High On Arrival (16 page)
Authors: Mackenzie Phillips
Back in L.A., my cousin Patty was getting married, but I didn’t go. Patty had been in a relationship with a cinematographer named Bradford L. May for years. Bradford used to come with Patty to tapings of
One Day at a Time,
and he had a distinctive, honking laugh. When I watch tapes of the shows, I can still recognize Brad’s funny laugh. Patty and Bradford were domestic, nesting. I went over to their house a lot before I lived with Jeff—before I stopped seeing most of my family—but now there was no way I’d make it to her wedding. I should have been there. I should have been a bridesmaid, but I was too out of it to go through the motions of civilized life.
Dolfi wasn’t a devil in disguise. Of all people to instruct me in the bad habits that I was already chasing, Dolfi was as sweet and warm a companion as one might find. That was part of the problem. We think of users and dealers as scuzzy people who scam and manipulate, but so many of my drug companions were dear, dear friends, people I enjoyed and loved. It wasn’t a matter of good and evil, black and white. So I kept at it.
The drugs kept running out and I kept calling Pat McQueeney from New York to ask for more money. Finally, she refused to send me anything but a ticket back to L.A. I moved in with my mother in Tarzana, where my brother Jeff had also landed with his own rampant drug habit. Neither of us was in good enough shape to live on our own. I’d been shooting coke day and night for months. I was painfully thin, and my arms ached. I’d been a human pincushion and the result was clogged veins, dying and collapsed veins. Every morning my mother massaged my arms and legs to restore my circulation.
One morning when my mom was rubbing my arms she looked up at me and said, “Your eyes look yellow.” By the next morning my skin was yellow too. I had hepatitis B. At St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, I was put in isolation. All attendants and visitors had to wear face masks. Most of the time I was alone, and I lay in the bath amazed at how bright yellow I looked against the white ceramic tub.
It had only been two months since Bijou was born. In that time I’d been in and out of rehab. I’d had a sweet but drug-infested love affair and come back home. But 1980 wasn’t over yet, and there was more trouble ahead. On June 9, I was at the recording studio where I’d worked with Jeff Sessler, hanging out with my friend Lisette. I received a call from my cousin Nancy. She was sobbing, but she managed to tell me that my cousin Patty had died. I sat there in shock. The memory of that moment breaks my heart every time.
Patty was six years older than I was, twenty-five, a beautiful girl who always wore a pendant that was the hand of Fatima. Two weeks earlier she had married Bradford, her youth and beauty and their happiness masking her drug problems. I remembered how when we were teens we’d sometimes drive into Hollywood to explore, just peeking into stores or walking down Hollywood Boulevard, staring at the sparkly bits of quartz in the sidewalk. Patty said, “I do believe we’re in the City of Glitter.” The whole world felt like our Oz, our playland, and we spent days with each other just wandering around tripping.
Patty, who was my companion for years, my happy sidekick in the City of Glitter. She could sing like nobody’s business. She was funny, quirky, my beloved sister, and now she was gone.
What happened to her could have happened to me on any number of occasions, except that it didn’t. She was at a party and apparently some guys gave her a hotshot, a lethal injection of drugs, so they could take advantage of her. Patty passed out and a friend—a sketchy girl whom we never found after she told her story to the cops—brought Patty back to her apartment, put her on the couch, and went to sleep. When her friend woke up in the morning, Patty was still out cold. The friend left for work, and by the time she came home Patty was dead.
The last time I had seen Patty was at my house in Laurel Canyon before it burned to the ground. Jeff and I had just gotten together, and things hadn’t soured yet. Patty came over and in the course of the evening she got progressively more fucked up. We were playing a board game, of all things, on a glass coffee table, and Patty was out of it in a sloppy, barbiturate way, bumping into things and slurring her words. It’s best to be in that state when you’re with others in exactly the same boat. When you’re not wasted like that and someone else is, it’s kind of gross. I told Patty to go to bed. I said, “Come on, you’re going to hurt yourself. You’re going to break something. Just go lie down.” But Patty wanted to play and kept knocking things over. It was unattractive. I’ve been that way myself, and I’m sure that people told me to go to bed just as I’d told Patty. But on this particular night I was sharp to her, saying, “Go, I love you, but just go to bed.” Now, after all those years of being so close, I was stuck with that as my last encounter with Patty.
That night I did anything and everything to remove myself from reality. I stayed at Lisette’s and slept with her and some guy. The next morning I scored a bunch of street Quaaludes (meaning they were fake, not pharmaceutical) and took them. By the time I arrived at Patty’s funeral I was really high. Everyone looked at me as if to say “How could you? How could you show up here like this?” And I thought,
How couldn’t I?
I’ll never forget the moment I saw Aunt Rosie, from behind, walking into the funeral parlor. She was bent in half, crying. She lost one girl to drugs, and another of her girls was to all appearances on her way to the same grave. I know I added to her pain that day.
Michelle and Pat McQueeney shuffled me into the back of a limousine and insisted that I wait in the car during Patty’s memorial service.
After the service, Michelle started telling me I was overdosing and had to go to the hospital. Michelle was always a presence at family events, a voice of reason, a stabilizing force. She was afraid for me, again, always. This time she had black hair for a part in a film and was wearing a Spanish mantilla made of black lace. I was too creeped out by her Addams Family look to defend myself. They took me to have my stomach pumped. I have no memory of that part at all.
The following weeks were a blur of sex, drugs, whatever I imagined would mask my pain. I was grieving for Patty. I am still to this day.
Two years after Patty died, Aunt Rosie gave me a framed picture of her, heartbreakingly young, smiling, caught forever in the time when we were so happy and blithe and sure that we could have as much fun as we dared without risking anything. I move that picture around my house, onto my porch, as if to bring Patty with me, a sister-guardian. On the back, in Aunt Rosie’s handwriting, it says:
Tell me then must I perish—
Like the flowers that I cherish?
Nothing remaining of my name?
Nothing remembered?—oh no!
I know to all who loved me—
I’ll always be young!
The songs I sang will still be sung!
And there will be flowers;
And poems;
And pictures with pretty smiles.
RAT 2/82
After Patty died, my brother Jeffrey and I moved in together. It was a cute two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood where our friends came to hang out. Danny Sugarman, Jeffrey, and I shared needles and drugs. Ah, friends and family.
When I wasn’t using, I was busy with my divorce. I had had Jeff Sessler evicted from the house, all accounts canceled, and all cars repossessed. But Jeff, who had spent as much of my money as he possibly could, countersued. Pat McQueeney had wanted to arrange a prenuptial agreement but I forbade it, saying that Jeff wouldn’t ever hurt me that way. What a trusting, blind fool I was. I’d been under Jeff’s spell when we were married, but now I saw our relationship for what it had been. Jeff was a wannabe. A wannabe producer, a wannabe rock star, a wannabe drug dealer. He saw me, or at least my money, as a ticket to these things. I do think he loved me, but it was a sick, controlling passion that sucked me dry emotionally, physically, and financially.
Ours must have been one of the first high-profile divorces in which a man was asking for alimony from a woman, because it caused quite a stir. We were in the courthouse in Beverly Hills every day and the evening news reported on it every night. Connie Chung was standing outside the courthouse talking about my divorce. It was surreal.
Weirdly, in spite of our court battle, Jeff and I never behaved like real enemies. We always said hi in court. Yes, he’d been bleeding me dry, but I was bleedable. Yes, he was trying to take me to the cleaners, but he was entitled to alimony under the letter of the law. I didn’t feel hatred for that. I had been in love with Jeff. I was married to the guy. The love didn’t just disappear because it all fell apart. No matter what hidden sides had emerged, he was still the person I had fallen in love with. I don’t believe in cutting people out of my life or erasing experiences. I am who I am by way of where I’ve been. Jeff was a terrible mistake on the road to many terrible mistakes, but he was part of an experience that I refused to regret. I didn’t blame him for who he turned out to be. I just needed to get out, and that’s what I was doing. But the old love made it hard, and the press made it harder. The whole thing took a toll on me. I was already so wrecked physically and emotionally.
The night before a particularly big day in court, my brother and I stopped by his pill doctor and picked up some Tuinal. We went shopping to buy me a new dress for the occasion, then home to get high. I took a few pills, and then I took more. I wondered how many I’d had. Was this my second round, or had I already had seconds? How many had I taken the first time? It didn’t matter. All I knew was that I wanted to be more high. As what I thought was probably my second round started to kick in, I went into my bedroom to lie down for a moment.
Apparently, my new boyfriend Mark, a beautiful Spanish boy, arrived some time later and asked where I was. He came into my room and found me unconscious on my bed. My cigarette was burning a hole in the blanket. I wasn’t breathing. When they tried to rouse me, my head flopped like a rag doll. Mark and Jeffrey called the paramedics. I know it sounds like a movie cliché, but I remember floating above the scene of the paramedics working to save me. I saw my brother and friends gathered around in tears. For a moment I felt like I had a choice to either go back or die. Next thing I knew I woke up in the ICU. I was released later the next day, and I was high again within hours.
I had overdosed, and I had nearly died, but so much other shit was going down that nobody made a big deal about my near-death experience, including me. We all attributed it to the stress of the divorce. We didn’t connect it to Patty’s death. We didn’t see that I had been right behind her. I don’t remember feeling scared for myself, scared of death, or scared that it would happen again. The truth is, I was doing everything I could to make sure I never felt anything at all.
It had been a year of marriage and divorce; rehabilitation and self-destruction; birth and death; love, drama, and pain. Something had to happen to pull us out of the tornado that had sucked me, Jeffrey, Patty, Bijou, Tam, Genevieve, and Dad into its vortex. And it did. In July, nearly a year after I married Jeff and everything went downhill, Dad was arrested for trafficking narcotics. His mother was dead. His niece was dead. His three-month-old daughter’s health was still compromised. Dad had been injecting himself with cocaine every twenty minutes for a year. And now he was facing forty-five years in prison. We were all scared and upset—even Dad, who had treated my arrest at eighteen as a rite of passage. Now he changed his tune.
It wasn’t exactly a wakeup call—nobody said, “Wow, what we’ve been doing is really, really unhealthy and wrong. We need to clean up our acts.” But nobody wanted Dad to go to jail for forty-five years. Dad and his lawyers started jockeying to change the charges and reduce the sentence. He immediately went into rehab, which would show the court that he was repentant and reformed. Then he called me and asked me to come into treatment. He thought it would look good on his record if he was not only trying to clean up his own act but also helping his own daughter with her vices.
I was using and living like a pig with my brother. When I wasn’t getting high with someone or trying to get cash or pulling myself together for a court date, I was sleeping or watching
General Hospital.
It was the summer of Luke and Laura on the run. I stayed in bed for days on end. Empty tequila bottles and pizza boxes littered the floor. When Dad called to ask me to come into treatment, I laughed at the suggestion and went on my merry way.
Days later Dad called again and I heard something different in his voice. He needed me. This time it was Dad who was calling me for help, and I would do anything to keep him out of jail. Anything. I arrived in New Jersey and for once Dad was actually there to meet me at the airport. The storm of that year—the drugs and helter-skelter and tragedy—was over. We were going to get better, and we were going to do it together. That, at least, was the image we wanted to present.
