Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (6 page)

When I got up to pee, the room started to whirl. I made my way to the bathroom like I was on a speedboat driven by Daniel Craig. I threw up white liquid that resembled a paste used for découpaging tables. My hands were shaking, and clearly someone had thrown a grenade into my brain. I made what I considered a wise choice at the time: to immediately fly home to D.C. Something was wrong, my sensors were out of whack, and I needed balance, I needed my mom. I grabbed my clothes, books, and the bag of cocaine. My thinking was that I needed to come down slowly, so I’d taper off little by little. (What did I know? I wasn’t raised in Coconut Grove!) I left the South American drug cartel and Abigail a note—“Freaked out, going home, thanks for the hospitality, you’re out of Coke—Ali.”

By the time the taxi pulled up at Logan airport, I was sweating profusely; a heart attack was imminent. And then, in slow motion, I saw guards and United Airline representatives eyeing me suspiciously. Everyone knew, and it was just a matter of time before I was surrounded by machine guns, blinding floodlights, and salivating German shepherds. I ran to the ladies’ room and flushed the white horse down the toilet. I was not going to spend my life in a Turkish prison!

The plane ride was endless. The stewardess looked concerned, kept asking me if I was okay and if I needed water. I was licking my lips like a puppy who’d been fed peanut butter.

My older brother, John, answered the front door. He was home from Brown for a few days. “What happened to you?”

I fell to the ground in the fetal position. “I snorted fourteen grams of cocaine!” This was not something he expected from me. He reacted with a combination of horror and pride. He called the cocaine hotline and had a long discussion with an ex-addict named Nancy who begged my brother not to give me any other substances. “She’s tweaking from the crap it’s cut with, not the actual cocaine itself. She should only drink water and eat steamed vegetables for the next few days.” Are you telling me John DeLorean got through detox on bok choy?

I tossed and turned in my bed, moaning as my brother placed cold washcloths on my head. And then we heard the front door slam and our miniature dachshund, Chester, yelping. We knew. Muffie was home.

“She has the flu, so the school sent her home.” My brother intercepted Mom as she cautiously entered my bedroom.

“They never called me? If she’s sick, why did they make her travel?”

John was quick. “They wanted her to see the doctor here.” Well, that made no sense, and the last thing you want to do when you’re strung out on illicit drugs is be prodded by a medical professional and given a blood test.

My mother came over and felt my forehead. “She’s cold!” She pulled the goose-down duvet up to my chin. Apparently, hyperthermia is a symptom of an overdose. That, or I was already dead.

My mother immediately took charge. She insists on antibiotics at the first nose drip. When she’s sick, her side table is spilling over with bottles and Kleenex boxes, potions and remedies. Sleeping pills were placed in our mouths like the body of Christ when we were home for school breaks. They were to help us catch up on our sleep, even though that’s all we did anyway.

She walked into my bathroom and inspected my medicine cabinet. She gingerly rearranged the contents, removing a bottle of Nyquil, some Tylenol, and something that’s been recalled by now. “Here we go!” She extracted a prescription vial that had sat in the medicine cabinet since I had my tonsils out at twelve. She held it up to the light and smiled. “Amoxicillin will knock out any virus.”

A mother’s power is hypnotic. I offered not a whisper of protest as she lovingly fed me pill after pill, shot of Nyquil after shot of Nyquil. I knew the dangers of administering even more drugs to my toxic body, but I was willing to play Sunny von Bülow if only to be cuddled and coddled that day, far from the rat race of defective teens.

And for my daughters reading this: I experimented with cocaine just once so you won’t have to. By the time you’re reading this I will have already shown you an unlimited number of drug documentaries, HBO’s
Addiction
,
Celebrity Rehab
,
Heroin: The Next Generation
,
Intervention
, photos of drug-related overdose autopsies and the film
Valley of the Dolls
. I will have stamped out any need for experimentation (not to mention my photographic scientific textbook on sexually transmitted diseases). Besides, knitting is so much more fun!

Chapter Seven

Mi Familia!

A
s kids, we were shipped off more times than a Pottery Barn catalog. I had sleepaway camp at nine, boarding school at thirteen, and then Spain the summer of my fifteenth year. It was called “the experiment in international living.” Disconcerting title, I know. Like they just parachute you down in Kazakhstan and see what happens. Well, actually, they kind of do.

I packed what any sheltered preppy in high school would when setting off for a European tour: seven Laura Ashley skirts, Bloomingdale’s days-of-the-week undies, a tennis racquet, and my collection of Bonne Bell lip smackers.

I found myself standing in the Madrid airport with a group of gum-smacking teenagers in a sea of monogrammed L.L.Bean tote bags, lacrosse sticks, and duffels with old claim tickets from St. Kitts and Vail. I scrutinized the crowd and, as if picking out the least-expired lettuce from the salad bar, chose a girl named Jennifer to be my summer friend. Jennifer had long, chestnut-colored hair, eyes that looked perpetually stoned (because they were), a Rolling Stones tour T-shirt, dolphin shorts, tube socks, and Dr. Scholl’s. She was never without a Walkman blaring from her ears. Even when we had our most private conversations, I could hear the dull roar of classic rock. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if she was giving me genuine advice or just regurgitating the lyrics assaulting her at that moment. I mean, why would I want to fly like an eagle?

Lucky for us, we were both placed in the same town five hours outside Madrid, a desolate desert town called Zamora. I couldn’t wait to charge Arnold Palmers at the beach club, shop for souvenirs, and meet a sun-kissed Spanish surfer (even though we were hundreds of miles from water). I even brought tubes of Clinique’s fake tan mousse to jump-start my Mediterranean glow.

The bus we took to Zamora resembled the vintage transports that run through San Francisco’s Chinatown. The majority of passengers were local farmers with—this is the truth—chickens and goats occupying seats next to them. The ride was cacophonous, turbulent, and stank like an unattended hamster cage. One woman, somewhere in her late nineties, wearing a scarf that had survived eight wars, stared at my Prince tennis racquet the entire trip. I figured she was thinking she could strain her rice with it. Or finish off that no-good husband.

Zamora looked like the back lot at Universal Studios where they shot the westerns starring Lee Marvin that run on unheard-of cable channels at odd hours of the night. While I gathered my personalized duffels, Jennifer flipped the Pink Floyd tape in her Walkman and added a new piece of Big Red gum to the wad in her mouth, and we both, with intense trepidation, began our perilous summer teen tour. There were two families standing across the road, anxiously trying to get a glimpse of the kid they were getting paid $200 a week to house. A fair exchange of “take my hormonal teen for the summer and you’ll get a new cart for your donkey.”

Jennifer’s family seemed pleased when they met her, stroking her hair for an unhealthy length of time. We found out later that the last summer guest they had lodged was a boy from Paramus who wanted a homosexual experiment in international living. He chased their teenage son, Jesus, incessantly around the house and through the fields until Boy George was shipped back to New Jersey. Jesus now spends a lot of time in church.

My family was a jolly (read: obese) bunch who looked like a photo stretched to panaromic view. There was Papa, who looked like Javier Bardem if Javier Bardem had swallowed Penelope Cruz; Mama, a Hispanic Delta Burke (post–
Designing Women
); Jose (Spain’s version of Charlie Brown); and three older sisters, who reminded me of increasingly chubby babushka nesting dolls.

I looked around for the Buick Regal or Chrysler LeBaron, but before I knew it we were hoofing it up a hill, my suitcase and racquet dragged behind us by an extremely sweaty Jose. The house was a small three-bedroom they had built by hand with the help of the entire town—about fifty people, give or take a goat. It had a mud-and-straw-patched roof and looked like an
Elle Décor
photo of how I picture Michael Douglas’s guesthouse in Mallorca, rustic and authentic. My room was quaint and cozy: a single bed with lumpy, lopsided hay-filled pillows and torn coverlet. A cross with an unhappy Christ nailed to it hung on the wall.

Dinner was like an all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet. There were potatoes baked in fat. Meat baked in fat. Fat baked in fat. After every third bite my Spanish father would hold up a goatskin sack and pour sangria down my throat. Then another course would come out, and another . . . I stumbled from the table, barely making my way to my bed; going up the stairs was like walking up a slide lined with Crisco. I collapsed, only to be awakened a few hours later for dinner. The earlier feast had been supper, not dinner. Like having breakfast, then immediately brunch. The Spaniards eat four meals a day. You know how geese are force-fed until their liver explodes to make foie gras terrine? I could barely keep my eyes open as the father poured another liter of sangria down my throat.

The next morning I woke up with what I thought was double vision from a throbbing hangover. I hallucinated a Spanish rave of people in my bed. And when I rolled over to stop the pain and got my right eye to focus, I realized this was, in fact, the case. I was in a bed full of Spanish people. Contrary to my assumption that I’d have an ounce of privacy, I did not have my own room; I shared it with Jose and the three gaseous sisters. To this day, when my husband accidentally touches me during the night, I sit up and scream, “Dios me ayuda!” (God help me!)

T
he highlight of each week in Zamora took place on Wednesday, when the whole town would come over to our house at nine o’clock in the evening. My Spanish family had the only television in southern Spain, and Wednesday night was
Dallas
night. The talk of the stall mucking was what nasty thing J. R. Ewing (pronounced Hera Arra Oowing) was up to. The fifty townspeople would cram into the living room, saddling one another, to get a glimpse of the fourteen-inch black-and-white TV. There would be deafening silence until Linda Gray (whose voice was dubbed by a Hispanic male wrestler) screamed an ultimatum at the stable boy. The room would shake their heads with gasps and
tsk
s. One great-great-great-grandmother would stand up and, shaking her fists, scream at the actors as if certain she was getting through to them. My favorite moment of the evening was when our dog, Carne, would excrete the most heinous fart imaginable, and my father, without turning to face the canine, would spray generic room deodorizer in the dog’s direction. After a childhood of black-tie dinners for the likes of Lady Bird Johnson, this was what I called a party!

It was during this summer that I learned that a pet could be your best friend and also your lunch. You could dress them in your doll’s clothes and name them Buttercup or slaughter them over a bloody slab of stone out back. It was really a cultural choice.

Jose and I were playing our usual game—How many cookies can you cram in your mouth without choking?—when my mother waddled into the kitchen with a chore for me. “Yo necessito pollo por favor.”

I knew she needed something, but
pollo
was drawing a blank. “Pollo,” she repeated sternly.

“Like on horses? With a mallet?” We continued with this Abbott and Costello routine until finally Jose got up and starting clucking around the room. “Ohhh . . . chicken,” I realized. “I’ll go to the market,” I assured her, using my fingers to mime the universal symbol of money. She and Jose looked at me with confusion. And then, like a Vegas bookie, I mimed counting money. She kept shaking her head. Perhaps I could just charge it to their account.

I walked down the parched road, choking on dust as I made my way into town. And by town, I mean one store of groceries and sundries the size of a New York kitchen run by a cantankerous old lady with no teeth (you know her as the lady who berates the people who live in the TV). I had gone about twenty-five yards when Jose, breathless, beckoned me back. I assumed my mother was adding to the list, maybe fruit roll-ups or coffee Häagen-Dazs. I, like my Spanish family, was now obsessed with all the gifts of the culinary world. I prayed for six meals a day; two hours between feedings felt like starvation and abuse, no matter how many lard balls and chocolate I ate to tide me over.

I slogged back up the road and followed Jose around the back of the house to an arid field. There was a chicken coop and loose (or as the Californians say, cage-free) hens chortling about. He pointed to one. “Uh-huh,” I said. “Is that your favorite?” He repeatedly pointed to the hen. “What? You want me to name it?” And then Jose made a gesture normally only associated with serial killers and Robert De Niro. He took his two palms and made a snapping noise while he turned them swiftly counterclockwise.

“KILL IT? Are you out of your fucking mind?” Jose chased the chicken around for ten minutes, occasionally slipping on bird turds, until he snagged it by its ruffled left wing. He placed it in my arms. I don’t know if you’ve ever held a live chicken, but it’s like holding a puppy after it’s drunk ten espressos. Jose placed my hands around the chicken’s neck and then had the audacity to smile. I tried to twist the neck, but it was more of a massage than a proper wrenching; the bird did seem to relax. Finally, Jose, who had reached the breaking point, so to speak, grabbed the chicken, bent it over his knee, and snapped the neck. As easily and swiftly as one would break twigs for kindling. The bird went limp and fell to the ground. I was right behind it.

I felt like Hannibal Lecter that night, sopping up the chicken stew with hunks of crusty bread. But I was starving; it had been forty-five minutes since my last meal. You’d think that afternoon massacre would have prompted a conversion to veganism, but one taste of the spicy sausage in the paella shackled my compassion. To this day I have repeated nightmares in which the souls of all of the animals I’ve eaten gather to gnaw me to death. Yet I always wake up with a yen for bacon.

I
spent the rest of the summer cutting slits in the elastic waistbands of my skirts. I had gained thirty-five pounds, most of which went right to my face. It was as if someone had put a bicycle pump up my mouth and inflated until the brink of explosion. After almost three months of asking, “Quien disparo JR?” and scarfing
tortillas de patatas
, I decided to meet my best friend, Holly, in Paris before returning to the land of Ann Taylor, Skittles, and MTV. Holly was having her own teenage summer abroad, just more luxe. She lived with a French family on avenue Foch, in the chicest arrondissement of Paris. She was smoking Gitanes and being courted by French boys with silk ascots and tailored shirts. The only chicken she choked belonged to a French banker’s son, in the garden maze of their weekend chateau.

We decided to travel to Brittany and stay in a bed-and-breakfast. It was the first time we had traveled unchaperoned; this was before AMBER Alerts, and children on milk cartons were just getting started. The notion of anything
Law & Order SVU
happening to us never crossed our minds, perhaps because we were more predator than prey. Today I am so paranoid, I tried to find a GPS-tracking chip to implant in my daughter’s scalp so if she were ever abducted, I could track her down like a missing Honda. I still may buy the patent.

The first order of business in the majestic northeast part of France was to ignore the ravishing countryside with the misty moors, and lose pounds. We were both pudgy (read: fat), and needed to slim down before we went back to Paris, a city where women look like walking wind chimes with blunt haircuts and poppy red lipstick. So we created our own diet, a cleanse of sorts. We drank only black tea with heaps of sugar and triple cream. Take that, South Beach diet! After two days we became weak and light-headed insomniacs and back in Paris decided to trade in our weight-loss pact for a platter of profiteroles and that cheese at Café Lipp that smells like feet.

I didn’t think it possible for me to tip the scales at 140 pounds, but when I arrived at Dulles International Airport, I was pushing 153 pounds. I had become the “before” in the Jenny Craig posters. As I collected my luggage at baggage claim (I had left the tennis racquet in Zamora; Jose begged to have it to play Hit the Cowpatty Over the House), I scanned the crowds. And then I spotted her. My mother was wheeling an airport cart in my direction. She was statuesque and tan and gracefully pushed the cart before her like a stewardess offering the warm cookies in first class.

I smiled. I was ecstatic to see her—and the Burger King sign just beyond. She got closer and closer. She smiled, I smiled; my steps turned to a light trot, my arms outstretched. And then . . . she walked right past me.

I paused for a Whopper and then set off to find her.