Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (30 page)

“I drank. That’s what happened,” I said, ashamed, and lay facedown across the bed. A freaked-out Michahaze called my sober mentor, who basically said what I said, which infuriated Michahaze. My sober mentor told him that there’s nothing to be done when an alcoholic drinks. That’s what they do. To stay sober, they have to want it.

When Michahaze recounted the conversation, I thought of the slogan on the wall of Michael’s House:
This is a program for those with a desire to stop drinking.
I still wanted to replace
desire to
with
need to
.

Despite all that drinking had done to me, all that I had lost, from the Persian-lamb coat on down, all that I’d
nearly
lost—such as my life—did I
still
not have the desire to stop drinking? As Dorothy Parker said, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” A week later I was back at a meeting announcing I had day one. And things got better, as they always did when I didn’t drink.

Seven months later Michahaze and I were on Fire Island for a glorious beach weekend. Everything was right that weekend. Work was going well. Michahaze and I were happy. I was in love with life.

One full-moon night, I took a solo walk along the beach. I was awestruck by the beauty and mystery of the shimmering sea and terrified by its infinite darkness. As the waves lapped toward me, the moonlight transformed the whitecaps into silver, electrified centipedes. They’d shimmer and shimmy before being swallowed by the sea. I walked along the shore and darted in and out of the fat fingers of the encroaching ocean and thought of Joan Crawford giving herself to that same Atlantic sea in an evening gown that glistened like the electrified whitecaps. “The sea is hungry and it wants you,” I said out loud, and actually shivered with fright. Even though I could swim, the holy terror of the water I had had as a little boy had never completely evaporated.

I kept walking, not letting the sea touch my feet for fear that it would grab me. My alcoholism was that encroaching sea, and I had to constantly dart in and out of the surf lest it take me completely. I could jump in the ocean, but each time I swam in it, there was no guarantee I could make it back to shore. I turned my back against the Atlantic and ran to the beach house.

The next day I went to a meeting that had a second-floor view of the glistening Great South Bay. I was as in love with the beauty of the bay as I was frightened of the sea the night before. I left the meeting feeling the way I felt the day I left Michael’s House. It was a new day, a new dawn, and I was feelin’ good. I felt so good that like a short-circuited robot I walked straight down the boardwalk into a bar with the same view of the bay and ordered a Cape Cod. I wasn’t angry or hurt. I wasn’t filled with fear. I had reverted to the fundamental feeling I’d craved when I first started drinking. I drank because I wanted to make a good feeling feel even better. Unlike the first two relapses, which were like minor colds, this one lingered for seven months, like a virus.

I’d go for days, even a few weeks, not drinking and silently counting days at sober meetings. I never stopped going to the meetings. My plan was that once I reached ninety days, I’d then admit I had relapsed. I couldn’t go through the shame of publicly counting days again.

But I couldn’t reach ninety days.

I was able to keep it from Michahaze. I was drinking secretly, hiding my vodka in the closet and taking sips while he was in the shower. Or I’d go out to the street on the pretense of smoking a cigarette but dash to the bar across the street and quickly suck down two vodkas on the rocks. I’d stash a bottle in the kitchen while I cooked. But I was always careful not to get drunk. When you’ve become the kind of drinker who drinks to get out of control, controlled drinking is no fun. And my God, the amount of work to control and hide it was exhausting. I felt like an actor playing identical twins with ten-second costume changes.

I never reached the level of drinking that had landed me in Palm Springs, but it was merely a matter of time before I did. I knew I had to stop. I was dog-paddling through the fifth stage of alcoholism: relapse.

Alcoholism has to be one of the only diseases with shame attached. People often say that if you have a disease such as cancer, you treat it. But I think that a disease such as anorexia is a better analogy. Like anorexics, alcoholics don’t want to believe they have a disease. Both are diseases in which the afflicted keeps drinking the poison—literally, in the case of drunks—the very thing that will kill them. The anorexic looks in the mirror and sees a fat person. Logically, she knows that she must eat to survive. So what does she do? She starves herself and hopes it will make her better. The alcoholic, once he begins to realize that alcohol is a huge cause of his problems, drinks more, hoping that the problems will go away, hoping he can recapture the bliss that booze used to bring. But each drink deepens the problems and creates brand-new ones. Alcoholism is a madness all its own.

No one knew I had relapsed. Not Michahaze. Not my sober mentor. Not my analyst. And certainly not Mama Jean.
No, ma’am!

It stung deeper every time I heard or saw Mama Jean telling the story of my near destruction, as she was telling it to Stella on that celebratory day. I turned my gaze away from her and Stella. Johnny, the comely bartender who always worked our parties and knew I wasn’t drinking (and I wasn’t drinking that day), was making a sweep of the room. He cut his eyes at the empty drink in my hand. “Another?”

“Yes, Johnny.” And then, loudly, as I handed him the empty glass: “Another Dinah Shore, please.”

I looked back across the room. Stella had ended Mama Jean’s story by pulling in another guest to join them.
Thank God.

When will she stop telling my story?
I thought, not understanding that it was just as much her story to tell.

And what’s wrong with her hair?

TWENTY-NINE

Gown Days (Reprise)

“
Elderly!
Do I look elderly to you?!” Mama Jean said through the phone to me. At seventy-three she didn’t look elderly, but she was starting to act elderly. She was referring to the anonymous description of her in the police blotter of the Beaumont newspaper that described her as such. Seven months before the New York brunch (about the same time as my first relapse), she had pulled up at the Bridge Studio in her brand-new, sporty, red Cadillac CTS. When she and Dad weren’t on cruises or trips to Europe funded by her nest egg from her career as a stockbroker, she was playing contract bridge and racking up trophies at tournaments all over Texas and Louisiana. She honed her game at the Bridge Studio downtown, which was housed in a no-frills, cheap, corrugated-metal building. These ladies played competitive duplicate bridge, as opposed to the more social form of bridge known as playing a rubber that the country-club ladies enjoyed. No rubbers for the hard-core Bridge Studio ladies. They went “bareback.”

Lucky for her other bridge partners, Mama Jean was always early, otherwise they could have met (somewhat) untimely deaths. On this particular day, when she arrived, she didn’t stop in the lot. She plowed through the flimsy metal wall of the building, swiftly pushing aside eight tables of four settings each for the luncheon bridge game and creating a paper rainstorm. The aftermath seemed staged: the red Cadillac sat parked on the industrial carpet as if displayed in a motor showroom, but with the decorative touch of two playing cards and one “Tally-ho!” score sheet artfully fanned behind the red, white, and blue Texas license plate.
Ready or not, here comes Mama!

Mama Jean was unscathed—not a hair out of place—and the car could be fixed.

“Did you scream louder when you crashed the car or when you read that report?” I asked her. It was a rhetorical question.

My mind played a collage of the classic images I have of Mama Jean: the glass curtain of a car window disappearing into the door to reveal her behind the steering wheel of a succession of ever-grander cars—a silver-blue, 1960s Chrysler; that white, 1972 Mercury Marquis; a slightly used, 1976, lime-green Lincoln Mark IV with oval opera windows; a 1978, silver Ford LTD with maroon interior; the navy-blue Pontiac Bonneville with matching landau top; and, after the money came in, a succession of Cadillacs that made her queen of the road. Her high-heeled, lead foot always knew the fastest route, the best roads to take, and how to avoid a speeding ticket (or get it fixed, if she got one). For her to lose control over anything—for her to lose control period—was unfathomable to me.

The Bridge Studio incident came in the middle of a pileup of increasingly lunatic mishaps to which any drunk could have laid claim. A year before the car crash she’d had knee surgery. For a month after the surgery she was batshit crazy, having wild hallucinations, thinking her nightmares were reality, falling out of bed repeatedly, imagining Dad was having sex in hotel lobbies with other women. “It’s like we’re down in
The Snake Pit
with Olivia de Havilland,” Dad told me over the phone, referring to the classic horror film about life in a nuthouse.

More devastating than the Cadillac crash was the financial crash of 2008. Despite rumblings of the coming storm, despite Dad’s urging her to move the money she still had tied up at her former stock-brokerage firm, she didn’t. Unlike the Bridge Studio incident, in which the only thing lost was her pride, a small fortune was lost. All of her years clawing to write her own ticket were wiped away in an instant. If a traumatic event can jump-start a latent illness, then the recession of 2008 did it for her.

When I came home for Christmas that year, I felt as if our roles were reversed, that I was now in charge. Smarting from the recession, Mama Jean and Dad decided not to have their grand Christmas party, which was by then a twenty-year tradition. No ten-foot artificial tree twinkled with a thousand lights and a thirteen-year collection of BOHs (balls of honor) from Michahaze with the Scarlett O’Hara doll from Dad in the center. Only the living-room fireplace was decked. The garlands of golden fruit hung on either side of the mantel, upon which three Venetian-glass Wise Men marched in single file bearing gifts.

Since I didn’t have any investments, I was untouched by the financial crash. Here was a chance not to even the score, but to at least make up for the Tobacco Leaf china Christmas. I felt as if my whole life had been a losing proposition in which I tried and failed to prove that I loved her as much as she loved me. I still dreamed of being able to give her as much as she had given me, to somehow even the score.

I got to be Santa that year. She was no longer buying expensive St. John Knits, such as the red, rhinestone-studded gown she liked to wear at her Christmas parties, but the more casual Chico’s. I gave her a catalog and told her to pick out whatever outfits she wanted. To watch her open all of those Chico’s boxes filled with everything she loved because she had chosen it (not one Tobacco Leaf rabbit in the bunch) was to watch on Christmas Day the kid I would never have. It may not have been the happiest Christmas, but for me it was one of the most satisfying.

And I was sober. I had about seventeen secret sober days under my belt. While I was still in Beaumont, a past playmate (the sexual kind, not the
Romper Room
kind) texted me from New York and asked if I wanted to meet for a drink at ‘21.’ “How about Monday the 29th at six-thirty?” he wrote. I’d be back in New York by then.

I stared at the text.
Say no. Say no.
Oh, but it was ‘21.’ Old-school glamour with its bar of wingback chairs in front of a roaring fire. Where Mama Jean and Dad had that hundred-dollar lunch. Joan Crawford’s former perch. Where Mr. Parker and I once had a glorious four-hour,
three-hundred-dollar
lunch drinking Joan Crawfords (100-proof Smirnoff vodka on the rocks). And now a date over martinis and the promise of sex afterward. The invitation mixed all the ingredients of the cocktail I always craved: booze, glamour, Old Hollywood, and sex.

Go to ‘21’ and
not
drink. Then why go?
I didn’t respond for a couple of days. He wrote back,
Did you get my text?

You know,
I thought,
I only have a few days sober; why not go enjoy myself and then restart my day count?

Remember Rio? I didn’t.

I wrote back,
Yes. ‘21’ on Monday at six-thirty sounds lovely.
But I didn’t send it immediately. I cradled the BlackBerry in my hand and stared at what I had written. I had that old edge-of-the-high-diving-board feeling. After a few minutes I closed my eyes and jumped.
Send.

I wasn’t going to drink until the date, but on the plane ride back to New York the flight attendant asked me if I wanted a cocktail. Without hesitation I answered in the plural: “
Two
gins and
one
tonic, please.”
If I am going to drink tomorrow, why not drink today?

That Monday at the office I was giddy with anticipation thinking of that Beefeater martini, dry, up, with a twist, that would touch my lips in a few hours. It was dead at the office, as the week between Christmas and New Year’s always is. My staff was still away, so I was the skeleton crew. I remembered that a Mir
ó
exhibit was at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), just a block from my office.

Why not have a nice lady’s lunch at the MoMA caf
é
and see the exhibit? Why not have a couple of glasses of white wine with lunch since I’m going to be drinking tonight anyway? Why not?
I forgot that “Why not?” was the question that so often led to my undoing.

The entrance to MoMA was jammed with a line of puffy-parka-ed, fanny-packed Christmas tourists that extended all the way to the street. A vat of liquid Drano couldn’t unclog that mess.
No, thank you.
The white wine wasn’t meant to be.

I grabbed a sandwich and went back to the office. Better to arrive fresh and dry to ‘21.’ That martini would taste so much better without the residue of white wine.