4. TRY ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE.
I went to Siddha Yoga retreats, got acupuncture for addiction, went to a fasting clinic, and even tried a meditation “doctor” who claimed to have cured members of the Grateful Dead.
All failures. I was down to my last shot.
5. GET HYPNOTIZED.
I found an ad on the Internet while searching for “the best hypnotist in L.A.” I called the number to make an appointment.
“Claudia, I’ve worked miracles with every kind of addict. I can help you. Come on over ASAP!”
The hypnotist’s apartment building was crumbling and looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned since the ’70s, but it was the fucking Taj Mahal compared to his apartment, which stank of old cigarettes, cat urine, and boiled cabbage.
“Watch the medal as it swings. See how it catches the light?”
He tried to hypnotize me into a state of past-life regression so that I could try to pinpoint when my alcoholism began. Now, I’m a big history buff, so if you want to charge me $450 to send me back to Renaissance Florence where I get to have some life-changing experience or at the very least a romping good time, then great. But this guy had a clumsy manner, the tape recorder kept jamming, and the chair I was sitting in had broken springs.
I told him I wasn’t impressed. He told me that I was a difficult case and needed a series of treatments at $120 a pop.
Fuck. That was it, then. It was all a load of very expensive horseshit, and I was at my wits’ end. I’d tried everything. Except the hard-core stuff. The stuff with the list of side effects as long as my arm. And I wasn’t ready for that, not yet.
I thought it would be a good idea for David and me to move in together. It would make it harder for me to binge, and he would be a healthy distraction. A relationship was one way of keeping busy. Surprise, surprise! It turned out to be a very bad idea. By then my compulsion was far beyond my control. I’d have to fabricate arguments, sneak out for binges, come up with all sorts of schemes to get what I could not do without.
And, of course, David finally realized I had a problem. And by then it wasn’t so much a problem as it was my entire life. Being an alcoholic was now normal. The problem was the lengths to which I’d have to go to appear normal by the standards of the outside world.
I was scared to commit to David, and he was coming on strong, talking about marriage and the future. I felt hopeless, that there was no future for me, that my struggle with the monster was a full-time career and relationship bundled into one. And David sensed this. He was jealous of the monster, of the hold she had over me.
So, since we were fighting at home, and I was in the middle of a binge, and I couldn’t stand the sight of David and wanted to break up, we went on a trip to Tahiti.
Now you might be thinking, “Why the fuck would she do something so monumentally stupid?” Because my therapist told me to.
“You should go to Tahiti. It would be good for you to work on your relationship in a neutral environment.”
From the moment we stepped on the plane the trip was a disaster. While David slept I sneaked to the back of the plane to buy little bottles of vodka from the flight attendant. My friends told me that Tahiti was heaven on earth. All I remember is rushing about like a crazy woman, drinking anything I could get my hands on. Rum, beer, vodka, gin. I launched an assault on the minibar and gutted it of tiny bottles in under twenty minutes. I’d buy bottles of liquor from the hotel shop and go through the whole charade of having them gift wrapped, only to tear them open in my room and guzzle their contents while I cried uncontrollably. I was a fucking mess. I’d have drunk mouthwash if I’d had any on hand. Tahiti wasn’t heaven for me. It was definitely hell on earth.
At one point I changed hotel rooms to get away from David, and then I sneaked back into his room when he was out and drank his entire minibar.
I’m sure David must have had a moment when he went to get a sip of vodka and realized that I’d cleaned him out and filled up all the bottles with water to cover my tracks.
I lasted half a week and then fled. I have no idea how I managed to travel from the island of Mo‘orea, where we’d been staying, to Papeete on nearby Tahiti, then get onto a bus and then an airplane, but somehow I made it. They say a drunk can always find his way home. Well, I found my way home from 4,000 miles away in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
I put my suitcase on my bed and opened it. It was filled with sand and ripped clothing and empty little bottles. Then I realized that I’d left my iPhone on with the data roaming the whole time I was in the South Pacific.
Altered flight charges: $5,000. Cell phone stupidity: $2,000. Memories of Tahiti: priceless.
Before David could get home I went to my mom’s place in Napa and went through the worst detox in my life. I was dehydrated and shitting blood and my eyelids were so swollen that I tried using Preparation H on them to reduce the swelling. I’d pass out, then wake up a few hours later and search the house for booze. My poor mom ended up taking me to the hospital. It took me nearly ten days to recover.
Needless to say, the Tahiti trip put some strain on my relationship. David now knew that I was a crazy wino and told me that if he smelled alcohol on my breath again he’d leave me. I was grateful for the second chance and swore I’d go dry. I’d lost twenty-five pounds during the detox, and I looked great, which lent weight to my promise of sobriety.
I was sober for three months before I slipped. I started out on small binges with minor detox flare-ups that I thought I could keep hidden. Those flare-ups quickly spread into a raging fire that consumed me, burning me from the inside out.
The binges ran day and night and didn’t stop until I passed out. When I woke up I’d shake and vomit until I was empty and then lie on the bathroom floor, half-conscious, hallucinating all kinds of scary shit.
When I could walk I’d start on chamomile tea and water, then move on to milk thistle and warm milk, anything to calm the thoughts of guilt and self-hate and suicide and help get my body into a state where it could sleep and heal.
Sleep deprivation was a big issue. I raided health food stores for natural sleeping aids because over-the- counter pills made the detoxes even worse. They made the hallucinations more intense and wired me up instead of calming me down. At night I’d take a hot bath and lie down and sweat out the toxins, terrified of what was to come. First the shakes would start, then the hot and cold flashes, and then more shaking. The room would fill with crazy thunder crashes, and I’d hear the voices of the ghosts and ghouls who visited me in my nightmares. Then I’d get hungry, but the nausea would overtake me so that I couldn’t eat, not even a cracker. I’d go to the kitchen and force down a banana or some milk and pray I wouldn’t puke it up. I knew my body needed sustenance when I’d been living on nothing but beer for five days. I’d go back to bed and just lie there, my mind amped up, filled with horrible thoughts that denied me the sleep I so badly wanted. I’d convinced myself that the monster was in the room, that if I fell asleep she would smother me. The CIA tortures people with sleep deprivation, and here I was doing it to myself.
After a sleepless night I’d get up and hide from the California sunshine like a hungover vampire. This was the same light that I had missed so much in London, the sun that I’d longed for. Now it hurt my yellow eyes and revealed too much of my puffy face. It stole away the shadows and left no doubt in my mind that I was losing. I was turning into the very monster I’d been fighting against.
I decided I had to get out of the house. I told David I was going for a walk. My reflexes were so bad, I knew I couldn’t get out of the way of a car if I had to. My eyesight was shot from dehydration. I was afraid to leave the house, but I had no choice. I couldn’t drink at home, because I was terrified of David catching me and leaving.
That was how I ended up sitting in a khaki-colored bus stop on Coldwater Canyon Avenue watching the world pass me by.
I felt dirty, ugly, and utterly alone. I had thought I’d reached the lowest point in my life when I clung to the toilet bowl at my mom’s house, my secret finally revealed. But I was wrong. Sitting at the bus stop drinking a hastily mixed screwdriver—this was rock bottom. You know when you have those dreams in which you realize
