Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (16 page)

After a few sessions on Bernie’s couch, I started to feel okay there. She’s pretty, and she has a soothing voice. Unlike other therapists and doctors who often had something negative or quirky I could obsess over (which then allowed me to dismiss whatever they were saying), I began to actually hear Bernie. She became a necessary part of our lives.

Bernie told Scott that in all the years she’d been doing addiction counseling, she’d never seen anyone go from zero to a hundred as fast as I’d done. “It’s as though you started at Intermediate Addiction,” she told me. “You’ve met your match,” she told Scott. The two of us were stones dropped into water, she said, falling fast, drowning together. Slowly and carefully, she began to unravel our complicated family dynamics and the history of our addictions, both separately and together. We were genetically loaded for the hell we were going through, she explained. That didn’t absolve us of responsibility—if anything, understanding it might possibly give us the beginnings of a road map out of hell. In time, she told us that she was in recovery from heroin addiction herself—nearly twenty years at that point. Uh-oh, I thought—no way to fool her. Sooner or later, she’s going to call us on everything.

For a while, the three of us met together; as time passed, Bernie and I began to meet alone. When it was just the two of us, she didn’t want to talk about Scott or his issues, no matter how I tried to turn
the conversation around to “What should I do about him? How can I help him?”

“That is for Scott and me to talk about,” she said. “When you and I meet, we are going to talk about you. What you think and feel, and what needs to happen next for you in order to find sobriety and health.” Scott and I were enmeshed, she said, as though we’d become one organism. In order to go forward, we had to become two separate people. That didn’t automatically translate to breaking up or going in two different directions—it meant that I had to figure out who I was with or without him.

I wasn’t sure about looking too closely at me. For so long, the only emotions I’d had revolved around Scott—wanting to be with him, happy when I was, grieving when I wasn’t, worried when we weren’t together, scared when he was away. Without this primary connection to define my days, what would I have? With no drugs to blunt or bury those emotions, who would I be?

Bernie referred us to a psychiatrist, whom we’ll call Dr. Langford. His L.A. office sat many floors above the street. God forbid anybody comes in here with a height phobia, I thought the first time we went to see him. A long wall of floor-to-ceiling windows looked down onto the sidewalk; it felt like an enormous space.

In every doctor’s office, I am fascinated by the books on the shelves. The titles are usually frightening or pitiful.
Women and Crime. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
. After I’ve committed the titles to memory, I move my gaze to the wall art. Well, not art exactly; more like framed things on the wall. You know that TV commercial for weekend art expos at some chain hotel? I’m convinced that’s where doctors buy their art. When your world is out of control, a framed print of a man and woman holding a para
sol in a rowboat does not help. And no cartoons, please. I can find humor in nearly everything, but framed cartoons about sick people and their doctors are not funny.

The only things that lift my spirits in a doctor’s office are the framed university degrees on display. I’ve even figured out some of the Latin.
Medicine. Chirurgiae. Summa Cum Laude
. I like visualizing my doctors during their college years. Younger, optimistic, working so hard, getting smarter every day, preparing to save my life. Dr. Langford looked a little like Ed Grimley, Martin Short’s
Saturday Night Live
character.

Earnest and focused, leaning forward in his chair in a way that made me want to lean back, Dr. Langford said we had a stack of paperwork to process first—our medical history, our “current problem.” What brings you here today? Everything. Everything brings me here. I sat on the couch as close to Scott as I could possibly get without actually sitting on his lap. We began with a series of questions, most of them specific to our past medications. These two lists were impressive for a relatively young couple; a casual observer might’ve guessed that we’d spent a large portion of our lives in pharmaceutical trials.

I don’t remember how or when I first learned that Scott was bipolar—somewhere along the line, he’d told me. I didn’t know exactly what it meant—it was simply part of who he was. A little bit crazy. Okay, a lot crazy. But I loved him, and if crazy came in that package, I’d deal. But when Dr. Langford suggested that I, too, was bipolar, I couldn’t resist laughing. It was as though Scott had rubbed off on me—a simple case of love addiction! Bipolar? Ridiculous. Bipolar disorder made Scott creative and interesting and wildly unpredictable. Applied to me, it meant only that I was mentally ill. Depression I might’ve bought, and there was certainly plenty of evidence
for being a junkie—but I was not crazy. Besides, wasn’t there something to be said for how we were young and brave enough to live on the edge? I saw this as an asset, not a weakness or a deficiency. Not everyone had the balls to live that life.

The degrees on the wall said this doctor was an educated man, so how could he make such a colossal mistake? Even I could see that my only real issue was my inability to separate myself from Scott. All right, I’d do what I could to kick the other drugs (maybe, sorta, kinda), but Scott was my main one, he worked fine, and I wasn’t giving him up. And I wasn’t copping to being mentally ill without a fight.

Carefully, the doctor tried again to explain what he believed was going on with me.

Bipolar disorder is no place for amateurs or self-diagnosis, and it’s no place for denial, either. Scott was farther down this road than I was; he was exhausted, and he was scared—for both of us. “You went through thirty thousand dollars in one month, Mary,” he said. “We’re sick. We need to do whatever he says to get well.”

Oh, well, that was different. If Scott was in, then so was I. We discussed the few medications that were available and with each of them came a long list of side effects. Awesome side effects. If a medicine has only one possible side effect, I’d bet money that I would experience it.

The first consideration with bipolar disorder is always lithium. At first, I reacted to that as though the doctor suggested that I go to a gardening store and consume rat poison. Like everyone else in the nineties, I’d read
Prozac Nation
and knew for sure that I was not the same variety of crazy as Elizabeth Wurtzel. Of course, I could relate to her depression and mood swings, but I was not mentally ill. I was
not insane. (Yes, an original poster of the movie
Frances
had graced my bedroom wall, but this was only because I had a love of genius filmmaking, not because I especially related to anything in Jessica Lange’s amazing portrayal of Frances Farmer.) The list of lithium’s potential side effects was a long one: tremors, dry mouth, diarrhea, sleepiness. Feeling tired. Not being able to get out of bed. Nothing new there. Tellingly, the one that scared me most was weight gain. A complete deal breaker. I’d rather be nuts. I’d spent my whole modeling career trying to lose that last five pounds; I was not interested in volunteering for an additional five. Or more likely ten. Plus, I’d need to report for blood tests regularly—something to do with checking my liver. This seemed too much like work. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot for a few weeks. The minute the weight piled on, the lithium went into the trash.

Okay, how about Depakote? It was an antiseizure med, the side effects didn’t look so daunting, it might help. Yes, I told the doc, let’s try this one. It occurs to me now that I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to have a vote.

I’ll never know if Depakote might’ve worked. I took it for a few days, and we relapsed again not long afterward.

The kicker for Scott was the night he took a pill he found at the bottom of his bag that he thought was Xanax, and it turned out to be naltrexone, an anti-opioid-craving med that (given the speedballs he’d injected beforehand) plummeted him into withdrawal. He became violently ill and we sprinted for the hospital, where the ER docs gave him morphine to “calm down” instead, it almost killed him. Where was I? Out in the parking lot, with a needle in my foot. When I came back into the hospital, I climbed onto the gurney with him, where we both passed out.

The next morning, both in wheelchairs, we were on our way to rehab again. For maybe the third time, our admissions counselor was Laurie, someone I’d come to think of as the Wicked Witch of the West. “Well, well, look who’s back to visit,” she said, her voice loaded with sarcasm, her hands on her hips like the parent who’s just about to kick your ass. “It’s our Scott and Mary.”

Scott’s behavior got him tossed out of his sober living residence, and since it was yet another violation of probation, put him in jail and on the court docket to deal with the long-pending criminal charges and a judge who was out of patience.

The night before court, I couldn’t sleep, and my fear was as much about my own fate as it was about his. If he was sentenced to anything other than house arrest, I didn’t know what I was going to do. There was no way I could make it on my own without using. When Scott was with me, I was a wild girl using drugs with her boyfriend. If he was gone, I was just a junkie.

I can’t remember what I wore to court. I’m sure it was my best attempt at looking modest and demure, but the “what’s wrong with this picture?” was the big coat I wore to cover my road-map arms. And then there was my hair, a very bad shade of blond, with pink tips. I have, and had, no explanation for this choice.

I don’t remember the drive to the courthouse, how I got there, who drove. For a few moments outside, it was a dream; walking in the doors and through security made it real. As I exited the elevator, I was greeted by Scott’s friends and family. His parents had flown in from Colorado, and countless sober people from the program had shown up to lend Scott support. I knew that most of Team Scott believed I shouldn’t have been allowed in the building at all, that I was to blame for the probation violation, that if we hadn’t been
using, he wouldn’t be in a holding cell, handcuffed, waiting to hear his sentence.

I was blessed to have my own team—Balthazar Getty and Eric Dane. When Judge Larry Paul Fidler walked in, my stomach rolled. Scott had appeared before him previously, and it was clear by the expression on the judge’s face that he was not happy to see Scott on this occasion. Balt and Eric stood on either side of me, each with a hand on my arm. They knew that if the day ended with Scott on his way to jail, the odds were good I’d fall to my knees.

A few people spoke on Scott’s behalf. He had stayed sober since the day after his naltrexone incident, he had been attending meetings and working with a sponsor. Even the DA’s office suggested that any sentence imposed could be served half in jail, half in a lockdown rehab. Judge Fidler listened carefully to everyone who spoke, but the air in the room felt like doom. There would be no easy way out; if there’d ever been a time celebrities got a free pass, it was over. Not long after this, Robert Downey Jr. was sentenced to a jail term as well. “Rules are rules,” the judge told Scott. “If you break my rules, you go to jail.” The sentence was a year, reduced by the thirty-five days he had already served. Eleven months. This leg of the Chaos Tour was over.

I’d never heard of a person leaving jail a “new person”—who would Scott be when he got out? He would be changed forever. And why was it that we were constantly torn apart? I was shaking like a leaf, so scared I couldn’t cry. Eric and Balt stayed with me the rest of the day, but the little voice in my head grew louder. The voice that makes the plan for you and waits for you to follow. Toward the end of the day I told the guys I was fine and that I wanted to go home and sleep. I was loaded within hours; I’m not sure when I surfaced after that.

I was alone. I’d been ducking my friends, lying for months to Kristen and Ivana (and Charlize had long since decided to keep her distance); everyone I hadn’t run from was running from me. So I called Ashley Hamilton, and we decided to run together.

That first day, we tried to get through just on methadone. We felt nothing. I called my dealer Martine and had him meet us near Ashley’s new place, in the parking lot at the Yum Yum Donuts on the corner of Vine and Melrose. After that, I started heading to Ashley’s every day. He lived in an Old Hollywood building near the Paramount lot, with renovated, old-school elevators. I’d like to point out how very slow an elevator can move when you need to get high and your pockets are loaded with heroin and coke. Ashley became my temporary partner in crime. He had a steady supply, and I knew how to make crack. This made for a great partnership.

After his sentencing, Scott was in the Los Angeles County men’s jail for not quite a week, in a small cell apart from the general population. Then he was transferred to Biscailuz Recovery Center—jail and rehab, all in one. Ultimately, he’d do six months there. I visited as often as I could. The cleaner he got, the sicker I got, and the more clearly he saw me. I was so out of my head, I assumed that when Scott was released, everything would go back to “normal” and we would continue our Bonnie and Clyde run. But I was (finally) about to hit the wall, and Scott would never be my running partner again.

Addiction is not a weakness
of character (although if you’re bipolar, it’s statistically almost baby-and-a-cookie easy to fall down the rabbit hole); it’s a recurring chemical disorder of the brain that creates both physical and psychological dependence. When researchers run a brain scan of a living addict’s brain, the physical difference between how it reacts to the words
cocaine
or
heroin
, versus how a nonaddict’s brain reacts, is remarkable. Long after he’s clean and determined to stay that way, an addict’s brain still reacts as though
he’s traveling with the Weather Channel’s storm trackers during tornado season.

Addiction is a liar and a cheat. There’s no safe room in the addict’s mind—ultimately, there’s no place to hide. It’s a lot like that movie stereotype of the gambler at the table who takes all your money and all your dreams, then shuffles the cards again. Even though you’re naked and penniless and everybody you love has long since taken the train back to Normalville, you sit right back down and wait for the deal, dignity be damned. And then comes the point when there’s no high to be found anymore. You run and run until finally, you run out. Ideally, you don’t die before that happens, or lose, discard, or somehow misplace everything that ever mattered.

The first time you walk into a twelve-step meeting or a rehabilitation facility, nobody tells you how many times you’re going to have to do it before you get it right. Nobody tells you that it will likely be two steps forward and one step back for the rest of your life. Nobody tells you that odds are, you will circle around endlessly and keep coming up against that First Step—admit that you are powerless over your addiction and that your life is out of control—until the day you finally stop selling yourself the same old bullshit story about your life. How it’s a mess, but it’s manageable, and anyway, you can fix it yourself. And even then, after you think you get it, you can still stumble and fall.

Full disclosure re: number of rehabs (mine): seven. Exodus; Cri-Help; Hazelden Springbrook in Newberg, Oregon; Vista Pacifica; Promises Mar Vista; return trips to a couple of them. The list is disturbingly reminiscent of all the schools I went to before the seventh grade. Over and over and over, I dragged my ass in and dragged it right back out again, until somewhere between six and seven, Scott
issued an anguished ultimatum—get clean or we couldn’t be together. At that, what little light remained in my soul began to flicker back to life. Nevertheless, I went kicking and screaming.

Whenever I have a bad day, a sad day, a day in which I doubt how far I’ve come, or the memories get foggy around the edges about how hard I had to fight (or the memories have such gaping holes in them that I’m amazed a breeze doesn’t blow through), I look into my two children’s faces. And then, after I’ve tucked them into bed, I reread my journals.

My least favorite room in a hospital was the bathroom, almost always shared with the very ill roommate renting the space on the other side of the curtain or the other side of the room. Sometimes there was a bench in the shower; I usually planted myself on it, threw
myself a weepy pity party, and kept the warm water running until somebody noticed I was threatening the local water supply. I liked the feeling of isolation (frankly, you don’t get much alone time in rehab). An institutional shower stall would be a very good place to conduct therapy sessions. Even now, it’s not unusual for me to break down about something in the shower. I sit down directly beneath the shower head and adjust the water pressure so that it comes down hard. I’ve never been able to decide whether that’s about getting clean or being punished.

Often, especially after the Chaos Tour finally came to an end, I sat on the bench in the shower examining the damage I’d done to my body. I’d avoided looking at my arms all day long and now, here they were. There’s no way this is me, I didn’t do this to myself. Mary, you have no visible veins, and the arms you’ve dreamed about using someday to hold babies are both covered in scabs. You did do it to yourself.

The first visiting-hours session in rehab should be put off as long as possible. If you’re on detox meds, you’re too high and dizzy to make sense. If you’re not, you’re sick, shamed, and awkward in a social situation without the customary glass of whatever, a little shot of something before company comes. It’s all you can do to keep your eyes at half mast. When your family and friends are announced, you shuffle (and I mean shuffle) down the hall. It’s pitiful. Your slippers keep falling off (hence the term
slippers
), and you hope the wall holds you up until you get to where you’re trying to go.

Once you sit down, you occasionally look sideways to see if your visitors have abandoned you yet. Direct eye contact is a bad idea—every time you begin to prop up your head, all your loving people force-grin back at you, a facial expression whose sole purpose seems
to be to reassure you that you’re not a junkie. (Right. And the momentous occasion which brings us all here together is, oh, something like walking up onstage to pick up your college degree.) Even after the first visit, the conversation is always the same. To fill the silence and sadness, it goes something like this: “We are so proud of you.” “You’re looking much better.” “I can see the color is coming back in your face.” “What are the other patients like?” “Have you made any friends?” “I’ve been to a lot of hospitals, and this is the nicest one.”

Please. You do not look good—you look like crap for weeks (if you stay that long), and you know it. Your lips are dried and cracked; it’s almost certain that at some point, you will drool. The hospital gown exposes track marks, bruises, and scabs on your arms. If you’re a picker like I was, God only knows what your face looks like. You are too weak to shampoo your hair, let alone blow it dry, and brushing and flossing your teeth requires more coordination than you’re capable of. I’m certain that neither Miss Manners nor Emily Post ever considered giving advice on the proper etiquette for visiting a crackhead, but in my opinion, a simple “You look like shit” would be fine. At least it wouldn’t be a lie. And the goal here is to stop lying. Right?

Your visitors are almost always well-dressed. It’s a little disconcerting, this Sunday-best thing, since only days before, you were most likely walking around with only one shoe yourself. If you’re lucky, they’ll bring food. Chewing in slow motion is one way to hold up your end of the conversation. Actually, everything you do is in slow motion, because most rehabs have a no-caffeine policy. No caffeine in the soft drinks, no caffeine in the coffee. Decaf coffee is like smoking something that tastes and smells like crack, but doesn’t get you high. Pointless. But that’s usually the only thing they restrict,
so bring on the calories and the carbs and the processed sugar! I’m the only person I know who actually likes hospital food. Sometimes there’s a small lunchroom with decaf coffee and snacks; at Exodus, my favorite item was hard-boiled eggs. Scott would cut them up and add them to a Styrofoam bowl of mustard, mayo, salt, and pepper. Then he’d smash the mix between two pieces of cheap white bread and hand it over. I could never get enough of that.