Oh, I’ve tried to party, and I’ve been successful at it. It’s the afterward I’ve been unsuccessful with. At Long Beach State, when I experimented for the first time with alcohol, I got sick. Early in my pro career, when I drank to be social with my colleagues, I couldn’t drive myself home. I even had trouble enjoying a drink at my own wedding, where guests handed me gin and tonics and glasses of champagne. At the end of the evening, I ended up facedown, in my wedding gown, sprawled across a hotel room bed. Today, if I’m at a dinner party or at a social gathering, I’ll have a beer or a glass of wine, but that’s about it. It doesn’t take long before the taste starts bothering me, and it carries me back to my turbulent childhood. I get to thinking, “Don’t screw up your life, Misty. You’ve worked so hard to get to where you are.” Plus, I hate waking up the next day with a hangover.
From day one, drinking was part of my parents’ lives. After their first date playing volleyball at Muscle Beach, they went to a local bar for some celebratory beers. At that time, Mom was much more into alcohol than Dad. She’d lied to him, claiming to be twenty-one, when she was just nineteen. As time went on, my parents began celebrating everything from birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays to tournament victories with their Muscle Beach cronies. They became more than husband and wife: They became each other’s best drinking buddy. I was the odd man out, the little girl playing video games in the back of the bar. Except for those times when they’d offer me sips of their beer; then I’d join in the celebrations. Eventually, it got to the point where my parents didn’t need an event to toast in order to drink. They’d celebrate the end of their workdays by having beer (Dad) or brandy and coffee (Mom).
And somehow, it all spun out of control from there.
Neither of them was really quite sure when or why it happened. Dad wonders if it was the Hollywood movie industry culture or the long hours he put in at the MGM film lab that contributed to their drinking problems. Perhaps Dad drank to unwind from work. Perhaps Mom drank because she was lonely. Whatever the case, Dad wasn’t afraid to work as many as forty-three hours straight as an assistant to the film colorist. There were two bars near MGM’s film lab in Culver City—the Retake Room and the Backstage—and a third bar, Dear John’s, a little way down Culver Boulevard. It wasn’t unusual for Dad to stop in during his lunch breaks. After a Trader Joe’s market was built near MGM, he joked that he “went around the world every day,” drinking a six- or eight-pack of beers from Tahiti, New Zealand, and God knows where else during lunch breaks.
Why do I think my parents drank? Because they both suffered from the same disease: alcoholism. It’s as simple as that, although everything else about their disease made my life complicated. There was never any rhyme or reason to their getting drunk. I couldn’t predict if, or when, it was going to happen. It was never a specific day, or time, like, say, at 5:00 P.M. (cocktail time). Typically, Mom started drinking when she got home from work. Dad, meanwhile, usually had a couple of beers after he got off. Truly, the only thing I could predict, in terms of their drinking, was how angry and upset I was going to get, how small and scared and out of control I was going to feel.
Alcohol affected each of my parents differently. Dad is a laid-back, fly-by-night kind of guy. He was the same when he was drinking. I think Dad could control himself a little better when he was drinking than Mom could. She was a warm, sweet, funny woman—until she got hold of that alcohol. Then, she wasn’t sweet, and she wasn’t funny. She became mean, violent, and belligerent.
When I was five or six Dad began using me as his beer mule for sporting events at the Los Angeles Coliseum. We’d go to watch motorcycle racing, and I’d carry the beer, half a case of it, as well as bottles of brandy and schnapps, all rolled up in Dad’s extra large Goodyear tire jacket. Dad knew the security guys would never question a little girl. They would never check underneath the bulky jacket draped over my shoulders. And they certainly wouldn’t pat me down.
As my parents started drinking, they’d begin arguing. As they reached various stages of drunkenness, the arguing escalated. They’d ratchet themselves up, one drink at a time. It got louder and louder, nastier and nastier, more and more cruel. At times, it got physical. Very physical. If Dad came home from work and discovered Mom drunk, which was often the case, he slowed down, or even curtailed, his drinking, figuring he needed to keep it together for my sake, but her drunkenness always ignited a fight. He’d see she’d already consumed a bottle of liquor and was diving into a second, and that would tick him off. And those fights instantly hit outrageous levels. Soon, Mom was transformed into someone I didn’t know, and she wreaked havoc on Dad, me, or our apartment. She punched holes in the walls. She smashed windshields. She broke plates, glasses, lamps, and other household items. She threw Dad’s volleyball trophies at him.
One time, before I was born, Mom was so out of control that Dad actually called the police. He had no choice. She was crazed, smashing things, and the neighbors had called their apartment, worried that Dad was killing her.
“What do you want to do, sir?” the policeman asked Dad.
“Let Barbara go,” he said.
“One of you will have to leave the house for the night,” the cop said.
So Dad slept down the street, in his van, well out of eyesight, and the destructive path, of Mom.
I’ll never forget the time Mom became so enraged that she broke through the bathroom door. She’d had only a couple of drinks. But I set her off, the alcohol didn’t. I was supposed to have cleaned my bedroom and taken a shower, and I dawdled. I was all wrapped up in listening to New Kids on the Block.
“Misty, your room better be clean, and you’d better be taking a shower!” Mom yelled. “I’m coming up the stairs to check on you!”
“Your room better be clean, and you’d better be taking a shower,” I repeated, mimicking her.
“Have you cleaned your room and taken a shower?” Mom asked again.
“Have you cleaned your room and taken a shower?” I mimicked her again.
At that point, Mom said, sternly, “You’d better do it, or I’m going to give you the what-for.”
“I’m going to give you the what-for, ———,” I mimicked, calling her a nasty word.
Mom exploded. I realized that she was only two steps away from the top of the stairs when I’d sassed her, and I immediately sprinted into the bathroom and locked the door to try to protect myself.
“Dad, help me!” I yelled.
“At this point, I can’t!” Dad said.
Mom punched a hole right through the bathroom door, reached inside, and unlocked it. She burst into the bathroom and walloped me, which I deserved. She had a hit for every syllable: Don’t. You. Ever. Talk. To. Me. Like. That. Ever. Again.
That was the last time I ever talked back to Mom.
For the most part, beginning from when I was a little kid, I took myself out of the firing line as quickly as possible. I’d head upstairs to my bedroom, and I’d lock the door. I’d slip on my Walkman headphones, and I’d turn up my music as loud as I could, but that still didn’t completely drown out the screaming or the destruction. Since we lived in a small apartment building, I’m sure all of the neighbors lived through the madness, right along with me. Most of the time, I was too embarrassed about my parents’ drinking to invite my friends to our house. And there were plenty of nights I slept at my grandparents’ or my friends’ houses to remove myself from the volatile environment. Although I never told them about what was really going on behind closed doors at our place.
That is, not until it became so unbearable I finally had to tattle on Dad and Mom. One night, when I was eight, they were both drinking heavily. They were yelling, pitching things left and right, and I was worried for my safety. So I picked up the phone, and I called my grandparents. They had no idea their daughter had a drinking problem, because we’d all managed to keep it a secret from them. However, that night, I had no choice. Their drinking, and their fighting, had gotten so bad that
I just wanted out of the house. When my grandfather arrived, he was mortified by Mom’s condition and our ransacked apartment. He loved Mom; he thought she hung the moon. Instead of blaming her for the situation, he pointed the finger at Dad.
“Barbie’s drinking because of you,” my grandfather said, accusingly, to Dad.
Dad was seething. He may have wanted to say, “Have you ever told your daughter that you loved her?” But instead, he said, “I don’t think she’s drinking because of me. If you want to believe that, I’m okay with it. Ask Misty who she wants to live with.”
Then, my grandfather looked at me and said, “Darling, do you want to stay here? Who do you want to live with? Your mother or your father?”
I didn’t have to think too long to come up with my answer.
“I want to go with my dad,” I blurted out.
Mom started crying. She was so drunk, she could barely talk. However, she managed to get out these words: “Fine, go live with your father!”
I think, deep down, somewhere, she was together just enough to understand why, at that moment, I would rather have lived with Dad. I loved Mom dearly, but I didn’t want to live with her like that. It was painful to watch her destroying herself. Dad, on the other hand, was better able to hold his liquor. Truth be told, a lot of nights after that episode, I slept at my grandparents’ house. They insisted on keeping me out of harm’s way, and I wanted, and needed, the security and stability they offered. My aunt Betty Ann says, in all seriousness, that I was their favorite grandchild. In fact, she maintains they loved me more than their own three children, because, she says, they felt so sorry for me having to grow up with alcoholic parents.
Wouldn’t you have thought my revelation, choosing Dad over Mom, would’ve been life-changing for her? An aha moment? It wasn’t. It took six more years before Mom quit drinking. Fortunately, for me, it took only two more years before Dad stopped.
One night, in 1988, when I was eleven, Dad’s drinking came to a screeching halt. Literally. He’d just left a bar in Orange County and had climbed into his truck to drive home to Santa Monica. He and his buddies had been celebrating a victory in a beach volleyball tournament. He was drunk, of course, and he never should have gotten behind the wheel. And never mind the fact he already had one driving under the influence (DUI) blemish on his record. He was acting irresponsibly.
In the blink of an eye, his life changed. And so did our family’s.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, while he was crossing an intersection, a motorcyclist, racing one hundred miles an hour, slammed into the front end of Dad’s truck. Miraculously, he escaped injury, but the motorcyclist wasn’t as lucky. Dad says he’ll never forget trying to assist him. The guy’s six-foot body was “folded over.” His arms, his legs, everything, were wrapped around his torso. He recalls the guy spitting his teeth into Dad’s left hand. As Dad was being handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car, the arresting officer said, “Buddy, you’ll never fart again.”
Now Dad was facing prison time, twelve years.
I’ll never forget Mom receiving the call to go pick him up at the Orange County jail. It wasn’t the first time she and I had been through that scenario. But this time was different. This time, for all Dad knew, he’d killed somebody. When he left the accident scene, the motorcyclist was being evacuated by air to a trauma center and was clinging to life. I cried my eyes out that night, after Dad told me he might be headed to prison. Twelve years? I’d have graduated from college by then.
Over the next few days, Dad did his best to pretend things were normal. He went right back to work at MGM. But the accident was eating him up inside. On the sly, he telephoned Ralph and Dixie Johnson, the loggers from Loyalton, California, who’d taken him in when he was a homeless rodeo bull rider. They’d opened their home and their hearts to him. Dad thought of them as his second set of parents, and they’d always been an important part of my extended family as well. With the possibility of prison time hanging over his head, Dad asked Ralph and Dixie if they’d take Mom and me in. If he was locked up, he knew that Mom couldn’t support the two of us on her tennis teacher’s salary. He also knew that, because of her drinking problem, I wasn’t safe. Without skipping a beat, Ralph and Dixie agreed.
Also unbeknownst to Mom and me, Dad had talked to one of his buddies, Jim Oppliger, a former lifeguard and volleyball player at Muscle Beach who was then a deputy district attorney in Fresno. One weekend, soon after the accident, Oppliger was playing in an amateur tournament at State Beach, and Dad was the tournament director. He told Oppliger the details of the accident. He said his blood alcohol level at the scene had been .08, the legal limit, and it had been taken twice more, including at the jail, where it was 1.0. He also told Oppliger he’d recently contacted the best DUI attorney he could afford.
“Before you go spending money, let me find out what your case is all about,” Oppliger offered. “Let me also ask around about who’s a good lawyer for you. The cost between an attorney for a felony and a misdemeanor DUI is a world of difference.”
When Oppliger returned to his office on Monday, he phoned the supervisor of the prosecuting unit in Orange County. Oppliger was told the accident was caused by the victim. He also was told the case had been filed as a felony, but that it clearly was a misdemeanor. The following day, Oppliger phoned Dad and explained that he was guilty of DUI, but not of causing the accident. He said that the best defense attorney couldn’t get Dad out of this mess. However, if the district attorney ended up reducing it to a misdemeanor, he told Dad to jump on it.
And then, Oppliger gave Dad the most stunning news: The motorcyclist who hit his truck hadn’t died. As it turned out, he was on the run from the Huntington Beach police at the time of the accident. They’d arrested him at the hospital. Oppliger told Dad that he didn’t have to worry about a long prison sentence, but he’d have to do some jail time.
“That was my lotto ticket,” Dad still says today, even though he has never defended what happened that night. It still doesn’t excuse his actions, he says. The motorcyclist was rendered a quadriplegic. Whenever he talks about the accident, Dad always says, “It changed everything about my life.” It changed everything about mine, too. If Dad hadn’t been forced to change his behavior, if he hadn’t stopped drinking, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
Two weeks later, Dad faced the music, without legal counsel. Because he had a clean record—his previous DUI had happened several years before—Dad was sentenced to three days in the Orange County jail. His sentence also included six months of alcohol and drug rehabilitation, and daily attendance at ninety Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings. He was fined forty-two hundred dollars.
Before the accident, Dad had been vaguely familiar with AA and its twelve-step program. His sentence for his previous DUI had included AA meetings, but he’d gone to one, and said, “I can’t get anything out of this.” Then, instead of getting the secretary for the AA meetings to sign off on his court card, Dad signed them himself. All sixteen of them.
If life is truly better the second time around, then so is AA, at least from Dad’s perspective. Right from the start, Dad was told by recovering alcoholics in his AA meetings to “shut up and listen.” The most valuable lesson he learned was the Serenity Prayer, which he still relies on daily, as do I:
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.
After six months of AA meetings, Dad recognized he was suffering from a disease, the disease of alcoholism, and most important, he understood he was powerless against it. He realized he had defects of character and had to learn to control his shortcomings. It was the stuff on the inside that had to be changed, Dad says, and in the process of doing that, he’d become comfortable in his own skin.
As an aside, one of Dad’s shortcomings is, and always has been, his inability to read the fine print. So when he sca
nned a listing of AA meetings near our apartment, he never bothered to look at the bottom of the page to see what the asterisk next to particular dates and places denoted. One day, when I was eleven, Dad decided to take me to an AA meeting for the first time. He was three months sober, a completely different person, and I was very happy about this turn of events. We arrived at a Santa Monica restaurant, and we were met by a man at a door to a side room.
“So you’re one of us?” the man asked Dad.
“Yup,” Dad said.
“How long have you known?” the man wondered.
“Three months,” Dad replied.
They introduced themselves to each other and continued to exchange pleasantries.
“So you’re one of us?” the man asked again.
“Yup,” Dad said.
“How long have you known you were gay?” the man asked.
After that, Dad read the fine print, when it came to AA meetings. He never again made “an asterisk” of himself.
Once he got sober, Dad was able to witness the unhealthy environment in which I lived: Mom continued drinking for another four years. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t safe.
Dad always told me, “Don’t get into the car with Mom if she is drinking.” Oftentimes, I didn’t realize she was drunk until we were on the road. At that point, it was too late. I’d tell her, “Mom, you’re not staying in the proper lane. I’d rather get out than drive with you.” Once, I was staying at Carol Luber’s house, and I was young, so I had to be picked up. Mom retrieved me, and we almost hit a tree on the way home. Mom put her foot on the brake, slowly. I slammed the transmission into park. I jumped out of the car and ran the mile back to Carol’s house.
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