Dad was drinking a glass of milk as he talked to me. I could tell that he hadn’t had any booze for a while because his hand was trembling. We both did our best to ignore it, but I couldn’t stop my eyes from drifting back to that telltale, trembling hand. He tried to casually place his other hand on top of it, to steady it, but it didn’t work. A week before, Marie had told me that Dad tried to stop drinking completely, but he couldn’t do it. He began to shake so violently that he couldn’t function at all. In the end, she whispered, he had to have a drink. She told me that he was shaking so badly by then that he could barely raise the glass to his lips.
“How are you feeling, Dad?” I asked, eager to change the subject.
He smiled weakly. “Don’t you worry about me, Kitten,” he said, putting down that shaking glass of milk on an old water stain. “I feel like a tiger.”
My father was not a good liar. I decided to let that one go. It was easier to ignore it than to have that painful discussion right then. I ignored the yellow skin, the yellow, watery eyes. I ignored the hand that would not stay still. Maybe I honestly did believe that if I ignored these things, they would simply go away.
“Mom’s been on the set,” I said. I don’t know why I said it; it was just the first thing that popped into my head in my rush to change the subject.
“How is she?” he asked. I couldn’t tell whether he really cared, or he was just being polite. I suppose he was just as eager as I was to speak about something—anything—else.
“She’s fine.”
We continued talking about nothing in particular. An unspoken accord had been reached. No more words about my weight, and no more words about Daddy’s drinking. Maybe if we just kept on in this state of denial for a while, everything would be fine.
It was a week or two later, on the set, that I really stopped and took a good look at myself in the dressing-room mirror. I looked tired. I hadn’t been sleeping much. It was taking more and more Benzedrine to get me going. And the worst thing was that the more I used one morning, the more I would need the next just to get the same effect. And then that palpitating would begin again.
“Dad might be dying,” I said to myself. There was no one else in the dressing room. I said it because the thought had been hovering around me for a while, an unfathomable darkness that lurked in the corner of every thought I’d have. This was the first time that I had ever spoken the words aloud. As soon as I said it, I felt that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Shut up, Cherie,” I added in a hoarse whisper.
I wanted a qualuude. I wanted to lose myself, to shed those toxic thoughts, and I dismissed the idea as soon as it surfaced. I couldn’t do them anymore. It was bad enough that I’d started drinking again—nothing heavy, just a little wine now and then. Still, my racing mind tried to beat me up about this sometimes, but I dismissed those thoughts, too. But ludes? I knew that taking those again would be a disaster. Booze was different; booze didn’t hurt anybody, right?
Wrong! my mind snapped. An image of Dad’s yellowish skin flashed through my brain. “Shut up, Cherie!” I whispered again.
Looking in the mirror, I turned to the side, admiring my profile. I was down to 103 pounds. Was I too thin, like my dad insisted I was? I smiled at the thought. No, you can’t be too thin, can you?
“Anorexic” was how my father put it. He must have gotten that word from a magazine article. But I knew deep down that I wasn’t anorexic; I just wasn’t hungry anymore. Marie had recently accused me of being on drugs again. “That’s why you’re so thin! You’re doing coke, aren’t you?” She was wrong, of course, because the only thing I was taking regularly was the Benzedrine, and Benzedrine was legal, so it was practically not even a drug as far as I was concerned.
Of course it’s a drug! my mind snapped.
Oh, shut up! I snapped back.
The back-and-forth in my head was getting pretty tiring. I wondered if I was going crazy from stress. No, I needed to calm down. I took a deep breath. I started thinking calm, rational thoughts.
Of course I’m not anorexic. I would know if I was anorexic. Jodie Foster loses weight by eating papaya and cottage cheese, and nobody is calling her anorexic. And Dad’s not dying! The reason he looks older these days is because he is older! He’s settling into his sixties, and I can’t expect him to look the same as he did when I was a child. This is life. Everything is fine.
I approached the mirror in my dressing room to check my makeup. The bright bulb lights shone down upon my face. I starting toying and fluffing my hair . . . then froze. I thought for a moment that my eyes were playing tricks on me. I blinked hard and started parting my hair.
I gasped, and felt my blood turn cold in my veins. Oh God, what on earth was that? I moved closer to the mirror and put my fingers back into my hair. Looking closely, I saw something that terrified me. In the thickness of my blond hair there were barren patches—areas of thinness. Areas of baldness. There were raised welts under my hairline all through my scalp. I swallowed hard and stepped away from the mirror.
There could be only one explanation for this. I went to my purse and took out the vial of Benzedrine. It looked so innocent—just a silly little yellow vial. It had tricked me, I fumed. Tricked me into thinking it was a harmless medicine, into thinking that it was good for me. Now look what it was doing! I had to get off of this stuff!
I walked over to the dressing-room window and tossed the vial out into the bushes. As I did, there was a knock at the door. “We’re ready for you, Cherie!” the assistant director called.
“Be right there!”
I was scared. Scared about what was going on in my body. What other side effects would this terrible powder have on me? I put a gentle hand up to my head and softly touched my damaged scalp again. This was all the Benzedrine’s fault!
I started to panic, but I managed to catch myself. I forced myself to breathe slowly. I knew what I had to do. The solution to this problem was very clear to me. There was only one rational way to deal with it.
Before I returned to the set, I went to the nearest pay phone and dialed a number. On the second ring, she picked up.
“Hello, Stacy? It’s Cherie.” Stacy was a friend of mine. The one who’d introduced me to Benzedrine, and had been supplying me with it. “Listen . . . that Benzedrine stuff has been doing weird things to me. I don’t think I should take it anymore. Could you do me a favor?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Can you come to the set? I need you to bring me some blow,” I said, gripping the receiver very tight. “I need you to bring it . . . as fast as you can.”
I hung up, already feeling better. Coke had never made my damn hair fall out. No more of that stuff for me! No, this was a new Cherie Currie, a responsible Cherie, who would recognize when she had a problem and deal with it accordingly. Feeling highly responsible and totally in control, I strode over to the set, ready to act, ready to deal with my life. Because my life was good. It was better than good—it was great.
And I was in control. Right?
Chapter 28
Battlefields
It was April. Although I was no longer on the set of a movie in progress, everything around me still had a vague hint of unreality. The clear California sky looked like a movie backdrop. Maybe that was just wishful thinking. There was certainly a part of me that hoped that I would wake up at any moment, and that all of the past few months would turn out to be some kind of terrible dream.
It had been three months since we’d wrapped up the shooting on Foxes. In those three months my life had undergone some pretty major upheavals.
“Should we tell him about Mom?” Marie asked as we drove toward Aunt Evie’s house. My hands trembled as they gripped the steering wheel. I wondered if I should even have been driving. Although I wasn’t high, I still felt that I was in no shape to be in control of a vehicle. I was sick with worry, and hurting inside. “Should we tell him?” Marie asked again.
“I don’t KNOW, Marie!’ I snapped. She
turned away from me, and a frosty silence descended in the car. After a few awkward moments, I looked over to my sister. “I’m sorry,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “I’m just . . . I’m feeling . . .”
“I know,” Marie said. “ I know how you feel.”
I pulled up to the house slowly. Turned the engine off, and we just sat in silence for a moment. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to go in. I looked down at my cold, shaking hands. Was I ready to see my own father like this?
“How does he look?” I asked Marie, without looking at her. Daddy had been really sick recently; his legs had swollen up so badly that they looked like tree trunks, as gout racked his body. The alcoholism was really tearing him apart. I knew the answer already. Marie had been crying so hard when she called to tell me how sick he had gotten that I could barely understand her.
“He looks real bad,” she said.
I opened my mouth, about to ask another pointless question, but then changed my mind. I didn’t want to know any more. I thought about Mom again, and a shiver ran through my body. I didn’t want to know how bad Mom was either. My mom was three thousand miles away, back in Washington. Even though they were thousands of miles apart, both my parents were gravely ill. Both my parents had something eating them up from the inside. For Dad, it was alcohol. For my mom, it was cancer.
I’d gotten the call the other day when I was in the control room doing the voice-overs on Foxes. That’s how I found out. Although the shoot had wrapped, we still had “looping” to do. Looping is the process of rerecording lines that don’t come out on the audio track. The first edit of the film, the rough cut, was done. This was all about the finishing touches. I was working in the control booth with Jodie and Adrian when the call from Wolfgang came. I had known that Mom was having some tests done, but that’s all I knew.
Wolfgang wasn’t the type of person to beat around the bush. The first thing he said was “Your mom has cancer, Cherie.”
“What?” I whispered, running a shaking hand through my hair. “What?”
He didn’t repeat himself. He knew that I’d heard. He cleared his throat and did his best to assume his typical, businesslike manner. “I know . . . I know it’s terrible, Cherie. It’s hard for all of us, but it’s the way it is. We just got the diagnosis. They’re doing the colostomy. They have to . . . remove her colon.”
“Oh my God . . .”
I sat there in shock and listened to everything that Wolfgang had to say. He told me that Mom had a good chance of survival.
“How good is good?” I asked.
“Thirty percent.”
I felt the tears welling in my eyes. “What’s so good about thirty percent?” I demanded.
Wolfgang didn’t answer. The rest of the call went by in a haze. I hung up the phone and turned to Jodie and her mother, Brandy. They were looking at me with concerned expressions.
“Are you okay?” Jodie asked.
I started crying. The only word I could sob was “No.”
I snapped out of my thoughts. I looked over to Aunt Evie’s front door. Behind it, my father was fighting another war. This time there would be no medals, and the only casualties were likely to be himself and his family. This time around, his body was the battlefield, and this conflict had been going on for so long that the scars of war were plainly evident. My dad—the tough, no-bullshit Marine who had survived despite terrible odds during the war—was now a casualty. I didn’t know if he had another victory in him: the alcohol seemed to have the upper hand this time.
“I don’t think we should tell him about Mom,” I said. Marie nodded silently. Maybe Aunt Evie had already told him. But if he didn’t already know, I felt that this was not the time to unload the information on him. “Come on,” I said. “We’d better go in.”
Dad was lying in Marie’s bed instead of in his own room. His failing health had forced him to make one of his periodic attempts at detoxing, and he was currently undergoing a violent, cold-turkey withdrawal. I could smell it as I approached. A pungent, fermented smell that radiated from my father as he sweated the alcohol out of his body. Maybe he had soaked through the sheets on his own bed already, necessitating the move into our bedroom. Marie and I crept into the room. When I saw my father, I stifled a gasp. He was lying shivering in Marie’s sheets, curled up in the fetal position. He looked like a baby. This wasn’t my father I was looking at. This was not my dad! I closed my eyes tight for a moment. No father should ever look like this. I opened them again, but the painful scene was the same as before. Marie took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.
“We should have done something,” I whispered. “We should have done something when we found him in his car . . . We should have done something, forced him to dry out . . . before it came . . . it came to this!”
“Shhh,” Marie said. I didn’t want to look at her. I think she was crying, and I couldn’t bear to see it. “Go see him,” she whispered. “I’m going to speak to Aunt Evie, okay? I’ll be right outside.”
She left, and I was alone in my childhood room, looking at the frail, little man who was lying there in place of my dad. There was a half-finished glass of milk on the bedside cabinet. I tried to tell myself that once he went through the detox, everything would be okay. That he would smile at me and tell me that he was feeling “like a tiger.” That he would come out of this, and never drink again, and that everything would go back to normal. He’d be a new man.
There was a time when I could have convinced myself of that, but not anymore. I was no longer naive enough to believe fairy tales. As sick as my father was because of the alcohol, and as painful as these periodic detoxes were, they never seemed to stick for any more than a few months. We’d know when my father was on the wagon because the kitchen pantry would suddenly be full of sweet stuff. He’d get an insatiable craving for sweets, and would eat stuff like Entenmann’s cheese Danish or sugar donuts for breakfast, all washed down with a glass of milk. He’d look different, too. Twenty years would fall away from his face. His eyes would clear up. That yellow tinge would fade from his skin. Slowly but surely, though, he would slip back into drinking. That healthier, happier Dad would be nothing more than a happy memory. Then, like clockwork, there would be another painful detox on the horizon. Except that each time he detoxed, my father would be sicker, frailer, and weaker than before. We always feared that he wouldn’t survive the next one.
I walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. Daddy. I felt responsible. He was my father! I should have taken care of him. I could feel fat, silent tears rolling down my cheeks. I reached out and touched him.
“Dad?” I said.
He stirred a little.
“Daddy?”
I shook him gently. He turned on his back, and his eyes opened, slowly, painfully. The eyes looked yellow, sick. And they looked old—older than Grandma’s. There was no light in them anymore. I watched him blink and try to focus on me. His hair was a mess, sticking up in places, flattened tight against the skull in others. I knew that if he were well, he’d be reaching for his comb right now. Instead he just stared at me, and managed to mumble a hello. I tried my best to smile at him reassuringly.
We remained like that, frozen, staring at each other. I sensed some unbreachable gulf in the inches between us. I don’t know why I did it, but I reached into my purse and pulled out my wallet. I opened it and removed a hundred-dollar bill. I folded the bill up, and slipped it into his limp hand.
Through my tears I said, “I just want you to know . . . Dad . . . that you have money . . .”
Dad smiled weakly, and allowed his eyes to fall closed again. “Thanks, Kitten,” he murmured. I watched him for a few more minutes, but he was asleep again. The bill slipped out of his hand and onto the bed. I wanted him to have it. I wanted it to be there for him when he woke up. Somehow I felt that this hundred-dollar bill would mean something. That it would magically chase away all of the problems, and heal all of the damage.
An anger rose in me, drowning out all othe
r emotions. How could my dad let this happen to him? How could anybody willingly destroy their body like this?
I put the bill back into his hand. It slipped out. I put it back, but he couldn’t hold on to it. I took the bill and placed it under his glass of milk. I had to get out. I didn’t want my sobs to wake my father up. I felt like there was nothing I could do to help him anymore, so I quietly left him alone, breathing softly in Marie’s tiny little single bed.
Chapter 29
Annie and Me
I am in a Cadillac, gliding down the 5 Freeway with an older couple. I don’t want to be there; I just want to get home to North Hollywood. These two are making me feel strange. They are man and wife, but the guy still puts his hand on my thigh. Right in front of her. She is laughing in the backseat. There is a sense of druggy madness in the air. I brush his hand away angrily. He laughs at me.“The beast with five fingers!” he mocks.
I don’t find this funny. I’ve had a bad day. Hell, I’ve had a bad year. Too many drugs. Too many bad decisions. I just want it all to end. I just want to get home. If I can only get home, then maybe I could start over. Maybe I could give up drugs altogether, put my life back together.
The man pulls a bottle of Bacardi from between the seats. He takes his eyes off the road as he pulls the bottle free. He’s already drunk; so is his wife. He takes his hand off the steering wheel and we begin to weave madly all over the road. Panicked, I reach over to try to steer for him. I curse my own stupidity. Hitchhiking was a terrible idea. Nothing good can come of this.
He puts his hand on my thigh again.
I scowl angrily.
Nobody is watching the road.
I look forward again. With a jolt I realize that there is a truck ahead of us, at a complete standstill. We are heading straight for it at a terrifying speed. I open my mouth to scream as the Cadillac plows into the rear of the truck at sixty miles per hour.