Seducing the Demon (22 page)

“Did you write the stuff about ... ?” She pantomimes drinking from a bottle and driving at the same time.

“Don’t you
dare
write about that before I do!”

“I’m so jealous,” she says. “How come I was never arrested for drunk driving? It’s such a good career move—jail.”

Until that moment, I have been ashamed. Now I’m hysterical.

“Look what it did for good old Martha.”

“True.”

“I want that story.”

“So do I.”

This is the absolute limit of my maternal generosity. She cannot have my drunk-driving experience!

Three months after my father died, in 2004, I wound up in jail. Needless to say, I had never been in jail before. The thought of sleeping on a plastic pad under wincing fluorescent ceiling lights in a glass-fronted cell with one stainless-steel toilet (behind cinder blocks) would have been inconceivable to me. So how did I manage to wind up in the drunk tank of the Beverly Hills jail two days before Mother’s Day?

My wrists were swollen and bruised by handcuffs applied deliberately tightly by the B.H. police—a three-member team consisting of two mild male policemen and one bitter bitch, who, upon hearing me call for my lawyer before deciding to take a blood test—would the needle give me AIDS?-or a Breathalyzer—would I get pneumonia from the Breathalyzer?—decided to tighten the steel wire cuffs until I bled. “I’m puttin’ ya down as refusin’ the test,” the policewoman said.

“I haven’t refused. I just want my lawyer.”

“That’s not an option in California,” she said. “You’ve refused.” And then she scribbled her report.

Presently, the three of them hustled me into a patrol car and sped me off into the night, leaving my rental car with all my stuff in it and my wrists stinging.

As we drove off, I heard the policewoman say, “She’s on stuff.” I knew this was not true—unless you counted the Effexor I had just started and the wine at dinner with old friends I grew up with in New York, who were now television moguls.

Was I still attracted to oblivion? Was I more like Plath and Sexton than I liked to admit? Was I distraught over my father’s death? Probably all these things. After a year in which my father died, my daughter got married and had a son, and my sisters hired lawyers to fight over the family fortune, I hardly
needed
to be on stuff. My beloved agent had just revealed he had leukemia. My husband had survived an aortic aneurysm and was alive only by the grace of God. My world had suffered an earthquake far stronger than those that make the chandeliers tinkle on this coast—and here I was standing on painted footprints in the cellar of the Beverly Hills police department, watching my jewelry inventoried, the emerald and diamond engagement ring labeled “white metal with green stone and white stones,” my dollars and euros counted along with my bank cards and my Cartier watch with the purple alligator band.

“Carteeyer,” the clerk said, counting and recounting my credit cards. She was nice, asked if I wanted a chicken sandwich or apple juice and did not appear to wonder how a woman with such a humongous emerald wound up in the drunk tank. “The Green Lantern,” my daughter calls it.

“I haven’t read your books, but I’ll try to catch them now,” she said sweetly, leaving me to wonder how a DUI made me somehow more readable. “And I love that other one—you know—Ms. Danielle, is it?”

I nodded. I wasn’t about to quarrel with anything after my rough treatment with the cuffs.

Shall I describe the prison-cell floor, the flimsy cotton blanket for a pillow, the plastic bedroll and cotton cover, the clock moving through its interminable intervals adding up to the statutory eight hours?

I had been on television that day arguing with a right-wing talk-show host who claimed that Iraqi prisoners were not
really
tortured in Abu Ghraib.

“What is ‘really tortured’?” I asked. “If I attached electrodes to your testicles, you might call it torture.”

Now, six hours later, I was in lockup.

Just having your freedom taken away and having to stand on painted footprints is humiliation enough—without hoods, dog leashes and electric shocks. My self-inflicted pain is not vaguely comparable to what our government inflicts on so-called enemy combatants, but it made me aware of the mortification of imprisonment, any imprisonment.

Though I can normally sleep anywhere, I could not sleep away the eight hours.

My dad had been talking to me ever since he died three months before. What would he say now?

“This too shall pass”?

“All you need is a pencil and a blank sheet of paper”?

I suddenly saw his mouth as it was in his coffin, twisted by the undertaker into a crooked scowl.

“Can’t you fix his mouth?” I asked the funeral director. “It doesn’t look like his expression.”

“The best we could do,” he whispered. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said robotically. I kissed my father on his icy forehead, leaving a pink-lipsticked two-lip print with which he was buried. I had to kiss him before he was buried. I had to leave my mark. Even that way I had to preempt my sisters.

As I got back to New York, I went back to AA. I had been sober before, sometimes as long as years, and I loved the clarity it gave me.

I did it again, in tribute to my dad and in defiance of my demon. But the State of California was not satisfied with AA. It wanted me to go to an “approved program” for my rehabilitation from a first DUI. So after months of searching and being abstinent and attending AA meetings every day, I found a program at a rehab in New York City that met the California standard. It was not an AA-based program but was based on “harm reduction” therapy. The great state of California blessed it, so I went.

My group included a male heroin addict with long red fingernails (to match his long red hair) and dangling earrings, a college student on weed, a young woman addicted to Percodan and other prescription drugs. Everyone in the group was still using and rationalizing it to the therapist by saying they were using less than before. Nobody aspired to abstinence.

The male heroin addict spoke first. He was the sort of tall man who seemed folded like a portable umbrella when he sat. He was all angles and crooks. “So I did one line last night and then I stopped.”

“How did it make you feel?” the therapist asked.

“O.K. I felt I was in control.”

“You can’t be in control,” Ms. Percodan said. “That’s impossible.”

“But I am.”

“I did a little weed,” the college student said.

“How do you feel?” the therapist asked.

“O.K.”

There was also an old hippie with long gray hair and a Rolling Stones T-shirt.

“I think I know who
you
are,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

They went around the circle. I had been abstinent for nine months since the DUI, but I was somehow ashamed to say so.

“What about you?” the therapist asked me.

“I find it easier not to drink.”

“You’re not doing that AA crap, are you?” This from the collapsible man with the red nails.

“It’s not crap,” said Ms. Percodan.

“Old hat,” said red nails.

“I think we must have respect for how others handle their compulsions,” said the therapist.

I never went back to that group. But how I handled my addiction is fodder for another book. I will probably not write it, because I know that AA triumphalism is a sure recipe for falling off the wagon. There are some things that are surely beyond words.

 

 

Never say never, but I will never drink and drive again. I will never forget to turn my headlights on—as I did that night. I will never drive a car without a GPS, because I can get lost even in Connecticut, where I’ve lived for thirty years, or New York, where I was born and raised. I will never try to walk a straight line in pink kid mules. I will never count from a hundred to one backwards.

 

 

But how can I keep Molly from writing about my DUI if she wants to? You can’t prevent your kids from telling their side of the story. And why should we? They are born to supplant us, and whatever gives them the strength to do so is something we should cheer. They are not born to be our clones. They have their own karma. I can think of little more horrifying than raising my own clone.

If we were honest, we’d admit that we’d like our writing relatives to sound like testimonial toastmasters rather than roast masters when they write about us. We’d like to be beautiful, thin, perfectly groomed, wise, wonderful and generous in our relatives’ books. But who wants to read about such paragons? Who would believe they existed? Our readers would feel like guests at a benefit dinner when the emcee gets up to praise some chiseling
gonif
for his fine character—when we all know this slob is only being ceremonially ass-kissed because he gave megabucks to some worthy cause as a cover for his thievery.

Nobody wants to read—or write—about perfect people. Perfection is boring. And unbelievable.

It was my curse or blessing to have interesting relatives. They were all smart and talented. But I was the one with the guts to risk disapproval and defeat. Talent is never enough. Talent without guts gets you exactly nowhere. Which is why I am most proud of Molly. She has guts. She has never been afraid to take me on. Or the world.

The connection between courage and writing is causal. Isaac Bashevis Singer begins various first-person stories in the voice of a demon—or even Satan himself. You don’t doubt him. You don’t say, “How did you go from being a puzzled grown-up Yeshiva boy with feuding mistresses in Brooklyn and the Bronx to being the King of Darkness?” You believe it. You believe it because of the authority in his voice. Author and authority are inevitably linked. You can make anything happen as long as you believe it.

When you’re the writer in the house, it’s your version that gets told. Naturally, other people resent that. The problem is that you must live with them and at the same time live with your own demon. The demon says, “The hell with them! Tell the story!” The family says, “Be nice. Don’t embarrass us. And, above all, be good to Israel.”

There is no way to make peace between these two conflicting demands.

 

 

During the two years my father was dying, I’m sure I saw his last days differently from my sisters. I knew he was fading. I’d go over to his house and try to get him out of bed, but he preferred to sleep away the days. When he awoke, he wandered around the house looking lost and pale. He was angry at having to die, angry with everyone who was living, angry with my mother, who was still her contentious self.

Before his last operation, I had visited my father in the fancy hotel ward of Mount Sinai. Told he had a blockage in his colon, he was looking forward to the surgery that he imagined would restore his youth. I had seen the same thing with my father-in-law, Selig, who wanted to submit to lung surgery at eighty-three. “Cut it out, cut it out,” they say. But there is an undertone, a minor theme as well.

“Do you know Spanish?” my father asked.

I nodded.
“Poco.”

“La vida es sueño.
Life is a dream. I look forward to that deep sleep.”

 

 

Throughout this book about my life as a writer, there is another book trying to get out. The demon is the midwife. I am trying to make sense of my father’s death. He keeps popping into this book wailing, “Remember me!” like Hamlet’s father’s ghost. “Life is a dream, but the dream disintegrates unless you write it down,” he reminds me.

It’s been my experience that in every book there’s another book trying to get out. Every book is a preparation for the next. This book wants to become a memoir about my father. At the same time, it is cooking up my next novel.

The last year my father was healthy, he insisted on retelling me the story of his life and having me make notes. He told it punctuated by jumping jacks in the middle of the bedroom floor.

“‘Get a job!’
was all my father ever said. And I always worked,” he said, jumping. “If you didn’t work you were a bum.” (Thump.) “I would go around the neighborhood, looking for signs that said BOY WANTED. I always found something.” (Thump.) “I started out playing weddings with Sammy Levinson when I was sixteen. That was already a good job. But you needed equipment. Sammy had a fiddle; I had no drums at first. I bought them with my BOY WANTED jobs. But my father said not to spend money on lessons since I was already making money with no lessons. That was why I wanted all my daughters to have lessons. Education.” (Thump.)

“But you can’t beat a job that only needs a pencil and blank sheet of paper. A writer. No equipment.” (Thump. Thump. Thump.)

To the end, he used his long walks to go into every bookstore and rearrange the books so mine were face out, covering other writers’ books.

He was an extremely competitive guy. He never stopped craving. That was why his end was so hard.

I carry on his craving, fighting with myself to detach from craving. I don’t think he ever stopped fighting with himself.

At the end, when he was all skin and bones, ninety pounds of wasted body, he could hardly breathe or speak, but he still had the strength to applaud me silently if I said something he liked. And he could still curse me out if I said something he hated.

As a writer, I am the one making notes by the hospital bed or in the funeral home. I feel ashamed and exhilarated at the same time. Life keeps happening in all its mess and squalor, and I am the one trying to squash it into a box, a book.

 

 

When I was a little girl and couldn’t imagine life without my family, I used to think that when I grew up I would travel the countryside with all of them—my parents, my grandparents, my sisters—in a round vehicle on wheels, with an ever-replenished refrigerator in the middle and a top open to the sun and stars. In my mind, I called it the “Roundling” (I never shared this fantasy with anyone—as if I knew it was somehow incestuous or forbidden), and in my imagination we were all together forever, traveling in lazy circles through beautiful landscapes, always safe, always fed, always united.