Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (49 page)

 

In a twenty-second phone conversation, punctuated by loud bursts of static, my manager dropped me as well.

 

When I hung up the phone, I suppose I should have cried. But I didn’t. I was too dehydrated, and the tears wouldn’t come. I sat and waited for Bruce to return. He was out working. Scoring some big deal. That was his job. I didn’t have a job anymore, but God bless him, Bruce did.

 

I was standing in the living room. It was dark; all of the curtains were drawn. That’s the way I liked it back then. I didn’t like the sun to expose the mess that my life was in. I preferred to hide away in the darkness.

 

For the first time in weeks, I opened the curtains. The light poured in, and I had to close my eyes. Even with my eyes shut tight, the brightness hurt. It burned through my thin, translucent eyelids. I suddenly felt light-headed. I knew that if I didn’t sit down, I might faint. But I didn’t sit down. I refused to sit down, or lie down. I breathed instead, feeling the irregular pounding of my heart. My heart had been twitching and skipping inside my emaciated rib cage for what felt like forever. It felt as though it was going to crank one last time and then die, just like an old automobile.

 

With the light flooding the room, I turned to look in the full-length mirror. I had always been able to gaze in the mirror and see whatever I wanted to see. After all, mirrors are only as truthful as the eyes that are looking into them. Today, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I demanded that the mirror show me the truth.

 

I looked at myself.

 

If I’d had the strength to scream, I would have. The scream would have been so loud that the mirror would have shattered into a million pieces, and I wouldn’t have to look at the monster reflected in it for a moment longer.

 

That monster could not be me. That skull, with a mop of stringy hair on it, was not me! The thing in the mirror had eyes so dead, so lifeless, that they made me shudder if I looked into them for too long. The thing in the mirror had skin that was haggard and gray. The grayness was not on the thing in the mirror, it was in it. It permeated every aspect of my reflection, especially the eyes. The grayness was even inside, choking the life out of that struggling, irregular heart.

 

Cocaine had destroyed me; it had taken Cherie Currie far, far away and left in her place this hideous zombie. At that moment I craved coke more than I craved life. The problem was that right then there was no coke to be had. Until Bruce returned, I was without. Maybe that was a good thing. It occurred to me that I could get out, right then, before Bruce returned with more of the stuff. It occurred to me that this could be my last chance, because if I was still waiting to hit rock bottom, I was a fool. I was already down there, and had been for a long, long time.

 

My car was in the driveway. It didn’t hold very much, but it held enough. I grabbed a handful of clothes. I grabbed some records, but then I dropped them again. On top of the pile I had dropped was Hunky Dory by David Bowie. One of my favorite albums. But I didn’t need it, not anymore. Instead I grabbed pictures—pictures of Mom, Dad, Marie, Sandie, and Donnie. I grabbed whatever I could carry before stumbling out to the car. I didn’t even bother to go back and close the front door. I wasn’t just leaving: I was fleeing, scared for my life.

 

I didn’t look back. Some hysterical part of me thought that if I did, I would see Bruce standing in the doorway, with that big glass pipe in his hand. He’d be holding it out to me.

 

Just one more hit. One more for the road.

 

I knew that if he really was standing there with the pipe, I would do it. And then I would never be able to leave. I had to get out right now.

 

I started my car, stuck it into drive, and peeled out. With a screech of rubber I careened down the hill, nearly wiping out altogether in my rush. There was never any question about where I would go: I was heading to the Valley, out toward my aunt Evie’s house. It seemed like it was a long, long way away but I knew I would make it. I had to. Right then, right there, I knew that making it to Aunt Evie’s house was the only chance I had.

 

In a weird repeat of the scene I had been through with my dad, I found myself in a sterile hospital room while a doctor said things that scared me. Only this time the doctor was talking about me.

 

“I want you to know before we admit you,” he was saying, “that you are in the terminal phase of your addiction. You weigh ninety-seven pounds. Your heart is in danger of failing, and so are the rest of your organs. If you hadn’t come in, I honestly feel that you would have been dead within weeks.”

 

I nodded weakly. The withdrawal had already begun. I was sweating, but I was cold. My body was screaming for cocaine. I was in the detox unit of a hospital in San Pedro, and I was set to be there for thirty days. Once the worst of my withdrawal was over, they would move on to rehabilitating me. If I could be rehabilitated.

 

Marie was sitting beside me, watching me as the doctor spoke. I was trying to unwrap a candy bar, but my hands were too weak. She reached over and took it from me, unwrapped it, and then handed it back. I put it in my mouth, but I didn’t have the strength to chew.

 

They put me in a wheelchair and rolled me away. Marie vanished behind me as the nurse pushed me through some double doors into a long, bare corridor. The medication they had pumped into me was already taking effect . . . I felt awful, but the worst was yet to come. It seemed hard to believe, but that’s what they were all telling me.

 

When Marie caught up to me to say good-bye, I was already asleep, with the candy bar hanging out of my mouth. It would be the image she took with her as she started back on the long drive to the Valley.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 33

 

A New Life

 

 

 

 

I wish I could tell you that it was as easy as staying in the hospital for a month and then simply emerging cured. But of course, nothing is that easy. I learned many things during my time in the hospital. One of the things that people kept telling me was an Alcoholics Anonymous mantra that went: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.”

 

It didn’t take me long to figure out exactly what this meant.

 

I wasn’t sure about how well Alcoholics Anonymous would work for me. I didn’t know how well anything would work for me. When I entered treatment in San Pedro, I felt that perhaps I was beyond saving. I remember very clearly that first time I stood in front of a room full of people and actually said, “My name is Cherie Currie. I am twenty-four years old. I am a cocaine addict and an alcoholic.” It was definitely a hard thing to admit.

 

It was a hard thing to admit because some desperate part of my brain simply did not want to believe it. I did not want to believe that something that had been such a big part of my life for so long was no longer in my control. I had been doing drugs since my early adolescence. The idea that they would no longer be there for me was terrifying. “I’ve been an addict for almost a decade . . . and I need your help to make me well again.”

 

I was just a few weeks into my treatment when I stood in that meeting and said this. I was still feeling weak and shaky, and my emotions were intense and confused. Then, something very profound happened that day. I started crying, and I had to leave the podium without saying any more. As I walked back to my seat, I felt the hands of the people around me touching me gently. I felt hands on my shoulders, hands on my back. That touch, that connection with other people who had shared experiences similar to mine, seemed to lift me up and hold me away from the pain. I looked at them, people of all ages, from different walks of life, all of them drawn together by a shared problem and a shared desire for change. In their eyes there was something that I’d long felt I could never have again. There was hope.

 

I wanted to be like them. I wanted to feel hope again. That was the first moment that the thought occurred to me that if I really stuck with it, if I followed instructions and I attended meetings, then maybe—just maybe—I could claw my way out of the hole I had dug for myself. But only if I did it—as everybody was quick to remind me—“one day at a time.”

 

But back to that other phrase, the one about insanity and doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I don’t suppose that I was very different from the countless others who have left drug rehab full of determination to stay clean and then fallen at the first hurdle. Once I was out of the hospital, once I was no longer surrounded by my peers, by drug counselors, by the institutional safety of the treatment facility, I promptly relapsed.

 

I called Bruce, and told him I wanted to get high.

 

Of course, it was just meant to be a one-shot deal. A reward for sticking to it through thirty days of treatment. I felt healthier, and more determined than I had felt in a long time. This time, I thought, I would be able to handle it.

 

I guess I don’t have to go into too much detail about what went on in those three days. I learned that all the warnings the drug counselors had given me about what would happen if I used again were true. They told me that I would never be able to go back to “normal” drug use. They warned me that something had altered in my brain chemistry, and that any drug use would send me back to a place that was as bad—if not worse—than my most recent “bottoming out.” I learned the hard way that these weren’t mere words or scare tactics. They were the absolute truth. The moment that I put that crack pipe to my mouth and took in a great lungful of that numbing, white chemical smoke, I became a different person. The thirty days of being clean that I had achieved melted away in an instant. There was no enjoyment in it anymore. There was no euphoria. In that instant I regressed to a place of such utter desperation and drug need that by the time I fled Bruce’s house for my aunt Evie’s place in a virtual replay of what had happened a month before, I knew that I would never, ever touch cocaine again.

 

When I stopped again, after just three days of being back on coke, my body went into a kind of shock. The first night in Aunt Evie’s house, I slept with her in her bed while the drugs worked their way out of my system. Without medication to ease me through the process, I experienced vivid hallucinations that seemed totally real to me. I woke up in the wee hours of the morning convinced that the bedroom was on fire. As the orange and red flames licked at the mattress, I realized with mounting horror that huge, mutant crabs with clacking claws were swarming all over me. I was kicking at their vicious, snapping maws and pincers. I screamed and screamed and screamed, literally crying in terror with my aunt Evie rocking me like a child, trying to calm me down.

 

“There’s nothing there, sweetie puss . . . It’s all going to be okay . . . Shhhh . . .”

 

I would be back in the hospital again very soon. This time I wasn’t a patient. I looked awful, but not as bad as I looked when I’d checked into treatment all those weeks ago. Since detoxing at Aunt Evie’s house, I had been doing better. No cocaine, no booze, nothing. I’d gained some weight—twenty pounds—and I regularly felt hungry again. My heart had resumed its steady, rhythmic beating and I didn’t shake the way I used to. But most of the time I still felt weak and depressed—like I had been robbed of my emotions.

 

The doctors had warned me about this side effect. They told me that cocaine rapes your mind of its natural endorphins—the chemicals that enable you to feel good. My brain had spent so long pumping them out at an artificially high rate because of the cocaine that its supplies were totally depleted. Feeling good, or even feeling normal, was a distant memory. The one thing that I clung to was that they’d promised that in time this feeling would go away, and my brain’s natural chemistry would realign itself.

 

But here in the hospital, that was still a long way off. I slowly climbed the stairs to the third floor. I avoided elevators because even climbing stairs felt like a victory to me. When I reached the ward, I walked toward the huge glass panel. I could hear soft sounds in the room on the other side. What I saw made me feel light-headed: I placed my head gently against the glass as I took in the scene. A thought occurred to me: my father died in this hospital. I felt tears coming, but they were not tears of sadness; they were tears of joy. I realized that maybe my long-frozen emotions might finally be thawing.

 

On the other side of the glass, in the nursery, were six newborn babies. It took me only a moment to realize which one was my niece. She had Marie’s nose and mouth and Steve’s eyes. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I put my hand gently to the glass and mouthed “hello” to this tiny miracle.

 

Her name was going to be Cristina. Cristina Marie Lukather. She was born yesterday, but I wasn’t there. I didn’t think that the family wanted me there. I knew Marie didn’t. She had said so. It was too soon, too many bad associations. I was carrying too much baggage, and that kind of darkness had no place in a maternity ward.

 

I was sober, though. And so long as I held onto that, I knew that everything else would be okay. It was Marie, Steve, and even Bruce who’d put up the money for my stay in the treatment facility. Today, illuminated by the good, clean sunlight that poured into the maternity ward, I could look at the people in my life with a new understanding. Even Bruce, poor Bruce, who was still so tied up in his own addiction, had tried to help me. Marie, who probably didn’t believe it would work, still put up the money to help me get clean. Marie had heard me deny my addiction for so long that I’m sure she felt I was beyond saving. Despite all of the hurt that we had piled upon each other in the past ten, tumultuous years, my sister had come through for me. Now it was my turn. Now it was my chance to prove that I was worthy of her trust.