Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (26 page)

I did as I was told. She went into the room and lay down on her back on the Victorian bed she’d given us. She was on the left side—her side of the bed—dressed and fully made-up, not a hair out of place at four-thirty in the morning. She had a six
A.M.
flight and was waiting for a car to pick her up.
At that time, who would care what she looked like?
I knew the answer.
She would.

I lay on my stomach, half on the bed, my feet still on the floor. I thought the tableau could have been in her bedroom in Beaumont until I looked at the nightstand on my side of the bed. The last time I had looked, a drained glass of vodka and an empty bottle of Ambien had been on it. It was also where I kept the Atripla, my HIV medication, which had been hidden before Mama Jean arrived. When I was still on the gurney and Jeffrey told me she was in flight, I had been so worried about her discovering my medication. She could never know about my HIV status. Michahaze remained negative; he had been tested after I told him, just to be sure.

Mama Jean stared at the ceiling. “Thank God for those girls. I don’t know what I would have done without them. You’re lucky to have friends like that.”

“I know.”

She reached out for me to take her hand. I did. It had been a long time since I’d held her hand. It was as soft as I remembered it. “I walked around this apartment for a week in a daze—oh, your little hand is so warm. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“It’s going to be okay now.” I felt ashamed of the dread that had filled me when Jeffrey told me that she was coming. In the way that she had been a nagging voice in my head during so many dark moments of my drinking—the only thing left of my conscience—my fear of facing her was wrapped up in the fear of facing what had brought me to that gurney. It wasn’t her I didn’t want to face. It was me. I hadn’t even spent twenty-four hours with her, but I felt as if she had saved me, fixed the situation like a deus ex machina in a Greek play descending from the heavens and waving a checkbook.

“You can’t know how I scared I was.”

“I’m sorry. So sorry.” I really was.

She abruptly let go of my hand and raised hers in warning to me. She looked me in the eye. “Let me tell you something. You can never drink again.
Never
.”

“I know.”

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

Silence. She folded her arms across her chest and stared back at the ceiling, her mouth slightly open and lips curled tightly over her teeth.

After a beat she spoke, still staring at the ceiling, not looking at me. “You know, suicide is a mortal sin. It’s a good thing you didn’t succeed. If you had, you couldn’t spend eternity in heaven with me.”

TWENTY-SIX

If They Could See Me Now

“Look, Coach, I’ll run three laps around the baseball diamond instead. Just don’t make me play baseball. I hate competitive sports. I hate
sports
.” I was pleading with a sixty-something, potbellied, snow-topped, bulbous-nosed,
sober
man in polyester shorts and a baseball cap who insisted on being called Coach.

“Everybody plays the game, Brickhouse,” Coach said.

“But Coach, the point of this is physical fitness. I want to be fit and lose this liquor fat. Believe me. But I’m telling you, playing baseball is
not
going to help my sobriety. In fact, it
threatens
my sobriety.”

He was silent, his reaction unreadable. Where his eyes should have been, two palm trees stared back at me in the mirrored lenses of his aviator sunglasses. I felt as if I were back in junior high PE class: scheming, bartering—anything to get out of playing the game. It was one thing to be in rehab, but to be forced to throw and catch a ball with my fellow alkie, druggie inmates was a sick joke. And to think I had been worried about being forced to scrub a toilet bowl with a toothbrush. I thought of that song from
Sweet Charity: “
If my friends could see me now … they’d never believe it!”

“Come on, Coach, there are seventeen of us. The teams will be uneven.”

“All right, Brickhouse. Run the laps. But run four.”

“You got it, Coach!”

After I ran two in the afternoon desert sun, I noticed that Coach was engrossed in refereeing the game, blowing his whistle and calling fouls or strikes, touchdowns or home runs … whatever. I parked under the shade of an oak tree far in the outfield—my favorite location on any baseball diamond—and pulled out my copy of
The Best of Everything
by Rona Jaffe.
The movie starring Joan Crawford is better.

*   *   *

The negotiation with Coach was in week three of my eight weeks in rehab, but back in those first twenty-four hours, I was convinced I had made a terrible mistake in choosing Michael’s House. Oh, the setup was nice. Anonymously nestled between two tony hotels, and a block off Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag, this former condo complex of Spanish haciendas was in an L around a kidney-shaped pool and Jacuzzi. A volleyball court was in back, where a rowdy game always seemed to be in play.

Intake—registration in rehab lingo—felt more like being booked into prison: confiscation of valuables, mug shot taken, and a litany of rules presented. I nodded and blinked in a haze, as if I were still drunk. I couldn’t let the last rule—“You are expected to not participate in sexual behavior of any kind”—go without comment.
Seriously?
“Does that include masturbation?” I asked the tech (administrative staff member) in good faith.

“As long as you keep it to yourself.” Sage “pressing” advice I already knew.

Turned out that the no-sex rule wasn’t going to be an issue—I was the token faggot out of about twenty men. Most of them were in their twenties, a mix of heroin junkies, pill poppers (OxyContin snorters, mostly), cokeheads, and only a couple of alkies.
Dipsomania is
so
twentieth century
. Their maturity level was barely above pubescence. When they weren’t playing volleyball, they were sitting around the patio smoking table and trying to light their farts.

After a starchy dinner of public-school cafeteria food that dashed any fantasy of California-spa fare of poached chicken breasts and alfalfa sprouts, we were driven to an off-site 12-step meeting in a short bus like special-needs kids on a field trip, which is what we were. Classic rock blared from the speakers, and everyone howled with delight when a Journey song came on.
I knew then that I was in Sartre’s hell.

Despite the dismal picture I saw before me, I was ready to dive into the deep end of getting sober—recovery, they called it—the next day at my first group-therapy session. I sat with the boys and the case manager (aka therapist) in a circle of chairs. Posted on the wall was a list of emotions (happy, sad, angry, depressed, fearful, excited, melancholy, euphoric, anxious, etc.). As we went around the room, everyone declared the emotion or emotions he felt: “Today I’m feeling _____”—fill in the blank. I scanned the list but couldn’t find the one that fit me: numb. So I went with “Today I’m feeling anxious.”

Since I was the new kid in town, I was invited to share my story. I threw the facts out onto the cutting board like raw meat: gay since birth; drinking since fifteen; everyday drinker by mid-twenties; healthy—and unhealthy—doses of drugs along the way; became suicidal;
tried
suicide.
Voil
à
! Here’s Jamie!

The shares followed. (Shares as in sharing what’s on your mind, what you’re feeling, where you’re at, man.) No one was as witty as Bob Newhart’s group-therapy patients. Someone commended me on how courageous I was to reveal that I’m gay.
Courageous?
It was a simple, obvious fact, like the red hair on my head. Coming clean on my full story, complete with suicide attempt,
that
was courageous. Then Hank from Indiana, one of the few older guys, piped in with “Jamie, I’m struggling with something and maybe you can help me understand it.” I knew where he was headed. Basically, he wanted me to help him understand gay people—
he never will—
and get over his “uncomfortableness”—
did he really just say that?—
when seeing “them.”
And I thought I was going to get laid? Flayed was more likely.

I scrapped “anxious” and did an emotion do-over. “Hank, today I am feeling
angry
. It is a waste of my time for me to explain myself or homosexuality to you. I’m not here to deal with my sexuality, but to get sober.” My face must have been as red as it was before detox.

Dave, the case manager, jumped in and started explaining the nature of sexuality and how any man is
capable
of having sex with another man. (Dave was gay.)

As he said this, Copper, an overpumped G.I. Joe police officer with an Ambien addiction, was writhing and twitching with every syllable of Dave’s words. I thought he was going to put his fist through the wall. “I am
absolutely
 …
incapable
 … of having …
sex
”—then he spit out rapid-fire—“with-another-man.” He let his words lie on the floor where he’d spewed them, then added, “But if my three-year-old son turned out gay, I’d still love him.”
Big of him.

When the session ended, anger was the only feeling I could see on the emotion cheat sheet. “Hey, man, come play volleyball!” one of the guys suggested, as if the Homo 101 lesson hadn’t just happened. I gave a terse no.

If one other person asked me to play volleyball or looked at me as if I had three balls when I explained that I played no sports nor had even a passing interest in sports, I thought I’d get on my knees and ask if they’d like a free blow job—my sport of choice. I was certain then that I’d made a terrible mistake. I should have gone to Silver Hill with the pill-popping, chardonnay-swilling, rich housewives.
It would have been a hell of a lot better than being the only girl on the dorm-room floor.

But thank God for my case manager, Dave. Every client (rehab inmates are not patients but clients) is assigned a case manager, who evaluates your drunk file from the forms you fill out, has one-on-one sessions with you three times a week, and makes written comments of encouragement, wisdom, or blunt-force honesty in the daily journal you are required to keep. A former New Yorker and recovering garbage head (an addict who ingests any readily available substance), Dave was a tall, olive-complected Italian American and a fifty-two-ish sixty. To me, he was the homosexual with the heart of gold—sage, pragmatic, insightful, and manicured—the kind of homo Stanley Tucci played in such films as
The Devil Wears Prada
and
Burlesque
. When he dubbed me Miss Lawson, as in Helen Lawson, the Susan Hayward diva from the film
Valley of the Dolls,
I knew I was in good hands.

My first journal entry was a rant about that initial group-therapy session. Dave wrote in red ballpoint pen, “I believe there is a reason you are at MH. It will be a challenge in some respects, but hard-won sobriety is the best kind (and most lasting). You’ll get what you came here for—don’t let the world get in your way. I’m glad you’re here.” I could see him staring down at me over his reading glasses with a hand on my shoulder.

He was right. The fog started to lift. Hank apologized. Copper thanked me for enlightening him about homos, and I found my first real friend in Keith. He consoled me after that inaugural group-therapy session at the smoking table by the pool while the boys hit the volleyball court.

“I’m not gay, but they all think I am.” Keith gestured in the direction of the volleyball game with a lit cigarette that twitched like a hummingbird between his shaky fingers. “So I might as well be.” He could have been one of my left-field friends from childhood. Twenty-something Keith was as thin as the cigarettes he fiendishly chain-smoked. (We all smoked like fiends.) With his dilated eyes and steady tremor, he looked like one of Robert Crumb’s fried cartoon characters.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Almost a month.”

A month?!
I thought he was still high. I guess my face didn’t mask my surprise.

He cut his dilated eyes toward his jittering hands. “It’s the benzos. They’re still in my system, and it’s been over two months.”

“Oh. I mean … What are benzos?”

“Pills. Psychoactive drugs. I’m a pill popper. Klonopin, Xanax, Librium.”

“I took a Xanax a couple of times.”

“Only a couple? You
are
an alkie. Benzos take forever to get out of your system. You alkies are lucky. One week in detox and you’re done.”

“I suppose it’s all relative.”

“I was at Sober Choices in Arizona for a month before coming here. Michael’s House is my third rehab. I’ll probably go to a sober house after this.”
My God, he’s a rehab careerist.

*   *   *

After a week’s moratorium on contact with the outside world, I was talking to Mama Jean and Dad for the first time. It felt as if I were calling them from college—
How’s the food? Who’s your roommate? What’s the syllabus?—
except I was in my bathing suit talking on one of the two pay phones by the pool. The only way to communicate with the outside world was via those pay phones and good old-fashioned mail. Cell phones and e-mail were
verboten
.

“Every time I see an ad for Ambien, it strikes terror to my heart,” Mama Jean said.

I didn’t tell her about Copper the homophobe and Ambien addict. I did tell her about the endless volleyball games and dressing down my brethren addicts in group therapy.

“You’ll teach those sons of bitches a thing or two,” Mama Jean said.

“And who’s your roommate?” Dad asked.

“Oh, yeah. Chris. He’s a really nice guy with a family. He drank nothing but Coors Light.
Cases
of it. Every day.”

“My God, is he fat?” Dad asked.

“No. Go figure. Weirder than the Coors Light is his thing for Katie Couric.”