Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (29 page)

After the session I went back to my room and reread a letter that Dad had written to me on the eve of my graduation from high school. While I was on the ER gurney and Mama Jean was on the plane to New York, he had pulled his copy of the letter and faxed it to Michahaze so it was waiting for me—along with Mama Jean—when I returned from the week in detox.

 … You can be anything you want to be. No matter what you choose to do in your life … discipline, dedication and, most important, patience will get you there. Sometimes we have set-backs and detours in life, but God is directing us on a different path, one that will eventually lead to a happy and fulfilled future.… Your sense of the ridiculous will always keep you young at heart.… But, please know your Mother and I will unconditionally support you. But, most importantly you have our undying love.

It was signed “All Our Love, Mom and Dad,” but the words were all his.

I never asked him to visit.

*   *   *

The last ritual of Michael’s House was “Good-Bye Group.” The client leaving sits in the center of the room, and the case managers share what they have observed about how you’ve sobered and matured. A black-and-white photocopy of your hideous mug shot from your first day at intake is posted on the wall. In my photo my eyes are puffy from five hours of crying on the plane. The left side of my bottom lip droops down. In fact, the whole left side of my face sags like a stroke victim’s. My expression is blank, numb.
I imagine the photo of me from the Great Falls of Paterson, New Jersey, looks about the same.

My fellow inmates handed me slips of paper on which they had written “one wish,” “one hope,” “one concern,” and “one gift” (received from the person leaving). The general messages of the well-wishes I received were:

One wish: That you start taking care of you and stop trying to tend to everyone else, one being your mother.

One hope: That a whole new rich and colorful life unfolds for you and that you never look back to the old drinking life.

One concern: That the flashing lights of Fire Island discos, shiny green of Tanqueray bottles, and sparkly white mountains of cocaine don’t make you forget how painful a life of using can be.

One gift: Your incredible sense of humor and always seeing the funny side of the dark.

I looked at the wall. There hung the recovery steps and inspirations that I had studied for the past sixty days. I was still confounded by “This is a program for those with a desire to stop drinking.” Shouldn’t it be “This is a program for those who need to stop drinking”? I knew I needed to stop drinking, but didn’t know if I had actually acquired a
desire
to stop drinking.

Dave’s last comment in my journal: “Looks like your reality holds joy and promise. Now you have to begin the process of self-forgiveness. Yuck indeed!”

The day I left, one of those sublime cinematic moments in life occurred when the perfect song hits at the right time. I had one day on my own in Palm Springs before returning to New York. I was going to spend it shopping with my newly regained credit cards. On that first day of freedom, when I put the rental car in motion, the song “Feelin’ Good” (most famously sung by Nina Simone, but I had the Paul Anka version) filled the automobile. I euphorically sang along with Mr. Anka about it being a new dawn, and a new day, and a new life for me, and I
was
feelin’ good. I sailed down Palm Canyon Drive. The car seemed to be propelled by my elation rather than gas.

Did Janine tell Mama Jean that the fifth stage of alcoholism is relapse?

Part IV

The Hair Is the Last to Go (2008–11)

I think that the most important thing a woman can have—next to talent, of course—is her hairdresser.

—Joan Crawford

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.

—Anatole France

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Seven-Month Itch

“What’s wrong with her hair?” I asked Dad. “It looks like she did it herself.”

With a look of weary exasperation he said, “That’s because she did. She fired her last beauty operator. She said the gal kept getting her appointments wrong. Your
mother
was the one who screwed up the appointments.” He shot me his signature eyebrows-raised, eyes-bugged look.

Mama Jean and Dad were staying with Michahaze and me for a few days before they went on a cruise. It was her first visit since the rehab rescue just two years prior. Instead of the perfect raven helmet to which I was accustomed, her hair looked like a home perm left out to dry.

Screwed up her hair appointments?
That was not like Mama Jean. One time, years before, Dad almost missed a colonoscopy because of her hair. Right before the procedure, the nurse couldn’t locate Mama Jean. “Mr. Brickhouse, we can’t start the colonoscopy until your wife comes back and we know that someone is here to take you home. Where did she go?”

“To get her hair done,” he said in a where-else-do-you-think-she-went? tone.

“Well, we have to get her back here. What’s the name of the beauty parlor? We’ll call.”

“Good Lord, I don’t know. She keeps changing beauty operators. It’s next to a Mexican restaurant on College Street.” The nurse called the Mexican restaurant, which called the beauty parlor. And Mama Jean came back.
After her hair was done, I presume.

For her to show up in New York at the beginning of a two-week trip with her hair not done to perfection was cataclysmic. I should have known then that something was seriously wrong with her. I was relieved that she couldn’t tell that things weren’t completely right with me either.

I wanted to do something special for that first postrehab visit. I still felt guilty that she’d had to pay the nearly sixteen grand for the program. I gave her five thousand dollars and she said that was good enough. I reminded her that Michael’s House was actually a bargain, almost half the price of the other places we considered. “I’d have paid double the amount if that’s what it took” was her swift reply.

I threw a brunch in their honor on a sunny Sunday afternoon in October. We were people who entertained. That’s how we rolled in our family. The apartment was filled with Michahaze and my friends coming to pay their homage to Mama Jean and Dad. I was chatting with guests and sipping a Dinah Shore (my renamed version of an Arnold Palmer—half iced tea, half lemonade—but with a dash of bitters), while across the room Mama Jean sat on the club chair where she had written the check to Michael’s House.

As the guests came to her, she sat like a queen receiving her subjects. My friend Stella stood at Mama Jean’s throne nodding her head as Mama Jean regaled her with a story. Stella, who was from Oxford, Mississippi, could be mistaken for a blond former sorority girl, which she was. But like Mama Jean, also a former sorority girl, Stella had an edge. When she was rejected as a buyer for an apartment by a snooty co-op board at 41 Fifth Avenue, she said, in her slow-as-Mississippi-mud accent, “You know whuuut? When 41 Fifth Avenue wouldn’t take my money, I went up the street to
Saaaks
Fifth Avenue and bought five pairs of shoes. They took my money. No questions asked.” She and I had been dear friends ever since we met at a publishing party years ago and bonded over our mothers’ hair. Her mother and my mother were both Chi Omegas, but more than that, they had the same once-a-week dos. When Stella told her mother the story of Mama Jean’s shower hair catastrophe, the color drained from Stella’s mother’s face. “Stella, that story isn’t funny at all. What did she
do
?”

Stella looked slightly aghast as Mama Jean, with her right hand on her chest, dramatically recounted a story. I was too far away to hear the conversation, but I was sure that I knew the story well. It was the same story she told me over and over.

She didn’t need an obvious trigger to launch into it with me. We’d be on the phone talking about Hugh Jackman’s latest movie and the next second: “Oh, you don’t
know
the terror that struck my heart when I received that call from Michael.… I still can’t believe that you would try to kill yourself. I just can’t get
over
that.” I’d interrupt her and say that my drinking and dark days were behind us, that she didn’t need to worry about it anymore. But there was no stopping her. She had to hit every lousy note of the story until she reached her final destination: “You can never go back to that dark place again.
Never
.”

It was bad enough that I had to relive the nightmare almost every time I talked to her, but to my mortification I discovered that she was telling the story to her friends in Beaumont, to
my
friends in Beaumont, to anyone who would listen.

I had told Stella, as I had told all my close friends, about my “nervous breakdown.” Stella referred to the sixty days at Michael’s House as my “extended Palm Springs vacation.” But Mama Jean didn’t know that Stella knew. While I looked at Mama Jean shaking her head in disbelief as an uncomfortable Stella futilely tried to steer the one-sided conversation in another direction, I winced and thought,
Stop telling that story! It’s
my
story. God
damn
it!

Every time she told it, I was struck with the worst symptoms of alcoholism from which I continued to suffer: guilt and shame. But then I was still suffering from the number one symptom of alcoholism: alcohol.

I honestly thought I was done after Palm Springs; not cured, but done. I knew that after rehab I had to immerse myself in a solid “program,” as the recovery set calls it. When I returned from Palm Springs, I went to an outpatient program twice a week (group therapy and one-on-one therapy) for three months. When that ended, I started private therapy sessions. My
analyst,
the old-school term I preferred over
therapist,
was Dr. Demma. He was Italian American and Catholic like Dave. Our weekly sessions were in the living room of his pristine apartment, decorated with Asian art and matching red velvet sofas. I’d always find him on one of the sofas serenely waiting for me as a candle burned on the table before him, like a priest ready to take confession.

We were on a first-name basis. I called him Anthony. He called me Blanche. As in Blanche Hudson, the Joan Crawford role from
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
In one of our early sessions I complained that I shouldn’t care what others think of me, and he shot back, “But ya do, Blanche! Ya do care what others think!” That was a riff on the famous Bette Davis line from the movie: “But ya are, Blanche! Ya are in that chair!” The name stuck. Anthony was also gay.

Besides the weekly sessions with Anthony, I went to my sober meetings almost every day. Despite all that, I kept getting blindsided every seven months.

Mr. Parker, who everyone thought was going to reject my sobriety and tempt me to drink again, had remained my most supportive best girlfriend, his love and friendship unconditional. When he announced he was moving to Mexico City, I was devastated, even though I had encouraged and supported the move. It was like losing not just my best friend, but my vestigial twin.

I threw him a party and he showed up drunk and barely thanked me. His thoughtlessness was probably due to his own shock over leaving New York after ten years and moving not just to another city, but another country. Two days later I had worked myself into an inconsolable lather. I went to a sober meeting and told myself that if the first person who shared didn’t say something significant to my situation, I’d leave and drink. No one spoke to change my mind. I left before the meeting was over. The bar was a short walk across the street.
New York makes it so easy for alcoholics: there’s a bar on every corner and a meeting on the opposite one. Dealer’s choice! I am greedy. I keep choosing both.

My walk across the street from the aborted meeting to the bar was as deliberate as a Nazi storm trooper’s. I sat down at the bar to drink away my hurt and anger. It worked. Within an hour I was drunk. The anger was gone, and I was right back where I had left off on that September morning: thinking of killing myself. Drinking in anger at someone is like wishing him dead and then drinking the poison that would kill him. A friend ran into me at the bar and called Michahaze. She got me home.

Guilty and ashamed, I jumped back on the wagon the next day and announced I had one day back.

Seven months later I was overwhelmed at work with a big project that I feared I couldn’t handle. I wanted to drink to escape it. I could barely wait for five o’clock to come so I could run to a meeting. It felt like the old days of waiting for quitting time so I could dash to Mesa de Espa
ñ
a across the street. I thought,
How pathetic! I have to escape to a meeting like I used to escape to a bar.
I failed to realize that that was the fundamental point of the meeting.
What an idiot!

Unlike the night of the first relapse, I did all the things that I had been told to do when I wanted to drink. I went to a meeting. I shared and said I wanted to drink, rather than keeping it to myself. I told myself that if no one from the meeting reached out to me afterward about my I-want-to-drink share, I’d go drink. Someone reached out to me.
Damn!
Out on the street he asked me if I was okay, out of danger. “Yes,” I lied.

Actually, I didn’t do all the right things. I didn’t call my sober mentor, who would have said, “It’s okay if you want to drink, but why don’t you put it off until tomorrow? You can always drink tomorrow.” But I didn’t want to make that call because after sixty days in rehab and a year and a half in a sober program, I shouldn’t want to drink anymore. I should be cured.
But you’re not, Blanche! You’re not cured!

As soon as that guy from the meeting was out of sight, I went to a bar. The desire to drink and escape from the fear that I couldn’t do the job was more powerful than the need to stop drinking. I didn’t shoot back down to suicidal, but I shot to slurry. I was hoping to hide that slip from myself and everybody else, keep it my little secret and not lose my new seven months of sober time. But when I got home, Michahaze knew immediately. With a look of sick despair, he said, “Again? What happened?”