Neon Angel

  Cut to: The hospital, where they slice open my bloody jeans and take off my shoes and socks. They stick a needle in my arm and put an oxygen mask on my face. I cough up blood, splattering it over the inside of the mask. My pulse drops lower. Lower. Then it disappears altogether.

  The doctors stop their work.

  It’s over.

  My friends watch in amazement and horror as the white sheet is pulled over my face.

  It’s all over.

  Fade to: Some months later Jodie stops by to put flowers on my grave. She reminisces to herself and laughs sadly to herself about the good times we’d once had.

  Freeze frame on Jodie’s face.

  Suddenly the dark theater erupted into applause. As the credits began to roll, the applause grew louder, people whooping and hollering. Relief flooded my body. I was sitting there with tears in my eyes. My father, sitting next to me, squeezed my hand. I look over at him. He looked better than he had looked in a long time. He was still drinking, but somehow tonight his pride in me seemed to have overcome all of the illness racking his body, and he looked years younger. Grandma was sitting there weeping. She had been doing this for most of the film. Daddy would always say that her kidneys were too close to her eyes.

  I could barely believe it—I’d done it. I pulled off a heavy, dramatic role! I stood, side by side with Jodie Foster, and I didn’t look like an idiot. All of the hard work had coalesced into this moment, the 1980 premier of Foxes. As the lights came up, I looked down the aisle. My entire family was there: Dad, Mom and Wolfgang, Aunt Evie and Grandma, Donnie, and Marie with her fiancé, Steve Lukather. Even Sandie and T.Y. Everyone I loved was in the same room, something that I honestly thought I would never see again.

  Not to say that some relationships weren’t strained. My relationship with T.Y. had never fully recovered from his asking me to drop the charges against the man who raped me. The sessions for Messin’ with the Boys had proved to be torturous, and had put a huge strain on my relationship with Marie. When Capitol realized that I was going ahead and recording a duet album with my sister, the pressure started building. The label’s mantra became “We know what we signed up for, and it wasn’t a sister act!” The most vocal critic was the man who had signed us in the first place, Rupert Perry, who was the vice president of A&R at Capitol.

  On top of all of this pressure, when I started dating the album’s producer, Jai Winding, Marie was furious. She felt that she couldn’t get a fair deal in the studio if I was in a relationship with the producer. However, since we had brought her boyfriend—and soon-to-be husband—Steve Lukather in, I felt that all I had done was level the playing field a little. The power struggle for control of the album had left some scars. With Steve involved, and all of the people he had brought in from Toto, I started to feel sidelined on my own album.

  The sessions had dragged on, and the songs started to take on the overpolished sheen of a Toto record. Of course, with so many members of Toto involved in the making of it, I guess I should have expected it. Since Steve had been winning a lot of Grammys his opinion carried a huge amount of clout in the studio. More than mine, it seemed. As the sessions dragged on, I started to get more and more depressed. One “highlight” occurred when Steve told me during a rehearsal to pull my performance back because I was “outshining” Marie.

  “She hasn’t been doing this for as long as you have,” he told me. “I don’t think it’s fair that you project so much of yourself. Pull it back a little. Let her shine.”

  I remember thinking how insane it was that I was now being told to “pull it back” on my own project. Wasn’t I meant to be giving every performance one hundred percent? To me, that summed up everything that was going wrong with the album. It all came to a head toward the end of the sessions when, during a heated argument, I finally told Marie that Rupert Perry didn’t even want her on the record. She didn’t believe me. The next morning I got a call from Rupert asking me to talk to my sister.

  “She’s in my office, crying and hysterical, and she won’t leave!”

  She had shown up demanding to know the truth. When Rupert told her in no uncertain terms that he had thought it was a bad idea to have her on the album, she became hysterical. There was a sense of grim satisfaction in knowing my sister finally knew the truth about how the label felt about her inexperience, but deep down I knew that serious, irreparable damage had been done to our relationship. I knew this even as we were all smiles at the premier of Foxes. Still, I didn’t have any clue about what was going to happen next; as far as I was concerned we were going to put a band together and take the album out on the road. Pretty soon I would discover how wrong I had been about that.

  Looking at my family as the credits rolled, I turned to Grandma again. I saw that she was still crying. I smiled at her and she did her best to smile back and act as though everything was okay.

  We all filed out of the theater, and I mingled with the cast and crew, hugging everyone and shaking hands. It had been well over a year since I’d last seen everyone, and it was a long-overdue reunion. My family was waiting for me outside the large screening room, so I tore myself away. When I made it over to them, Grandma was still crying.

  I went over to her and gave her a hug. I knew very well why she was crying. “It’s okay, Grandma,” I whispered as I held this proud little woman in my arms. “It’s okay. It was just a movie . . .”

  “I know, sweetie,” she said, but it didn’t stop her from sobbing.

  I looked up to the rest of my family and loved ones, and for a second it was as if I were looking at a photograph—a Polaroid shot, the colors faded and bleeding away with the ravages of the passing years. The sounds all around us receded for a moment, and it was as if I were seeing everyone truly for the first time.

  This would be the last time that my family would ever be all together. Mom, Dad, Donnie, Marie, Grandma, Aunt Evie, and me. There wouldn’t ever be another Christmas that would find us all in the same room. Although I didn’t know this at the time, I sensed it. A cold shiver passed through my body, sucking all of the conversation out of the air.

  Who would be missing the next time around? I didn’t know. There were many black clouds hovering over my family at that moment, despite all of the smiles and hugs. My dad could only mask his alcoholism so much. His eyes gave it all away. His drinking hadn’t slowed, and the warnings of the doctors still echoed loud and clear in my head. And Mom? Her face was still radiant, but she was thin and pale. Following the operation, the doctors had informed her that she had maybe a year to live—if she was lucky. So far she had been doing much better than expected, but for how long? I knew that my mom was strong-willed and tough, but was that enough to beat the cancer that was eating away at her?

  Even Grandma . . . you know, my dad told me that he’d found her in the kitchen one morning, crying. When he asked her what was wrong, she told him that she’d forgotten how to cook bacon. She talked more and more about Grandpa and her sister Martha, wistfully saying how she missed Martha’s singing, as if in some strange way she were preparing to see them again. And Aunt Evie would talk about how she hated December. “Everyone dies in December,” she’d complain sadly as she ticked off the names of our many lost loved ones. “I really can’t stand December . . .”

  I shook my head. It was dangerous to linger on thoughts like these. The sadness that they caused was too deep, too immediate. And what about me? A twenty-year-old girl, with her whole life ahead of her. But for a fleeting moment I was able to see my life from enough distance to catch a glimpse of the wider picture. A twenty-year-old girl who needed to keep cocaine in her purse and her medicine cabinet just so she could pretend to function like a normal human being. A twenty-year-old girl whose bathroom scale barely seemed to creep above a hundred, and whose heart palpitations never seemed to stop.

  That’s why Grandma cried so hard when the credits rolled. Because Annie’s drug-ravaged life and violent death were more than just moments in a movie. I think that Gra
ndma was crying because she, too, had realized that the next time the family would all be in the same room would be when we came together to say good-bye to one of our own.

  And she was silently praying that it wouldn’t be me.

  Chapter 30

  Life in the White House

  When it came time to put our dad into the hospital, I was about to turn twenty-one years old. Just months before, our beloved grandma Onie had complained to Aunt Evie of a headache. Aunt Evie took her to the hospital . . . where she died suddenly, and for no apparent reason. The family was in a state of shock and bewilderment. She was a wonderful, loving, and soft-hearted woman, who’d loved her only son more than anything on this earth. It wasn’t until this day, sitting in a luxurious doctor’s office next to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, that I began to wonder if it hadn’t been kinder that way. Grandma Onie would have been devastated by this tragic turn of events. The doctor spoke to all of us in dry, measured tones. I remember that I detested that doctor. I remember that very clearly. He was unsympathetic and blunt, and said things in front of my father that made my skin crawl.

  “First of all,” the doctor had said, “I want you all to hear this. Your father is very sick. He is in liver failure. He has heart disease, and lung disease. To be perfectly honest, he is sick enough to kill three people.”

  When he said that, I looked over at Dad. My father was trembling, unable to look at the doctor directly. He was staring at his hands, tapping his fingers nervously against his knees.

  A few weeks before, Marie and I had been on The Dinah Shore Show to promote Messin’ with the Boys. All we had to do was show up, look good, and lip-synch. Dad’s hero, Dean Martin, had been the cohost. Dean was drunk . . . well, that’s putting it mildly. He was really blitzed. I remember that Dad just looked so happy to see us both performing and sharing a stage with Dean Martin. It was the happiest I could remember him being in a long while. To go so suddenly from that to this horrible scene in the doctor’s office was beyond words.

  I looked back at the doctor. He was a young man with a beard, full of vigor and life, and it was obvious to me that he had real contempt for alcoholics. He was sitting behind his desk, with his expensive-looking fountain pen on his mahogany desk and the look of superiority all over his face. Inside, I was screaming at this man. How dare he say such things in front of my daddy? In front of a war hero? In front of a gentle, good, and kind man who loved his children so totally and unconditionally?

  As I sat there wishing I could claw this doctor’s eyes out, Marie spoke up. “What are you trying to tell us, Doctor?”

  “I’m just being honest with you. I don’t believe that sugarcoating the situation is going to be beneficial for you, or your father.”

  Even the way he said “father” . . . there was a mocking tone to his voice. This man didn’t know anything about the person our dad was. All he could see was an old alcoholic shaking in that chair, looking for all the world like the naughty schoolboy who had been hauled up in front of the principal. He barely hid his disgust behind that phony white coat and clipboard. Every word, every gesture insinuated that my father was weak, selfish, and that he had done this to himself.

  I shook my head and looked away. For any other disease, people are sympathetic. If my father had been suffering from leukemia, the doctor’s manner would have been totally different. He would have been caring, concerned. And yet they tell us that alcoholism is a disease just like any other, a chronic and incurable one at that. So why was this man treating my father as if he had some kind of moral problem?

  “We’ll have your dad stay in the hospital,” he continued in that expressionless monotone, “but he may die. The evidence is plainly obvious—just by looking at him, you can see that he is in the final stages of alcoholism. The damage he has already sustained is very severe. To be frank, if we can keep him alive through the delirium tremens . . . that is to say the shakes . . . then I would consider us fortunate.”

  We all looked at my father, this once proud man, sitting there, utterly broken.

  “What are his chances . . . if we take him home?” Marie asked, in a quavering voice.

  “Nil,” the doctor replied.

  I remember in the hospital a little later on, when he was in his pajamas and lying in the bed where he would later die, I asked my father why he couldn’t give up drinking. We had tried—oh God, we had tried, we had begged, we had wept, we had done everything we could think of. We had read the books and we had brought him to meetings. After every meeting, my father would look more and more demoralized and deflated. “I’m sorry, Kitten,” he told me on numerous occasions. “I just can’t relate to those cats!” We had even resorted to hiding his liquor . . . We had done everything that was within our power. Yet on the morning of that final trip to the hospital, right before we checked him in, he’d asked to go to a bar so he could down his last two double vodkas.

  “Why, Dad?” I asked him, my lips trembling, my hand holding on to his thin, frail arm. “Why didn’t you stop? Why did it have to come to this?”

  My father was silent for a long time. Then he looked at me. He stared at me with those sad yellow eyes, and his face became very serious. He looked as if he were about to impart some great cosmic truth, something that would help me to understand his pain, his helplessness in the face of his condition. He was shaking; I could feel his bones twitching and vibrating underneath my own hand. My father was terminally ill; I knew that. In my heart, I knew it. I could taste my own tears as they trickled down my face and touched my lips.

  “Because . . . because I didn’t want to stop drinking, Kitten,” he said in a whisper. “And the truth is . . . I still don’t.”

  He closed his eyes, as if exhausted by the exertion of this revelation. He raised his hand and touched my wet cheek. “I love you, Dad,” I said through my tears.

  “I love you, too, Kitten. I love you both.”

  Marie and I held our father, hugged him and kissed him. We clung to him really, as if at any moment our father was going to be dragged under some vast inky expanse of water and we would never be able to hold him again. It reminded me of the time my father left for Texas, and we held on to him at the door, crying and begging him not to leave. How he had to call my mother, and she had to physically drag us off him, all of us hysterical and heartbroken. There was no one to drag us away this time. We clung to him for dear life. But still, we couldn’t hold on to him forever.

  I remember Marie reaching over to his dressing table and handing Dad his comb. His hair was a mess, and we knew he hated that. With shaking hands, he held his comb and brought it slowly and painfully across his head. He did this five times, until his hair was perfect. Drained by the exertion of this simple movement, he closed his eyes and breathed easy for a while.

  Our father would survive the shakes. He made it through the entire detox, amazing even the doctor who had thought for sure that he wouldn’t survive. The day before his scheduled release from the hospital, his doctor asked permission to perform a bronchoscopy. The procedure involved inserting a rigid metal tube into the lungs and collecting a tissue sample for testing. After all that my father had been through with his detox, we refused.

  Later that day I got a frantic phone call from Aunt Evie. She told me that she had spoken to Dad, and that the doctors had gone ahead with the procedure. She told me that he sounded like he was in pretty bad shape, and that he’d told her that he felt he’d made a big mistake in giving permission for the bronchoscopy. I called Dad immediately. The voice on the other end of the phone sounded weak, hoarse, and unsteady.

  “Dad!” I cried. “Why did you let them do it?” He didn’t really have an answer. I told him to hold on, and I raced over to the hospital. By the time I arrived, Marie was already there. She was in tears. She told me that Dad was in a coma and on life support in the intensive-care unit.

  Visiting Dad in the ICU was a harrowing experience. We just sat with him and cried. He was hooked up to every machine available, i
ncluding one that kept him breathing. He seemed to improve for just one day—our twenty-first birthday. Even though he was still on a ventilator, he looked so at peace and so young, just like he did in the pictures from his war days. We started to feel some cautious hope that he might improve. When we left the hospital that night, we really believed that Dad was going to pull through.

  Daddy died clean and sober, three days later, at 4 a.m. They told us that he died peacefully, just as the sun was coming up. A male nurse told me he was with him, and that those quiet predawn hours were the nicest time to die. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a nice time to die. But I did feel that our father died with dignity.

  When I got the news, the memories came back—some painful, some sweet. I had lost the man who had meant the most to me in my life. I was a daddy’s girl, and now my daddy was gone and I was totally lost. My father’s death added to what was becoming a great black void inside of my soul that became impossible to fill. I missed, and continue to miss, my dad so much.

  My mom was luckier than my dad. She beat her cancer, as if it were no contest at all. It was a miracle, they say. Mom had always been very religious, a devout Catholic. My mom is a tough lady, I had known that all along, but she took no personal credit for her incredible—or should I say miraculous?—recovery. My mom told us that when she lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, she’d fly to Singapore for her chemotherapy. Her doctors had told Wolfgang that she had maybe four to eight months to live. He said that the cancer had spread throughout her body and that all we could do was pray.

  A friend drove my mom to her treatments. On the way they stopped at a small chapel in Singapore so Mom could say a prayer for a friend who was having surgery that day. Mom was praying to the Blessed Mother for her friend when she said the miracle occurred. She felt a tingling in her feet and then the sensation rose steadily up through her body. The feeling crept up to her throat, and my mom remembered raising her eyes to the statue of Mary in utter and complete amazement. She realized that she was hungry for the first time in months, and asked her friend to take her for lunch before the appointment.