He says, “Son, I’ve been writing TV shows for twenty years. Turn back, before it’s too late.”
I try to impress him with saying I want to write a book.
“Ah,” he says. “We all start out with big dreams, but we end up writing cartoons about talking horses.”
I like this guy instantly. He’s cynical and surly and he’s carrying a Henry Miller book under his arm. His name is Bobby, and, as bad as I feel, I actually manage to talk to him a little bit. Turns out we know a lot of the same people. He knows (and despises) Dr. E, Zelda’s doctor, and he was married to that woman, Ria, who runs the Sober Living where I went.
“Holy shit,” I say. “Bobby. Did you write Ria this two-page, unpunctuated, all-lowercase letter about how you still loved her about a year ago?”
“Uh, sounds like me.”
“Dude, I read that fucking letter.”
“You read my letter?”
“Yeah, man, she gave it to me to read.”
“That bitch,” he says, joking—and then, in typical writer’s fashion, “What did you think?”
“It was well written.”
Which is true.
“And, uh, you know,” I continue, “I think she’s still got a thing for you.”
He nods and pulls at his chin with his cigar-butt fingers. “That Ria, she was something else. I know she’s gotten sort of—well, matronly, but she was wild, boy. I’ll tell you.”
“I bet. Yeah, I had a crush on her for fucking ever.”
We have to go up now and I’ve talked myself back into catatonic sleep—but I feel like I have an ally with Bobby and I fucking can’t wait to tell Zelda I met him. I mean, he’s world famous. At least Ria has made him so through her stories.
When I wake up it is already night and I make a few phone calls. Zelda is missing me bad and is gonna come tomorrow. Apparently she’s gonna get into a detox on Monday. She’s been talking to my dad a whole bunch and he says he’s going to help her get into the hospital at UCLA. My mom is actually going to drive her there.
After talking to Zelda and after the nurses have finished trying to get me to eat something, I call my dad. He sounds very relieved. But I just try to convince him to let me out of here.
“Dad,” I say, “I’m so grateful to be sober now. I’m definitely not gonna use anymore, so I think I can probably go home—maybe tomorrow or something.”
“No, Nic, absolutely not. Your mom and I are working on getting you into a longer program. We just have to figure out what place would be the best for you.”
“Dad, come on, I don’t need that.”
He sighs. “Yes, you do. Nic, right now you’re like a little baby, just learning how to crawl. Or maybe even back further, just learning to hold your head up. You wouldn’t ask a newborn to run a marathon, would you?”
“Maybe if I was a sadist—which I’m not saying I’m not.”
“Well, there’s no point even discussing it. You will be arrested if you leave.”
“Can I stay in L.A.? Can I go to treatment around here?”
“I don’t think so. No, none of the places in L.A. can deal with the issues you have.”
I get mad now. “What fucking issues are those?”
“Drugs and your relationship problems.”
I tell him I don’t have any relationship problems and he tells me he’s not going to discuss it with me. I can either do what he says, or go to jail. Goddamn, my dad can be so manipulative. I wish he’d just leave me the hell alone.
“Look, I don’t want to get high,” I continue. “I just want to go back home and lie in bed with Zelda and watch movies.”
There’s a pregnant silence.
“You know what that sounds like to me? That sounds like shooting heroin. Don’t you want to be able to really live again?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, and that’s the truth.
My dad tells me to be patient. He assures me that he and my mom are working together around the clock to try and find the right place for me. I imagine half their objective, at least, is to get me as far away from Zelda as geographically possible. Maybe I’ll be going to rehab in Norway.
So my dad and I hang up. I feel very sick, but I’m not ready to sleep. I stumble into the TV room. Bobby is in there, passed out on the couch. He’s been shooting heroin for so long that all his veins have collapsed. Even the doctors and nurses can’t find a vein to draw blood from. All he’s got is this hole in his arm—an open wound the size of a softball. The flesh and everything has been eaten away to the bone. It’s really one of the most repulsive things I’ve ever seen and I have a hard time not staring at it. I sit as far away from him as possible.
Besides Bobby, there’s this new patient who wanders by every twenty minutes or so. He weighs three hundred pounds and his face is bright red. His pants are usually around his ankles and his bulbous tongue dangles out of his bulbous mouth. His eyes hold the helpless confusion of a little puppy dog. He is most always covered in excrement. Plus, I guess he’s wet-brained or something, ’cause all he ever says is:
“Is it lunchtime?”
Or: “Where’s the hallway?”
He usually asks the hallway question from the hallway. He almost trampled me one time when he couldn’t find a spoon and felt sure that I must have one. The guy eats a lot. He packs that hospital food away.
But anyway, Bobby is sleeping and I start looking through the video selection. Their selection is pretty bad, but I notice a Lars von Trier movie called Breaking the Waves. At least it’s something I’ve been wanting to see. I put the movie in and the sound wakes Bobby up. He was actually sleeping with his head buried under a copy of that James Frey book.
“You bastard,” he says, sounding like Templeton, the rat from Charlotte’s Web. “I can’t believe you read my letters. What’re you watching?”
I tell him.
“Great flick, man. A little heavy maybe.”
Bobby is right. It’s a good movie, but goddamn—if I thought I was depressed before, after watching three hours of this sweet, innocent little Emily Watson turning herself into a whore for her quadriplegic husband—well, I was ready to pretty much end it. They say suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Well, the problem of being human isn’t really so temporary and sometimes a permanent solution seems like the best possible way out.
Bobby snores through most of the movie. Every once in a while he’ll roll over and say something about how great an actress Emily Watson is—or about how lucky I am to be young. I nod, watching the screen. Three hours pass and finally I take some chloral hydrate, drifting into a sleep filled with nightmares about an airplane flown by large monkeys.
DAY 583
Zelda visited me yesterday and brought In-N-Out burgers—the first solid food I’ve eaten in quite a long time. I was actually a little embarrassed by her while she was on the unit. I guess she’d been shooting coke ever since I left, and then she tried to counteract that by swallowing a bunch of pills before coming up.
The result was that she ended up nodding out over and over while she was sitting with me in the TV room. What made everything worse was that they’d already started cutting back my Phenobarbital. I can no longer sit still. I’m squirming constantly and my skin feels like bugs are crawling all over it and like there’s an electrical storm surging through my body. And my stomach is fucked up as hell. It feels like there are acid fires raging in my belly—or like those oil fires you see on TV in Iraq.
All of this made it extremely difficult to just sit still with Zelda while she was falling asleep on me. Today, however, she seems more sober and has snuck me in a bunch of Somas and some more Suboxone, so I should be feeling better shortly. Plus, she talked to a friend, who’s been thrown in jail a bunch of times. According to him, the crime I committed will, at the most, get me thirty days. That means I’ll only have to serve five, tops. And if I say I’m gay, they’ll put me in a separate cell with a bunch of queens and I’ll just be able to watch
TV and it’ll be totally safe and actually kind of fun. Besides that, we can maybe hide out at Zelda’s friend Juliet’s house.
I want to leave and I figure they can’t stop me, so I’ll just get my stuff and walk out with Zelda. I’m detoxed enough. We can get into some sort of outpatient program. She seems pretty sober at the moment.
So I go into my room with Zelda and start packing.
She paces nervously. “You know,” she says, “maybe I’ll still go into detox tomorrow. Then we can be clean together, right? I mean, I should probably throw away all the coke I have in the car.”
I stop and look up at her. “You have coke in the car?”
“Yeah, I stayed at Sam’s last night. She gave me so much coke. But if you’re coming home, I’ll throw it all away.”
I just stare at her silently. Suddenly I realize I can’t go with Zelda. I’ll just get high again and all these days of hell in detox will have been wasted. I also see an image, very clear, of Zelda and me sitting together in her car—dressed in our designer clothes—cell phones to our ears—both OD’ed—dead, cold, purple.
I didn’t even really think I wanted to live, but I guess I do.
“Zelda, baby,” I say. “I love you, but if you’ve been using all night, I can’t go with you.”
She freezes. “Uh, yeah, of course. I…uh…that makes sense.”
“I love you and I want to be with you more than anything in the whole world. But we both need to get clean. We need to do this if we want to have a life together.”
Zelda’s eyes are filled with tears. “I know, baby. You’re right.” She hugs me and cries all over my shoulder.
I’m not sure where this clarity comes from. It hits me somewhat miraculously. Maybe I’ve been given the faintest glimmer of hope over these last few days. I wasn’t asking for it. Spencer would probably say it was God or something, but I just can’t believe that anymore.
Regardless, I don’t leave with Zelda. I ask her, again, to go into detox. She promises me she will. Then a woman nurse takes us all out to smoke with our visitors. The drugs Zelda snuck in start to hit me out there in the sun and suddenly I feel a whole lot better. I mean, a whole lot. Everything’s gonna be fine, just fine. Why was I worrying so much? I say good-bye to my Zelda and go upstairs to sleep.
“You think you have the world on a string, don’t you, kid?” says Bobby. “Just try being forty-five with a hole the size of a grapefruit in your arm—writing talking horse cartoons for TV. I even got a fucking kid. What happened to me? The time goes so fast, so goddamn fast.”
DAY 586
My dad and mom are forcing me to check into a treatment center in Arizona that deals with dual diagnosis patients—people who have addiction along with other psychological disorders. I absolutely do not want to go, but it’s not like I have any real choice.
The usual stay is one month, but due to my feeling like I need to crawl out of my skin, turn inside out, and tear out my veins—well, they want me to stay an extra two weeks. Initially I go into a program they’ve named Serenity, but after that I go into a more in-depth group. The center apparently deals with trauma, as well as chemical dependency issues. I don’t really think I’m much of a trauma survivor, but it beats jail. At least, I hope it does.
The last two nights have been hell. My body can’t figure out how to fall asleep on its own anymore and the doctors here have cut back all my medication. I have these surges of electricity pulsing through me. The bugs are still crawling all over me and I have the worst diarrhea.
But despite all that, at six thirty in the morning my mom is helping me carry my bags to the elevator. All the nurses say good-bye to me, and, once again, they’re so nice. They tell me to call, like, five hundred times. I know I never will, but I’m like, “Oh, of course, thank you so much.”
My mom is sweet if somewhat nervous around me. She definitely acts a little strange and makes lighthearted jokes about things that aren’t funny.
In the car, she says I’m like a worm in hot ashes. I can’t stop moving. My body is gyrating uncontrollably and it’s actually completely embarrassing.
I do tell my mom how sorry I am about everything, though I’m sure my words are meaningless. There’s nothing I could possibly say at this point to make anything better. I’ve fucked it all up beyond repair, maybe forever. My mom definitely doesn’t trust me. She even insists on getting a special medical pass from the flight attendant so she can make sure I get on the plane.
My mom tells me Zelda got into UCLA detox last night. It’s sort of hard to believe. I text-message her from my mom’s phone, telling her that I will, no matter what, come back for her.
The flight is terrible. I’m terrified of having to sit in such close quarters with people—my body convulsing like it is. Plus, there are tons of little kids on the plane. It takes me a while to figure it out, but I finally realize that in three days, it’ll be Thanksgiving. Great—another holiday in rehab. At least I don’t have to be with my goddamn family.
I keep jumping around and I have to go to the bathroom, like, five hundred times. I’m going totally out of my mind so I have to try reading as best I can. I actually forgot a pen, so I can’t draw or anything. The book I have is this one Zelda gave me called The Painted Bird. Once again I find myself in the same position I was in with Breaking the Waves. The book is great, but it’s dark and brutal and actually kind of hard to read. I mean, I’m into stuff like that and this is still almost too much for me.
I finally have to put it down when this peasant scoops out the eyes of his wife’s admirer with a spoon. It makes me think of Mike and Zelda, and I must still be hallucinating because I kind of drift in and out of being a part of the story. By the time the plane lands in Phoenix, I’m just gripping the armrest and trying not to scream. I’m sweating but cold, and everything feels so surreal.
The airport in Phoenix leaves me in total culture shock. First of all, it is very small and there are military personnel all over the place.
I’m so jacked up because of that electrical current thing surging through me, I almost walk past the guy holding the sign with my name on it. But he recognizes me from my mom’s description and calls out to me.
I stop and we talk some. He is so sweet and soft-spoken I want to slap him. He looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, but with white hair and thick glasses. His name is Jerome. He is gentle and calm and I don’t think I can take much more of him at present.
What makes it all worse is that he tells me he actually used to live in L.A. He moved to Arizona after attending the program I’m about to go into. He says the pace of Los Angeles was too much for him. All I want to do is get back to Zelda. I am completely uninterested in going into another rehab. I am just frustrated talking with Jerome, and, despite my present condition, I feel I’m much better than he is. I want to say to him, “Don’t you know who I am? Who I know?” I sit quietly, though, trying to answer his questions politely.
Arizona is desolate and ugly. Everything is brown and dusty and strip-malled and windswept. Jerome and I drive along the two-lane highway and he talks to me about where I’m headed and what a wonderful place it is. I feel like I’m in a wasteland. Sitting still in the car is almost worse than the airplane. It’s just me and Jerome and I’m vibrating like a maniac. I miss Zelda so bad. I feel anchorless without her.
The Safe Passage Center is high in the Arizona mountains, about an hour and a half away from Phoenix. It’s basically just a trailer park on a mound of dirt. There are faux log cabins where we sleep and a couple of buildings where groups are held.
The first thing that bothers me is that when I introduce myself, people refuse to shake my hand because there’s a “no touch” policy. Also, half the women can’t talk to me because they’re not allowed to talk to men. Then the guy who does my bag search is so weaselly, old, and mealymouthed that I can’t stand to even look at him. He wears these baggy-butt jeans that are just awful. Plus, I can’t stop moving ’cause of the bugs and all. If this is wh
at sobriety is gonna be like I don’t think I can cut it. My roommate asks me why I’m here and I say, “Drugs.”
He smiles, a tattooed kid who’s very punk-looking—maybe a year or two older than me. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought when I got here too. But that’s just the beginning.”
I’m too fried out to think of anything biting and sarcastic to say. Besides, I have to sit through a mountain of intake paperwork and sitting through anything right now is nearly impossible.
James, my roommate, shows me around and then makes me a necklace with my name on it. The food at dinner looks so good compared to the hospital stuff that I eat way too much and throw up all night. I’m freezing always. I don’t sleep for four days and nights and the fucking bugs won’t leave me alone. There are groups and different meetings I’m supposed to be going to all day long, but I can’t imagine trying to sit still through anything. I go into the counselors’ office and demand to be taken to a hospital. A silver-haired Austrian woman with shimmering blue eyes suggests, “Why don’t you just lie down and invite the bugs in? Experience the bugs crawling on you. Become one with the bugs.”
I tell her what I think about that idea.
I eat no Thanksgiving dinner because I’m still too sick. I can’t get through to Zelda in her detox and the cold is so deep inside me. I snarl at anyone who tries to talk to me.
I think I’m definitely in the wrong place and I imagine the few counselors I’ve had interactions with probably think I’m in the wrong place too. I’m not sure why the hell they let me in, but I’ve got no choice but to ride this out.
DAY 589
I spent the weekend at the Safe Passage Center basically just watching movies and praying no one would talk to me. I finally got in to see a shrink lady, who prescribed me some medication for sleep and for the seizures I’ve been having. I guess that’s what the electric feeling was—little seizures throughout my body. Anyway, that’s what she told me. But they’ve gotten me on an antiseizure drug called Neurontin, which has calmed me down. Also they’ve prescribed me enough Seroquel to knock out a fucking hippopotamus.