Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (2 page)

When a new patient
first checks into a rehab facility, addiction counselors and case managers are required to take that person’s medical history—not an easy job, given that in those first few days, the patient is so out of sorts (soul-shattered, ashamed, bone-achingly miserable) that he’s often unable to remember even the simplest information about himself. When this happens, the words “poor historian” are inserted into his chart. A label on top of a label.

For most of my life, and for a whole variety of
reasons (many of them listed in medical textbooks), I have been a poor historian. Oddly, what I do remember, I remember with amazing clarity: certain days of my childhood, falling in love at first sight, my wedding day, the births of my two children, and my first highs. So what I’m doing now is connecting the dots and filling in the blanks—who I was, who I am, and who I will be. The process is somewhere between architectural dig and crashed-hard-drive repair. It’s all in there someplace; I just have to retrieve it.

When I was a little girl, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. In spite of the proximity of Hollywood and Disneyland (I lived with my family in Southern California), I didn’t dream of being a princess, and I certainly didn’t dream of finding Prince Charming. I’m not sure if I dreamed at all.

Mostly, I thought about food. And toys. I had a baseball glove (which was very used before I got it), a Big Wheel (also secondhand), and a Barbie. She, too, was well used before she became mine, and somewhere on her journey to me, all her clothes had disappeared. One day when I was about six, while I was combing Barbie’s hair, I became very frustrated with her lack of wardrobe. I went into the kitchen, riffled through the drawers, and found tape, scissors, and some paper. For at least an hour, I frantically cut and taped and cut and taped, but in spite of my efforts, the final result was simply pathetic. I sat on the floor of my room and cried. What good was a naked Barbie to me?

My family didn’t have much. Not having much was a daily fact of life. It’s why, to this day, I clip coupons, exalt over bargains, and have a complex love/hate relationship with food. I’ll clean my own plate and everyone else’s (even my children’s if they leave anything), and am equally happy at Taco Bell or a four-star restaurant with linen
on the table. Just put the food in front of me and I’ll polish it off. I wince every time I have to scrape leftover bits into the garbage.

Some observers might call my family history colorful; others might label it chaotic. Me, I think that on some level, it gave me everything I needed to survive in the world (and to survive what I did to myself in that world). My parents tell stories about themselves these days, to help me fill in the blank spaces. Sometimes their eyes twinkle, but sometimes there is a glimmer of regret in them, as though the memories and the telling come at a price.

My maternal grandmother, Rosa Maldonado, was born and raised in Juárez, Mexico. She moved to Tijuana as a young widow with four kids, looking for an American husband who would somehow get her over the U.S. border. Waitressing in a Chinese restaurant, she met John Jaswilka, a GI from Los Angeles who visited Tijuana on weekends with his buddies. Rosa didn’t speak English; John didn’t speak Spanish. Nevertheless, within a couple of months they were in L.A. and married, with two of her kids in tow (it took awhile before she confessed to him how many children she really had), and newly pregnant with the baby who would be Maria, my mother. Soon, Rosa brought the other two kids from Mexico to live with them, as well as her own mother, her stepfather, and a couple of nieces. My mother was raised in a two-bedroom house with eleven other people.

When my mother was only fifteen, her father, John, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer (and, maybe, exhaustion). Immediately after her high school graduation, she moved to San Diego, where she got a job in a local hospital and began to work and save toward her dream of becoming a nurse. She’d never had a boyfriend; in fact, under the strict eyes of her mother, she’d never even dated. Friends at
work set her up on a blind date with an eighteen-year-old guy named Mike Forsberg. Turns out that she’d met him twice before and didn’t like him either time; the third time, she changed her mind.

My dad grew up in and around San Diego, and he didn’t have an easy time of it; his own father died when he was only seven, his half sister was murdered at eighteen on the day of her high school graduation. His ethnic background is what he always called “Heinz 57”—Swedish, Scotch-Irish, French, Native American, and Russian. In spite of their different ancestry, my parents looked oddly alike in the seventies—both had long dark hair, parted in the middle, and intense dark eyes. In some of the old snapshots, they look almost like twins. Mom’s vibe is a combo of Geena Davis and Jaclyn Smith; in middle school, I was convinced that Dad looked like Ian Astbury the lead singer of the Cult. (And when I actually met Astbury, many years later, I caught myself staring at him, waiting for my dad’s voice to come out of his mouth.)

A week before her eighteenth birthday, my mom discovered she was pregnant—with me. “I thought I was hungover,” she says now, “but the hangover lasted three months!” Morning sickness hit her hard and fast; she dropped out of nursing school. Although
Roe v. Wade
had become law, abortion was not an option for this good Latina Catholic girl. On the other hand, she barely knew Mike, let alone loved him. For a while, she hoped for divine intervention, but then Dad sealed the deal—if she wouldn’t marry him, he threatened to go to L.A. and tell her family that he’d gotten her pregnant. Evidently, the idea of standing in front of Grandma Rosa, pregnant but with no wedding ring, was scarier to her than the alternative.

My parents eloped to Yuma, Arizona, came back to San Diego, and tried to settle down, with lots of family involvement on both
sides. They probably should’ve paid attention to the fact that they hadn’t liked each other in the beginning, because that back-and-forth was the dynamic for the rest of their marriage, which ultimately lasted thirteen years. Dad gave being a grown-up his best shot, bagging groceries during the day and clerking the late shift at 7-Eleven. He sold shoes at JC Penney, he worked construction; later, he specialized in sheet metal, as well as heating and air-conditioning. But he was overwhelmed and unpredictable. He was also battling a crystal meth addiction, which I didn’t know then—I just knew he and my mother fought all the time. Dad would punch a hole in the wall and stomp out; Mom would patch up the hole, pack up, and move out. Six months was their average stay in an apartment, and they were separated almost as often as they were together. On Mother’s Day 1975, Mom drove herself to the hospital to have me.

When I was a year old, we lived for a while in a tacky motel in Chula Vista. The room lacked many amenities (including a fridge), so Mom kept everything on ice in the sink. My parents’ diet consisted primarily of sandwiches made of Goober peanut butter and jelly (the kind that looked striped in the jar); my own diet was primarily Carnation evaporated milk. To supplement their income, during the day Mom would put me in my tinny little used stroller and go out looking for cans and bottles for recycling. One day, she was crossing the street and the stroller telescoped, folding and collapsing with me in it. For a few seconds, she was convinced I’d been chopped in two; once she realized that wasn’t the case, she was humiliated because it happened on the corner of Broadway and E Street, one of the busiest intersections in town. Everyone was looking at her; everyone knew that she didn’t know what she was doing.

Because of the constant moving, there weren’t many San Diego
communities we didn’t live in—Lemon Grove, Chula Vista, and San Ysidro, where you could literally walk right up to the Mexican border. I was three when my little brother, Johnny, was born, at which point Dad abruptly hauled us all up to Tacoma, Washington. He had friends there, he told my mother; it would be a new start.

It didn’t take long for things to go bad. For one thing, it never stopped raining. My father pulled a disappearing act, and my mother, stuck in an unfurnished duplex with two tiny kids and no one to talk to, taught herself to bake—sugar cookies, from scratch. I loved the ritual of it, watching her put all the ingredients together, rolling the dough, cutting the little circles with a water glass, and then that amazing butter-sugar smell filling the apartment. Sugar was my first addiction; the second was the bottle of codeine-based grape-flavored cough syrup in the cupboard above the refrigerator. I would lean on my elbows, look out at the gray rain, and think, Guess we’re not going outside today. Then I’d wait for the chance to sneak a quick swallow or two out of that bottle. I had to carefully hoist myself up on the counter to get it. It just made me feel better. I’m not sure exactly when I started feeling sad most of the time, but if I had to guess, it would be in Tacoma, in the rain, with the cough syrup and the cookies.

One morning, Dad stayed home from work with what he said might’ve been the flu. “I’ve got some medicine that might help,” Mom told him helpfully, and she gave him a couple of whopping tablespoons of the cough medicine. Turns out she’d been planning our escape from the rain forest for days, and she wasn’t going to let him or the flu or anything else stop her. When he was safely in a deep sleep, she hustled us out the door, telling us it was a game, shushing us to not wake Daddy.

A neighbor drove us to the airport in a lime green and white VW bus. “I feel like I’m helping you cross the Iron Curtain or something,” the neighbor said.

By the end of that day, we were back in California, camping at Grandma Rosa’s, whose house was always full of family members coming and going, so she didn’t seem particularly surprised to see us. Grandma’s English was never very good, but Mom helped me understand her Spanish, and soon enough I was hanging on her every word. Her favorite thing to watch on TV was videotapes of the pope saying Mass, followed by episodes of the British comedy
Benny Hill
, featuring a lecherous old guy chasing half-naked women around, which made her laugh until she ran out of breath.

Grandma told me of the myths and legends she held certain to be God’s truth, as sure as anything the Catholic Church taught her. If I would only know these things in my heart, she said, I would stay safe from harm. For instance: If you get scratched in the eye by a cat, you’ll see ghosts, so it’s probably best to avoid cats. Do not go outside and jump up and down, because it will make your guts fall out. Don’t ever pick up a solitary baby in the desert with the idea that you’re rescuing it; an unfortunate cowboy did this once, whereupon the baby sprouted huge teeth and started talking about hell—it turns out the baby was the Devil himself. And finally, if you are pregnant, always keep a pair of scissors in your pocket in the event of an eclipse; otherwise your baby will be born with a harelip. In Grandma Rosa’s world, everything was a potential threat, so the best course of action was to stay in the house with the pope and Benny Hill, and pray.

It wasn’t long before Dad came back from Tacoma and retrieved us. He and Mom tried to work it out, then separated again. Too
young when they married, and chronically poor, they struggled constantly with the outside world, and with the one inside their own walls. Very early on, I understood the connection between work, a paycheck, a roof over my family’s head, and food on the table. The grown-ups were always talking about jobs—who had one, who’d lost one, who knew somebody who maybe was hiring. Describing them as blue-collar is to overstate it; even when they were working, they were the working poor. We “borrowed” the neighbors’ cable connection for months; we qualified for food stamps and free lunch at school. And the legendary government cheese line: Just show up and pick up the goods—powdered milk, fifty-pound bags of white rice, and big blocks of cheese with no labels, colored an odd yellow-white or Day-Glo orange. On weekends, Mom had me sit with her while she balanced the checking account; by the time I was seven, I knew addition and subtraction, which bills had to be paid right now and which ones could wait. She kept us in clean, good clothes (I’m remembering a particular striped T-shirt from Mervyns that, by the time they applied the discounts, cost forty-eight cents), and she always made sure we looked presentable.

I knew there had to be another way to live. I wanted more. In fact, I’m pretty sure that
WANT MORE
! is tattooed somewhere deep inside my brain. I was always trying to make money. From elementary school on, I sold (or resold) whatever I could get my hands on: trinkets, candy, ice cream. I even sold my lunch.

The summer I was nine, I started my own small business, which I operated through the open window in our living room. I came up with the idea one day when my mother and I were shopping at Price Club. When I told her about my idea, she loaned me a little money, which I used to buy chips, candy bars, and frozen Otter Pops. Mom’s
job was just a block from our apartment; I stayed home to watch my little brother, and during her breaks or lunch hour, Mom came home to check on us. When TV’s
The Price Is Right
was over at eleven in the morning, that was my cue to open the window and wait for my customers. After checking out the local ice cream man who drove his truck around the neighborhood, I lowered my prices by five cents an item and made a tiny fortune.

In the summer, different public libraries had reading events for kids and rewarded you with fast-food coupons or tokens to a nearby arcade. This was great incentive, since the only way my little brother and I ever got to play arcade games was scrounging for dropped quarters between the games tables. I actually read
James and the Giant Peach
from start to finish in one day while sitting in a tree on a very uncomfortable branch. I also went through a phase where I read anything I could find on gymnast Nadia Comaneci. I thought it would smooth my way when I moved to Texas to work with Comaneci’s famous trainer, Béla Károlyi. I believed that with the fierce Béla at my side (plus blood, sweat, tears, and tragically being separated from my family), I would someday win a medal. I had a Mary Lou Retton red, white, and blue leotard, and I was ready to wear it for my country. It was sadly true that I had no gymnastic skills whatsoever (and in the fourth grade was already five inches taller than most retired gymnasts), but that didn’t stop me from picturing myself on the podium, waving after the national anthem played.