An hour or so later I checked into the Sunset Marquis, a half mile away, and resumed my drinking and drugging. Sometime after midnight I noticed the number inked across my palm and texted someone named Melissa to see if she wanted to meet for a drink. I’m sure I had no good on my mind. Melissa’s response was swift, polite, and to the point: “No thank you. I’m asleep.”
I shuffled into the shower and scrubbed the number off my hand. My crackhead brain sure as hell didn’t memorize it. I toweled off and reached for a pipe.
If this were a more probable story—if this were a movie that followed my narrative arc to its more plausibly tragic outcome—my future would have ended there.
It would’ve run off my hand with Melissa’s phone number and slid down the drain for good.
Instead, Melissa texted me in the morning. She asked if I wanted to meet for coffee; her friends had encouraged her to do so. I texted back that I could meet her at eleven at the restaurant inside the Sunset Marquis. I waited at a table there until she texted again to say she was running late and could we meet instead at one. A little later, she asked if we could make it four.
Remarkably, I wasn’t already totally fucked-up; for reasons I still can’t decipher, I hardly smoked or drank at all that day, unlike every other day since I’d returned to Los Angeles. For one thing, I hadn’t shared my latest whereabouts with my traveling band of vampires. So my only human contact that day was with an actual civilian: Melissa. Yet when five o’clock rolled around, I assumed she’d blow me off again, and sure enough, she texted an apology for canceling so many times, then promised she would be there, for dinner now, at 5:15.
I made my way to the dining room, not really clear why anymore, other than that I’d gotten myself into this mess and figured I’d let it run its disastrous course. That had been my MO for most of the last four years anyway. Still, I had showered and pulled on a pair of jeans and a denim jacket—what Beau and I used to call a Canadian tuxedo. It was my first actual date in twenty-six years. My relationship with Hallie belonged to a whole other category, and the other women I’d been with during rampages since my divorce were hardly the dating type. We would satisfy our immediate needs and little else. I’m not proud of it. It’s why I would later challenge in court the woman from Arkansas who had a baby in 2018 and claimed the child was mine—I had no recollection of our encounter. That’s how little connection I had with anyone. I was a mess, but a mess I’ve taken responsibility for.
Not that I was sure that this coffee-turned-lunch-turned-dinner with Melissa was going to head anywhere. I didn’t want a relationship, certainly nothing with strings attached. I just wanted to be gone.
As I stepped past the restaurant’s outdoor seating area, set in a kind of lush secret garden, I spotted a woman seated alone at a table. Lit by the glow of L.A.’s gauzy spring light, with oversized sunglasses pushed atop her honey-blond hair to reveal the biggest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen, the woman I took to be Melissa glanced my way and flashed a bright, easy smile. It floored me. It was full of warmth and free of guile. A charge rushed through my body—the first genuine, non-crack-aided jolt to my system that I’d experienced since I could remember. It was electrifying.
It was a bell ringer.
My boots clacked under me as I continued on to the restaurant’s front entrance and navigated my way to the table. Tiny white lights were strung through trees that ringed a terraced wall. We both smiled as I sat down.
I spoke up first.
“You have the exact same eyes as my brother.”
Then, not long after that, having no idea what I was going to say until it jumped out of my mouth:
“I know this probably isn’t a good way to start a first date, but I’m in love with you.”
Melissa laughed. Again, it was electric. When a waiter came by to take a drink order, I told him Melissa probably needed something strong “because I just told her I’m in love.” The three of us laughed aloud together.
An hour later, Melissa said she was in love with me.
An hour after that, I told her I was a crack addict.
“Well,” she responded to that news, without blinking or hesitating, “not anymore. You’re finished with that.”
My reaction:
“Okay.”
I had no idea what I meant. There’s a point you reach in addiction—a point I had so clearly reached—where you believe it’s impossible to ever be in a healthy, life-affirming relationship again. You’ve accrued too many deficits. When you tell a person who you really are—in my case: crack addict—you scare them to fucking death. They rightly become protective of their own hearts, their own sanity, no matter what they might think of you otherwise. With me, you could also toss in a messy divorce, a very public affair, and the daily grenades lobbed my way from the White House. Googling me was enough to send anybody running.
Yet, in an instant, I knew this: I was finished with what I’d come to California to start. I went from completely giving up on the notion of ever trying again—trying to get clean, trying at life—to knowing I was finished with whatever kept me from trying both those things. Here was a magnificently beautiful woman sitting across from me, dressed casually in a light blue denim blouse and jeans, speaking in the noblest South African accent, who was so fearless that she didn’t head for the hills the moment I said
