High On Arrival (15 page)

I think they wrote Julie out of the show by having her run away. I can’t be sure—it’s not like I celebrated being fired by having viewing parties to watch the show go on without me— but I believe that Julie ran out on her husband, and it was about time for me to do the same.

Jeff was waiting for me in the parking structure when I came out of the meeting. I climbed into the car and said, “That’s it. I’m fired.” We went straight to the dealer’s house.

When I was fired from
One Day at a Time,
I didn’t realize what I had. I thought,
Fuck them. I’ll get another job.
But I’d already dug my grave. Drugs were expensive and my paycheck was gone, but I had no luck getting work. I’d hear about jobs that sounded right for me, but nobody could get me an appointment for an audition. Word was out in the industry that I was unreliable, and nobody wanted to hire me. I was blacklisted. And they were right. I was completely out of control. And we were running out of cash. Work had been a stabilizing force, and once it was gone, my life began to crumble. Now that I wasn’t leaving for work every day, I was home. Home in the marriage that had begun with a flameout of destruction and ruin. Home with Jeff, the man whose own mother had warned me against him.

In the beginning Jeff was cocky and confident, which was attractive until it veered into excess. We had an amazing sex life, but now that wasn’t enough for him. We’d have threesomes and I’d have to watch him fuck other women. To watch the man I loved have sex with other people was painful, and to see him take glee in my sadness was heartbreaking.

When I still had a job, Jeff had started to become controlling and possessive. When I went to work I had to take my pager so he could reach me at all times. Even so, I’d come home to an interrogation:
Where have you been? Who did you talk to? Who was that guy?
He was afraid of losing me.

Now that I was home, he grew more threatening. I had known women who were abused by men, and now I saw how it happened. My attentive, doting husband was becoming one of those men. I don’t know if his abusiveness was triggered by marriage, money, drugs, or all three, but suddenly he was no longer the silly, loving man I’d married and I was a prisoner. If I stood up, Jeff wanted to know where I was going. If he didn’t want me to leave, he’d say, “You’re not going. Sit down.” He told me, “If you leave me, you leave with half a face.” He slept with his hand under my thigh. He didn’t let me see anyone he didn’t want me to see. My family was worried about me—so they fell into the category of people he didn’t want me to see.

By the time I realized what was happening, my relationship had blown up in my face. Our home grew increasingly violent. Jeff threw me down the stairs. I kicked him in the balls. We got into a huge fight on a night when Jeff’s father and his girlfriend were staying at our house. I called to his dad to help me but the man wouldn’t help. I never liked that man.

Jeff was out of control, doing crazy drug stuff, spending all my money, fucking other girls in front of me. One night I woke to find him shaking my shoulder. As I opened my eyes, he asked me to sign a blank check. I rolled over and socked him in the nose. It wasn’t the money, though he was bleeding me dry, it was the inhumanity. I’m not a violent person, but I had never had anyone try to put me under his thumb like that. It came really close to breaking my spirit. I put up a front, pretending that everything was fine, but I was falling apart. I lost all sense of myself. I was a walking skeleton. A zombie. I felt soul-sick.

It all came to a head one weekend. Jeffrey and I had bought a huge amount of cocaine that he was planning to sell at a profit. Soon he was hoovering it up, while insisting that I not use the “merchandise,” which I did anyway. Maybe all druggies have this battle, trying to turn their passion for drugs into a business, wheeling and dealing, stealing and cheating themselves, resenting one another for diminishing the supply. Whatever the case, between our two out-of-control selves, we ended up doing all of the cocaine that we had planned to sell.

Jeff said, “Go to McQueeney’s and get a check.” He wanted me to get money from my manager, Pat McQueeney, so we could pay our dealers for the coke. It’s one of those moments I see from above, as if someone described it to me, but nobody else was there. I was wearing red overalls, a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, and sneakers. I gave Jeff a kiss and got into my car. This was my chance, the first time he’d let me leave the house alone in weeks and weeks. I was about to save my own life. I beeped the horn twice on the way down the hill, like I always did. I glanced over my shoulder at the house. Many times I had stayed up all night and become delusional at that house. I never went back.

I drove straight to Pat McQueeney’s office, burst through the door, and told her, “I’m half dead, so unless you want to finish me off, file for divorce right now.”

I was broken, distraught, lost. From the outside the marriage may have seemed doomed from the start, but I had been too wrapped up in it to see that. Since I had sacrificed Peter, I had to believe that Jeff was the love of my life.

Running away took all my strength, but once I made the break, I did everything I could to make sure it was permanent. In seven months of marriage I had lost seven hundred thousand dollars, much of it to drugs and Jeff’s spending. My bank account was drained, my house was gone, and I knew that if nothing changed I’d be destitute, drug-addicted, and married to an asshole. I told Pat to cut Jeff off, and to repossess his car and everything he had that I had bought.

Jeff was going to be mighty pissed. I had to get out of L.A. I called the person who, in my twisted mind, represented safety: my father. I knew my father wouldn’t say I told you so. I knew he wouldn’t judge me. I had pushed the rape aside. It didn’t matter in this moment. I knew that this was one of those times when Dad would come to my rescue, and he did. He said, “You’re coming to New York. Go to the airport, there’s a prepaid ticket waiting for you.”

I arrived at the airport, and there was no ticket. And the flight he’d told me to take was full. I should have put it together that Dad couldn’t afford a plane ticket, didn’t even have the wherewithal to arrange one. Countless times throughout my life, he’d promised me plane tickets. I always arrived at the airport expecting them to be there, and they never were. I had only myself and my stubborn willingness to believe in him to blame. I whipped out my trusty credit card and got on the next flight.

When I arrived in New York there was no one there to pick me up. I waited a long time, hours, trying in vain to reach Dad. This, if anything, was the message my father sent me over and over again in the hours I spent waiting for him, wanting his attention, craving his love:
I love you. I will rescue you. Don’t count on me.

15

I’d been with Jeff for half a year, and during that time I’d lost Peter, my house, my grandmother, my job, and, it seemed, my soul. A fire had swept across my life and left only ashes. But the worst was far from over.

After I’d been waiting for hours at the airport in New York, a driver finally showed up and took me to Connecticut, where Dad and Gen were now living. Let’s see, what was new with them: Gen was hugely pregnant with her second child, and Dad was hooked on heroin. He was working some scam where he brought blank prescription pads to a pharmacy on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and in return they gave him boxes and boxes of narcotics and syringes, which he’d turn around and sell or trade to street dealers for heroin or cocaine. My father was no longer a stoner musician, or even just a flat-out addict. No, Dad was too smart for that mundanity. He was trafficking drugs, big-time. All hell was about to break loose in that house, but regardless of the drugs, my dad, the loss of Dini—the next cloud to shadow me was brought on by nothing but my own fucked-up, warped self.

In my dad’s Connecticut house there were loaded syringes hidden everywhere. When you’re a needle freak, there’s comfort in knowing that next time you need a shot, there will be one ready and waiting for you. Besides, I think Dad had to hide them from Genevieve. My dad was at least half a foot taller than anyone else who might come into the house. And so in that beautiful old house he kept them stored on top of bookshelves, balanced on top of window ledges and door frames, stashed out of sight above the refrigerator. Syringes were stowed anywhere normal-size people couldn’t see them.

Never one to shy away from dispensing fatherly advice, Dad kept telling me that shooting coke was a better high. He said it was like being smacked in the face with a cocaine truck. I’d never shot up before, but the line of fear that I’d drawn at using needles was fading. A better high … that sounded good. Yes! A better high was what I wanted, and I wanted it more than anything. I wanted it so much, in fact, that I couldn’t quite remember what was so bad about needles. There’s a natural progression in anything you do. As you become comfortable at a certain level, the next level becomes more accessible. This is a good thing, say, if you’re skiing. As your skill increases, the expert hills don’t look so steep. But after two years of smoking freebase, I found myself at the unfortunate juncture where shooting up was just skiing down a slightly steeper hill, and I was ready.

As a child my father’s boundless world had been fun and carefree, like the song “Down the Beach,” which he wrote about Michelle:
Things are cooler in my castle … everything is stoned and groovy
… I went from being attracted to the liberal ease of it all to being attracted to the dark danger of it. As my dad went down an alternative path, he didn’t lose his appeal. I just switched to what he was doing. Nobody grows up thinking,
I want to be a junkie,
but in a weird way I did. I wanted to be whatever it took to fit in with my dad, his friends, and his life.

Where does a girl turn for help when she doesn’t know how to shoot up coke? Daddy. To be fair, once I finally wanted to try it, my father was a little reluctant. After all, it wasn’t exactly teaching your kid to drive a car. But eventually there we were, in the master bathroom. With a look of anticipation, Dad put some coke in a spoon, poured some distilled water into a syringe, and squirt it into the spoon. Then he flipped the syringe over and used the plunger to mix the powder and water. He tore the cotton tip off a Q-tip and dropped it into the solution to filter out impurities. He pulled the liquid through the cotton into the syringe, flicked it, and we were ready. He had on half glasses, the reading glasses he wore to see close up. I put my right arm out. He tied me off. He was squinting, trying to see the vein, but when he pushed the needle through my skin he missed. It’s common to miss; maybe I was holding my arm at an odd angle, maybe my vein rolled, maybe, just maybe, he was nervous to be shooting up his own child—but whatever the case, he missed. I was pissed off. I knew that missed veins caused scarring. I’d seen my father’s arms, covered with dark track marks and thick with white scar tissue. Dad, maybe a little bit relieved, said, “I’m not doing it again. Forget it.”

I went back to my room with one of his loaded syringes. I wanted to shoot up in my ankle because I didn’t want to ruin my arms. I timidly poked myself a couple times, but I had no idea what I was doing. Then my father walked in. He took in the scene: I was on the floor in an awkward crouch. The needle was tentatively aimed at my ankle. I’d forgotten to make a tourniquet. He said, “Aw, honey. You’re not doing it right. But I’m not going to do it.”

I said, “Talk me through it,” so he did. And I was off to the fucking races. Daddy’s little girl, all grown up.

I was happy to be where I was. With my Dad. Doing drugs all day and night. I tried to shoot myself up a few more times, with varying success. Dad wouldn’t prepare syringes for me, and I was scared that the loaded ones I found around the house would be too much for me and cause me to overdose. So I’d try to do part of one, or I’d chicken out midshot and miss my vein. But there were plenty of new, colorful pills to lab-test on myself. Every so often I’d join Dad for the drive in to New York to pick up drugs and supplies at the pharmacy. Otherwise, I just stayed home and partied with Dad and Gen. I had escaped Jeff, and now I lived a much more palatable version of terrible with people I knew and loved.

Dad and Gen had won custody of Tam. Dad, true to form, had convinced the courts that the situation with Tam was all a big misunderstanding—he and Gen
weren’t
junkies. They loved their son and wanted nothing more than to provide a good home for him in the fancy Connecticut home that they would soon litter with umpteen needles.

In Connecticut, they had forged an odd friendship with their next-door neighbors. The Thurlows were a young, friendly, well-rounded, churchgoing family. When I showed up they invited us all to dinner so their young daughter Katie, who had acted in school plays, could meet the TV star next door. It was the night of their son Michael’s first Communion. I showed up several hours late, on downers. I sat next to Katie, laboring over weighty decisions like how to get a fork up to my mouth, but before I could eat much of dinner, I passed out, face-planting in a plate of mashed potatoes. Katie must have been shocked to see this whole new side of Julie Cooper. My dad, for once at a loss, tried to blame my behavior on antibiotics. He needn’t have bothered trying to sustain the charade. That night he left a trench coat at the Thurlows with a bloody tourniquet and prescription pad in the pocket. All I can hope is that the Thurlows dined out for years on their tale of the degenerate neighbors who spoiled their son’s Communion dinner. We owed them that.

Though Dad’s supply seemed endless, he controlled what Gen and I used. She was his pregnant wife, I was his daughter—could be that he wanted to protect us, but more likely he just relished being the drug master. On April Fools’ Day, Gen and I found a Dilaudid, an opiate stronger than morphine, on the floor, hiding in the carpet behind the door like a little chocolate Easter egg that somehow stayed hidden through all previous hunts. I suspect Dad had dropped it there. He liked to plant little surprises for us to find.

I snapped the pill in two, and in true Genevieve fashion she snatched half and ran. Who knows what she did with hers, but I immediately shot up the other half. Dilaudid is synthetic heroin that’s given to terminal cancer patients for pain. I felt the instant surge of euphoria and went upstairs to lie down. A few hours later I woke up to hear a commotion downstairs. I came to the top of the stairs, but Dad yelled up for me to stay where I was. Gen had just given birth to my little sister on the couch.

Bijou was born tiny. It was spring, but snow was falling, and the volunteer ambulance guys who finally showed up had no oxygen and no heat and they were hell drunk. They rushed Bijou to a nearby hospital and she was soon transferred to the Yale–New Haven Newborn Special Care Unit.

The first time I saw Bijou was in the hospital. She was so small, all wiry arms and legs, hooked up to a million monitors in a special crib. She may have been born into irresponsible, reckless hands, but Bijou was a beautiful, perfect, heavenly light sparkling through the clouds. We loved her—we all loved her immediately, deeply, and relentlessly.

Dad, Gen, Tam, and I moved to a hotel right near Yale–New Haven to keep vigil on our little jewel. My father was self-righteous about his drug use, but he didn’t want to lose Bijou, and he knew that he had something to hide from the powers that be. When we went to the hospital, Dad hid the track marks on his arms with long-sleeved shirts. But that didn’t cover the track marks on his hands. An old junkie trick is to cover up track marks with a layer of toothpaste, then spread makeup on top. Effective
and
thrifty. Every day before we went into the special care unit I covered my dad’s tracks for him. They kept the nursery warm for the newborns, and when Dad put on gloves to hold Bijou, he’d start to sweat and the makeup would get gooey under the gloves—it looked like his hands were melting off inside them. I think of those sweaty, goopy, destroyed hands, the hands that held Bijou so gently, the hands that made music, the hands that reflected a life of contradictions and despair.

There’s a song from the fifties by a band called Lambert, Hendricks & Ross called “Bijou.” I’d sing it to her—
ma petite bijou
—while I rubbed her tiny feet and tiny legs. Little Bijou— she has triumphed over incredible odds. Her story is her own, but my culpability is part of it. I witnessed the dangers of Genevieve’s pregnancy. I shot up with her. I was there, complicit, the night of Bijou’s birth. My brother Tamerlane was about ten years old. He and I shared a room at the hotel near the hospital, and while I prayed for our sister’s survival from a drug-wrecked birth, I did coke in front of him many times.

I had no sense of the hypocrisy in how much I loved my two younger siblings and how damaging my actions may have been to them. I watched them endure horrific parenting; I behaved irresponsibly in front of them; and later I would make essentially the same mistakes with my own son. There are people in the world who do these things, and I was one of them. We all survived, but barely.

Then, out of the blue, Dad decided that I needed to go to rehab. I was taken aback.
Excuse me? I need to go to rehab? What about you?
But Dad had a point. While he was preoccupied with Bijou, his control of my drugs slackened and my use escalated dramatically. I think Pat McQueeney must have chimed in to persuade Dad to get me help, and he in turn convinced me to go to a psychiatric facility called Silver Hill. It was a country club–like rehab in tony New Canaan that Dad thought was cool because Truman Capote used to go there to dry out. I agreed to go—I’d reached a point where the drugs weren’t fun. I was just stuck in a cycle of needing more and more and I wanted out. Silver Hill didn’t have much experience with drug addiction—I believe I was one of the first cocaine patients they ever had—but they took me in.

My father came to visit me. It pissed me off that I was in rehab when his habit was worse than mine, though any sensible person could’ve seen that it wasn’t a competition. I said, “You know what? This isn’t fair. You’re as bad off as I am.” I made him check in and join me as a patient. It’s safe to say that neither of us was wholly committed to recovery, but I, at least, was clean. Dad, on the other hand, asked me to pee in a cup for him and hide it in the woods so he could hand them my pee when they drug-tested him. Eventually he just checked himself out. Maybe they caught him swapping pee cups. I don’t know how it went down.

I met a guy at rehab named Dolfi Aberbach. Like me, he was in for cocaine. He was tall, elegant, and charming. I thought he was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Dolfi and I spent a lot of time talking and becoming close friends. After a couple of weeks, Dolfi signed himself out, which meant he was leaving without completing his rehab, against medical advice. The next day I signed myself out. So much for staying clean. As I left, the staff said, “Say hello to Dolfi.”

Genevieve came to pick me up in a limo and the first stop was to buy cocktails for two. Because cocktails are an excellent way to celebrate ditching rehab. When we arrived home we did shots of tincture of morphine. Morphine: more celebration. Later that day we took a car into Manhattan to see Dolfi, and I stayed.

Dolfi and I didn’t even pretend to want to be clean. In Connecticut, at Dad’s, I’d never gotten the hang of needles. Now, in a matter of days, Dolfi taught me to shoot up for real, and we proceeded to shoot outrageous amounts of cocaine together. We were young. We were rich. Money from reruns and/or syndication was accumulating now that Jeff had stopped draining the coffers. We could go anywhere and do anything we wanted. We chose to sit around and shoot coke. Sometimes we drove to Connecticut to see Bijou and Tam and to partake in Dad’s wares. We’d crouch down in the back of the limo, shooting up all the way. We visited Betsy Asher, my ex-boyfriend’s ex-wife, at her hotel and snuck into the bathroom to do a shot. Coke was all we did day and night.