Getting It Through My Thick Skull (10 page)
That spring, Joey and I decided to build an addition onto our house. With two small children, we desperately needed more room. I was attempting to live normally and do regular things like remodel the house, even though my life was falling apart. Some more space and breathing room would do us all good. If I couldn’t make it out into the fresh air, I would at least expand my living quarters. The painter, a friend of ours from high school, was coming over to show us paint swatches one night after dinner, and I was racing around trying to clean up. I ran after Jessica, leaned over to pick her up, and discovered that my arms were frozen. I literally could not pick up my own daughter. For a moment I thought I was having another attack, but this was different.
With an enormous effort I picked up the phone, punched in the number to the shop, and told Joe, “Something’s wrong with me. I can barely move. You have to come home—it’s an emergency.”
He raced home. I had scared the hell out of him. “I can’t move! I can’t move!” I cried as he walked in the door. I literally crawled into bed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” I cried hopelessly. The constant anxiety, the debilitating panic attacks, the agoraphobia, and now this inability to even move—my life had come to this. My nerves were shot and were now getting the best of me. My body was rebelling. I was done. “I need to see a doctor,” I told Joe. “I need to be on medication because I literally cannot function anymore.” The next morning, I picked up the phone book, thumbed through the yellow pages, called the psychiatrist nearest our house, and booked an appointment.
When I arrived at the doctor’s, it all burst out of me. “I can’t leave the house. When I do, I’m shaking because I’m so scared. I never know when these attacks are going to come over me. I have two little kids who need to be taken to nursery school every day. I need to be able to run my errands. I’m thirty years old, and I am cracking up.”
We had a short discussion about the nature and treatment of panic attacks, and I was prescribed antianxiety medication. I was also given a referral for behavioral therapy, which I immediately started.My problems didn’t disappear—likely because I didn’t mention my husband’s cocaine abuse—but I wasn’t expecting anyone to fix that. I was too ashamed to tell anyone that my picture-perfect life—the son and daughter, picket fence, family business, husband everybody loved—wasn’t really so perfect. That was an admission I was unwilling to make to my mother, my sisters, my friends, or even a doctor who had heard it all before.
All I wanted was to be able to function again, and Xanax proved to be a good buffer. It was, in fact, a miracle drug in terms of stopping the panic attacks in their tracks. Medication didn’t address my underlying problems, of course, but it certainly managed the symptoms. I found the therapy sessions extremely helpful. I was given all kinds of tricks and tips to try when the panic attacks arrived. The crux of the training was realizing that I might not be able to control when an attack might arrive, but I was capable of learning to control my own reaction to it. I completed an eight-week behavior modification program, stayed on my meds, and slowly but steadily got out of the house and resumed holding things together.
Once I was back to a reasonable level of functioning, I focused on a new plan. My thinking was that if we left our current neighborhood and moved back to Massapequa, the town where we had both grown up, we would be even closer to both our families and support systems. I could get Joey farther away from all the bad influences in Baldwin: the recording studio, his disreputable friends, the hangouts where he bought and did drugs. Paul was nearing school age, and it was the perfect time to settle somewhere new if we were ever going to make a move out of the school district. So I began a serious house-hunt. This is what an enabler does best—tries to put a Band-Aid on the problem instead of addressing the situation head-on.
I found the perfect house for sale in Massapequa, right on the water and next door to the Biltmore Shores Beach Club. We loved swimming, boating, and all water sports, so the location alone was ideal. Not to mention that both our families’ homes were only blocks away, and we knew many of the neighbors on all the surrounding streets. We put a retainer on the house in Massapequa, and I prepared to put our cottage up for sale.
Joey came home one night with great news. He had found a private buyer interested in the house who would pay cash for it. “How can he afford to do that?” I asked. Joey went into a whole explanation of how this buyer was a single guy, a successful entrepreneur, that our house was perfect for him, and blah blah blah. I met the guy. He seemed all right and gave me basically the same story.
Hmmm,
I thought,
we won’t have to pay any real estate agent fees for the sale of this house. Great—let’s do it!
That was easy. I proceeded to get on with the major cleanup, toss-out, and packing that came with ten years of life in one house. It was a huge job, but I was motivated and excited. We were going to make a fresh start.
When moving day arrived, Joey and I had an appointment midmorning at our lawyer’s office to close on the Massapequa house. I rose at dawn and raced around, packing last-minute boxes and loading our cars with things we’d need immediately at the new house. Eventually, I glanced at my watch and found my husband in his garage. “Come on, let’s go! We have to get over to Mike Rindenow’s office. Where’s the money, Joey? The guy gave you a cashier’s check, right?”
“Ahhhh . . . let’s go inside and talk for a minute,” Joey said. He looked guilty and nervous. I followed him into the cottage, dodging all the boxes stacked in every room, impatient and anxious to get moving. He sat me down on the bare floor of the living room, where the imprints from the legs of my coffee table remained. He then walked across the room, as far away from me as he could get, and slumped to the floor, leaning up against a blank wall. He was trapped with nowhere to go. I knew something was up, but nothing could have prepared me for what came out of my husband’s mouth. “It’s gone, Mary Jo. There is no money.” He couldn’t even look at me when he said these words. I started to shake. I thought I was going to vomit.
“What do you mean, it’s
gone
?
Where did it go
?” Well, it turned out that Joey had signed over the deed to our house to his cocaine dealer because he owed him so much money. As the story came out, I wanted to kill him right then and there in our empty living room. We were closing on the new house in a couple of hours, and there was no money! The Xanax came in real handy that day as I tried to absorb this blow.
The endless scrambling around and lying had caught up with Joey this time. He cried. He was sorry. He would fix it. So he went to see Enabler Number Two: my father-in-law. His father was shocked and disappointed, of course, but he didn’t want to see his daughter-in-law and grandchildren homeless, so he offered us a solution. He would give us the $50,000 that we had agreed to put down on the new house, but Joe would lose his ownership shares in the business. From that point on, Joe would just be an employee.
My husband signed the papers and we got the new house, but he threw his whole future away because drugs had become more important to him than his family. You would think that would have been a major wake-up call to him, but, incredibly, it wasn’t.
It took weeks for me to recover from the shock of the lost $50,000. Fortunately, I had plenty to keep me busy. I was racing around unpacking, setting up the new house, socializing with the new neighbors, arranging for Paul to enter school, and the million and one other details that come with moving. In our first couple of months at the new house, Joey really lost control. He pulled a couple more disappearing acts, and these were major binges. He dragged home looking sick and lost— skinny, with dark circles under his eyes, unshaven. He was unraveling right before my eyes.
My mother stopped by one morning for coffee. As we sat in my new kitchen overlooking the water, she said, “Joey’s doing drugs, isn’t he?”
“How did you know?” I asked, while I cursed myself. I had been making excuses for so long about how hard Joey was working, big jobs, late nights—now the secret was out. It was actually a tremendous relief; the game was over. I couldn’t hide anymore.
A few weeks later, when Joey disappeared yet again, I felt an inexplicable calm descend upon me.
This is it . . . the end
, I thought. I located a treatment center in the nearby town of Amityville and called to speak to a counselor. “My husband is a cocaine addict and has been for years. Can you help him?” I asked. After a great deal of discussion about Joey’s habit and endless insurance documentation, the man promised that a bed would be held open. He cautioned me that Joey would need to remain at their facility for at least three weeks. “I’ll be bringing him in the minute he walks in the door,” I promised.
Then I dialed Cass at the garage. Joey wasn’t there, of course. “Dad, we’re going to lose Joey if we don’t do something. He’s going to die if we don’t get him help. He needs treatment, and he’ll need to take some time off work.” I wasn’t asking—I was telling. Cass had an urgent family discussion with his wife and Bobby and called me right back. “Do it,” he said.
The next call was to my own parents. “I’m putting Joe into a drug treatment center,” I told them. “I’ll need you to watch the kids while I’m gone if you could, please.” Of course, they agreed. My mother came right over and picked up Paul and Jessica for an overnight.
I was well over the age of thirty, but was finally, at long last, acting like a real grown-up. I packed a bag for my husband and waited for him to wander home. When he came in, as he always did, with his tail between his legs, I didn’t yell or cry or reproach him. I sat him down and said, “Joey, you are going to rehab. Today. If you don’t go, I am leaving you. Today.”
He definitely heard something new in my voice. “But my job . . . I have to work . . . ” he started.
“The treatment center is waiting for you to arrive. All the arrangements have been made. I’ve already spoken to your parents and mine about this. We are all in agreement.” That statement really threw him—he knew very well how invested I was in keeping up appearances at all costs. In fact, he’d been counting on that weakness for many years. But I was no longer going to play that game; I had no reason to. My ugly secret had been exposed.
Cocaine was Joe’s mistress for the first ten years of our marriage. To his credit, when I finally put my foot down, he didn’t put up any resistance. We drove to the treatment center, where he remained for the next three weeks. Joey successfully completed treatment, attended a 12-step program, and came out clean and sober. He never touched cocaine again.
As anyone who has lived with a substance abuser can attest to, the problems caused by alcohol and drug addiction alone are so overwhelming that there’s no need to look any deeper for a root cause of all the marital, work, and financial problems that addiction leaves in its wake. And I want to stress that alcoholism or drug addiction does not in any way necessarily equal sociopathy. However, the symptoms of addiction do mimic many of the sociopath’s distinguishing traits: utter disregard for the feelings of others, lying without remorse, difficulty in sustaining relationships, promiscuity, and endless manipulation to achieve their goals—meaning alcohol or drugs. Anyone in the throes of addiction definitely behaves like a sociopath in many ways.
In my case, it’s easy to see why I blamed cocaine for all my misery. Everything had been great until Joe got addicted. Fortunately, there is help available for addicts. It is a manageable and treatable condition. After Joey cleaned up, we enjoyed what I thought were several absolutely charmed years, almost like a second honeymoon—which ended abruptly when Amy Fisher shot me in the head. Completely sober, and without drugs as an excuse for his inexcusable behavior, the truly sociopathic tendencies in my husband were starting to become more apparent. And for that, there is no cure.