I'm the One That I Want (22 page)

I think if we all told our stories and said out loud what has happened to us, to warn other women, to comfort those who have had the same things happen to them, to show that we are not alone, the world would suddenly become a bigger and better place.

People ask me sometimes if I ever go too far, if I ever reveal too much of myself and later regret it. I don’t think it is possible to get too personal. We all have pain. We all have doubt and sadness and horrible things that have happened that shouldn’t have, and when we cover them up and try to pretend that everything is okay, then our stories are forgotten, and our truths become lies.

I tell the truth because I am not afraid to. I tell the ugliness to show you the beauty. But there is so much ugliness still left.

16

THE DRINKING CURE

I was very disappointed by the entire screenplay episode. I was very disappointed by life. It seemed like my existence was hopeless, and that everything and everyone was against me. I thought the only solution was to drink myself to death.

It was interesting when I actually decided on suicide. It seemed very practical to me. I wasn’t sad about it. It wasn’t a big, tragic melodramatic thing. I just felt relieved. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I was at peace.

I knew that I didn’t have the courage to jump off a building or blow my head off, but I always held those as options in the back of my mind, in case things got completely intolerable. I was content to drink as much as I could until I just stopped breathing. That seemed sensible enough.

Of course, this decision to drink myself to death had been a long time coming, but now the alcohol also helped me to stand being myself for another day. I hated myself and everything I had done, and I wanted to get out, get away from me. Being drunk gave me the ability to romanticize my fall somewhat, feel beautifully doomed like Marilyn Monroe, swallowing handfuls of pharmaceuticals and red wine. I felt it would all be good for the biography someone would write in the future. That’s funny, but it’s true!

I still had to try to make money, so I took comedy gigs when they came along, but I was usually so drunk onstage I would have to hold the mike stand to keep the room from spinning around me. I was slowly turning into
The Rose
.

Once, at the Irvine Improv, I was headlining the show, but I had so little confidence in my ability that I brought three other acts with me—not including the other two guys already booked. I went on last and barely eked out a pathetic set while the patrons left in droves.

Too fucked up to drive back to L.A., the three comics and I got a room at the local hotel. For some unfathomable reason, I sent two of the comics to the store for more booze so I could fuck the other one while they were gone.

I don’t know why I did this. I didn’t even like him. He was a nice enough guy, but I wasn’t attracted to him. He got on top of me and moved his fingers around inside me and kept saying, “Where’s your spot? Where’s your spot?” and I couldn’t even feel it. It was confusing. “Spot! I usually park on the street.” Or “Spot? I don’t have a dog.”

Fortunately, the other guys came back pretty fast as there were no stores open, and we all fell asleep fully clothed on the bed. Later, that guy kept calling me and calling me, to see if I was okay, to tell me what CDs he had in his stereo, to see if he could find my spot again. I couldn’t talk to him, it was too embarrassing.

If I was promiscuous, it wasn’t out of a love of sex. I tended to despise sex, ever since that first awful time. I was just using it as an escape, a way to get power and alleviate boredom, and also, interestingly enough, a way to avoid real intimacy.

Waking up with a hangover was a regular, normal thing, but the morning after the “where’s your spot” incident, it was truly evil. I think that I did drugs and alcohol with such a vengeance so I could avoid mornings like those, hoping against hope that I could bypass the hangover and just not wake up. It was all part of the suicide solution.

That morning, my headache woke me before the morning light. I drove back to L.A. midday, feeling every few seconds like I was about to throw up. Getting home, I tried to ease the pain by watching
In the Name of the Father
while hanging upside down on my couch, but even the Irish struggle could not compare with the war raging inside my head. The hangover lasted well into the night, the second evening of the horrible Irvine gig, and carried over to the next drunk. And on and on.

In a way, I liked being hungover, because it was the only time I was kind to myself. It was the one time I would allow myself to eat fattening, rich foods without beating myself up about it. I needed the calories to get back on my feet again. I treated myself to big bagels stuffed with cheese and avocado, alongside massive bowls of matzo ball soup. The starch blocked the pain in my stomach and my head, and eating took away the horrible brown taste in my mouth.

After eating, I would get movies and sit at home all day watching them, imagining that I was doing something for myself, like I was attending my own film school.

Sometimes, I just had to drink in the morning to keep from being sick. At first, I tried to be genteel about it, feeling like David Niven and serving myself tall Bloody Marys, but after a while, shots from last night’s bottle seemed good enough. I’d start to average two or three hangovers a day, drinking to get over the first one, getting drunk, falling asleep, waking up in the middle of the day with another one, drinking it away and getting a headache again.

Then the sun would set and the true drinking would commence, until I passed out for the night and the whole thing would begin again the next day.

I still took massive doses of diet pills, which would somehow balance out the alcohol, along with packets of Mini Thins, which were over-the-counter “pep” pills that you could purchase at 7-Eleven.

On top of those pills were sheets of blue diazepam, a kind of Valium that was obtainable in Mexico. I also had my precious prescription for Xanax, worth its weight in gold.

Wine made me fat and sicker the next day, so I just switched to vodka, frozen until it was syrupy, taken in shot glasses that were actually big enough to be highballs. I drank them freezing cold and fast, and it felt like an icicle right through the head.

I also loved tequila, Patrón being my favorite, which left a tingly purple aftertaste at the back of the throat, and a warm glow throughout my body. The bottles frustrated me because they were deceptively small, their stinginess due to a deep cavern at the base. They were expensive and I bought two at a time, getting used to the Silver, somewhat cheaper vintage, as opposed to the top-of-the-line Gold label.

Drinking in bars was an everyday occurrence, with Siobhan, at the bar at the Dresden at 6 P.M., before all the swingers came with their cocktail irony, and it was still a divey, tacky place. She and I would sit there and knock back double whiskeys and watch the news. Then we’d stumble over to Pedro’s across the street and drink more and more and some nights easily put away twenty drinks each. She started having seizures at night, probably because of the massive amounts of alcohol, and had to stop drinking. I lost my drinking buddy, but not my enthusiasm, and so I kept it up for both of us, still hanging out with her in bars and watching her drink her 7-Up and telling her I missed her as a drunk.

I was in bars every evening, but my favorite drink was the one right at the end of the night, the one to put you to bed, the one to grow on. It was the reflective drink, the one that would cleanse all of the sins of the day. It was, in its own way, a meditation, a silent reverie for the day’s end. I would knock back my eight-ounce shot and climb up into my antique Chinese bed and, as always, hope I died before I woke.

I am convinced I did die once. I did so many drugs one night, on top of an already-raging whiskey drunk, I floated off into a deep, drowsy place. My spirit was as heavy as hot, wet sand. I came to a dark place, filled with long shadows and narrow corridors. The walls were made of that kind of Victorian portraiture where the subject would sit next to a burning candle and the artist would trace the outline of his shadow on the wall, making a pattern and cutting it out of black construction paper.

When people die and come back to life, they see long-lost relatives telling them it isn’t their time yet, they see their lives flash before their eyes, they are enveloped in an unearthly peace, they see the behind of the universe, the backdrop of the stars, and sometimes, they see God. I see arts and crafts.

I saw my body beneath me and I couldn’t get back. I tried to move my body from where I was, but I couldn’t. I stayed up there on the ceiling, trapped by the shadows, terrified, trying to get my mouth to say, “Call an ambulance.” I couldn’t get down for the longest time, and then after a while, the fear subsided. I knew I was going to die. It was okay. I didn’t fight it.

I died.

But I didn’t stay dead.

I came down. I woke up in my body. The next day, my head and mouth were dry and squeaking. My salivary glands ached from dehydration. I was fragile as bone china, my hands shook. Yet miraculously I was alive.

I got high again the next night, but I couldn’t get off. It was like I burned out the pilot light. I’d never get up there again.

The sickening, bloodshot mornings spread out later and later until they took up the entire day. I started doing yoga, because that was the only thing that would make me feel better. It was hell at first, getting to class, twisting into those first few impossible poses, sweating pure vodka all over the shiny wood floors. Afterward, my body would be completely wrung out of alcohol, and I could start over. Working out became not just about losing weight, but about ridding myself of the poison that I put into it every night. This is a fairly common practice, judging from the smell of perspiration in any given gym on a Saturday morning. I tried to get more out of my class by downing shots of espresso directly beforehand. This just made me want to pass out before the class was through.

Interestingly enough, even though I was dying, I was in pretty good shape. Sure, all my hair fell out, but I had a small ass.
Wow that
bald chick is pretty hot! She might be dying, but a least she doesn’t have
cellulite!

I liked to go to see bands a lot. Although music helped dull the pain, it intensified the self-hatred. I’d go to Largo and waste away in the back for the Friday night Jon Brion shows, loving him as much as I hated myself. The sad songs he sang were all about ghost girlfriends and how he was falling for you against his will, and I drowned in the whiskey and self-pity against the sonic love of his voice.

I ran around pop shows those days oddly obsessed with this poor singer named Bat. I wanted his attention so badly and drank fuckloads to impress him, and tried so hard to be an outlaw.

In one of the few sets that I actually did, I blasted another pop band for no reason. I said that they sucked five dicks, which is hard because there are only four of them, so one of them has to double-barrel. This is actually a really funny insult, but totally unfair because I like them. I was just showing off.

I remember weaving back and forth on my heels and swallowing an entire glass of shitty red wine from the bar at Small’s. I grabbed Bat and hurriedly assaulted him with a “DO YOU FIND ME ATTRACTIVE?!!!?!!!” He pulled away terrified and said while he was running away, “Of course but let’s just take our time and get to know each other.”

Going back to visit that memory is so sickly sad, not just because of my behavior, which was abominable, but because of how I felt about myself. I was immersed in self-loathing and then suddenly struck by all these delusions of grandeur where I thought I could have any man—or woman for that matter—in the bar.

Maybe it was the dread of leaving town, which it seemed like I was always doing. Maybe it was loneliness. It just felt like a disease.

There were other, external reasons helping it along. Sledge “yessed” me into insanity, condoning my outbursts and celebrating my craziness in the name of being fabulous. He spoke of us as if we were a kind of New Age Zelda and F. Scott—diving into the hotel fountains without care or repercussion, thinking we were beautiful and damned when actually we were just okay-looking and pathetic. There is a part of me that worships my former recklessness. If only it were not so sad underneath. If only it did not have such a rotten core.

I suppose most of it could be put down to grief. I was mourning the loss of my TV show, my grand and massive and very public professional failure. I felt unattractive and fat no matter what I did. I was still hopelessly in love with Glenn, and he did not love me. I had tried to climb out of it with my screenplay, only to be demolished by Roman and my own stupidity. I thought that everything I did turned to shit, and that my future was closing in on me fast and I had nowhere to turn. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, and then my grandfather died.

My grandfather was a minister, and offered me my first glimpse of show business. In his robes, he looked holy and taller than he was. I loved how he held parishioners in the palm of his hand when he spoke, always with a smile on his face. He was at times oddly distant and then completely in love with my brother and me. He spoke English better than most of my other relatives, and was eager to practice on us when we were around. He never went outside without a hat, and even though he was badly scarred around the head and neck from a terrible fire many years ago in Korea, he was still very handsome.