Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (6 page)

It made no sense to me, this notion that the way to keep someone from feeling suicidal was to remove every piece of clothing and whatever remained of her dignity—what, did they think I was capable of killing myself with the socks? Now I really
was
suicidal. I was so disgusted and couldn’t bear to touch anything in the cell. I wrapped the horrible blanket around me and sat on the mattress, dangling my feet over the side but making sure they didn’t touch the ground. I began to think of all the ways I actually could hurt myself and came up with the following courses of action: I could bang my head against the metal toilet; I could dive headfirst off the bed onto the concrete; I could use the blanket to scratch myself to death; I could hold my breath until I passed out; I could use the plastic mattress to suffocate myself. My least favorite possibility: I could drown myself in the toilet. It was my second night in a row with little or no sleep. And people wonder why I’m crazy.

The next morning, a caseworker came to speak with me. In spite of being tired, dirty, cold, hungry, and demoralized, I summoned enough energy to somehow convince him I was just fine. I got my uniform back and was allowed to return to the general population. I am proud to report that my new homies were impressed. I was thirteen and being held for assault with a deadly weapon. This was the big time.

I had to take some state-mandated tests to see where I placed in school; when I passed them all, I was told I could go watch TV. All the other kids around me had been given a book and some schoolwork assignment—I had a chili cheese dog and
All My Children
. I put my feet up on a chair and began to enjoy my stay.

Meanwhile, my mother was frantic. From what the cops had told her, she’d been under the impression that they were just going to scare me a little—drive me past juvenile hall and then bring me home. After my behavior the previous few months, this sounded like a plan she could live with. But clearly, the plan went horribly wrong. Later that day, after I had already been processed in, she received an urgent phone call from a man who was handling my case. “Please come and get your daughter. She doesn’t belong here.” He kept his voice hushed throughout the entire conversation as though he didn’t want to be overheard, and then in an even quieter yet more insistent whisper, he said, “I could get in trouble for doing this, but please come and get her. I’ll let you get her.”

When Mom finally arrived, wild-eyed and obviously not having slept, my reaction was to do a Bob—just pick her up and throw her. How could she let some asshole have me arrested? I gave her the silent treatment all the way out to the car and then started hollering.

“I don’t want to go home with you,” I announced. “I want to go to a hospital.” I was gratified by her protests and the horrified look on her face. “Just take me to a hospital.”

My request had a certain logic—to me. In a hospital, I could stay in bed. Food would be brought to me and I wouldn’t have to stand in the free-lunch line to get it. I could wear a gown and not worry about what my classmates thought of my clothes. I wouldn’t have to help Mom with her daycare kids, I wouldn’t have to watch her interact with her boyfriend. More than anything, I didn’t want to spend another day being me. “In fact, take me to a mental hospital.”

“All right,” she said. “I will.”

I look back at that woman and that little girl, and I ache now for them. How lost they were.

I rested my head on the passenger’s-side window, and my mother kept her eyes only on the road as we drove to the county hospital in San Diego. I remember nothing of the building’s exterior; the minute we walked in, I had goose bumps. The Japanese call it “chicken skin” I call it intuition. The building was huge and freezing, even the air felt gray and old. If I’d had the energy, I would’ve made a dash for the door. But the black cloud was in charge. I imagine that a homeless person living under a freeway overpass lacks inspiration and some get-up-and-go, too; living with constant racket, whether it’s in your mind or under the freeway, separates you from your body and separates you from the world. This ugly building seemed as good a place as any to hold up the white flag of surrender.

Without speaking, my mother and I kept on walking, right up to the reception desk, where she signed in. We sat down and waited to be called. There wasn’t anything to say. We were still mother and daughter and loved each other, but we had terrified each other; we had betrayed each other. She’s supposed to be the grown-up, I thought. Why didn’t she protect me? I know now she was asking herself the same question.

We may have brought in with us the only silence in that building. The ambient noise coming down the various hallways was deafening. I’d always been under the impression that crazy people were drugged-up in their beds, but no, here they were, walking around in regular clothes, howling and shouting and laughing. I was never a fan of horror movies; now I was in one.

Our number was very close to being called when a blond woman dressed in a draped and tattered Stevie Nicks–esque outfit suddenly
appeared. At first, you could only hear her boots—high-heeled boots—the rhythmic, echoed clacking sound of her footsteps on the hard floor made me feel like a tourist in a disease museum. When she opened her mouth, the intensity of her words and the way she delivered them was beyond frightening. She wasn’t screaming, but you could hear the insistent desperation in her voice as she asked for her medication. “I need my medication,” she said to the women behind the desk. “I need my medication. I need my medication.” Then she half-turned and opened it up to the room at large. “I need my medication!”

For the first time in nearly seventy-two hours, a glimmering in my mind warned me that being here, giving up, giving in, was maybe not such a good idea. My mother sat up straight in her chair and grabbed my arm; I looked at her, she looked at me. It was as though we’d both been in some kind of zombie state. And then Mom said the two words for which I will be grateful for the rest of my life: “Walk fast.”

We sprinted for the parking lot, then raced out of it in record time, relieved to look back only once and see that there were no white-jacketed men coming after us. It was a mess, and we were battered. But we weren’t broken. Somehow, we would figure it out.

We took the long way to get there, as many families do. But even now, at times of stress or upheaval, all either of us has to say is “I need my medication!” and the laughter starts to roll.

After the first big manic episode
of my life, I have to admit that for a while, I looked back on it with a certain amount of affection. Yes, there were some frightening moments: the handcuffs, the lack of privacy, the cold-metal reality of the suicide tank, and the level of anger I felt toward both Bad Bob and my mother. That anger worked just like jet fuel—it literally blew me out of my home and into the justice system, even if only for thirty-six hours.

On the other hand (I’m good at looking at the
other hand), it was an adventure, a walk on the wild side. It had serious risks, but it also had a couple of rewards: for one, it got rid of Bad Bob, who was never seen around our house again; for another, I was the center of attention, especially my mother’s. All that time I was so busy telling her I didn’t need her—until the day I discovered that I did.

And the image of that young pregnant teen stayed with me for a very long time. I often wonder what happened to that girl and to her child.

When I was very tiny
, my mom took me to a photo studio to have baby pictures taken. When she returned to pick them up, she was surprised to see that one had been blown up, framed, and put on display. There it was, my very first modeling job. It would be about fourteen years until my next one.

I didn’t think of myself as pretty, and for a long time, I wasn’t. I had huge lips on a little face, crooked teeth, and big feet. I wasn’t tall, I wasn’t short—if I thought of my appearance at all, it was average, especially compared to the blond, blue-eyed standard of beauty of the popular girls at my school. I cringe now whenever I hear a model or actress talk about how difficult it was to grow up different (too skinny, too tall, too other), because I’ve learned that even the most confident, cool-acting kids are sometimes shaky inside—awkward, about to be found out. Doesn’t everyone have a story about being that solitary teenager who basically held up the wall at a dance or a party? And addicts always speak of having felt like outsiders long before they ever used anything to help them feel better. And honestly, who wants to hear “poor me” from a model?

In any case, worries about what I looked like weren’t at the top of my list—I was too busy trying to hustle my way somewhere. I didn’t know where, just somewhere else. And I knew that money was central to getting there. I was never a job snob. I cleaned yachts at the Glorietta Bay Yacht Club, I cleaned bathrooms at the public restroom facility on the bay where the boats were docked, I helped my mother clean the doctors’ offices where she worked. God bless housekeepers (and I bless them, too), but even now, I’ve never seen a kitchen or a closet that I couldn’t make better, especially if I’ve got a caffeine source. Call it OCD, call it ADHD, call it a defiant echo of Scarlett O’Hara’s “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” Work
works
for me.

When I was fourteen, I began hearing ads on the radio for the Barbizon Modeling School. I had no conception of actually being a model—my mother didn’t have fashion magazines around our house (my brief glimpse at
Cosmo
in juvie was actually kind of horrifying), I had never been to a fashion show, and I wouldn’t have known a supermodel from a shrimp fork. But Barbizon’s ads talked about teaching poise and etiquette, about confidence, assurance, and self-improvement. These were powerful buzzwords to me—I was eager to learn anything that would help me be a success at something.

Barbizon had an office in San Diego (I learned later that they have offices all over the country—and more than two hundred locations today). I begged Mom to take me there so we could find out more. Finally she said okay.

Barbizon’s San Diego location was on the far end of the Fashion Valley Mall. JC Penney was at the other end. Fashion Valley wasn’t a frequent destination for me and my mother, so it took us about a half hour to get our bearings. But when we walked through those
doors, everything changed. The woman in charge, Candice Westbrook, was petite, with a short blond bob and direct blue eyes. I was never good at guessing ages (when you’re a kid, the world is divided into three parts: other kids, grown-ups, and old people), but I think Candy might’ve been forty when we first met. She reached out to shake my hand (I don’t think, until that moment, any adult had ever shaken my hand), and at that moment, she became a friend for life to both my mother and me. There was no way we could’ve known that then—all we heard was “fifteen hundred dollars’ tuition” and “She’s going to need braces.” Well, that’s the end of that, I thought, and the look on my mother’s face said the same thing. “Wait a minute,” Candice said. “I think maybe I can help.”

She told us she saw something in me. Something in my bones or in my face. I had no idea what she was talking about. But I certainly saw something in her—a way of speaking: direct, straightforward, with something warmer and kinder just beneath it. I immediately trusted her, and so did Mom. A payment plan was negotiated—basically, she loaned us the tuition. Not long afterward, I had a mouthful of braces. Candy helped me get a part-time job at the San Diego Zoo, as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. The costume was big and hot: I felt as though I’d wrapped blankets around my body and head, then tried to breathe while the summer sun beat down and parents took pictures of me standing with their awestricken little kids. For fifteen dollars an hour (which went toward my braces) and a free lunch, it was a good job and a fine alternative to cleaning bathrooms.

I know there are families, and kids, who get the “I’m going to make you rich, I’m going to make you famous” pitch from modeling “schools” and “agencies” everywhere, in exchange for a big check and
a signature on a dotted line. That is never what Candy, or Barbizon, said to me or my mother. We were not hustled. What we were offered was an opportunity—access to information and instruction, to be better, to go forward and out into the world in a way that didn’t seem otherwise available to me. “I want you to know that this is okay with me,” my mother told me. “As long as you’re willing to work for it. Nobody ever let me do the kind of things that I ever wanted to do. But now, you—if you’re willing to work for it, I want you to try.”

Every Saturday morning for six months, I took the bus to Barbizon for a four-hour class with six other girls. We worked on everything from applying makeup (not clown makeup, but look-a-little-better-than-you-normally-do makeup) to walking across a room without falling over our own feet. How to speak to one person, how to speak in front of a classroom of twenty-five. How to stand, stand still, and stand up straight. How to smooth your skirt under your butt when you sit, so that a cold folding chair doesn’t surprise you. Where your hands go when you’re talking to someone (hint: not in, on, or near your mouth). How to smile. How not to laugh at someone, but laugh with them. Manners: Please, thank you, excuse me, no, thank you, I don’t care for seconds. That last one was hard. The more the teen hormones kicked in, the curvier I got. Cleavage not so much, but the hips, the ancestral Latina hips—it was clear early on that my heritage was going to fight me pound for pound.

Candy introduced me to a photographer in San Diego who agreed to take my pictures. We shot on the beach in Coronado. I was able to calm my nerves by focusing on the professional makeup artist who was working on my face—this was a first, and I was fascinated. When I looked in the mirror afterward, I couldn’t believe Mary Forsberg
was looking back at me. That was the first time I remember thinking, I might be pretty. Even with braces and crooked lips, maybe I had potential.

I don’t know if Barbizon actually made me more confident or taught me how to convince people that I was. Whatever the case, with my mother’s trust and Candy’s guidance, I slowly began to move into the world of my Hotel del Coronado fantasy.

Barbizon holds
its annual “Model of the Year” competition in a different city each year, and each regional school chooses which of its students to bring. The year Candy took me, it was in Washington, D.C. I had never been east before—except for the disastrous trip to Tacoma, I’d never been out of San Diego—and I was excited, nervous, and scared. I knew I would fall off the runway or, worse, walk straight off the end of it. I had to do some serious slimming down, too, and my wardrobe needed adjusting, since shorts and flip-flops were not an option. “Why can’t I wear what I want in between competition events?” I asked.

“Because it’s just not a good look, Mary,” Candy said. “The whole idea is to impress and intimidate the competition when you’re off the stage as well as when you’re on it.” That had never occurred to me (I’m glad it occurred to Candy, since the Texas girls brought their A game). The flight was exciting, the images outside the car window were amazing as we rushed from the airport to the hotel, but it was hard to register the details, since everything went past like a video on fast-forward. Although I’d spent time in between homes at motels, I’d never been in a real hotel—the one in D.C. loomed
at least twenty stories into the sky. I stared, gaped, and gawked so much I wouldn’t have been surprised if the soundtrack to the
Beverly Hillbillies
started playing in the background. When I saw some Girl Scouts standing next to a table piled high with boxes of cookies, I loosened up a little. Candy saw my eyes grow to the size of Thin Mints, and she bought some. “For later,” she cautioned. “Once the competition is over, you can eat nine boxes if you want.”

There were perhaps three hundred other girls in various rooms, in various stages of excitement and preparation. I can’t remember actually stepping onto that first runway. That fear has never gone away (full disclosure: I’ve always been relieved that I was often considered too short for runway work). I don’t recall making eye contact with the audience or the judges—I just thought about falling and not falling, and keeping my lips safely clamped down over my metal mouth. And then there were the 1980s outfits that I wore. The funniest was my “athletic look”—a one-piece electric-blue leotard with oversized white leg warmers and a white tank top tied to the side in a knot and slightly cropped. And real Reeboks, with white rolled-down socks. A Sheena Easton/Olivia Newton-John hybrid. I thought I really rocked those poses, alternately bouncing and vamping from one corner of the runway to the other. Only later, when I was a professional myself and actually judged model competitions, did I realize that a
Charlie’s Angels
pose did not scream high fashion.

There were three different prize categories based on height: petite, tall, and me in the middle, at five foot seven. When they called my name, I caught Candy’s eye—she was just as surprised as I was. I headed back to the stage (yet one more chance to fall down) and stood between the two winners from the other categories, holding
on to my trophy like it was a newborn baby. The announcement for Model of the Year was moments away, and honestly? I couldn’t give a shit. I was so excited I’d actually won something! I had a trophy! And I knew Candy was happy, too. Plus there were Girl Scout cookies waiting back in the room.

The judges, modeling agents from many top American agencies (most of them based in New York), took their time scanning us, whispering to one another, and taking notes on their little notepads. When the emcee started to ask us questions, I started shaking—how did I not know this was part of it? For days, I’d kept my braces a secret; now, I had to open my mouth and speak. When the microphone met my lips, as if on cue, the judges all scootched closer to the little TV monitors they had on the judging table. Their double takes couldn’t have been more obvious than if I’d been wearing a big gold rapper grill.

I didn’t win, but after the judging was over, there was a sheet with agent requests posted on the wall. Nearly every agent had asked to see me. One of them was Karen Lee, a scout from Pauline’s Model Management in New York. “I want to stay in touch with you and Candy,” she told us. “I’d like to take another look at you once you’ve grown another inch or two, and after those braces come off. You’ve got…something.”

In the short time we had remaining, Candy and I walked around the city. I knew the smart thing would be to look at the Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, the skyline, the White House. But I was totally inside my head, spinning a vision of what was going to happen next. Gassy city buses, government cheese, and little San Diego would be replaced with planes, money, and big cities around
the world. How could it be otherwise? Hey, I had cookies, and I had a trophy.

Candy told me
that
Seventeen
magazine held an annual teen model contest, and JC Penney was one of the sponsors. Was I interested in going for it? Yes, of course.

Ten girls were picked to participate in a back-to-school fashion show at the Chula Vista mall; I made it onto that list. I don’t remember what I wore, but I do remember that the creative concept was to show the clothes on the carousel, not on a runway. Ten lanky/awkward girls, in coordinates we’d most likely never wear, walking to the beat of Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative,” stopping to strike poses on a unicorn or a pastel-colored pony with tassels in its nose.

After the fashion show, I was selected to go on to New York City for a shot at a cover. A national magazine cover. I was told that
Seventeen
had more than forty thousand other “finalists” to choose from across the country, and only eight of us had been invited. I’d thought the JC Penney gift certificate was great, but this was astonishing. There were gift certificates if you won and introductions to big modeling agencies—and there was a car! A Geo Tracker. I wanted that car. And then I remembered that none of the pictures I’d submitted for the contest actually showed my braces. Should I tell somebody, or should I keep my mouth shut and just go to New York? Be serious: I was going without my mother, I was going without Candy. I would be staying in a beautiful hotel. We would see the sights, go to a real Broadway play, and be taken out to restaurants. Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this.