My Fair Junkie

by Amy Dresner

  One time, I am on the phone with my mother, bawling, when the brunette girl comes up to me and says casually, “Get off the fucking phone.”

  With a quiet rage that surprises even me, out of my mouth comes, “Are you threatening me? I will take you fucking down, bitch.”

  She looks at me blankly and walks off to tell a nurse.

  I have thoughts every night of how I might hang myself from the curtains, but I’m not that ingenious. So I just lie in my bed and hope to die. And then I begin to pray. I get on my knees and say the simple prayer so common to every desperate soul, every drug addict and alcoholic: “God fucking help me.” As they say, nobody is an atheist on their deathbed, and I might not actually be dying, but it sure feels like it.

  I go to the therapy groups, but only because I want to get discharged. I can kill myself on the outside. Mental institutions are designed to keep you from offing yourself. I’ll have a much better chance at home. Plus, I can get a drink.

  I avoid grooming group (I know how to brush my own fucking hair, thank you) as well as occupational therapy, but I go to the substance abuse meetings and “talk therapy.” I sit there—sullen, shoeless—in a ripped-up .38 Special T-shirt and worn-in black cords. Next to me is a young woman in a hospital gown with a creepy smile on her face and a faraway look in her eyes. These people are crazy, I think. But I am in here, too. So I must also be crazy. But is it crazy to want to kill yourself? To want to free yourself from a life rife with despair? Honestly, it seems the only sane recourse.

  With four rehabs and three previous psych ward stays under my belt, I am convinced that Darla, the substance abuse counselor, won’t possibly have anything new or insightful to share. But I go to her group anyway. With her long gray ponytail, brown cargo shorts, and black trouser socks, she looks more like a psych patient in Portland than a therapist in L.A. She hands out the usual shit—flyers that explain that “HALT” stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired—and a couple of pages explaining neurotransmitters. I try not to look bored.

  I call Clay from the pay phone. “I’m so sorry,” I sob. “Please forgive me.”

  That same slim crazy brunette comes up to me and says, “Can you get off the phone soon?”

  “Yes, as soon as I wrap up this conversation,” I answer as politely as I can muster, tears streaming down my face.

  “Why are you lying to me?!” she demands. Puzzled, I turn back to the phone.

  “Hi. Sorry. Are you there?” I sniffle. It is silent.

  “Hello?” I say again.

  There is a deep sigh and then this: “I can’t do this anymore, Amy. Get yourself out of there and get a job.” And with a click, my husband hangs up on me.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  Silence.

  “You said till death do we part, you fuck!” I scream. And then I start crying. The sound echoes off the barren hallways of the psych ward and what I hear back is piercing, disturbing, like a wounded animal caught in a steel-jaw trap.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My mom makes some calls and pulls a magic trick, getting me scholarshipped into a rehab—my fifth. A tech from a very posh Hollywood Hills treatment center comes to collect me from Glendale Adventist psych ward. I am in a green gown and slippers. I haven’t showered for four days. My hair is greasy and flat. My face is puffy from sleep and sadness.

  “Do you have a cigarette, by any chance?” I ask, squinting at the unfamiliar sun.

  “Of course.” He is tall and gangly, with glasses and a timid demeanor.

  We smoke in silence, standing by the black SUV that will take me to the next chapter of my nightmare.

  “Good look, huh?” I joke, glancing down at my psych ward attire.

  He smiles. “Whatever it takes, right?” he says as he exhales smoke.

  We pull up the long, winding driveway to the gated treatment center, nestled high in the hills. The owner of the treatment center is a charismatic guy in his fifties who liberally uses the words “motherfucker” and “bro.” Whether he’s trying to be hip or is just stuck in the seventies is anyone’s guess. He has hypnotic blue eyes and a commanding demeanor. I knew him well through my soon-to-be ex-husband. He’d always liked me. Back in the day, he’d joke around, saying things like, “What are you doing with him? Call me later.” When my mom blindly called the rehab and mentioned my name, they took me in immediately, no questions asked. Whether it was out of pity, altruism, or to possibly avenge my ex, I will never know and don’t really care. I needed help.

  When I show up at the rehab, the owner smiles and says, “Welcome to the family. I own you now.” And then he starts laughing—a laugh that sounds like a donkey choking.

  This rehab where I will spend my next seven months is beautiful: three separate houses and two pools, all nestled in the woody hills of L.A. Rumor has it that it used to be Rock Hudson’s estate. What really stands out to me is the grittiness of addiction set against this posh background. Drugs do not discriminate. So, although some client might be a millionaire lounging by the pool in an expensive monogrammed terry robe, lift a sleeve and you will see the track marks and abscesses of any skid-row junkie. Addiction is a brutal and unforgiving mistress.

  I’m led to my room after signing pages and pages of documents. For the first time in my life, I am not high off my face while checking into treatment. I am tired and depressed and sad, but not high.

  My room is clean, hip, and modern. I smile weakly at my new roommate and climb into the soft bed. Ahh, a real bed. Not like that government-issued, plastic-encased crap at the psych ward. I fall deeply asleep.

  The next few days are a blur, but I must have been pretty hysterical because I am immediately put on a hefty dose of Valium. My blood pressure is a limp eighty over forty for the first four days, so tattooed techs periodically drag me out of bed to walk laps in the parking lot. We walk in circles, and I yammer on about how I used to have years of sobriety and a great marriage. They pretend to listen and be impressed.

  My roommate, Amanda, is a twenty-four-year-old artist, a high-end escort, and a sex addict. She is beautiful, with big blue eyes, long red hair, and an amazing ass. She is also shy and terminally depressed. When she says she likes the “throwback music” I play, I realize for the first time that I’m getting old.

  “I could actually be your mother. How scary is that?” I say one evening, lying on the carpet, peering into my computer screen.

  “I don’t even think about how old you are because I fuck guys old enough to be my grandfather,” she answers casually while putting on makeup in the bathroom.

  “Nice. Do you really hook?” I ask her.

  “Yeah. Been doing it since I was sixteen.”

  “Wow… interesting. What’s that like?”

  “It’s easy money, and I like sex.”

  “What if they’re gross?”

  “I’ve been doing it so long, I can kind of disassociate. I mean doing it sober… might be a whole other deal.”

  I nod my head, fascinated.

  “Like one of my clients flew in from San Francisco to fuck me in the ass and paid me three thousand dollars. That was the other day, and I haven’t even thought about it once since.”

  “Just another day at the office,” I joke.

  I am disgusted but also intrigued by her complete emotional detachment from sex. Little did I know that state would soon be all too familiar to me.

  The days are pretty full: yoga, groups in spiritual solutions, relapse prevention, gardening, emotional recovery. But I can still find time to feel sorry for myself and ponder, in astonishment, the wreckage I have created: a criminal trial, shattered marriage, lost friendships, no home. I have managed to burn my life down to the ground. Again. It seems to be the only thing I can do consistently.

  My counselor, Liz, is a short blond woman with steely blue eyes and a terrifyingly direct demeanor. She is as tenacious and perceptive as a sniffer dog, and, in time, it becomes obvious that she gets assigned the relapsers and the “very probl
ematic” clients. I am scared of her, but not too scared to be a smart-ass and talk back. Plenty of arguments ensue.

  “I don’t understand,” Liz says. “Why are your car and your phone in Linda’s name?”

  “Because I have the credit score of a crack whore.”

  “So you basically went from your husband paying for everything to your best friend paying for everything?” Liz harangues.

  “She doesn’t pay for my car or my phone!”

  Liz gives me a withering look.

  “Okay… my dad does,” I say. I start laughing hysterically.

  “You think this is all a game, Amy? You’ve been enabled your whole life. It’s all part of your disease. You need to take this seriously.”

  “I am taking it seriously. But if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry. And I’ll probably never stop.”

  Liz is jotting something down in her notes about me. “I think you should cut contact with Linda,” she says.

  “Oh, yeah… I’m sure she’ll appreciate that: ‘Hey, Linda, thanks for being my loyal friend, but I don’t need you anymore. So see ya!’”

  Liz is not impressed. “Do you want to get better or not?!” she snaps.

  Yes, of course I want to get better! But I can’t deal with all of this change all at once. Change is fucking terrifying to an alcoholic. We are fear-based people who have a difficult time tolerating ambiguity, and change is nothing if not “Hmm, well, let’s see!” Also, everything she’s suggesting feels horrible and wrong and completely against my nature.

  Then again, look where my “nature” has gotten me so far. Liz is the one they send the hard cases to—and she has a track record of helping assholes like me, so she must know something. Ugh. I really don’t trust her—but I want to. And I need to. I need her to walk me through this difficult period as I transition into my new, sparkly life as a single, sober, and (most important) independent woman—something no shrink or parent has ever been able to do. (Good goddamn luck, lady.)

  “The universe has a plan for you,” Liz keeps saying. Yeah… but in my mind that’s always been drinking, anonymous sex, and suicide.

  One day, I confess that I recently fucked a guy in a bathroom at an AA meeting. I say it casually in the hope that it will be received casually, seen as just a stupid stunt and not as the beginning of a new burgeoning problem.

  “You can’t possibly feel good about that,” she says to me.

  “Well, the speaker sucked,” I answer.

  “I’m serious, Amy.”

  “Well, I don’t feel bad about it, either, if that makes any sense.”

  Shame and I parted ways a long time ago. We had to. We had an unhealthy relationship. Shame always made me feel like shit. I felt remorseful for things I couldn’t keep myself from doing, and if I couldn’t stop myself, then why feel remorseful? I decided to embrace my vices.

  Fuck shame.

  About two months in, my treatment team wants to take me off the Valium. I do not want this. I don’t give a shit if, in AA thinking, it doesn’t make me classically or technically sober. It does something more important than that. It makes everything bearable, smoothing out the rough edges, allowing me to glide through a razor-sharp life. But when you aren’t the one controlling your meds, you don’t have a choice. I’d heard that benzo withdrawal was one of the worst, and I get to experience it for myself. They aren’t kidding. Kicking coke and meth was a breeze in comparison. Despite the doctor slowly tapering me off, the withdrawal is brutal: months of anxiety, trembling, and sweating. I feel like I am falling all the time… but on the inside. The ugly mug of reality slowly comes back into crisp focus, and I cannot, will not, look at it. I begin searching for some goddamn thing to grab onto, but there is nobody and nothing left. And that’s when I discover my newest nemesis and coping mechanism: sex addiction.

  Sex addiction feels a lot like drug addiction and can get you almost as high. No wonder they call it “two-legged dope.” I can’t get high anymore, so I check out with sex. Granted, it’s a little tricky when you’re in residential treatment, but thanks to sexting, FaceTime, and the occasional clandestine rendezvous, I manage. What should be about intimacy and connection is just another drug to me now. I want from sex what I wanted from booze and pills: numbness, obliteration. All my addictions have the same formula: I put something in my body, and I change my feelings. It doesn’t matter if it’s a donut or a Xanax or a cock.

  By the time you’re on your fifth stint in rehab, you learn some things—like about “rehab goggles.” They’re the treatment version of “beer goggles.” They basically make you attracted to fellow inpatient clients that you’d otherwise never have anything to do with. It’s a small, limited population, and you pick among what’s available. A decade earlier at another rehab, I fucked a very talented, extremely notorious movie star. I would just sneak into his room and push him onto his bed.

  “Amy, we can’t,” he’d say. “If I get kicked out of here, I go to prison.”

  “Shut up and fuck me.” And with that, my mouth smashed onto his, and I yanked his pants off.

  This time around, the pickings aren’t half as good. I finally set my sights on a pretty twenty-two-year-old kid who sings and plays guitar. He’s kind of boring and quiet, but once I hear him sing, I see him as this beautiful little songbird, and I have to have him. We have a few heated make-out sessions, and then the kid tattles on me. He says I bum-rushed him in his room. What an asshole.

  The owner of the rehab grabs me by the back of my hoodie and drags me outside for a “chat.”

  “Uh, are you a fucking predator?” he asks. “What the fuck?”

  “I’m a cougar,” I say and smile smugly. I lose my phone privileges for a week.

  However, it isn’t long before I’m on the prowl again. Sam, a twenty-four-year-old husky rich kid, is my next victim. He’s a recovering junkie in day treatment who looks like he just stepped off an Ivy League campus. Incredibly, we are granted a pass to go to a day meeting and end up fucking in his Hancock Park apartment instead.

  We are a motley crew of clients. There is a man with borderline personality disorder from Jersey who is addicted to steroids and food and occasionally takes a fork to his muscular forearms and mutilates himself. The techs call him “juice box.” There is a young Southern belle with Tammy Faye–style makeup and sweaty, bountiful cleavage who falls asleep in every group as she detoxes off Suboxone. There is a junkie who is a straight throwback to the seventies, complete with cartoonish print shirts open to the navel to reveal an overabundance of chest hair. I’m shocked to find out he is a criminal lawyer who has been going to court high on heroin for ten-plus years. There is a whiny, blond, anorexic mom who, despite being from the moneyed enclave of Brentwood, knows all the words to every rap song I’ve never heard of. She denies she’s an addict; she’ll only admit to suffering from “anxiety.” There’s a terrifyingly smart (if pretentious) heir to a famous brand, who can paint like Picasso but is crippled with Lyme disease. We periodically find him convulsing on the bathroom floor, but he’s always cheerful and claims to be “super wonderful.” When his seizures get really plentiful or violent, “shadow nurses” are called in to follow his every move 24/7. I don’t know what’s creepier, getting paid to watch someone sleep or paying someone to watch you sleep.

  There is a male model who’s so vain he has more products than your local Sephora. We share a bathroom for a hot minute.

  “Wait, is that blood on the floor?” I ask him.

  “No, it’s bronzer,” he says.

  “God, I don’t know what’s worse,” I quip and walk away.

  The rehab regularly takes us all to “outside meetings.” Every night we get packed into a van with loud music and vape smoke and driven down the winding roads of Laurel Canyon to AA meetings in the city. It is humbling to come tumbling out of the “druggy buggy” with all these guys at some of my old regular AA spots. Yep, it’s me. And I’m in treatment. Again.

  Inpatient treatment is communal livi
ng at its finest. We are stuck together all day in multiple groups, eating meals together, smoking on the patio together, and going to evening meetings together. It feels a bit cultlike—as if we’re in some weird quasi-spiritual compound—but here, everybody’s religion is addiction.

  Day by grueling day, I push forward, resisting my impulse to get loaded or take myself out. This is the same rehab dance I’ve been doing for more than two decades, and I am tired and out of hope. So is my father.

  “You’ve drained me financially and emotionally for years. I’m over it. I’m over the roller coaster. Call me when you have good news, or don’t call me.”

  Ouch. These are the most devastating words a daughter can hear from her father. But I understand. Everybody is sick of my shit… myself included. This wasn’t supposed to be the way it turned out.

  I was born into a Richard Neutra house in Bel Air. My mother was a model and then a fashion designer; my father, a novelist and screenwriter. When I see pictures of myself back then, I just look like a happy, chubby baby with a big blond Jewfro. And maybe at some point I was.

  My parents were well matched in that they both loved to drink and fight. My father came from a long line of Jewish depressives, and my mother had a family tree rife with schizophrenia and addiction. Their dynamic wasn’t so much pouring gasoline on a fire as much as it was putting an IED into the fireplace. They were divorced acrimoniously by the time I was two. From then on I was swatted like a badminton birdie between New York and Los Angeles, Los Angeles and Mexico, and then, just Los Angeles and Los Angeles: spending half the week at my father’s house in the posh Hollywood Hills and the other half at my mother’s in the hippie stomping grounds of Laurel Canyon.

  My parents are a study in opposites. My father is a drinker, garrulous and social, charming and witty. He couldn’t give a shit about clothes. My mother, who got sober at thirty-nine, is quiet. She is an artist, a loner, a listener. Back then, she wore all Armani, in earth tones, with ethnic silver jewelry, and sported a perfect blond bob.