Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (24 page)

When I returned from lunch, there was a message waiting for me. The CEO wanted to see me in his office to discuss a press release.
Not good
.
Not good.

With a heavy heart and sudden LBD, I walked into his office. It was four-thirty, the witching hour of Dr. Connolly’s call. Even though I knew what was coming, I sat there stunned. I only caught fragments of what he said:

“We appreciate the service you’ve given to this company …

“But there have been mounting complaints …

“I know that Liz spoke to you before she got sick …

“… mounting complaints …

“It’s best if you leave the company …

“… mounting complaints …

“The announcement will be made tomorrow…”

By five o’clock I was sitting on a barstool at Mesa de Espa
ñ
a alone. The regulars hadn’t arrived yet. I was the opening act.

But out of the corner of my eye I saw the reflection of my doppelg
ä
nger. His bloated, red face hovered above the backlit bottles in the mirror that lined the rear of the bar. I turned away, and the bartender silently slid a cocktail napkin across the bar. With shaky hands hidden at my side, my head poised for the trained-seal act, I said the only thing I knew how to say at that moment: “Beefeater martini,
dry,
up, with a twist. Please.” Then I realized that the reflection in the mirror was mine.

TWENTY-FOUR

Dangerous When Wet

Joan Crawford made suicide glamorous. In
Humoresque
she plays an alcoholic socialite in love with John Garfield, a concert violinist whose star rises as she sinks. She’s listening to him play Franz Waxman’s “Tristan Fantasy,” broadcast live on the radio. She’s dressed for the evening in a black, sequined gown by Adrian, but she’s not going anywhere. She pours glass after giant crystal glass of Scotch and replays every moment of her dissolute past, convincing herself that she’s no good. Each thought drives her away from Garfield’s haunting music and toward the ocean outside, just beyond her terrace. She sees her reflected image in the glass door of the terrace, floating over the racing sea as she throws back another drink. The sea is calling. She stumbles toward the ocean, and under a moonlit sky the sparkles of her gown become one with the glistening whitecaps as the sea claims her.

Even though I knew the end, I always hoped that she would change her mind, realize that she was good.

I spent every day of those last few months of drinking obsessed with suicide—it was the last thought when I passed out at night and the first thought when I came to in the morning—but I didn’t have the guts to do it. I kept hoping for divine defenestration, some magical force to pull me from bed and throw me out of the tenth-floor window, or maybe I’d walk in front of a bus and make it look like an accident. Then I’d think of Mama Jean, and Michahaze and Dad. I couldn’t do that to them. Myself, yes, but not to them.

When I found myself watching Joan’s suicide waltz over and over and pouring myself tumbler after tumbler of booze on the rocks along with her, I thought,
I think I get it. I understand how she feels. Just like Genevieve.

Genevieve. That friend of Mama Jean’s who shot herself. I could hear Mama Jean saying, “She was an alcoholic. A
bad
alcoholic.” I barely remember Genevieve, but what she did haunted the rest of my childhood. Every time I passed her house, I imagined her last day on this earth. I saw her in her bedroom upstairs in the dark of day, the only light from a bedside chinoiserie lamp and the morning sun bleeding through the corners of the closed shutters. She sits on the bed in a quilted, powder-blue robe, crying and downing a gin on the rocks, as a Smith & Wesson waits on the nightstand. After draining that heavy crystal glass with both hands, she sits erect, pulls herself together, and takes a deep breath. Then she swallows the Smith & Wesson.

I didn’t understand how Mama Jean must have felt about Genevieve until I got my own Genevieve in Paul Rosenfield. Paul was an author with whom I had worked early in my career. I adored Paul. He wrote a book about his adventures with the old guard of Hollywood. Though a good book, it didn’t light any fires, and he was always a little sad that he didn’t have a boyfriend. He disappeared for a while. When he resurfaced, he told me over a lunch of salad and copious Bloody Marys what had happened to him. He’d taken an overdose of pills. He felt that he was all used up.

“I’d hit the Peggy Lee ‘Is That All There Is?’ wall,” he said. “Unlike her, I
was
ready for that ‘final disappointment.’” I looked at him, uncomprehending. He explained further. “I felt that I was … I don’t know …
done
.”
Done
dropped onto the table like a dead pigeon from a ledge.

He was about forty-two and I was twenty-six when he told me that. I couldn’t understand how anyone as talented and beloved as he was could sink to that point. But all that was behind him, he told me. He said that he was much better after a few weeks in the nuthouse.

“Thank God,” I told him as I raised a glass. “Stick around. I know we’ll be friends for life.”

The next day I sent him a book as a gift with a note that said:

Dear Paul: We’ll meet again. Don’t know where. Don’t know when. But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.

Kiss, kiss, Jamie

I didn’t hear from him again until he mailed my note back to me barely a year later. He had written in the margin:

Jamie, You couldn’t have known how prescient your words were. Love, Paul

By the time I received the note, he was dead. The second overdose took.

*   *   *

In those last months of my nearly intravenous drinking, I came to understand how Joan, Genevieve, and Paul felt. I no longer needed to watch that scene from
Humoresque
. I was living it. I spent each day replaying every scene of my dissolute life—sans gown by Adrian and John Garfield playing “Tristan Fantasy.” I had been fired from a job that represented the pinnacle of my career. I was a laughingstock among those former colleagues and in the industry. Even though I had landed a new job immediately after being fired, I couldn’t enjoy the satisfaction of saving face, so deep in the depression of booze was I. I had been destined for great things and reached marginal at best. And the good things got all drunk up. I was nothing but a lush—a “positively” diseased one at that. My looks—what looks I’d had—were gone.

“You disgust me” was my daily affirmation to the red, bloated face in the medicine-chest mirror. “No.
Really
. You disgust me.” Every day that I couldn’t get out of bed—and there were more of those days than not, near the end—I lay there with the shutters closed and the covers pulled, until I passed out from a few tumblers of vodka. I didn’t have the ocean beckoning to me from a terrace, but it called to me in a recurring dream I had on those dark mornings.

I’m on a ship. It’s night, and I awake from a drunken slumber. I’m still intoxicated and feel as if the room were spinning. I put one foot on the floor. Then the other. I immediately lose my bearings and fall and slide across the room into a corner. My head is spinning. I slump in the corner of the room. I’m dizzy. The room seems lopsided. It
is
lopsided. I stare across the room, blinking my half-shut eyes. I place my hands on the walls and slowly pull myself up. My crotch is wet. Did I piss myself? I stand. My feet are wet. I look down and see that I’m standing in a small puddle of water. When my blurred vision comes into one-eyed focus, I see a stream flowing toward me. My eye follows the oncoming stream across the room to the opposite corner, where there is a shut door, a door I somehow know I can’t open and walk out of. I see water bubbling under the door. I am powerless to move. The water begins to flow toward me, but in slow motion, and I awake in a panic.

I always woke before drowning.

*   *   *

The morning I decided to take the plunge wasn’t so different from any of those other mornings. It wasn’t premeditated. It was a sunny, clear, crisp late-September day—as deceptively beautiful as a 9/11 morning—with a nip of fall in the air. It was a workday and I came to after Michahaze was long gone. The night before had been the usual routine: a few martinis after work, a couple of gin and tonics at home, wine with dinner, a bourbon on the rocks, plus several more, a couple of Ambien.
Nighty night.

I had started taking Ambien for three reasons: to stop drinking as much by bringing on sleep sooner, to lessen the crush of the hangovers, and to insure an uninterrupted night of sleep. Once I started taking the pills (over time the one pill became one and a half, then two, then two and a half), three things started happening: I’d pound more drinks faster before I fell asleep, the hangovers become worse because a residual Ambien wooze was on top of the liquor every morning, and I never wanted the sleep to end. What I loved most about Ambien was the awareness of being put to sleep. It was like the moment before a movie begins in a theater. You’re aware that the lights are swiftly dimming as the room goes to black. Then the screen lights up and the movie plays. Only with Ambien the movie never plays.

On that morning I had overslept as usual, but I was slowly moving through the miasma of my daily hangover to get ready.
Will I or won’t I?
(Throw up, that is.)
I will.
I did. I lay on the bed to recover as the city ten floors below continued to come to life with honks and bus farts and the sounds of another day starting without me.

Don’t drink.

But a drink would stop me feeling so sick from feeling so sick.
The cycle was vicious.

I drank.

When I came out of the shower, the half-drunk screwdriver was waiting for me on the toilet. I finished it and made myself another. The second “dressing drink” would either put a spring in my step, like Fresca on a jockstrap (to paraphrase a classic Joan Rivers joke), or it would make my bed beg me to return. I was half-dressed when I finished the second drink. The bed was begging.

My only intention was to sleep another hour. I shot Debbie, my boss, an e-mail with the bogus excuse that I would be late after an author breakfast, then removed my half an outfit, poured a tall vodka on the rocks, unmade the bed, closed the shutters, and jumped in. I couldn’t call in sick again, since in four months on the job I had already racked up enough sick days for a cancer patient.

When I came to, it was after lunch.
Shit!
I looked at the time on the clock in disbelief. Then I checked my watch. Same time, which was the wrong time. I threw open the shutters. I looked at my e-mail.

Debbie had responded to my author-breakfast excuse with “
Again???
” Apparently, I had had breakfast with that author a scant three weeks prior.

Busted!
I thought. Not just caught, but smashed, broken, unfixable. Busted.

I poured another vodka on the rocks. I dashed around the apartment in circles, picking up and throwing down my shirt, rereading Debbie’s e-mail, rechecking the clock—frantic, rudderless.

“I can’t keep doing this. I just … I can’t,” I said out loud, my hands nearly crushing my head like an egg.

I looked at the mirror and stared hard into the eyes of a ghost, or was it the picture of Dorian Gray (the one he keeps in the attic)? I wanted to join Joan in the ocean. Genevieve was waiting for me in the bedroom. And I finally understood Paul.

“I’m done,” I said, nose-to-nose with myself in the mirror. “Done.”

The ocean wasn’t a terrace away. I didn’t own a gun. I’d have to take Paul’s way out. I didn’t let myself think about Mama Jean or Michael or Dad. I didn’t let myself think. I was operating on vodka and a mountain of self-loathing.

Then I got hold of myself. I poured another vodka on the rocks. I brought it into the bedroom and set it on the nightstand. I closed the shutters again. I stood next to my bed in the dark of day like Genevieve. I emptied what was left in the Ambien bottle into one hand. I stared down at the blue pills as if they were the deep end of a pool, like the times when I was a kid too terrified to jump off the high dive into the water below. I did what I did in those days. I forced myself by not thinking about anything but what I
had
to do.
Just jump. All you have to do is jump.
I closed my eyes, cupped my hand over my mouth, tilted my head back, let the pills slide down my throat, took a big gulp of vodka, and “jumped.”

I sank into bed and pulled the covers up as the sounds of traffic and life ten floors below drifted away.

Part III

Palm Springs Follies (2006)

Starting here, starting now, honey, everything’s coming up roses!

—Mama Rose from
Gypsy
(lyrics by Stephen Sondheim)

A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.

—Christopher Isherwood,
A Single Man

TWENTY-FIVE

Ready or Not, Here Comes Jamie!

“What’s happened to your hair?! It’s not red anymore!” That was the first thing Mama Jean said to me when Michahaze returned me to her after my week in detox. She was in our apartment, where she’d been waiting ever since she slapped on her face in Beaumont and flew to my rescue. It was just before noon and she was having a gown day. She wore the black satin nightgown with oversize red roses that she’d picked out for me to give her one Christmas as she held on to the art deco bar she’d reluctantly given to Michahaze and me years ago. Gathering dust in the bottom cabinet of the bar was a laptop computer, also a gift from her, but given with the vain hope that I’d start writing. It was the first time I’d seen her since I came to on that emergency-room gurney following my melodramatic suicide attempt.