Happy Accidents (11 page)

“Now, the General doesn’t allow gentleman callers past ten o’clock,” she said, like a
1920
s schoolmarm. “And not past the second floor after eight
P.M.
You can get three squares a day down in the cafeteria. And pay your bill on time, on the third floor.”

It was as close to a convent as I would ever get, and it was perfect.

My room was tiny and really did remind me of a monk’s cell, with just a sink and a twin bed. But I had my own bathroom, which a lot of people didn’t, and I had a lovely view of Gramercy Park. The building housed mostly old women who had been there since the forties and could have been Eve Arden in their former life. There were also a fair number of Asian exchange students who were going to NYU. I, as usual, was in a subset all by myself. Rent came out to be a little over $
600
a month.

The Real Live Brady Bunch
ran for ten months at the Village Gate, and I was miserable the whole time. New York City is packed with people, but I had never felt more alone. When I stopped drinking, I stopped self-medicating and had no way to dull the edges of my anxiety or my loneliness. Though the Nyquil helped at night, the days were empty for me and dragged on. To pass the endless hours before I could leave for the show without being ridiculously early, I’d close the drapes of my tiny room, take a swig of Nyquil, toast with a simple “Bye-bye,” and go into a deep sleep.

On a freezing Sunday night in January after our last show of the week, about six months into our run at the Village Gate, we booked the back room of a restaurant in Soho for a private soiree. A couple of people rolled joints and passed them around. Just as in high school, the smell alone made me fear the cops would bust in at any moment—I had smoked pot maybe ten times in my whole life, and it never did anything but make me feel paranoid. But because I was just so tired of being the outsider, I took a puff when the joint was passed my way. I was that desperate to be a part of the group. I also wanted to feel altered. Or maybe I just wanted to feel anything other than what it felt like to be me.

I smoked myself into oblivion that night. I never even felt “high” but went straight to a place of even more severe loneliness and isolation. I hoped someone would notice when I just got up and walked out, but I made it all the way back to the Parkside without anyone catching up to me and asking me if I was okay. The real world wasn’t the Brady Bunch. I crawled into bed, just despondent. I had blown my year of sobriety, and for what? I still felt like crap, and even lonelier than I had felt before.

So the next morning, I got up, called Alcoholics Anonymous, and found a meeting. It was January
20
,
1992
. I was thirty-one years old.

I don’t remember my very first AA meeting, but
I do know that I didn’t mess around when it came to working the program. To my relief, there was a recipe, rules to follow called the
12
Steps of AA. We all know how I love me some rules. I was no fan of the gray area. So I got the Big Book, I got busy, and I worked all twelve steps in about an hour and a half and said, “Okay, I’m ready to do some service.”

I adored going to meetings. Because of the Irish DNA dancing in my person, I’ve always been drawn to storytelling. The hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell talked and wrote about has always fascinated me. In the rooms of AA, I was captivated by the courage and the extraordinary effort it takes to face an addiction and come out the other side transformed. What is facing an addiction and getting sober if not a hero’s journey? I ate those drunkalogues up. They inspired me. I was convinced that in these meetings, the real stuff of life was going on and being talked about. The emotional honesty and good humor blew me away. I was all ears.

I did sometimes have a bit of drunkalogue envy. Had I known that in AA one of the things you do is tell your drinking story over and over, I would have made mine much more interesting. My own story was unmistakably bland. First, I drank only Miller Lite. Second, many of my contemporaries drank far more than I and were fine with themselves and their lives. They did not suffer it the way I did. In AA there would be one dramatic story after another, with people losing everything to drugs and booze. And here I was with my Miller Lite and morning hangovers and some occasional unremembered vomit in the bathroom. Some of the stories I heard in the rooms of AA were so endless, horrible, and tragic that I would have to stop myself from screaming at them “At what point did you hit bottom?!” I guess what I’m saying is: when I stopped, I had reached
my
limit. I knew that my mind, body, and spirit had just had it.

Despite being a girl looking for excuses to feel different, unworthy, and separate, my not-so-exciting drinking backstory did not prevent me from feeling a kinship. I felt the very same feelings many of the people in AA spoke of: alienation, self-contempt, and obsession. I felt like I’d come home and I couldn’t wait to get to a meeting every day, and sometimes I’d hit two.

I also experimented with a new version of myself. I wanted not just to try on a different “me,” but also to feel more a part of the Brady gang. Grunge was in, and the Urban Outfitters that had just opened on Sixth Avenue was selling it. All the girls in the cast either shopped there or looked like they had. Skirts, plaid, and cowboy boots were a hot look in this circle. I was not much of a skirt wearer, so my interpretation of this look was long underwear bottoms that I wore
under
flannel boxer shorts, plus the boots. This would have been an excellent choice if my goal had been to look like a homeless cowhand. I also stopped shaving my legs and underarms, which was actually somewhat fashionable at the time. This was a fairly radical departure for me, as heretofore I’d been a fan of Peter Pan collars. Like a character you grow into by putting on the wardrobe, I loosened up, accessed my inner earth mother, and found some compassion for myself.

I became obsessed with the Indigo Girls and started to write my own music, tunes with titles like “A Blood Red Tear Stains My Face” and “I Gave You the Gun to Shoot Me.” I think I was trying to impose some Sturm und Drang on my story, so I wouldn’t feel so woefully inadequate in the drama department. Though they were written in earnest, I would use one of the songs years later to get huge laughs in a one-person show.

I started taking yoga and began reading
Goddesses in Everywoman
by Jean Shinoda Bolen. She wrote about the stories of goddesses and how these classic figures exemplify aspects of every female self. I fell in love with her notion of archetypes and that they live in all of us. I used this idea to methodically take apart my own psyche and apply a goddess to each proclivity. My inability to connect intimately with another human being was the goddess Artemis operating in my psyche; she rode solo, was chaste and immune to love. My one-track mind and ability to focus on a goal to the exclusion of all else was my inner Athena. I looked for the goddesses operating in others as well. It was a methodical and organized way to understand something that overwhelmed me. Reductionist, yes, ridiculous, perhaps, but it inspired me and helped me to understand my own self and the world.

It was the exploration of my inner Aphrodite that led me to the
10
th Street Baths in the East Village. Wednesday was Ladies Day, and I was enraptured from the first moment. All stone walls and wooden benches, the place made me feel like I’d been transported way back in time to the Isle of Lesbos. Naked ladies of all shapes and sizes lounged about and luxuriated themselves like Greek goddesses. In the steam room I saw one woman comb conditioner into the hair of another. Next to the baths, an impromptu yoga class was doing downward facing dog while giving the rest of us an anatomy lesson. The cold wading pool was filled with the freshly steamed. I left all body shame at the door, and on that first day, I did it all: I steamed, I sauna-ed, I dunked my naked body in the cold water, and I sipped hot tea. At the end of the day I had a massage with a Russian man named Boris who said I could call him Bob. As he rubbed baby oil farther and farther up the inside of my thigh he purred, “I am like doctor, yes?”

I left thoroughly uplifted and full of bliss. I also took home a yeast infection and a cold sore on my lip, but I went back the next week.

I started going to AA meetings at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center on
13
th Street in the West Village, not because I was looking for love (in fact, relationships and sex were the furthest things from my mind) but because all the best “circuit” speakers seemed to pop up there. Circuit speakers were sought after and known for their awesome stories of transformation. Mostly, these were drug addicts who had been at death’s door and who, through AA and finding a power greater than themselves, had been reborn.

I also met one of my best friends, Laura Coyle, through that Center, though she never was in AA herself. When I started going to AA meetings, I met her girlfriend, Trixie, a triple Leo who basically sucked up all the energy in a room, including the energy that was Laura Coyle. Laura has never been a shrinking violet, but in the glare of Trixie, she was kind of a vague background haze. . . . That is, until one day in yoga class.

I was a devotee of Integral Yoga, which was across the street from the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. After we’d go through all the asanas and breathing exercises, stretching and energizing every muscle in our bodies and exchanging all the stale air in our lungs for fresh, we would chant. This was my absolute favorite part. In a half lotus, I’d rock back and forth and bliss out to the experience of sound resonating in my body. It felt like my soul was being massaged, and I just loved it. On the day that Laura Coyle became something other than a vague presence to me, we had a substitute teacher. When this female instructor I’d never seen before began to lead us in the chant, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She sounded like Miss Hathaway from
The Beverly Hillbillies
: thin and reedy voice, and absolutely no ear or rhythm.
Why is this happening? Who allowed this?
Appalled, I opened my eyes and looked around the room.
Am I the only one who notices this?
I caught the eye of Laura Coyle, who, unbeknownst to me, was also taking this class. I saw she was having the same experience of yogic horror, and as that recognition passed between us, we started to giggle. I looked away and dropped my head forward so I wouldn’t laugh out loud, but of course I had to look up at her again. Laura was doubled over. When she looked up at me, I saw she had tears running down her cheeks and that her shoulders had started to shake, and I lost it. I was lucky I didn’t pee through the long underwear I was wearing for everything now, including yoga.

New best buddies. Me and Laura in the yoga changing room.

And with that, a lifelong friendship was born.

Throughout my life, friends would come and go. Laura stayed. Although in the glare of her girlfriend Trixie she had seemed almost retiring, I would very quickly discover her huge and loving energy. She is the most emotionally available person I’ve ever met. However, her blasting energy and love of life are not for the faint of heart. Her humor is fast and manic and goofy; she will tweak your nipple after just meeting you. In later years we would watch episodes of
Absolutely Fabulous
together. She is the perfect Edina to my Patsy, and she would go all-out to reenact moments from the show for me because she knew how much it slayed me.

We were in a crowded Sears one day and it was over one hundred degrees outside. While I was waiting in line to pay she said, “Watch.” She walked out the automatic glass doors in full view of everyone in the store, and when she hit the heat outside, à la the “Morocco”
episode, she collapsed into a heap on the pavement. Who would do that for a friend?! Laura Coyle, that’s who.

We would find something hilarious and play the joke to each other all day long. Like the day we kept seeing empty strollers all over Santa Monica. We walked all over yelling to each other in horror, “
Where are all the babies?!
” The humor would usually be lost on others long before it would die for us as we’d play it over and over. Laura would say, “We just
killed
that!”

Laura is a singer/songwriter. Her voice is incredibly beautiful, and she plays the guitar as if it were an extension of her very soul. She writes fantastic songs, and she holds the stage like few others. She can be singing about the joy of falling in love in one moment, and making you cry the next with a song about loss. Offstage she makes these emotional jumps with nary a transition. She can be cracking up about something in one moment and then crying about the plight of dolphins in the next. She has great compassion and can easily take on the suffering of others. I always say “Now, don’t go global on me!”