Wishful Drinking (8 page)

But how had I managed to end up at the destination of dead when that was never the direction I originally set off in? It’s as if I tripped and almost fell into my own grave. My only intent was to feel better—which is to say, not to feel at all.

So based on the fact that my best thinking got me in an emergency room with a tube down my throat, I had no trouble at all accepting the fact that I was an alcoholic. Not that I drank all that much—you might say I took pills alcoholically. Anyway, I didn’t have any difficulty accepting the notion that my life had become unmanageable. I mean, let’s face it, my most creative achievement at that time was having unnecessary gum surgery just for the morphine. (I don’t think you can use the word “just” and “morphine” anywhere near each other.) So I threw myself into twelve-step group recovery—believing now that alcoholism was the headline, the overriding thing wrong with me. Which was, of course, in large part true and remains true to this day.

Because I have to admit (well, I don’t have to

), periodically I have had drug slips. All in, I’ve had about four or five slips since I first started going to twelve-step support groups at the age of twenty-eight. Making that four or five slips in twenty-three years, which is not great. I mean, I’m not proud that I wasn’t able to remain sober that entire time—especially in terms of my daughter, who has had to suffer the most from these largely inexcusable forays back down the dark path that is drug use. The most painful thing about returning to this dark planet is seeing the look of disappointment and hurt that these forays invariably put in the eyes of your loved ones. But ultimately you could say that I don’t have a problem with drugs so much as I have a problem with sobriety. And it wasn’t Alcoholics Anonymous that failed me—it’s that I have, on occasions, failed them by not working what they call a good program. But I keep going back. I’m as addicted to all the things A.A. has to offer as I am to the things that made me need those groups in the first place.

But when I first got to twelve-step land—after my stomach pumping incident—I thought, Okay, fine then, this is what the matter is with me. I’m not going to shrinks anymore. My best shrinking and thinking got me into emergency rooms all over Southern California. So I planned to be an all-meeting-all-the-time gal. Psychiatrists were a thing of the past. Why, they hadn’t even told me I was an alcoholic! So screw them—especially the doctor who tried to convince me I was hypomanic. Huh! Fat lot he knew. Well, as it turned out, what he knew was an extremely fat lot after all because over the next year of getting and staying clean and sober all the people I’d come into the program with were calming down and leveling out while I seemed to be doing just the opposite. Quick to excite, to agitate, to engage, to anger—I was heading straight up into the rafters of my overly good or bad time.

In short—okay, fine, yes, I know it’s far too late for that—I was manic, the monster was out of the box, the cat was out of the bag, and it appeared after a year of erratic sobriety that I was en route back to the shrinks and psychopharmacologists I imagined myself not needing anymore. Without the substances, I had used to distort and mask my symptoms, it was now all too clear that I was a bona fide, wild-ride manic-depressive. And this initially dismaying discovery led me to my third and best shrink, Beatriz Foster, who turned out to be the psychiatrist who finally got me to address my manic-depression.

And I ultimately not only addressed it, I named my two moods Roy and Pam. Roy is Rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood, and Pam is Sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs. (Pam stands for “piss and moan.”) One mood is the meal, and the next mood is the check.

There are a couple of reasons why I take comfort in being able to put all this in my own vernacular and present it to you. For one thing, because then I’m not completely alone with it. And for another, it gives me a sense of being in control of the craziness. Now this is a delusion, but it’s my delusion and I’m sticking with it. It’s sort of like: I have problems but problems don’t have me.

Statistics say that a range of mental disorders affects more than one in four Americans in any given year. That means millions of people are totally batshit.

But having perused the various tests available that they use to determine whether you’re manic depressive, OCD, schizo-affective, schizophrenic, or whatever, I’m surprised the number is that low. So I have gone through a bunch of the available tests, and I’ve taken questions from each of them, and assembled my own psychological evaluation screening which I thought I’d share with you.

So, here are some of the things that they ask to determine if you’re mentally disordered. If you say yes to any number of these questions, you, too, could be insane.

1. In the last week, have you been feeling irritable?

2. In the last week, have you gained a little weight?

3. In the last week, have you felt like not talking to people?

4. Do you no longer get as much pleasure doing certain things as you used to?

5. In the last week, have you felt fatigued?

6. Do you think about sex a lot?

If you don’t say yes to any of these questions either you’re lying, or you don’t speak English, or you’re illiterate, in which case, I have the distinct impression that I may have lost you quite a few chapters ago.

AN ALTERED, FALTERING SELF

Now, come back with me to when I was first told that I was an alcoholic—which greatly relieved me by the way, because I knew something was the matter with me, so I thought, “Great! That’s it—that’s what I’ve been struggling with (and enjoying) all this time! Fantastic!”

But what they further do—to (I think) soften the blow of this arguably awkward new way of looking at yourself—they enumerate a number of other famous and accomplished folks who have also struggled with (and enjoyed) alcoholism.

There was:

Scott Fitzgerald

Mel Gibson

Dylan Thomas

Ireland

Rush Limbaugh

Lindsay Lohan

Russia

And George W. Bush

I think their point is—don’t feel bad, you’re joining an illustrious group. Great people have been alcoholics. Oh, be one, it’s fun!

Now I don’t think they’re implying you could be great, but those people weren’t exactly losers (except probably to some members of their families, and all of their constituents) so relax and join the great drunks who staggered the Earth before you.

So, when I was told I was a manic-depressive, there was a whole new list waiting for me.

There was Abraham Lincoln—who wrote the Gettysburg Address in four hours—now that’s pretty manic

Winston Churchill, who called his depressed mood the black dog

Korea

Kristy McNichol and Sir Isaac Newton (who I think would have made an adorable couple!)

Mark Twain

St. Francis

St. Theresa

Jonathan Winters

Poor Brittany Spears

And George W. Bush

Well, naturally after this list I felt invigorated—but then that is part of my diagnosis.

So, to celebrate my newfound ascent into the lofty heights of this noble group, I thought I would inaugurate a Bipolar Pride Day. You know, with floats and parades and stuff! On the floats we would get the depressives, and they wouldn’t even have to leave their beds—we’d just roll their beds out of their houses, and they could continue staring off miserably into space. And then for the manics, we’d have the manic marching band, with manics laughing and talking and shopping and fucking and making bad judgment calls.

Of course, all this is still in the early planning stages—and knowing manics it probably always will be—but the point is we have a plan and that’s what counts. Because when you’re manic, every urge is like an edict from the Vatican. No plan is a bad one, because if you’re there and you’re doing it, it can’t be bad. It’s like a bank error in your favor.

Mania is, in effect, liquid confidence

when the tide comes in, it’s all good. But when the tide goes out, the mood that cannot and should not be named comes over you and into you. Because to name it would be an act of summoning.

Losing your mind is a frightening thing—especially if you have a lot to lose—but once it’s lost, it’s fine! No big deal! There could be a light shining out of your head. It’s sort of like glowing in your own dark.

Part of my story—because God forbid you miss a minute of it—is that I stayed awake for six days. This happened because two of my medications were interacting badly, so the doctors put me on what they called a medication vacation—now on a vacation like this you don’t get a tan, there is no Club Med, and you can’t send cute little postcards. Now, anyone who has stayed awake for six days knows that there’s every chance that they’ll wind up psychotic. Anyway, I did, and part of how that manifested was that I thought everything on television was about me.

Now if anything like this should happen to you, I have some excellent advice. Don’t watch CNN. Please. Watch one of those pet training shows or cooking shows—even some of the discovery shows might be okay. But I watched CNN, and at the time Versace had just been killed by that man Cunanin, and the police were frantically scouring the Eastern seaboard for him. So I was Cunanin, Versace, and the Police. Now this is exhausting programming.

But by the time I got to be Versace, he was dead. And also by then I was in the real hospital part of Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, and I could literally hear the nurses outside of the door saying, “Don’t listen to her, she’s crazy.”

My brother eventually arrived and he had to call the mental hospital to see about getting me in because there was, as my friend Dave says, “no room at the bin.” You had to be seriously nuts to qualify for residence in the lockdown ward. So finally, the head doctor of the facility came over. This guy looked like this kind of weird John Steinbeck character with his abnormally high pants and his strangely neat hair and his trimmed just so beard.

So he walks in, and I say, “Finally, here’s someone who can tell us what it’s like to get his cock sucked.”

Because (as you might have noticed) I had begun swearing a lot and apparently I couldn’t stop. Something in me had become unleashed and taming it was not imminent.

Anyway, this was my audition for the locked ward, and, as you probably guessed by now, I passed. I made it into the mental hospital. Hurray!

When you qualify for the mental hospital, you have to sign yourself in, like commitment papers, I guess; but I was so far gone I didn’t know what I was signing or doing, and so when they put the papers in front of me, I took the pen and I signed with my left hand, “Shame.”

That’s how I signed in for the mental hospital. How sad is that?

Oh, and my form of mental illness is also a tiny bit infectious by the way. I may have gotten it from Amy Winehouse’s toilet seat. So, by the end of this book you could be gay and insane! Unless you began that way.

Anyway, ever since my fateful announcement on Diane Sawyer that I was mentally ill—like anyone really needed to know that. Don’t you hate it when celebrities just blah blah blah—talk about themselves—I mean, who asked?—I find it all so wearying

Anyway, where was I? So having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything (okay fine, not acting, but what about a tiny little award for writing? Nope), I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. I’m apparently very good at it and am honored for it regularly. Probably one of the reasons I’m such a shoo-in is that there’s no swimsuit portion of the competition.

Hey, look, it’s better than being bad at being mentally ill, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?

The first time I did drugs was when I was thirteen. Before we lost all our money, my family had a vacation house in Palm Springs, about two hours outside of Beverly Hills, where I ostensibly grew up. So periodically my mother used to rent that house in Palm Springs to these people who, after one of their stays, left behind a bag of marijuana. Who knows? Maybe they left it intentionally, a kind of chemical sacrifice on the altar of appreciation for their time there. Anyway, after my mother found the pot, she came to me and said, “Dear, I thought instead of you going outside and smoking pot where you might get caught and get in trouble—I thought you and I might experiment with it together.”

Well, frankly at the time, and let’s face it—even now—I couldn’t imagine anything weirder. But what actually came to pass was that after presenting this bi zarre, albeit marginally appealing proposal, my mother got swept back up in the whirlwind of her life and promptly forgot about it. But being the crafty, eager-for-the-altered-state person I was destined to become, I absolutely did not. So once it became obvious that our proposed experiment had slipped my mother’s mind, I snuck into the lab of her sacheted underwear drawer and stole the pot, subsequently experimenting my brains out in my backyard tree house with my friend May—who coincidentally also ended up in A.A.!

And you’ve got to figure that I enjoyed it, because I ended up experimenting with marijuana for the next six years until it suddenly—and I think rather rudely—turned on me. Where at the onset it was all giggles and munchies and floating in a friendly haze—it suddenly became creepy and dark and scary. What was a junkie to do? Well, the answer was quite obvious—I needed to find a new replacement drug. This was when I was about nineteen, while I was filming Star Wars. (It ultimately turned out to be Harrison’s pot that did me in.) So, after carefully casting about for a substitute substance, I finally settled into my new drug digs—hallucinogens and painkillers. Mind expanders and painkillers. (Though over time and protracted use their meanings got jumbled until they became mind reliev ers and pain expanders—a place where everything hurt and nothing made sense.)

Anyway, at a certain point in my early twenties, my mother started to become worried about my obviously ever-increasing drug ingestion. So she ended up doing what any concerned parent would do.