I’d made Jan the promise to stop doing drugs and I kept my promise and I don’t know why— save for Jan's kindness—her kindness toward the baddest worstest kid in Miami (okay maybe second baddest after Kathy). If there was a god, he or she was the very act of the forgiveness Jan had bestowed on me. As I lay on my bed the next night— after my stoned debacle at Jan’s—I felt a light come down and a shedding of the skin. I knew I was done with the drugs and felt the weight of ten thousand elephants lift and disappear. Was this what some call a spiritual experience? It was a lifting of a veil to be sure, except I didn’t believe in God and not just because I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see the ghost of my dead brother yet I knew he occupied our house in Englewood. I still believe in ghosts, but God? I’m not so sure.
But what skin was I shedding? What weight had been lifted? It was the weight of me at fifteen, in Miami doing everything wrong. I mean, look, how wrong was it to pass out in art class and have to be carried out by the principal? How wrong were the car crashes? The waking up in a pool of my own vomit at a friend’s house and having her mother see it knowing I’d just been let out of jail? Very wrong. Wrong to the tenth. And degrading. And disgusting. All I had to do was look at my own mother, fuming with rage to know how monstrous wrong I’d been. Forgiveness and understanding were foreign territory, another country in my mind.
Apart from the previously mentioned fuck ups, there was the time I was the most at fault—the worst of all, there was no worse—when I went, with my friend Debbie to the apartment of a man who called himself a producer. Debbie thought this guy was a big deal because he pretended to know everybody who’s anybody. I didn’t buy into her star-struck state because at twelve I was having breakfast with Cary Grant and my father’s Academy Award was displayed on the Steinway. I wasn’t impressed by celebrity. But I was impressed by Debbie. The producer lived in the Banyan Bay club, an apartment complex on Biscayne Boulevard, and he was old, 35 at least. I didn’t want to meet him but Debbie insisted and I, ever the people pleaser, couldn’t say no.
We got to his apartment—a nothing apartment with its bland white walls, a brown shag carpet and fake suede sofa—and I knew he wasn’t a successful producer because at fifteen I knew he wasn’t a producer at all.
On the wall was a framed Western Union telegram which he was quick to point out was signed Love, John and Yoko. I got right away that he’d sent the telegram to himself. What happened next is too traumatic and triggering to put on social media but will be in the book.
I have no conscious memory of the aftershock of the trauma. I work in trauma treatment now and when so many come in with cases of PTSD from a sexual assault, my knee-jerk reaction is to think why? Why the neurosis? Why the disorders? I was gang raped, and it didn’t do anything to me. But it did. There’s that ice sheet locking in those feelings. It was easier to take on the blame.
I told my parents what had happened the next day, again painting myself the villain in the scene because I took the half a quaalude (forgetting the fact that I’d been drugged, no half a “lude” would put me under like that). I had to tell my parents because I was afraid I’d get pregnant.
My mother was furious, but furious with me, not the swinger fake producer rapist. She and my father dragged me to my therapist in a fury of white hot rage because, once again, I’d done something wrong. They should have been at the police station, not the therapist, but there I sat between my two parents, facing the therapist and feeling nothing but shame and guilt. The therapist did nothing to allay my feelings or explain to my parents that their anger was misplaced. She didn’t tell them to go to the police. Wasn’t she a mandated reporter? Years later when I begged my mother to send me to drug rehab her response was “Oh no, you’re not doing that to me!” referring to the disgrace I’d bring down upon her house by getting help. Parents beg their kids to go into treatment now, I talk to them daily, they stage interventions, and here I was begging my mother to send me to a rehab and was met with fury. Her anger at me and my anger at myself had folded into one.
So part of the weight that had been lifted was that of my own self-loathing, and the light that filled the room, while not god per se, was the light of someone who’d looked down on me kindly.
I found a support group meeting close to my apartment in Studio City and made a plan to go the next night. I showed up at a small house where meetings took place nightly I knew no one in the packed room, but I felt right at home. I poured myself a cup of weak coffee, grabbed a cookie and took a seat. A 50-ish man stood at the front of the room and shared his story. He was dressed neatly in corduroys and a white starched shirt and couldn’t have been less like me, but he had an engaging manner and had the room sitting up and laughing. Everyone was in fine spirits at the Church of the Here and Now—which I’d come to call my support group—and I was in fine spirits too. As different from me as the speaker was, he was just like me; he’d lived under a bridge before finding these rooms and I’d had money but lived under my own special kind of bridge.
I was beginning to understand what had been wrong all those years and felt less alone. I went back to the Church of the Here and Now the next night and a little Irishman spoke. In his brogue he said he knew he was doing God’s will when he got that good feeling right in the pit of his belly. He couldn’t have spoken it plainer and his visceral explanation of god made me know exactly what he was talking about. There was a moral psychology to this program I liked. I began to meet people and take phone numbers, eventually becoming part of a group of young sober women who did things together, They turned me on to other good meetings. Suddenly all the coke dealers started calling me. Where was I? I was their best customer. “Sorry I don’t want any.” I’d say proudly. I wasn’t even craving the stuff. But I didn’t stay sober, well I did for ten years until opiates came along, at which point I was well into my career.
So powerful. Really understand how not only is drug addiction a brain disease but it’s also a social disease factored by your environment which I your case was so backwards in the lack of knowledge and support by your loved ones. You, as a youth, were left to feel responsible and guilty for violent acts that were crimes against you!! The cycle of self medicating and coping were bound to happen without proper support and compassion!! So sad and harmful to your psyche. Proud on your own you found groups who could understand and help you!! Sometimes we make our own families who truly care about us and not how we reflect on their status and reputation in society.