to save his son from getting involved with me.
So alcoholic stepbrother moved in, along with his wart-nosed mongrel called Pepsi. The party continued (stepbrother had some money set aside). I’ve never hated an animal in my life, not even Lucy, who tried to eat my face for lunch, but for the one exception of Pepsi. Whenever I’d go out she’d shit on my floor and chew my furniture. A collection of valuable Native American antiques that I’d been planning to sell ended up as Pepsi chew toys. Maybe she was the jealous type?
In a bout of sobriety I saw the stupidity of it, the rift this situation was opening up between my mother and me. Her marriage was under stress as long as it continued. So I told stepbrother the party was over and sent him and Pepsi on their way. He went back to doing what he did best—growing medicinal pot.
On the next visit to my mom’s house I was determined not to fuck up again. I was a rock. I was on the goddamn stairway to teetotaler’s heaven.
And now it’s four o’clock on the morning after the tea party, and my mom’s there for me again. She stands over me as I hang over a toilet bowl in her house, riding the last wave of a protracted vomiting fit.
The bullet I’d hoped to dodge had hit me right between the eyes. I drank a whole lot one night after an argument with my stepdad, and the next morning I was really sick. I decided to put myself on a forced detox, hoping I would snap out of it, but instead my body went into shock from the sudden alcohol deprivation. The upside was that I missed the tea party; the downside was that I suffered one of the toughest detoxes of my life. I hadn’t realized just how badly I’d poisoned myself. I lost motor functions and part of my vision. I didn’t know that by stopping cold turkey I was damaging both my body and my brain.
My mom didn’t understand just how bad it was for me. “Can’t you clean yourself up? Take a shower and come down to the party. It will do you good to talk to people.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“So, you’re not coming down to the party then?”
When the party was over, my mother returned to my side and watched me throw up bile. She was angry and confused, tears in her eyes. I was shaking like a leaf, hallucinating and crying. Shame and guilt aplenty, there was no shred of dignity to try to recover. I couldn’t even stand up; I was stuck on all fours like a baby.
“Claudia, I’ve had enough. I called Holly. She’s flying up, and we’re taking you to rehab. I’ve booked you in.”
I looked up from the bowl, clinging to it so I wouldn’t fall in. I had no fight left in me, no tricks up my sleeve. I could only manage one word: “Okay.”
It was that easy. I was desperate.
My mom went back to bed. I doubt she slept a wink. When the fit passed I managed to get up and limp down to the kitchen. You can’t sleep when you’re detoxing. You’re a human ant farm, busy little critters rushing around your body and mind driving you slowly crazy until you have to drink to make them stop.
I found an unfinished bottle of decent champagne and grabbed some chilled orange juice from the fridge. This would be my last drink. Seriously. The last one. So it might as well be a good one. I needed the drink to steady my nerves. I was determined that if I had to go into rehab, then I was going to drive myself, and I would drive myself out as well—out to the airport and off to my new job in merry England.
I mixed a killer mimosa and looked out the window at the view of my parents’ vineyards as I waited for the dawn. And I prayed. I prayed that God would heal me, that this really would be my last drink, that I could be set free from the cycle that was destroying not only me but my family.
The drive to the treatment center was a silent one. Holly and my mom sat in the back seat. All my energy was focused on shutting out the voice in my head telling me to turn the car around. Holly tried making conversation with my mom, who’d started mumbling away, mostly to herself, trying to understand how I’d ended up like this.
“You’re so beautiful, Claudia, so beautiful. Why do you want to do this to yourself?” And then she’d ask Holly, “Why doesn’t someone just make Claudia stop drinking?”
She couldn’t understand what I was going through. She thought I was weak. She thought that someone other than me might have been able to stop me. Holly didn’t tell her about the splintered cellar door and the crowbar and the French wines.
I said nothing. I was preparing for my latest role as a rehab junkie. I already knew what a rehab center looked like. I’d starred in
I was more than a little surprised when we pulled up to the swanky Bayside Marin rehabilitation center, a beautiful complex surrounded by majestic views. This was a far cry from the cellblock I’d been expecting.
I filled out the paperwork, peed into a cup, had blood drawn, and got a tour on the way to my private room. Someone asked me if I preferred tai chi or yoga in the morning before my organic whole-food breakfast. Fuck. I realized that, far from a place of last resort, this was in fact a resort.
“Mom, how much is this place costing?”
“Thirty thousand dollars, so you’d better get better.”
I knew the tests would come back clean. I metabolize alcohol fast, and aside from the mimosa I hadn’t had anything in my system for a few days. Perhaps Keith Richards and I share some DNA, I don’t know, but my hunch was right. The tests came back clean, and I was pleased as punch to tell my mom to let my stepdad know that I was an alcoholic, plain and simple, that I wasn’t on drugs, and that in future he could just shut the hell up when it came to making pronouncements about my health.
Sensible Claudia went in there with the best of intentions. I had a job. I’d always dreamed of living in London. This was a chance to fix things with my family, to prove myself to them, to get good and healthy again. I might even regain some semblance of sanity.
But the addict’s brain is wily. It’s got more tricks up its sleeves than MacGyver with a Swiss Army knife. Claudia’s plan was perfectly sensible, but somewhere in the back of my mind the monster had been making preparations for a jailbreak from the Rikers Island of rehab centers. Now all we had to do was escape from a day spa. I was an actress, a pretty good one if I do say so myself. Mere mortals would fall before my batting eyelids and proclamations of sobriety. I had
I set up in my room, which was decorated entirely with the same shade of orange they use at Burger King, then headed off to do my downward-facing dogs and breathing exercises with the yoga teacher.
We’d meet once a day for group therapy around a kitchen table, talk about our feelings, and then have our meals. There was no one-on-one therapy except for a one-time psychiatric evaluation when we first went in.
They should have screened educational movies. Some footage of black, bloated livers would probably have done me a world of good. At the very least they should have shown
The food was good, but they had a no-sugar policy, which created problems. You’re a heroin addict, what the fuck do you care if someone slips you a Hershey bar? Sugar doesn’t trigger addiction, or if it does then it’s one of a thousand things that, taken to excess, can tip the scales in the wrong direction. Sex, eating, arguments, walking past a liquor store, being in a car accident, having a miscarriage, getting dumped, having a dog rip your face off, needing a cigarette, someone dying, moving house, and, if you really want to get finicky about the whole fucking thing, sure, eating a Hershey bar could do it, but it’s at the bottom of a very long list, right above too many cups of coffee.
The people who came to speak to us had between five and twenty years of sobriety, and none of them believed in anything except the AA system. You had to accept that you were an addict for life, repent to God, and surrender. That was the only choice—abstinence and daily or weekly meetings for the rest of your life. I wondered how atheists got sober. Or what if you were a Hindu? Do their gods manage alcoholism?
The shitty thing was that one girl was a bulimic alcoholic, I was just your plain, garden-variety alcoholic, another was a heroin addict, and another was a crystal-meth addict. Beam me up, Scotty; it just made no sense.
