Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (33 page)

This was just the change I needed: A new country, a new starring role, a new sci-fi series, and comedy to boot! This was saving grace in action. With change comes hope.

I arranged to rent out my house short-term while my step father kept trying to make a sale. I was happy to let him manage it. After struggling to keep the house for so long, the finality of losing it was all too depressing, and I didn’t want to risk doing anything that might jeopardize my new job.

Unfortunately, the carefully executed system of binge-suffer-detox was not working as efficiently as it once had. I needed to sober up, but first I needed one last round of drinks before the bar closed. By then I only had bottles of cheap sherry and vodka in the cupboard. I could walk clear of the fallout of a wine binge within a week, but a binge on vodka was akin to a death sentence. Yet there was nothing else to drink, so I figured I’d dice with death and keep my fingers crossed. I crashed and burned big-time, and as I sat on my tiled kitchen floor, wasted and leaning up against my seafoam-green cupboards, I estimated that it would take me at least two to three weeks to pull clear of the vodka aftershock.

And then I remembered that I was due to visit my mom in Napa. I had already booked the flight.

You have to go. She’ll become suspicious if you pull out at the last minute. You can pull it off. Have another drink. That’s the world’s best hangover cure.

Shit! Mom was having a ladies’ luncheon and had made a big deal about my attending. Forget the silent phone—that was lightweight torment. Sitting through a rich women’s tea party while detoxing, that was a fate express-shipped straight from the deepest pits of the inferno right to my door.

But the monster was right. I couldn’t risk losing her support, not this close to starting my new life. I needed my mom to help prop me up until I could stand on my own again.

There was still a glass of vodka left in one of the bottles. I threw it down my throat and felt better at once. My nerves steadied; I could do it. That was it, my last drink. I was going to dry out. I’d white-knuckled it before and I could do it again. The women’s tea party was a bullet that I meant to dodge.

I couldn’t fuck up this visit at my mom’s, not after the last one. That had been a disaster of epic proportions.

On that occasion I thought I’d gone in prepared. I knew I was prone to drinking at my parents’ house. Family gatherings are always hot-buttons for me, so to avoid the awkward conversation when they noticed their booze slipping away at an alarming rate I supplemented my consumption with vodka that I’d smuggled in concealed in water bottles. I’ve never really liked hard liquor, but I needed something to numb me out.

My mom has given me a tremendous amount of love and support over the years, and yet she can be a very judgmental person. I’m no pushover, but all it took was one comment from her about my weight or my career to send me running for the bottle. I never felt that I was good enough in her eyes. I wasn’t thin enough or pretty enough or with the right guy or rich or famous enough. She wanted her children to be perfect physical specimens with perfect jobs, complete with perfect little families of their own. I guess it was a kind of German-clockwork fantasy, efficient little dolls popping out of the right window at the right time to hit the right bell, everything running smoothly. Add to that my sensitive nature and there was very little anyone could say that was critical without triggering me to drink.

We’d been sitting around the dinner table, my mom, my stepdad, and his son. I was slicing up my lamb chop, happily munching away, when my stepbrother asked if it was any good. I picked up a piece and fed it to him with no sensual motive in mind; I just wanted him to try some. I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my ankle and turned to see my mom’s narrowed eyes staring at me. She’d kicked me under the table.

“Stop that!”

I just smiled and kept on eating but inside the monster had been awakened and was already formulating what it considered an appropriate revenge. When we all went to bed I went and knocked on my stepbrother’s door, and I seduced him.

He was my stepfather’s adult adopted son, so there were no blood ties, and I didn’t break any laws, but just the same, it showed just how poor my judgment was. It turned out that he was an alcoholic, too, so we understood each other just fine. We combined our hidden stash of booze and partied on into the wee hours of the morning.

In the morning, after the shit storm had passed, I realized that I had an ear infection, which ruled out flying back to L.A. I was already legally deaf in one ear from an infection I had when I was a kid, so I was terrified of damaging my hearing even more.

My stepbrother offered to drive me to L.A., but my mom and stepdad commanded him to stay put and told me to get on the plane. Now it was his turn to stage a revolt.

“Screw this. I’m driving Claudia.”

He was living in their guesthouse, and they were employing him to landscape their garden.

“If you’re not here for work tomorrow then don’t bother coming back.”

He took me to L.A., and in doing so lost his job and accommodations. I felt guilty and invited him to stay with me. I understood where my stepdad was coming from. He was convinced I was on drugs and was just trying to save his son from getting involved with me.

So alcoholic stepbrother moved in, along with his wart-nosed mongrel called Pepsi. The party continued (stepbrother had some money set aside). I’ve never hated an animal in my life, not even Lucy, who tried to eat my face for lunch, but for the one exception of Pepsi. Whenever I’d go out she’d shit on my floor and chew my furniture. A collection of valuable Native American antiques that I’d been planning to sell ended up as Pepsi chew toys. Maybe she was the jealous type?

In a bout of sobriety I saw the stupidity of it, the rift this situation was opening up between my mother and me. Her marriage was under stress as long as it continued. So I told stepbrother the party was over and sent him and Pepsi on their way. He went back to doing what he did best—growing medicinal pot.

On the next visit to my mom’s house I was determined not to fuck up again. I was a rock. I was on the goddamn stairway to teetotaler’s heaven.

And now it’s four o’clock on the morning after the tea party, and my mom’s there for me again. She stands over me as I hang over a toilet bowl in her house, riding the last wave of a protracted vomiting fit.

The bullet I’d hoped to dodge had hit me right between the eyes. I drank a whole lot one night after an argument with my stepdad, and the next morning I was really sick. I decided to put myself on a forced detox, hoping I would snap out of it, but instead my body went into shock from the sudden alcohol deprivation. The upside was that I missed the tea party; the downside was that I suffered one of the toughest detoxes of my life. I hadn’t realized just how badly I’d poisoned myself. I lost motor functions and part of my vision. I didn’t know that by stopping cold turkey I was damaging both my body and my brain.

My mom didn’t understand just how bad it was for me. “Can’t you clean yourself up? Take a shower and come down to the party. It will do you good to talk to people.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“So, you’re not coming down to the party then?”

When the party was over, my mother returned to my side and watched me throw up bile. She was angry and confused, tears in her eyes. I was shaking like a leaf, hallucinating and crying. Shame and guilt aplenty, there was no shred of dignity to try to recover. I couldn’t even stand up; I was stuck on all fours like a baby.

“Claudia, I’ve had enough. I called Holly. She’s flying up, and we’re taking you to rehab. I’ve booked you in.”

I looked up from the bowl, clinging to it so I wouldn’t fall in. I had no fight left in me, no tricks up my sleeve. I could only manage one word: “Okay.”

It was that easy. I was desperate.

My mom went back to bed. I doubt she slept a wink. When the fit passed I managed to get up and limp down to the kitchen. You can’t sleep when you’re detoxing. You’re a human ant farm, busy little critters rushing around your body and mind driving you slowly crazy until you have to drink to make them stop.

I found an unfinished bottle of decent champagne and grabbed some chilled orange juice from the fridge. This would be my last drink. Seriously. The last one. So it might as well be a good one. I needed the drink to steady my nerves. I was determined that if I had to go into rehab, then I was going to drive myself, and I would drive myself out as well—out to the airport and off to my new job in merry England.

I mixed a killer mimosa and looked out the window at the view of my parents’ vineyards as I waited for the dawn. And I prayed. I prayed that God would heal me, that this really would be my last drink, that I could be set free from the cycle that was destroying not only me but my family.

The drive to the treatment center was a silent one. Holly and my mom sat in the back seat. All my energy was focused on shutting out the voice in my head telling me to turn the car around. Holly tried making conversation with my mom, who’d started mumbling away, mostly to herself, trying to understand how I’d ended up like this.

“You’re so beautiful, Claudia, so beautiful. Why do you want to do this to yourself?” And then she’d ask Holly, “Why doesn’t someone just make Claudia stop drinking?”

She couldn’t understand what I was going through. She thought I was weak. She thought that someone other than me might have been able to stop me. Holly didn’t tell her about the splintered cellar door and the crowbar and the French wines.

I said nothing. I was preparing for my latest role as a rehab junkie. I already knew what a rehab center looked like. I’d starred in
Clean and Sober
. It would be grimy, with dusty old couches and smoke-filled rooms. There’d be a Morgan Freeman guy, the supervisor who comes down hard on you when you’re tempted to relapse.

I was more than a little surprised when we pulled up to the swanky Bayside Marin rehabilitation center, a beautiful complex surrounded by majestic views. This was a far cry from the cellblock I’d been expecting.

I filled out the paperwork, peed into a cup, had blood drawn, and got a tour on the way to my private room. Someone asked me if I preferred tai chi or yoga in the morning before my organic whole-food breakfast. Fuck. I realized that, far from a place of last resort, this was in fact a resort.