Getting the job at the Taper felt like I was getting a reward for being sober. The swiftness with which is happened reinforcing that notion. I’d decided to get sober and bam a dream job. For the first time ever I’d felt as if I’d been set down in the right place at the right time. Some people call that destiny. Something I’d never felt as a child. When my parents decided to move to Miami from Englewood New Jersey I felt a terror and a breaking apart of my psyche. How much did this contribute to my drug use? I will always wonder who I’d become if that move had never happened.
I felt nothing short of stark terror in having to move. Englewood was covered in Oaks and Maples which canopied the streets; Miami was bright and flat and open. I couldn’t appreciate the water, the palms, the bright sun and the beaches. The move was as hard on my mother who had to take care of my father and me.
The move did not start off well. When we first arrived in Miami Sam had cut his throat on a crab shell at Joe’s Stone Crab which caused him to cough up blood. He was convinced it was cancer until it was proven otherwise. For weeks we went through the “I have cancer” drama in a place where everything was new. We had to find new doctors, new schools, and my mother had to deal with the ever escalating neurosis of my father and me. I was eleven years old and cried every night. Two qualities in children that often forecast a future addict: shyness and risk taking. I was painfully shy and was always a risk taker, daring to do things other kids wouldn’t. I’d explore the outer reaches of our Englewood neighborhood going farther away from home than my playmates would, even at six or seven.
Once in Miami, we rented a depressing run down Spanish style house on Dilido Island until the house we were building on Palm Island was ready. It would take months. I had a father screaming he had cancer and I was afraid to start a new school. Everything was topsy turvey. My one constant was my dog Blossom.
I don’t know how I got through the first day of my new school, Lear, except that our fifth grade teacher, Bella Wechsler assigned me a buddy (much like they did at Penny Forge) who happened to be the sweetest prettiest girl in our grade: Jackie Cooper. I don’t think I would have made it past day one without Jackie Cooper. She had a natural kindness, so rare for a fifth grader, and made everything easier for me.
Then “The House” on Palm Island was ready. It was an architectural museum, which I’ve described before, with sweeping curved walls and 30’ ceilings that formed into peaks. Cathedral like. It stood out among the other houses, but it’s grandiosity embarrassed me. Nonetheless it was a joy to live there. I made friends on the Island: Steven, Missy, Jeff, and because the Islands were self-contained floating gems with a guard gate all the kids were free to wander The Islands on our ten speeds without worrying our parents who merely expected us back at dinner time. At thirteen, and before Kathy introduced me to pills, a friend Adam introduced me to hash in an empty lot on The Island we called “The Happening.” Again, I was a risk taker, so trying this drug at thirteen came easy for me. After we smoked I went into dinner and I just laughed at everything, not that anything was funny. I was zonked.
“What’s wrong with you? Did you take something?” This was the early warning sign my mother had of what darkness lay ahead and it must have terrified her.”No mom” I giggled and lied. But I still feel that without drugs at this time in my life, I may not have made it, so fragile was my mind. Your brain stops developing at the age you begin doing drugs or drinking which put me at thirteen years old well into my adulthood. I didn’t develop the ability to delay gratification, hold my temper, weigh and measure situations accurately. This deeply effected the trajectory of my life.
I was never a drinker in middle school or high school—that would come later—but there was one party I went to where alcohol was served and I was a blackout drinker from the first time I tried liquor. Apparently I had broken an expensive dish of the mother of the kid who’d thrown the party. He called the next day angry. I had no memory of breaking a plate, and this was the first time I’d ever had alcohol, though I have a memory of Dutch plates on stands leaning up against the wall. Breaking a plate is on the cutting room floor of my film of the evening. So deep and brutal was my self-centeredness I didn’t care that I’d knocked the plate off the wall in a blackout. A plate his mother cared about and valued. The blackout I’d had would foreshadow so many years of extreme drug and alcohol use. Later I would never drink without blacking out. I once flew from San Francisco to LA in a complete blackout and came back to San Francisco having no idea where in the vast airport I’d parked. Somehow I found my car. Had I known that blacking out was a trademark of alcoholism I may have done something to stop myself earlier. But because I discovered pills alcohol played no role in my teen years. I woould always like pills best and most. I didn’t blackout on pills— but I passed out. Often behind the wheel of a car and hit the royal palms that lined the inner thoroughfare of The Island. And I was not above sneaking out with my friends in my parents’ car when they weren’t home.
Lest this be too dark, I must mention that this was an idyllic time in paradise as well. We took our boats out as the sun glistened over Biscayne Bay. Our house was always filled with kids swimming in our 75’ pool with the two bridges over it you could jump off. We were tanned, young, and beautiful. We listened to Crosby, Stills, and Nash and my mother would make great dinners for everyone. For all my mother’s cabaret glamour, she was an earth mother at heart and the kids would come to her with all their fears and anxieties. Once we got our cars at sixteen we’d drive through Coconut Grove at night and burn patchouli incense.
Kathy who’d introduced me to the pills had a handsome golden skinned boyfriend named Domingo Rivera. He was 23, much older than we were at fifteen and sixteen. Domingo was deep and kind and soft spoken in his workshirts and faded levis. He had a mystery about him, or was it a sadness? He was troubled, but I was too young to understand just how. He’d hang out at Missy’s house (where you’d find me most nights) and we’d play guitars. He went missing one day. Kathy left notes on his door for days “Please come back, I love you.” When Kathy finally found him he had taken his life, hanged himself. A big piece of my life was gone, but it was my mother who sobbed harder than anyone but Kathy at Domingo’s funeral. It devasted my mother who understood Domingo’s pain in a way I couldn’t at so young an age. She felt everyone’s sadness. I had learned to shut down my pain for fear it would kill me. I was angry too, an anger that masked the pain.
A WOMAN OF SUBSTANCES
Your language hooks the reader’s attention from the opening words and sustains it effortlessly until the end. And the end always feels too soon, which is ideal! Thank you for sharing your story, Cara. You are inspiring.
Newly sober once again, the majority of your story fits me to a T… Geographics are different and certainly didn’t live in a palace. Thanks for making me feel connected today Cara❤️