My Gentle Barn (4 page)

“Puff passed away,” I said.

“Who’s Puff?”

I hesitated before saying, “My parakeet.”

As soon as I’d said it, I was flooded with regret. The girls exploded in laughter, and as I watched them double over in delight at my expense, some door inside me slammed shut. I got it like a punch in the stomach: I couldn’t talk about animals—not at all. If I did, I’d keep being seen as a freak.

So I packed my special bond with animals away deep inside me and sealed it tight. From now on, I vowed, I would keep those two worlds separate. My animals were my secret. Other humans didn’t have to know.

I applied myself to my new task of creating a normal life and a normal personality for myself, where I spent more time with my own species. I never stopped finding a deep comfort and peace with animals and was never without a pet—or two or three—but I thought the only way I could survive would be if the four-leggeds stopped being the sole center of my world. What rushed in to share that space was boys, or rather the attention I got from them. In high school I seemed suddenly
to become visible to the opposite sex, or was it perhaps that they had become visible to me? Everywhere I went I noticed boys noticing me—on my walk home from school; at Saturday services, where the boys were not supposed to be noticing girls but they always did; and at the beach, where I fled when I began ditching school. I even had a partner in crime, my classmate Liza. The two of us would sneak out of the dank, dark school that shared a basement with cockroaches and teachers who wore wigs and skirts down to the floor, and we’d hop on a bus headed west. The moment the brakes released and the bus was rumbling toward the ocean, I was free. Free of the false beliefs that were crammed down our throats, free of rules and regulations that did not allow someone to turn on a light or even rescue a dog from a burning building on the Sabbath, free of the box I was much too big to fit in.

Liza and I would hike up our skirts and descend from the bus at the boardwalk. Venice Beach was a smorgasbord of male attention—in every flavor, color, and culture—and it was delicious, especially for someone as emotionally starving as I was. After the beach, we’d head to the mall and add to our secret wardrobes of short skirts and blouses that showed cleavage. On Saturday night I’d change at Liza’s house and we’d sneak out to the Comedy Club to meet guys or down to Gladstones, where we didn’t get carded on the margaritas we ordered.

It wasn’t long before I turned from boys to men much older than me. They treated me better than I’d ever been treated, fawning over me as though I were an exotic princess. I was willing to give a man anything he wanted in exchange for adoration. What I wasn’t yet equipped to understand was that it wasn’t adoration at all. These men didn’t want me, they wanted something from me. But I was so hungry for love I was willing, even eager, to take it personally.

By the time I was twenty-two I had left my upbringing far behind in the dust. I saw my parents on Saturdays for lunch but didn’t talk much
about my life. I was taking acting classes (which they didn’t approve of) and sleeping with whoever I wanted (which they didn’t know about). My life was going to be much larger than anything they could have planned for me. I had friends and a social life and a promising career as an actress.

One day my acting teacher couldn’t make it to class, and a talented actor and director named Don showed up to teach instead. Don was tall, stunningly handsome, and thirteen years my senior. He began coming around after that to watch my scenes, and a playful flirtation blossomed between us. Eventually he invited me to lunch at his house, but when I got there, there was no lunch anywhere in sight. An afternoon of kissing turned into spending all our free time together. He’d take me out with him to the theater and introduce me to all his actor friends and bring me backstage, and he even took me out of town to his beach house. I felt honored that someone so talented would choose me, and I felt safe and protected in his presence and in his arms, and I wanted to be with no one else.

But for all my newly acquired worldliness, my sheltered Orthodox upbringing kept me from understanding what was happening when, a year into our relationship, Don began acting very strange. He would say he’d call me right back and I wouldn’t hear from him for a week. He’d tell me he was on his way over, but then wouldn’t show up for days. I finally demanded an explanation, and he broke down in tears and confessed that he’d been fighting a drug problem. He said he wanted to quit but he didn’t know how. I had no point of reference for understanding such a thing. Why couldn’t he just decide to stop?

I loved Don, and I promised to stay with him and to help him. But I was puzzled by the power a substance could have over someone. In order to help, I reasoned, I needed to try his drug so I could understand his experience from the inside out. Don fought me on it, but I was like a dog with a bone and wouldn’t let go.

“Fine,” he finally said one day, “try it.” And he reached into his pocket and pulled out his crack pipe.

It’s called freebasing, and it hits your brain in a couple of seconds. And that’s exactly how long it took me to become a crack addict.

When I took my first puff, my ears rang and everything stopped. The chatter in my mind evaporated. Leaving only stillness. Time replaced by a vast field of nothing. No past to overcome, no future to deal with, no self to like or dislike. Movement slowed like an underwater dive, silent explosions of euphoria in every cell of my being. The moment so full that nothing outside it existed—a lot like being covered in butterflies.

But twenty minutes later, the thoughts slammed back in. Judgments. Self-hating.
What the hell have I done? My parents. My friends. What would they think?
The noise in my head like a brick being thrown through glass. Don held out his pipe and I gratefully reached for it. I wanted that peace and stillness back more than anything I’d ever wanted. And the rest of the night went just like that—suspension in pure quiet until the noise slammed back in and I reached for the pipe—again and again until my blood was pumped so full of crack cocaine that my heart started pounding triple-time.

“Oh God, Don, I don’t know what’s happening.” I couldn’t catch my breath. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

He gently led me to the door, and we walked barefoot into the cold night. Walked and walked until my heart calmed down and I could take a full breath—an emergency room visit averted.

I wish my drug tale ended there—scared straight and back on track with my life—but it didn’t. I soon was willing to do anything to have more of that feeling—the euphoria of that first puff. My life disappeared into the drug as I chased, and never quite captured, that fresh, first hit. Don and I scored in dark alleyways in the worst neighborhoods and binged for weeks at a time without sleeping or bathing or eating, until all our money was gone. Each sunrise cracking me over the head like a two-by-four with the reality of what I had done, again, which made me reach once more for relief. I stopped seeing my family altogether, I had no job, and my friends fell away one after another.
Don was the only person I talked to, and week by week he got stranger and stranger.

In the middle of the night during a binge he returned from the liquor store with a bottle of vodka. He slammed it down on the table.

“You poisoned it,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You poisoned my vodka.”

I looked at the clear liquid, still sloshing in the sealed bottle. “It’s not open,” I said.

Don lunged for me and threw me down on the carpet, his hands grasping my throat. He held me there, and everything began to fade to white.
Kill me
, I thought.
Please, just kill me. Release me from this insanity
. But he finally let go, and I automatically gasped for breath.

I couldn’t leave. The drug cycle had sucked me deep inside it and Don and I were inextricably tied together at its center.

Each time we ran out of money, we’d be left with absolutely nothing. Even the euphoria was out of reach. All that remained was a feeling of failure and hopelessness darker than anything I’d ever known. Disgusted with myself, I’d finally swear off crack … for a month, or four, if I was lucky. Then we’d have a reason to celebrate—a gig landed or one left behind—and Don would hand me the pipe, and it started all over again.

After running this cycle over and over for three years, I found myself alone one day in the apartment at the end of a binge. At ninety pounds, my hair greasy and matted, I was crawling around the floor searching for crumbs of the drug in the carpet. In that dim room—the blinds drawn at noon—I abruptly stopped and sat up.

“Oh—my—God,” I said out loud. “What are you doing?”

It was suddenly so clear. I was not a
middle
kind of person. I had always been sort of an extremist. And yet, this was not
life
and this was not
death
. It was in the
middle
.

“You can’t stay in the middle, girl,” I told myself, “so why don’t you
just end it?” And I crawled into the corner of the room and sat hunched against the wall, where I could see out over all that remained of my world, and from there I began planning my exit.

I thought long and hard and considered all the possible ways I might end it. But after a couple of hours of scheming and plotting the perfect exit strategy, there was an opening through which a thought was born:
In the spectrum of life–middle–death, there isn’t only one extreme; there are two
.

My ancestors were not middle kind of people either. Some of them had been lined up along a European river by the Nazis and shot dead just for being Jewish; others had been orphaned by tuberculosis and had sung in the streets of London for money. And yet out of that dark soil, new lives had grown and blossomed. My orphaned grandfather had grown up to lead the Jewish brigade to free people from the concentration camps, then went on to become the chief rabbi of South Africa. An entire nation of Jews traveled miles just to seek his advice. That was not a middle kind of life. Neither was my father’s. Despite a terrible childhood, he’d grown up to be the top cardiac surgeon in the world.

And you
, I thought to myself,
you’re going to do crack for three years and then kill yourself? What a pathetic attempt at being an extremist. Look at your ancestors! Look what you’ve descended from
.

What might I become if I chose life? Really
chose
it?

What a shock this was. I’d spent my whole life hating myself, hating life, wanting to be numb, wanting out, and here I was at a moment when I could slip easily out life’s back door, and I wanted to live? But how on earth was I supposed to do that? I couldn’t even remember how to live. I sat there for a long while absorbing and integrating this unexpected twist.

Eventually I got myself up off the floor and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and take a shower. I combed the snarls out of my hair and then ate a good meal, the first in a very long time. Then I found
the closest Narcotics Anonymous meeting and broke up with Don. I moved to an apartment on the other side of town and began the slow, painful climb out of addiction.

It would be nearly twenty years before I would come to understand that what had gotten me up off the floor that day was not just me on my own making a decision to give life another shot. I’d been caught in a powerful undertow, and the strength it took to reverse that tide could not possibly have come from my small, misguided self. No. I was not alone in the room that day. That room was packed with my ancestors and guides and spirits come to lift me up. To lead me away from the abyss and set me right on my path so I could do what I had come here to do.