“Come on, Coach, there are seventeen of us. The teams will be uneven.”
“All right, Brickhouse. Run the laps. But run four.”
“You got it, Coach!”
After I ran two in the afternoon desert sun, I noticed that Coach was engrossed in refereeing the game, blowing his whistle and calling fouls or strikes, touchdowns or home runs … whatever. I parked under the shade of an oak tree far in the outfield—my favorite location on any baseball diamond—and pulled out my copy of The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. The movie starring Joan Crawford is better.
* * *
The negotiation with Coach was in week three of my eight weeks in rehab, but back in those first twenty-four hours, I was convinced I had made a terrible mistake in choosing Michael’s House. Oh, the setup was nice. Anonymously nestled between two tony hotels, and a block off Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag, this former condo complex of Spanish haciendas was in an L around a kidney-shaped pool and Jacuzzi. A volleyball court was in back, where a rowdy game always seemed to be in play.
Intake—registration in rehab lingo—felt more like being booked into prison: confiscation of valuables, mug shot taken, and a litany of rules presented. I nodded and blinked in a haze, as if I were still drunk. I couldn’t let the last rule—“You are expected to not participate in sexual behavior of any kind”—go without comment. Seriously? “Does that include masturbation?” I asked the tech (administrative staff member) in good faith.
“As long as you keep it to yourself.” Sage “pressing” advice I already knew.
Turned out that the no-sex rule wasn’t going to be an issue—I was the token faggot out of about twenty men. Most of them were in their twenties, a mix of heroin junkies, pill poppers (OxyContin snorters, mostly), cokeheads, and only a couple of alkies. Dipsomania is so twentieth century. Their maturity level was barely above pubescence. When they weren’t playing volleyball, they were sitting around the patio smoking table and trying to light their farts.
After a starchy dinner of public-school cafeteria food that dashed any fantasy of California-spa fare of poached chicken breasts and alfalfa sprouts, we were driven to an off-site 12-step meeting in a short bus like special-needs kids on a field trip, which is what we were. Classic rock blared from the speakers, and everyone howled with delight when a Journey song came on. I knew then that I was in Sartre’s hell.
Despite the dismal picture I saw before me, I was ready to dive into the deep end of getting sober—recovery, they called it—the next day at my first group-therapy session. I sat with the boys and the case manager (aka therapist) in a circle of chairs. Posted on the wall was a list of emotions (happy, sad, angry, depressed, fearful, excited, melancholy, euphoric, anxious, etc.). As we went around the room, everyone declared the emotion or emotions he felt: “Today I’m feeling _____”—fill in the blank. I scanned the list but couldn’t find the one that fit me: numb. So I went with “Today I’m feeling anxious.”
Since I was the new kid in town, I was invited to share my story. I threw the facts out onto the cutting board like raw meat: gay since birth; drinking since fifteen; everyday drinker by mid-twenties; healthy—and unhealthy—doses of drugs along the way; became suicidal; tried suicide. Voilà! Here’s Jamie!
The shares followed. (Shares as in sharing what’s on your mind, what you’re feeling, where you’re at, man.) No one was as witty as Bob Newhart’s group-therapy patients. Someone commended me on how courageous I was to reveal that I’m gay. Courageous? It was a simple, obvious fact, like the red hair on my head. Coming clean on my full story, complete with suicide attempt, that was courageous. Then Hank from Indiana, one of the few older guys, piped in with “Jamie, I’m struggling with something and maybe you can help me understand it.” I knew where he was headed. Basically, he wanted me to help him understand gay people—he never will—and get over his “uncomfortableness”—did he really just say that?—when seeing “them.” And I thought I was going to get laid? Flayed was more likely.
I scrapped “anxious” and did an emotion do-over. “Hank, today I am feeling angry. It is a waste of my time for me to explain myself or homosexuality to you. I’m not here to deal with my sexuality, but to get sober.” My face must have been as red as it was before detox.
Dave, the case manager, jumped in and started explaining the nature of sexuality and how any man is capable of having sex with another man. (Dave was gay.)
As he said this, Copper, an overpumped G.I. Joe police officer with an Ambien addiction, was writhing and twitching with every syllable of Dave’s words. I thought he was going to put his fist through the wall. “I am absolutely … incapable … of having … sex”—then he spit out rapid-fire—“with-another-man.” He let his words lie on the floor where he’d spewed them, then added, “But if my three-year-old son turned out gay, I’d still love him.” Big of him.
When the session ended, anger was the only feeling I could see on the emotion cheat sheet. “Hey, man, come play volleyball!” one of the guys suggested, as if the Homo 101 lesson hadn’t just happened. I gave a terse no.
If one other person asked me to play volleyball or looked at me as if I had three balls when I explained that I played no sports nor had even a passing interest in sports, I thought I’d get on my knees and ask if they’d like a free blow job—my sport of choice. I was certain then that I’d made a terrible mistake. I should have gone to Silver Hill with the pill-popping, chardonnay-swilling, rich housewives. It would have been a hell of a lot better than being the only girl on the dorm-room floor.
But thank God for my case manager, Dave. Every client (rehab inmates are not patients but clients) is assigned a case manager, who evaluates your drunk file from the forms you fill out, has one-on-one sessions with you three times a week, and makes written comments of encouragement, wisdom, or blunt-force honesty in the daily journal you are required to keep. A former New Yorker and recovering garbage head (an addict who ingests any readily available substance), Dave was a tall, olive-complected Italian American and a fifty-two-ish sixty. To me, he was the homosexual with the heart of gold—sage, pragmatic, insightful, and manicured—the kind of homo Stanley Tucci played in such films as The Devil Wears Prada and Burlesque. When he dubbed me Miss Lawson, as in Helen Lawson, the Susan Hayward diva from the film Valley of the Dolls, I knew I was in good hands.
My first journal entry was a rant about that initial group-therapy session. Dave wrote in red ballpoint pen, “I believe there is a reason you are at MH. It will be a challenge in some respects, but hard-won sobriety is the best kind (and most lasting). You’ll get what you came here for—don’t let the world get in your way. I’m glad you’re here.” I could see him staring down at me over his reading glasses with a hand on my shoulder.
He was right. The fog started to lift. Hank apologized. Copper thanked me for enlightening him about homos, and I found my first real friend in Keith. He consoled me after that inaugural group-therapy session at the smoking table by the pool while the boys hit the volleyball court.
“I’m not gay, but they all think I am.” Keith gestured in the direction of the volleyball game with a lit cigarette that twitched like a hummingbird between his shaky fingers. “So I might as well be.” He could have been one of my left-field friends from childhood. Twenty-something Keith was as thin as the cigarettes he fiendishly chain-smoked. (We all smoked like fiends.) With his dilated eyes and steady tremor, he looked like one of Robert Crumb’s fried cartoon characters.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Almost a month.”
A month?! I thought he was still high. I guess my face didn’t mask my surprise.
He cut his dilated eyes toward his jittering hands. “It’s the benzos. They’re still in my system, and it’s been over two months.”
“Oh. I mean … What are benzos?”
“Pills. Psychoactive drugs. I’m a pill popper. Klonopin, Xanax, Librium.”
“I took a Xanax a couple of times.”
“Only a couple? You are an alkie. Benzos take forever to get out of your system. You alkies are lucky. One week in detox and you’re done.”
“I suppose it’s all relative.”
“I was at Sober Choices in Arizona for a month before coming here. Michael’s House is my third rehab. I’ll probably go to a sober house after this.” My God, he’s a rehab careerist.
* * *
After a week’s moratorium on contact with the outside world, I was talking to Mama Jean and Dad for the first time. It felt as if I were calling them from college—How’s the food? Who’s your roommate? What’s the syllabus?—except I was in my bathing suit talking on one of the two pay phones by the pool. The only way to communicate with the outside world was via those pay phones and good old-fashioned mail. Cell phones and e-mail were verboten.
“Every time I see an ad for Ambien, it strikes terror to my heart,” Mama Jean said.
I didn’t tell her about Copper the homophobe and Ambien addict. I did tell her about the endless volleyball games and dressing down my brethren addicts in group therapy.
“You’ll teach those sons of bitches a thing or two,” Mama Jean said.
“And who’s your roommate?” Dad asked.
“Oh, yeah. Chris. He’s a really nice guy with a family. He drank nothing but Coors Light. Cases of it. Every day.”
“My God, is he fat?” Dad asked.
“No. Go figure. Weirder than the Coors Light is his thing for Katie Couric.”
“What?” they asked in unison.
“He has photos of her cut out from magazines and tacked all over his bulletin board.”
“Katie Couric?!” Dad said. “I could see Diane Sawyer, maybe, but Katie Couric?”
“I blame it on the Coors Light. That’s the infatuation he can’t get over. Like a lot of guys here, he’s been through multiple rehabs.”
“Bless his heart,” Mama Jean said. “That’s just pitiful. You’re smarter than those other guys. You know what will get you through this? Your intelligence.”
I lied and told her that she was right, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that intelligence was as effective as an umbrella in a hurricane when it came to alcoholism. Why else would I, Little Miss Straight-A Student, have a couple of pops at nine in the morning, then show up unprepared for a sales-conference presentation and hope for the best?
Like a good pupil, I fell right into the routine of the place. Up at six-thirty. Smoke a cigarette. Breakfast. Smoke. Morning meditation. Puff. Group-therapy sessions. Puff. Puff. Puff. Free time for volleyball, swimming, TV, reading, or back-to-back cigarettes. Lunch. Afternoons were spent at either a workshop (journaling, art collage, educational video), the dreaded baseball field with Coach, or an off-site gym with a perfect view of Bob Hope’s spaceship of a house. The drive was the best part. The special-needs van would glide along Bob Hope Drive, Ginger Rogers Road, Frank Sinatra Drive, and Dinah Shore Drive. It made me feel safe knowing that Dinah and Ginger were right under my ass. Back to the dude ranch for more volleyball and fags—the carcinogenic kind. Dinner. Off-site 12-step meeting. Round-robin of daily affirmations: “Great game, Hank.” “Love ya, man.” “Today, I’m grateful to be sober and I thank my HP [higher power] for Marlboro Lights.” Hot tub and one last butt. Lights out at midnight.
Once I asked Hank what day it was. He replied, “How the fuck do I know? Every day is like Groundhog Day around here.”
There was also the privilege of “town time” three days a week. We were allowed to leave campus unsupervised in buddy groups of two or more. Since we were a scant block from the main drag of town, we could cover a lot of ground in the two or three hours we were given. If anyone thought of sneaking a drink or scoring some dope—and we all thought about it—there was the threat of random urine testing back at the ranch. A stroll down Palm Canyon Drive in the warmth of the arid desert air was heaven. I was no longer dying for—or from—a drink, but as I passed all of the alfresco restaurants, I could name every drink caught in my peripheral vision: martini with a twist, salted margarita on the rocks, cosmopolitan, perfect Manhattan, whiskey sour, Bass ale.
A stronger distraction was the sidewalk, a knockoff of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame called the Palm Springs Walk of Stars. The marginal and forgotten names kept my head staring down at the stars: Rona Barrett, a 1970s gossip columnist; Cheetah the chimp from the Tarzan movies; Mr. Blackwell, the queenie arbiter of best- and worst-dressed celebrities; Mamie Van Doren, a cheap Jayne Mansfield, who was a cheap Marilyn Monroe—that’s pretty cheap.
Lining the Walk of Stars were shops and art galleries of every caliber. My favorite was the gallery of Thomas Kinkade, aka the Painter of Light. Keith and I would pretend to be serious buyers of the vomitus, mass-produced paintings of saccharine, bucolic scenes with candles glowing and stars twinkling. The paintings appeared to have pin lights in them, but, no, it was the magic of the master’s technique that made the light shine. The saleslady positively radiated like a lit fire in one of the pictures as she told us that she was a graduate of the Thomas Kinkade University of Art. “You mean that you can actually teach people to paint that way?” was our response.
Most of my town time was soaked up by some of the seriously chic antiques and design stores. We weren’t allowed to carry credit cards, and our petty cash of forty dollars maximum wouldn’t buy a crystal ashtray in these shops. I had my eye on a Czechoslovakian glass bowl from the 1930s. The glass was lacquer-shiny—the outside Halloween-cat black, the inside an orange the color of a taxicab when a taxicab isn’t yellow. I had to have it. It was only $150, but it might as well have been $150,000 when all you’re carrying is piddling change left over from the Jamba Juice smoothie and Starbucks scone you just had.
“You simply don’t come across glass with a sheen this pure,” the effete shop owner raved rhapsodically.
“It would be perfect in my art deco apartment in New York.”
“New York? Do you have a place here too, or are you just visiting?”
“Actually, I’m here on extended vacation.” I glanced at my watch. Yikes. “You know what, I have to dash or I’ll be late for an appointment. Can you place it on hold and I’ll get back to you in a couple of days?”
“Certainly.” He handed me his engraved business card with his well-manicured hands, the nails of which had a sheen almost as pure as that glass bowl.
“Really, I must dash or I’ll turn into a pumpkin.” I had less than ten minutes to make curfew back at Mission Rehab.
I made it back just in time for the afternoon mail delivery, always an endorphin rush.
“Brickhouse, get over here!” Hank shouted from the patio smoking table where the mail lay in stacks. “You have a package and it looks like food. Open ’er up. I’m hungry.”
“In a minute.” I bypassed the table where heads bobbed amid a cloud of smoke over the mail. I went straight to the pay phone.
“Michael Hayes,” Michahaze said in his clipped, professional, office voice.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Howdy. How are you today?”
“Good. Just got back from a lovely town-time afternoon.”
“Oh, yeah? What did you do?”
“The usual. Grabbed some treats from Jamba Juice and window-shopped. You know, they have some exquisite antique shops here.”
“That’s what I hear. I can’t wait to check them out.”
You’d think I was on a solo vacation, but that was Michahaze’s way of coping—keep things upbeat and normal. We hadn’t had a heart-to-heart since that moment in the dark on the pullout sofa before I left.
“Well, there’s a tiny shop off the main drag that specializes in vintage glass and ceramic vases.…” I described the bowl.
“Sounds fabulous. It would be perfect for the dining-room table. You should get it.”
“Actually, you should get it.” I reminded him how strapped for cash I was. “I have it on hold. Why don’t you call the store and have them ship it?�
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“Ha! Did you tell them where you’re staying? In Palm Springs, they’re probably used to that.” I pulled the salesman’s card out of my pocket and gave him the number, before heading to the mail party.
I had quickly become the most popular gal in rehab since I received more mail than anyone else. Part of the reason was my advanced age. Since most of MH’s clientele was under thirty, none of them nor their friends had ever written a letter. On one town-time afternoon I had to walk some of them through how to address and stamp a letter at the post office. “Didn’t they teach you kids anything at school?” I asked them in my best Texas mawmaw voice.
The letter from my brother Jeffrey—who had been my third parent and mentor growing up and held vigil next to me in the emergency room after Michahaze went home to make sure my HIV medication was hidden before Mama Jean arrived—filled me with hope: I am looking forward to having my brother back. The brother whom I adore. The brother whom I will always, always be there for.
The most entertaining letters came from Mr. Parker. He didn’t need a best girlfriend in rehab as an excuse to write letters. He’d never abandoned them and was valiantly fighting to keep the art of letter writing alive. His missives were a work of art, not just in content but in presentation. They were written in royal-blue fountain-pen ink in an affected, exquisite script—flowing, upright letters, sans slant, like the cursive font of Neiman Marcus.
Dear Jamie—
So I checked out Michael’s House on the internet, as you advised. The place looks nice … comfortable I suppose; like a dude ranch. I guess you can think of it as a Reno, Nevada, divorce ranch not unlike the one such prosperous New York matrons as Mrs. Lorna Hansen Forbes, the Countess De Lave and Mrs. Stephen Haines were obliged to spend six months (!) because of a world that didn’t understand. I suppose your time in the desert is your Reno-vation from the bottle.… Maybe it will be the answer. (Well, not the answer, exactly, but a way to get at it.) The only danger I see are the quilted bedspreads I saw on the website. Fiberglass, insulation-filled, poly-cotton bed “linens” cannot be considered therapeutic. It really is the only thing in the Michael’s House environment that might drive one to drink.… I want only the best for you, no matter how much your life does or does not change and I love you wet, dry, or otherwise.
Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir Page 20
