Getting It Through My Thick Skull (16 page)

This was an incredibly generous and kind offer, but I was balking big-time. Just the word “rehab” brought up terrible memories of the years of Joe’s cocaine abuse. I was responsible, I took care of my children, and I didn’t sell a house to a cocaine dealer! I got my pills from the doctor because I had a bullet in my skull and unrelenting pain! Sure, I needed to stop taking quite so many pills, but basically I was fine. Joe was the addict, not me! I didn’t need to do anything as drastic as Betty Ford! Jessica was in school and still needed me, and I didn’t want any more press scrutiny . . . I had lots of reasons why I couldn’t go. Dominic wouldn’t let the matter drop, so I called the Betty Ford Center and they mailed me some information. I examined it. Joe and I talked it over; he was very supportive. He didn’t like seeing me so depressed, not wanting to go anywhere or do anything, spending half my days curled up under the covers. Betty Ford was booked solid with a long waiting list, but Dominic pulled some strings and got me a place with very little notice. He called me one night.

“You’re in. You can check in this Monday, but you have to go now. It’s a thirty-day program, and I will take care of the bills. You really do need to do this, Mary Jo.” The ball was suddenly in motion. I was going into treatment. My main concern was that this would become another tabloid news story. I could just see the headlines. Just imagining it sent waves of shame and embarrassment over me. I didn’t want anyone to know my life had sunk to this new low. I agreed to go, but only if I could register under a different last name.

On a blazingly hot day in August of 1998, Joey drove me through the desert to the world-renowned treatment facility in Rancho Mirage. I sat next to him, absolutely petrified of what was to come. I couldn’t even speak. I was so sad and bewildered. How had my life come to this? I was in California, where I never wanted to live, and Joey was driving me to rehab? I popped one last big handful of pills as we parked the car, then followed my husband reluctantly as he walked into the main building.

Right from the start, it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I didn’t want to be there in the first place, so I certainly wasn’t feeling or acting grateful for this opportunity or hopeful about my recovery. They didn’t care what my attitude was. I was now part of a very well-oiled machine, and there was nothing—especially an attitude problem—that they hadn’t seen or dealt with before. Joe left, and I was left to the assembly-line admissions process. They were quite efficient. Every person who arrived each day was just one of a new batch, and I went through the whole admissions day with a random group of strangers. After some paperwork in the main office, the five of us who were checking in that day were shuttled onto a golf cart for a short ride to the hospital on the grounds. A man who couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds, so out of it he was transferred to the cart in a wheelchair, was propped up next to me. His arms were covered with fresh needle marks and bruises. I edged away and thought to myself,
I am in the wrong place. I don’t belong here with these people.

The hospital workup was very thorough. I, of course, had a more complicated medical history than most. Every conceivable test was run on me, which took quite a few hours. Every single item I had brought was examined. Nail polish, perfume, hair spray, mouthwash—they were all confiscated. As the day wore on, I became increasingly antsy. The effects of the pills wore off and the dreaded anxious, sweaty feeling of panic came over me. I needed another dose. I certainly wasn’t going to get one there. I grew weaker and more nauseous as the day wore on, and my blood pressure eventually dropped to a dangerously low level. The doctors gave me some sort of medicine—not nearly enough for my tolerance level—but the immediate physiological problem was addressed.

The five or six days that followed were sheer hell. All I wanted to do was roll into a ball in bed. I had uncontrollable shakes and vomited constantly. When I wasn’t throwing up, my mouth was so dry I could barely swallow, let alone eat. I woke up each morning drenched in sweat, the sheets soaking wet, which the staff had anticipated. I’d been given extra sheets on my first day, and the first order of business each morning at 6:00 AM was for me to remake my bed. I was barely able to stand up, but rules were rules. The program was the same for everybody, though I did not want to follow it. “I just need to get this stuff out of my body. I don’t need to do all this other crap. I want to get out of here and go home. I don’t belong here!” I kept telling anyone who’d listen.

“Oh, no, you definitely need this program. Stick it out,” the counselors told me. I dragged myself to the main office and literally begged the head counselors to excuse me from group meetings. “Please, I can’t do these meetings. I don’t want to get into why I’m here and have everybody staring at me because of who I am. I’m here because Amy Fisher shot me in the head and I take too many pills!”

They had heard it all many times before and didn’t care. “You’re going to go to every meeting along with everybody else.” Every day we followed a strict schedule, with several group meetings that, sick as a dog, I was compelled to attend. “Come on, come on, you’re not dying here,” the counselor would say. No, it only felt like I was. I hated every minute. They might force me to sit there, but I wasn’t about to say anything. The first week I was so miserable that I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to. I sat, and sweat, and listened, and mainly thought about how much I hated being there. I didn’t know if anyone recognized me, and if they did I was too out of it to care. Many of the other group members were equally shaky. My identity was the last thing anyone cared about as they detoxed. The staff knew who I was, of course, but they were accustomed to public figures as patients.

Somewhere around a week or ten days into the program, I simply gave up the fight and surrendered to the process. It was relentless. The program took up every waking minute, and I couldn’t escape. Accepting the reality that I needed to be there came easier once I could actually eat, keep food down, and the cold sweats stopped as the last of the drugs drained from my system. After six or seven days, I was clean for the first time since I’d been shot. Tired, shaky, and weak, but completely drug-free. I stopped begrudging the early wake-up, the endless chores, and the round of meetings, where I listened to some truly horrifying stories of loss from other women. The ones who had lost their children due to drug and alcohol abuse particularly moved me. The fact that every life had problems, many much worse than mine, was made very clear to me several times a day. After a completely silent couple of weeks, where I simply shook my head when it was my turn to speak, all my resistance vanished one afternoon when I felt compelled to finally talk.

We were in another endless meeting about getting to the roots of addiction—why we drank or abused drugs—when all my years of pent-up anger exploded. I had been living with it for so long that it was simply a part of me. Even I was amazed at the depths of my rage as it spilled out. “I hate that bitch Amy Fisher . . . it’s all her fault!” I screamed. “I was minding my own business, and she destroyed my entire life. She ruined my health, she ruined my husband’s life—he had to go to jail because of her lies!—and she ruined my children’s lives, too!”

This gave us all something to talk about for quite a while. After letting me rant until I was exhausted—me, me, me and all that had been done so unfairly to
me—
the counselor spoke up. “Well, what do you want to do about this? You have every right to be angry, but do you want to spend the rest of your life feeling like this, living like this, not wanting to get out of bed every day and blunting your anger with pills instead of dealing with those feelings?”

Well, this was something to consider. Over the next two weeks, I worked through many complicated layers of rage that I’d held so closely for so long. Everything I was so angry about—the loss of my whole life—I relived, sober. It was very painful. At one point, I was assigned an exercise to write a letter to Amy—one that would never be mailed—telling her exactly how I felt. For hours, I sat, stone-cold sober, and reconsidered the chaos of the past six years. As I wrote down how I felt, everything poured out of me in a letter filled with vitriol.

My counselor read the letter. At the end, she said, “All right. Do you want to continue to carry this anger, or are you willing to learn some tools to help you manage this anger and live with what’s happened, and get on with the rest of your life? You’re only in your forties, with a lot of years to live ahead of you. How are you going to live them?” I really
didn’t
want to live this way anymore. I was miserable and had been for years. At an outdoor group ceremony that evening, all the patients took turns dropping their letters into a campfire. As each turned to ash, we all cheered for its writer. The literal burning away of years of resentment, regrets, and pain symbolized the idea that this was to be our new beginning.

Through the many workshops and programs that followed, I learned—slowly and painfully—to let certain feelings go. I had to learn acceptance of things I could not change, a very hard lesson for me. In addition to my rage at Amy, I had plenty of leftover anger about the fact that I had never been given my due as the victim of a violent crime. The media had turned it into The Joey and Amy Show, the police and prosecutors hadn’t helped, and the whole experience had left me deeply scarred and resentful. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t change or fix any of it. It was scary. If I let go of my anger, what was I going to do with myself ? The wheels started to turn. A tremendous shift began. I was letting go.

I had to mourn for everything that I had lost without the buffering of any pills. For days, I was grief-stricken as I relived all my losses and faced all these feelings raw. There was nowhere to go and no pill to pop to make it all blurry. It was as big an awakening for me as the day I opened my eyes to see the lights and the nurse hovering over me in the hospital.

I walked out of the Betty Ford Center with a gold “one day at a time” medallion in my hand, a clear head, and a better attitude than I’d had in years. I was detoxed but knew I had plenty of work still to do. It wasn’t easy to let go of the anger that had been barely contained for so many years, but I was calm and determined. “What happened, happened; this is your life now. What are you going to do with it now that you’re free?” The counselors’ words rang in my ears.

I returned home to my little rented house in Los Angeles and faced life sober. It was a tremendous relief to be free of the pill habit. I never even considered abusing them again. The pain in my head, particularly problems with my right ear, was always present, but manageable. I looked better, felt better, and had a new attitude.

I continued to work on my anger issues by reciting mantras to myself and practicing calming breathing exercises when I felt the old anger start to flare up. I lived the 12-step philosophy the best I could. I continued to read all kinds of books on forgiveness and became very clear on what I was doing here: forgiving, not condoning. Amy’s act was never going to be comprehensible or excusable in any way, but for my own peace of mind I had to free myself of the hatred I felt for her. From now on, I had to concentrate on looking ahead and dealing with the life I had—not the one I missed. I was working my program, as they say in recovery circles.

Joe and Paul were busy with work at the new auto body shop. Jessica was in school, with friends, or playing sports, and everything seemed to be working itself out. I was working through my grief and feeling lighter every day, as if a huge burden was slowly lifting—one I hadn’t consciously realized I was carrying. I started to really consider
me
again, not what had been done to me, but the active, social person I’d been before the shooting. I knew I’d never be the same woman again, but I was certainly capable of making some kind of contribution or difference to someone beyond my immediate family. I believed again that I was worth something.

My first step was to get busy; I needed to find something to do to fill my time. No more lying around a darkened bedroom all day. I saw a notice seeking volunteers to record books on tape for the blind, so I signed up for the program. It was a baby step, something to get me out of the house each day, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the work. Each day when I showed up, I was given whatever needed to be recorded that day, ranging from college textbooks on astronomy, to Harlequin romances, to serious biographies. I learned how to master the huge reel-to-reel machines and conduct a recording session on my own. Sitting in the booth with the headphones on, I’d get lost in another world. And I certainly learned about some things I’d never have known otherwise. When I left each session, I took some satisfaction from the realization that I had done something good and productive, no matter how small, that might brighten someone’s day a bit, or even help educate them.

Less than four months after my return home, I got a phone call one afternoon out of the blue from Dominic Barbara informing me that Roseanne Fisher, Amy Fisher’s mother, had hired a new attorney named Bruce Barket. My stomach clenched. I wasn’t sure what was coming next.