Real Cases

For a long time, I didn’t even tell myself. There’s nothing glamorous about prescription medication. No outrageous weekends, no crazy hallucinations. Pills are done alone. Pills are private. Maybe that’s why addicts from Elvis to Eminem to Rush Limbaugh to Michael Jackson to Paula Abdul to Jamie Lee Curtis have never bragged about their addictions at the time, even when it was obvious. Their debauch is not fascinating and gritty like that of Lady Day or Edith Piaf or Keith Richards, with their back alley needles and spoons and jail time. To tell my friends about my growing reliance on anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills would be like dominating a dinner party with the gory minutiae of hip replacement surgery: “I’m old. I give up.”

But mostly I didn’t talk about my addiction because I didn’t see myself as an addict. It wasn’t the plan for who I was supposed to be. Addicts are numb. Addicts are predictable. How could I possibly be that?

I was supposed to be like my father, the thrill seeker who had escaped from a Mexican prison and told stories about what it felt like to shoot people. An international drug dealer, he was impervious to addiction. For him, drugs were all about the game. Of course his chosen lifestyle meant he spent the majority of my childhood in various prisons, leaving me with a stressed-out mother and no child support. But all I knew was how glamorous he looked on visits, with his speed-freak hangers-on and his eternal lack of restraint. He was my hero, this literal outlaw, and a template for my life. (Being female, however, my adventures were more with sex, less with violence.)

Meanwhile, my mother was a pill popper, a life-duller with no friends and no money. Drugs were not a way to live for her; they were a way to avoid living entirely. She was a “doctor-shopper” — firing the ones who advised her to change her attitude and diet, keeping ones who prescribed pills or surgeries to treat the symptoms rather than the underlying problem. Over the years she acquired about 30 addictions, including one to the steroid Prednisone, which made her mean and her bones so brittle that toward the end of her life they broke anytime she fell down (which, considering all she was gulping down, was often).

Leaving home at 16, I wanted life — in all its curious pain, chaos, uncertainty, wonder. I didn’t want to be like my mother, of course, but I also didn’t want to be like my peers, so many of them numbed out — on booze, pot, “Twilight Zone” TV marathons, booty calls. It was like a vision of the future from “A Clockwork Orange”: everyone dulling their consciousness with illicit substances, brainwashed by ads, eating frozen dinners in front of the TV, disconnected and alone.

I refused to take even an aspirin for a headache; I never had a cup of coffee till I was 19. When I worked in a brothel, I was the only one not doing downers or trading a blow job for a line of coke. I enjoyed the job — the atmosphere, the clients, the girls. When it became a drag, I didn’t numb myself out to keep doing it; I quit. Years later, after a boob job, I threw away my doctor-prescribed Percocets and lay there on the couch thinking, “So this is what wanting to die just so the pain will stop feels like.” But wanting to die is part of life, too, and I had no desire to miss out on that.

I do believe in drugs — for fun and enlightenment. I’ve tried PCP, LSD, speed, poppers, mushrooms. (I even wrote a book called “Drugs Are Nice.”) If it weren’t for a one-time use of Ecstasy — which I believe opened up intimacy passages blocked by childhood trauma — I may have gone an entire lifetime without understanding why anyone would want to kiss anyone. E unlocked a door for me. But I didn’t understand taking something over and over, walking back and forth through a door already opened wide. That’s like watching reruns all day. I’ve occasionally drunk to black out, only to discover what I was capable of when inhibitions were deactivated. (The answer? A lot!) But I would no more smoke or drink as a daily habit than I would throw darts at my eyes. I was against stupefication in any form — doing computer blackjack at work till you’re fired, having compulsive sex with exes who don’t care about you. Why would you want to escape life? Life is everything! Nor did I want to escape who I was, no matter how fucked up. I was infinitely interested in strange me, in strange life.

So how did I go from 35 clean, bright years to becoming exactly what I detested? I fell into a trap, and there was no longer strange me and strange life to be interested in. During a several-year custody battle, my ex used my writing against me in court and with Protective Services to try to prove neglect and abuse of my daughter. Not one time, but five. Approximately every six months it would start again, with them in my home, in my stuff, in my words; workers had stacks of printouts of my articles given to them by my ex. At his request, I was tested for mental instability; a chunk of my hair was cut off and tested for drugs. Even the contents of my refrigerator were examined. For the first time in my life, I was more scared than I could handle. I couldn’t write my way out. I also couldn’t hoof my way out of it. The judge ordered me not to relocate from my home in Dover. If I were truly like my father, I would have bolted anyway, even though it would have meant abandoning my daughter. Instead, I understood for the first time the pressure my mother felt — to bend down to rules you don’t like and stay bent because it’s the only way to protect somebody. No one says thank you. No one admires you. They feel scorn for you, because you become miserable and lose all your zest.