The problems of a hard-core heroin addict are not the same as those of someone with an eating disorder or an alcoholic. Your problems are not their problems. A doctor wouldn’t treat a cold, flu, and pneumonia all in the same way. The diseases might seem similar—they’re all respiratory diseases—but distinguishing between them and treating each appropriately can make the difference between life and death. It seemed to me that the bulimics needed their own group, to talk about body issues or if they’d been sexually assaulted. They don’t need to be hearing about the drinking problem of a thirty-eight-year-old actress with career anxiety.
There was an anorexic-alcoholic woman who kept weeping and saying, “I just want a pepperoncini martini at night. What’s so wrong with that?” She must have weighed seventy pounds. She couldn’t stop drinking, and that made her feel that she didn’t deserve to eat. She had a handsome, healthy-looking husband who’d come and visit her on family days. He’d hold her frail body while she wept from a mixture of shame and withdrawal.
There was this one gal who clearly had once been a real beauty but now was missing teeth from crystal meth use. Her skin was as rough and pockmarked as a pineapple. She couldn’t have been older than thirty-five but she looked fifty-five. One night she just climbed over the fence and walked to the nearest 7-Eleven. She came back from the other side with presents, her pockets loaded with candy, a sugar messiah reeking of beer and cigarettes.
I stashed my candy bars in my room along with some cookies I’d found hidden in the kitchen. If the sugar bug hit, then I was set. And if it turned out that rehab was more like prison than I thought, then I had a stash of currency at hand to buy whatever I needed.
Sometimes the lesser of two evils is a good thing. All human beings are addicts to their biology. If we don’t eat and breathe we get into serious trouble. Sometimes it’s a matter of choosing one addiction over another. Go to an AA meeting. There’s no shortage of smoking, and everyone’s eating copious amounts of sugar. Some of those guys are forty years sober.
The meth addict had a husband and kids who would come to visit, and my guess was that her $30,000 hadn’t come as easily as mine. Addiction possesses you. It takes you over. She’d lost her identity as a mother and wife, and however much she wanted it back, she couldn’t even stop herself from escaping rehab to get a smoke and a drink. How long would it be before she went back to the addictions she really craved?
After a few days, I felt great. They didn’t have to give me Librium, Valium, or any of the other drugs used to cope with alcohol withdrawal, because I completed most of the detox on my own. I started looking better; after a few days I was back to my old self. I signed up to go to the gym, but since they didn’t have one at the center they had to bus us to the nearest one, which was located next door to a liquor store. There’s some clear thinking for you. Now and again someone would come in to see who was working out, but there was nothing to stop me from strolling next door when they weren’t looking. I stood in front of the window and looked past the display of beer and spirits to the wine rack. I didn’t go in. I thought of the face of that young woman, her teeth gone, her skin all messed up. Then I thought of my mom. She’d be able to tell if I’d reoffended, and I couldn’t risk losing her again. Did I really want to be Iris from
It’s easy for many alcoholics to resist temptation in the first weeks after going sober. That high can last anywhere up to three months, but then the brain starts to crave what it has been missing, and the trench warfare begins again. And each time you relapse it gets worse. The body can’t go without its bad medicine. If I had been in rehab three months sober instead of three days, I’d have been the one sneaking back in, reeking of beer and cigarettes.
So I checked that the coast was clear, headed back to the treadmill, and stayed another week—a total of two in all—before I convinced myself that I was ready to leave.
Here’s how that happened.
There was this smug psychiatrist who did a personal evaluation of me during the second week. First, she told me I was highly sensitive. No shit; a grown woman who cries when her mommy tells her to lose weight. You bet I was highly sensitive. Then she told me I was antisocial.
“Antisocial? You wouldn’t say that if you’d been to one of my dinner parties.”
“I think you’re in denial about the seriousness of your disease.”
“If I didn’t think it was serious then why am I here?”
“I don’t know. Why are you here?”
It was like waving a red flag at a bull.
“You’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t be here at all.”
I walked out of there shaking my head.
The monster was right. I’d hit a whole string of them: the men in my life, the house, Lucy, and, worst of all, my failed career.
And it didn’t help that rehab was boring. Rehab was about to beat my New Year’s Eve at Charlton Heston’s house as the single most boring time of my life. Chuck put on a kilt and made his guests eat Scottish food while sitting through the three-and-a-half-hour uncut version of
I set about manipulating the staff.
“I have to go to England and start a new life. I need to make calls and find a place to live and coordinate being on a TV series.”
In no time at all I had my cell phone and computer access. Then I went into my counselor’s office and sat down opposite him.
“Thanks for the two weeks. I feel terrific, but I think I’m done here.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I don’t want to blow the chance to go to the UK and star in a series. It’s not going to wait for me, and if I stay here and miss out then I definitely will start drinking again.”
“Well, legally, we can’t keep you here…”
“Oh. Fine. Well, if I’m not staying the whole thirty days I’d like to renegotiate the bill.”
That was it. I was out of there.
I went home and started packing. It didn’t matter that the monster kept pushing me toward the bottle. I didn’t need a drink. I didn’t need rehab. I was going to England, baby! Travel has always had that effect on me. I felt that if I could just get far enough away from my problems I’d be able to start fresh. No one knows you in a new country. The weight of expectation is gone. It’s an appealing idea and, as I said before, as with all good lies there’s some truth to it. But you can never escape yourself. You’re always there, looking back at yourself in the mirror; and when you’re dry the face you see there never looks quite right. It always looks like it could do with a good, stiff drink.
14. GOD SAVE BELINDA BLOWHARD
Moving to England felt like something of a homecoming. I’ve always been an Anglophile; it has to do with leaving Connecticut—its landscape and historical buildings—at a young age to move into tract housing in California. I’d learned to thrive in the new world, but my heart always yearned for the trappings of the old, and in that sense England was a cornucopia of distractions.
I’d arrived just in time to experience London in spring. There wasn’t a raincloud in the sky, and buildings that predated Columbus’s discovery of America were a dime a dozen. The British Museum became my second home; I soaked in the beauty of the antiquities that England had looted from around the world when they had ruled so much of it.
