From that day on, Melissa nursed me back to health.
Nursed me back to life.
The first thing she did: took my phone, my computer, my car keys. She took my wallet. She deleted every contact in my cell that wasn’t my mom, dad, aunt, or uncle—anybody whose name didn’t contain Biden. Gangbangers, bouncers, valets—all gone. If you weren’t blood, you were out. When I protested that lifelong friends were getting erased in the massacre, Melissa calmly countered that they’d find a way to reach me if they were truly lifelong friends. She reset the password on my laptop and didn’t tell me what it was, ensuring that I had to go through her to use it.
She dumped out all of my crack. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without her following me inside, sure that I’d hidden something in there. I had. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and she’d tail me into the living room. I’d insist I was fine, that I just couldn’t fall asleep, hoping that she’d head back to bed. I only wanted a minute to rifle through my bags for whatever residual dope I could find. I didn’t realize she’d already gone through every bag I owned and tossed out anything that resembled a drug, from Advil to my unused Lexapro.
The vultures didn’t wait long to call and knock. Their cash cow was missing, and they wanted me back. They said I owed them money and tried to intimidate Melissa if I didn’t pay up. She turned to steel. She was merciless. She went through my bank records and checked off charges, like the $15,000 worth of purchases at a Best Buy in the Valley, where one of my dealers lived. She then told my former compatriots in debauchery in no uncertain terms that if they showed up at her door or tried to get in touch with me again she was calling the police and would otherwise turn their futures into a living hell. The South African beauty with the bottomless blue eyes made that crystal fucking clear. She changed my number and within weeks would find a house for us tucked high in the Hollywood Hills. She pushed away everyone in my life connected to drugs.
It was all on Melissa. It’s no picnic trying to monitor and manage an addict. It’s an enormous amount of work. It’s onerous and frightening. Nobody wants to be anyone’s jailer, and Melissa was imprisoned as much as she felt she needed to temporarily imprison me. She had to put up with my whining and crying and scheming. I tried to negotiate an agreement for a slow weaning process off crack. She said no—hell no—though she did ease me off drinking by first allowing three drinks a day, then one drink, then nothing, while also arranging for a doctor to come to the apartment and administer an IV to remedy any nutritional deficiencies and aid with my withdrawal.
When I tried to sneak around, she busted me. I tried to convince her through sheer force of personality that it wasn’t fair to make me stop using crack all of a sudden—that it was, in fact, dangerous.
She called bullshit.
I never ran, never resented her taking that kind of control. I knew she was saving my life. I was certain that if I had my keys and wallet and phone for two hours while she went out grocery shopping, I would relapse. The gratitude I felt only deepened the connection that was already deeper than anything I could imagine. I’m certain there was no one else in my life capable of doing what Melissa was doing, though not for lack of effort or love. At that moment, I required the impossible: a foreign body with a familiar soul.
That was Melissa.
When it sank in for me that there was nothing left of the substances I’d smuggled into her apartment, either consciously or accidentally, upon my arrival—that there was nothing still slipped between books on the shelving near the door, nothing tucked under a skateboard that leaned against one wall—I finally slept, fitfully, for three straight days.
On the fourth day, I opened my eyes and asked Melissa to marry me. It wasn’t quite as direct as that. I couched it in a conversation about our future, set it loose like a trial balloon, light and breezy: “We should get married!” The next day we drove to the Shamrock Social Club, a hipster tattoo parlor up the street on Sunset, across from the Roxy. An artist there inked Shalom inside my left biceps in Hebrew lettering, exactly like Melissa had on her arm—sort of an engagement tat.
The day after that, there was no ambiguity. We were just talking in the kitchen at some point when I suddenly and quite literally dropped down on one knee and blurted, “Will you marry me?” Melissa smiled, kissed me, then tapped the brakes slightly. “Yes, but let’s just wait for the right time.” I asked her to let me know when that right time would be. When we woke up the next morning, seven days after we’d met, she turned to me again and said softly, “You know what? Let’s do it.”
I was ecstatic. I was forty-nine, newly clean, and seeing the world again. I wanted back in.
To get married that quickly, I figured we’d have to drive to Nevada, just a few hours away. But after googling around, I learned we could do it that same day in California. I dashed out and bought a pair of plain gold wedding bands.
Meantime, I searched for a local one-stop marriage shop. True to its name, Instant Marriage LA provided in-a-moment marriage services—license, officiant, on-call minister if you chose to use their on-site Encino chapel (capacity: twenty guests). I called and asked the woman who answered if she could send someone to Melissa’s apartment that evening. It was already the middle of the afternoon and
