon.
2. I have showered for longer than three minutes.
3. I had a nonretractable pen.
4. I smiled at DL.
5. I left my closet light on and did not write myself up.
6. I have gossiped.
7. I have washed my hair more than once a week.
As I succumbed to the program, I started to change. I had never been sober for such a prolonged period. The fog had time to clear. It felt like the first time I had been chemically free, away from my junkie lifestyle, and continually educated in a new way of thinking. Gradually, with work, my true self started to emerge. When I told my mom I was being brainwashed, she said, “Good.”
At the Lodge I finally started to examine the life I had lived and the role drugs had played in it. I covered page after page of loose-leaf paper with confessions: I would do almost anything for drugs. I left my child alone in the middle of the night to go out for drugs. I let strange people live in my home because they had easy access to drugs. I befriended total strangers for no apparent reason, except not to be alone. I stole pills and cocaine from my father and then lied and lied about it. I used openly in front of my brother Tam, who was eight or nine at the time. The lists went on and on.
As I looked closely at my life, new realizations came pouring out. I faced my true emotions—especially the anger—some legitimate, some shallow, that I’d never let come to the surface. Every last bit of the anger that I’d masked with drugs. Anger at my father; my mother; my ex-stepfather, Lenny; my ex-husband, Jeff; Genevieve; Hollywood Professional School for throwing me out; Mark Gold and Fair Oaks Hospital for telling me it was okay to drink the first time I got clean; Valerie for being pious; even Chynna for thriving despite our shared parentage.
I came to understand that being high wasn’t something I did for fun, as I’d always insisted. It wasn’t a cool, alternative choice that other people didn’t understand. Even if it had been fun at one point, now my relationship with drugs was different. It was an escape, the only way I knew to deal with emotional pain.
At the Lodge I learned that to stay sober I would have to change myself. I would have to change the way I dressed, the way I lived, the way I saw myself. I wasn’t a countercultural rebel who was going to run it out till I dropped, dying a tragic junkie. I developed a new, sober identity for myself. No more cowboy boots or tight jeans. When the video loop of unresolved events from my past played in my head, I just ignored it.
My brother came all the way from San Francisco to New Jersey for Family Week. Jeffrey had been clean for three years. He had a thriving business as a mortgage broker. He was married to a research scientist named Gail, and they had a young daughter, Lauren. Jeffrey and I had shared so much, and I had missed these major events in his now sober life. But he was here for me now, as he’d always been, and he was as happy as I’d ever seen him. He said, “I’m so glad you got clean. I was preparing myself for the phone call that you’d been found dead.”
When news finally came from my father after his operation, it was in the form of a postcard. He wrote, “Hey Max, the logjam is finally broken. Heard you’re about to poke your head out of the nest. Heard you’re doing great. Let’s never go to Greece again.” Dad was back to his cryptic self, but there was one thing I knew for sure. I wasn’t going back to Greece or any other place with the Mamas & the Papas. I was done with the band.
When the day came to leave the Lodge, I was absolutely ready. My bag was packed, my room was clean, and my life story, handwritten on pages of loose-leaf paper, was stuffed in a plastic bag in my suitcase. As I waited for the limo to pick me up, I felt scared of everything. Of people, of having sex with Mick, of aspirin. I had gained fifty pounds and felt uncomfortable in my own skin. I was used to being a tall, skinny witch. But for the first time in a long time, I felt hope. I was clean for the first time in my adult life and I planned to stay that way. I was no longer a broken kid. Cheesy as it sounds, I had been reborn. I was a woman, and I thought of myself as someone who was meant to be a sober, functioning member of society. I was going to make it. I was going to be okay. After the initial fear and panic, the world seemed clear and bright, as if the eye doctor had clicked from the wrong lens to the correct one, or as if the September rains had washed the L.A. smog off everything.
