“When I’m high, I act like Cee Cee does all the time. Gutsy, saying anything I feel like and cracking people up.”
Dear God, Cee Cee thought, why would anyone want to act like that? I do it because it’s all I know how to do.
“Has it been hard over the last seven years to keep up with whatever it means to belong to Cee Cee Bloom?”
There was a silence, then Nina smiled, a smile that looked eerie on her bright red face, and said in a voice that sounded odd coming from her, “You bet your ass,” and all three of them laughed a laugh of recognition.
Now as Cee Cee pulled up to the admitting entrance of the hospital in Newport Beach, what at another time might have brought rage simply caused a blanket of weariness to fall over her, because standing in wait, festooned with their cameras, was an army of fanmagazine photographers. Somehow the sons-of-bitches knew everything, maybe from someone who worked at the other hospital, maybe from someone on Cee Cee’s own staff who was selling the information about her troubles. And there they stood, waiting to take shots of Nina’s entry into the hospital so that they could sell the pictures to the tabloids.
Instead of pulling into the portico where they stood, Cee Cee stopped and with a screech of tires backed up and found herself waking Nina and walking her into the hospital through an obscure entrance she found, just behind the linen service man who was making a delivery.
A nurse frisked her. Cee Cee stood and watched a big black nurse, wearing a plastic pin that said that her name was Marvel, actually frisking Nina for drugs, while Cee Cee stood there feeling as guilty
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as if she had been caught red-handed killing the very person she cared about the most.
While the nurse patted Nina down Cee Cee noticed Nina hung her head in a way that looked so tough, she must have seen it in some old “women in prison” movie on television. It was almost as if she was relishing the role of the beaten-down bad kid because it was so unlike the perfect girl she’d been, or pretended to be, up until so recently. Cee Cee’s stomach was cramped and twistcd, and she could feel every touch of the nurse’s hands on Nina as if she was living through the humiliation herself. Marvel handed Nina a plastic specimen cup and was ushering her toward a door marked RESTROOM.
“You can leave any time now, honey,” Marvel said to Cee Cee, with more than a little hint of I’m-running-the-show-here. “She’s starting detox right after her shower, and after that you’re not allowed to even talk to her for about three weeks.”
Cee Cee made a noise in her throat to indicate that what the woman had just told her was absurd. “You mean I can’t see her. But it’s okay to call her on the phone. Right?”
“You can call me,” the nurse said. I’ll be glad to let you know how she’s doing,” and she gave Cee Cee a little wave of dismissal. “But, no you can’t call her, and she can’t call you. Not till the doctor says so.” When Cee Cee looked as if she was about to give her an argument, Marvel looked at her closely and said, “Why don’t you stop by Doctor Pappas’s office and get the packet we give out to the parents. The rules are all in there real clear.”
Nina was in the bathroom now and Marvel was using her own foot, wearing white Nike tennis shoes, as a doorstop to hold the door partially open, until Cee Cee saw Nina’s hand pass the urine specimen out to her. Marvel looked down just long enough to mark BARRON with a grease pencil on the side of the plastic cup and then looked back at Cee Cee. “You go on now,” she said. Nina emerged from the bathroom, and Cee Cee walked closer to her, hoping to give her a parting hug, but before she could, Nina shook her off. “I’m leaving,” Cee Cee said.
“Bye,” Nina said, and walked with Marvel down the hospital hall.
“You’ve got to be joking about the three weeks,” she said to the doctor. “I’m not gonna make it through that. Anyway, why keep me out? I’m
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not going to bring her any drugs.” Doctor Pappas was in his late fifties, handsome in an Anthony Quinn sort of way, olive skinned with white hair and a slight Greek accent.
“No, but you might perhaps be a reminder to her of why she’s been using thcm.”
“I don’t get it. You mean I’m the reason? Hey, I know I’m a pain in the ass, but Doctor Kagan sent you her records. Her mother died a grisly death when she was eight years old, and her father is the worst prick that ever lived. You know what her life has been like. And what about peer pressure? That’s what pushes kids to use, isn’t it?”
“Ms. Bloom, it would be too easy to blame any and all of those things. The reasons for adolescent addiction are mixed and complicated. The sad fact is that today thirty percent of the addicted population are adolescents. They’re a perfect target for the drug sellers, as is anyone who is fearful, feeling rebellious, anxious to be attractive to the opposite sex. And it’s also classic for the child of an overbearing and famous parent to seek independence from that parent, and solace in substance abuse from the sad fact that he or she will never be equal to that parent. Maybe since you caught Nina so early in life, by working together we can find out what her particular reasons are and infuse her with enough confidence in herself to make her want to get and remain sober.”
“What can I do? Tell me and I’ll do it.”
“After she’s been detoxed, I want to put her in a private rehab program not far from here which I facilitate. You can go home, and come to a family meeting there when I think she’s ready to have you. At least three weeks. In the meantime,” he said, handing her half a dozen small paper booklets, “it would be good if you would attend some of these.”
Cee Cee looked down at what he had given her. Brochures from Alanon, Naranon, AA, Cocaine Anonymous, CODA, Adult Children of Alcoholics. “Those are lists of meetings of Twelve Step programs of various types. Programs that will help you to understand what we do here better than my explaining it to you. Go to them, find one or find several where you’re comfortable, and go every day, at least once. We like to say ninety meetings in ninety days, but going to more than that won’t hurt you. Because if you sit there long enough, eventually the commonality of the situations hits home
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and you learn through the pain of others how to overcome your own.”
“I don’t have…” She started to say. she didn’t have time to go to a bunch of meetings. To explain she had work to do, the ()scars to prepare for, but she stopped herself. “Look, it’s not my pain that worries me. I’m okay. It’s the kid’s pain we’re talking about here. This is a kid who could have O.D.‘d on crank. Who told me she had to toot up just to make it through a schoolday. And I don’t remember the last time I saw her arms. She could be mainlining for all I know.”
“You seem to have the lingo down already,” the doctor said, looking
long at her, and she felt herself flush.
“I’m in show business,” she said.
“I’m very aware of that fact,” Pappas said, “but I’m in the reality business. So now we’re going to deal in Nina’s reality. As unpleasant as that ma) turn out to be.”
I’ll go to meetings,” Cee Cee said, “and I’ll see you” — she looked at Pappas for an answer but he had none for her. “… when I see you,” she said, and she left his office and walked through the quiet corridors of the hospital, feeling cold and tired and not sure what day or time it v’as. When she got to the delivery entrance where her car was parked, she noticed for the first time that it was dark, and she got into the car and drove into the night alone. Somewhere along the freeway her stomach growled. She was hungry, so she pulled off at
the next exit and into the drive-through entrance of a McDonald’s. “Next, please,” said a disembodied voice. “Big Mac, side of fries, and a Coke.”
After she picked up her food, she pulled the car into a parking space in the brightly lit parking lot, looking through the windows at the families inside McDonald’s enjo
ying their dinners, and she envied them.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The next morning she stood on the beach in Santa Monica before sunrise, holding the hands of two people she’d never seen before in her life. In fact, she was part of a large circle made up of dozens of people she’d never seen before. She was wearing her disguise, the hat and the sunglasses, and it seemed to be working. So far not one person
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there had asked if she was Cee Cee Bloom. The Serenity Prayer, she thought. That ought to be called the mother’s prayer.
As the meeting began she sat on the blanket she’d brought, holding a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee and four cookies, which she ate in rapid succession, not caring if they were going to make her look fat in her Oscar dress, and she watched carefully and listened to the welcomes and to someone reading the Twelve Steps, and then she realized they were going around the group and everyone was saying his or her name. Just the first name, after which everybody said “Hi” to them by name, but Cee Cee was such a funny name that if she said it and
they took a good look at her, everyone would know who she was. “I’m Pat,” she said when it was her turn.
“Hi, Pat,” everyone said, and she felt relieved when they went on to the next person and nobody seemed the wiser that she wasn’t Pat, but she hated herself for lying at the same time. Mostly what happened at these meetings, she was figuring out now, was that people got up and told their stories. One young girl in her twenties said that her husband was so physically abusive she had to move out on him, because it was one thing for him to hit her before, but now she was pregnant, and she thanked all of them for being there for her because, she said, “Without you people I would have nobody.”
Then a very straight-looking, handsome, gray-haired man said that last week was his birthday, and he was trying to figure out why that depressed him, and then he remembered that when he was a kid he always hated his birthdays because he had to have his birthday dinner at a restaurant that had a bar in it, so his father could leave the rest of the family and sit at the bar and drink, and how his father still ran his life, and he wanted to stop wishing his father would die already.
One girl said she spent the money her parents sent her to buy books and clothes at college on drugs, so she had to go to the college bookstore and steal the books, and then to the clothing stores and steal clothes. And now that she was sober and working her program, she was up to Step Nine, which said, “We will try to make direct amends to people we have harmed, where amends are possible to make,” so she had gone back to those stores she had stolen from years before and offered to pay them back for the merchandise.
An older woman said she used the twelve noon, twelve midnight plan. “I never ask myself how I’m gonna get through the day. When
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I wake up I tell myself I’ll just try to get to twelve noon, and at twelve noon I say, I’ll just try to make it to twelve midnight. It’s how I survive my husband’s drinking.” Cee Cee reached into her purse and took out a pen, and the only paper she could find was an old envelope, so on the back of it she wrote herself a note that said, TWELVE NOON. TWELVE MIDNIGHT. She would try that.
Maybe these meetings worked, or maybe they were just a bunch of slogans and coffee. But she needed something, anything, so she sat tailor-seat on her blanket on the sand listening to it all, taking it in, hearing the way other people lived with their problems. These little bits of people’s lives are better, sadder, more human, and much more moving than any of the stories the writers who come in to meet with me at the studio ever bring, she thought. These people are spilling their real beans all over the place, and feeling better for it, and even getting applause after they do. She could never do that in front of strangers. When a character she played was in pain, that was okay. She could cry and scream and writhe and suffer publicly as someone else, but not as Cee Cee Bloom, who thankfully no one at this meeting seemed to realize she was.
When the meeting on the beach was over, she helped some of the others pick up coffee stirrers and half-empty Styrofoam cups, and put them in a trash can, then walked to where she’d parked the BMW in the lot, slid in, and picked the pile of lists of meetings up from the passenger seat. At nine o’clock she was at a rolls-and-coffee breakfast meeting in the basement of a church in Woodland Hills.
Our Father
Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come Thy will be done…
“Well, don’t you look familiar,” she heard a woman’s voice say very loud at the break, and she cringed, wondering what she was going to say to some fan, how she was going to explain why she was here, but then realized the person who had said that wasn’t talking to her, but to another woman, and the two women hugged and went off to find two seats together so they could chat until the break was over. Cee Cee sat in the back, close to the exit door so when it got boring she
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could leave early. But she was never bored and she never left early. Not from that meeting or from the candlelight meeting in Hollywood she attended that night, or the meeting that was conducted while the group took a walk on the Venice bike path. Or even at the meeting of gay men and transvestites she went to by mistake, where a short bald man came over and said to her, “Jim Dale does a great Cee Cee Bloom, but you know what? I think yours is better.”
She went to a Cocaine Anonymous meeting in the north valley and
a guy wearing a pin that said THERE IS NO PROBLEM WHICH CAN’T BE SOLVED BY THE DIRECT APILICATION OF EXPLOSIVES asked if she
would give him her phone number. She declined politely, hoping he wouldn’t apply the explosives to her face. In that meeting she looked around and decided she was probably the only person in the room who didn’t have a tattoo. In fact, when she first walked in and saw the people who were showing up, she was so unnerved by how tough they all looked it made her want to leave, but as they stood one by one to tell their stories, they looked different to her.
A recovering drug dealer-user who had his first honest job, working for a cold storage company, told everyone how the minute there was some quiet time at work, he sat in his seat high atop the hydraulic lift, read his Twelve Step study book, and meditated. Then there was a recovering heroin addict whose wife had committed suicide three months and one day earlier, who received a ninety-day chip at the meeting as his reward for being sober for three months. He had started on his road to sobriety the day after her death. They were all filled with gratitude for the safety of “these rooms” as they called the places they came to meet with one another, and support one another, and get each other through the difficulty of becoming and staying sober.
At a meeting in Brentwood, Cee Cee stopped on her way in the door because inside she saw a few people she knew. One of them was a woman studio executive, very high up in the Hollywood hierarchy, and when the woman saw Cee Cee she came right over to her. “If there’s anything I can do” was all she said, and she squeezed Cee Cee’s hand warmly. Cee Cee decided not to go back to that meeting, or to any other one where there was a chance they would go around the room and give their names. In those, she always allowed herself to lie and say she was someone else. Until she understood by the end of
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day ten, by which point she had been to more than thirty meetings, the queen o( overkill, that nearly everyone had known all along she was Cee Cee Bloom and that it didn’t matter.
One by one she had canceled the fitness-training sessions she had booked after she’d heard about the Oscar nomination, canceled her firming facials and a photo session with People magazine because she wanted to spend the time at meetings. She postponed two of her new projects and didn’t go in to the office, just went to these meetings, day after day, night after night,
trying to get it. And she had some private sessions with Florrie too.
“Why the compulsion to work so much, so hard, so constantly?”
“I don’t know. Because it feels good, and makes me feel powerful,
important. Sometimes I think I need it to feel alive.”
“What happens when you stop?”
“Well… I’m okay for a little while and then…”
“And then?”
“If I stop…” She paused and then laughed an embarrassed laugh and admitted, “I guess it’s my drug of choice.”
Florrie nodded as the two women’s eyes met.
“When she gets out of rehab she’s going to need you. I think you should take a long look at your future schedule and make it one that gives you a lot of time for her, even if that means cutting back on your
own productivity. Will you do that?” “I want to be able to do it.” “But will you do it?”
“I can probably do that.” “Cee Cee, will you do it?” Cee Cee didn’t speak.
“Answer the question for yourself, not for me,” the doctor said. On day twelve, at her thirty-sixth Twelve Step meeting, she felt herself standing and wanted to sit down, but was called on by the leader before she could change her mind, and with the rapidly beating heart of a first-time performer with stage fright said, “Hi, I’m Cee Cee.” Then wondered what in the hell she was going to say.
“Hi, Cee Cee,” everyone said back to her. Then she waited a beat to listen for snickers or for people saying “Don’t we know it,” but nobody did, and she went on. “I’m raising a teenager, thought I was doing pretty good at it, but recently | found out she’s into drugs. So
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