Postcards From the Edge (2 page)

The thing about having it all is, it should include having the ability to have it all. Maybe there are some people who know how to have it all. They’re probably off in a group somewhere, laughing at those of us who have it all but don’t know how to.

The positive way to look at this is that from here things can only go up. But I’ve been up, and I always felt like a trespasser. A transient at the top. It’s like I’ve got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I’ve got a lifetime pass. I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.

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POSTCARDS from the EDGE

DAY SIX

This is hard-I feel like I’ve got bugs flying around inside of me. I called my friend Wallis today, and I tried to get the operator to say, “Collect call from hell, will you accept the charges?”

After not feeling anything for years, I’m having this Feeling Festival. The medication wears off and the feelings just fall on you. And they’re not your basic fun feelings, either. These are the feelings you’ve been specifically avoiding-the ones you almost killed yourself to avoid. The ones that tell you you’re something on the bottom of someone’s shoe, and not even someone interesting.

I talked to my agent and ended up in tears, which is not my favorite presentation of myself. Crying to my agent. I tried very hard not to, but I didn’t have a chance. I’ve used up all the Not Cry I was issued at birth. Now, it appears, it’s crying time.

I talked to my mom briefly. I was afraid that she’d be mad at me for messing up the life she’d given me, but she was very nice. She said a great thing. I told her I was miserable here, and she said, “Well, you were happy as a child. I can prove it. I have films.”

What went wrong between what she gave me and how I took it?

DAY SEVEN

How old do you have to be to get past caring?

Sid looked over at me during lunch and said, “You look so unhappy.” I was sort of startled, since the picture of myself that I carry around in my wallet of a head is of a peppy, happy-gocrazy gal. I keep my eye on this picture when evidence to the contrary is all around me.

How could I have gotten all this so completely wrong? I’m smart. I guess I used the wrong parts of my brain, though-the parts that said, “Take LSD and painkillers. This is a good idea.” I was into pain reduction and mind expansion, but what I’ve

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ended up with is pain expansion and mind reduction. Everything hurts now, and nothing makes sense.

DAY EIGHT

Drama in Drug Ward Six!

Irene got kicked out of the unit for smoking dope in her room. She offered some to Carol, the agent’s wife, and Carol came to me crying and asked me what she should do. I told her we should turn Irene in, so we told Stan, the therapist who was on duty.

Stan called Irene in, and she had this real defiant look on her face, like she’d been caught doing something noble for her country and now she was going to be killed for it. Carol was crying and I was sitting and holding her hand. Stan said, “Irene, we hear you’ve been smoking dope.” Irene said, “Well, I didn’t know where I was gonna be when I moved out of here, if I was gonna go to a halfway house or whatever, and I was confused so I smoked dope.” Stan said, “There are a thousand excuses and finally no reasons to do drugs.”

Most of the people in here share the desire to seem cool. They can be aching from heroin withdrawal, but ask how they are and they’ll say, “Pretty good, man. Hangiri in there.” The answer comes too quickly, and hovering over a grin, a look of desperate loneliness gazes across the abyss. The only thing worse than being hurt is everyone knowing that you’re hurt.

So, essentially I could have died. Not only this time but probably several times, forgetting how much I took and when I took it, not to mention why I took it. Was I celebrating, or drowning my sorrows? Or celebrating my sorrows?

The junkies were up in arms this morning. Half of them wouldn’t speak to Carol and me because we snitched on Irene.

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POSTCARDS from the EDGE

The other half thought it was pretty stupid for anyone to have smoked dope at a drug rehab. They had to call a special little group session to defuse things. These aren’t people with a good handle on their emotions, and without their chemical coping skills it’s every man for himself. It doesn’t run hot and cold here, it runs hot and hotter. Bart, the homosexual triple Scorpio, called me an asshole in the Ping-Pong room.

It turns out Irene got the dope from one of the cleaning men who she was fucking in the stairwell during lunch. My kind of people.

DAY TEN

Three new people checked in today. Marvin, a retired bus driver in his fifties, is probably here for alcoholism. Wanda is a heroin addict who says she’s a model and brought the makeup to prove it. And Mark is a crazy kid from Vacaville-I don’t know what his drug of choice is, but I don’t think it matters anymore. This is a cross section of village idiots from all over the state. Everyone you ever would have thought was too loaded at a party is in one place.

After group, Bart apologized for calling me an asshole and told me a story about the time that he spilled amyl nitrate on his testicles and his balls melted into the sheets, and he had to take the sheets and his balls to the hospital and have them separated. I told him it was a great idea for a TV movie.

We had lunch and watched The Outer Limits. Drug addicts pretty much all have the same taste in shows: science fiction and MTV It’s so bizarre. Everyone is acting like where we are is sort of normal, and we’re in a drug clinic.

DAY ELEVEN

The new people came out of detox today and joined our group. Marvin said he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he likes it here.

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He thinks all of us are interesting. It’s like he’s on a field trip for Psychology Today, or a segment of Bloopers, Blumpers and Bleepers where they send a healthy person to blend in with a wardful of addicts just to see if anybody notices.

Wanda was in the hospital recovering from a suicide attempt (carbon monoxide in her car). She called her dealer to bring her heroin because she couldn’t sleep. She overdosed in the hospital, so they just transferred her down here.

Mark was brought in by his parole officer directly from Vacaville. He’s nineteen, and he looks like he’s been on medication of some kind for most of his life. His blond hair is greasy and parted down the middle, and he has very wild eyes. When he walks down the hallways, he hugs the walls, which Carl says is a prison thing. Mark has already been in jail for three years for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer, and now he’s in a drug clinic. His father came in today to bring him some clothes. He seemed disappointed at the way Mark’s turned out.

My mom is probably sort of disappointed at how I turned out, but she doesn’t show it. She came by today and brought me a satin and velvet quilt. I’m surprised that I was able to detox without it. I was nervous about seeing her, but it went okay. She thinks I blame her for my being here. I mainly blame my dealer, my doctor, and myself, and not necessarily in that order. She didn’t like my hair very much, but pretended to. She said it was “interesting.” She thinks my life would work better if I got a new business manager. She washed my underwear and left.

In the last few years I’ve become an accepted eccentric at best, and a fuckup at worst. I feel like I’ll let people down if I take away the behavior they’ve grown accustomed to disapproving of. They try to discipline me, I refuse to be disciplined. They object, I’m objectionable. We all know exactly what to do.

Julie talked to us today about the family and friends of the addict, the Alanons. She said they become very caught up in the whole downward spiral of watching the alcoholic slowly die. It

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POSTCARDS from the EDGE

can become their whole lives. Addicted to addicts. “It’s like an Alanon jumps out the window and someone else’s life flashes in front of their eyes,” said Sid. I wished I’d said that, but then, I probably will.

I keep thinking that if I could marry somebody, this would be less embarrassing. I’m so jealous of Carol because she has a husband. It makes it seem less final that she’s here. It gives her something to go back to, someone to be with, and someone to be. I have no situation that requires me to be more than I am. It just seems like when you get two people together, and one’s in a suit and one’s in a dress, how could they be unhappy? Unless their kid murdered another kid or something.

I envy people who have the capacity to sit with another human being and find them endlessly interesting. I would rather watch TV Of course, this eventually becomes known to the other person. I once told Jonathan that I would pay more attention to him if he got better programming. It always seems that in the beginning with someone, nothing they do could ever be wrong, except that they don’t see you enough. And eventually it gets to the point where you just want to say, “Get off my leg, okay?”

What’s the difference? No one would marry me with this haircut, anyway.

DAY TWELVE

This boy Brian was checked in this morning by his mother and his aunt. He wore a red knit hat and stunk of beer. He was about eighteen years old, and he did not want to be in a drug clinic. He had a concert to go to Wednesday night.

Brian’s brother was killed last year in a car accident. He was lying in the street and someone released the brake on a car, and it rolled over him because he was too loaded to get out of the way.

They sent Carol and Bart and me to convince Brian to stay.

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CAR R I E F I S HER

He said he was impressed that someone like me actually stayed in the clinic, and that he wanted to be an actor, but he couldn’t be persuaded to stay. He said he was too young to stop drinking and drugging. All his friends did it.

He knew he was probably an alcoholic-he drank all day and smoked a lot of dope, and did cocaine when he could get it-and he knew that his brother had, in effect, died of it. Still, he couldn’t handle what it meant to be in a drug unit. He wouldn’t examine it. It was too heavy and it was definitely too hard. It couldn’t be true, therefore it wasn’t. And so he split.

The whole thing made me think. I used up so much energy explaining why I was late, why I didn’t show up, how I wasn’t really loaded, I was just tired, I had jet lag. Avoiding looking people in the eyes because I couldn’t stand how I felt when I saw the disappointment in their faces. That ate up a lot of energy. If I could accept that I’m a drug addict, I could have all that energy back.

So, I’m a drug addict. I guess we’re allowed just so many drugs in one lifetime, and I’ve used up my coupon. From here on out, there’s just reality. I think that’s what maturity is: a stoic response to endless reality. But then, what do I know?

DAY THIRTEEN

This is not necessarily where I envisioned myself when I was young. I didn’t stand up in school and say, “My goal when I’m older is to be in a drug hospital, eating cafeteria food and watching The Outer Limits and fighting in group therapy and playing volleyball in the park and not dealing with my feelings.”

I talked to Thomas on the phone today. He said he’s been trying to reach me, but the line is always busy-it’s a pay phone. Thomas sounded so calm, so okay, so not me. Somehow I absorbed the world’s genetic horror, while my brother inherited the sweetness and patience of someone who befriends birds.

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POSTCARDS from the EDGE

He’s one of the few people who, when you ask how he is and he says fine, you don’t question it. It reminds me of the scene in The Exorcist when the priest looks into the devil inside the possessed girl and cries, “Take me!” and the devil leaves the girl and enters the priest. It’s like I’m an exorcist, taking all the darkness and letting it gather inside me, while Thomas absorbswell, maybe not light, but certainly lighter colors. There’s some sad buoyance in him. He ambles and strolls, moving through life in smooth easy motions. I told him that the great thing about having me as a sister is that I make him look even better by supplying him with contrast. He said, “The really great thing about having you as a sister is that you’re the only adult I know that keeps a bowl of Tootsie Rolls for her guests.” I don’t know why, but this made me feel better.

Sid said that drugs weren’t the problem, life was the problem. Drugs were the solution. I think Sid has a crush on me. He gets me up in the morning by coming into my room and holding my feet until I’m totally awake. I like having my feet held, even if it is by Sid.

Marvin still doesn’t think he’s an alcoholic.

Mark showed me his letter from Manson today It didn’t seem to make much sense-something about redwood trees. Mark says Manson is deeply misunderstood and a “cool guy”

DAY FOURTEEN

Today Mark threatened Sid’s life. Nobody quite knows what happened, but Mark was given Haldol, an antipsychotic. Now he has all this mung in the side of his mouth, and he looks wilder than ever. Carol and Wanda say they’re going to put trash cans in front of their doors tonight, because there are no locks in drug clinics.

Carl’s mad at me because I gave him ten dollars to shut up. He says I’m a spoiled movie actress and I don’t know the first thing about real life. Maybe he’s right. Sometimes I feel like I’ve

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got my nose pressed up against the window of a bakery, only I’m the bread.

DAY FIFTEEN

A lady came in today to beef up our spirituality, AA-style. She told us a couple of great stories. First, she explained why people who bring us into AA are called Eskimos. There was this guy named Harvey, sitting in a bar up in Alaska. Another guy, Tony, came into the bar and started talking to the bartender about God. Harvey said to Tony, “Do you believe all that stuff?” Tony said, “Yeah, I do,” and Harvey said, “Aaah, I tried that God stuff. It’s a bunch of crock.” Tony said, “What do you mean? What happened?” So Harvey said, “Well, I was in this really, really bad snowstorm. I mean, I’d been lost for days and I was dying. I was desperate. Finally, I dropped to my knees and prayed. I said, ‘God, if you’re up there, please get me out of here. Save me!”’ “Then Harvey stopped talking, so Tony said, “Well, what happened?” And Harvey said, scornfully, “Oh, nothing. An Eskimo came and got me out.”