Babylon Confidential

though you keep getting drunk?

A: I don’t really get drunk, just happy… a lot.

10. Have you missed days at work because of the drinking?

A: What work? I’m an actress!

11. Do you have blackouts?

A: Not that I can recall…

12. Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you did not drink?

A: Yes. I would be thinner.

13. Have you ever embarrassed yourself or someone else when drinking?

A: Possibly. Probably. Alright already—yes!

14. Do you drink every day?

A: Nearly. Mostly. Always.

Then at the bottom of the page I’d write things to crack myself up, like: “FUCK! THAT WAS EXHAUSTING. I NEED A DRINK!”

I was still running from myself and the reality of my disease. On the set of Babylon 5 we played practical jokes on each other all the time. Now I was becoming a big joke and I couldn’t even see it. I wasn’t working, but if an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, then I was at least keeping someone well occupied. When I was working fourteen-hour days on a TV series I never thought about drinking, and when I got home I’d never drink because I was too busy learning my lines for the next day. Now I had oceans of time filled with tiny islands of distraction, but those were slowly sinking as even the freebie jobs started drying up. I reached out for the bottle again, despite my promises to myself. I was too far gone to just stop.

I was sick of the Hollywood youth game, sick of the superficiality of the whole industry, and yet I found that I couldn’t wander too far from the phone. It was like some kind of underworld torture—chained to a stool beside an eternally silent phone, wine glass in hand, waiting for it to ring. That fucking phone was cursed. Each day it refused to ring, I’d feel that I was aging a year, slowly transforming into a crone. If only the phone would ring, the curse would be broken.

And then one day it did. It was computer animation studio boss Andrew Dymond, who I’d met a few years before at a convention in London. I was telling him my tales of woe (but not of drunkenness) when he said to me, “Well, I’m putting together a really low-budget sci-fi comedy over here. How would you like to come over and star in it?”

I was stunned, so overwhelmed with happiness that for a moment I was speechless. I think Andrew took my silence as lack of interest.

“Look, before you say anything, let me tell you the name of the character—Belinda Blowhard.”

Brilliant. I told him that if he could get me SAG scale there was a good chance I’d be interested. Inside I was the dazzled heroine of a bad romantic comedy proclaiming, “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!”

This was just the change I needed: A new country, a new starring role, a new sci-fi series, and comedy to boot! This was saving grace in action. With change comes hope.

* * *

I arranged to rent out my house short-term while my step father kept trying to make a sale. I was happy to let him manage it. After struggling to keep the house for so long, the finality of losing it was all too depressing, and I didn’t want to risk doing anything that might jeopardize my new job.

Unfortunately, the carefully executed system of binge-suffer-detox was not working as efficiently as it once had. I needed to sober up, but first I needed one last round of drinks before the bar closed. By then I only had bottles of cheap sherry and vodka in the cupboard. I could walk clear of the fallout of a wine binge within a week, but a binge on vodka was akin to a death sentence. Yet there was nothing else to drink, so I figured I’d dice with death and keep my fingers crossed. I crashed and burned big-time, and as I sat on my tiled kitchen floor, wasted and leaning up against my seafoam-green cupboards, I estimated that it would take me at least two to three weeks to pull clear of the vodka aftershock.

And then I remembered that I was due to visit my mom in Napa. I had already booked the flight.

You have to go. She’ll become suspicious if you pull out at the last minute. You can pull it off. Have another drink. That’s the world’s best hangover cure.

Shit! Mom was having a ladies’ luncheon and had made a big deal about my attending. Forget the silent phone—that was lightweight torment. Sitting through a rich women’s tea party while detoxing, that was a fate express-shipped straight from the deepest pits of the inferno right to my door.

But the monster was right. I couldn’t risk losing her support, not this close to starting my new life. I needed my mom to help prop me up until I could stand on my own again.

There was still a glass of vodka left in one of the bottles. I threw it down my throat and felt better at once. My nerves steadied; I could do it. That was it, my last drink. I was going to dry out. I’d white-knuckled it before and I could do it again. The women’s tea party was a bullet that I meant to dodge.

I couldn’t fuck up this visit at my mom’s, not after the last one. That had been a disaster of epic proportions.

On that occasion I thought I’d gone in prepared. I knew I was prone to drinking at my parents’ house. Family gatherings are always hot-buttons for me, so to avoid the awkward conversation when they noticed their booze slipping away at an alarming rate I supplemented my consumption with vodka that I’d smuggled in concealed in water bottles. I’ve never really liked hard liquor, but I needed something to numb me out.

My mom has given me a tremendous amount of love and support over the years, and yet she can be a very judgmental person. I’m no pushover, but all it took was one comment from her about my weight or my career to send me running for the bottle. I never felt that I was good enough in her eyes. I wasn’t thin enough or pretty enough or with the right guy or rich or famous enough. She wanted her children to be perfect physical specimens with perfect jobs, complete with perfect little families of their own. I guess it was a kind of German-clockwork fantasy, efficient little dolls popping out of the right window at the right time to hit the right bell, everything running smoothly. Add to that my sensitive nature and there was very little anyone could say that was critical without triggering me to drink.

We’d been sitting around the dinner table, my mom, my stepdad, and his son. I was slicing up my lamb chop, happily munching away, when my stepbrother asked if it was any good. I picked up a piece and fed it to him with no sensual motive in mind; I just wanted him to try some. I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my ankle and turned to see my mom’s narrowed eyes staring at me. She’d kicked me under the table.

“Stop that!”

I just smiled and kept on eating but inside the monster had been awakened and was already formulating what it considered an appropriate revenge. When we all went to bed I went and knocked on my stepbrother’s door, and I seduced him.

He was my stepfather’s adult adopted son, so there were no blood ties, and I didn’t break any laws, but just the same, it showed just how poor my judgment was. It turned out that he was an alcoholic, too, so we understood each other just fine. We combined our hidden stash of booze and partied on into the wee hours of the morning.

In the morning, after the shit storm had passed, I realized that I had an ear infection, which ruled out flying back to L.A. I was already legally deaf in one ear from an infection I had when I was a kid, so I was terrified of damaging my hearing even more.

My stepbrother offered to drive me to L.A., but my mom and stepdad commanded him to stay put and told me to get on the plane. Now it was his turn to stage a revolt.

“Screw this. I’m driving Claudia.”

He was living in their guesthouse, and they were employing him to landscape their garden.

“If you’re not here for work tomorrow then don’t bother coming back.”

He took me to L.A., and in doing so lost his job and accommodations. I felt guilty and invited him to stay with me. I understood where my stepdad was coming from. He was convinced I was on drugs and was just trying