It’s not
The Heroin Diaries
and it’s not
Trainspotting
and it’s not William Burroughs and it’s not a
Million Fucking Little Pieces
, OK? I’m not gonna be on
Oprah
and I don’t have a series of meaningful vignettes to relate that can compete with the gazillion other stories of druglife. It’s not
Crank
and it’s not
Tweak
and it’s not
Smack
. No matter how marketable the addiction story has become, this is not that story. My life is more ordinary. More like … more like everyone’s.
Addiction, she is in me, sure enough. But I want to describe something else to you. Smaller. A smaller word, a smaller thing. So small it could travel a bloodstream.
When my mother tried to kill herself for the first time I was 16. She went into the spare bedroom of our Florida home for a long time. I knocked on the door. She said, “Go away, Belle.”
Later she came out and sat in the living room. I went into the spare bedroom and found a bottle of sleeping pills - most of which were gone. Alone in the house with her, I scooped up an armful of vodka bottles and pills and brought them to her in the living room, my eyes full of water and fear, my mind racing. She looked at me more sharply than I ever remembered, and more focused than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was weirdly stern and two octaves lower than the southern cheery slurry drawl I was used to. She said: “Stay away; this isn’t anything for you. I’m not
talking about anything.” And she turned her gaze to the television.
General Hospital
was on.
I went straight into the bathroom and sat on the toilet and ate a wad of toilet paper. My face felt hot enough to ignite. I cried hard. That hard kind of cry that brings guttural grunting rather than sobbing. I muscled up my bicep and I punched the wall of the bathroom. It left a small crack. My hand immediately ached. How I felt was alone. Like I didn’t have a mother. Or a father. At least not ones I wanted. When I came out of the bathroom I felt a little bit like a person who could kill her.
It scared the crap out of me. I didn’t call my father. I didn’t call an ambulance. I called my sister, who lived in Boston, where she was busy getting a Ph.D., trying to erase her origins. My sister told me to call an ambulance and then to call our father. My mother in the living room watching soaps.
I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.
My mother did not die. At least not that day. Eventually I did call an ambulance, and she went to the hospital, and they pumped her gut out. She was diagnosed with severe manic depression, and her doctor assigned talk therapy as part of her recovery. She saw a therapist five times. Then one day she came home and said, “I’m done.” But when she came home she was a dead woman masquerading as a live one. Drinking. Slowly. Surely. What she did next, well, sometimes it’s difficult to tell rage from love.
When I was 17 my mother signed me into an outpatient teen drug treatment center. She found dope in my pants pocket while doing laundry one day. The place I had to go to every day for eight weeks was a soft Khmer Rouge. I was told that “behavioral healthcare” is your “doorway to choice and hope.” That was the
motto. I didn’t find choice and hope through the doorway. I found bibles and Christians with thick gator-mouthed drawls and skin cancer tans counseling me on self-esteem and a purposeful life. They fed me bible passages. I brought Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
with me every day for moral support. They always made me put the book at the front counter, but I knew it was there. I knew it had my back. Not like my mother.
Through the doorway to choice and hope were the saddest girls I have ever met. Not because someone beat them or because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother.
My rage became nuclear. But I did my time. I exited the program with a certificate. I wanted to punch my mother - my mother the puffy hypocrite, the woman currently putting away a fifth of vodka a day - in the face. But she was the same woman who would sign the signature on my scholarship papers a year later. So I did not punch my mother’s mouth off of her face. I just thought this: get out. Hold your breath until you can leave. You are good at that. Perhaps the best. This woman’s pain could kill you.
Later in life, after I flunked out of college, I lived alone in Austin in a crappy-ass efficiency off of the freeway. I got into some more trouble living on my own that led to another round of mandatory drug and alcohol counseling for six weeks in a very strange basement of a medical clinic serving underprivileged folks. Poor people, Mexicans, unwed mothers, African Americans, and me.
There, I was meant to “find meaning in life’s traffic through clearing spiritual barriers.” A different healing slogan. More self righteous hypocritical Christians. There was even a woman in my sessions named “ Dorothy.” My mother’s name. Or
The Wizard of Oz
. I did my time there too, and left with yet another certificate.
Trust me when I say I definitely found “meaning in life’s traffic.” Eventually.
So then this is not an addiction story.
It’s just that I have a sister who walked around for nearly two years when she was 17 with razor blades in her purse seeing if she could outlive the long wait waiting to get out of family.
Her first round.
It’s just that I had a mother who ate a whole bottle of sleeping pills at middle age with only her daughter the swimmer at home to witness the will of it.
Her first round.
I know that will well now. It’s the will of certain mothers and daughters. It comes from living in bodies that can carry life or kill it.
It’s the will to end.
Crooked Lovesong
PHILLIP DID WRITE ME A SONG. HE DID. AND IT WASN’T about how my life was spiraling away from bold swimmer toward comfortably numb. It wasn’t about the three abortions I’d had before I was 21. It wasn’t even about how much money I’d won drinking Texans under tables. Or all the nights I made him break into other peoples’ homes the way my father had broken into me.
The song he wrote for me was mostly instrumental. But you have to understand, and my archangel and his lover will back me up on this - he could play the acoustic guitar better than … you know, James Taylor. So the song took on a rather epic quality. Way before Windham Hill. But there was one, small, tender refrain that would come out of nowhere, or rather, it would come from the very heart of the music, deeper than anything I’d known, and it went like this: Children have their dreams to hang on to. How they fly, and take us to the moon. They flow from you. They flow from you.
The first time I heard it? Sitting on a driftwood log at our wedding, which was on the beach of Corpus Christi, Texas. And it wasn’t just me who couldn’t breathe from the jesusfucking - christknot in my throat and the salted water pouring out of my eyes rivaling the ocean. The whole posse of people there bawled. Nothing nothing nothing nothing about me deserved it. But very deep down in me, very tiny, very afraid, was a girl who smiled from within the cavernous place I’d hidden her.
Is that love? Was it? I still don’t know. It’s possible. But none
of us are any good at naming it. It comes and then goes. Like songs do. I do know this: it’s the kind of thing that happens in stories.
Phillip and I tried to make a go of it as something called “married.” In Austin, Texas. I don’t know how to explain why we went busto. OK, that’s a big fat lie. I know exactly why we went busto, but I don’t want to have to say it. Look, I’ll tell you later. OK?
While we were trying to be married in Austin he got a job - the only job he could find - at a sign-making company. That’s what happens to artists like him - a man with the talent of the most revered painters in art history has to go work at a sign factory. I got a job with ACORN. Yep, that ACORN. But I didn’t give a shit about humanity or common cause or grass roots. By then, there wasn’t much I gave a shit about. I’d so colossally failed athlete/student/wife/woman at that point I felt like something an animal puked up. A human fur ball.
This is something I know: damaged women? We don’t think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It’s threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well. Seriously. Like abandoning a child at the bottom of a well because it’s better than the life she is facing. Not quite killing my little girl me, but damn close.
So I set to work destroying things.
The first thing I did was get drunk one night and punch Phillip in the face. Yep, I punched the most beautiful talented musician and painter I will ever meet in my life, also the most passive and gentle man I have ever met, right in the face. As hard as I could. Wanna know what I said? I said, “ You don’t want anything. You are killing me with your not wanting anything.” Classy. Astute. Mature. Emotionally stunning. I am my father’s daughter.
The second thing I did was get fired from ACORN. Which
is hard to do. But I hated it. I hated having to go out into the hot Texas sun and knock on door after door begging assholes for money when all they cared about was their next latte and what pair of jeans that cost more than my rent they were about to buy. I’d go to maybe 10 houses or so, enough houses to get beer money. Then I’d sit on curbs and smoke pot and drink beer. Then I’d fill in my canvassing sheets with made up addresses and names.
The third thing that happened is I got pregnant. I’m still not sure why, I took my birth control pills regularly. And more and more JT and I were not making love - shocker. But a seed went up and against all odds, in. Breaking my fucking heart.
Look here it is straight no chaser. The me I was if I leave Phillip out of it? Abortion. But something about him and something even deeper down inside me - like a hidden blue smooth stone - it all made that impossible for me to choose. And yet, there was no way to keep pretending the life we had together was anything but a sad ass country song, so as my belly bump turned into a hill, I did the only thing I could do, given the life I’d frankensteined. I called my sister in Eugene where she worked as a Professor of English at the University of Oregon and asked her if I could live with her. Across her leaving me as a child, across the waters of our age difference, across her life as a successful academic and my life as a reckless fireball. The fact was, we were both adult women now. Living adult women lives. Meaning we had something very deeply in common: the tyranny of culture telling women who they should be.
It’s not possible to explain to you how quickly and profoundly she said yes. Maybe she was waiting for me to come back to her. Bringing my big as a house belly with me. To birth and raise a child together, to make a family outside the lines. Because it was the only story I could think of that might live. And though she’d left me to save her life, she somehow knew how to make a space for sister, child, self. But I know too that it was a sacrifice to bring a daughter in from the cold.
Phillip eventually followed me to Eugene. He lived on the
other side of town. We barely saw each other. He worked at Smith Family Bookstore, I went to school in English. Sometimes we’d run into each other, and lock eyes, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d put my hand on my belly to feel what was there between us. It was all I had to give to him.
Here it is. What I didn’t want to say before. It’s me. I’m the reason we went busto. I could not take his gentle kindness. But neither could I kill it.
Family Drama
WHEN MY SISTER WAS 16 AND I WAS EIGHT, SHE’D MAKE me “do” things.
Like this: just hold this apple in your mouth by taking a partial bite out of it. Yeah, like that. Now hold it, hold it … her socking the apple out from between my teeth, sending it across the room, while my little blond head shot to the left with the momentum and my teeth clacked shut on my lower lip.
Or this: see this ashtray? Do this. Just blow in it. One, two, three.
Ashes going all up my nose and all over my face.
Or this: aren’t the icicles hanging from the house cool? C’mere. Put your tongue on this one. It’s pretty!
I would have done anything.
Lemme say from the get-go - I adored my sister to the point of going cross-eyed and fainting as a kid. I thought she was mythic. For one thing, she had the thickest, longest, most beautiful auburn hair I’d ever even heard of, better than the idiotic dolls my mother kept buying me with hair that you could pull out from the tops of their heads - Chrissy with the red-auburn hair and the shorter platinum blond Velvet. Whereas I had a kind of … Q-tip for a head. Chlorine bleached head fuzz. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull any hair out of the top of my head.
For another thing, she could read and recite Shakespeare scenes by heart. She’d seen the R-rated “ Romeo and Juliet” - she had the album. She could paint real paintings that went on
walls. She had a black portfolio almost as big as me (that I was secretly convinced could be used as a sled). She could write poems, speak French, she could play guitar, recorder, she could sing, she could ice skate. I mean really, really well. Me? Eight years younger, if you discount swimming, about the best thing I could do was dress myself. It was a banner day if I didn’t cry, pee, or rock back and forth like a little monkey.